[Episode XXVIII: The Moon's Eye and the Keeper of the Abyss — Continued]

  ---

  [SCENE: The Bridge That Broke and the Dirge of the Living]

  Location: Atlantis — Temporary Joint Medical Center

  Time: 5 hours after the Atlantis collapse

  ---

  The command was delivered.

  In the deep dark of Sublevel 100, a finger pressed a button. There was no explosion. No alarm. A soft electronic tone — the sound of a soap bubble popping, small enough to be embarrassing for what it represented — and then system confirmation in the cold synthesized voice:

  NEURAL BLOCK INITIATED.

  SYNCHRONIZATION RATE FORCED TO ZERO.

  And four hours and sixty floors above, on the coast of Atlantis, in the temporary medical center that the joint forces had assembled from whatever materials the ruins had left behind — crystal slabs for tables, salvaged diagnostic equipment, whatever the PDN medical team had carried in their field packs — every instrument monitoring Mitsuko Kamishiraishi changed at once.

  The line went flat.

  The tone that filled the medical center was not quiet. It was the specific long, unbroken tone of a system reporting that the condition it was designed to detect had been confirmed, and that the confirmation was final, and that there was nothing further to monitor.

  One continuous note.

  Filling the space.

  ---

  The crystal medical bed was at the center of the room.

  She had been on it for several hours by now, the diagnostic arrays suspended above her generating their soft light, the PDN medical team maintaining the interventions that had slowed but not stopped what was happening to her body — the cracks still spreading, faintly, at the diminished rate that was the best anyone had been able to do, the aether still dispersing in small purple clouds at the points of greatest fracture.

  She had been breathing.

  Her chest had been rising and falling.

  Then the tone started.

  The green line on the neural monitor — the line that had been moving through its erratic anxious curves, proof of a consciousness under pressure but still present — went horizontal.

  White.

  Flat.

  Mitsuko's body convulsed once. A single full-body shudder, every muscle contracting simultaneously, the body's last involuntary protest. Then she went completely still in a way that was different from any of the stillness she'd been in before. The specific stillness of something that has stopped, not something that is resting.

  The color left her face in the time it took to blink.

  Not the sick pale she'd been — the pale past that. Gray-white, the pallor of marble.

  The diagnostic arrays above her shifted from amber standby to red.

  ---

  Cavill was through the door before the second pulse of the alarm.

  He had been in the outer space of the medical center — had not been able to stay further away than that, had been sitting on a piece of intact wall twenty meters from the entrance, counting the pulse of his own heartbeat and making himself stay there rather than going back in to hover over the medical team. The alarm's first note hit and he was already moving.

  He crossed the room and got his hand around hers.

  Cold.

  Not the cold of skin that's been in cool air. Not the cold of someone sleeping. The cold that came from the bone, from the inside out, the cold of a fire that was no longer burning, the cold of a house where the last warm thing has been removed and the walls have started to take on the temperature of the outside.

  "Mitsuko."

  He said her name.

  The alarm continued.

  A man in a white clinical coat came from the side of the room — older, silver-haired, moving with the controlled urgency of someone who had received bad news in professional settings many times and had learned how to receive it without falling apart. He had a portable scanning unit. He moved it across Mitsuko's head, read what it showed him, and the control he had over his expression slipped for a moment before returning.

  Professor Morpheus. Chief of PDN's Comprehensive Medical University. The foremost living authority on human neural function.

  He looked at the 3D brain map his scanner had generated and was displaying in the air beside the bed.

  Gray.

  Not dim. Not damaged. Gray. The specific gray of inactive tissue — no electrical activity, no metabolic response, no signal of any kind from any structure. The image of a brain that had become an object.

  His hands trembled. The scanner nearly fell.

  He removed his glasses. Pressed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Replaced the glasses.

  "Mitsuko Kamishiraishi..." His voice was not steady. "Is dead."

  Four words. The weight of them was not proportional to their number.

  "Her brainstem function has completely ceased. The neurons—" He stopped. Started again. "Every neural pathway underwent simultaneous self-termination. This is..." He stopped again. "This is complete brain death. She's gone."

  ---

  The sound that followed was Lasnohar's knees hitting the floor.

  Not a collapse — a going-down, a controlled descent made necessary by the fact that his legs had stopped participating in the project of holding him upright. The big man — the soldier who had spent thirty years in environments designed to break people and had not been broken, who had the specific physical presence of someone who had learned early that standing communicated something to the people around them about the state of affairs — was on the floor of the medical center, looking at the crystal bed, and his eyes had nothing in them.

  He had brought her out of the lower districts. He had seen what she was and offered her a future. He had made promises.

  He had put her on the battlefield.

  She had died on it without leaving a last word.

  "No." Cavill's voice had changed. Something had exited it — the controlled quality, the specific discipline of the Maya hunter who had spent decades learning to be precise and cold when precision and cold were what a situation required. What was left underneath was not cold.

  He was still holding her hand.

  He was not letting go.

  "No. You didn't die just to be a bridge!" The sound came out ragged, the specific rawness of a voice that has been trained against betraying anything and is now betraying everything. "You said you wanted money! You said you wanted to live! You get up right now — you don't get to die for us, we didn't ask for that — "

  His voice broke apart.

  He was a Maya warrior and he was shaking and he didn't care.

  Arphelia — who had lived long enough and made enough hard decisions that her default was the same calculated remove she had worn every day for decades — came to stand beside him. She looked at Mitsuko's face. The expression on Arphelia's was one she had not worn in a very long time.

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  "When you first came to us," she said, very quietly, "I didn't believe you. I thought you were a trick. I thought no one like you actually existed."

  She looked at the assembled people in the room — PDN officers and Aztec warriors and Mu emissaries and Maya soldiers, people who would not have been in the same room without her, people who had been ready to kill each other three days ago.

  "You proved me wrong. You stopped the war. You made us into — this." She gestured at the room, at all of it. "And now you're dead."

  She looked up.

  "Who builds the bridges after the bridge is gone?"

  The room held no answer.

  ---

  Lasnohar's head came up.

  The emptiness in his eyes was replaced by something else — the sudden desperation of a man who has run through the available options and has found one he hadn't considered yet.

  "Morpheus." He was on his feet. His voice had the intensity of someone gripping the last possible thing. "You've had contact with Persephone. She's been working on human reconstruction technology for her entire career. She built the Ouroboros — she built something that could rebuild Endolf after clinical death. She has to have a way to restart a brain—"

  "It won't work," Dissard said.

  He had been in the corner.

  He had been there since the alarm started, and he had not moved, and he had been completely still in the way of someone who was absorbing something and needed stillness to do it. Now he walked to the bed. He looked like he had aged ten years since the morning.

  He looked at Mitsuko's face.

  "Persephone doesn't have that capability," he said. "Not for this. Not for a brain-dead person — for the specific kind of death that just happened."

  He set his hands on the edge of the bed and looked at her.

  "We could restore the neural pathways. Given enough time and the right resources, PDN's technology could rebuild the physical architecture of what was there. We could make the heart beat again. We could make the body perform the functions of a living body." He paused. "What woke up in it would not be Mitsuko. It would be an organism containing fragments of her memory without the thing that organized those fragments into a person. A machine that would answer to her name."

  "That," he said, "would be the greatest desecration we could do to her."

  Cavill's head snapped up. The word had hit something.

  "Soul," he said.

  Dissard looked at him.

  "You said — soul. That's what she needs. That's — Atlantis handles that, doesn't it?" He was turning, looking around the room, the desperation reshaping into something with direction. "The priestesses, the ancient instruments — the connection to the voice — someone in the Giant Gate Alliance has to have done soul retrieval before. If Ragu could manipulate souls, there must be others—"

  Silence.

  The ancient civilization representatives in the room all looked at the ground at the same time.

  It was Docina who answered.

  She was against the wall, exhaustion in every line of her posture.

  "I looked into this," she said. "After what happened with Ragu — after I ended up on the wrong side of what he could do — I spent a long time researching every instrument and device in the Giant Gate network. Everything the voice had given the civilizations." A pause. "Soul manipulation is Ragu's gift. Specifically Ragu's. There is no device that replicates it. After his death, the instruments that were connected to that function went silent."

  She looked at the bed.

  "And even if he were here—" she finished the sentence with a look that communicated the rest.

  The last possibility closed.

  Cavill's legs stopped working.

  He sat on the floor beside the bed and put his arms around Mitsuko — around the still, gray-white body that was no longer Mitsuko in any way that word had meant something — and the tears came down silently and landed on her face.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

  Morpheus picked up his medical recorder. He said her name and began the formal death declaration.

  Dissard's hand shot out. He stopped it.

  Everyone looked at him.

  Dissard was looking at Mitsuko's face — at the expression that had settled there after all the pain had left it, which was not an expression of suffering and was not empty but was something in between those things, something at rest.

  "She's alive in everyone here," he said.

  He pulled the white sheet up, slowly, with both hands, the way you covered someone you were not ready to say was gone.

  "This bridge may be broken. But it already connected us." He smoothed the sheet at her shoulder. "She's not dead. There's no declaration to make."

  Morpheus looked at him for a moment. Then set the recorder down.

  "Understood," he said.

  At the edge of the room, Stan and Azure stood with their hands intertwined, watching. They had not spoken. There was nothing to speak — they knew what their power and its limits were, and those limits were real, and the person who had been their most trusted companion had just reached a place those limits did not extend to. Stan's face was a specific quality of blank. Azure was crying with the specific silence of someone who had decided not to make sound about it.

  And in the center of the room, people who had been trying to kill each other seventy-two hours ago stood quietly around a girl they had each, in their own way, followed past the edge of what they had thought they were capable of.

  They gave her the only thing they had left to give.

  ---

  [SCENE: The Other Shore of the Soul]

  Location: Unknown — an assembled space

  Time: No concept of time

  ---

  The long tone of the flatline reached this place.

  But by the time it arrived, it had traveled far enough and changed enough that it didn't sound like what it was anymore. A string of wind chimes, maybe — distant, dispersing, the sound of something in the act of dissolving rather than ending.

  She was falling.

  Not the cold fall of a body losing altitude — nothing like that. The fall of a feather. The specific weightlessness of something released from the thing that had been pulling at it, descending without direction, turning slowly in air that was neither cold nor warm because it was something that the word *air* was not built to describe.

  Every piece of pain left.

  The specific pains: the fracturing of the crystal-rock skin. The pressure on compressed neural circuits. The weight of what she had done, and what had been done to her, and what she had watched happen to other people, and the specific gravity of carrying a body that had been modified and modified again and pushed past every operating limit it had. All of it —

  Gone.

  Not forgotten. Released.

  She opened her eyes — if they were eyes. The sensation was the sensation of eyes, but the information coming through them was something else.

  No up or down. No gravity. No reference point. The space she was in did not obey the structural rules of space as she had always understood it.

  Color — that was the first word for it, though color was insufficient. Currents of vivid living green and deep quiet blue, the two intertwining and separating and intertwining again in motion that was too large to be contained in any field she had ever occupied. Not a background. Not a sky. Something that was the space itself, the substance of it, light in motion that was also the medium through which you moved.

  She looked at herself.

  Her body was not her body. Not the battle-worn, cracked, scarred configuration she had last been in — no wounds, no fractures, no evidence of anything that had happened. What she was now was a shape in silver, semi-transparent, like moonlight gathered into an outline, like the concept of a person rendered in luminescence rather than flesh.

  The feeling of it:

  Familiar. Strange. Both at once in the specific way of things you have encountered before but do not have clear memory of encountering — the body's recognition, not the mind's. Like—

  The earliest thing. Before names. Before anything put into her. Before the process that had been done to make her what she was. Something that had been present before all of it, some original state that the layers of modification and training and experience had buried so deep it had become theoretical, and was now — somehow — the only thing left.

  The warmth of amniotic fluid.

  The absolute security of the newborn, held completely, not yet separate from the thing that held it.

  She had forgotten this was a feeling that had existed. She had never expected to feel it again.

  "We've finally met."

  The voice came from everywhere and from inside her simultaneously. Genderless. Ageless. It carried the distance of something that had been speaking in one form or another since before human language had been invented, and also the intimacy of something that had been waiting specifically for this specific moment and this specific person.

  She turned — though *turned* was not quite what she did.

  At the center of the space, where the green and the blue converged: a sphere of light. Enormous — the scale of something that should not fit in any space and somehow occupied this one without strain. And simultaneously small — the scale of a seed, something gestational, something that contained potential rather than exhibiting it. The two scales coexisted. She was not certain which was accurate. She thought both might be.

  It pulsed. Slow and steady. Each pulse sent the colors of the space rippling outward the way a heartbeat sent blood through vessels, the space itself responding, breathing.

  She did not recognize it.

  And yet.

  Something in her — not her mind, not her trained responses, not the version of her that had been shaped by PDN and shaped by Mu and shaped by three years of building alliances and making decisions in the dark — something underneath all of that knew exactly where it was.

  Had always known.

  Had always, at some level, been looking.

  "Welcome," the voice said. "To my world."

  She reached out with what was her hand in this place — the silver outline, the moonlight shape — toward the warmth of it.

  She tried to speak. Found she didn't need to — the intention moved outward from her directly, forming itself in the medium of this space without requiring sound:

  Who are you? Where is this?

  The sphere pulsed. Did not answer directly. Breathed outward instead — a deepening, something older and larger than any answer she could have processed filling the space for a moment and then subsiding.

  An ancientness past human scale. Past ancient civilization scale. Past the scale of anything she had reference for.

  "It seems," the voice said, "that we have some things to discuss."

  The sphere's light moved. Reached. She was not certain if she moved toward it or if it moved toward her, or whether the distinction applied in this place. What she was certain of:

  The moment of contact.

  And the specific quality of what happened in that moment — the way the wars fell away, and the grief fell away, and the weight of everything she had been carrying fell away, and none of it stopped being real, but all of it stopped being the thing that defined the available space.

  There was more space available than she had realized.

  A lot more.

  On the shore of something she did not yet have words for, a conversation that would change what she understood about everything was about to begin.

  ---

  [End of Episode XXVIII]