"Why are we here?" I asked.
"Because she Saw us," Nicols said.
"Who?" I looked at the woman on the bed. "Hildegard?"
"Yes," Nicols said. "She looked into the future and Saw us."
"You too?" I asked. "Eight hundred years of Western history preordained by this woman. I don't believe it. John. I can't."
"You can't dismiss it," he countered. "Remember the vision? The figure with all the eyes? The child who ascended into Heaven?"
"I can't trust anything Vivienne told me," I said bitterly. "Especially now."
"But you know, don't you? In your heart, you know she is right. You know who those two figures are."
"I'm sorry, John. I should have been stronger."
He pressed the cloth to my chest, and when he took it away again, there was less blood. "Strong enough," he said. "It's all right, Michael. I know it wasn't your fault."
"I can't subscribe to the belief that this all happened because it was supposed to. It makes it all so meaningless, and so many people died, John. There has to be some meaning to it. There has to be some hope that we could have made a difference." I closed my eyes as a wave of pain ran through me, a shuddering pulse that rippled from front to back. When it passed out of me, I choked and coughed, and there was blood in my mouth.
Nicols didn't say anything as he leaned forward and wiped my lips clean.
"She only had twenty-six visions," I continued when the shakes passed. "She saw key points at best. She couldn't have seen everything. Like Nostradamus. And look at his track record."
"True, but you're assuming you know everything he wrote. Maybe the material that was clearly the ravings of a madman are the only works that were made public. What of the rest?"
"Well, I guess I wouldn't know, would I?" I nodded at the three wise men clustered around the bed. "Not having all the answers like them." Now that I had acknowledged John's aid and that he and I were talking, I was stronger. More anchored in this dream. It was easier to breathe now, easier to speak.
"I'm willing to guess that the old batshit Frenchman didn't squirrel away a bunch of papers where he put things down in a much more lucid way. Even if Nostradamus had secret papers, deciphering them would still be a matter of interpretation, wouldn't it? Like the vision Vivienne showed me. It could mean anything. It doesn't have to be a representation of what happened in Portland."
Nicols smiled. "Of course, it doesn't. But that's the case with all of the secrets, isn't it?"
Through the gaps in the screen, I watched Hildegard suffer her ecstatic fervor. Was she Seeing the future? Like Husserl had said: scry reality and fix it in place by Witnessing it. Had her records been better than Nostradamus', or had they been the same sort of vague poetry that we associated with him: open to so many interpretations that it could fit whatever excuse you needed to justify your actions?
But the mission of the Watchers had always been to be True Witnesses, objective observers of history so that there was at least one record that was untainted by special agendas or personal biases. Or was that just the lie all of us eager neophytes wanted to believe?
How different was that from any history we learned?
I got lost in the woods, a scared little boy who was afraid of the dark and the monsters that might lurk within it, and so I invented a way to be strong. I invented a history for myself that would sustain me, that would allow me to understand this strange new world in which I had found myself. And what had that gained me? Wisdom? Understanding? Peace? Hardly. It had been a way to justify the pain.
Hildegard moaned and bucked on the bed, straining against her bonds. Her head moved on the bed, and there was a smear of blood on the mattress. Were her visions any different? What she saw, what she wrote down: Was it a record of the future, or a justification of her pain?
I looked down at my wound, now a pale hole in my chest. The bleeding had almost stopped, and the hole looked like a shadow on my skin. Nicols squeezed the rag over the nearly full basin, and pale blood spattered the surface of the pool. Like rain falling on the ocean. Why did we feel pain? Why had the Creator given us this failing? Why hadn't He made us stronger?
If you believed we were His eyes, distinct observers who could look upon His work and validate it by Witnessing it, then our purpose was to inhabit this world, to be part of its existence as a way of giving it all purpose. It is a grand extrapolation of the question about a tree falling in an empty forest: If no one is there to witness creation, has it really happened?
But was it more than that? Were we justification of His pain? Were our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our nervous systems, our souls a means by which the Creator expressed His own apprehension of being? Was our pain an infinitesimal part of His, split and shared across billions and billions of points of light?
"Of course, it is," Nicols said. He sat back on his heels. "All existence is suffering. Don't you remember the Eight-Fold Path?"
"Why are you here, John? And don't tell me that you're the guilty part of my conscience. I don't think I can take you parroting back to me everything I told you."
He smiled. "No, I'm a volunteer."
"Why?"
"To watch over you."
"What about them?"
"They're transient. They won't stay much longer."
I recalled Husserl's comment about the Architects. They will leave you.
"When?" I asked Nicols.
"Soon." He lifted his shoulders at my expression. "It's not my place to tell you." He looked at the three men and the possessed priestess. "You will know, I think. When it is time."
"But not yet."
"No." He shook his head.
I lifted my stump from the chair's armrest. The candlelight reflected from the silver medallion pressed into the pale flesh of my forearm. Cristobel's magick circle, meant to protect him from injury. What good had it done him when an entire building fell on him?
"I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft. I should be dead."
He took my shortened arm and turned it over so he could examine the medallion too. "You should be."
"But I'm not."
He smiled. "Not yet. Death isn't a part of this place. Neither is time. We are like that kitten. The one in the box."
"Schrodinger's."
"That's the one. Caught on the cusp. Neither one nor the other. Not until someone looks in the box and observes us."
"Who?"
"God, perhaps."
I shook my head. "I don't believe that. That would imply that there is a place where I can go that He cannot. That would invalidate His existence. That would invalidate mine."
"Unless you were God."
"But I'm not."
"Are you sure?" he asked. "You thought you were once."
"That was different."
"How?"
"I was trying to rattle Bernard. I was trying to get him to doubt himself. To doubt that he was right. He was going to kill us all with his insane plan to harvest everyone's soul. I didn't have the power to stop him; I had to trick him. I had to plant a seed of doubt."
"It worked, didn't it?"
"Yes, but-"
"So why does it have to be a trick? Why couldn't it be the truth? One you were more ready to accept than him?"
"I'm-I'm not sure. . What do I believe, John? What's the point of trying?"
Nicols laid the rag down on the floor and stood up. He offered me his hand, and waved his fingers when I looked at him dumbly. "Come with me," he said.
"I'm-" I indicated the hole and then, realizing I was pointing at it with the stump of my right hand, I waved that at him too.
"Those are the limits of your flesh," he said. "They don't matter here." He gestured again. "Come on, Michael. We need to wake her up or she'll never stop dreaming."
At first, I felt the pain of all my wounds, recent and historicaclass="underline" every bone ached, every joint complained; the old holes in my chest-imagined and real-burned like hot coals had been placed against my skin; the new hole, this one made by Antoine too, spewed a great rush of dark water-tears and blood; I lost sensation in my right arm again, a frost descending upon my nerve endings. The chair exerted a tremendous pull on me, like a mother's embrace. But I stood.