Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

AKHILA, DIVIDED by C.S. MacCath

Akhila fell out of the sky on Yule’s Eve, by lunar reckoning, and blazed across the icy twilight like a bright thing thrown by a god. She thought about dying while she fell, gave in to the tug of the moon’s mass and plummeted toward its embrace in the peace that precedes a suicide. Who would know, she wondered, that she hadn’t lost her way somewhere between thermosphere and troposphere? Who would be able to tell from the scattered fragments of her corpse that she had chosen to challenge gravity in the hope of failure?

It was only when she sensed a gathering of Organics around a bonfire that she questioned the wisdom of her choice. Her flight path would take her too near them; they might be killed when she crashed. So she slowed, turned and dropped, courting the ground and not crushing herself against it, the reflected light of planet rise illuminating her descent.

She was still a rocket when they approached but was struggling toward a different shape. There was a three-dimensional face on the skin of her silvery surface, and the base of her frame had toes. It was snowing, the first flakes of a heavy fall, and the frozen water evaporated as it fell toward her, leaving the hillside wreathed in mist.

They were naked from the waist up and led by a tall, youngish man with black hair that fell to his hips. She watched them climb the hill with part of her consciousness while she sought the weak, reflected light of the rising gas giant with the rest. It would be morning before she could morph completely, she thought. It was too dark to transform now.

The youngish man turned to wait for the others, and then she knew he was a monk, guessed that all of them were monastics. The skin of his spine bore the mark of each path he had traveled; the Valknut, the Pentacle, the Yin and Yang. After the company crested the hill he knelt down in front of her, too close for his safety, and pressed the tips of his fingers into the frozen grass.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m human.” She used the last of her energy to force breasts from her middle. “A woman.”

“I’m certain you’re many things, and I’m sorry for all of them. What is your business here, Augment?”

“My name is Akhila. I have a name.” I could have already been dead, she thought. “Do you have a name?”

“I do.” He didn’t offer it to her. “And I asked you a question.”

Organics weep when they feel this way, she thought, but I don’t have the energy for tears. Her eyes rolled left, then right. One of the monks was shivering; a fine, white dust covered his blond hair and shoulders. She imagined the snow was ash and then willed the vision away. “I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t do that anymore.”

The youngish man tensed like a predatory cat, or perhaps like its prey. She wasn’t sure. The other monks glanced at one another and backed away. Then she heard a roar, faint at first, louder as it approached the hillside.

“It’s a bomb!” The roaring man crested the hill and leveled the barrel of a hand weapon in her direction. His iron gray beard and hair whipped in the rising wind. “Vegar, get out of the way!” He gestured down the hillside with his free arm, and the mantle of symbols on his back and shoulders rippled as he turned.

Vegar rose, his hair falling forward as he looked from her to the weapon and back again.

“No, I’m a person.” Her desire for life rekindled then.

“Father, wait.” Vegar lifted a hand to block the weapon.

“You don’t know what it can do, what those things have done.”

“She hasn’t threatened us.”

“I said to get out of the way!”

“Sigurd, I can’t let you murder her.”

“I take refuge!” Akhila cried. They would take her in. They were obligated by their oaths. “I take refuge in the spiral that leads outward and in the spiral that leads inward. I take refuge in the one road of many paths and in the company of fellow travelers. I beg the sanctuary of this hostel.”

“You have no right to sanctuary!” Sigurd shifted his aim to avoid the younger monk and fired at the half bomb, half woman, but Vegar turned in that instant and flung himself over her frame. A stream of energy passed above them as they fell, and the sharp odor of burning flesh rose from their bodies. By the time they separated, several members of the priesthood had blocked the older monk’s path.

Sigurd’s lips curled downward, and he spat on the ground, but he didn’t fire again. Instead, he handed the weapon to one of the monks in front of him. “I’ll call the Councilor and let her know we have a problem.” His voice was flat. “Somebody treat Vegar’s burns and make sure that thing doesn’t go anywhere.”

Vegar refused to leave the hillside while a gun was pointed at Akhila, so a medic was dispatched to bring him warmer clothes and treat him where he sat. He also refused pain medication, which would have encouraged sleep. For a while, he hoped she might get up from where he left her, but she remained supine for the rest of the night. She didn’t speak again either, but her eyes continued to roll left and right, up and down until she had cooled enough that ice gathered on their surfaces. Then she stopped moving altogether. After a time the monk with the weapon relaxed, and Vegar withdrew to a place within where there was no weariness and no pain.

Akhila began to transform again when the sun rose. Her rocket body split into a head, torso and limbs while her silvery skin grew caramel-colored and soft. By mid-morning she looked like the person she claimed she was, a full-hipped, brown-eyed woman with black hair cropped short. “Thank you for saving me,” she said to Vegar when she was done.

He stood up from the place where he had kept vigil and began to pace. “I’m not doing this for you.”

“I didn’t think you were, but thank you, nonetheless.” Her voice was low and soft.

Vegar’s wounds were still blistering; he could feel the puffy pockets of fluid ballooning against his bandages. His eyelids felt heavy, and his limbs were weak. The muscles in his jaw knotted. “What kind of refuge do you expect us to provide while your people are butchering ours?”

“I don’t know what I expected, and it’s war, not butchery.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and looked up at him. Her eyes were full of ghosts. “Even so, I’ve done some terrible things.”

Vegar stopped pacing, and his lip lifted back from his teeth. “The Valfather counsels us that the path of strength is to atone for our mistakes, not run from them. I won’t be your confessor.”

“What would you have me do, go back to the worlds I’ve blighted and make amends with the dead?”

“Is that why you’re really here, to ‘blight’ us?”

“Don’t be stupid. I took refuge in good faith. If I had wanted to kill you, you would be dead.” She glanced at the other monk, who had lifted Sigurd’s weapon, and smirked. “Good luck with that. I’m not so vulnerable in the sunlight.”

“I should have let our Godman shoot you when he had the chance.”

“Well, I’ve certainly earned it. Would you like to see how?” Before he could answer, her body began to stretch, thin, and re-shape into a pair of figures; a smaller replica of herself and a small boy dangling in her grip over a rocky outcropping.

The stone under the replica’s feet melted away, and as it dissolved, it was drawn up through her legs and torso, which pulsed in a slow but steady rhythm. Then her mouth opened wide, and a flood of tiny, transformed particles poured from her nose and lips onto the face of the terrified child.

“Little boys go to school,” Akhila said. “Little boys go home. And everywhere this one goes, I go too, forever. Let me show you something else.” She morphed again. This time she became the boy, a few years older now. He was half silver and half skin. His wrists and ankles were bound, and his ears trickled blood. “He was a good carrier, and he’s still alive somewhere in a small, dark place I can’t find. But his people are dead; my nanoparticles bled from his pores and burned their flesh away. I went back and collected them before the bones were buried.” She resumed her human shape. “It was easier than making new ones.”

“Why?” Vegar’s vocal cords constricted as he spoke, and his vision blurred. He thought he might vomit bile out of his empty stomach.

“How can you call yourself a holy man and not know why? Were you born on this moon? Have you never left? How could your Godman identify me by my profession, point a weapon at me, refuse to use gender-specific pronouns when he talked about me and never have told you why?” Her voice was growing mechanical, resonant. It whined like metal on metal.

Then Akhila froze and swung her head to the left. “Three people are coming. They want to take me indoors.” She surged upward until her body was tall, thin and bulbous at the top. Her caramel-colored skin melted to silver, and the bulb widened.

“For later,” some indistinct part of her said, “when I can’t see the sun.”

Sigurd came over the rise with a pair of armed nuns. As Akhila morphed back, he watched her, a rarified hatred on his face. Two bowls of steaming food smelling of grains and honey shook in his tight grip. “I’ve been on the line with the Councilor all night,” he told Vegar. “She agrees the bomb can’t be trusted, but she asked me not to destroy it. Says it might be useful to study. I think she’s putting the hospital at risk, but I’ve told her we’ll keep it here until the military arrives from off-moon.”

Vegar watched Akhila stare back at him as she was led down the hill. “Can we really hold her with three guns? She didn’t seem afraid of the one you gave to Clautho.”

“Those weapons are mine, and they are sufficient, but the Councilor is sending a militia detachment over with a little more firepower. We’ll be all right for a few days.” He handed the bowls to Vegar and his companion. “Here, I’ve brought you something to eat. I can’t believe nobody remembered to feed you.”

Vegar wondered for a moment how the elder monk could be so certain of his guns, but the bowl in his hands was warm, fragrant and distracting. His mouth watered, and his stomach growled.

“Vegar…” Sigurd began, and then sighed.

“You were right. I’m sorry I stood in your way.”

“What happened?”

Vegar shook his head. “It’s not important.”

Sigurd nodded. “You tried to do a good thing. I’m just glad it didn’t cost you more than a bad burn.”

Vegar began to walk down the hillside while he ate. Sigurd followed. Akhila’s back was long, straight and brown in front of them, and her hips swayed back and forth like a copper bell when she walked. She looks human, he thought, and remembered what she had said of his mentor.

“Are you all right?” Sigurd put his hand on Vegar’s shoulder.

Vegar blinked and realized he had stopped. “I’m glad too,” he said, and started walking again.

They shut Akhila in a root cellar and posted the nuns outside. Vegar slept the rest of the day and most of the night in the monastery’s infirmary, where his bandages were changed at regular intervals and ointment was applied to his burns. While he slept, he dreamed Akhila was sitting in the dark, statue-still to conserve energy. He woke wondering what she thought he should know that he didn’t.

In the early pre-dawn light, he went to the arboretum and paced the Stages of the Pentacle, pausing at each elemental shrine to remember its place in the natural world, its place in his body. The winterbound trees creaked above him in the wind, and a flock of sleepy birds hooted down at him from their icy perches. He closed his eyes at the southern shrine and listened awhile as the perpetual flame warmed his face and hands.

The sky brightened. Vegar left the flame and approached the crest of the star where an empty stone vessel represented the human spirit. He usually offered a prayer here, of gratitude or charity, but this morning he felt as hollow as the bowl itself. He had prevented his Godman from protecting the people in his care and had saved a torturer of children, a mass murderer. Then Akhila the rocket and Akhila the woman blended together like watercolor paint in his thoughts, and he remembered she’d said she didn’t do those things anymore.

Vegar wondered for a moment if Akhila’s nanobody made her less human, less worthy of redemption. He’d heard of radical augments, machines with human minds, and believed she could have killed them if she had wanted to in spite of Sigurd’s powerful guns. There was something about the tone of her anger that sounded old, deep, and unhealed, some wound that seeped and poisoned. Did she hope to cleanse it here?

There would be no answers to these questions in meditation, he knew, so he strode away from the shrine and made his way to the root cellar. Four men with heavy guns were posted outside the door, who refused to allow him in without an escort. Vegar relented after a brief exchange, and two of the guards accompanied him inside. Akhila was motionless as he dreamed she would be, sitting cross-legged on the cellar’s work bench, still naked as she had been the previous day. Her eyes opened, and a faint, blue light shone from them, the only light in the room.

“Hello, Brother Vegar. How are your burns?” Akhila heat-scanned his chest and arms as he closed the door. The flow of blood to his wounds was good. He was probably in pain, but he would heal.

“Why were you so angry with me? What don’t I know?”

She smiled. “You’re awfully brave to be so naive in mixed company.”

“I didn’t come here for you to insult me.” Vegar turned to go and put his hand on the doorknob.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but a hint of humor remained in her voice. “I shouldn’t provoke you. It was good of you to ask at all.”

His hand remained on the door, but he looked in her direction again. Her scent receptors registered nervous sweat, the medicine on his burns and the stale residue of burned incense. It was a pleasant counterpoint to the gunmetal stink of the guards’ weaponry, so she allowed herself a moment to soak it in. While she did, she thought about making conversation, perhaps asking about his faith. But then she remembered what she had shown him and what he had said to her.

“It started with gills,” she finally said, “so people could mine in deep water without suits. Prisoners got early parole; people dependent on their governments got bigger stipends, and all they had to do was change a little and learn a new skill…”

Vegar interrupted her. “Those people were volunteers…”

Akhila raised an eyebrow and spoke over him. “Most of them died on the bottom of the ocean and were forgotten by everyone but their families, who were offered new opportunities on new worlds. Why go to the expense of terraforming a planet with skilled workers when you can augment criminals and the poor at a fraction of the cost? So gills became chemicals or genetic alterations for breathing hostile atmospheres. Sometimes skin became scales or even better, self-replicating body armor. It’s amazing what you can do to flesh when you don’t care whether or not it survives for very long.”

“What does any of this have to do with your war?” Vegar’s heart rate increased, and she heard his breath grow shallow. Good. She was making him angry. Maybe she could make him think as well.

“Did you know that drowning is a terrible way to die? You can’t hold your breath until you pass out; your body will force you to inhale eventually. So you breathe in water knowing it will kill you, but it takes a minute or two for you to lose consciousness. Chemical burns are bad too; they linger on the body, and no amount of medicine can make it easier to look in a mirror.”

“I don’t support any of that, and I’m sure the little boy you destroyed had no idea it was happening at all.”

“Of course you support it. This is a terraformed moon, and you’re living on it without any regard to the people who made it habitable.”

“But why children?” He was shouting now.

“Yes, Vegar. Why children? Is it because they’re easier to augment? Is it because they fit into smaller spaces? Is it because a child’s mind is as malleable as her body is?”

“I’m just a monk. I haven’t hurt anyone.”

“You’re a…” She paused, chose a word from his argument with Sigurd, “… murderer. At least I have the grace to get my hands dirty.”

“You’ve butchered entire worlds full of people!”

“Who refuse to tell the truth when they know it and refuse to listen when they hear it. Who are living on the bones of other people who died to put them there. Who will never have to run out of oxygen or water or food or wonder what kind of abomination they’ll turn into if the augmentation fails. Who’ve never had to sell one daughter’s mind to pay for another daughter’s medicine. And I will keep on killing them, every one of them, every man, woman and child of them until you stop it, stop it, stop it!”

Akhila heard the guards cock their weapons and realized she was standing on the table. Her body glowed a faint blue in the darkness. She shuddered once and slumped into a seated position again. “Oh, Vegar.” She began to rock back and forth, her arms wrapped around her belly. “Help me.”

But the guards were already escorting him out.

Some time later, the door opened again and Sigurd entered the cellar alone. He was wearing the same expression he had worn on the hillside and carrying one of the weapons he had brought there. He strode over to her as the door closed behind him and shoved it under her chin. She didn’t move to stop him.

“Do not speak to the boy again,” he growled, “or I will melt your nanobody slowly, over a period of hours, while you beg me for your life.”

“Father Sigurd, where have you seen a radical augment before, and what did it do to you?” She ignored the gun.

He picked her up by the throat and threw her against the dirt wall of the cellar. Gravel and soil crumbled around her. Again, she didn’t struggle but rose to her feet in a single, fluid motion as he crammed his fingers into her mouth and gripped her jaw.

“You are not allowed to call me ‘Father.’ I’ll kill you for that, too. I should kill you for that now.” He wasn’t shouting anymore, but his body was shaking, and his breath hissed in and out over his teeth.

Akhila remained calm. She had come to this moon seeking death and was not afraid to meet it. Her mouth peeled back from his fingers and rematerialized beside them. “For whatever it was, and for whoever did it, I am profoundly sorry. I invite you to do to me whatever you believe is just in order to avenge your loss.”

Sigurd’s eyes misted then, and he looked away from her. When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion. “It wasn’t a ‘who’, and neither are you.” His barrel chest heaved. “Leave the boy alone,” he repeated, leaning on the door and stumbling out into the afternoon sunshine.

Akhila sat in darkness for the next day, a slender nanofilament extending outward from her body, through the micro-cracks at the base of the cellar door and up into the grass. It didn’t collect much sun, but if she was still, it was enough. At the end of that time, she had sufficient power to stretch the nanofilament farther, make it longer, and escape the cellar altogether without attracting the attention of the guards.

She spent the rest of the afternoon draped over the metal roof of the monastery like frost on a window, glinting in the early winter sun. After planet rise, when all was quiet, she slid down from the roof and went walking in the arboretum.

Vegar stood at the edge of a sand sculpture of the Yin and Yang. His hands and shoes were gritty; his chest and arms ached. He had been there all evening with a rake, combing the sand into place when he heard the crunch of snow underfoot and spun around, startled.

Akhila reached forward and covered his lips with a flat-handed seal to keep him silent. “I didn’t mean what I said before.”

She withdrew her hand, and Vegar considered her for a moment. “You really aren’t here to kill us, are you?”

“I’ve made a choice, and I intend to see it through.”

“Even though you can’t stay here?”

“I don’t think I ever believed I could.”

“The military will be cruel. You probably won’t live long.”

“I’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

Vegar turned back toward the sand sculpture and sat down. “Nobody deserves cruelty, not even someone like you.”

Akhila sat beside him. “So I’m a person, then?”

“I think so. I don’t want to think so, but I do.”

“That will carry me a long way.”

Vegar examined her body. Her breasts were round and dark, there were thatches of fine hair in her armpits and her skin looked real on close inspection. He reached out a hesitant hand and touched her arm. It was warm. “How long has it been since you were Organic?”

“Bharati was never my mother, and Dhiren was never my father. They were deep sea miners who sold the right to copy their little girl’s mind. It doesn’t hurt to have your mind copied; you just go to sleep, and they wire you up and take an imprint. Only their Akhila went home with them, and I stayed in the machine.”

Horrific, he thought. She must have been terrified. Then he remembered something she had told him. “Did your sister get her medicine?”

Akhila nodded. “For the rest of her life. Or at least that’s what my parents were promised. It was a long time ago.”

Vegar gathered his robe around his body and buried his hands in it for warmth while Akhila brought the tips of her fingers together. Sparks flew between them, and a fine dust began to accumulate on her legs. He watched her for a while. There was a faint smell of hot metal, and he had the sudden urge to hold his hands up to hers the way he had held them up to the fire shrine. After a moment he asked, “What are you doing?”

“My nanoparticles are self-policing. When some of them malfunction, I use others to destroy them.” The flame faltered and died. “Vegar, I didn’t just decide to come here. I was sent, like you said, to blight the hospital and surrounding community.”

He stiffened. “But you haven’t.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Why not?”

“I recently found my granddaughter and made a carrier of her before I realized who she was. Gorgeous girl, about five years old. Her father must have been fair-skinned because her hair was blond, and her eyes were green, but her skin was like… was like her mother’s. Of course, she wasn’t my granddaughter, but she might have been.” Akhila grew still, and her body began to shine blue in the darkness. “So you see, there isn’t anything you or anyone else could do to me that I don’t deserve, and I had to land somewhere.”

They sat together in silence for a while. Akhila closed her eyes and tilted her head while the barren branches above her creaked in the breeze. Vegar watched his sand sculpture soften.

“Are you familiar with the Tao?” he asked a few moments later.

“I know the data.”

“Humph.” Vegar’s lips lifted in a half-smile. “This isn’t a good representation of it.” He pointed at the sculpture. “The one on my back is better. Here, I’ll show you.” He shrugged off his robe and unbuttoned his shirt but sucked in a breath as he tried to pull it from his shoulders.

“Let me help you.” She lifted his collar and moved his hair. His torso was still swathed in bandages, but the Yin and Yang was tattooed above them. Akhila leaned down to look.

“Do you see the two halves?”

“Yes.”

“The dark half represents the receptive part of nature and the bright half the aggressive part. The opposing spots in each are the seeds of one in the other, the hope for integration.”

She raised her head. “You think I can heal.”

“I don’t know. Your path is a hard one. But I do know there’s a place beyond duality where the Tao is eternal, a place we all come from, a place we all return to.”

“And what happens when we return?” Her hand rested on his bare shoulder.

“We come to understand why we had two halves to begin with. Help me with my shirt again, would you?”

Akhila slipped the garment over his arms and helped him with his robe.

“It would be better if nobody else saw you out here.” He stood and prepared to leave.

“I know. I won’t be much longer. I just want to take in a little more light before it gets too dark.”

“All right, then. Good night, Akhila.”

“Good night, Vegar,” he heard her say as he walked toward the monastery kitchen, where a cup of evening tea and other human comforts could be found.

Sigurd was waiting in Vegar’s room when he returned there.

“Where have you been?”

“In meditation.”

“Ah.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Father?”

The older man opened his mouth to speak, fell silent, and then opened his mouth again. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m better than I was.”

“Good.”

“Are you all right?” Vegar sat on the bed and put his elbows on his knees.

Sigurd shifted in his seat. “Do you believe in fate?”

“Well, I believe our ancestors needed the idea of fate, and I think our thoughts and behaviors create ripple effects we often don’t understand, but no, not really, not in the way I think you mean it. Why do you ask?”

“I… do you know how I came to be a priest?”

Vegar smiled. “I’m afraid that was before my time.”

Sigurd gripped the chair seat between his legs, shifted again, and looked out of the window. “This war with the Augments has been going on a long while.”

“Did you lose someone, Father?”

The knuckles on Sigurd’s hand whitened. “I’ve tried to be a good priest.”

“And you’ve succeeded.”

Sigurd turned his head and stared at the floor. “Some wounds never heal.”

“Priests don’t have to be perfect; they have to be present. You taught me that.”

“You’re a good man, son.” Sigurd rose from the chair. “Remember I said so.” He left the room and closed the door behind him before Vegar could formulate a reply.

Akhila was still sitting beside the sand sculpture when Sigurd finally found her. She rose and turned to face him in a single, fluid motion. “Good evening.”

“How did you get out?” He raised his weapon and aimed at her chest.

“You’ve never imprisoned a nanobody before, have you? You’re a long way from the war, here.”

“Not long enough.” His hands shook, and the lines of his face were hard.

“I see. Well, you don’t need your weapon, Father. I’m here of my own free will.”

“Stop calling me Father.”

“Of course, Sigurd.”

“You look just like a woman.” He took two steps toward her.

“I am a….”

“Shut up.” He took two more. “You shouldn’t look like a woman. You shouldn’t look like anything you’ve killed. It’s obscene.” His eyes filled with tears, and he ground his teeth together. “Obscene.”

“You went to the root cellar to kill me.” Akhila looked from the weapon to his face, so red and full of rage. This is it, she thought, and waited for the blast.

“There is no sanctuary for you, no redemption, no peace.” He lowered his weapon and closed the space between them. His free hand grazed the skin of her belly and then gripped a breast. “No.”

“What are you doing?” She put her hand on his coat and pushed a little, but he lunged forward instead, closing the space between them. Then he buried his nose in her neck and his hand traveled upward, tightening around her throat.

“You don’t smell like a woman.”

“You don’t want to do this, Sigurd. I don’t want you to have to live with this. Please, shoot me or go back inside.”

“Are you a woman?”

Akhila shuddered. “Yes, I am.”

“Didn’t you invite me to do whatever I thought was just to avenge my loss?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then I want to do this.” Sigurd lifted her into the air by her neck. “Open your legs, woman,” he said, and threw her onto the sand sculpture.

She reached into the place where she carried the imprint of a small, half-metal boy lying in a dark place, of all the children lying in dark places because she had ruined them. She thought about the sun on her nanobody. She remembered the touch of Vegar’s hand and the long threads of hair she held aside so that she could put her fingers on his shoulder. She thought of the girl who would have been her granddaughter, who should have been her granddaughter, and of all the things, the human things her body would never be able to do.

She opened her legs.

He shoved his gun inside her, and she opened inside so it would fit. Then he flipped her onto her stomach, grabbing her hair and pushing her face into the sand while he loosened his trousers.

“Can you bleed?” he roared into her ear as he shoved himself into her rectum, which she opened for him as well. “Let’s see if you can bleed!” He spat on the right side of her face, and she closed her eyes while his saliva crossed her nose on its way to the ground. “Let’s see if you can bleed like my sister bled! Let’s see if you can bleed like my son bled! Let’s see if you can bleed like my wife bled!” Akhila’s body rocked with his thrusts, and the gun rocked loosely in her body, but she didn’t resist him, and this only inflamed his rage. He punched her face again and again with his free fist, and when she didn’t respond, he reached behind their joined bodies and slammed his gun into her with a repetitive, jerking motion. When he was spent, an anguished howl escaped his throat, and he held her pinned while he wailed. Tears streamed down his cheeks and onto her face, where they cooled on her lips and eyelids.

The crunch of footsteps on frozen ground and the muffled chatter of worried voices moved toward the arboretum from the monastery. A crowd was gathering, looking for him, looking for her.

“Sounds like your guards are coming.” Sigurd wiped his face on his coat sleeve and leaned down close to her ear. “Why don’t we see if they’re interested in any ‘justice’ before I melt you into scrap metal?” He rose from Akhila’s back and reached for the weapon still buried inside her. But half of the barrel was gone, absorbed. He stepped back, trousers around his knees, and watched as she began to glow. A second passed and she was bright, blazing. A face appeared in the back of her head; hands and arms reached out of her back. Then her body halved. The fiery part of her got up out of the dark self still lying in the sand, whipped long fingers around Sigurd’s neck and lifted him into the air.

“Thank you Father,” she said as she left her other self behind, “for renewing my sense of purpose. You’ll make a fine carrier.”

Bright Akhila was half the size of her whole body, but she began to remedy her lack by drawing sand up out of the sculpture and processing it. As it was diminished, her darker self stirred and rose, a diminutive shadow to that growing brightness. Vegar found them then. She watched him look from her to Bright Akhila and then to Sigurd’s half-naked form struggling against the burning fingers that held him.

He screamed. “Akhila, no!”

Dark Akhila turned to him then and threw out a hand in his direction. “Stay back!”

“What did you do to her?” Vegar turned to Sigurd, but the older man could only roll his eyes in the younger priest’s direction and plead with his lips.

“I couldn’t stop him. I tried. And I couldn’t stop her,” Dark Akhila said and then addressed her other self. “Let him go. Please let him go.”

Bright Akhila sneered up at the man choking in her grasp. “What was it you said? No sanctuary, no redemption, no peace.”

Then Dark Akhila drew the remaining sand up into her body, processing it, growing with it. “I can’t let you make him a carrier. I took refuge among these people.”

“For what? So they could lock you in the dark? So they could rape you?”

“For him.” Dark Akhila’s arm spanned the rest of the distance between her body and Vegar’s. She brushed her hand across his chest, and for a moment he held it close until she slipped it out from under his grip and brought it back to her center. “He said that I’m a person, and I will believe it. I have to believe it.”

Then Dark Akhila blazed blue-hot, her face full of compassion. Her arms extended, elongated, and stretched forward, inviting her brighter half to step inside the circle of her embrace. Bright Akhila turned, a pivoting motion on legs still pulsing with gathered sand, and the rhythm of her body faltered; the leer on her face softened. Her fingers tightened once and then loosened. Sigurd fell to the ground, dead.

A moment passed, and both bodies stilled. Then Bright Akhila fell forward, a scream filling her throat and filling the air. Dark Akhila caught her, brought her close and wept blue tears that fell from her cheeks and dissolved in the mass of pale hair beneath her chin. They shook together for a time, and the barren trees shook with them.

Then Dark Akhila looked up at Vegar. “Is there redemption? Is there peace?” she asked as her body began to wrap itself around Bright Akhila’s seething form.

Vegar’s face was grief-stricken. “I hope so.” He looked down at his broken mentor and added, “For both of you.”

“You need to go now.” Her dark, blue body converged around the raging woman inside her. “This will be hot.”

Vegar turned and ran. As he ran, he could smell hot metal, could hear a crackling sound like the spark of a welding torch, could feel a rising heat chasing him out of the arboretum, could see a reflection like daylight in the night sky over his head. When he finally fell to the ground gasping for breath, the world was cool and dark again.

The Councilor arrived with the military an hour later to take custody of Akhila, but there was nothing for them to retrieve but the mingled ashes and bone fragments of tree, bird, monk and nanobody. Vegar was kneeling in prayer just outside the blast radius, where smoke still rose from the earth. When the Councilor asked if he knew where his mentor was, he fell to his face in the snow and sobbed.

In time, his body healed and the bandages came off, but a reddened, stretched place remained on his chest. As the scars softened, they took the shape of Akhila’s elongated face in the throes of change, pleading for her life. The day he first recognized her face on his body, he packed his belongings and left the monastery to walk the path that had marked him, gathering broken Augments in Akhila’s name, mending broken Organics in Sigurd’s. When the time came, he had his scars limned in black and filled with a blue that shone even when he walked in darkness, which he often did.