Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

Did their grip tighten, a little? “Yes.”

“Are they doing anything to me to help me trust you?”

“Yes.”

“Did they arrange for you to save me from falling?”

“No. That was just luck. Like I already said, I was coming to visit you already.”

“That’s the truth?”

Skye alone: “Don’t ask that again, Andrea. It’s hurtful.”

“But they’re still doing something. To help me feel what I’m feeling.”

Now Oscin: “Yes.”

“I should resent the hell out of that. I don’t much like being manipulated.”

The joined voice again, surrounding me all sides, confident and beautiful: “They’re not manipulating. Not with this. They’re just freeing.”

“It’s still not right,” I insisted.

They shifted, together, pulling me into a standard seated position. I didn’t resist as I was moved. Once they were done, I was still cradled by them, but able to take in both sets of eyes at once. Skye’s heart pounded a hypnotic tattoo in my ear. Oscin glanced at her, as if seeking some kind of confirmation he couldn’t discern through everything else they shared. Then Skye spoke alone, in a voice as gentle as any I’d ever heard from her, her words soft and evocative as she began a fairy tale. “A woman spends her entire life cursed by evil forces outside of her control to carry a stone so heavy that her back creaks beneath its weight. Because of all the years she’s carried this burden, without a single moment of rest, her arms have grown incapable of ever putting it down. Because she has never had freedom from that burden, she’s grown strong. Because she will never know freedom, that strength is useless. For as long as she lives she will never be able to hold anything else in her hands, let alone release the burden that torments her.”

I missed the point when Oscin took up the story. He might have taken over from her in mid-syllable, or simply faded in with his own voice easing into dominance while hers faded breath by breath. “Then, one day, she sees a caravan blocked by an obstacle. It is a stone, identical to her own. She is the only person in sight gifted with enough strength to move that second stone out of the way, so the caravan can proceed. The problem is that she will not be able to do so, and join her fellow travelers, until someone relieves her of the stone she’s already carrying. Which, thanks to the curse, they cannot do. She cannot drop the weight, and she cannot do anything else until she does.”

During the next few sentences, control of their shared voice gradually returned to Skye. “When a magical hand reaches down from the clouds, and plucks that first weight from her back, freeing her to stand up straight, do what must be done, and live whatever life she chooses to lead, she should be happy. But her first reaction is anger.”

Their next words emerged in a spooky duplication of my own New London accent. “‘ Who are you ,’ she asks the clouds, ‘ to just take away what I’ve carried for so long? It’s not right! That stone was mine!’”

“Believing it by then to be some kind of treasure—” Skye spoke alone.

“And not what it actually is,” Oscin concluded, “a crippling burden.”

I wanted to wrest myself free of their shared attentions, and curse them for thinking they could understand me so easily.

Somehow, I didn’t move.

Skye used her fingertips to draw circles in my hair. “It is like I told you yesterday. The individuals Oscin and Skye were once very angry people. They each carried their own weights, their own secrets, that might have been as terrible as any of yours: secrets that even included blood on their hands. Neither Oscin or Skye thought they could possess enough strength to carry anything else. They even wanted to hoard their burdens, afraid that sharing such things would mean giving up everything.” Oscin’s voice joined hers, forming a new gestalt that filled the chamber to its ceiling. “But they were burdens, and not treasures. They could be shared. And if that boy, and that girl, needed a little help, then that help was not wrong. It was a gift.”

The AIsource had spoken of three gifts: one they’d already given me, one they were still in the process of giving me, and one they hoped to offer me at the end of this business. I wondered just what I was experiencing now.

Either way, it was growing increasingly difficult to maintain even the pretense of not trusting this. The warmth, rising from the base of my spine, felt like it belonged to me even if it originated from someplace else.

Desperate to deny the feeling, and drive it away by any means possible, I seized Skye by her wrist, digging my fingertips into her tendons to inflict the greatest possible degree of pain. “When I was eight years old I killed my Bocaian father. My Vaafir. I stabbed him through the back and felt joy doing it. I scooped out his eyes while he was still able to feel the hurt. When the Dip Corps found me, I was sitting on his floor, playing with them, my hands covered with his blood.”

Skye placed her free hand on the back of mine, and with a mere touch loosened my grip on her wrist. “I know that, Andrea. It’s like I said: I’ve looked up your background. And you were just one small child among an entire peaceful community that went mad all at once.”

“A community contaminated,” Oscin said, “by nothing you could have controlled.”

“But that’s the whole point. I’m still contaminated. That’s why they still call me a war criminal. Why they locked me away. Why they made me their property. Why they keep saying I’ll never be forgiven.”

My field of vision was now dominated by two faces, his and hers.

“Politics.”

Damn it, I wasn’t going to let this happen. It was one thing to weep coming out of Intersleep or alone in my quarters on New London, another thing entirely to weep where other people could see it. Other people weren’t something I could go to for comfort. They were part of the puzzle I’d been left alive to solve.

But I didn’t have enough voice to stop them. “I’m a monster.”

Oscin leaned in closer, while Skye held me tight.

“You’re beautiful,” they said together.

First one at a time, and then together, they kissed me.

For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt myself coming close to putting down the burdens I’d been carrying my entire life. None of it seemed important: not what I’d seen, not what I’d done, not what people thought of me and would always think of me, not the Unseen Demons and everything they had come to mean to me. All of that remained part of the broken but sharp-edged thing I had become—and for a moment none of it mattered, because it was only noise. None of it had anything to do with the realization, surprised and comical but no less delighted, as I overcame my paralysis: Great Juje, they’re right, they are only one person.

For just a moment I responded. I pulled Oscin close, not out of preference but because he was easier to reach. Skye, murmuring, kissed the back of my neck. A hand, that could have belonged to either one of them, that I now had to remind myself belonged to both, fluttered along my spine, the touch so light I might have imagined it, or just hoped for it.

But then something happened.

There’s a certain disquieting moment everybody’s experienced at least once. It happens when you’re lying in bed, hovering on the very edge of sleep, your eyes closed and your thoughts sludgy, your consciousness and all the crap that goes with it about to sink into the welcoming darkness.

Sometimes, just before you surrender to sleep, you feel a sudden, terrifying sensation very much like free fall, and jerk yourself awake, your previous feeling of well-being lost.