“I did not!” I shrieked, and the pull redoubled until I was stretched taut like a drumskin. I screamed in agony.
The invader chuckled. “Think how many lives you could save, protecting this reality. Be sensible. One Neutrality balanced against the lives of an entire world. Your choice, custodian. Choose now.”
I felt the entire store tugging at me as it strained to be sucked into the void. The creatures within it were drawing closer. I can’t, I thought at the oracle. It has to be lying.
The oracle, which had been silent until now, said, I will end. Helena will end.
But it will be pointless! The invaders will destroy everything!
Its voice thundered through me: Make an end.
I released everything I was holding and let myself and all those golden chains be dragged into the void.
28
A flash of light blinded me momentarily, and I tried to blink and found whatever I was using to see with didn’t work that way. The blindness passed as rapidly as it had come, and I was in darkness as complete as the light had been, darkness that smelled of mold and dead things. I strained to see anything, even horrible invaders, but I might as well have been blind again. The chains had either disappeared or were invisible. I suspected the latter, because I still felt them tug on my immaterial body. Everything was perfectly silent. That all should have terrified me, but I felt only the ghost of fear, trembling through my core.
We are one. This place is not. See and know.
I can’t see, I thought, but even as I did I made myself relax into the meditative state I’d practiced all those times. Once again, webs of light uncurled before me, like undulating jellyfish radiant with red and purple and blue light. Then they faded, and I cried out and tried to make them stay. My cry was silent, and I couldn’t even feel a vibration in my throat—the throat I didn’t have.
See, the oracle said. There was no light, nothing to illuminate my surroundings, but impossibly the blackness lightened, became dull brown like dried mud. The dreary, bland color sharpened until it appeared to be brown hills I was floating high above. Immediately, my perspective changed, and they were a bumpy brown wall—changed again, and I was looking up at a ceiling that hung pendulous above me. I twisted and made a slow roll, with the unseen chains dragging behind me. The brown bumpy surface extended in all directions, like being inside a sphere with hills for walls. I couldn’t tell how far away they were; they might have been a mile distant or a million miles. I rolled again and confirmed that I was surrounded.
I sniffed, and smelled peanut butter atop the stink of decay, the same thing I’d smelled during the realignment. At the time, I’d known it was a phantom smell, and now I wondered how much of what I was seeing was real and how much a product of my brain’s effort to make sense of the truly alien. As I thought that, the brown hills wavered and vanished, replaced by shiny black spikes in random patterns. Which of these is real? I asked the oracle.
I do not know real here. They come.
I rolled again, looking for the portal we’d entered by, and found nothing. This can’t be right, I said. It said I would die here.
Not human. Not oracle. I am myself.
I knew, when it started talking like that, it saw us as a unified being even though I still could distinguish between us. So what happens now? We wait to be killed? I hadn’t seen any other creatures in this bizarre landscape.
Lose the battle. Win the war.
I think we’ve done that. Lost the battle, anyway.
I am myself. Fight.
The tugs on my body grew stronger. I envisioned the golden chains, but nothing happened. I willed them into existence harder and felt, again, nothing.
In the distance, something moved, black against black, like an insect skittering across the wall. Another, and another, until tiny creatures were swarming over the black spikes, making them appear to wave at me like seaweed fronds. I again felt a twinge of fear and was grateful I couldn’t panic in this state. They’re coming for us, I said. Can they hurt us?
I will end. Helena will end. I am myself.
It turned out I was perfectly capable of feeling frustration. You have to tell me what to do, I insisted. The swarm was growing larger, the specks becoming thumb-sized dots. The black spikes became charcoal gray blocks stacked irregularly atop each other. I don’t want to die.
A tremor went through me. Pressure grew as if, impossibly, the oracle intended me to possess it more fully. I cried out silently. You can’t! There’s no room!
I
AM
MYSELF
My thoughts shook me to my core. And just like that, I knew what it meant.
I can’t do it, I said.
The oracle said nothing, but I quivered with tension as it waited for me to accept the inevitable. We were not one. And could not be one so long as I clung to my own identity. My life.
I looked around again at the alien landscape, at the oncoming flood of invaders bent on destroying us. There was no point in doing what it wanted. I would die, and then we would die, and the world would follow soon after. No one would know what had happened to the oracle and its custodian because there would be no one left to care.
Malcolm, I thought.
Then I let myself fall more deeply into that meditative state. The oracle pressed down on me with such force I instinctively fought back. No, the oracle said. I end. Helena ends. Now.
With a scream of equal parts fear and pain, I stopped fighting and let the oracle fill me.
Even in my immaterial body, it hurt like nothing I’d ever experienced, worse than touching the anchor’s field, worse than becoming the oracle. It felt like drowning in acid. I struggled to breathe despite having no lungs and wanted to flail and kick until I reached a place where there was air. Instead, I made myself hold still as the oracle scoured through me, tearing me apart.
Memories rose unbidden and dissolved, leaving only fragments. There went my high school stage crew experiences. The first time I rode a bike by myself. Fighting with my sister. Then people began disappearing. People I barely remembered meeting went first, followed by Wardens I’d helped with auguries. My ex-boyfriends Chet and Jason. Sydney the therapist. Rick and Ruby. The memories came faster and more painful now, as if they were being stripped away by a caustic substance.
Judy. Gone.
My parents.
Viv.
Malcolm.
The last thing I remembered was my final sight of the intelligent invader, its blood-red beady eyes fixed on me as I fell upward into its reality, and then my mind was blank nothing.
The black tide rushed toward her. It was composed of millions, maybe billions of creatures. She couldn’t remember what they were or if she had ever seen anything like them before. They were still distant enough that she couldn’t make out details.
Something filled up the corners of her empty mind, and she came alive. Color washed into the forbidding landscape, revealing it for what it was: clouds of unformed matter in every imaginable hue, gaudy and horrible. The oncoming tide never hesitated, but in an instant the creatures, too, were filled with color so profoundly wrong it made her want to end them.
Her body, immaterial and glowing, was a spot of purity within that horrible landscape, and she knew without looking at herself that she had grown—grown from what? She didn’t belong here, and she wanted to return to the place where she did.