She slipped from the room and moved off a short ways, walking with that weird gliding step. I had a whiff of an unpleasant odor, but it was less intense than it had been with the Willowy Woman. She stopped, stared at me, and edged nearer. A line of perplexity creased her brow. She lifted a hand as if to point at me, a gesture half-completed. “Isha?” she said. I spoke her name, or its approximation, and the line on her forehead deepened. She apparently wasn’t able to link the name with an identity. Which meant she had been imprisoned long enough to dissolve the memory of her purpose. She glanced in both directions along the corridor and I realized she must not recall the way out. I led her to the elevator. As we ascended she pressed herself into a corner as far away as possible, watching my every shift in posture. I carried the gun barrel-down, but was prepared to use it. Outside the bunker, standing at the bottom of the hollow, she scented the air and scanned the sky, pricked here and there by dim stars. Occasionally her eyes darted toward me, as if she had lost track and was checking to see whether or not I was still there.
The things she had forgotten, a different sky, different tastes, different musics, and the things she could not forget, surviving in her as instinct and dream…I wanted to watch her change, to guide that change, to walk with her in the West Virginia woods and give her the knowledge by which she could overcome her innate fears. I wanted to illuminate the past, demonstrate that its hold on us was breakable, and then we might be able to live. But I didn’t believe we could escape our natures or our fate. She had to go her own path and I had to return to mine. Having seen her again, I thought now I could relinquish her and abandon the world to the Siskins and the Rahuls. I’d find another country in which to forget her…or perhaps that would require another universe.
I waved at the rim of the hollow, telling her with that sign and a harsh shout to go. Reluctantly, she walked away, and then she ran, her supple stride carrying her a hundred feet toward the sky in no more time than it would have taken me to turn and go back inside the bunker. Halfway up the slope, she stopped. She was scarcely more than a shadow at that distance, but I felt her eyes on me. She cried out, “Isha!” in a voice both pleading and demanding. The connection between us was palpable, a tension stretched to the breaking point—intimations of emotion seemed to course along it. She stood awhile longer, then turned and sprinted for the rim. The connection was broken, shocking my heart. After the briefest of hesitations, abandoning all my resolve, compelled by things I knew and things I could never know, I followed.