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She would never be able to scrape away the memory of the collective, unwelcome breathing of dozens of people surrounding her in the night.
They’d been waiting for the dream to visit her. Hoping for it. Praying. Vultures, hungry for scraps of her terror. If they couldn’t have the dream for themselves, they wanted to be near it. As though her screams might impart salvation, or better yet, as though maybe, just maybe, it might burst free of her—the dream, the monsters, terrible and terrible and terrible forever, amen—and pour forth its a
As though Eliza might be the actual fount of the apocalypse.
Gabriel Edinger had gotten nightmare ice cream, and she had gotten that.
“I still do. I still hate them,” she said now, maybe a little too fervently. Dr. Chaudhary had put his glasses back on, and his eyes were wary behind them. When he spoke, his voice had the stilted delicacy reserved for talking to those of unsound mind.
“You should have told me,” he said, with a glance at Dr. Amhali. He cleared his throat, evidently uncomfortable. “This could be considered a… a conflict of interest, Eliza.”
“What? There’s no conflict. I’m a scientist.”
“ Andan angel,” said the Moroccan doctor with a sneer.
Who sneers?wondered Eliza, fadingly. She’d thought it was something only book characters did. “We aren’t… I mean theyaren’t. They don’t claim to beangels,” she said, unsure why she was making any explanations on their behalf.
“Pardon me, of course not.” Dr. Amhali was all chill sarcasm. “ Descendants of.Oh, and incarnations of, let’s not forget that.” He stabbed her with a pointed look. “Apocalyptic visions, my dear? Tell me, do you still have them?” He asked it as though it were worse than absurd, as though the very notion profaned decent religion and must be punished.
She felt herself diminishing, shrinking in the face of double accusation and scorn. Disappearing. She wasn’t Eliza, right now, in this tent, in the eyes of these men. She was Elazael. I’m not her, I’m me.How desperately she wanted to believe it. “I left all that behind,” she said. “I left.”The last part was emphatic, because it still seemed simple to her. I left. Doesn’t that mean something?
“It must have been very difficult for you,” said Dr. Chaudhary.
It wasn’t that it was the wrong thing to say. Under other circumstances, this conversation might have led there: to his legitimate pity in the face of her tale of hardship. Damn straight it had been difficult for her. She’d had nothing, no money or friends, no worldliness at all. Nothing but her brain and her will, the first woefully neglected—she hadn’t been given an education—and the second so often punished that it had become stunted. Not stunted enough. Kiss my will, she might have said to her mother. You will never break me.
But under thesecircumstances, and in the tone in which he said it—that stilted delicacy, that patronizing indulgence—it wasn’t the rightthing to say, either. “Difficult?” she returned. “And the Big Bang was just an explosion.”
She’d said that to him last night, in jest. She’d smiled ironically and he’d chuckled. She meant it in the same spirit now… well, sort of… but Dr. Chaudhary raised his hands in a calming gesture.
“There’s no need to get upset,” he said.
No need to get upset? No need. What did that even mean? No reason? Because it seemed to Eliza that she had plenty of reasons. She’d been framed and she’d been outed. Her hard-earned anonymity had been snatched from her, her professional credibility from this moment forward would be entangled with the history that she’d fought so hard to hide, not even to mention this vicious allegation and the damage it could do to her, the legal ramifications of breaking her nondisclosure agreements, and… hell, the violent fallout on the world. But the most immediate reason was taking shape in this hazmat tent, in the company of two presumptuous men bent on treating her like their cardboard cutout of a long-lost victim.
Reflexively she glanced at the laptop screen that had shown her her undoing. It was frozen on that old photo of her, with its same old caption. CHILD PROPHET MISSING, BELIEVED MURDERED BY CULT.
“I’m not upset,” she said, taking a series of measured breaths.
“I don’t blame you for who you are, Eliza,” said Anuj Chaudhary. “We can’t change where we come from.”
“Well, that’s big of you.”
“But perhaps it’s time now to seek help. You’ve been through so much.”
And that’s when things started to go sideways. He still had his hands upraised in that let’s-not-do-anything-rash ma
She didn’t know how to react. It brought on a bizarre feeling of helplessness to face such an exaggerated response. “What I need help with,” she said, “is proving that I didn’t do this.”
“Eliza. Eliza. It doesn’t matter now. Let’s just get you home, and worry about that later.”
Her heartbeat started to pound in her ears. It was anger, it was frustration, and it was something else. Free as dandelions, she remembered. Normal as pie. Well, maybe not normal. Maybe not ever, but she would be free. She looked at her mentor, this dignified man of rare reason and intellect who stood to her as a kind of paragon of human enlightenment, and she felt his hypocrisy weighed against her truth—her own new knowing—and there was no contest. “No,” she said, and she heard her tone, which had gone soft and slippery with her own shame, slough off all weakness. “Let’s worry about it now.”
“I don’t think—”
“Oh, you think plenty. But you’re wrong.” A flick of her hand toward the laptop and all it stood for with its freeze-framed news broadcast. “Morgan Toth did this. Look into it. The truth is so far beyond him, I wouldn’t expect him to get it. He might be smart, but he’s a shallow pond. You, though.” Again he tried to interject, and again Eliza silenced him. “I expected more from you. You’ve got godsstrolling the hallways of your ‘mind palace’.” She put good, fat air quotes around that. “And they’re trying not to bump into the… what was it? The delegates of Science, so they can keep it cordial in there. That’s how open-minded you are, right? And now you’ve seenangels, and you’ve touchedchimaera.” Chimaera.The word came to her the same way godstarshad: a card flipped upside. “You know they’re real. And you know—surely you know—that, wherever they came from, they’ve been here before. All our myths and stories have a real, physical origin. Sphinxes. Demons. Angels.”
He was frowning, listening.
“But the idea that Icould be descended from one? Now that’scrazy! Ship Eliza home, get her some help, and for heaven’s sake, keep her the hell out of my mind palace!” She laughed, mirthless. “You don’t serve my kind in there, isn’t that it? Whoever heard of a black angel, anyway? And a womanto boot. This must be so difficult for you, doctor.”
He shook his head. He looked pained. “Eliza. That’s not it.”
“I’ll tell you what ‘it’ is,” she said, but she held on to it, for a second, wondering if she was really going to do it. Tell it. Here. To these hypocritical, doubting men. She looked from one to the other, from Dr. Chaudhary’s pained dismay and… embarrassment, for her—for her delusion, her sad display—to Dr. Amhali’s trembling contempt. Not the greatest audience for a revelation, but in the end it didn’t matter. Eliza’s new certainties had grown beyond concealing.