Jon Grimwood - Stamping Butterflies

The heat was beyond anything Tris had experienced. Almost beyond anything she could imagine. This had to be dying, Tris realized. And all the while the Emperor just stood opposite her, seemingly unmoved and unharmed, the flames now so close that his cloak had started to char at the edges.

"You did this," she said, each word tearing at her throat.

He shook his head.

"Yes," said Tris, "you." Stepping forward, she drew her blade to finish what she'd travelled the worlds to accomplish. She expected him to twist sideways or block the blow, to turn and run.

Instead Zaq stepped forward, put out one arm to steady Tris as she began to fall and barely grunted when she used all that remained of her strength to ram the blade under his ribs and into his heart.

Time froze?

This was not strictly accurate. What actually happened was subjective in the way everything is when one gets down to that level. Time slowed to a crawl as the Library rewrote reality inside the skulls of Zaq and Tris, the handful of seconds separating Zaq from cardiac failure and the alveoli in Tris's lungs from rupturing suddenly extending before both of them like a slow glide to infinity.

And as the speed at which their thoughts began to operate ripped apart their neural nets, the flames which had been roiling around them slowed and slowed again until they barely crawled up the walls.

"Why?" Zaq said. But then he knew.

Because what Tris thought was what he thought and there were no boundaries between them. They looked at the world through the same eyes. And that world was fucked, seriously screwed, far weirder than either had imagined.

Zaq saw...

Well, he imagined that he saw himself. It looked like him only he couldn't remember any such incident. He was in a bath, marble and old. The room was painted in flat greens, golds and reds but then his rooms were always painted in those colours.

There were no servitors, he was naked and the water in his bath had turned cold. So cold that a scar on his wrist had grown blue and the skin around his nails become frayed and white. The fingers of his right hand, the one that gripped a knife, were so pale they seemed to belong to someone else.

It was a very beautiful knife, with a wavy line along one edge from where it had been forged, and fragments of room reflected in the blade's surface as if looking into a river or a bowl. Zaq had a feeling the knife might have been given to him by someone; he found it hard to remember.

Actually, Zaq found it hard to think, full stop. In locking him into this moment the Library had trapped him inside such pain that it overwhelmed his sight and hearing, his sense of smell and his very self.

"Hell," said Tris.

The Library nodded.

"Remember now?" Tris said.

She was talking about the room and the cold bath and about the boy who came through a door, a plate of dim sum on his tray and a rat perched on one shoulder. Through the eyes of that rat had peered a brain of a rodent and more billions of people than Tris could imagine. The servitor was about Tris's age. In fact, Zaq was pretty certain that the servitor was--

"Wrong," said Tris. She could feel the knife in Zaq's chest as clearly as he suffocated beneath her struggle to draw breath, both frozen into each other's pain on the wrong side of death.

"Look again," she demanded.

It was as if he refused to recognize himself or found it hard to care about what had happened to the boy with the rat. As if he saw life through a sheet of glass. Except... Tris corrected herself. It was a sheet of darkness and ice. And then, as Zaq finally remembered sitting in the bath, Tris understood everything . (Something she could have done without, really.)

"What?" Zaq said, looking up.

The boy grinned, shut the door behind him and looked around at the ornate room and whistled. "Wow," he said. "Fucking neat."

"Out," said Zaq.

"Zaq," said the boy, "it's me. I've blagged you some dim sum." He held out the tray as if he expected the Chosen of Heaven to join him in eating congealed food.

"There was this weird guy in the kitchens," he added, oblivious to Zaq's fiercest scowl, "wanted me to--"

"Don't," said Tris.

Zaq rose from the water, blade in hand.

He was naked and so was the blade which took the boy's head from his shoulders. As a spout of arterial blood pissed itself almost to the ceiling, Tris screamed and the boy began to crumple, his knees buckling as the torso toppled forward to hit the floor.

How could you?

From the far corner, the rat and the servitor's head both stared at Zaq with looks that only grew less accusing when the rat blinked and death began to soften facial muscles and glaze the boy's eyes.

"But he's not even--"

"Of course he's fucking real," Tris shouted, her voice a wind which scoured the edges of Zaq's mind. "They were all real," she said. "Every servitor you killed, that concubine you raped..."

She stopped, considered what she now knew. "You really didn't--"

"No," said Zaq. "I didn't know."

He saw it all now. The horror of what he'd done, which was as nothing to the horror of what he had been. A monster.

"Who was he?" Zaq began to ask and realized he already knew. Tris had been too young to watch it happen on feed, little more than a baby. No, Zaq knew that was untrue. She'd been unborn when her--

"Your father?"

This didn't seem possible, yet it was true and there was something else, something obvious.

Eli ate the apple , said the Library, as if this explained everything. And strangely enough it did. Both of them instantly understood why it was always this fruit that tradition demanded. And with the memory of juice running down Zaq's chin and Eli reaching out for his share the final piece fell into place.

"My brother," Zaq said. "Your father."

She's your half niece, said the dark. You had different fathers . This seemed possible, even likely. Although, since Zaq could barely remember his mother, how anyone might expect him to remember the man who...

I can still save you.

"How?" said Tris, knowing it was to the Chuang Tzu that the strange voice had been speaking.

I can loop time back to when you were young. Or we can let your flame pass to the next candle . The Library sounded regretful, as if things really hadn't been meant to end like this.

"Save us," Tris said.

The Chuang Tzu said nothing. He felt sick and stupid, ignorant to the point of wanting to disappear, to be anything other than what he was. He didn't want to be young again or inflict his memories on the next Chuang Tzu. He wanted everything to be different.

The Library thought about that.

"Billions will die," said Tris.

"No," insisted Zaq. "They will simply become someone else."

"Right," said the Library. "Let me find the tipping point."

Hassan sat back in his chair and pulled out a wallet, counting ten-dollar bills onto the table. The total got to forty dollars before he hesitated, added one more to the pile and slipped his wallet back inside his jacket.

"Fifty dollars," he said.

It was an incredible sum for a boy who once scraped a living delivering bread and now survived on trading odd snippets of information with the police. For a girl who kept house, swept, cooked and spent most evenings persuading the drunk who was not her father that he didn't want to hit her it was enough money to fund an escape.

"Half now," said Hassan, "and half later." Pulling a small cigarillo from a leather case, he waited for Idries to produce a lighter. It was brass overlaid with chrome, the name of some Essaouria nightclub in enamel along one side. "We can meet at Café Lux afterwards."