“Enough for what?” I say. I’ve moved around the sofa to confront her, but somehow I don’t feel like nestling in. “You know us beamers aren’t very bright. We need our betters to explain everything to us. Nice, clear, explicit language. Like, maybe, Hey, I’ve been pretending to be your friend just to manipulate you into killing yourself for good, because it’s too much hassle for me to keep doing it. You’re cool with that, right?”
We’re pretty close to the fireplace. There’s something about the way the flames move that keeps bugging me, but I can’t put a finger on what it is.
“And what do you think a true friend would do?” Lore asks. As insinuating as the crackle of the fire. “Would a friend allow you to come back a thousand times more, with no purpose but murder and no potential beyond sorrow? Helping you achieve your end is the greatest kindness I can show you.”
“A friend would treat me like I’m a real person, with real feelings! A friend would believe I can change.” How can that plaintive whimper be mine? That’s something else Lore’s done to me. She’s broken me down, reduced me to a squeak.
“Oh, Angus. Why else do you think I’ve spared you till now? I’m putting more faith in you than you know. I’m giving you a chance to be more than Gus ever made you to be, and I’m taking a significant risk to do it.”
Something in the fireplace leaps in a distinctly unflamelike way, drawing my gaze. I can see now that the stone is carved to give the impression that we’re inside a cave, looking out through its open mouth. And that fire: the longer I look at it, the more I can see how it’s sculpted too. Flames shoot up in narrow trunks and spread at the top into rustling blue-tipped foliage; blazing embers stretch out wings and dive from tree to tree. A bevy of fiery deer break from their bright cover and go bounding across a clearing, each smooth curved body free and flowing, before a flying spark turns into an arrow and strikes one in the throat.
The shining deer stumbles and falls to its knees with a hiss, transformed into glossy char. I didn’t mean to sit down next to Lore, but seeing the deer collapse—somehow it drops me on my ass.
Fuck you, I think at the fire. Fuck you so hard.
I’m searching among the blazing trees for the hunter. Can’t find him anywhere. Lore is watching me watch the flames, I realize, with a knowing curl to her silver mouth. “I think it likes you.”
“Whatever,” I say. I’m still looping back to her last obscurity, don’t have time for this one. “Trusting me more than I know? Why? Am I supposed to believe you give a shit about Geneva, when you’re—”
“When I’m her professor, and she’s the most gifted student I’ve ever had, and also my friend? Not everyone in Nautilus limits themselves to a singular existence, Angus, or forgets how to love the world beyond.”
“But then—” Geneva’s studying video stuff, she said. So then Lore—“You weren’t just acting in that video. You made it. All those horrible tricks it pulled. They were yours.”
Lore inclines her head. “I specialize in the empathic arts. But I have a knack for passageways and connections beyond the emotional variety as well.”
Passageways. I think I’ve seen some of those too. I can’t count all the ways she’s played me, and we barely know each other.
Except that we do, of course.
“And those sidewalk cracks. You said something about a friend, and I didn’t even think—”
“That wasn’t me,” Lore says, almost absently now. “It was a gorgeous piece of magic, though. I’ll concede that much.”
“Margo said you were working with someone to hurt me! So, great, it wasn’t you personally. It was a friend of yours, messing me up as a favor to you, all so you could swoop in and rescue me and I’d be so, so grateful—”
“I believe I said it was your friend who was responsible. She’s hardly a friend of mine,” Lore observes, in a definitely unfriendly tone. “Angus, listen. There are things you deserve to know about your condition. Aspects of your history that might inform your choice, and I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have about them. But there are other questions that are more intrusive than you realize.”
She means she’ll only tell me things that herd me along the way she wants me to go. Up till now I’ve been blasted by knowing too much, too fast. Stunned and staggering. But somehow hearing Lore’s condescension strips away my bewilderment.
Inform my choice, you say. Yeah, that’s the quick of it.
“So what do you want from me?” I ask. Somehow I keep my snarl suppressed, deep in my throat. What comes out is all polite young man. Still innocent, still unbroken.
Lore nods. Pleased to be wrapping things up so promptly, because who has time to waste on me?
“Vengeance. You understand, now, who the author of your suffering has been, all this time. My hope is that understanding will let you at last break through your limitations. That you will make a genuine choice for the first time in all your unnumbered lives, and destroy him.”
I mean, I knew that. It still sucks hearing her say it. “Even though I’ll destroy myself that way too. Forever. You really think that’s a fair thing to ask?”
Lore coughs up a half laugh. “I think it’s much more than fair, actually.”
This might be one of those agree-to-disagree things. Just because I’m an abomination, that means I don’t get to live?
Gus Farrow. He must be too powerful for Lore to kill directly, or she never would have bothered picking off a succession of Anguses. So why does she think I can do what she can’t?
“How?”
Firelight licks across her silver smile. “That’s a remarkable question, coming from a living weapon.”
Oh, gross! Gross, gross, nasty gross. But also, check.
“Point taken.” Voices rise and fall around us, and for the first time I register that we aren’t alone in this palatial room. There are peoplesque clusters lounging here and there on divans and couches, conversations fuzzing the air with languages I’ve never heard before.
“The greater difficulty is in reaching him. A few iterations ago an Angus turned up at his door, screaming and wailing. So now his rooms here are barred against you. And if you try some sort of stakeout, he’ll notice soon enough that you aren’t where you’re supposed to be.”
“Okay,” I say, but my focus keeps veering away from her. The singed floral stink from the gallery, and not just from the gallery, chokes me with a kind of sick nostalgia. Home, I think, and then I finally spot the hunter in the flames. He comes staggering out of the flickering underbrush, clutching his head. Is there something sprouting from his brows, something he’s trying to hold in?
“The Nimble Fire chooses one person from among those present, and reveals something in their mind. Something secret. A passion, a dread. Hope or history.” The words haul on my attention. Amber light curls on Lore’s lips like a sneer. She tips her head toward the hunter, his body canted forward while his arms elongate and kink with weird new joints. His face is stretching under spreading horns. “But it pays for what it takes. As long as the vision plays, the fire’s elect can pass through it. To anywhere. Or to anyone.”
What is she trying to say? That I can throw myself into the fire and come out with my lips smack against the creep who made me?
“That’s not coming from me,” I say. I can’t pull my gaze away from the hunter’s transformation. “I don’t understand what it’s getting at, at all.”
Lore glances from me to the fire and back again. “Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it’s drawing its imagery from someone else. Strictly speaking.” What’s that supposed to mean? But Lore doesn’t give me time to wonder. “If you can’t reach Gus through this fire, you have other ways to him. Ones he opens himself.”
God, I’ve been slow on the uptake. That face in the smoke—
Lore sees me catching on, and smiles. “Having such imperfect control over you must grate terribly on him. He can’t stop looking for ways to keep you in check.”
“The candles! I’ve only lit one of them. I got freaked out, I couldn’t stand—”
“I can imagine that recognizing yourself in him would be aversive,” Lore says. It’s not in her interest to goad me, so maybe she’s trying to keep that mocking note out of her voice. But if she is, it’s a major fucking fail. “Well, then you must have quite a few candles left?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Enough for a big-ass funeral pyre. I’ll invite all my friends to come over and self-immolate with me. Make it an occasion.”
“I can think of some who are overdue for a funeral,” Lore says, and now her smile jabs through me like it’s aiming for something tucked behind my eyes. “But sarcasm aside, Angus. Have you made up your mind?”
“I think so,” I say. Here’s my chance to demonstrate my incredible capacity for learning, right? “I never wanted to kill all those girls; Gus tricked me into it. He set me up! I don’t have to be human to hate someone for messing with me like that.”
Lore nods gravely and rests her hand on my arm. As dreamy, as oblivious, as complacent as any beamer I’ve ever met.
“It will be the best proof you could ever give of your love for Geneva, even if she’ll never know.”
“Right. It makes me feel a lot better, thinking of it that way.” Geneva, her dear protégée, her gifted one, her blaze of promise. My precisely nothing—unless, you know, I make her my something. I look into the fire again, see the stag dragged down by leaping dogs. I’ve got gifts of my own, I want to say. I’ve got promises. You’ll see.
“You may have trouble believing this, Angus. But I told you the truth when I said that I’d come to care about you, through all our many confrontations. I’ll remember what was best in you, always.”
She’s so sure she’s got me on her line, bouncing dutifully all the way to annihilation. As if, bitch. I give her my best impression of a poignant, boyish smile, and she actually pulls me in for a hug.
It’s vengeance you want from me, Lore? Can do.