Chris Wooding - The Black Lung Captain

But he had to try. He had to prove to himself that it couldn't be done, that there was no way to save Bess. He needed to fail before he could be made to see.

'It's not as simple as life and death, Crake,' she said. 'You should know that. I'm technically dead. My heart doesn't beat. But I am Jezibeth Kyte. I'm as much Jezibeth Kyte now as I was the day the Manes caught me.' She looked at Bess: an empty 7shell, her essence departed to wherever it went when Crake sent her to sleep. 'All that you knew of your niece, all the things that made you love her . . . they're gone. Gone for good. And what lives in that suit is not that girl.'

Tears had started to fall. Crake was beginning to sob. He wiped his nose. 'Why are you telling me this, Jez?'

'Because you can't change things, Crake. What you need to realise is that your niece died that night. That golem is just a memory of her. But it's not your niece. Your niece is dead.'

Crake shook his head.

'Say it, Crake!' she urged him. 'It's been killing you every day, and it won't stop killing you until you accept it.'

'She's there!' he insisted, thrusting a finger at the armoured suit. 'I put her in there! It's up to me to get her out!'

'You can't!' said Jez, grabbing him by the shoulders. 'That over there, that's something else. And it loves you and it needs you to take care of it, but it's not your niece.''

Crake pushed her away with a moan of anguish. He spun around and lashed a mass of chemical apparatus off a nearby table, then snatched up the book he'd been copying from and hurled it at Jez. She stepped aside with ease.

'What do you know? What do you know about it?' he shouted at her. Spittle flecked his beard, and his bloodshot eyes bulged.

'I know the difference between being alive and being dead,' she said calmly. 'Better than anyone, I reckon.'

Crake rampaged around the sanctum, knocking over anything he could see. When he'd smashed or thrown anything he could lay his hands on, he wheeled drunkenly against the wall and leaned there, sweating and red and spent.

'Say it, Crake,' she said relentlessly. 'You can't save her. You don't have the power. She's dead. Say it.'

'Alright!' he said. 'She's dead! I killed her and she's dead and gone! Happy now?'

His words rang into the silence, and then his face crumpled and he began to cry. He hugged himself and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. 'She's dead,' he said again.

'You have to accept that,' Jez said. 'Accept it. Make it a part of you. Move on.'

'Easy for you to say,' he muttered. He clambered unsteadily to his feet, his face hard with disgust. 'I know why you're here. I know what all this is about. You've a daemon inside you, and you want it out.'

'Well, yes, I—'

'Well, nothing! You think I haven't considered that? All this time when I suspected you were a Mane? I was your friend, Jez. You think I hadn't wondered if I could fix you?'

Jez had a sinking feeling in her guts. 'Can you?' she asked.

'No!' he crowed. 'No! No one can! Because you died, Jez! Because your heart doesn't beat! I could drive that daemon out of you, but it's the only thing that's stopping you being actually dead. Without that daemon, you're just a corpse. Accept that! Make that a part of you!'

Jez was shocked by the viciousness in his voice, the hate on his face, the glee with which he crushed her hopes. Tears prickled at her eyes. She struggled to maintain her composure. She'd hurt him, and he wanted to hurt her back. She understood that. It didn't make it hurt any less.

No wonder he left as soon as it was clear that she was a Mane. Maybe that was the spur he needed. He didn't want her to ask him. He didn't want to tell her that there was no help for her. That she was condemned to slowly turn into something else.

She fought to come up with some kind of argument, some way to persuade him that he was wrong. But his reasoning was infallible. In fact, had Jez not been so desperate to rid herself of the invader in her body, she might have seen it herself. Even someone who knew nothing about daemonism could have worked it out. But just like Crake, she'd believed what she wanted to believe, what was necessary to keep going. And just like him, she'd been doomed to failure from the start. Some things couldn't be changed, no matter how hard you wished.

But now that she came to it, she found there was none of the disappointment or sorrow or misery she'd expected. Instead she felt a bleak, sad sort of resignation. The peace of a prisoner as they walked to the gallows, knowing that all possibility of reprieve or escape was gone. Maybe she'd always known, deep down, that there was no going back.

'Alright,' she heard herself say. 'I believe you.'

'Good,' he said.

She walked around the room. 'There's no chance.'

'None.'

'The way I am is the way I am.'

'Exactly.'

She shook herself, brushed a strand of hair back from her face, and nodded. 'Then that's how it is,' she said quietly.

Crake gazed mournfully at the empty shell of the golem. 'That's how it is,' he agreed.

She raised her head. 'We'd like you to come back, Crake.'

The daemonist surveyed the room, strewn with the wreckage of his studies. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'm finished here.'

They held a small gathering on a hillside on the way back to Iktak. There was nothing to bury, so they simply raised a marker: a slab of metal that they'd scored with one of Silo's screwdrivers.

Bessandra Crake

Beloved niece of Grayther Crake

DY138/32-147/32

The whole crew attended, except Pinn, who was no longer with them. Crake was glad of that. He'd only have asked moronic questions. The others understood well enough, though. They didn't know the dead girl, nor why Crake was honouring her now when she'd died two years ago. But they came anyway and kept silent. Because he asked them to. Because he wanted them there, and they were his friends.

And though they couldn't have failed to notice the similarity between the name on the grave and Crake's golem, he knew they'd never guess the truth. It was too terrible, too impossible. Easier to assume he'd named the golem in her memory.

On reflection, Crake decided they were right.

Bess herself - the golem Bess - stood off to one side, her ball clutched in her massive hands, shifting restlessly. She'd picked up on the mood and made sad cooing noises, but he wasn't sure whether she really fathomed what was happening here. If his niece truly was inside that armoured skin, he'd surely have seen more of a reaction. She was witnessing her own funeral, after all. But the way she behaved was no more than might be expected of a faithful dog.

The wind was warm, rippling the grass, and sunlight broke through the clouds to slide over the hills in great patches. Harkins had his cap scrunched in his hands. Malvery's head was bowed. Jez had tears in her eyes. Frey and Silo stood solemn and grim. Even the Ketty Jay, visible nearby, was a witness to this.

She's dead, he told himself. It still didn't feel true. But, on some level, something had changed. He'd begun to feel that, if he repeated it enough, he'd believe it. That was something, at least. That was hope.

No words were spoken. They simply stood and stared at the grave-marker. Silently sharing the emptiness of death.

After a time, Crake stooped and laid a small toy at the foot of the marker. A doll that he'd bought in Tarlock Cove. Bess had always been enchanted by the toys he bought for her. He used to pretend he made them himself, in his secret basement. It explained what he was doing in the wine cellar of her father's house, night after night. It had been her desire to see his mythical toy workshop that led her to sneak into his sanctum, on the night that was to end her life.