And they could be right.
I might be the only person on the planet who can bring people back from the dead right now… but it might not stay that way for long. I finish up the last of the breakfast, and it nags at me that I missed the importance of this Offering before. I knew of Miriam’s plans but only colored through her own coy words and Zachary’s memories. Despite being a jiv and one of Miriam’s closest protectors, he’s not a true believer like the others. He doesn’t think her tech can bring about this human-sourced ascendance they’re seeking. But there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s possible—not least because I’ve already got what they’re after. No wonder Miriam didn’t want a new prophet showing up at her door. She didn’t want one to come from the outside, no matter what I could do. I thought she wanted exclusive rights to that job, but that wasn’t quite right—this new Offering is supposed to create their true prophet.
But that’s not my only problem.
I desperately don’t want to be anyone’s prophet, but it’s become as unavoidable as the rising sun. I’ve resurrected people and miraculously healed them. Signs and wonders, as Delphina says. Only I don’t know where this should lead. I can’t turn to anyone in the Resistance or the ascenders for help—either they expect me to lead, or I don’t trust them. But the Dalai Lama and Leopold are already dead. Or possibly reincarnated. Either way, they have no stake in this, not the way anyone on this side of the veil does.
It’s time I finally went looking for them.
I walk my empty plate over to the door of my barracks and set it there. Then I go back for my mat and move it to the center of the cleared-out room. The food is hitting my bloodstream, making me crave some real sleep, but crawling back into the cot isn’t an option. With my mat in the middle of the room, I’ll have nothing to tempt me into napping.
I settle in, cross my legs, and leave my hands upturned on my knees.
Slipping into the fugue is automatic. I lift straight out of my body and leave it slumped on the mat—only instead of zipping right to the two souls I’m seeking, I end up in the master painter’s workshop. I’m still distracted and not focusing properly.
“I’m not here to see you,” I tell the old man. “I’m seeking some friends.”
Maybe it’s not lack of focus that’s landed me here; maybe I’m still hesitating. I’ve been avoiding this for a while, afraid of not finding them at all and what the implications of that would be. Not only was I responsible for their deaths, but if they’re not in some afterlife where they might even be happier than here… then they’re simply gone. The Dalai Lama’s murder hangs on me, but at least he was human. I’m fairly sure he’s in a good place. Or possibly even reincarnated. But Leopold? He’s an ascender. He might not have an afterlife. And if that’s true, his self-sacrifice to save me is a debt I can never repay. I feel unworthy to seek either one of them, plus I’m outright responsible for getting them killed.
But all my hesitation and guilt has to step aside because I need help with this.
The master ignores me, still working on his painting. The dull gleam of candles flickers on the polished wood of his ancient workshop. His paintbrush is old-fashioned—a wooden handle with peeling lacquer and natural boar bristles. All of it is no more real than my imagination… but apparently, I paint with reality now, so who’s to say this is any less real?
The master pauses at his canvas. “You do not paint with reality.” His sonorous voice echoes in the small confines of the room. “You are simply a manifestation of the reality that already exists.” The fine wrinkles around his eyes grab the shadows and hold them.
His cryptic sayings tend to make sense later, so I try to pierce the meaning of his words, but his eyes seem to laugh at me. I edge closer to see what he’s painting today—as if “today” has meaning here in the fugue.
“The reality of the people I healed certainly changed.” Then I frown—his painting is an armor-clad girl stabbing my prone body with her broad-bladed sword. Why is Miriam still showing up on the master’s canvas? Unless she’s not done trying to kill me yet…
It’s childish, but I don’t like seeing myself impaled. I wave a hand at his canvas and wipe away the painting, sending the flinty blues and inky blood-reds tumbling off into mist.
The master’s steady gaze takes on even more humor. “Not every wound can be healed so easily.”
I scowl. “I shouldn’t be able to heal wounds at all. I don’t understand how this works.” I hear the whine in my voice, complaining about a miracle because I don’t understand the technical details. But maybe if I did, I would know what to do with it. “How can I fix something I don’t even understand?” It feels like I’m talking about the world in general. It applies equally, in any case. It’s not like I’m a surgeon who knows how all the internal organs fit together or even what damage was done when that hole was blazed through Simone’s gut.
The master gestures to his now blank canvas, and the pulsing image of a human body appears. It’s moving, alive like my renderings of Kamali when she was dancing or my paintings of blood dripping from the page when I was frustrated. “Did you know the exact mechanics of the dancer? Or the precise viscosity of the blood?”
It seems cryptic, but I understand. I didn’t have to know every particle of Kamali’s beautiful body to render it in motion. I simply imagined the wholeness of it—the essence of who she was—and it took flight on my page. I pictured beauty. I imagined health. I healed the jivs by knowing who they were… and aligning that knowledge, fugue-state forms, with reality. These are just concepts, just constructs in my mind, but then reality shifted to match those ideas, snapping into place like it knew what to do, it only needed a nudge toward the correct solution.
This boggles my mind. Is there a correct solution for reality?
“There are many solutions,” the master says, knowing my thoughts intimately here in the fugue, as he always does. “You are the bridge. You are the connection. But you are also the architect. You decide which solutions should be brought into being.”
“But I don’t know what that means,” I complain again, my words feeling small in the face of the master’s wisdom. Maybe I don’t need to seek out my dead friends; maybe I can get the answer right here. “I’ve brought back four people—five including Kamali—and I’ve spent the whole night assimilating those lives into my own. I know more than I want to—I feel everything. Every tear, every pain, every sadness. It’s difficult. This isn’t something I can do for everyone.”
“That is certainly true,” the master says with a small smile. “For precisely as long as you believe it.”
I restrain the urge to ball up my fists. He’s definitely not helping now. “What would it even mean to conquer death like that?” I push back. My anger feels like a rising steam, trapped inside my head. I hear Kamali’s words—it’s not fair. Self-pity is a dark pit I need to stay out of. “The ascenders live forever with their robotic bodies,” I push on. “And somehow I’m going to repair human bodies? So they can live forever? Is that what this is all about? Because that seems… dangerous. Like I’m messing with things that should not be tampered with.”
“Your mind is a prison whose walls you cannot see.”
Great. More cryptic sayings that are useless. “Okay. All right. Fine.” I raise my arms wide. “I need to seek out the Dalai Lama and Leopold,” I say, speaking my intention with the force of my anger… and it works. I’m whooshed out of the painter’s workshop, tumbling and traveling through space that’s not space, a different reality mapped on top of the real world. The mountains of Seattle below me are vapors, and the living things in the city spark alive and vibrant.
But instead of being sucked down to a reincarnated Dalai Lama or the disembodied soul of Leopold, the world goes blank. A white sheet of nothingness stretches endlessly in front of me and meets a milky-void of sky. There’s a dead body in front of me. I recognize it instantly—this is another vision of my death, rendered in the smoldering remains of my physi
cal form. The head is turned away, but I know whose face it has.
I’m not sure what to do. Is this the fugue telling me the Dalai Lama and Leopold are truly gone? Or is it a warning that seeking them out will mean my death? Suddenly, a female ascender appears and bends over my body. It only takes me a moment to recognize her glittering silver skin, the long limbs, the stiffly held stance…
Hypatia.
Augustus’s assistant and partner in crime. And possibly the ascender he experimented on in developing his custom bodyform, the one that carried his illegally-enhanced mind until Leopold destroyed it. Is that why I’m here? Is this vision all that’s left of Leopold in the fugue state—an echo of his influence?
Either way, it’s the first time I’ve seen her in the fugue state.
Which means she’s resurrected. I think. This feels more like a vision than current-time, fugue-state reality. But it’s possible. Has Augustus resurrected, too? Did I miss all this while I was preoccupied with the Makers?
Hypatia rolls my body over to its back. Smoke rises from where light-weapons have scorched the life out of me. She inspects my wounds, peering at them in that cool way she has, precise and merciless like she’s the surgeon’s blade, rather than the surgeon herself. Her expressions have always had a cold fury to them, unlike Augustus’s angry arrogance.
Then she does a horrific thing.
I cringe as she pulls my arm from my body. It’s a bloodless detachment, not a horrific ripping of flesh from bone, but simply a removal—as if my body was designed to come apart. She sets my detached arm aside, and an ascender arm suddenly appears on the white fabric of this space. She puts it in place of my human one, then repeats this cold and vaguely gruesome act with my other arm, then my legs. Piece by piece, she’s replacing me with bodyform parts, until I am wholly ascender except for my head. Then she removes that, setting the slack-mouthed version to the side while a smooth ascender cranium takes its place.
She pulls back fast as if startled, and I get a look at the face.
Augustus.
Suddenly, she whips her head to stare straight at me.
I jerk at being caught watching.
She opens her mouth wide, inhumanly wide, and screams in an unholy screech that vibrates the air like a mountain crumbling. I turn and run, taking flight from this horror show, and I’m wrenched back to my body at the Resistance camp…
…but somehow, I’m still flying through the air…
…something has lifted me from the mat and flung me backward across the empty expanse of the barracks. I land hard on the wooden floor, then I’m crushed by something falling on top of me. I’m stunned—so stunned that I reflexively fight against the thing crushing me, even though it’s not hurting. It’s soft and large and covering me like a blanket. My ears ring as if a great boom has passed by, and I’m engulfed in the deafness that follows.
Then my senses snap back—I’m fighting my own cot. The mattress and frame press me down, and the blankets tangle around me like a shroud. I work free of it and scramble backward, out from under the mess. I’m still sprawled on the floor, but I freeze in my scuttling when I see what lies beyond my cot.
Half the barracks is gone. The rest is on fire.
The exposed earth of the missing barracks is scorched black. Flames engulf the broken boards of the flooring where, a moment ago, I sat on my mat. Something happened—an explosion or some kind of blast. It flung my cot back, taking me with it.
That’s the only thing that saved me.
Shouts come from behind me. People tear aside the canvas door and rush in. Nathaniel is instantly by my side, along with Cyrus, and the two of them haul me off the floor. My feet don’t even touch as they carry me out of the barracks and onto the grass. Screams and shouts and a wispy black smoke rise from the wreckage.
Cyrus is shouting at me. I can’t understand because the ringing in my ears is too loud.
I place a hand on his shoulder and squeeze, not trying to speak, simply reassuring him that I’m still alive.
But it hits me—someone just tried to kill me.
I’m only alive through an insane amount of luck… or a Lord I don’t believe in was trying to protect his prophet.
Kamali has hugged me three times since we left the charred remains of my barracks.
Even now, in the middle of the command pod, surrounded by a host of Resistance members and leadership, she has a tight grip on my hand. Like she has to keep touching me to ensure I’m still alive.
Only I don’t feel like I’m here at all.
My ears are still ringing from the bomb. I keep having to blink because my eyes aren’t focusing correctly. My head is fuzzed out, and it’s not the fuzzing that comes with the fugue—it’s the kind that results from being thrown halfway across a room and having a cot pile on top of you after someone blew up your barracks.
Someone tried to kill me.
The chill of that keeps sweeping through me like a fresh wind. It was no accidental explosion. This was a bomb meant to blow me up. Even when Miriam had her hands wrapped around my throat, I didn’t have this sensation of being so close to death—actually near it physically, in space and time, like it had just whispered in my ear then got spooked away by some stranger rambling down the street. With Miriam, I was fighting for my life—I panicked a little, but I was fully in it, grappling with the possibility of death but still very much alive. With this bomb in my barracks… that could have snuffed me out before I came back from the fugue, and I would never have known. Would I? If luck hadn’t saved me with a cot thrown across the room, would I have returned only to find the charred remains of my body, just like my vision?
I shake my head to physically clear out the buzz, and I catch Kamali staring at me. Her hand squeezes mine a little tighter, and her lips move, but I can’t hear what she’s saying, not exactly. I lean in and ask her to repeat it.
“Please say something,” she says. The words line up with her lips, and I can faintly hear them as sound filters back into my world.
I try to smile, but it feels false. “I’m okay.” But I’m not—I’m still in a haze of shock.
She nods, but not like she believes me. She motions over Tristan, who’s standing by the door, armed with a blaster in one hand and two more holstered outside his body armor. Nathaniel and Cyrus are next to him, likewise outfitted with half the armory strapped to their bodies. They’re my own personal brigade of protection—only none of that kept someone from planting an explosive device at the far end of my barracks where I was supposed to be sleeping.
Commander Astoria and Grayson are having a tense conversation with Delphina next to the large screens that show all the operations of the Resistance. Lenora and Marcus hover nearby, and I get the sense that they’re protecting me too.
Tristan is stalking over, holstering his weapon as he approaches.
“I think he’s in shock,” Kamali says to him.
“Probably,” Tristan says, frowning at me.
They’re talking like I’m not even here. “I’m fine,” I repeat. My hearing is back, but their voices sound strange, like they’re traveling down a long tinny horn from the other side of the room.
Tristan pulls a penlight from a pocket in his camouflage pants. He gestures to my head. “I’d like to check you out, sir, if you don’t mind.”
His military politeness unnerves me like crazy, but I just nod.
He taps on the light and places one hand on my forehead while he flicks the light across my eyes, one by one. “Do you have a headache, sir?”
“No.”
“Nausea or dizziness?”
“No.”
“Do you know my name, sir?”
I want to give a sarcastic answer, but the dullness in my brain stops me. “Tristan. Wait… how is it that I don’t know your last name?”
He gives me a small smile. “Because you’re a jerk and never asked?”
I snort-laugh, but it feels unbalanced, like I’m on the knife edge of madness, so I
stop. “I can be a jerk sometimes.”
Tristan’s face loses his humor. “Are you experiencing any other symptoms, sir? I could bring the med bot over to give you a thorough check out, but Commander Astoria wanted to lock down everything while we search for the suspect.”
I grimace. The suspect. The person who wanted me dead badly enough to make it happen. “My ears were ringing for a while, but they’ve stopped.”
Tristan nods. “I think you’re all right. I don’t see any signs of a concussion. If your ears were still ringing, I would insist on a med bot right away.”
I shake my head. “I’m really okay, I just…” Words run away in front of me, eluding my reach. All I can think to say is I’m scared, and that’s not anything I want Kamali to hear.
Tristan nods again and seems to understand. “Being thrown like that is a shock to the system. Your body will take a little time to recover.” He turns to Kamali. “He’s fine. Stay close to him and let me know if you see any changes in behavior.”
Kamali wasn’t going anywhere before, but now she steps even closer, wrapping her hand around my arm like she thinks I’ll keel over without her support.
Tristan turns away, so I call after him, “Hey.”
He stops and turns back.
“What is your last name?”
He smirks. “Baudin, sir.” Then he pivots back to the door, rejoining the contingent there.
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