Very deliberately, she relaxes the arm holding her lover to her body and uses the other to stroke the bloody bangs from her pale, waxen face. “Wait for me,” she whispers, before laying Dakota’s body on the ground and carefully arranging her limbs into a pose that looks as if she is merely sleeping. With a half sob that she cuts off savagely, she leans forward and places a kiss on chill lips. “I’ll be with you soon.”
*
The impact as her body hits the floor jars along her bones, but somehow, strangely, its solidity does not break her fall. She plunges through it into the void, an infinity of night that spins about her as she tumbles through it like a dark comet, all its light and glory spent. Here and there the blackness thins, and she glimpses distant points of light that may be stars, glowing wisps like nebulae, the final blaze of dying suns. Wind beats at her as she falls, stripping her sight from her, scouring her skin. Voices ride on its current, strange whispers that seem half-familiar, half-alien. She strains to hear, but the wind drowns them, all but fragments. Threaded in among the voices, high, wild laughter skims along its current, echoing against the walls of night that close in about her.
“. . .replaced me, knew you would . . ..”
“. . .bright for a prairie nigger, but still . ..
“. . .left me to die . . ..”
“. . .I said, your Christian name, girl . . ..”
“. . .just need a man, bitch . . ..”
“. . .could have saved hm if you’d tried . . ..”
“. . .couldn’t protect her. . .dead . . .dead. . .”
“. . .all dead, all dead . . ..”
“. . .your fault. . ..
“. . .your fault your fault YOUR faultfaultfaultfault. . ..”
The wind batters at her like breaking waves, slamming her as she begins to spin on the axis of her spine. Except that she has no spine, has no bones, no flesh, no skin. Under the incessant assault, she feels herself begin to fragment. She tries to draw in upon herself, reflexing into a knot with knees drawn up and arms crossed over her breast. But her muscles do not answer her, do not exist. A part of her tears away to go spinning back the way she has come, whirling down the spiral path that leads toward earth, back toward life. A part of her consciousness clings to it as it bursts free of the darkness to hover over the sprawl of her body, and she regards it curiously. Blood stains it from thigh to neck, pools on the floor around it, begins to grow viscous at the edges of its flow. At the desk not far away, Kirsten sits before a computer screen, face pale as her hair, mouth a thin line of control. Her fingers fly over the keyboard. Her concentration armors her, but beyond it lies a welter of pain raw as stripped flesh. It calls to her, calls her name.
Even in death. Even in death.
Even in death, I will never leave you.
The winds take her again, and awareness of the earthbound fragment fades. Their force spins her through the darkness, whirling faster and faster as the circumference of her self draws inward, concentrating her essence. Without warning she bursts forth into the starlight of a summer night, floating somewhere above a narrow valley where a stream runs silver in the moonlight and hummingbird moths fumble at the spires of paintbrush and lupine. A big dog lies among the flowers on one slope; he looks up and whines as she passes. Peace, she wishes him. And, stay. Then she is gone, carried up and over the shadowed landscape, skimming the energy lines that stretch like cobwebs from the sacred mountains in the lands of the Dine far to the south, to the sleeping cones of Grandfather and Little Sister in the north, that the whites call Ranier and St. Helen, to the Black Hills far to the east.
But distance has no meaning to her now. With the thought she is there, the Paha Sapa rising jagged up out of the plain, the place of her people’s beginnings. Here we came forth. Here we became human, came forth to live in the light of Wiyo on the surface of Ina Maka.
At the foot of the barren slopes lies a stretch of forest. A clearing shows pale where the pines stand back from a ribbon of bright water and a spoked circle of stones laid out on the short grasses. She wills herself downward. A mule deer buck, his antlers still in velvet, browses among the undergrowth. He startles for a moment, then placidly resumes his feeding. In the branches a screech owl stirs, its burbling call blending with the rush of water in the small stream that tumbles down from the bare mountains above. Koda settles in the center of the medicine wheel and waits.
After a time, she hears a thin thread of song. It grows stronger as it approaches, a woman’s voice, chanting in Lakota.
See me.See me.My steps on the EarthAre sacred.
The voice comes nearer, still singing.
Hear me.Hear me.My words to the PeopleAre sacred.
A bright shimmer appears at the northern edge of the clearing. It moves toward her, and as it does, the figure of a woman takes shape within it. Rainbows dance in the light that surrounds her, striking fire from the rock crystal of her headband and armlets, running blue and violet over the fall of her hair.
Understand.Understand.All things in the hand of Wakan TankaAre sacred.
The woman of light halts before her, close enough to touch. She stands tall and slender, eyes great pools of shadow, her skin smooth and unmarked as the new bark of the madrone. A buffalo, worked in beads made from the pearl lining of mussel shells, adorns the white buckskin of her dress. All things, she sings. All that is created, is sacred.
Han, says Koda without sound, her gaze lowered in respect. It is so.
It is so, the woman answers. You know me.
Wohpe, she says. White Buffalo Calf Woman.
Han. You walk the Blue Road, sister.
At that she looks up. I know. She hesitates a moment. Then, Is there—
—another way? But you have seen your body. A gentle regret comes into the sacred woman’s voice. It is past healing. Come. There is one who waits for you.
There is one left behind. Stubborn, her grandfather had called her. Argue with anyone.
It is not her time. The answer is patient, but firm. Come.
Hesitantly, then, Koda takes her hand. It is insubstantial as her own. The forest winks away, and the night closes in again.
*
Kirsten finds herself behind the rainbow shaped work table with no clear memory of having gotten there. Adam stands to her right, hands clasped behind his back, an expression of compassion mixed with relief in his dark eyes. “Doctor….”
“Let’s just get this over with.” Her voice is hollow, bleak, empty as a tomb. Her eyes match the tone, flat and lifeless, as if her spirit has already left and only this shell remains behind.
Adam nods once, then gestures with his chin toward the alien line of code scrolling endlessly, nauseatingly, across the bottom of all the monitors on the work table. “This code, I’ve discovered, is not meant to be read. It is meant to be heard.” He fancies he can see a flicker of interest in her dead gaze at the revelation, then realizes it is nothing but a trick of the increasingly fickle lighting in the office. The building’s circuits, no doubt, are close to being cooked by Dakota’s destructive charges. He can feel some sense of satisfaction in that, and does. Then he continues.
“It is not, however meant to be heard by human ears. Nor even by android ears, I suspect.”
“My implants,” Kirsten states, as interested as if she were talking on a sport in which she had absolutely no interest. Lawn darts, for example.
“Yes. Specifically, your own implants and no one else’s. The code was designed to communicate with, and respond to, the unique variable frequencies in your set of cochlear implants. To anyone else so enhanced, it would sound like gibberish. To the rest of us, there is only silence.”