The Neon Tempest
93: Chapter Thirty-One, Part Two
Previously…
92: Chapter Thirty-One, Part One
It’d taken Mer most of the day to slip from there to here across the six crowded miles between downtown and the Mound with the help of her guide, the Sprite riding her nanite Inoculants, whispering in her ear that it’d been her savior, that she’d died and been brought back on a miraculous whim, there before the grace of her friendly digital spirit. They’d made themselves as small as they could for the short, urban hike, as quiet as they could, so it took time, and the day stretched long as they moved through the city’s blind spots.
Mer went along, guided by the new voice in her head, but failed to realize at first where Sprite took them. Early on, she thought to ask, but Sprite remained silent. Mer wondered if this was what birds feel when the yearly migratory urge come over them, a silent certainty that her path stayed true and ended in safety. Sprite had argued and Mer agreed, though her recent memories fray to fuzz around their edges, that more of her father’s people would come looking for her - for them - that they needed a safe place to hide while they planned, where Gomez Miyazaki would never think to look, where the others would never find her.
Sprite said she’d died, that Mer wouldn’t want it to happen again, because miracles - like lightning - strike once, and so quick that people see aught but the consequence burnt on the world like an after-image. “A miracle,” Sprite bid soft, a sweet sound hanging in the air, “is a miracle because it can’t be reproduced.”
Mer crouched between a hatchback and a pickup truck in an automated car park, waited for a squat drone attendant to scuttle by on its crab legs before she darted to the next row of vehicles. “If I go again?” Mer asked.
“I’ll likely go with you,” Sprite said.
The drone clacked by. Its flat metal feet ticked and tacked the smooth concrete like hard rain on a windowsill.
Mer counted to ten Mississippi, finished, but remained rooted to her spot. “I don’t feel like I died.”
“After the fact,” Sprite said, “dead people rarely do.”
She tried to remember the dying, and the being dead. She managed to recall bright light, then none, then the sense of slow things in deep, dark waters moving slowly away from her grasping fingers, like a dream fleeing memory on waking. In the dark, with the ponderous things about her, she felt - all at once - fear and warmth, and finally peace, then time’s liquid movement, ebbing and flowing. If she’d been dead, she reckoned, it’d not been much different than a deep sleep, and not so bad at all. Mer supposed she should be horrified at the thought of it all, that she’d been dead for several minutes according to Sprite, and confirmed by Inoculant diagnostics. Even the nanites’ sluggish response to commands belied the truth of the matter, but Mer couldn’t fear what she couldn’t remember, and so went on, avoided testing the miraculous moment further.
Mer surfaces from her thoughts, from probing the boundaries of the newest, nebulous memory in her long-fractured recollections, and finds her feet had carried her to the place where she’d been born. Her stomach trills and she asks her guide, “Why?” She stands in the shadows beneath a birch tree in the yard fronting the cordoned wreckage of Calico Carnifex’s home.
”Why here?” she asks. “Why now?”
To be continued…