Page 133 of Love, Nemesis
Ana filed through her options. Chronos would not stop him, not completely. Chronos dampened Madness, made it vulnerable to injury, but the Strike in their manipulation of it would not be put down so quickly. There were so many of them.
She couldn’t attack Ivan now. She needed to help Lethe.
Help him–
She stared at his hand, at his blackening fingers and the realization dawned on her.
The Snake Bite.
Lethe was a Strike. No. More than that. He’d been a Strike all along.
“All this time,” she whispered, hands lighter on him now though she still wanted to help him. She looked around the room, realizing that the only creatures capable of helping Lethe were likely standing around him now.
That thought then led to another, and then another as a picture unfurled.
She paused.
Wait.
She stared at the shell. She thought of the replicas of the shell, no doubt created to protect the real one.
This time, Ana did not resist unveiling her thoughts, looking Ivan directly in the eyes like an invitation.
Ivan’s expression settled, his eyes narrowed only slightly as if he’d clearly received her question.
The State seemed to be built up to protect The Great Light at all costs, as if it were an object of great value. They had complete control of it, but what did they merit from that control? In all likelihood, Hailey had been trapped in their game too.
“Yes,” Ivan said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall that guarded the pyre. “Ivan, the other Ivan, the ‘real’” he gestured with his fingers to emphasize the word, “Ivan told Hailey when he was going to die. They’d been exchanging secrets of the future in coded letters. Haily reached out to him to try and save himself and possibly the State from us.”
“You’ve probably predicted a lot of this,” Ana said, inspecting the room.
Despite the shock and terror of the revelation of their existence, when she looked at the Strike, she noticed how many of them seemed to keep their distance, glowing eyes nestled in the darkness. A couple of them were sprawled out almost lazily in the back of the room.
Ana looked back at Ivan, her fear fading in the slightest way. She inquired again, asking questions in her mind she knew he could see.
Ivan didn’t move. When he didn’t reply, she asked aloud.
“You have all been down here for years, manipulating people to rule on your behalf. Why not just show yourselves? Why not…?” She paused because at last she understood. “Strike are different,” she whispered, glancing down at Lethe momentarily.
His breathing had settled. He still hid his hand in his chest.
“You can transcend time. You don’t think like people do.”
“We can’t be fooled into thinking we are real,” Ivan said. “It was a flaw of The Great Light we didn’t anticipate, because we didn’t really anticipate activating it at all. It was a grand experiment, facilitated by Strike Peter. He released its power toward the end of the Burning of the Strike for a single purpose that he had largely kept to himself during its development.”
Ana read Ivan’s eyes, trying to understand the direction he was taking them. She searched the room and realized that there was no illusion of Peter among them. Two illusions were missing.
Peter and Amiel.
“Do you want to guess why?” Ivan prodded.
“No.” She shook her head in horror.
Lethe spoke after a prolonged silence. Ana looked at him to see something feral in his eyes, body clutched close as if coiled to pounce, his arm still tied to his chest as he gritted his teeth. “We burned their illusions.”
“And then,” Ivan said, sweeping his arms out into the room with a bored tone, “thinking they were dead, you stopped lookingfor them. Me, missing? Not worth the effort, but if you thought Peter or Amiel had survived. By all of the Madness in the world, you would have never stopped looking! The trouble was, The Great Light was just an early experiment. When Peter triggered it and then left, it didn’t just maintain he and Amiel’s illusions. It was unstable and it spread. It fell over the world with a light rain of The Eating Ocean, just a small veil, not even close to what it was meant to be.”
Ana remembered the rain at the end of the Burning of the Strike. So that had been The Ocean after all? A curse falling over the world, unrestrained and imperfect but powerful.
