When he could, he said, M— and her nun spent a while yelling through the door at me. Well, M— was yelling. M— kept saying this was too far, she knew I didn’t want to do this, I could walk this back. She told me everything could be okay so long as none of those buttons got pushed. She said the ex-cultists had made it as far as the labs, so what were we going to do? I didn’t respond. Eventually M— gave up and went away.
He said, more dreamily, Not much left of the hour. Everyone would have been inside the ships, everyone would have been in place, they would have been doing last-minute checks. There was G— waiting in the middle of a city centre across the ocean, definitely half a dozen sniper beads on him, a nuke in his hand. I could feel it. I was there with him. I was with a dead body in a command room, security detail none the wiser, with three guys with codes and their fingers on the buttons, everyone who knows this guy’s a walking stiff locked out of the room. A nun praying for my clarity outside my bedroom door. A bunch of scared ex-cultists exchanging fire with the faithful down the hall. It was only a matter of time before someone I loved caught a bullet that I couldn’t bring them back from. I needed to do something. I couldn’t do anything.
He said, Eventually it was the nun who changed things. She knocked on my door and said very nicely, John, how are you doing? And I said, Not great, honestly. She said, John, how close are you to finding the soul?
And I said, I can’t, Sister. It’s too big. I don’t understand why it’s so huge. I can’t find the soul inside the body, I don’t know where to look. I don’t know what I’m doing.
She prayed over me, and then she went away for the longest five minutes of my life. Call came down the line that they were trying to evacuate the city around G— but I was all, You took too long, you know that won’t work. And they didn’t talk to me again.
Then the nun came back and knocked on my door and said, John, I think I have it. I know you’re very scared right now, but I’m going to help you. Please let me in.
He said: I let her in. She’d brought P—’s gun.
As they stood in that filthy hallway, he looked down at the brown collection of clothes and body. She did too, recognising, dimly, what she was looking at. He said, “Don’t. This isn’t what she looks like.”
And he said, as though he were underwater with the rest of everything: I guess in all the confusion P— didn’t notice it was missing. I thought she was there to kill me. Titania and Ulysses were there, but I didn’t have them jump in front of me, I didn’t have them stop her. I guess I almost—I was feeling pretty bad, you know? I was feeling pretty shaken.
He said, She just smiled at me. She said, John, don’t misunderstand. I want to help you. I truly believe that in our most terrible hours we don’t instinctively reach out to God; we push ourselves away from Him. Don’t feel bad for not rising heroically to the occasion right now. Fear doesn’t help us achieve a state of grace; it deafens the heart. John, I truly believe you can save everyone. So concentrate, please.
She said, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. And she shot herself.
He said, Her soul hung there, for a second, nothing more. And I tried to keep her—all I was thinking was that I had to save her, had to stop this fuckup if I couldn’t stop any of the others. I’d got a huge injection of the death energy close up, and it was like getting meth injected into my eyeballs. For the first time I could hold a soul and see its edges, pin it down. It was like a tiny atom bomb. I could tell immediately that this was the missing link. If I could only control it. I should have been able to take that bullet out of her brain and undo the damage. Fix the soul back in. Bring her back to life.
He said, But I held her soul in my hands and I knew why it had been so hard, because I was tuned in. I was looking at the code. I knew why I hadn’t been able to see anything.
He said, When I touched her soul, I touched you.
He said, You were the noise that was everywhere. It was like trying to talk to someone down a phone line with someone screaming through a megaphone in the same room. You drowned everything out. You were so huge and so complicated, and you were screaming. You wouldn’t stop screaming. You were so scared. You were so goddamn mad.
She said, “I was?”
He said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
He said, But that’s when I realised you were there. And I realised the soul of a single human being was incredible, but at the same time—incredible small potatoes. I wasn’t holding two nukes on the line. I was holding three. And compared to you, the other two were birthday candles.