Page 77 of Katabasis

She spent a while peering at the statues, but their smooth perfection got boring in short order.

They were only inspiring from a distance; up close, all their faces looked the same.

Florence had been fascinating in a way this place was not, she thought.

Florence was textured. Nothing here had history.

Nothing was cracked or rubbed shiny with time.

It was all built and repaired and maintained constantly so that eternity somehow looked merely a decade old.

She felt a bit let down, if she was being honest. The name Rebel Citadel promised something more—ideally, something rebellious—but mostly it just seemed quiet. Where were the Lucifers?

She wandered further along the silent path, mildly curious to see where she would end up.

She could not grasp the citadel’s design.

It was not a spiral or a beehive or a simple spread on the hill, but somehow all three of those at once.

It curved in on itself; the same paths that crawled down its inside also looped around its outside.

Several times she passed along dark, high walls, convinced she was down deep in the city’s bowels, only to pop out unexpectedly onto a terrace.

Outside, from all angles, the citadel seemed empty and idyllic—so then where were its secrets?

Alice fixed herself an arbitrary principle—turn always toward the darkness—and this led her to a dense maze of squares that quite resembled the walled-in matrix of alleys and campos of Venice.

She turned a corner into what looked like a courtyard, and saw in the dim light the most incredible thing.

Growth. A root. A branch .

Alice’s heart leapt. A True Contradiction, Elspeth had named it. Something growing in the land where there can be no new life. Was this the secret to their confidence? Could the Rebel Citadel have grown its own Dialetheia?

But this branch didn’t look like how the archives said. The archives promised a dazzling bloom, a vitality that shouldn’t be. But this branch was a withered, black-brown thing, extending limply from a dried-out bush. When Alice touched it with her fingertip, it shrank away like a worm from salt.

She thought she heard a voice in the dark. But it was so faint, a feeling more than a word. Something like No, go away, leave me be .

“What on earth?” she murmured.

She touched the branch again. And though the branch shrank back further, Alice heard the sound more definitely this time—a coherent voice now, a word she could just barely make out, if she could decipher its language.

She held her finger against the branch, and a whorl of whispers seeped through the air.

She strained her ears. Please let it be a ghost , she thought, please give me some company, anyone at all .

But whenever she tried to seize on one strand, to decipher its train of thought, it dissipated back into the mass.

All she could make out was a general air of hostility.

The branch did not want her there. The bush wanted to be left alone.

But Alice was too curious to leave things be.

She moved fast this time, and succeeded in grasping the tendrils in her palm. The whispers grew louder. She knew it was foolish, but she simply had to know, with sick fascination, what would happen if she grasped a branch and simply—

Crack.

The branch snapped in her hand. The bush shrank back, all its whispers crying out at once. They were not loud cries, but so dearly pathetic.

Why would you do that , they cried. Why would you ever do that?

Alice glanced to her palm. The branch was a branch no longer, but an ugly twisted thing.

She dropped it. It shriveled and crumbled into dust, and in the bushes where she’d broken it a shiny tip was exposed to air, gleaming with something darker than blood.

A whisper of smoke curled around that wound, the same gray of a Shade’s essence.

Alice ventured deeper into the campo, and saw row upon row of bushes and trees—a whole garden, interlacing thorns and twisted branches and mulch. She moaned. “All of you?”

“Not so loud!”

Alice jumped.

It was the knob at her knee that spoke; an ugly, lumpy growth in the side of a blackened tree.

She could personify that stump, if she tilted her head just the right way.

A rustle, a groan, and suddenly it became the turtle-like head of a toothless old man.

He nipped at her fingers. Alice yanked her hand back, and the knob cackled.

“Playing. Only playing. Don’t startle, love.”

Alice folded her arms tight across her chest.

“Are you new here?” the knob inquired.

“Clearly, yes.”

“Why don’t you sit down over there,” said the knob. “He’s new, too.”

Alice turned to where the knob gestured. A stone bench lined the path. But she didn’t see anyone else, only more undergrowth.

“Who?”

“I’m not sure about his name. We don’t have much use for names.”

Alice took a second glance at the undergrowth and saw that the cluster of greenery on the edge looked younger and greener than the rest. The leaves were small and tender. The branches hadn’t yet grown thorns.

“Why don’t you sit,” said the knob again.

Alice perched gingerly at the edge of the bench. “But what do I do now?”

“Why,” said the knob, “now you rest.”

Alice crossed her ankles, then uncrossed them. She felt oddly self-conscious. She half expected leaves to start budding on her own limbs, but nothing happened. “You mean, like this?”

“However you like.” The knob shrank back against its stump. “Only settle down, and rest.”

“Rest how?”

“Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go.”

“And then I’ll turn into a tree?”

“You’ll take root,” said the knob. “You’ll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.”

Alice’s chest felt tight. The groves were too still, too silent.

There was something terrible about leaves with no rustle, stones with no sound of water.

A courtyard needed wind. She felt dread trickling in her stomach.

She tried to ignore this; tried to remind herself that she should be at peace now, that nothing and no one could hurt her.

But of course this was the wrong thing to think.

For here, without the distractions of hunger or exhaustion or a million mysteries trying to kill her, Alice realized she was facing down the greatest horror of all, and that was the agony of stony spaces.

Where all was silent, and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.

A great pressure built up in the back of her skull; bottled-up memories, demanding release.

Now hear the screams. Now taste the metal.

Now feel the blood, enormous volumes of it, smearing her eyes, salting her tongue.

She had never imagined the human body contained so much blood.

Professor Grimes’s panic—the way he spun toward her, the reproach in his eyes, the way he knew —

Knew what? After all this time, she still could not make a coherent narrative from the mess, could not sort those impressions into a structured story that offered any clarity about what she had done and what she owed.

Here was the Gordian knot: her memories were perfect, but she could only sort through impressions as they had first occurred to her.

And the day of Professor Grimes’s death was so jumbled and confused that, months later, and after a million times of reviewing the evidence, she still had no idea what to think.

Certainly she hated him. Certainly in the weeks before the accident she had often looked into his face—that crevassed, savage, handsome thing—and fantasized about smashing it apart so it no longer had value, could not enchant.

Was that killing intent? Was intent enough?

But she didn’t want him dead. She never wanted him dead.

She only wanted him to feel a shred of what she felt, only so that he would understand —only so he wouldn’t look down on her so.

And she remembered gazing at him and not wishing he were gone, but that things could go back to normal; that she could keep dancing on the line, flirting with danger, have her cake, eat it too.

She could not define her guilt. All she had was fragments, and these she went over compulsively.

The whoosh in her mind when she entered the lab that day.

How his voice alone made her dizzy. Don’t look at me , she had thought; forget I am here .

Her shaking hand, the chalk wobbly in her grasp.

A broken white line. She saw it, she saw it clearly, otherwise she wouldn’t have this memory; she saw the gap between one statement and the next, and she didn’t do anything about it.

But did it register ? Did she know what it meant to ignore it?

She saw the gap, she blinked, she stood up, she said they were ready to go.

Alice ran this sequence back in her mind a thousand times over but each time it offered no answers, only a building urge; a screaming desire—for what?

A confession, a correction, something —something had to change, something had to give; she could not go on under these conditions.

She fidgeted. The groves hissed, and Alice strained not to scream.

Settle , whispered the forest. Settle, settle—

“I can’t,” she gasped.

Just try , whispered the forest. Hold your thoughts at arm’s length, and go—empty.

An impossible task. They might as well have asked her to retrieve the moon.