A gurgling sounds in my ears, a rhythmic slosh slosh slosh of falling water. Mossy bank, watermill, green-brown current. Dead young man, his pointy, bony, arrogant face aimed skyward. Green-white eyes mirroring the glide of sudsy little clouds. Living girl, gasping and trembling as she rises onto her knees, a ring of red bruises fresh on her neck and her honey-colored hair clumped and muddy.
“Thank you so much for your help, sir,” the girl rasps through her damaged throat. “Another moment and you would have been too late!”
She stares at me and her gratitude blurs into confusion. As if I look familiar. As if she can’t quite place me.
“I am too late, actually,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. I’m more than a hundred years too late. Catherine, don’t you remember?” I’d like to cling to the heroism she’s imagining in me, but I can’t even do that. “I’m not even the one who killed him, though I guess I tried. It was Lore and Anura and me and you together. But mostly you, honestly.”
She bites her lip as the memories hit her. Trying not to cry in front of me.
“I did have the impression that I’d been screaming for rather a while.” She gives a sad half smile, and after a second I get it. She’s smiling at me. “It’s coming back to me now, like a dream far longer than my own life. How odd it feels, to remember my future, and a future in which I’m dead at that!”
She shakes her head hard, wet hair swinging. She’s just realized her life is gone, that what she thought was her rescue was nothing but a figment, and her wounded composure as she faces that—
I feel it as if Lore’s pendant were still around my neck, that’s all.
“Yeah. I can imagine it would be pretty overwhelming.” I hesitate, because I almost don’t want to know. “So do you remember who I am now?”
“You’re Gus’s creature. His projection, made to shine murder into the far reaches of the world. Hello, Angus.”
Her, so very her. But that word doesn’t have the same meaning for me that it used to. I don’t covet Catherine, and it feels like freedom: that I can respect her, admire her, without the compulsion to consume her.
“That’s me,” I agree. “And the term is beamer. That’s all I am.”
Why is she still wasting her smile on me, if she knows? It’s a hell of a smile, wry and raw and aching—but there’s something else in it, too, something I don’t deserve. Compassion. Appreciation.
“And yet you helped me destroy him. I don’t suppose that was part of Gus’s design for you.”
“Defective, I guess. I’m still just a spin-off of the old creep himself. And he killed you.” All at once I feel how inadequate anything I can say will be. Even the corpse splayed out by the brown sweep of her skirt is a pathetic offering. Justice is no recompense for life, and life is something no one can give back to her. “I wish I could— Catherine, I should have died a hundred times rather than hurt you. I—”
But she’s not thinking about me. Her gaze rests on Gus’s body, but her expression is inward, dreamy, like she’s searching for something in her own mind. It’s the hardest thing to accept, that she doesn’t even hate me anymore, can’t be bothered to listen to my stumbling apologies. I’m just not that important to her.
“I have regrets as well,” she says at last, and I have a pretty good idea who’s on her mind. “There was something of a question whether my ghost would persist once Gus was dead, but I think that question is about to be settled. Regret won’t remain much longer. For either of us.”
Yeah. I’m really trying not to be bitter. I got what I wanted, so what right do I have? Even these last moments, this conversation on this bank, and the thoughtful delicacy of Catherine’s expression as she considers everything that happened: all of it is a gift far beyond anything I should expect. The current twinkles with diamantine flecks. A single, impulsive sun-glint on the water is surely wonder enough for a whole life.
And then I see what Catherine’s talking about. “Shit.”
Because a pool of sunlight laps around the two of us, the corpse, pillows of moss, and a few sinuous yards of rushing stream. But everything beyond that is lost to jet black that’s nothing like the blackness of night. An absolute density of nowhere-to-go, a velvet omega. It takes only a moment to realize that our little patch of light is dwindling.
“For you at least it’s a real death, because you were a real person,” I tell her. “For me, I guess, it’s not even that.” It’s misery being kicked out of misery, the way you’d turn out an unloved cat. I shouldn’t even mourn for myself, because what the hell was I?
Catherine brushes the dirt off her apron and turns to watch the world’s vanishing. “In helping me kill Gus Farrow, you knowingly brought an end to yourself. To all your selves.”
“Sure,” I say. Justice is no recompense for life, I thought, and I know that’s true.
But there are also the lives of all the girls who will be freed from future Anguses, and those lives are my tribute to Catherine as well. To her, to Geneva, to Lore. If I could find the words I’d beg Catherine to accept, on all their behalf, my gift: a world without me in it.
“So you made a real choice. One with very real consequences. Surely that’s the act of a real person?”
Maybe. Maybe it is. Either way, we’re running out of time to discuss it. Gus’s corpse has vanished into the curtaining dark, the babble of the stream has gone, and it’s just her and me in a last shaft of sun.
Catherine stretches out her hand, and I realize that she’s offering me something. A stalk of grass topped by a plume of flickering seeds.
She smiles one last time, the darkness already draped like a veil around her hair. Her face appears as a luminous oblong framed by devouring midnight. I only have a moment—and there’s something I still need to say.
“Catherine? Thank you. You saved my life.”
Then Catherine is gone, and I’m alone with the seed-tuft in my hand. I recognize it. It’s the same one young Gus enchanted right before he strangled his beloved, the glistening seeds that reflected the faraway face of an otherworldly woman. Why did Catherine give the stalk to me? She wasted too many of her last moments on me as it was.
Then I look closer. There’s a face in the seeds, all right.
It’s Geneva. She’s smiling, and God, there’s such a force of joy and enthusiasm in that smile. I hurt her beyond repair, but at least I didn’t ruin this moment for her, didn’t dull this brilliance.
She’s smiling at someone, and that someone will never be me. That’s how it should be.
I hold the seeds against my cheek, clinging to the last of their trembling warmth. Her full mouth lifts a kiss to the future; it’s not a kiss for me, but I almost feel it anyway. The memory of her pierces me, a final ray, until the light winks out.