Page 125 of Last of Her Name
“Tell you …”
“About Pol, stupid!” She grins. “You kissed him.Finally.”
Unreal as this body is, it can still flush furiously. I press my hands to my heated cheeks. “I’m sorry! It just—ithappenedand I didn’t know how to stop and—”
Clio laughs, bright and sparkling as rain on a sunny day. She grabs my hands and pulls me close. “He’s lucky, you know. Don’t you ever let him forget it.”
I stare at her, therealnessof her, like seeing a dream come to life. My Clio. My dazzling, laughing friend, my twin moon. I want to grab her hand and steal her away, keep her all to myself. I want everything to be the way it was. I want to live our beautiful lie, all else be damned. But I may as well want the stars for a necklace. Clio isn’t mine to steal; she’s only mine to protect for as long as I can.
“This is you, isn’t it?” I say. “I mean, you’re the Prismata, not just my imagination. But Danica said you couldn’t speak the way we do.”
“For all her cleverness, Danica never totally understood me. Not many of your ancestors did. They never believed in me the way you do, with the whole of their beings.” There is a touch of sadness in her smile.
“I think I understand.” The other Leonovs resisted accepting Clio, knowing she wasn’t real. She was just a ghost to them, never a person. But I grew up believing shewasreal, and so I could love her in a way they never could. Our connection must be deeper than any Leonov has ever had with the Prismata. I wonder: If they had known her the way I do, if they could haveheardher the way I’m hearing her now, would they have used her as a weapon? Would the course of history be totally different if my ancestors had just loved her the way I have?
“Clio, there’s one thing I can’t make sense of. Why did you leave me on Amethyne? Why did you let me believe you’d been captured by Volkov? If I’ve been connected to the Prismata all this time, why couldn’t I just blink, and there you’d be?”
She tilts her head, giving me a skeptical half smile that’s so familiar, soClio, it aches to look at her. It’s the expression she always gave me when I asked a stupid question. Then she’d just wait, amused and patient, while I worked out the answer on my own.
Like I do now.
“You didn’t leave, did you?” I whisper. “I pushed you. I told you to get far away from me and you … you listened.”
“I’ve always been as you believed me to be,” she says. “Your greatest fear was that I’d be captured by your enemies, and you feared it so much you began to believe it was true. And so it was.”
“It was all in my head,” I murmur, feeling sick. “All the panic and dread I felt, thinking you were being tortured—that was me torturingmyself.”
She plants her hands on my shoulders, her eyes looking directly into mine. “I was always with you, stupid. Even though your own brain wouldn’t let you see me, I never left. You and me against the universe.Always.”
“And …” I swallow, then ask impulsively, “Is that what youwant? For us to be linked so inextricably? To feel yourself stretched across the light-years, woven through our silly human lives?” These aren’t at all the words I had planned to say, but they well up anyway, from the bottom of my soul. “Say the word, and I’ll fight to set you free from us. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way. If that’s what you want.”
“You’re done fighting, Stacia.” She smiles and raises a single finger. “Let me show you what I want.”
Her finger presses to the center of my forehead, and I gasp as a flood of emotions pours into me.
I feel what it’s like to be a billion years old, to burn in the darkness for eons. To feel the centuries turn while I never change. To be a being of light and love and sharp, brilliant lines, lost and alone in the cosmos, the last of a once innumerable species, mourning my lost kin through the millennia.
Because, I realize, the Prismata was not always alone. There were others. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Prismatas once filled the galaxy, communing, connecting, sustaining one another. But then they began to die, their lights dimming and their songs fading, until at last, only one remained.
She’s the last of her kind, just as I am the last of mine.
But then—
I feel the burst of excitement and curiosity when out of that infinite darkness, a lone voice calls out, the voice of a desperate, mortal human mind trying toconnect. And I feel the joy of making that connection, of experiencing companionship after millions of years of solitude. I feel the pleasure the Prismata took in us frail humans, its immense affection for these ephemeral creatures that burned, lived, and faded like sparks from a fire. How pure her happiness was, to be joined again with others.
How could I return her to that lonely dark?
With a gasp, I open my eyes, and Clio lowers her finger. It takes me a moment to recover from the force of those emotions, so much deeper and stronger and older than anything I could ever experience in my own brief human lifetime. Already they begin to fade, but not before I capture their meaning.
I stare at her, eyes watering. “I understand, but I’m frightened, Clio. Bad people are coming for you, and I don’t know how to stop them. I don’t know how to end this fighting. What do I do?”
She smiles, like this is inconsequential. “Hope is born in darkness. Peace is born in trust.”
“But what does thatmean?”
She pulls me close and whispers in my ear, “Who will you trust, heart of my heart?”
Trust?