“She’s been behind all of this, the betrayals, making people leave for—” his eyes looked out across Seattle— “this?”
“She’s bringing the pieces home. She hopes you’ll follow.”
Paul shook his head in rejection. His fists settled into a bleak and horrifying surrender.
“Hunt her down. You’ve quite a group of friends waiting out there for you, fictional and non.”
Somewhere along the conversation, the shaking had calmed.
“And—”
“Alina?”
“Yeah.”
“She started pure, until you started writing into her. Can’t take Jud out now, but you can prevent something deeper.”
“How?”
“Don’t you dare write reality into her. Keep her here. Don’t see another in her. If you do, Maire will get her claws into her, and that’s it. Three strikes. You can’t control your real future. Just live with it.”
“You didn’t.”
“Paul, I’m just a character in a book. A meditation. I’m the alien hand, or maybe the lesion, or maybe the tumor. But I’m not here to hurt you—just to keep you alive long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
“To win.”
Grasping, reaching, screaming.
love is the nearest unsteady light; a heart can only break so many times before you start to lose the most important pieces of yourself. “I’m sorry.”
The statement didn’t so much flop as leap to the floor and grope around, seeking meaning.
“That’s it?” West’s face was steel and stubble.
“I don’t expect a simple apology to—”
“You’re damned right you don’t expect. You’ve been in that fucking silver for so long, we didn’t think you’d ever come out. Didn’t think you’d ever finish writing.”
“West.” Alina reached out.
“And don’t you start, god damn it. Every minute he’s spent in that pool is another minute we’ve lost a ship, lost a fort. The bleed’s picking up speed, no thanks to the hours or months or fucking years he’s spent swimming.”
“We can fix—”
“Alina, the Delta’s at ninety over. Maire’s gained a lot of ground since the last confrontation in Seattle. Since we lost Hope and brought in the Lettuce Brothers. We need new modular calculus. She’s had a lot of time to infect both the Alpha and Omega lines. The code’s spilling everywhere.” Reynald pushed his glass forward across the table. It glowed with Delta gains. “We might be at a point where nothing we can do can—”
“Judith can show us the way.”
“She can show you the way, inside looking out.” West studied the window looking out onto stagnant birth fields. “And truth be told, I don’t trust you any more than I trust him.” He pivoted his head toward the author, met his gaze with no apology. “Hope was just the first to go. We can’t fucking find anyone out there anymore. Hunter and Lilith? Whistler and Hank tried sniffing them out for months. If anyone could lock those lines, it would’ve been them. But the Whens are emptying out. Everything’s blurred. Silver.”
“What do you want me to do? How can I make it up to you?” Paul spoke through clenched teeth. “You think I was in there for the hell of it? You think—”
“I don’t know what to think, boy.”
Reynald cleared his throat. “I think what Adam’s trying to say…We’ve been sitting here too long. Losing too many good people to Maire’s armies. Waiting for a miracle to walk out of that pool. You. We’ve done what you asked, looked for more characters to bring in, reinforced the lines. We’ve done everything we could to seal off the merges. But none of it’s been enough. We’ve been waiting for a miracle, and you’ve been swimming. We’ve lost faith.”
“Alina has been a good commander?”
“She’s done her best.”
“And you’ve expected more from her?”
“I’ve expected more from you, Author.” Reynald was cool. “Fewer words and more action. We’ve held the line as long as we could, but we’re losing. Maire’s only growing more powerful, the more her forces consume, with each break between the lines she finds. Her forces are pouring through, and the war’s not just out there. We’re all fading. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“That neat little battle we saw at the initial bleed?” West remembered Frost’s fleet, the beauty of their easy victory over the Enemy assembly. That insertion had been the first hint at something fundamentally flawed in the timeline, the Judas and Enemy in a time and place they shouldn’t have been, a fragmented, shattered procession of reality from beginning to end starting to collapse upon itself, a blending of at first two distinct universes. “We’ve been losing steadily since. No matter who we bring in. All the main characters, all the forgotten plot points. None of it seems to matter. We’re out of options. No more fresh meat to bring in.” He picked Reynald’s glass off the table. “Delta’s propagating out of control, and we need to stop it now. We’re only holding on to ten percent of existence, and—”
“Eight percent.” Reynald’s fingertips dropped from his subdermal.
West just shook his head, and Paul could see the wetness of frustration glinting in his eyes. “Eight fucking percent. What’s that? Another three forts along the timestream? Another hundred fifty vessels?”
“Adam—”
“If you have a miracle, now’s the fucking time, boy. If you learned anything in the pool, you better teach us right fucking now.”
“I did.”
And he was silver.
Maire was pleased.
She realized she’d lived a lifetime of lie and hypocrisy. She’d embraced everything that formed the core of her hatred and attempted to manipulate it to her own ends. After the revelation, after encountering Michael Zero-Whatever in the Seychelles Drift, the tiny machine of night with its encoded civilizations that she could have held in her broken hand, after learning the nature of silver, she’d taken that possibility and used it to initiate the Forever Dust. She remembered Hannon’s collapsing vessel and a war machine named Gary and the gorgeous dissemination of silver powder throughout everything, everything, but perhaps the most poignant memory as her body ungrew, as she stood a child dissolving into infancy, was the sight of Hunter Windham and his gun, that beautiful gun so like her own, and the phased slug that had sheared off the side of his head, leaving his body to collapse next to the love of his life, the spent and murdered Lilith. In that moment, she’d experienced the base loneliness of the final survivor of her existence, but she knew it wouldn’t last. The child Maire, the infant Maire, grasped the Zero-Four probe in her palm, thought it to life, ushered it into silent expansion, gave meaning to loss and ruin.
They whispered through her now, the trillion trillions of uploaded souls, merging with her, feeding yet sustaining, outside of times and places. She was a galaxy; she was everything.
There had been a moment of abject solitude in the wake of Hunter’s parting shot. She struggled against her child mind’s instinctual reaction to sob, to plop down on that barren plain and grind tiny fists into the open sores of her eyes. She suspected that his body had held the possibility of immortality, if she could have gotten to it in time. Lying dead on the dust as the vessel collapsed around it, the corpse mocked her ambitions. She suspected a grin if there’d been enough face left to sculpt one.