Page 37 of High Noon

He made it sound so simple, but this wasn’t something you could just ‘make good choices’ and veer away from. “Maru, what if…” I looked to the blue sky, wishing the clouds had all the answers and I didn’t need to voice the question. “What if I’m already her? What if time, not circumstance, is what sets me off?”

Kohana rode down the hill, guiding a horse. Hotah followed, guiding the fourth.

“Do you intend to bury the man you killed?” Kohana asked. I appreciated his bluntness. There wasn’t enough of that in the world. If something was bad, sarcasm was my shield. It was Titus’s, too. Abram’s was his faith. Maybe he was the sanest of us all…

“No, but we need his clothing,” Maru answered. “I can—”

Kohana held up a hand. “Stay with her. I’ll retrieve it.”

“The tech suit?” I whispered.

Maru nodded once. “Looks like you might need a new one.”

I wondered if we should bury him. I argued with myself about how it was right, and why I shouldn’t care what happened to the clone or his body. The entire scene replayed in my mind. Abram drawing his gun. I knew I’d only killed his clone, but for a second, I couldn’t separate the clone from the original.

The Abram I trained with boiled with anger and hatred. His fervent faith was his life preserver, perhaps, but Abram seemed to always be just shy of drowning. He wasn’t sane, but maybe his insanity was the sum of his experiences. Torture plus training plus exhaustion plus upgrades plus whatever else he’d endured equaled Abram.

Maybe he couldn’t help what he was any more than anyone else could. And maybe his clone was no different.

Maru watched me. “Do you want to bury him?”

I swallowed thickly. “No. That would take too much time.”

A person could rise above their past, but they couldn’t escape it. Some got trapped in the mire of what happened to them and could neither live in the present, nor envision a future.

I had no idea where I fell on that spectrum, or if I was now so burdened by my future, I was too afraid to move out of the present.

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