by Scott Sigler
Bello stares at the ground, hugging her shoulders. Aramovsky grins at me, happy the power structure is back to the way it was before the farmer yelled at him. Kevin O’Malley has no expression at all.
No one will help me.
I reach for Brewer’s rag.
“You can use the rag after,” Okadigbo says. “To wipe off your hands.”
I didn’t do anything to her. I didn’t say anything to her. Why does she humiliate me like this?
I hate her.
I want to see her die.
I want to see all the tooth-girls die.
Someday, I will make that happen. I swear it. But if I don’t do what she says, the priests will hurt me.
I kneel before Nyree Okadigbo. I reach for her boot.
A stinging pain jolts me awake.
I reach to slap it away, but my hands won’t move. I’m bolted down.
Of course you’re bolted down, stupid—how many times do you have to get “stung” in the neck before you realize it’s just a needle?
It’s not a snake biting me in the dark. I’m not trapped, waiting for a monster to come get me…
…because I am the monster.
Aren’t I?
No, I’m still me. And I am her.
I am ancient.
I feel young.
It worked: all my sacrifices, my plotting and planning…I have another chance, a chance to live my own life and not what others planned for me. It worked: I’m still me, I remember waking up trapped in a coffin, meeting Spingate and the others. I remember the walking and the fighting and the laughter.
So many years, so many centuries. My memories are fragments of a shattered vase, pieces all over, pieces missing.
Was the human mind ever meant to exist this long? To soak up a millennium’s worth of faces, names, places, experiences, feelings, sensations, emotions?
It worked: I beat that silly girl. It worked: I beat that horrid old woman.
My mind…it’s splitting in two.
Who am I?
I’m Matilda Savage.
No, I am not no you’re not no we’re not…
I’m Em.
That’s not who you are Em is gone you’re not her…
I am…I am no one.
My scream—desperate, piercing, born from a terrified, ancient mind, driven by powerful young lungs.
What is happening to me?
The sound of machinery. My restraints snap away. Light, so bright it’s blinding.
“Em, calm down.”
The one voice I truly need to hear, Spingate, calling to me. I feel her hands on my wrists, firm but comforting.
“It’s all right,” she says. “You’re safe.”
Safe. That word again. The word of nothing. The word that doesn’t exist.
Theresa says I’m safe…but…but Theresa is dead. I had her killed because she betrayed me. How can she be talking to me now? She is a revenant come to drag me to hell.
I try to fight her but I’m still weak from the process.
The process.
It worked it worked it worked…
It failed it failed it failed…
Hands stronger than Theresa’s slide under my arms, lift me up, hold me.
“Em, relax, I have you now.”
Ramses.
One lover of many.
The only boy I’ve been intimate with.
No…Ramses is dead. I saw him die…I saw me kill him, during the fire in the Observatory…
I killed Ramses. So how is he holding me now? And O’Malley…
I killed Kevin.
My soul is tearing to pieces, cracking like the plaza stone when the Grub rose.
That thing Em saw…the God of Blood can’t be that it can’t be that.
I told you! I told you and you wouldn’t listen!
The God of Blood has me, all parts of me, he’s going to punish me for killing O’Malley and Yong, for all the rebels that died, for the butchery I did to my own people to show everyone on the Xolotl that I was the only way into the future, the way to life itself, punish me for all the Springers I slaughtered, for the city I destroyed, for the Wasps I shot and burned, for the—
“Shhhhh,” Ramses Bishop says. “I have you now. Breathe.”
I breathe.
My panic ebbs. I am not free of fear, but it no longer controls me. I open my eyes, I look upon the face of Ramses Bishop.
He looks so young….
“I have you, my love,” he says. His words are sweet like chocolate. “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
No, he won’t hurt me.
It is I who will hurt him.
A little bit at first, because he’s young and the young have hope that life will turn out the way they want it rather than the way it actually does. Later, I know his hurt will be so much worse, so much more.
Eventually, he will accept things.
For now, though, I have to give him his first taste of pain, the first tiny tear in his big heart.
“I have you, Em,” he says. “I’ll never let you go again.”
“I’m not Em.”
His smile fades. Spingate steps into view. The fear that left me must have pounced on her. I see growing despair in her eyes.
“Yes, you are,” she says. “Just focus.”
I almost feel bad for these two young people, for these…infants. They are beholden to their emotions, as they will be for many years to come.
Behind them, another face steps into the light. A face that is black, wrinkled and withered.
“Hello, Matilda,” Jason Yong says. “I’m so happy to see you again.”
His voice drips with malice, but the two children seem oblivious to the threat. Yong wants to kill me. He always has. Ever since the revolt. He’s always wanted to be the leader.
No…it’s not me he wants to kill.
“I’m not Matilda,” I say.
I assume Yong will think I am lying, because I’ve lied to him so many times before…but from the look on his gnarled face I know he believes me.
He’s been my foe for centuries. He and that bastard Victor.
To think that Old Victor and I used to date? The Em part of me is aghast at the Matilda part.
“Whoever you are,” Yong says, “you have to finish the ritual.”
He offers me a ceremonial knife. It’s black. The hilt is decorated with two rings of rubies, one inside the other.
O’Malley used a knife just like this to kill the older version of himself.
And I used a knife just like it to kill O’Malley.
He was still in there….
Bishop snatches the blade away.
“I’ll do it,” he says. “Em has been through enough.”
Yong reaches for the blade. “She has to do it herself, that’s the ritual.”
Bishop easily pushes the smaller Grownup away.
“I said no. Don’t test me, Yong.”
Past the foot of my coffin is the black X. A withered, sagging body—my body—hangs limply, head down, wrists held by shackles. She’s moaning softly.
Not she…me. Is that what I look like?
No, what I used to look like. Now I am Em, I am Me. Matilda is gone.
Not gone, right there, still alive, I am still alive that evil bitch is still alive…
But not for long.
The ritual must be completed.
I hold out my hand toward Bishop, palm-up.
He stares at it. “Em, don’t do this.”
“She has to,” Yong says.
Spingate grabs my wrist, tries to push it down.
“Em, Bishop is right! We’ll vent her into space, you don’t have to be the one.”
I grab Theresa’s wrist with my free hand, and I squeeze. She snarls, thinking she can hold on, thinking she can resist me, but I squeeze tighter until her snarl shifts to a look of surprise, then pain—she lets go with a gasp.
So much strength in this body. I haven’t felt anything like it in a thousand y
ears.
“The knife,” I say to Bishop. “I will do what must be done.”
My words sound as cold as the void itself. I want this over with.
Bishop glances at the knife, then at my palm, then he looks me in the eyes.
“It is my right,” I say.
He slaps the handle into my palm. My fingers close around it. I feel the weight.
A small, weak voice calls out: “Help me…please.”
Matilda. Me.
I walk toward her. My steps are slow and awkward, yet stronger than they have been in a millennium.
Matilda’s head is still hung low. She’s pulling at her shackles, weakly, making the chains rattle like a sad, small musical instrument.
“Didn’t work,” she says. “Gaston, dammit, you…you screwed it up.”
I stop in front of her.
Matilda’s pitiful efforts cease—she’s looking at my boots.
“No,” she says.
She slowly lifts her head. Even this slight motion seems to take everything she’s got.
Her one good eye is pink.
I am looking at Matilda. I am looking at myself. I am looking at a monster. I am a monster.
“No,” she says. “I want to live.”
She is an old woman. Ancient and twisted. She did what she thought was right. I can’t remember all of what happened to her—to us, to me—but I know she felt justified in every action.
But was it her, or was it the “God of Blood”? Was she corrupted, just like Aramovsky was? I was Matilda, once—maybe those memories will return someday, maybe I’ll know the answer.
“It’s not fair,” she says. “I want to live.”
But even if Matilda was corrupted, she is responsible for the horrible things she did. Aramovsky had to pay. So does she. I touch her cheek—gnarled skin that was mine a few moments ago feels wretched and vile to these young fingers.
What does a thousand years of agony sound like? It sounds like Matilda.
“It didn’t work,” she says. “Why didn’t it work?”
I almost feel bad for her. “It worked well enough. You knew what would happen. You knew one version of you would be chained here, knew that version would end. And you didn’t care. So selfish, right to the end.”
She finds the last of her strength, shakes her head hard enough to rattle the chains.
“Let me go! If you kill me, you won’t get the codes!”
This is beyond confusing. My head spins in a dozen directions. At my core, though, I know she and I can’t both exist. I had a chance to kill Matilda once. I let her live—look at the price of that choice.
“You already gave Gaston the codes. Remember?”
Her one eye stares at me. It’s redder now; she’s slowly regaining her strength.
She should die with a blade in the belly, in agony, like O’Malley did, but I can’t bear to cause unnecessary suffering.
It’s time to do the humane thing.
I put the point of the blade on her sternum. I expect firm resistance, but the bone beneath the coal-black skin gives a little, as if her skeleton is spongy with rot.
“I want to live,” she says.
I nod. “And I want you to die.”
The fingers of my right hand curl tighter around the hilt. My left palm cups the pommel. My strong, young arms push the blade forward.
It sinks in slowly, steel vanishing into blackness, blade hissing against skin until the cross guard thumps into her chest.
There is no winner here. No loser. Em earned a chance for her people. Matilda got her young body.
Thick, red-gray blood drips down from Matilda’s sternum, splatters onto the floor.
“I hate you,” she says.
“I know.”
With that, I pull the blade free.
I stand there and watch Matilda Savage bleed to death.
When she stops twitching, I walk back to the golden coffin. Ramses and Theresa stare at me as if I am an alien thing. Yong simply watches, his feelings indiscernible.
“You say you’re not Matilda,” he says. “And you’re not Em, either?”
I shake my head. Bishop and Spingate exchange a glance. It’s obvious they wish with all their tender hearts that I will suddenly wake up and declare, I was wrong, I’m your little friend, I’m Em!
But that will never happen.
Yong’s red eyes swirl. How I hated looking through eyes just like those, the way they let me see so many things and yet made everything different. I hated that body, too—so ugly. In the first few centuries, we called our bodies “pain suits,” a joke meant to help us cope with the constant state of agony.
But I don’t hurt now. Not at all.
It has been so long since I was without pain that being without it, feeling normal, seems maddeningly strange.
My memories roil and clash. They combine to make me recall things that I know never happened. Tiny shards of reality, like small islands in an endless haze of gray.
“If you’re not Matilda,” Yong says, “and you’re not Em, then who are you?”
Parts of me are a woman older than even this ship. A woman who has done unspeakable things, who lost friends, who lost lovers. A woman who can’t remember the face of her father, because he’s been dead a thousand years.
Parts of me are a girl, barely past the age of twelve, who was thrust into a position with demands far beyond her years. A violent girl who fought and clawed, who learned to be devious because that was the only way she and her friends could survive. A girl who would not stop, no matter what the odds.
Two identities. Two completely different people.
And yet, both identities are unified in one key area.
Because both did the things that had to be done.
And in that commonality, I coalesce, I unify as the myriad shards meld together, lock into place like the pieces of puzzles that I am so good at solving.
Brewer warned that the longer Em was awake, forming her own memories and mental connections, the less likely the overwrite process would work. O’Malley was still in there. Some of Bello was as well. But Em was her own person for far longer than those two, and her intellect was too well developed to destroy. Instead of being overwritten, she and Matilda fused, their identities and experiences amalgamating into one individual.
An altogether new person.
Brewer. My childhood friend. I called him by his first name back then, I called him Bashar. He had a name for me as well.
I am not Em.
I am not Matilda.
I am neither—I am both.
I am something new.
“Mattie,” I say. “My name is Mattie.”
Ramses, Theresa and Jason stare at me. The kids are crushed—they think they’ve lost someone they love. Yong looks…not elated, exactly, but so hopeful. I’m sure he’s wondering if I’ll unite all the people and lead us against the Wasps.
The multiple parts of me are talking to each other, comparing notes, seeing the connections that everyone else missed, that we both missed.
I’m not Em, I’m not Matilda, but one thing has not changed—I will do what must be done.
“Ramses, darling-dear, do something with this knife,” I say. “We don’t have much time, and I need to plan.”
I stand alone in the Tactical Control Center, watching the clock tick down.
12:15:26
12:15:25
12:15:24
There isn’t time for expansive plans or multiple options. I’ve invited just five people to help me decide what to do, the only five people who really matter for what happens next—Bishop, Borjigin, Zubiri and both Gastons.
Like the rest of the Xolotl, the TCC was built twelve centuries ago. Much of the equipment is dark. Lifeless. I wonder how long it’s been each piece stopped working, wonder if—somewhere back on the planet Solomon or elsewhere in the universe—entire empires rose and fell during that time.
The room is round, wide enough to hold twenty people easily. Cur
ved wall panels are displays, like those in the shuttle. A quarter of them are blank and black. Others are peppered with dark spots of varying sizes, like the overhead lights in the Garden. A few panels flicker maddeningly. Those that work correctly show images of Omeyocan, the green dot of the Dragon following the red dot of the Xolotl around the planet’s curve, inexorably closing in.
The Wasp ship is faster than ours—it’s too late to make a clean getaway. I felt the God of Blood’s power. Even if we break orbit and head straight out into space, I know the Wasps will follow us. They will not let an enemy go, risk that enemy coming back sometime in the future.
The Wasps want to wipe us out.
12:14:59
12:14:58
12:14:57
Memories rush back at a breakneck pace. I’m having trouble understanding what happened when, and to whom. The memories of the farm: those were burned into Matilda’s thoughts forever, were the spark against the kindling that lit the fires of revolution. The memories of my parents sending me away, though…those memories had been mostly lost. Matilda’s brain had blocked out what happened in the canoe, and much of what came after.
My mother and father said the Church of Mictlan was a farce? I/Matilda had completely forgotten that. I/she was only six years old at the time. The merging with Em shook up my long-term memory, broke loose things I didn’t even know were there.
The Em part of me wondered if something caused Matilda to wind up so “evil.” The Em part had no real past, was able to form her personality off of Matilda’s core essence without the contamination of the bad things Matilda experienced. If Em was still around, if she knew what I know now, I wonder if that knowledge would answer her question.
All of this—the church, the Xolotl, the symbols, the rituals—was began by a coppery worm burrowed deep in the dirt of a distant planet. I can’t recall most of the journey from Solomon. I can’t even fully recall how the rebellion began. Those memories will return, I feel them surging, reincarnating, but what matters right now is the next twelve hours.
Old Gaston—the “Admiral,” as he prefers to be called—was betraying Matilda. Since the debacle on Omeyocan where Old Bishop and the others died, he’d been feeding Yong and Old Victor information. After my overwrite, he opened the doors to let in Spingate, Bishop and Yong.