Or she was sharing herself with this person. Or perhaps this person was sharing herself with Sancia. Or both at once.
said Berenice’s voice in her head,
Sancia swallowed. She found this instinctive reaction was useful for helping her remember which body was hers, since that suddenly seemed rather fuzzy. Having located her own throat, she then located her face, and then she went about the process of opening her eyes…
Light poured in. She saw herself staring into Berenice’s cool, calm gaze, her face resting gently on the stone floor of the basement. And the sight of her, as well as the sight of herself from Berenice’s eyes, was overwhelming.
Yet it was also overwhelmingly beautiful. The experience was like nothing she’d ever had before. It was like returning to a childhood home that you’d left long ago: every aspect of the sight of Berenice was just so achingly familiar, so overlaid with memories and feelings and echoes of sensations…
They blinked in unison.
Then they heard Valeria say, “I believe alignment is near completion…”
They blinked again.
Silence.
Sancia thought rapidly. She reached out and grabbed Berenice’s hand, and somehow the sensation of connection intensified, like half of their minds was here in the room with Orso and Valeria and Gregor, and half was in some secret, invisible room where no one could see or hear them.
said Berenice.
Together, they slowly sat up and looked around at the basement. Everything was still the same, but the experience of seeing the familiar through someone else’s eyes was so strange. It was both wonderful and yet somehow crushing, for you learned so much, but you realized instantly how limited your experience of reality had been for the whole of your life.
She both felt and heard Berenice say: “What a critical and crushing thing, perspective is…”
“Huh?” said Orso. “Damn it all—did it work?”
Sancia looked at Orso, and suddenly her memories were flooded with knowledge about him she’d never had before, days and nights of laboring and planning and scheming in the Dandolo hypatus office. She instantly realized he wasn’t just some privileged old crank—though he was that, of course—but he was also much more.
“A…A dreamer,” said Sancia quietly. “Aspirations crushed, hopes embittered. Only flickering to life just now, for the first time in decades.”
He stared at her. “Whaa? Sancia…are you all right?”
Sancia and Berenice shook themselves in unison. Then they both simultaneously said, “Yes. I’m fine.”
Gregor and Orso shot each other a wary glance. “Are you…” said Gregor dubiously.
“Can Berenice do the same thing Sancia can?” said Orso.
Berenice shook her head. “I can’t see scrivings yet…You said they look like little silvery tangles, right, San?”
“Yeah, but…Here. Let me actually flex my sight…” Sancia focused, tensed the secret little muscle in the back of her head, and the world lit up with bright ribbons of logic and meaning, woven throughout the reality around them.
Berenice shrieked in surprise. “Oh! Oh my God.”
“What is it, girl?” asked Orso.
“I…I see them…” said Berenice. “I see all the commands, all the bindings, all the little bits of persuaded reality all around us…and they’re so beautiful.” Then she said to Sancia,
Berenice grew still.
“Alignment…appears to have gone well,” said Valeria. She sounded impatient. “Ready for the next step?”
Their wonderment vanished once they remembered their predicament, and what they were about to do.
“Yes,” said Gregor grimly. “The bit where you murder me.”
25
Sancia stared at the darts clutched in her hand, their points small and dark and gleaming with dried venom. She tried to ignore how she trembled, how her hands quaked, how her very heart seemed to flutter…
“It will work, yes?” Gregor asked her. He grunted as Berenice tied the bonds around his legs tight, securing him to the chair. “I have heard of fishermen dying from the sting of the dolorspina…”
“It’ll work,” said Sancia hoarsely. “I…I remember being told not to stick someone twice, because then…”
She trailed off, unable to articulate the thought.
“Because then they might not wake up,” said Gregor. “Yes. I see.”
Orso and Berenice finished with his legs, and then his hands. Gregor—ever the seaman—had actually tied these knots for them, and given them instructions on how to ensure they were secure. “How many will it take?” he asked as he tested the bonds on his wrists behind his back.
“I don’t know,” said Sancia. Everything felt terribly numb to her. “But…these are a little old. Been a while since I did any thieving.”
Gregor nodded, his face solemn and serious, as if he were debating an expensive purchase. “But will it be enough?”
“I have six here, so…” Again, she trailed off.
“It will be more than enough,” said Berenice gently.
“Good,” said Gregor.
“It’s…It’s a good way to go,” said Orso. “It’s the way I’d like to go, if I had to choose.”
“God…” Sancia shook her head. �
�How mad this all is. How insane it is to just be casually plotting a death. I…I don’t understand how you can be so calm about this, Gregor.”
“It’s not that mad,” said Gregor. “When I was a soldier, we frequently discussed burial plans and messages home and final wishes. Do none of you ever consider it? Ever? For the sun shall set on all our lives at some point, of course—unless you’d prefer a life like Crasedes’s.” Then he added darkly, “Or mine. I…I almost feel I…”
“Feel what?” said Sancia.
He shook his head.
“Never mind. Let us do it and get it done.”
“The critical thing,” said Valeria, “is not to interfere with the scriving, and not to break the connection to Gregor. You will feel an echo not of a dull object that has been weakly convinced to do something unusual—you will feel an echo of what it is like to have your reality abruptly and suddenly changed. To have your experience of time itself altered. I do not comprehend the nature of that experience. But I expect it will be…unusual. Do not break away.”
“Scrumming hell,” sighed Sancia, shivering. She approached Gregor and took Berenice by the hand. “Okay. Ber—our connection is stronger when we touch. So I’ll hold your hand with my right, and touch his forehead with my left. Which means…”
“Oh God,” she said. “I’ll have to be the one who…who does the bit with the darts, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” said Orso. “Perhaps I’d be the better choice…”
“No,” said Gregor. “Orso—you take a dart of your own and stand clear. When I’m activated, I’ll…I’ll need you to stick me and put me back down, if you can.” He looked at Berenice. “But that does mean this duty will stay with you, Berenice.”
She shut her eyes. “I never thought I’d ever have to do such a thing…But I suppose that goes for all of us.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Gregor. “Just do it, please.”
Berenice picked up a dart, then paused and looked Gregor in the eye. Then she took a breath and stabbed him in the thigh with one of the darts.
He didn’t flinch. Then his eyelids grew woozy and he began blinking very hard. “Oof,” he said.
“Feeling it?” said Sancia.
“Yes,” he said. “But—you’re right. These aren’t as potent as the ones you used before. I was…I was barely conscious within a second when you pricked me that time…It will take a lot more to kill me than this.” He swallowed, and then he suddenly laughed. It sounded slightly delirious. “Do…Do you remember it, Sancia?”
“Remember what?”
“You jumping through the window, and darting those men? In the Greens, I mean…And then you hauled me out to the gutters, and…and we spoke for the first time.”
“Yeah. Sure. I remember, Gregor.”
His smile faded and he stared into space, glassy-eyed. “How odd, to feel nostalgic for such a time. It seems so long ago now.”
They watched him. He began to lean in the chair, and his face grew dead and dull and oddly pained, like he wasn’t quite sure what was happening, but he knew he did not like it.
“Knocking…Knocking me out,” he said, his words slurred. Then: “Another.”
“What?” said Sancia.
“Another…Another dart. Not enough.”
Berenice hesitated.
Gregor’s head lolled back. “Another!” he cried. “Get it over with! Please!”
“Ber—another!” hissed Sancia.
Cursing quietly, Berenice snatched up another dolorspina dart and stabbed him in the leg again.
Gregor’s head had rolled to the side, and he was staring into space with an expression that was both miserable and despairing. “Okay,” he said. He was breathing hard now. “All right. Here it comes.”
Sancia almost asked if he was feeling all right, or if it hurt, but then she realized the awful pointlessness of such a question.
“I thought”—he grunted slightly—“that I would remember a little more of what this was like. Dying, I mean.” His voice trembled. “I thought it would feel a bit old-hat. But…I mean, I know I shouldn’t be afraid…”
Berenice turned away, now weeping freely.
“Going out now,” whispered Gregor. He looked up at Sancia. “Am I…Am I bad for hoping, a little, that it sticks?”
“Sticks?” said Sancia. “What do you mean?”
But then his neck went limp, and his face slackened. She knew he was not dead yet, but he was very clearly dying. She had seen many people die in her life, many in ways far more horrible than this, but for some reason this seemed worse than all the others. And as she watched him leaning sideways in the chair, his face aggrieved as if he’d been holding vigil all night mourning the loss of a loved one and could not stay awake a moment longer, she realized why.
Does he want this? Does he welcome this? Does he hope to die?
said Berenice.
Then Gregor closed his eyes and went still.
Everyone stared at him for a moment, slack and leaning in the chair, his face pinched in pain and sorrow, his chest still and devoid of breath.
Orso hobbled up and felt the side of his neck. “He’s still alive. His pulse is slowing, but he’s still alive.” He blinked for a moment and said in a very strangled voice, “Berenice—I think you need to do another dart.”
“No!” she said, sniffing.
“Yes!” he snapped. “You’re going to have to!”
“I don’t want to!” she said. “It’s too horrible!”
“It’s going to happen anyway!” he said. “We just need it to happen faster, all right?”
“Orso, you…you rotten bastard!” she cried.
Orso looked a little surprised and hurt at those words.
“Ber,” said Sancia sharply.
Sobbing, she picked up yet another dolorspina dart and jabbed it into his leg.
Orso felt Gregor’s pulse again, his own face convulsing with anguish. “It’s…It’s still slowing,” he rasped. “It should be enough…”
They stared at Gregor, limp in the chair, lying in a way that would have been terribly painful for him had he been conscious. Sancia was suddenly struck with the strange and heartbreaking realization that if this were to fail, and Gregor were to actually die tonight, then this would probably be how he’d wish to do it: gently, slowly, in his sleep, surrounded by his friends. And then she began to cry.
* * *
—
Gregor Dandolo slept.
He was not sure why, or how he’d come to sleep, but he lingered in the shadows, unable to think or feel or move. All he knew was a suffocating darkness, an encroaching void that seemed to drown his very mind…
Then his thoughts began to crumble in, all the memories flashing and crackling as the grand stage of his mind went dark, interactions and moments from all throughout his life bursting in the shadows like sputtering fireworks.
Ah, he thought. I know this now. I am…I am going to die now, aren’t I?
A barrage of moments, of sensation, of textures and emotions. Not simply the epiphanies and the conflicts and the victories and defeats that formed his person, but all the tiny interstitial, forgettable exchanges that make up the sum of one’s life…
The feeling of thick leather in warm sun.
A man’s hand, turning a coin over and over again.
A pebble in the back of a boot.
Birds b
ursting from the foliage to wheel away into the dawning sun.
Memories upon memories upon memories.
And among them…
* * *
—
Asleep.
Gregor felt cloth under him, over his face and against his body, and all about him was the smell of his mother.
He was asleep in her hanging clothes in her closet again, in that secret place he went when he felt threatened, for in that place he knew he was safe. This place was hers. No one could harm him there.
Then he heard a sound—a splashing from nearby, and someone gasping and spitting.
Gregor opened his eyes. He sat up and slowly emerged from the hanging clothes, and he crouched there on the floor of her closet, listening.
There was a splashing from a room beyond—the bathing room—and a cough, and another bout of spitting. And then there was a sob, miserable and pained.
Gregor stood at the door to the closet, hesitating. Then he opened it and stepped out.
The first thing he saw was his own face, looking back from the reflection of a mirror—he was so young and fragile, not yet six. He looked at himself only for a moment, for then his mother shrieked in fright.
She was on the floor of the bathing room in a nightshirt, kneeling before a bowl filled with rose-pink water, her face and hands dripping. She appeared to have been using it to wash her face—which was, to his shock, badly beaten: her split lip, still dribbling blood, and her blackened eyes, and bruised cheeks.
“Gregor!” she said. “What…What were you doing in there?”
“Momma,” he said. “Momma, what happened to you?”
The rag fell from her hands into the bloody water in the bowl, splashing her nightshirt. “Were you hiding in there? Why would you be hiding in my closet?”
“I…I fell asleep in there.” He felt hot with confusion and shame. “I…I do that sometimes but I…I…” Then he burst into tears.
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