Book of Graham

The airbags burst into the Honda with a violence that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

White fabric struck Jen.

The seat belt caught her body and dragged it back against the seat before the rest of her had finished moving forward.

Pain drove through her ribs.

For an instant, she could not tell whether she had made a sound.

The whole car was noise.

Impact.

Glass.

Metal grinding beneath them.

Then a ringing so complete that it seemed to have replaced hearing rather than injured it.

Beside her, Georgia had one hand clamped over her shoulder.

Something had gone wrong there.

Not a bruise.

Not the temporary protest of a body struck too hard.

Her arm no longer belonged to the arrangement she expected. Every attempt to move it produced a deep, white pain that reached into her jaw.

In the back seat, Jane sat rigid against her restraint.

A thin line of blood traveled from a cut near her hairline.

The false stubble remained upon her face.

One edge had begun to lift.

Georgia saw it and experienced, for one absurd instant, the impulse to smooth it down.

They had been laughing about it.

Not long ago.

There had been a road.

There had been time for the disguise to be ridiculous.

Now the Honda lay across both lanes.

The windscreen held a ruined view of trees and pale sky.

Steam or smoke moved beyond the glass.

Somewhere underneath them, the trapped motorcycle settled with a small metallic shriek.

Jen’s hands were still upon the wheel.

Her eyes were open.

She seemed to be trying to understand where the road had gone.

Georgia turned toward Jane.

Or tried to.

Pain struck through her shoulder.

And the dust began to shine.

Every particle acquired an edge.

Green.

Thin.

Exact.

The airbag residue filled the cabin in a drifting cloud, and Georgia’s sight seized upon all of it.

Not the cloud.

Each fragment.

Each minute shape turning through the air.

A world of debris too small for ordinary vision became a crowded architecture between her eyes and everything she needed to see.

Lines appeared.

Boxes.

Angles.

Measurements accumulating faster than she could dismiss them.

A grain of dust crossed another.

Her mind supplied its speed.

Its direction.

The place it would occupy an instant later.

Then another.

Then thousands.

Each insignificant movement arrived with the authority of something that mattered.

Georgia squeezed her eyes shut.

The shapes remained behind her lids.

Focus.

Cassandra had said it so often that the instruction had acquired her voice even when she was absent.

Choose what mattered.

Let the rest go.

A face.

A doorway.

A single moving object.

Do not try to receive the whole world.

Georgia knew.

She knew what she was supposed to do.

But knowing did not quiet the pain.

Her shoulder pulsed, and with every pulse the geometric field broke into another impossible abundance of detail.

“Jane.”

The name left her as a rough breath.

Jane’s eyes moved toward her.

There was fear in them.

Not yet the understanding of what stood outside.

Only the stunned, searching fear of someone waiting for the person she trusted to tell her what happened next.

Georgia tried to make herself that person.

Tried to find Jane’s face inside the green storm.

“I’m here.”

She did not know whether Jane heard.

Beyond the broken windows, Marion lifted the pistol.

Georgia perceived the movement before she understood the woman.

A shape.

An intention expressed through position.

Lines began to form where danger would become motion.

For a fraction of a second, the future lay visible.

Not the whole of it.

Only a path.

The narrow, terrible journey of a bullet not yet free of the weapon.

Georgia reached for it with her attention.

The dust intervened.

A hundred thousand green edges.

A hundred thousand small, useless certainties.

The larger line appeared.

Vanished.

Appeared again behind the measurements of drifting powder.

Her shoulder convulsed.

The pain broke her concentration.

She turned toward the back seat.

Jane had shifted.

Her body was angled away, trying to look past the ruined glass, trying to locate the source of the threat.

Georgia saw the back of her head.

The dark hair.

The blood from the first small cut.

A living person arranged in an instant that would never return.

The shot came.

Georgia tried to move.

Not to protect herself.

Not even to reach the door.

Only to close the small distance between her hand and Jane.

A distance she should have been able to erase.

She could cross towns without touching the roads between them.

She could lift creatures that outweighed her several times over.

She could see the measurable world in a language ordinary eyes did not possess.

And she could not reach the back seat in time.

The bullet struck Jane.

There was no useful interval afterward.

No moment in which Georgia could still believe she had misunderstood.

The body before her changed.

Not greatly.

That was the horror.

A small movement.

A sudden loss of intention.

The person within the shape no longer answering it.

“Jane.”

Georgia said it again.

As though the first time had failed because she had not spoken clearly enough.

The green outlines held.

They described the seat.

The window.

Jane’s shoulder.

The angle of her head.

They continued supplying information with a precision that had become obscene.

Nothing in them knew the difference between a body and the woman who had occupied it.

Georgia did.

The second path appeared.

Clearer now.

Her mind, shocked out of its struggle with the dust, caught the line at last.

A narrow green prediction entered the place her body occupied.

She could move.

There was time enough for that.

Not much.

Enough.

Georgia saw it.

And did not.

The bullet struck near her collarbone.

The impact drove her back.

Pain flared through the already injured shoulder, then spread outward in a hot, sickening rush.

Her breath stopped.

Her hand opened.

For a moment, the whole cabin became a field of trembling lines.

Then she found Jane again.

That was worse than the pain.

She kept looking.

Cassandra appeared.

Georgia did not see her arrive.

One instant, Marion remained beyond the car with the weapon in her hands.

The next, Cassandra stood in the road.

Black geometry covered her bare body.

Her face held no hesitation.

She killed Marion quickly.

The third shot never came.

The absence of it meant nothing to Georgia.

A third shot belonged to a future in which there were still events capable of making this worse.

She could not imagine that future.

She was still inside the first.

Still turning.

Still trying to make her arm reach.

Still believing, in some shattered portion of her mind, that the moment could be entered again and performed correctly.

Cassandra came to the Honda.

Her gaze moved across the cabin.

Jen had lost consciousness.

Her body had sagged against the restraint, and there was blood upon her forehead.

Cassandra reached her first.

Placed her hands against her.

Green lines spread.

Not the frenzied multiplication filling Georgia’s sight.

A deliberate design.

Shapes closing.

Relationships restored.

The body receiving instructions it had not known how to give itself.

Jen moaned.

“Georgia.”

Cassandra’s voice cut through the ringing.

Georgia did not turn.

“Fix yourself.”

Blood warmed the front of the borrowed shirt.

The pain had become less like a point and more like weather moving through her chest.

She kept looking at Jane.

“Fix Jane.”

Cassandra’s hands remained upon Jen.

The light shifted around the driver’s face.

A cut drew closed.

The swelling above her brow diminished.

“Georgia.”

“Fix her.”

The words were no longer a request.

They were the only arrangement of language Georgia could make.

The only possible answer to the shape in the back seat.

“You have to.”

Cassandra looked at Jane.

Then at Georgia.

The next words came softly.

That softness made them unforgivable.

“She’s gone.”

Georgia heard the sentence.

Her mind refused to place it anywhere.

Gone was distance.

A room left.

A door closed.

Jane at the bar before Georgia walked in.

Jane turning away while she pretended not to be jealous.

Jane somewhere Georgia could still reach if she moved quickly enough.

There was no meaning of gone she could bear that matched the back seat.

The light around Jen faded.

She breathed.

Unconscious, but breathing.

Cassandra turned toward Georgia.

Said something else.

Her mouth moved.

The sounds reached the cabin without becoming words.

Georgia watched her.

The black lines upon Cassandra’s skin began to blur.

So did the green ones covering everything else.

She tried once more to turn toward Jane.

Her body would not complete the movement.

The pain receded.

Not healed.

Distant.

As though it belonged to a person sitting somewhere else.

The cabin darkened from its edges inward.

Georgia held Jane’s name inside her mouth.

Then even the name went beyond reach.

She woke beneath an open sky.

For several seconds, she did not know that she was lying down.

There was brick beside her.

A pale strip of daylight above it.

A smell of rubbish, damp stone, and warm food escaping through a vent.

The alley.

The one beside Cibo per l’Anima.

She had brought people here before.

People pulled out of terror.

People who could still be taken inside and given water.

Jen knelt over her.

Her face appeared intact.

Tired.

Frightened.

But the blood upon her forehead was gone.

“Hey.”

Georgia blinked.

Jen leaned closer.

“You awake?”

The question seemed to require more certainty than Georgia possessed.

She tried to lift herself.

Jen steadied her.

“Easy.”

Georgia looked past her.

The alley held no car.

No shattered glass.

No white fabric collapsing from the steering wheel.

No back seat.

“Jane?”

Jen’s expression changed.

Not much.

It did not need to.

She had spent the last moments waiting for this question.

She had found no way to answer it that would not destroy the person asking.

“I’m so sorry.”

The words were almost a whisper.

Georgia stared at her.

There should have been pain.

She remembered the shoulder.

The impact.

The second bullet.

She touched the place where it had entered.

Whole skin.

No heat.

No open wound.

She moved the arm.

It answered.

Nothing inside her body remained arranged to explain what had happened.

She had been repaired.

Jane had not.

Her hand stayed against the collarbone.

For a moment, she pressed hard enough to hurt.

A small pain.

One she had chosen.

Then she looked at Jen.

“Where’s Cassandra?”

“She left.”

Georgia waited.

Jen sat back upon her heels.

There was a hesitation now that had not been present when she apologized for Jane.

A different kind of dread.

“She asked me to tell you something.”

Georgia’s eyes fixed upon her.

Jen glanced toward the restaurant door.

Behind it, people were working.

Someone might be laughing.

A cake might be taking shape.

The thought of carrying the next sentence into such a world made her feel sick.

“She said Neve is dead.”

Georgia did not move.

“And Hesperia.”

Jen watched her carefully.

“Someone called Sonya killed them.”

The names were new in Jen’s mouth.

The facts were not.

She had been handed them without enough explanation to know how they fitted together.

Only enough to understand that they belonged to people Georgia knew.

“Neve was the baby?”

Georgia’s hand fell from her shoulder.

Jen continued more quietly.

“Which one was Hesperia?”

For a moment, Georgia seemed not to hear.

Then she looked down at her own hands.

No blood.

No geometry.

Just hands.

Hands that had lifted wolves.

Carried drinks.

Touched Jane’s face.

Failed to reach her.

Now they lay empty in her lap while the morning offered another dead child.

“Nine months.”

Jen’s brow tightened.

“What?”

“Neve was nine months old.”

The alley seemed to lose what little warmth it held.

Jen looked toward the ground.

There was nothing she could say.

Nine months reduced every useful word to something shamefully insufficient.

Georgia drew a breath.

It shook.

Then another.

Her gaze lifted.

Something had changed behind it.

Not grief ending.

Not acceptance.

A line becoming clear within a field of ruin.

“Hesperia isn’t dead.”

Jen looked back at her.

Georgia’s voice was quiet.

Certain in a way nothing else had been since she woke.

“Cassandra is lying.”

Beyond the rear door, the restaurant continued its morning.

Cups were filled.

Orders called.

Someone was waiting for a table.

Here, in the narrow alley where the rescued had appeared and gone inside, Georgia sat with a healed body and no way to make that healing feel like mercy.

Jane was dead.

Neve had been nine months old.

And somewhere beyond the reach of an ordinary road, Cassandra had carried away another truth and left Jen to deliver a sentence Georgia refused to believe.

She pressed one hand against the brick and began to rise.

The world returned to her in edges.

Hard.

Distinct.

No drifting dust to conceal them now.

Only grief, and the first clear shape of a lie.