Tomorrow and Tomorrow

8, 18—

New Castle, Pennsylvania—about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, outside of what the EPA maps out as the Pittsburgh Exclusion Zone. PEZ, it’s called. New Castle was a mill town once, the industrial machinery and warehouses sprawling along the bank of the Shenango in disuse now since Pittsburgh. The houses sag and are worn like cardboard boxes left in the rain. Downtown must have been vibrant once in a long past decade, the newest building now a Sprint wireless store, but otherwise we’re left with a Giant Eagle, a Dollar Blowout, a Kentaco Hut, a Dairy Queen only intermittently open. There are rumors we’ll get a Walgreens sometime soon. Just down 65, a little closer to Pittsburgh, is PEZ Zeolite, but the money from all those government cleanup contracts hasn’t flowed to New Castle—most of it’s gone up to Youngstown, far enough away from the exclusion zone for the cleaners and engineers to settle their families. There’s a Walmart not too far away in Ohio, and on weekends we have a farmer’s and flea market in the school parking lot. Albion’s house is on the outskirts. She bought the place for cash—she said it only cost the equivalent of a few months’ rent of her loft back in San Francisco. A two-story Victorian with claustrophobic rooms and warped hardwood floors. I bought a bookcase for Albion but had to prop up the front with folded towels because the living room sags so deeply down from the edges to the center. The kitchen’s a work in progress with mildewed wallpaper to peel, cabinets to repaint, a floor that needs a fresh layer of sticky tiles or maybe just stripped back to the hardwood. I’ve tried to paint out Mook’s graffiti pig with several coats of primer, but the damn thing still shows faintly through. There’s an acre or so of patchy yard before the neighbor’s fence. We have a garage made of cinder blocks and a few pines in the back.

Tracking Albion in the Archive gave me a wildly inaccurate impression of the woman I’ve come to know—now I realize that all her interest in fashion and design, which I took only as something artsy, is a symptom of a larger rage for order and self-reliance. She makes all her own clothes, by and large, and cooks every meal—I haven’t had takeout for weeks, but she’ll go to Dairy Queen with me for sundaes. She jogs several miles before dawn and by the time I get up and pour my first cup of coffee, she’s already out tending her garden, a twenty-by-twenty patch of vegetables we use for cooking. I sometimes wander out with my coffee and sit on a folding chair to watch her, helping only when she wants help. A few months ago she’d washed out the black dye she had when I first met her in the gallery—her natural hair’s no longer the startling crimson I’d known from the Archive, but a chestnut shade of red that seems brown in the dim but like changing autumn leaves in the light.

Every Sunday morning Albion drives us south into the wildlife refuge and we walk for hours along the trails—muddy paths and creeks cutting through underbrush, ugly reedy groves and metal signs warning not to drink the water for fear of radiation or animal contamination, scum-skinned lakes with mucky swathes meant as beaches. Miles and miles, the kind of woods I grew up with—nothing majestic, just Ohio and Pennsylvania scrub, but Albion finds charm here. She knows birdcalls and identifies flitting shadows I’m never quick enough to see. She’s a good hiker, she drives our pace—I often fall behind, heaving for breath and sweating, and when we hit upward slopes my knees crackle like damp sticks breaking and I figure I’ll need to lose even more weight or my joints will just give out some day, but I’m happy to try to keep up with her.

Sometimes I lose patience with my trepidation and broach questions about her past. “You once mentioned that you and Peyton were sometimes sent out to recruit other girls,” I say on one of our hikes, working to keep my wind, to match her gait.

I never know if I’ll push her away when I ask questions like these—I’ve lost entire days to her silence when I’ve overstepped—but over the past few months I’ve come to believe that Albion wants to talk about the raw areas of her life, only it’s difficult for her. She’s guarded herself with strict boundaries, and seems to weigh each exchange she has with me against her vulnerability. I’ve learned that talking at the house about anything other than our life together is off-limits, but that she’s much more willing to talk candidly when we’re in these woods—I don’t know if it’s because she feels protected or removed out here, or if she feels a sense of grace in nature that turns her confessional.

“We were loosely affiliated with the King of King’s parish and if we ever spoke with members of that church, we talked about ourselves like we were a foster home,” she says. “Some of the girls came to us through that church—but Kitty was particular in who she would accept for residence. You’re right, though, there was recruitment involved, especially on campuses. One or two of us would make friends with the same girl and invite her to worship with us. We’d try to make contact with her every day, usually more than once a day, and eventually we’d try to preempt her other friends. Every so often one of us would be too aggressive and we’d lose her, but usually young women on their own want to meet other women. We picked foreign exchange students or women who were already looking for a community of faith. We’d go to prayer services on campuses and watch for girls who came alone—”

“Hannah didn’t seem vulnerable,” I tell her. “She had plenty of friends—”

“We wouldn’t have been successful with Hannah in the long run,” she says.

“But this was something you were actively involved in?” I ask her. “Meeting girls and bringing them to back to the house with you—”

“I was very religious,” she says. “I don’t know if you’d understand if you’ve never been religious, or if you’ve never felt something so strongly that you think it’s God. I thought I was helping those girls—”

When I don’t answer, she says, “You know, I really fucked up my life. I can’t have that back—all those years of shitty choices. It wasn’t until after I was free of Timothy and Waverly and that house did I feel the weight of what I’d done to those women—it’s like a panic, whenever I realize what I helped do. I didn’t know what would happen to them, what Timothy and Waverly did to them—all that time I thought I was helping bring them closer to what I called Jesus. I was deluded and still feel sick, physically sick, when I think of my part in that house. I had to stop believing in God before I realized what it meant that we all bear the weight of the cross. I had to stop believing in God before I wanted to atone for what I’d done in His name—”

Albion pushes the pace and I fall behind—I can’t keep up with her when she picks up speed, but I also realize I’m not meant to, so I slacken my pace and let her pull away. Whenever we come to a creek or some vein of running water, she pauses to listen. She once asked me if I was a Christian and I told her that I wasn’t, that I don’t believe in God.

“You believe in love,” she said.

The New Castle Farmers’ Market and Super Flea, perfect for plums. Saturdays the worst for crowds, aisles difficult to thread through, vendors in tents or wooden-framed booths draped with tarps. Steelers jerseys, Confederate flags, bootleg MMA sims, strawberries—I still need strawberries. Strawberry rhubarb cupcakes for Albion, if I can figure out the recipe. Scroll, scroll: one-quart saucepan, heat strawberries, rhubarb, sugar, flour, butter. Four of five stars, but sounds easy. Do we need butter? Ping Albion and ask, Do we have butter? Rhubarb, ten dollars for a bundle from Tuscarawas Farms—SmartShopper says I can do better.

Good on butter, pings Albion.

I purchase a package of plums. Booths of jarred preserves, bell peppers in plastic wrap, gourmet marshmallow cubes, dark honey of Ohio. The aisle’s capped with a booth for the handmade ginger soap Albion likes, so I grab a few bars and pick up a dozen bananas Foster marshmallows. Trust SmartShopper when it flashes BEST BUY on a package of rhubarb sprigs.

I buy groceries from lists she writes and she prepares our dinners. She has me on a vegetarian diet. With our walks and what I’ve been eating, I’ve lost weight—I feel trimmer than I have in years. I try to dress up for our dinners, sometimes even wearing Gavril’s suit if I know she’s making something special. I pour wine and set the table, just the small kitchen table, and she serves our food. Albion still likes the act of prayer, to remember what her life was once like and what it has become, but says she doesn’t know what or who she prays to any longer. I bow my head and clasp my hands and say “amen” when she’s finished but spend my time thinking over what I’ve lost but also what I’ve found.

I clean the dishes while she works in her studio. I tidy up the place as best I can. Around nine I brew tea and around nine thirty she joins me on the sofa and we talk. Most nights we talk about art. She shows me her designs and sometimes I read to her. At some point it became tacit between us that Albion would leave behind making images of the house in Greenfield if I started to write poetry again—that we would help each other move forward. We go to bed nearing midnight and every night I wonder if we’ll kiss good night, but we never have. She uses the only bed. There’s a mattress on the second bedroom floor and an antique trunk she found for fifteen dollars at a Goodwill I use for my clothes and books. I lie on my mattress staring out the window into the dark tops of our pines until I no longer hear the soft sounds of Albion readying herself for bed. I can’t sleep until she’s asleep.

I can never have Theresa back.

She’s been deleted and Albion believes that even Mook couldn’t have brought her back, that Mook’s work is thorough. She asks how we met.

“It’s not a romantic story,” I tell her.

“It’s romantic to me,” she says.

“So, there was a conference every year about social networking tools called PodCamp,” I tell her. Albion wants to see the moment I met Theresa, so we immerse together—strolling downtown Pittsburgh like tourists in a foreign city lost to time. The City’s working through its infinite loop of weather, the sky a leaden ceiling, snow and rain slurring into an intolerable frozen mush that grays out the buildings and dampens everything. From certain angles, there is a beauty to these downtown streets, even on days like this, when car windows fogged and people huddled in grotesque wet coats, using umbrellas and slipping on the sidewalks. It’s November in the City. Windshield wipers brush away globs of snow. Albion and I duck into the Courtyard Marriott where it’s warmer, and sit together in the lobby drinking hot cocoa. Despite the weather, dozens of people arrive for PodCamp—designers, students, young professionals, all dressed better than the rest of us wading through the muck outside. I scan their faces, recognizing people whose names I’ve forgotten.

Albion and I wander the hotel hallways together, looking behind room doors at televisions playing to empty rooms and out-of-town travelers inadvertently filmed as they fetched ice from the vending machines or went to the pool or checked into their rooms, their images trapped in the Archive like ghosts haunting wrong, unfamiliar places. Throughout the morning the PodCamp attendees settled into folding chairs to listen to PowerPoint presentations and take notes in PodCamp binders, but after lunch the sessions became more specific. The room was called Partitioned Conference Room B, and the session was “Generating a Realistic Income with WordPress and Affiliate Marketing.” There were only six of us registered. Theresa came in just after me—a peach blouse and blue jeans, a suede jacket, her hair longer then. She doesn’t come in now. She sat a few seats away, I remember, and I stammered when I introduced myself.

“Theresa Marie,” she said, and I remember that hearing her name was like hearing a rare and sacred word, but all I could come up with was, “Aren’t you Elvis Presley’s daughter?”

“Itching like a gal on a fuzzy tree,” she said, “but I think that was Lisa Marie—”

We talked—about statues of horses in Washington, DC, for some reason, I don’t remember why, some sort of small talk, but we talked. What one hoof lifted from the ground meant, what two hooves lifted meant—I think I asked her what four hooves meant and she said “Pegasus.”

Partitioned Conference Room B is set up with folding chairs when Albion and I visit here, a dry-erase board in the center of the room. We watch John Dominic Blaxton, and Albion says that I was cute back then, that no wonder Theresa fell for me, but I don’t like seeing myself—skinny and young, full of unearned confidence. I see in that young face a total ignorance of everything that will happen and I both admire and hate him for it. The others filter into the class and take their chairs for the session, just like I remember they did—but Theresa never comes into the room and I watch myself speaking to no one.

“Please, let’s go,” I tell Albion.

I remember standing outside in the thickening slush waiting for my bus after the conference, nearly heaving with excitement like my lungs were bursting into sparks and might leap from my chest singing. I wanted desperately to somehow keep talking with her, so I tapped out an e-mail on my cell, saying how great it was to meet her, how I would love to keep talking about WordPress with her, and accidentally hit Reply All and so for the next few days heard from just about everyone from the conference except her. People trying to set up a follow-up meeting about WordPress, even the WordPress lecturer wanted us all to meet at the Panera in Shadyside. I figured I’d embarrassed her, or that she was politely unresponsive because she had a boyfriend, or just wasn’t interested, or genuinely thought I was interested in WordPress, but after three days she responded: Drinks? When are you free?

Albion and I go there now—to Cappy’s over on Walnut, only a block away from the apartment where Theresa and I would live in Shadyside. I look for Theresa here, Adware pulling memories of this place, but she’s nowhere—instead, Albion and I sit at the same table Theresa and I shared, near the front windows, watching the increasing snowfall and the snow-laden shoppers on Walnut Street. Theresa and I talked for over three hours that night. She was a botanist, working for Phipps Conservatory. I told her about my Ph.D. program and my poetry. She loved music and talked about bands she loved—the Broken Fences, Joy Ike, Life in Bed, Meeting of Important People, Shade—bands I’d never heard of become suddenly important to me. We said good night and I offered to see her home, to ride the bus with her to the South Side where she lived, but she refused the offer so I waited with her at the bus stop, shoulders piling with snow, until the 54C appeared through the mist. She boarded and I watched her in the lit interior of the bus—her hair covered in wet flakes of snow. She waved as the bus pulled away and I walked home—the city quiet, everything shrouded in a profound white silence. I was so happy that night—an ecstatic contentment in that silence, a feeling like I’d come home, like I’d discovered where home was. I remember singing “Maria” from West Side Story at the top of my lungs, but not knowing the words and replacing “Maria” with “Theresa.” A few minutes later she texted and told me that she had fun, and asked if I was free that weekend. Yes, I answered, yes. I texted her for a playlist and she wrote back in an hour with a list of bands and tracks—my homework. I spent the next several days memorizing everything I could, every band, learning to love what she loved.

Albion and I are there now, at the bus stop watching the 54C pull up through the snow, its wheels leaving muddy tracks, the driver asking if we need a ride, but the bus feels like a ferry for the dead and we refuse. Albion and I walk through the snow together holding hands. She says she misses the winter, living in California so long. She sometimes forgets how beautiful it was. We walk through the serene Shadyside streets to Ellsworth Avenue, to the apartment I shared with Theresa, through the courtyard to the lobby, shaking snow from our shoes and the shoulders of our coats. We walk to Room 208—I’m here. Theresa, I’m here. Albion kisses me, a slow, tender kiss, our lips cold but warming. The kiss is perfect but doesn’t exist in the real world, it only exists here and I understand that, I understand the gift she has given me. I open the door to Room 208 but in Theresa’s place we see Zhou. This is the first time that Albion has seen what Zhou is in my memories, that Zhou is here where Theresa should have been, and she begs my forgiveness and I tell her that it’s all right, it’s all right—

Albion’s taken me on her bus. We ride together and I brace her against me as we enter the perpetual twilight of the tunnel. I watch the old lady in front of us clicking her tongue at the child in front of her. I find Stewart, that first voice of her hope, a handsome man in a Pirates ball cap—he must have only been in his thirties, about my age, his kids that he wanted so much to see again must have only been toddlers. Albion points out every person on the bus and tells me what she’s been able to find out about their lives. She points out Jacob, the singer, an overweight black man with ashen hair, and hopes that he’s forgiven her for leaving through that thin path in the stones, leaving him behind. She points out Tabitha, the woman who tore out her own eyes—she’s dressed in nurse’s scrubs and reads Joel Osteen. We brace for the explosion, for the bus to wreck, but I only experience the initial concussion of the end because that’s when the footage stops and we’re left in total darkness with the Archive asking us in floating bronze text if we’d like to visit somewhere else. Sometimes Albion and I ride that bus several times in a row, looping back to the moment when she boarded and riding until we die, until I finally say, “That’s enough, Albion, that’s enough,” and we retreat together to somewhere else, usually to Kelly’s Bar in East Liberty to sit in a shadowy corner booth on the vinyl seats, listening to rockabilly on the jukebox, drinking cocktails and eating baked mac and cheese, trying to forget together what we desperately want to remember.

Kelly’s in East Liberty has become important to us, a bar neither one of us had visited often when we were both in Pittsburgh but perfect for us to discover together now.

“Tell me about Mook,” I ask her, one night over drinks in our usual booth. “Sherrod, I mean—”

“Sherrod was troubled,” she says. “I feel sad when I think of him—”

I ask how they met and she tells me they met at Denny’s. “I was out with friends from Fetherston,” she says. “We went out and ended up at Denny’s in the Mission—two or three in the morning. The waiter, this guy, he was hitting on us, kind of flirting with the entire table, when one of the cooks came from the back. Baggy jean shorts, a 49ers jersey, a white apron. He was short—only five feet tall, maybe, or maybe a touch over—and deformed, in a way. Hunched. He walked with a limp, though I think the limp was an affectation—once I knew him a little I realized that sometimes he forgot to limp. Cauliflower ears, this wet mouth that sort of hung open. Squinty eyes. He smelled like grease and cigarette smoke but he sits right in our booth, right with us, and asks if we were interested in an orgy. My friends laughed at first, some of them, but I didn’t—not my type of humor. I remember he noticed I wasn’t laughing and he just glared at me until I acknowledged him. Unnerving. ‘I have access to a hot tub,’ he said, and I think he called me Red.

“I can’t remember what I said to him, something dismissive, and so he started telling me everything about my previous life—he knew my real name, knew about Pittsburgh, knew parts of my past that no one had the right to know. He knew about Peyton. He told me obscene things about myself. My friends didn’t know what was going on, thank God, but they could pick up that things had taken a turn. We left right away—I was mortified. I didn’t even know what the Archive was at the time, but once I figured it out, I realized that my past life was living itself again and again and again. I wanted it erased. I went back to Denny’s the next afternoon, found Sherrod at the start of his shift. I went back to the kitchen and screamed at him, just—I really broke down. All those cooks looking at me. He realized he’d crossed a boundary when he dredged up those things, that he wasn’t being cute or clever but had overstepped. He was contrite. For all his tone-deaf bluster, he’s actually principled. He’s sensitive. I can’t quite call him a gentleman… but he said he could help me and I accepted. I didn’t know who he was until much later, I didn’t know about his art—”

We never talk about how he died.

We take walks in the afternoons, sometimes, back around the garage and the pines into Albion’s garden, sometimes taking longer walks through the neighborhood, but Albion feels conspicuous—passing our neighbors on their front porches, women Albion’s age already three or four kids deep into families, old women and old men on lawn chairs in front yards smoking cigarettes, young girls circling bikes on the street or the teenage girls in cutoffs and tank tops—it’s obvious that Albion doesn’t belong here. Besides, I think most of our neighbors are keen enough to spot a woman in trouble. After our walks, Albion will disappear into her room or lose herself in a charcoal drawing and I’ll head outside to the front porch and voice Gavril—we usually talk at least every other day. After dinner one night, sitting out on the porch, Gavril asks about my psychiatrist.

“Timothy? What about him?”

“No, the other one. The one you had before—”

“Simka?”

“You didn’t hear about him? He was stripped of his credentials—it was in the Post,” he says. “He can’t practice anymore. Some scandal—”

“What scandal? What are you talking about?”

“Selling painkillers to kids,” says Gavril. “You haven’t heard about this? Three or four girls accused him of trading sex for oxy. They were on the same tennis team, came forward together. The whole thing broke open—”

“No. No, that didn’t happen—”

“It’s all over the Post,” says Gavril and I tell him I have to go, to read about what’s happened. I scan DC Local feeds and find something on the Washington Post blog, allegations that Simka sold painkiller medications to teenagers, some of his patients. Cock Doc Writes Oral Prescriptions—cached streams show vids of his arrest, District cops leading him from his office in cuffs, carrying away boxes marked “evidence.” I try to ping Simka, but no answer. I write him an e-mail asking what happened. Details are sketchy—a follow-up post explains Simka’s painkillers led to the deaths of three young women who’d gone missing after nights on the DC club scene, surveillance footage of coke and liquor and pills, overdosing on Simka’s narcotics before disappearing. Some of the victims are underage, but hacks have posted pictures anyway, prep-school blondes in burgundy blazers and plaid skirts, photographs of them in tennis whites. Bullshit. He sold to anarcho club kids who sold on campuses, a drug ring centered on Simka’s office. I can’t believe this. Simka’s lawyer, state-appointed, maintains his innocence, but in the interim the state board has stripped him of his license and has incarcerated him. When Simka finally responds, it’s through e-mail: I don’t regret helping you.

I tell Albion while she’s painting and she hugs me, holds me until I stop shaking. She asks if I need anything, if I need to go to DC.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know what good it would do—”

My other e-mails go unanswered, and when I reach out to his family I receive a form e-mail from an unknown sender, signed by their lawyer, requesting not to be contacted. Restless sleep, obsessing over Simka—at night when I’m thinking of him, he’s so present it’s like he’s here with me, like I can smell his aftershave and coffee breath or reach out into the dark of my room and touch his hairy arm, convince myself he’s right here with me, chuckling about some joke he’d heard, ready to dispel my gloominess by asking about the Beatles.

Albion wakes me early, says I was shouting—having nightmares. Over grapefruit, she asks if I want to go camping and we drive to the wildlife refuge. She checks the park guides for different trails to explore, but we’ve hiked them all. We rent a fifteen-dollar site to pitch our tent and stow our gear and walk familiar, light trails. I bring bottles of water, hummus and pita and a bottle of wine. We hold hands as we hike like friends who might someday discover they’re lovers. We take naps in the afternoon and hike again before dinner, coming back to the campsite to cook mushroom burgers and fry potatoes and drink our second bottle of wine.

We stay up around the fire and Albion asks if everything’s all right.

“No,” I tell her. “Everything’s not all right…”

“Tell me,” she says.

“His family doesn’t answer—they don’t want my attention. They don’t respond to me, and I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him since that first night. There’s nothing I can do for him—”

“Simka?”

“He’s married, he has a family,” I tell her. “Simka was one of the best people I’ve ever known—compassionate. There’s no way he’s involved in something like this—”

“You think he’s innocent?”

“I know he’s innocent,” I tell her. “I don’t believe he was selling drugs to kids, not after everything he’s done for me. About my own problems. I don’t believe it. They’re ruining him, his entire family—”

“Sometimes people disappoint us,” she says.

“Enough of that,” I tell her. “Enough. He has two sons who no longer have a father. We’re not just going to keep ignoring the obvious—”

“What’s obvious?” she asks.

Is she going to make me say this? “Someone’s doing this to him,” I tell her. “Someone’s fucking up his life, probably because of what he knows about me. Maybe they lost us and they’re trying to provoke me, to flush me out—”

“Waverly?” she asks, her voice tentative, breathy, like she has trouble forming the word.

“You tell me—”

Albion doesn’t answer and I don’t care if I’ve somehow hurt her, and after a few moments she leaves the fire, dissolving into the outer darkness of the woods. Bruised anger catches in my throat that she’s run away, but I’m more upset at how abstruse she is, at the lines she’s drawn around herself, withholding even when others are suffering. Simka—fuck. That furniture he’d made and his house cradled by the creek and the woods, roughhousing with his sons—gone, gone, and I want to scream but I sit staring at the fire, impotent and cold.

I hear Albion’s tread in the woods and when she comes back into the ring of firelight, she sits next to me instead of across from me. She puts her hand on my knee and leaves it there for a moment before pulling a marshmallow from our pack. She skewers it on a stick, lights it on fire. She holds it up to watch the glowing cube before puffing it out. The air’s filled with the scent of caramelized sugar and Albion holds out the marshmallow until I eat it.

“Dominic, I can help you,” she says.

“Help me? Or help Simka?”

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to help Simka,” she says, “but there’s something I can show you that we might be able to use—”

“Use how? What do you mean?”

“I’ve kept things hidden for far too long,” she says. “I was mistaken, Dominic. I want to face this, I want to help end this suffering—”

Something’s different about her, something opening—a complex comfort grown between us, present in a way that I hadn’t yet felt, less diffuse and fragile, like we’d been describing a relationship to each other these past few months but suddenly find ourselves together in one.

“In a day or so we have to go on a hike. It will be harder than the hikes we’ve been taking recently,” she says. “You should rest up, rest your feet. I’ll need to buy some gear we don’t have—I might need to drive for it, maybe as far as Cleveland. I’ll go tomorrow morning, but I shouldn’t be gone more than a day—”

We share a tent together. We’re in separate sleeping bags but she reaches for my hand and holds my arm around her. My body feels like liquid fire holding her and I pull her close but we never kiss. Instead, I let my face rest against her hair like I’m lost in a veil of flowers. It’s rained in the night. I wake up earlier than Albion and watch her sleep. I slip from our tent. Gray light hangs throughout the forest. I hear a tread and stop—a tawny deer twenty or thirty yards from me looks up. He’s unconcerned, and lopes away through the fog.

Three days pass, we wake in the darkness before dawn.

“Good morning,” she whispers.

Adware at half-light, the dashboard clock flips to 3:47 a.m. Albion’s sitting on the edge of my bed, silhouetted by the hallway light. “Are you awake?” she says.

“I’m awake—”

“Coffee’s brewing, and I’ll make some eggs.”

Albion’s only packing prewrapped food for our trip—protein bars, dehydrated meals, enough for a few days if needed, even though we’re planning on being home by tomorrow afternoon. We’ve divvied up the weight of our gear, but she says my main job is to lug water—we can’t stint ourselves on water, she says—so my frame pack will carry the bulk of our supply plus a ClearSip purifier. I load the Outback while Albion brews a second pot of coffee and fills two thermoses. When she joins me, she hands me a bouquet of flowers cut from our yard—dahlias, it looks like, deep violets, bundled with sprigs of yellow and miniature sunflowers.

“These are for Theresa,” she says.

We leave before dawn and watch the sunrise break violet as we drive, burning the ridges of clouds like they’re waves of fire, pink and tangerine. Coming down 65 toward Pittsburgh, running alongside tracks cluttered with the iron hulks of trains, graffiti-bright boxcars and flatbeds loaded with heavy equipment—hunter’s-orange bulldozers and excavators—and car after car strapped with canisters of radioactive waste. Canisters filled with glass, if I understand the process correctly—by-product hauled off for burial in reinforced cement sarcophagi, sites dotting Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio. Our road follows the tracks, the tracks hugging the course of the Ohio River, past the first of the tri-state purification plants straddling the water—zeolite dumps built beneath one of the steel-span bridges, the water churned and pumped, filtered. The facility looks like a shopping mall.

“Will I see her body?”

“No, you won’t see her,” says Albion.

“I don’t know what to expect—”

“There aren’t bodies, if that’s what you’re imagining,” she says. “You may see some remains specifically where I’m taking you, but there aren’t bodies anymore—”

Of course, she’s right—staring out the window at the ripple of hills, remembering sensationalistic streams that leaked after the blast, of bulldozers rolling bodies and other debris into mass burial ditches. The authenticity of those streams was disputed—I don’t know if any of that was even true—but I’ve always imagined Theresa’s body rolled with those others, imagined her body somehow still whole, buried in a shallow grave, naked with the naked corpses of strangers, but I know it’s not true, it’s not true.

“There were no funerals,” I tell her. “I think sometimes—when I imagine how many people died, I can’t help but think of their bodies—”

“It won’t be like that at all,” says Albion. “Even right after the blast, right after I came from the tunnel, my memory isn’t of bodies—”

“Where did they go?” I ask her.

“The way they died,” says Albion. “Most were cremated—by the blast, I mean. There was so much ash, at first—buildings, trees, people. I remember being covered with ash. Ash in my hair, my eyes. Breathing ash. I still remember the taste of ash. Anyway, even if there was a body, it’s been ten years, Dominic. No, most of what we walk through will look like very young woods—or heavy growth like weeds and wildflowers. You’ll probably recognize some things—”

Twenty minutes or more before we pass another car on this road, a white pickup with flashing yellow lights heading in the opposite direction—we don’t see anyone else until we come to an intersection with a BP and a McDonald’s, the McDonald’s already bustling, a few cars queued in the drive-through and several tables filled. Jingles in my Adware, spinning hash browns and Egg McMuffins. I don’t know what I was imagining the approach to PEZ to be like, something anonymous, maybe, something private. The McDonald’s is absurdly bright, like the architecture’s made of light—Albion sees me looking over and asks if I need to stop, but I tell her I’m all right.

“Who are all they?” I ask her.

“I’m guessing they’re connected with the cleanup crew,” she says. “Independent contractors. PEZ Zeolite—”

“I’ve never been back,” I tell her once the McDonald’s has disappeared behind us and it’s easier to believe we’re the last people left on earth.

“What we’re doing is illegal,” she says. “And, anyway, there are only a few places to access PEZ. You have to have an idea of what you’re doing. People don’t just come here to visit—there aren’t any memorials, not yet. There was no reason for you to come back until today—”

This stretch of 65 used to be desolate, oddly active now because of PEZ Zeolite—makeshift signs line the road: WARNING. SLOW. CONSTRUCTION VEHICLE ENTRANCE. We pass PEZ Zeolite’s main campus, buildings that look like small airplane hangars and administrative offices, enough piles of what looks like sand to make it seem like we’re passing through acres of dunes incongruously planted in Pennsylvania. Heavy machinery plies the dunes, yellow trucks with tires as large as our car, the whole place a dust haze of sand. Albion runs her wipers with fluid to smear away powder from the glass. Belches of fire in the distance—the vitrification plants. We get stuck behind a convoy of dump trucks, each one mounded with that grayish sand.

“This is going to slow us down,” she says, and I see her eyes scan, searching in her Adware for alternate routes. Eventually we turn off 65 onto a winding side road overgrown with trees—Camp Horne Road, bracketed by long-defunct houses, chapels and schools, many of the structures partially collapsed, windows broken. The pavement’s cracked, huge gaps devouring our tires. We come to a checkpoint, the first we’ve seen. Nothing but an abandoned kiosk with a crossbar lowered across the road. A sign’s posted:

Albion pulls off the road, tires sinking in soft grass. She drives around the crossbar and pulls back onto the road. We pass another military checkpoint, this one with a raised gate—Albion says the only checkpoints that matter are the PEZ Zeolite checkpoints on direct access roads closer to the city. The military abandoned this place years ago—after cases of thyroid cancer spiked among the soldiers stationed here. We pull onto what was once a major artery into the city, 279, but the road is extremely poor—rolling bramble and chunks of tar, swathes of shredded blacktop and greenwood trees and waist-high grass. Albion pulls off the road and parks in a thicket of brush so our car won’t be too obvious if someone were to pass through.

“This is good, I think,” she says. “I think we’re close enough. The last thing we need is a blown-out tire trying to park a little closer—”

I wander into the street, look around—the day’s overcast, the sky marbled steel gray, the light murky and depressive. My body’s refusing to wake because of the early hour and the weather—moist, heavy air that’s already gummed up my sinuses.

“You said we’re close enough?” I ask her, considering the vast expanse of emptiness and flatland and scrub surrounding us, thinking we must be nowhere near the city, not yet, that we must have miles still to drive, until it dawns in my gut that ahead, in that emptiness cradled between slopes, should have been the city skyline—yes, the city skyline should have been there, right over there, skyscrapers leering over the tops of trees. There’s nothing now—just space.

“Oh no, oh God, no, no, no,” I say, the corners of my vision darkening, everything tunneling into black—I don’t exactly faint but sit down gingerly, like too much blood’s rushed to my head. “I can’t do this,” I tell Albion. “I don’t think I can do this—”

Albion opens the hatch of the Outback, unpacks the car. She separates our gear before making her way over to me. She kneels, waits until I raise my face and look at her.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “Physically, I mean. Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m okay,” I tell her.

“Then get up—”

We prep—Tyvek coveralls over our clothes, layered with rain slacks and hard shells. Smurf-blue PVC-coated gloves, a military-grade first aid kit in case one of us falls or is somehow injured. Flashlights and a compass in case our Adware blinks, a nylon rope and a SHIELD severe-weather-graded tent. Albion tucks her hair beneath her Tyvek hood and tugs the drawstrings tight. She yanks my drawstrings hard enough to collapse my hood over my face. She laughs, and when I work my hood open she kisses me, a chaste kiss—she smells like hardweather lip balm.

“You’ve gone beet red,” she says.

“High blood pressure,” I tell her, feeling my flushed face. “I’m just having a heart attack or something, nothing to worry yourself about—”

“Do you think you can handle all this?” she asks. “This will be difficult—and I don’t mean the emotional toll. Some areas are still very radioactive, others aren’t. We’ll have to monitor our levels. I know how to hike, even in extreme weather, but I’ve never done anything like this, so I might make mistakes, too. The surfaces will be uneven so there will be plenty of things to trip over. We should rest often. We can still head home right now—”

“I want to do this,” I tell her.

Albion unravels a necklace with a heavy plastic badge and places it around my neck, tucking the badge down beneath my Tyvek so it rests against my T-shirt.

“That’s your dosimeter,” she says, wearing one as well. “It starts out clear. We’ll check again in a little while—if it turns red, we’ll need to leave right away. If it’s black, we leave and go to an emergency room—”

We wear gas masks, the same type the cleaners from PEZ Zeolite wear on their shifts—rubber-shelled, insectile, with bulbous filtration systems that hide our faces. Difficult to talk with these things, so we ping text messages to each other, go over our checklist one last time. I bring the bouquet of flowers, thread them through a loop in my pack.

Albion holds my hand as we start—we’re wearing our gloves, but I savor the weight of her hand, the feel of her long fingers cradled with mine. I’m assuming these gestures of hers are meant to succor me through the dead land, but hoping, in a way allowing myself to hope, that we’re falling somewhere deeper. We don’t make it ten minutes before the first drops of rain.

Springtime in Pittsburgh, she writes.

Uncomfortable in all this gear—already sweating. I figured this trip wouldn’t be much more taxing than one of our strenuous hikes through the wildlife refuge, but our water sloshes in my backpack with every step, throwing my weight off-balance, and the paths are uneven through here, knotty with weeds and brambles and pits and pocks of the road, potholes we step over or around. The rain picks up. I load Compass Rose, the graphics vivid against the bleak sky, true north marked, the direction we’re heading—SSE—marked with a flourished green arrow, latitude and longitude displaying in real time. I load the Archive, and the City appears like a transparency glowing in brilliant colors, layering over the blighted landscape. There should be two churches here, side by side—I can see them in the archived landscape, vanished from the true landscape—and there should be houses and bars lining the hills a little further to the west, the tower of Allegheny General. There should be hills. There aren’t hills anymore.

Do you know where we’re going? I ask her.

I’m following directions Sherrod left, she pings. He’s been this way before—

Another military checkpoint and a barbed-wire fence meant to keep people like us from trespassing. The checkpoint’s long since abandoned, the kiosk littered with Mountain Dew bottles and used hypodermics, Snickers and Mounds wrappers and old condoms. A boot, a bird’s nest. Albion leads me along the fence until we come to the GPS marker Mook once set at his entrance point—supposedly a spot where the fence had become unmoored, where someone could peel back the chain-link and slip through. Everything’s been patched, though. Albion spends twenty minutes or so mining PEZ forums, sifting through discussions from people who claim they’ve gained access to the city—thrill seekers, conspiracy theorists, journalists, looters—until she finds solid references to another entry point, another breach in the fence somewhere nearby. Another forty-five minutes to find the gap, nothing but a corner section of the fence that’s been cut away. We push our packs through, then take turns crawling on our bellies—muck slicks our chests once we’re on the other side. Compass Rose reorients and the Archive resets—a ghost image of the Veterans Bridge spans the sky but the actual bridge is nothing more than rubble and rebar scattered on the slopes running to the riverbed.

Sherrod’s directions say the 16th Street Bridge is passable, Albion pings.

We pick our footing along the Allegheny into a strong headwind, the fabric flap of wind against our hard shells like the beating of birds’ wings. We skitter down slopes and find a passable trail across the flats of what was once the North Side, nothing but wildflowers now and saplings sprouting among the guts of incinerated buildings. I have vague memories of the architecture here, but even checking against the Archive, I can’t quite place what was left behind by what’s left—a rectangle outlined in bricks, exposed basements filled in with rubble, a doorway without a door. Most things here have simply disappeared. There used to be a camera store somewhere over here, the last place in the city that would develop actual film—grass, now, as far as I can tell.

The 16th Street Bridge is relatively intact—still standing through some fluke in blast pattern. The span whines in the wind and the sound is like a chorus of infants crying. Cacophonous, steely-pitched, unnerving. As we draw closer I notice that the winged horses and armillary spheres decorating the tops of the bridge columns have scorched and melted, the horses now like blackened hellhounds. The screaming of that bridge as we cross—all I think of is my own child dying with Theresa, that I’m hearing our child among the others, but this is melodramatic, I know, hysterical, but still—my child burned in a concussion of fire, layers of skin, the system of her nerves and of her veins, her profile, hair and eyes, ten fingers and ten toes that I would have counted. Stop it, stop this. The river passes below us, a poison stream flashing silver. I pause halfway across to search out downtown. The Archive layers in where the city once was—nothing, now. Plumes of dust. At the end of the bridge we find a lone brick wall casting a black shadow so we rest for a moment, lifting our gas masks long enough to take swigs of water. Albion’s eyes are ringed red—she’s been crying, and I wonder what tormented her as we crossed that bridge, who she heard screaming, but I can tell by her tenseness that I shouldn’t pry, that she’ll deal with this pain on her own terms, on her own, like she’s dealt with every other pain. The rain sweeps through again, cooling even if it is turning our footing to mud. Albion checks her dosimeter—still clear, so she slips it back beneath her suit.

We skirt downtown, still following Mook’s old route—threading single file along a thin path, Albion about ten yards ahead of me. I don’t know what would have caused a path like this—animals, maybe? Deer, or something? I’m almost on top of a snake when it uncoils and glides away from the path. The thing startles me and I stand quite still, holding my breath, giving it plenty of time to leave before I start clomping again along the trail. Amazing how quickly nature has reclaimed this space, only ten years and everything’s covered with grass and weeds, vines curling the mortar—Albion gets my attention and points ahead: about a hundred yards down the trail, a herd of deer feeds among the concrete stoops of the vanished courthouse, tawny shapes in the distance. Oddly, not every tree that was here perished in the blast. Older trees still stand, but their bark’s been shocked red.

In the Adware, the 10th Street Bridge flutters golden in the rain, its hesitant art deco styling even more like a phantom image of a lost age than it used to be. The mouths of the Armstrong tunnels still gape out of the side of stone, and I suggest making our way a little into the tunnels to duck out of the rain.

I’d rather get pneumonia, Albion pings.

Rather, she points out a verge of Second Avenue that ascends beneath the 376 overpass. She suggests we make camp up the slope, to scramble up where enough of the old road still forms a natural roof. The rain hasn’t let up and climbing the mud’s almost comical, slipping every few steps, but we find enough footing on a scatter of rocks, pull ourselves up with shallow-rooted weeds. The place where Albion suggested we camp is bone-dry. I help her pitch our tent, a cherry-red narrow tube that snaps into form like fabric flexed into concrete. Albion takes off her mask, checks her dosimeter—still clear. We’ve been hiking for over five hours, now, and this is our first real rest.

“Are you hungry?” she says.

“Starving, actually—”

I don’t remember lying down, let alone falling asleep, but Albion’s sorting out silver food packets when I startle awake.

“You were out,” she says. “Snoring—”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe. Not too long. Do you want Tuscan-style veggie lasagna or roasted red pepper fettuccine?”

“Oh, ugh. The lasagna, I guess—”

Albion pours water into the foil reservoir in the dinner packets, cracks the spine along the ridge—a heating element—and stirs. She hands me the steaming lasagna and a wooden spoon, almost like a miniature little trowel.

“This is for you, too,” she says, giving me rehydrated chocolate pudding.

“Delicious,” I tell her. “You’re a great cook, adding water to this stuff. Actually, this pudding’s not too bad. I’d just eat this stuff, normally. We should have some of this around the house—”

Albion wants to finish the last leg of our hike before dark. “Another couple of hours there and back,” she says, “then we can relax until we head out tomorrow morning. How are you holding up?”

“I’m all right,” I tell her. “More humid than I thought it would be, and everything aches. My feet. I think I have blisters on my blisters—”

“Just a little longer,” she tells me.

We continue along Second Avenue—Albion hasn’t told me why we’ve come here, why we’ve come back to Pittsburgh like this, but this far along Second it’s clear she’s leading me to the Christ House, that she wants to fold me into something private there. We hike underneath the old rail trestle at the end of Second and take the switchback at Saline, entering the Run. Streets are still here, or the outlines of streets, frames of some of the houses—a few of the houses. Albion leads me through a field, tromping through grass that’s grown knee-high. The wind breathes through the grass—it sways like green waves.

“Here,” says Albion.

I may have missed this place on my own—the Christ House vanished except its outline, cinder blocks and brick and slabs of foundation, but even the outline’s obscured by grasses and the wild growth of weeds. I load the Archive to gain my bearings and the Christ House appears translucent—the charcoal gray wooden siding, the words of Christ slathered in whitewash, Except a man be born again. The last time I saw this place, Mook made the house appear as if it were burning, but even now without the fire the house seems ignited by some inner blaze—something burning cold and black, inexhaustible. I click away the Archive, but now even the field seems damned by what once stood here—the grass seems oily, ill, and the remaining bricks and cinder seem like they’d be corpse-cold to the touch. I walk the perimeter, the house easy to trace.

“Watch your footing,” says Albion.

After a thicket of overgrowth, the earth drops away into a concrete pit, maybe an exposed section of the house’s basement. I’m glad Albion warned me—someone could easily misstep here, the plunge at least ten feet to concrete. The pit was once a series of small rooms, it looks like. Coal rooms? Root cellars? They’re connected by a hallway that still tunnels underneath the main body of the house—I could scuttle down, I think, and still enter the original basement. I once walked that basement, in the Archive, I walked through the darkness, feeling my way along the dank walls and heard the sound of breathing. They kept people down here.

Albion’s removed her gas mask and taken down her hood—her hair’s vivid red in this storm light, blown about, the weeds are lush and gaudy green. She’s standing over in what would have been the house, tracing rooms in her memory.

“Over here is where we sat for prayer meetings,” she says. “Bible study. There used to be a fireplace about here—you can still see the chimney base, those bricks. We set out folding chairs in a semicircle around the fire, but Peyton and I always took a love seat over about here. Whenever Peyton came to these things—”

“She didn’t live here with you?” I ask.

“Peyton was a critical thinker,” she says. “She didn’t like this place, she hated being here. After Bible study, when we were alone, she’d look over my notes and tear apart whatever Waverly had told us. She only came here because of me, whenever she needed to help me—”

Albion crosses the grass to the other side of the house and points out a slab of stone.

“The stairs were here,” she says. “There were two bedrooms downstairs, built as additions out back. We had the second floor divided into six bedrooms, with another two rooms in the attic. It was a big house. Kitty had the master bedroom to herself, but we doubled up in the other rooms, sometimes three to a room. My bedroom was on the second floor, second to the right—”

Albion paces forward, trying to figure the location of her bedroom, one story above the grass.

“About here. Sometimes Peyton stayed with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone—”

“Peyton protected you—”

“We were able to endure things together that we might not have been able to endure apart,” she says. “She couldn’t protect me but she never abandoned me—”

“We can leave,” I tell her. “You don’t need to put yourself through this—”

“I haven’t shown you yet,” she says.

Albion leads me around to the exposed section of basement, to a place where a minor cave-in has created a series of earthen steps.

“I can’t go down there with you,” she says.

I scramble down into one of the chambers—a minuscule room, only about six feet to a side, if that. There’s a concrete slab—maybe a bench, or maybe it was supposed to be a bed. Jesus. I find my footing along what would have been the connecting hallway to a doorway veiled by wisteria—through the flowers, a hole leads underground. I glance back at Albion—she’s watching from the edge of the precipice. She helped bring people here, she and Peyton—whatever else happened in their lives, they recruited women to come here, they helped fill these cells. By the end of the city they lived in their own apartments, playing dress-up with each other and modeling, pursuing fashion design and art, Raven + Honeybear while women suffered here. This is hell. I’m walking into hell.

I pull aside the flowers and vines, plunge through the hole into the dark of the basement. This place smells like soil and rot, the sweet rancidity of things that grow in death. I have the flashlight—click it on, sweep it over the room. This place is preserved. A worktable with tools. Hammer, lathe. Circular blades hung on pegboard. A washing machine, a dryer. Sooty floors and sweeps of ash that must have blown in through the weeds. Above me, the ceiling boards moan and crack with every gust of wind like a cave-in is imminent—run, I should run from here—but whatever Albion wants me to see is down here somewhere. Other cells sprout off this main section of the basement, hidden behind wooden doors. One of the doors is painted with a stencil of a woman walking two other women on leashes like they’re dogs. There.

The door’s stuck, but jerks open once I pull with my weight. Musty, cold. Another concrete slab for a bench or bed. There are bones in the corner. There are human bones lying intertwined in the corner. Two skulls, like whoever these people were held each other as they died—or maybe the bodies were just stacked here, somewhere out of the way. Losing myself, feeling the need to vomit—but what pours from me is a scream, a harrowing, sorrowful scream. I collapse to the bench, and when I do, a stream launches in my Adware. The stream’s swift, sweeping past anti-malware and firewalls. Mook. This is one of Mook’s geocached installations—the stream triggered when my Adware synced with the right coordinates. This basement, this cell, this bench.

My eyes fill with recorded memory: I’m still here in this basement room, but someone flicks on a light and Timothy and Waverly are here, bathed in greasy orange from a naked bulb. There are others here, too, three others—one of them, the youngest, is just a teenager, lanky and pale with feminine eyes and long black hair. Rory. This must be Rory, the one I pushed into the path of traffic, but he’s so young here—a camo Pussy Hounds jersey and boots worn without laces. I’ve never seen the other two, but they must be Waverly’s brother, Gregor, and the other son, Cormac—Cormac’s the one Albion said was a family man, the one she remembered showed pictures of his daughters—he’s broad shouldered with a barrel belly, midtwenties here or probably older, his sloping chin covered in a reddish scruff of beard. Gregor Waverly stands apart from the others, his posture stiff, like he’s wearing a brace or some sort of body cast, arms hanging limp at his sides. His natural expression’s a horrific pout, the purple underside of his thick lower lip curling outward and down. His hair’s bone white, close-cropped, his ears like meaty, ragged flaps.

Timothy grips me by my hair, forcing me to stay close to him—all that crimson hair spilling over my shoulders, he’s looped it around his wrists and holds me by it. Albion—this is Albion’s memory, recorded through her eyes.

“You don’t have to suffer,” says Waverly.

Timothy pushes me farther into the cell and I see her: Hannah Massey. She’s imprisoned here. Gaunt, naked—only a specter of the young woman I’d tracked through the Archive, case #14502. She’s kneeling on the bench, gazing up through the ceiling at—what? Is she praying? Her eyes are like dead eyes, distant. Her ribs and breasts are striated violet with bruises. Rory and Cormac, the brothers, pull her from the corner and stretch her out between them. I realize, now: by leading me here, Albion is showing me how Hannah Massey will die.

The men take turns with her, Waverly first. Rory and his brother. Gregor. I scream—or is it Albion who screams? My innards turn to water and I slump, my legs buckle. Hannah doesn’t struggle—she’s endured this before and endures this now like her body’s already dead. Her head falls to the side and she looks through me. When our eyes meet, her eyes tremble. “Please,” she says, “please, please, please—”

I want to help her, but can’t because Albion can’t help her. All Albion offers are her screams, and so I scream.

“Why are you screaming?” says Waverly. “Albion, why are you screaming? What is causing this fear in you?”

“You’ll kill her,” Albion says—I say.

“And what if she were to die?” says Waverly. “Look at her—all of you, look at her. What do you see? You see a body—but what is a body? A body is flesh. A body is not the spirit. Don’t weep for this woman’s body. When you look at her, remember that you’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy. What you see is not her spirit—her spirit is immortal. You can’t see her spirit. When you see her, see the beasts you’ve seen dead on the side of the road. Roadkill, that’s all she is. Remember, there is a God above God—”

Timothy’s young here, thinner—I recognize him from the newspaper photographs I’d researched, when he went by Timothy Billingsley or Timothy Filt. His beard’s just a stringy strip outlining his chin, his arms reedy, his paunch a soft sag.

“You can save her,” says Timothy to me—to Albion. “I’ll forfeit my turn with her if you take her place—”

Albion’s hyperventilating. Hannah turns away. Albion says nothing.

I think of Twiggy. I think of Timothy’s wives. I think of Albion and Peyton. I think of the farm in Alabama and these basement cells, of the countless, faceless others as Timothy takes his place between Hannah’s knees. He strips off his clothes and the two bodies are absurdly white in the dim cellar room. He takes his turn with Hannah, or tries to take her. His movements aren’t the bludgeoning of the other men but a frantic, vicious scrabble until he yells, “I can’t, I can’t,” and strikes her in the stomach. Hannah groans, doubles up, but Cormac and Rory pry her legs apart and brace her between them. Timothy’s father hands him a chisel from the basement workbench. Timothy doesn’t finish until he stabs Hannah through her breasts, his arm pumping, gashing quickly, pulverizing her. Timothy moans at the eruption of Hannah’s blood. He’s whimpering, spent.

Albion’s memory ends, resets to the beginning.

Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ, please, oh Jesus, please.

It’s the closest I’ve come to prayer.

I don’t know how long I stay hidden in this darkness, but I exhaust myself crying, hoping for comfort in this utter black but finding none. I reload the stream and record everything I witness. I send the file to Gavril’s drop site with a message: Do not open or view. Save for me, please.

Deep twilight when I emerge from the basement. The rain’s cleared out for the time being—the stars are thicker here, without the pollution of city light. I climb from the pit, walk the perimeter of the house, around farther back to lush weeds. Albion’s sleeping on a bed of grass. No—she’s not sleeping. Her eyes are flickering, almost like she’s dreaming—but she’s not dreaming, she’s not asleep. I lay with her, load the Archive, find her.

It’s daylight where she is, in the garden of the Christ House. The Christ House casts a shadow across the lawn, but the garden is bathed in sunlight—archived sunlight from some distant past. The brightness of this place offends me—it’s too warm here, like the world is sick with fever. Albion’s tending to sprigs of calla lilies. She’s wearing a sundress pattered like a painting by Rousseau.

“I never want to come back to this place,” she says.

“I won’t ever ask you to,” I tell her.

“I used to work in this garden every morning,” she says. “This was my bliss—being out here. Calla lilies for Peyton because Peyton once mentioned she liked them—they remind me of her. I learned to cook because of this garden. I’d grow food out here and cook for the girls in the house. There’s rosemary and pansies, fennel and columbine and rue—”

“How many died here?” I ask her.

“I don’t know, Dominic—”

“But there were more, weren’t there? Jesus Christ—”

“I brought them,” she says, “I helped bring those girls here, I brought them here, I brought those girls—”

I watch as her emotion boils, as every humiliation and shame she thought she’d buried rises in her, as the horror and guilt at what she’d done brims in her eyes. When she cries, her sobs seem like pleas for forgiveness, but I can’t absolve her, nothing can. “I can’t get rid of it,” she says. “I can’t—”

I hold her, try to comfort her. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” I tell her, knowing it never will be. I cradle her head to my shoulder, but when my hands touch her hair I realize that’s where Timothy’s hands were—the comfort I want to give curdles, I don’t know how to comfort her or whether I even should. The garden’s gorgeous here, full of garish flowers that thrive in the sweltering heat.

“Timothy used to tell me the only reason I was alive was because he loved me,” she says.

“What could you have done,” I ask, not really a question.

The stream was visceral, and the complicated residue it’s leaving feels like a sinkhole in my stomach. I look at Albion, now, in her sundress standing among blooming flowers in her absurd garden, archived here, and just as I hate her for recruiting girls, for playing at glamour to bring girls to Waverly, I remember the burning grip of Timothy’s fists in her hair and can’t blame her for what happened here, I can’t, I can’t. Now that I’ve seen how Hannah Massey died, I’m not sure what I can do with the information. Anyone piecing together what had happened at this house so many years ago would figure out Albion’s involvement and might not be as forgiving as I want to be.

“That stream will be here forever,” I tell her, “or at least until every satellite fails and falls. Eventually someone will come through here, eventually someone will see—”

“I asked Sherrod to delete everything, every moment I appeared in the Archive, but when he came across Hannah, he refused—he wondered if I was using him to bury her. We argued but came to an understanding, and when he came through here to buy the house for me in New Castle, he made his way to this place, installed this stream. He said he created this space so no one would forget what happened here—he called it a memorial. He didn’t want the house to simply vanish, he didn’t want it to be buried over in a mound of zeolite and disappear, rebuilt as something new in a city with amnesia. He wanted anyone drawn to this place to know what happened here—”

“But you’re implicated—”

“I kept quiet when others were suffering,” she says.

We close the Archive, step into the night wind and find our way back to our campsite by moonlight, sweeping our flashlights over the broken road to spot our footing. We climb the mud hill to our tent. We eat protein bars around a campfire and find that the coffee we brought with us in the thermoses is still warm. We undress from our rain gear and our Tyvek and slip together into the tent—the only living creatures in miles of dead lands, the desolate moon bathing everything in silver. We stay up late, remembering Pittsburgh together, recalling the patterns of streets we’d known like we’re plotting a map between us—discovering where our courses may have overlapped.

“I want life,” she says.

We immerse together. The Spice Island Tea House in winter—and although Zhou is sitting at the table Theresa sits at in my memories, Albion and I stay. We choose a table far enough away so we can’t hear Zhou’s voice endlessly circulating the words my wife is supposed to say. Layering, the scent of basil, the scent of curry.

Albion and I linger over chai. I tell her, “Tonight—the one we’re reliving here at this restaurant—was the happiest night of my entire life. Theresa and I tried for years for another chance to have a child, but couldn’t—but tonight, Theresa told me that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a daughter, and I knew everything would be all right for us. I’ve never been happier. After this night the future just opened wide—”

Snow’s on the ground when we leave the restaurant and strings of lights hang in the barren trees. We walk from Oakland to Shadyside, through the college campuses and Craig Street, the restaurants and cafés and bookstores populated with ghosts, forever frozen in their past lives. I bring Albion back to the apartment, to the Georgian. When we’re in the lobby, she kisses me.

We make our way upstairs, through the paisley-carpeted hallway, to Room 208. I don’t engage the room through my own account, because I don’t want to see anything other than Albion tonight—I don’t want Zhou, I don’t want memories of my previous life. I want Albion. An empty blueprint of rooms with generic furniture. We leave the lights off—I lead Albion into the bedroom where we kiss again.

“Let me help you remember,” she says.

I untie her dress and she unbuttons my shirt and we lie together. None of this is real, but it is real—there are consequences here, even if we don’t speak them. Albion is beautiful, certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, but what I’m seeing isn’t her, it isn’t really her, and when I hold her or kiss her breasts, what I’m feeling is the closest the iLux and imagination can convince me that I’m feeling. This isn’t Albion, even though I’m with her here—it’s all so close, but it’s all just a beautiful lie.

Albion pauses. She separates from me, leaving a gap between us.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so, so sorry—”

“I can’t do this,” she says. “I’m just not ready to be with someone, not yet—”

She lets me hold her. We listen as a train rushes past the window and she says, “I don’t hear trains much anymore,” but it’s just the sound of the wind battering our tent as we wake.

—

Dominic—

Two thirty in the morning when I wake from a dream of Theresa. Fine rain taps the mud around us. I’m sweating in my sleeping bag. Wide awake, concentrating to recapture details of my dream, but the only thing I remember clearly is Theresa speaking my name. I’m uncomfortable, fidgety. Albion sleeps beside me. I hear her even breathing. I slip from our tent.

I don’t bother with the Tyvek, but hourly forecast displays rainfall throughout the night so I dress in rain slacks and the hard shell. Peckish, but I’m not sure where Albion’s packed the pudding and there’s little light to search by, only the overcast moon and the last of the fire sputtering whenever raindrops hit it. Careful down the hill, lighting my way with the flashlight—the only other thing I’ve brought with me is the bouquet Albion picked from our yard.

I ping Albion: Went for a walk. I’ll be back by breakfast.

I remember a set of stairs at the mouth of the Armstrong Tunnel that hugged the sharp ascent of the Bluff, topping off at the Boulevard of the Allies—the stairs were concrete and steel, maybe shielded from the blast by the Bluff itself, and when I check on them now, shining my flashlight over the steel rails and cracked concrete, I’m relieved to find the stairs are relatively intact. The moon hangs like a silver smudge as I climb. Sweating by the time I reach the hilltop, but cold in the haze of rain—I’m sure I’ll get sick clambering around out here in the mist, maybe catch pneumonia. Feverish already, shivering. Scorched cars and the ruined faces of houses through what were once the streets of Uptown, splintered wood and sheet metal, tendrils of wire and rubble.

Burial mounds warp the earth of what was once Oakland—the radioactive scrap of museums, row houses, lecture halls, bulldozed and interred under heaps of chemical sand. Heavy machinery’s parked here, excavators and dump trucks—Oakland must be PEZ Zeolite’s focus right now. Layer in the Archive to gain my bearings and Phipps Conservatory shimmers in a distant field behind the burial mounds, the greenhouse like a Victorian dream of white steel and glass, gardens and lawns. This was Theresa’s, this was hers—I used to come here from campus to visit her in her office, we’d have lunch together in the café. There’s nothing here, now—nothing but the poisoned dunes. The air’s tanged with the stink of burning plastic.

I follow makeshift roads gouged from the ruins by PEZ Zeolite, threadlike stretches of slippery gravel vaguely milky and luminescent by moonlight. To Shadyside, to Walnut Street where she died. Layering the Archive over this place, boutiques and sidewalk sales, outdoor tables at cafés. Layering, the scent of roasting coffee, of baking bread. Layering, J.Crew and the Gap, United Colors of Benetton, Banana Republic. I find the store where she died, Kards Unlimited, layering in the T-shirts she was looking at, It’s a Neighborly Day in the Beautywood, but she’s not here, not here. Time-search the moment of the blast: light flares over the west and everything blackens, the bodies around me spark to flame, then shrivel to cores of ash, then vanish. In the moment of the blinding flash, Theresa’s reflection appears in the store’s window, just for a heartbeat I see her face. The buildings ignite and vanish. I’m left with ash.

A breath of ash.

This is not the Archive, this ash. On hands and knees—crawling through ash made muddy with rain. I grasp at handfuls of ash. This is Theresa. This is her body, my child’s body. This is all she’ll ever be, this ash, this is all I have left of her.

This ruination in the moonlight looks like shattered marble and lunar dust, broken statuary, shadows.

I reset the Archive to the moment just before her death, layer in Walnut Street and watch for Theresa’s split-second reflection in the moment of blinding light.

This time, however, following the flash and her fleeting reflection in the window, Theresa’s here with me as if she’d never been deleted, as if I haven’t lost her. She’s turned away from me, looking into other store windows. There is no fire, there is no ash. The sidewalks swarm with upscale shoppers living lives that were never given to them in life—they should have died, they should have all died in the fire, but there is no fire. Is this some trick of Mook’s? Some other geocached installation of Pittsburgh as if it hadn’t burned? The day is crystalline blue and crisply tinged with fall. Theresa is full-term, and women who pass her on the sidewalk stop and ask when she’s due, tell her she looks beautiful, a glow of health, wish her well. I want to see her, I want to hold her and feel the movements of our child. This can’t be happening—this never happened, this isn’t her. I follow her.

“Theresa?” I say, but she can’t hear me—she doesn’t turn toward me. She walks down Bellefonte, a side street running off Walnut that terminates at Ellsworth, our apartment. Layering, cool tree shade. Layering, a distant lawn mower and the scent of mown grass. This can’t be. This never existed—the bomb should have detonated five minutes ago, all these places should have burned—but we’re here, we’re here. Everything about this is wrong.

“Theresa?”

I run to her, place my hand on her shoulder. She turns to me but she is faceless, just a gray oval where her face should be, featureless, a blank avatar. I recoil. The images end—the Archive crashes, collapses into a point of light, then blinks away, day flips to true night, the desolation of the world as it is. She’s led me home.

Broken earth, the sky arcing toward dawn—sunrise still an hour or so away, but the horizon bleeds gray into the dome of black and the stars are dim. The Georgian Apartment still stands, much of it, anyway—the western-facing wing collapsed, either in the blast or in the years of dereliction following, but much of the far side of the building survived. The front stairs are nothing now, just a splay of mortar and brick, weeds and soil. I scramble across the front lawn, past where Grecian urns once spilled over with peonies, through the cracked front portal into the lobby. I’m here. The checkerboard tiles singed black, the brass mailboxes lying twisted across the floor. Shattered glass. Burned-out couches. Everything’s glistening from rainwater leaking through gaps in the roof— puddles and wet wood, pungent soot.

I run upstairs.

I’m here.

Theresa, I’m here.

Room 208.

I open our door—but there is no Room 208, not any longer. The rear of the Georgian’s collapsed, Room 208 nothing more than a few splintered floorboards and an expanse of air, a twenty-foot drop onto a slide of bricks below. I look out from the cliff that was once our home. There’s nothing left. Nothing.

I don’t know what I was hoping to find—

I should never have come here—

I drop the flowers, watch them fall.

“Mr. Blaxton?”

I turn from the emptiness. A man stands in the hallway wearing black fatigues and a gas mask.

“Are you John Dominic Blaxton?” he asks, his bass voice oddly muffled in his mouth, like he’s speaking through a side of raw beef. Another man stands a few feet behind him—a bear of a man, also in a gas mask. I’m going to die. I’m at their mercy, whatever mercy they’ll show me. Increasingly faint—this apartment will be the last thing I see.

“What do you want from me?” I ask him.

A third man has trailed us up the stairs, blocking any exit I’d hope to have. Rory, it has to be—he’s also wearing a gas mask. The one who’s speaking must be Gregor, Waverly’s brother.

“Waverly knew that once you saw your wife you’d come running here,” he says.

The bear, Cormac, unsheathes a nightstick and advances swiftly. I flinch, but he strikes me across the side of my head, the blast like a bright light of pain that explodes my ear and breaks my jaw. Ringing, but like I’m hearing underwater—my Adware’s music shuffles, Albion’s Boris Vian jazz sputtering from inside my head, skipping. Error—

A second strike, this one across my right knee—and I crumple, my leg broken forward. I see bone gore through my skin. My right shin and foot flop like they’re made of cloth, unattached, when a third strike lands across my face. Adware rebooting. iLux. Blood sprays from my mouth. Teeth. Two more strikes, one against each hand—bones snap, fingers shatter. I scream—

My Adware blacks out again, reboots a second time. iLux.

“I saw you,” I tell them. “What you did to her. I saw how you killed her—”

Blood pulses from my mouth when I speak and I don’t know if they’ve even understood what I said. I’m swimming in blood and darkness, but I concentrate—I can’t black out, not now. Think. This isn’t going to be quick, what they do to me. I need to get out of here. Christ, Christ—

“Rory, he’s all yours,” says Gregor. A dark, swift shape kneels over me. I see his eyes through the gas mask lenses.

“An eye for an eye, brother,” he says.

He pulls a serrated hunter’s knife and I feel the blade slide cleanly into my shoulder, snagging on muscle and bone as he pulls it out. The knife slides into my chest, rips me as it comes out. I can’t breathe, but don’t realize I can’t breathe—I can’t scream, but still try to scream, my breath like a fog of blood. He swipes his blade across my face like he’s a calligrapher writing something sacred into my skin. Pain flares through the right side of my face, a deep pain—like he’s reached into my skull through my eye socket. I wonder at all the blood—is this all mine? It doesn’t seem possible—

I’m lifted.

It must be Cormac who lifts me.

I’m falling—

They’ve pushed me out, over the ledge. Falling. The apartment recedes from me—

“Dominic—”

That voice.

I recognize that voice. From where? I try to open my eyes, but can’t.

The camphor scent of coagulant and the cottony rank of blood and gauze, but also the smell of dirt and something like milkweed and grass.

“You need another dose of morphine,” says that voice.

Open my eyes—

Everything’s blurred—no, everything to my left is blurred. Darkness to my right. I’m blind to my right side. It’s like a charcoal cloth covers everything to my right but if I close my left eye the world goes dark. Daylight—I can see well enough to know there’s daylight.

I lift my head but the movement cramps through my chest, an agonizing soreness, and I collapse back down, panting. Every breath is pain.

“You’re awake,” he says. That voice.

Timothy.

“Where is she?” I ask him.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asks. “Do you know where we are?”

I’m here. Theresa, I’m here—

“You’re at the site of your apartment in Pittsburgh. Three men attacked you,” says Timothy. “Do you remember? You fell. I haven’t moved you—”

Rory Waverly carving me with a knife.

“I can’t see very well,” I tell him. “Come over here where I can see you—”

He blocks the sunlight when he stands near, but I still can’t see him. I hear him kneel. A damp towel touches my face. He wrings water over my eyes and wipes gently with the towel—once I blink away the water, I can see him, but it’s like I’m looking at him through a scrim of steel wool. He’s examining me with those pitying blue eyes. I want to ping Albion, ping Gav, someone who can help me, but the virtual interface I’m so used to seeing isn’t here.

“You’re very injured,” he says. “I did what I could, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had to practice emergency medicine—not since school. I stopped most of the bleeding. I’m so sorry, Dominic. I didn’t intend for this to happen—”

“Did you kill her? Did you kill Albion?”

“She’s safe,” says Timothy. “She’ll be here soon—”

My body’s numbed from coagulant and painkillers but whenever I move, profound pain ripples through me. Something plastic’s draped over me as a blanket—a tarp, maybe—the corners weighted by bricks. My head’s cushioned by a rain jacket—Timothy’s, it looks like. He’s wearing a T-shirt and khaki hiking pants, but nothing to protect him from the radiation or the rain. His backpack’s nearby, cherry red. What will happen here? Where are the others? Why didn’t they just let me die?

“Did you kill Twiggy?” I ask. “Why? Why her?”

“I didn’t kill her,” says Timothy. “My father knew you’d be interested in her—he’d studied your Adware, knew your tastes. He hired her, made sure she’d cross your path by making sure your cousin worked with her. My father paid her to give you hard drugs so that once you were arrested on felony drug charges I could commandeer your case from Simka. We knew we had to get close to you, one way or another, to find out what you knew about the woman’s body you discovered in the Archive—”

“Hannah,” I tell him. “Her name was Hannah—”

“My father thought he’d taken care of that mistake years ago, but when you found her in the Archive, he panicked. He wanted to have you killed—he thought killing you would solve these problems from the past. I had to convince him to let you live. I told him that we should figure out how you found Hannah, what you knew—what else you might know about us. I convinced him that you might be able to help us with another problem we were having—”

“Albion—”

“The dead don’t stay dead,” he says.

“Albion wanted to stay dead. She wanted no part of this—”

“We didn’t know Albion was alive until she disappeared from the Archive—she wanted to disappear, but that’s what exposed her. Albion vanishing was like a dead woman rising to life, and then you found Hannah’s body. My father was haunted by these Lazarus women. He met with his brother and told him he wanted Albion dead. My uncle and cousins remembered Albion. They wanted to kill her, they’ve always wanted her… but I couldn’t let them. I can’t let them—”

The door to Room 208 is at least two stories above us, leading into the scorched hallway—I remember falling, but don’t remember hitting—I’m so numbed I feel like I’m hovering inches above my body, like I haven’t quite finished the fall. I glance around—the flowers I’d brought for Theresa are all around me.

“Are you going to kill Albion here?” I ask him. “Kill us?”

Timothy’s incredulous. “I’m saving her,” he says. “I’ve tried to save you. This whole time, I’ve been saving you—”

“Bullshit,” I tell him. “I saw what you did to Hannah. I saw everything, you sick fuck. I saw everything—”

“I’ve saved you three times,” he says. “When you found Hannah, I saved you from my father. I saved you a second time after my father’s party—when you quit working for him, you ceased having value to him, but I convinced him that we could still follow you to Albion. I saved you a third time just a few hours ago, when my cousins were scrambling down here to mutilate you, Dominic—”

“You don’t want me to live,” I tell him. “You’re luring her here because you don’t know where she is—”

“The first night I met you I told you that I’d been saved—”

“When you tore out your Adware—”

“I was Saul on the road to Damascus,” says Timothy. “I lived with the shadow of my father—that Adware, those images that filled my mind, were him. They were him. I slit myself open and tore out my Adware and it was like I was tearing him out from me. I knew I might kill myself but tearing out that Adware was like tearing sin from my soul—”

“Twiggy didn’t have to die—”

“No,” says Timothy. “No, she didn’t, but once she served her purpose, my father saw her as a liability. He gave her to his brother and his sons. Killing her was a mercy, by the time they were through with her—”

“You keep saying ‘my father.’ ‘My father.’ You keep saying, ‘They did this.’ You did this—”

Timothy’s not listening—something’s caught his attention and he stares out over the ruins into the far yard, intent like a hunter who fears his movements might scare off the prey.

“She’s here,” he says. “She’s here—”

“Albion?” I try to scream, but my breath’s frail. “Get out of here. Run—”

I follow Timothy’s eyes and see her. She stands at the base of the slide of bricks. Something formal in the way she stands. She’s come to meet death.

“Dominic’s up here,” says Timothy. “I promised I was with him—”

Albion scales the bricks like she’s scaling a slant of a shallow pyramid, picking a circuit that will keep her wide of Timothy.

“My God,” she says when she draws close to me, “what have you done?”

“He would be dead if it wasn’t for me,” says Timothy, voice edged with—not quite glee, but something proud, catlike, like he’s gifting his owner the body of a bird.

Albion doesn’t cry at the sight of my body—she’s blanched white, but studies each of my wounds like she’s cataloging them, keeping tally for some future reckoning. She sits next to me, takes my hand. Having her so close is like a balm—the scent of her hair, the feel of her as she caresses my face. “Poor Dominic,” she whispers as she touches kisses to each one of my eyes, “poor, poor Dominic—”

“Leave,” I tell her. “They’re coming for you. Run—”

“How did you find us?” she asks.

“My father ruined that doctor, Simka,” says Timothy. “Drugs for sex with high school girls, bullshit he knew would hit the streams. My father snared Dominic’s accounts, sent him an e-mail—it was supposed to look like it came from Simka’s lawyer. When Dominic opened the e-mail, my father could track him. We came to New Castle, found your house, but you were already here—”

“What have you done to him?” she says, her voice like someone grown weary of a long and brutal prank. “Timothy, what have you done to him?”

“Gregor,” he says. “Rory and Cormac—”

“Why did they do this?” she asks.

“They were preparing to do much worse when I stopped them,” says Timothy. “They wanted to open him up, collar to belly—they were going to hang him by the ankles and let him bleed out. I told Gregor that you were the one we wanted, but that you’d run if Dominic was dead. We needed him alive to get you—”

Albion takes the news stoically, like someone used to absorbing sudden horror.

“Are they here now?” she asks.

“Gregor and Rory are waiting for you at your house,” says Timothy. “I told them I’d bring you there. Cormac is at our camp here, waiting for me. We won’t have much time to get out of here before he comes looking for us—”

Albion removes a compact mirror from her pack and holds it up for me to see my reflection. Although she doesn’t angle it so I can view my entire body, I see enough—my chest wrapped in bandages and gauze, blood seeping through. My forehead had been slashed, almost torn from my skull, a ragged gash running from just above my right eye up across my scalp. Sloppily applied coagulant coats the stab wounds and slashes, a cloudy gel that’s hardened into a medicated carapace. My eyes are ringed with bruising, my mouth swollen. My right eye socket is crushed inward, the eye almost black with blood. She removes the mirror.

“Why are you helping us?” she asks.

“I’ve changed,” he says. “Alby, I’ve changed—”

“They won’t let this rest,” says Albion. “They’ll kill you. They’ll kill all of us—”

“There is a way out,” says Timothy. “I need to convince my father and my uncle that you’re both dead—”

“Don’t listen to this,” I tell Albion. “This man is a murderer. You showed me what he’s done. I’ve seen what he’s done to you, I’ve seen what he’s done to Peyton—”

Albion flinches at Peyton’s name.

“Albion,” says Timothy. He slides a flat white box from his backpack. He lifts the lid and reveals my Adware resting in a cushion of folded cloth. It looks like a tangle of golden wool, stained by flecks of my blood. “I removed this from him. It’s the only way—I need to send this to my father. I’ll tell him that I killed Dominic, disposed of him—as long as I have this, he’ll believe me—”

“That won’t be enough,” says Albion.

“No, you’re right—this won’t be enough,” says Timothy. “He’ll hire people to check my work, to look for Dominic’s body. He’ll want proof after proof of his death. He’ll want access to his account information, all his passwords. He’ll need to be certain that any shred of evidence that Dominic has found against him is eradicated. Dominic will need to get out of here. Out of the country, preferably—”

“Don’t listen to him,” I say. “Don’t listen to any of this—”

“Dominic needs to go to a hospital,” says Albion. “He’ll need money. You’re asking him to start a new life—”

“Money won’t be an issue,” says Timothy. “I’ve prepared everything—”

Albion turns to me. “Dominic, we can do this. There’s another place we can go, somewhere far up north—”

“You don’t understand,” says Timothy. “I can convince my father of Dominic’s death by giving over this Adware, but Dominic never mattered to him like you do. Convincing him that you’re dead without presenting your body to him will be much more difficult. I need to take you away, Albion. I need to hide you somewhere I know my father can’t look. I have a cabin in Washington State—it’s a private place. You’ll be comfortable. I’ll take you there, tell them all I killed you and disposed of you like they taught me. We’ll come up with something to show him, some images, as proof. Alby, come with me—”

“You killed her,” I tell him. “You killed her and you’re killing her again. Albion, what he did to you—”

“I remember everything,” says Albion.

“Listen to me: God changed me,” says Timothy.

“You’re wrapped up in all this death,” I tell him. “You’re trying to convince us of Christ, you’re trying to convince yourself that you’ve changed, but all you want is to take her away again, to keep her for yourself. Look at you. You’re desperate. You don’t look like a man who’s found peace—”

“I was never offered peace in this world,” says Timothy. “Every day I live with the weight of what I’ve done. I was never offered anything remotely like peace, but I am offered grace. I want to work to earn God’s grace—”

“Grace isn’t God’s to give,” says Albion. “Grace is ours to give.”

Timothy’s eyes are quavering pools, his face fatigued. He’s several inches shorter than Albion and watching them is like watching a supplicant before a queen.

“Let Dominic rest,” says Albion. “Timothy, we should talk. There are arrangements we need to make—”

Timothy injects me with medication from a clear bottle. Albion kisses my forehead, my eyes, my lips. I feel numbness beyond the numbness of the medication, like my soul has dropped through the darkness of the earth to slumber in the soil. I listen to the ringing in my ears like listening to chiming bells, straining to hear what Albion and Timothy are saying to each other, their voices at first just whispers but swelling into a clipped argument. I can’t distinguish their words—I try to listen, but the numbness swallows me just like it has swallowed every other pain.