He wouldn’t go any farther inside for a while. He stood there in the smelly hole-pocked rubbishy darkness and said— They made it clear that they’d arrest anyone who tried to join us. Floods of people came anyway. It felt like half the world. In reality it was, what, maybe a couple thousand? Coming out as a necromancer didn’t exactly win me the popular vote, but the police were pushed to a fever pitch with anxiety. The international party line was that the problem had to get taken care of. Overseas relief troops were being flown in by the UN and our government didn’t like it. They said it wasn’t a war zone and they didn’t want a blood bath and was it even legal. We took who we could behind the wall. I was extending that thing outward metre by metre, didn’t need new cows by then because I could grow the original material, but that just freaked everyone out more. It even scared A—。 He was all, Matter doesn’t play by these rules! You’re doing bone parthenogenesis! I told him his mum did bone parthenogenesis. A— told me he’d kill me one day.
He said, What I could do wasn’t simply freaking out everyone outside the walls. We were running out of tests to run on me. I was getting stronger minute by minute. The last frontier I couldn’t cross was the soul. M—’s nun of all people was convinced this was the element I was missing, and that finding it—the last link between what made someone alive and what made someone dead—would bring us closer to God. She was right, but I’m not sure she was right in the way she meant.
He said, I was getting so frustrated trying to figure it out. The soul. Element X. I knew the only way I was going to get closer was to see more people die. I got my wish—a bunch of new faithful appeared outside the walls hoping to come in, and they refused to back off, and they exchanged fire with the crowd keeping watch outside, and five people died.
He said, And I saw something.
He said, I was too distracted to do anything with it because it was then that I found out fresh deaths were like—like crack cocaine. I’d never taken crack cocaine, but I thought that must’ve been what it felt like. It was like my brain was hyper-attuned to the moment of violent death. I could feel it like it was happening to me. Like it was injected into the bottom of my spine. I could see everything. I could feel everything.
He said, I took the energy from those five dead people and I dropped everyone with a gun in a kilometre radius. Stopped the hearts of the army guys, the rent-a-cops, the peacekeepers, the locals. There were over a hundred of them, but I didn’t discriminate. A couple of them were in helicopters, but I didn’t get the pilots, just the guys inside. Just, bam! And they were down. It was so easy. It was like I was dreaming. I could see them all like I was standing right there, from the heat of their bodies and the blood chewing through them. It took no effort and it took no time. It simply happened. And the more I did it the more I could see. I was on the verge of something insane.
He said, I came to when P— started shaking me. Talk about police abuse. She asked what the fuck was I doing. She was angry, one of the only times I’d seen her angry, one of the only times I’d seen her scared. Because I’d stopped the hearts of all those guys, right, and I hadn’t started them again. I said I forgot. She said you’ve never forgotten before. I said I swear to God, I didn’t know what I was doing. A bunch of the guys were her old coworkers—guys she’d gone through training with in Porirua, beer buddies. I kept saying sorry, I’m sorry, I freaked out, it was an accident, I don’t know what happened, when they opened fire I lost my head. I said I made a mistake. She let it go eventually because the others were telling her to lay off. Just said, Guys as careful as you shouldn’t have accidents. If you’ve got a gun learn how to aim it. This is too big for fuckups now. Poor G— didn’t know what to do. He never knew how to pick between me and P—。
He said, In the end we dragged in all the corpses. For the skeleton army, I said. And I’d stopped kidding.
For a while both of them stopped talking. He kicked at some of the old, wet rubble. A bad smell came out. He did not fix the bad smell.
She said, “Did you ever find out what happened? With your accident?”
He turned to her and he smiled a funny little smile. It only used one half of his mouth. In the dream his new eyes did not show happiness or unhappiness.
And he said, “Come on, love. Guys as careful as me don’t have accidents.”
22
FIVE HOURS LATER, NONA did not know herself. This was a good thing as she wasn’t meant to be herself; she was only meant to turn her head and answer if she was called “Harrowhark,” or “Nonagesimus,” or “Ninth.” Her complete inability to answer to “Harrowhark” or “Ninth” meant that Camilla had given up on anything other than “Nonagesimus,” and a sigh of— “Remember not to smile.”