Page 80 of Love, Nemesis
He walked along the walls, still looking at the paintings, and she was acutely aware of how he slowly came closer to her as he circled. He stopped at a painting near her, attention focused on it.
“Not any more than you think you can stop Ares, but hunting Strike has never been about thinking you’ll win.” He lingered there for a moment before facing her. “What is it about the State that you love so much?”
“It’s my home,” she asserted, and to her surprise, he didn’t challenge her answer. Rather, he kept her eyes as if watching something swimming beneath the water’s surface—as if he were still watching art, looking for the message in it.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. She was surprised at his conviction, and by his somber behavior.
As he passed her on the way to the door, she asked, “Why?” But she was unsure what exactly she was questioning. He was fine,suddenly? Not bringing up their interaction in the mountains, not addressing the abrupt change in their circumstances? They were parting ways, possibly to never see each other again, and this was it? Or had she been fooling herself all along? Was he still more an enemy to her than she had the good sense to understand?
Lethe turned in the doorway, and he seemed to understand that her “why” was not isolated to his previous statement, because he lingered on it. He scanned the paintings a final time before looking down at his hand. Out of character, he started moving his fingertips around the beginning of his ring finger on his left hand. Almost a nervous gesture, Ana found herself fixated on it as he spoke.
“I understand it now,” Lethe said. “It took me a while since the mountains, but you reminded me that I used to care very much about some things.”
Sensing he wasn’t done, Ana didn’t fill the silence.
Lethe continued to move the invisible ring around his finger.
“I used to avoid thinking about those things. I used to know someone. Emma Shepherd. I think you might have too.”
Ana kept very still for a moment. “Emma Shepherd,” she whispered, struggling to understand if the name was familiar.
“‘There is always another way of doing things, even if it’s just having faith that there is something else to be done,’” he repeated her words from earlier, the words that had startled him. “Where did that come from?”
She hadn’t realized it had come from somewhere specific until he asked the question.
It had felt natural to say at the time, but only as he questioned it did she realize its source.
“I—” Ana paused, struggling to piece together a coherent story, to tell of a time she’d sworn never to speak of at all. “I,” she started again.
Lethe didn’t rush her. He waited there as if they had all the time in the world.
“I was injured during the Burning of the Strike,” she said and even that statement was a confession. It was confirmation that she had, in fact, been there at the end.
Lethe didn’t react to this but allowed her to continue.
“I don’t remember it well, but I remember that I felt scared and alone. There were many others there, trapped inside the Bleeding Grin when all of the fire still burned outside and the ROSE stormed the interior.”
He nodded as if waiting for her to tell the rest of the story.
Ana reached for the cloth Ares had held, cleaning off trembling fingers as she spoke.
“A woman held me. I remember her as barely more than a shadow. Everyone else ran past us, trying to save themselves. I was young and children often didn’t have good chances of surviving anyway, but this woman kept me into her arms, and just kept…saying that. I didn’t understand it at the time. Shekept saying it to herself, over and over again, until she couldn’t anymore, but she held me. I was hurt badly, but I wasn’t alone. It was a chaotic time, but I never forgot that. I used to think about those lines a lot, trying to decipher why she’d said them. Admittedly, I haven’t thought about them in forever, but I guess without even realizing it, I’ve found my own meaning in them.”
“She used to say that a lot,” Lethe said. “She objected to the idea of the Burning of the Strike. I bet in the end, she kept repeating it to remind herself that she had never wanted to play a part in it. She was often prone to fits of instability and rumination but had a lot of her own wisdom too.”
“Who was she?” Ana asked.
“Her name was Emma,” Lethe said. “She had a rare mutation like mine. She could transform. She could change parts of herself into other people. It was a critical advantage for us, but the side effects were ultimately madness anytime she completely transformed into someone else. Similar to Chronos not working with combining peoples’ time, Emma struggled with combining identities. There was always a risk she wouldn’t be able to find her way back. She’d forget herself, her mind trapped between multiple people, and eventually all of reality would shake loose. She’d get lost for days, sometimes weeks before becoming lucid again. Each transformation cost another piece of her, and the pain of the war seemed to make her always more reluctant to come back to herself.”
He paused for a long moment. “A few weeks before the Burning of the Strike, I was captured. She tried to come after me, and they captured her too. She was tortured in their experiments. I heard her beg for hours, but I couldn’t talk. I was trapped inanother cell and eventually they disposed of me when they were confident I was useless and beyond my healing abilities.”
He retold the events with obvious reluctance to feel their sting.
“As you can see. I lived, and I came back with a vengeance, eager to set her free. By then, their experiments had twisted her far beyond herself. By the time the Burning of the Strike started to reach its close, prisoners broke loose. In her profound suffering, Emma had transformed into something horrible. I nearly died trying to stop her. In the middle of it all, she wounded a young slave girl. At the time I thought the wound had been deadly. It was the only thing that brought Emma to some recognition of herself. She grabbed the girl and ran off into the flames to die. I thought she died a monster…burned like one in the chaos of it all.”
Ana could not resist the profound guilt that she felt because in remembering anything about her past life, she remembered, always, how she’d served the Strike. Even as a slave, she did not feel absolved of the role she’d had to play in the world around her. Having the horrors exposed so blatantly made the guilt widen like a blackening yawn in the pit of her stomach. She realized at last that Lethe only represented an oppressor in that he represented a victim of the system she’d supported.
She remembered Evira’s body in flames in the cavern and wondered what her judgment would be.
