Kylie Lee | Slash fan fiction

1. Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths / Enwrought with golden and silver light

John Preston opened his eyes and gazed up. A heavy film of plastic overlay him. He wasn't sure what had awakened him. Maybe he'd heard a soft domestic sound, or felt the mattress move as someone lay herself next to him. He turned his head to look. The room was dark and the plastic distorted his view, but of course he was alone. Viviana had been gone for four years, after all. Yet if he had seen her body next to his, he would not have been surprised.

The sheeting made a low, heavy noise as he tested its weight. He looked at the back of his glove-clad hand, barely visible in the dimness. That, along with the familiar sensation of fabric around his chest and waist, meant that, incongruously, he wore his black clerics' uniform. He had a sudden remembrance of looking down at his gloved hand and seeing blood. He'd held the dying man in his arms only briefly before the light in the man's eyes had gone, life snuffed out, and the horrible immediacy of it, its intimacy, had stricken him. Preston flexed his hand. It seemed to belong to someone else. He pushed, lifting the plastic away from his face. He could suffocate in here, cocooned in his own bed under heavy plastic sheeting. The air had already grown moist and stale. He could die. No one would hold him up or look into his face. No one would look at a bloody glove and spare an instant's regret at his demise.

At first precisely, then more frantically, he sought to move the plastic. The piece seemed endless; he couldn't find its edges to lift it off his body. Faint confusion gave way to abrupt terror that made his heart pound, the sensation explosively unfamiliar. Plastic enveloped him, and he had to get out or he would die. With both hands, he seized the heavy substance, grabbed, pulled.

And it ripped. It tore open, right over his face, and it hadn't been dark at all. Sunlight filled his bedroom. The plastic dropped off either side of the bed with a heavy rustle. A moment later, someone stepped in front of the window, momentarily blocking the light. Preston, dazzled, couldn't make out the face. The sense of panic had already faded, leaving behind only its taste.

"I've been watching you," said a quiet voice he recognized: Jürgen, the leader of the sense offender underground. He squinted at Jürgen in puzzlement as Jürgen stopped next to the bed, extended his bare hand, and pressed it gently in the center of Preston's chest. Heat flowed from his palm. Preston could feel it suffuse his body, even through the heaviness black of his uniform. "We're the same, you and I. We don't have the luxury of feeling." His blond hair caught the light, making a corona around his head. He wore dark pants and a shirt of heavily embroidered white cloth, the rich texture visible even to Preston's dazzled eyes.

When Preston reached up, as if to touch the brightness, as if to ask a question, as if in supplication, Jürgen took his hand. Preston watched as Jürgen turned his hand over, as if examining it. Was there blood on it? He'd thrown that pair of gloves down because he'd known that he would never be able to wear them again. Jürgen, not meeting his eyes, gently loosened the glove. He could feel every touch, magnified, soft and insistent, as Jürgen worked at the leather and fabric. He started at Preston's index finger and ended with the thumb, catching at the tips as he tugged, sending the gloves along each finger, one by one. When the glove slid off, he gasped at the sudden sensation. He was afraid to speak, afraid he'd sink back to his place in the darkness, wrapped in plastic and black wool.

He let his arm drop limply to the side when Jürgen released it. His hand tingled. Jürgen reached for his other hand and repeated his task, working the glove off, finger by finger. Preston thought he would be prepared for the shock of the glove sliding off, but he wasn't. Every nerve ending in his hand throbbed, exquisitely sensitive. They had the luxury of feeling here—here in this place set apart, in the bedroom he used to share with his wife. Jürgen's hair and shirt caught the light as he moved. Preston lay on his back, utterly still, his black cleric's uniform signifying his status. When he'd seen Jürgen, Jürgen had worn the pale blue coveralls of a day laborer. His clothing and his paleness had made him invisible—not like now, when they made him conspicuous.

He stared up at Jürgen, wanting touch so desperately that his bare hand sang. No leather lay between their palms now as they pressed them together, flesh against flesh. And yet he could not move. He wanted to reach up and give Jürgen his other ungloved hand, so Jürgen could clasp them. They would intertwine their fingers. Instead, he lay back, hands yearning for human touch, and looked at a man made of light.

Jürgen clenched his hand and pulled, tugging him up. Preston rose without complaint, half-afraid to speak. Hand in hand, they walked the few steps to the window. Jürgen's hair blazed, whiting out Preston's vision. He could sense a trail of snapping, electric brightness in Jürgen's wake, just as he himself trailed darkness. At the window, Jürgen reached out and touched the glass, Preston's hand coming with it. Preston just had time to feel the cold glass as the embroidered cloth Jürgen wore blazed and Jürgen imploded in a cataract of light—Jürgen, who wanted something from him, something that grew out of the black that roiled in Preston's wake.

And he stood alone in his clerics' uniform, his ungloved hands peeling away the layer of fine plastic that covered the window, the plastic that, like prozium, diffused the light and kept out its sharpness. He remembered this moment. He had come alive with the light, and it had so disturbed him that he had run to the bathroom and held prozium to his neck, ready to dose. He relived it now: as he peeled the plastic away, the sun shone through, blindingly bright, until he had the window clear and he could press his body against it. He dissolved in the brightness, as dream-Jürgen had, as he imagined Viviana had dissolved in the flames, flesh reddening and crisping, then flaking, the body finally falling, exploding into dust and ash. At the end, she had known what it was like to feel. Perhaps her death had been like this: an explosion of sensation, with nothing blunting or mediating it.

Like taking off a glove.

Like touching a handrail with bare skin.

Like hearing the first movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony for the first time.

Like longing for someone's touch.

When he woke up, alone on his mattress, wearing not his clerics' uniform but his pajama bottoms, he buried his face in his knees because he did not want to wake his son and his daughter as he gasped for air.

His face was wet. It was because of the light.

2. The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light

"Cleric," the clerk said, and Preston looked up from his desk. His meeting a few hours ago with Mary O'Brien—he thought of her as Mary, without the O'Brien—had troubled him, so he had decided to distract himself by reexamining the security that surrounded Father. He needed to familiarize himself with personnel and armament before he called on Jürgen again.

"Yes?" Preston prompted when it became clear that the clerk was waiting for him to speak.

She extended a small, dark blue, fabric-covered box. "Errol Partridge's personal effects have been released. In lieu of family, Vice Consul Dupont has asked that they come to you."

"Thank you," Preston said automatically, accepting the box. The clerk bowed slightly, turned, and left. He hardly noticed.

He'd already gone through Partridge's things. He'd visited Partridge's body and poked through them then. Still, he opened the box, knowing what items he would see: photographs in a small carry case, watch, keys, pen, official electronic reminder—little enough. Notable by its absence was a prozium injector. He knew that if he visited Partridge's apartment, he would find nothing. It would be spare and absolutely clean. Partridge had been removing items from sense offenders' stashes, but Preston had no idea where Partridge's own hoard was. He'd probably given it to the underground—maybe even to Mary, to hide away in the room that Preston had burned.

He'd followed Partridge into the Nethers because he had grown suspicious. Partridge had failed to log in evidence he had seized—in fact, had failed to add any evidence at all to the repository for weeks. He had been going alone into the Nethers at night, but Preston had checked and couldn't correlate his visits with official business. He had shot his partner inside a ruined church, with stained-glass windows, on the outskirts of the Nethers. He hadn't noticed the colored light at the time, but now, when he remembered that moment, the event that had changed him, night and light and the half light—artificial light thrown from the street lamps outside—suffused that day, that moment.

"You always knew," Partridge had said without looking up from the book of poetry he was reading, indicating his awareness of Preston's presence. If Partridge, a Grammaton cleric first class, could be a sense offender, anyone could. And yet now, looking back, he could say that Partridge was right. He'd always known, just as he'd known about Viviana, but he couldn't acknowledge it to himself because he'd have to turn them in. It was better that way.

Despite the lies, he had known. His intuition told him that their calm faces hid roiling emotion, just as his intuition told him that his new partner, Brandt, had feeling just under the surface. It expressed itself as a sudden smile, an unexpected flicker of emotion in his face, all concealing quick danger. Viviana had rolled atop him in the dark, newly aggressive. Partridge had hid contraband in his pockets and lied badly. Jürgen's eyes had searched his during their interview, willing him to understand something that Preston couldn't yet comprehend.

He hadn't been fully aware of his motives when he'd skipped the first dose. Had he wanted to peer inside Partridge's mind, gain insight that would permit him to understand Partridge's motivation? Why had Partridge's betrayal spurred him into unlawful action when his own wife's had not? And how could the two people closest to him, his wife and his partner, keep such a secret from him? How did their deaths make him feel?

"I didn't feel anything," he'd told Dupont, the Father's Voice, when Dupont had posed that very question to him. That hadn't been true either.

Preston had begun training in earnest when his wife entered the Palace of Justice and left via the Hall of Destruction. He owed his current exalted position to her death. He had previously shown aptitude for the gun kata and had achieved proficiency to the third class, but after her execution, he had tripled his training time. His focus had improved. He had studied recordings and helped refine the algorithms—the lines of force, the angles of fire, the probabilities, the statistics—that went into the art. Above all was the mastery of the body, the flow of movement, so his weapon became an extension of his hands. He no longer aimed, and yet his aim improved. He simply pointed, or gestured, or stepped. His body accepted the percussive sensation of the recoil of a gun, or of a stick when it struck his body, and his movements automatically adjusted. Yet he controlled it all, moving, stepping, gesturing in patterns drilled so many times that they had become a well-known dance with familiar, repetitive choreography. Nothing was random. Everything was a logical response. Perhaps the same could be said for his turn as a sense offender. That meant that Viviana and Partridge had died to give him the opportunity to kill Father.

He took one more look at the screen outlining the assault personnel assigned to Tetragrammaton security, but the box beckoned him. He poked through the items, mentally checking them against the inventory he'd seen in the morgue. Everything was there. He opened the small metal case that housed Partridge's photographs and sorted through them again. In the morgue, he'd found and taken a photograph of Partridge with Mary O'Brien. They had been lovers. That picture sat safely in his pocket; it had led him to Jürgen, the scrawled word "Freedom" providing the key to finding the organized resistance, just as it told him something about how Partridge had felt.

Now, only family photographs remained, but Partridge had no family. Who were they? Had they all died? Were the pictures even his? Preston didn't know. But of course he hadn't known Partridge at all, for all that they'd been partners for over a year. Partridge had ordered executions. At his gesture, a crew of men with flamethrowers would immolate secret rooms stuffed with sensate artifacts. Everything Preston thought he knew had to be rethought, now that he was a sense offender too. He had to reinterpret every word, every gesture of Partridge's in light of this new information. He'd done it often enough with Viviana after her death. Now it was Partridge's turn.

Some of the photos had words on the back, most often a brief gloss of the photo's subjects. A few were dated. The words didn't strike him as meaningful. Partridge hadn't left any more messages for him to find, then. "Freedom" was one message, and Mary herself was the other. Partridge had certainly had no way of knowing that Mary would be captured as a sense offender so soon after his death. Preston wished for the thousandth time that he could have interviewed Mary without being under constant surveillance. She could tell him many things, not the least of which was what his partner had really been like.

He arranged the photos by size and replaced them in their case, largest in back. He picked up the electronic reminder next. The Tetragrammaton's insignia decorated the top of the device. He turned it on and scrolled through Partridge's calendar. He knew it would all be official because it synched with the Tetragrammaton's scheduling computers, and so it was. It would tell him nothing. Had Partridge gotten early information about raids in the Nethers? Had he warned his contacts? Did the Tetragrammaton's archives contain only a small part of what existed, the rest spirited away, leaving just enough to satisfy the Tetragrammaton?

In this case, what was missing was more informative than what was present. There was no prozium injector, because Partridge no longer needed it. But the notion triggered another idea. He turned back to his console. Father's security concerns were closely guarded, of course, and yet to reach Father, he had to pierce it. Perhaps instead of searching for who was assigned to Father's security, he should search for who was missing. His clearance was high enough to allow him to discover the total number of men assigned to work security in the building. Once he removed the details at the doors and security checkpoints, he would have an estimate.

Had Partridge done this? The thought struck him even as the answer he sought flashed on the screen. Had Jürgen spoken to Partridge, asked him to do what he'd now asked Preston to do? Had Partridge searched for a way in? He cleared the query, blanking his screen. Numbers of men weren't important. It didn't matter. A single cleric first class would be a more formidable opponent than an entire squadron. To get in, he needed a ruse, not blueprints or force. He needed a triumph that would allow him to force an audience with Father. And once he was in, getting out—well, that was another problem altogether.

He pocketed Partridge's keys and returned the other objects to the blue box. Were he to die, the objects he carried would be just as uninformative: keys, a picture of Partridge and Mary O'Brien with the word "Freedom" scrawled across the back, a piece of red ribbon suffused with scent, his own electronic reminder, and of course his prozium injector, ampoules of the golden substance nesting in the handle. He imagined the items on a tray, as they had been for Partridge. After he was dead, the morgue attendant would set the tray right by his head. Partridge had lain quiet, eyes shut, cold and wonderfully still, the bloodless wound that had ended his life at the base of his throat. And yet he might be asleep, dreaming.

Preston's own dreams had become shockingly vivid. He felt a little thrill when he remembered last night's—the way his hand had felt as the glove had slid off, suddenly bare and exposed. He understood the metaphorical implications of it: Jürgen, the leader of the organized resistance of the sense offenders, would free him from his insensate prison, just as he hoped to free all of Libria, which Father ground under his heel with the unconditional support of the Council. But the metaphor didn't explain the sheer sensuality of the glove sliding off, or the feeling of Jürgen's fingers trailing against his palm. And it didn't explain why Jürgen dissolved in the light, shades of Viviana immolated in the Hall of Destruction's fire. The same would happen to him, eventually.

He should contact Jürgen now that he'd completed his research, small as it was, because now he had his answer. He knew how he could get in to see Father, but it would involve sacrifice. Soon. It had to be soon. He would stop at home before dropping in on Jürgen.

He shut down his console and picked up the box. The personnel area was an elevator ride away. "Grammaton Cleric Errol Partridge's personal effects are in here," he told the clerk there, sliding the box across the counter. "Burn it."

The elderly clerk, hands protectively on either side of the box, looked at it but didn't touch. "Very good," he said neutrally.

Preston placed Partridge's keys on the counter next. "These are his keys. Assign someone to clear his things out before the apartment is reassigned. Those can be burned too."

"You don't want to clear it yourself?" the clerk asked. "I understand he has no family," he added at Preston's unblinking gaze.

"No," Preston said. He took a step back from the counter. He slid a hand into his pocket. He felt the slick slide of the red ribbon, familiar now, as he fumbled for his gloves. He thought of Partridge falling to the ground, dead, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths, fair hair catching the light, the sun's blaze through the windows. "There's nothing there," he added, and he turned on his heel and left.

3. I would spread the cloths under your feet: / But I, being poor, have only my dreams

He didn't know why he did it. It would be better to get rid of it. Instead, he pulled the mirror out of the wall and added two more ampoules of prozium to the golden pile. Once he had dropped them during assembly so they could be crushed underfoot. That way was best. If he wanted to count the days off the dose, the days since he'd become a sense offender, he didn't need to tally up the ampoules. He only needed to remember the number of days since he executed Partridge.

The hidden cache of glass ampoules glittered golden in the dim. The black lettering on them, inscribed during the manufacturing process, would permit them to be traced all the way through the supply chain and into his hands. The staff at Equilibrium need only call the number up on the computer to see who they'd signed them out to. If he flushed them whole into the sewer system and a screen caught them, they could be traced back. He should crush them here, wipe everything up, and flush it. That would be the smart thing to do. He should do that now.

Instead, he turned away and reached for the mirror propped against the wall. He hefted it for a moment before he fit it back into place. Small fragments of wall material and paint speckled the surface of the sink. His son had a keen eye and the rule-bound fervor of his age. Preston had no doubt that Robbie would turn him in in an instant if he suspected anything. He wiped the debris up carefully, got the floor for good measure, and disposed of the evidence.

His mirror, like everything in his house, was plain, spare, unadorned. Empty horizontal and vertical surfaces were free of the chaotic bric-a-brac that characterized the hidden rooms that the sense offenders created and decorated. He knew Libria's architecture had its own kind of aesthetic, one that promoted focus and edges and rules, a metaphor for the spareness of feeling and the restrictions on life. When he'd grabbed Mary O'Brien and turned her to face the mirror, he'd shouted, "Look at you!" He'd looked at himself, at them together, framed by the mirror, its ornate golden frame so different from the one in his bathroom. "Look at you!" he'd said, but he'd looked at himself, because they were the same.

"Look at you," he murmured at his mirror image, framed in cold, spare silver. Sense offender.

When he thought of Mary, he thought of her eyes and hair. He thought of her scent, contained in a glass bottle with a beautiful top. The bottle reminded him of an ampoule of golden prozium. He didn't know Mary at all. Partridge, not Preston, knew her likes and dislikes, her thoughts and feelings. Mary just happened to be the first sense offender Preston had caught since he'd ceased taking prozium. He empathized with her because of that. No doubt he'd feel the same if it had been anyone else.

Although they didn't look alike, Mary had become confused in his mind with Viviana: someone had broken in and taken away a woman. If he could save Mary, he could save Viviana. Of course it made no sense. He was four years too late to save Viviana, and he couldn't save Mary. She was due to be combusted in the Hall of Destruction tomorrow. It felt to him like murder. Perhaps he should have killed her himself, now that Father had decreed that due process was to be abandoned and sense offenders were to be shot or immolated on sight, but he had managed to save her life by suggesting that she still had use. She could be interrogated. In fact, he'd done some of the interrogating, although the logs indicated he wasn't the only one. Dupont himself, the Father's Voice, had been to see her. She would probably give them something. He had likely put more sense offenders in danger than if he'd just killed her, because Mary was part of the organized resistance. Jürgen had confirmed that merely by knowing who she was.

He'd told Dupont that he had had no idea of Viviana's betrayal—that he'd gone over it and over it, but he couldn't understand how he hadn't known. He'd known but refused to face it. He'd had four years to think about Viviana's last few months alive. She had acted differently toward him. Her response to him during their relations at night had become breathless, almost frantic. Looking back now, he wondered why he had not been curious at the change. He had preferred not to face it. Prozium made his troubled thoughts serene, damped down the extremes of emotion, leaving a narrow band of response. The people of Libria used words linked with emotion—love, jealousy, despair, sadness, joy, happiness—but it was too simplistic to say that they did not know what they meant. The emotion waited at the back of the brain, subdued, driven back by interval after interval of self-administered prozium, each person creating his or her own insensate prison. He now knew that he had felt: he'd missed Viviana after she had gone. He had wished for her presence again. He had wanted her to turn to him at night.

Four years' distance had dulled his pain, but Mary O'Brien had reawakened it. What he felt for her would serve as belated mourning for Viviana. Mary had said that to live was to feel, and he was beginning to understand what she meant. He stretched out the moments when he could revel in sensation—the feel of a dog's fur against his hands, the smell of perfume suffusing red ribbon, the sound of music dropping like raindrops on a pond.

He stared at himself in the mirror, a man behind a mask of self-control. He had to leave soon and find Jürgen. Everything would speed up then. He had very little time. Yet he'd just become sensate. His self-knowledge felt too recent and precious. He could not give it up. He wanted to visit Mary's hidden room with her. He'd taken a book from that room; she would show him her other treasures. Mary, playing the role of Viviana, would understand, even help him. But of course the room had been burned. He'd seen to it himself.

That was in the past. If he thought of the future—if he thought that he might have one—he thought of Jürgen wearing a white embroidered shirt, smiling, and extending his hand. Instead of the unspoken between them, every gesture a symbol, they would speak in words, and Jürgen would take his hand, bare flesh against bare flesh, and explain everything, just as he'd pointed out artifacts and spoken briefly of them. They were completely different, one dark and one light, and yet they were the same, with the focus of the driven and the resulting ability to tamp down feeling. Together, they would be able to let go. They would have freedom. And yet his mind shied away from it, thoughts skittering when he thought of Jürgen's touch, experienced only in dream. Reality would not permit it.

Preston felt, but no one could tell him whether what he felt was appropriate. Was it right to feel only a faint distaste after killing so many faceless men, whereas for Mary, a single person, he felt a sense of terrible despair that he could not save her? Why did he value one sensate woman over a squadron of insensate men? Why did he remember Jürgen's face when Jürgen said, "We've been watching you"? Why did he risk discovery by hiding a dog in a utility room in the bowels of his apartment complex? By sitting in his children's room at night, watching them sleep?

He found himself sensate amid the hard-lined edges of his life. The smallest gesture, like trailing his hand along the wall, touching the holes left by a spray of bullets, held a kernel of exquisite pleasure. Right now, he needed the restrictions. Otherwise, he would be unable to contain himself, and he would be discovered. The sensations within those strictures were all he could bear. He thought of Viviana atop him in the dark, her aggression explicable to him now, or of shoving Mary down on the table in the interrogation room and holding her helpless under him as she attacked him, or, this morning, of the dream Jürgen's hand against his, startlingly bare and intimate. The impetus didn't matter, only the intensity of the feeling. Love, self-defense, or simple sensation all shocked him equally. Now that he felt, he could not afford to feel, or he couldn't do what he had to do. Still, the dilemma would not trouble him long. In his spare, poor existence, he had only his dreams, and it was likely that very soon, he wouldn't have those, either.

He thought of Viviana's last words as, "Remember me." They hadn't been. She had said that when they'd taken her way, but after that, she had spoken to him from her cell during their brief visit, and again before her sentence was read. Her last word to him had simply been his name: John. He had stood behind her, between two other men as witness in the Hall of Destruction, her red-cloaked figure before him, hood pulled up to cover her long, dark hair. He had never played the recording of it, so he hadn't seen her face when the sentence was read. He remembered that he had looked away. At the time, he would have said that he felt nothing, but now, he understood that what he felt was so extreme that it bled outside the confines of the prozium-limited band of sensation. He had looked aside, where now he would fall to his knees and gasp for breath, cradling his chest because his heart had been ripped out.

He splashed water on his face and let his face drip over the sink for a few long moments before reaching for a towel, waiting for the ache in his chest to dissipate. He'd loved Viviana. He knew that now. Yet the certainty of his fate condemned him. He would follow Viviana, and Mary, into the fire. Who would remember any of them when they were gone?

He had to find Jürgen again and give him his answer. He'd managed to cover his tracks a day or two before, during his interview with Dupont, but it had been a close thing. "I've heard the most disturbing rumor," Dupont had begun. Preston had managed to keep his face neutral, until it became clear that Dupont knew nothing. Dupont had only been fishing. He'd promised Dupont that he'd redouble his efforts to find the underground, but he was running out of time. They were suspicious. He could only spin half-truths for so long before they thought to strap him down and interrogate him, to see whether he'd ceased his dose. In fact, it was a wonder that they hadn't done that to all the Grammaton clerics first class already, after the deaths of two sweeper squadrons.

He wiped his face, schooling his features. He folded the towel neatly and set it by the side of the sink. He couldn't delay any longer. He had to meet Jürgen, and then everything would be set into motion.

When he exited the bathroom, his son stood waiting for him. "Robbie," he said neutrally, stopping in the hall. Did his son make a habit of coming home from school early?

"John," his son greeted him gravely. He looked competent and self-contained, like every other child in Libria. "You're home."

"I could say the same about you," Preston responded. "I'm just stopping for a minute. I have to leave again now."

"We were let out early to study for tomorrow's exam." Robbie unbuttoned his coat. "I thought I would do better here than in the common room at school."

"I'm sure that's so." Preston took in Robbie's face, his neat, brushed-back hair. He used to think that he saw something of himself in Robbie, but now he knew that he saw only the bland facade that everyone in Libria shared. Everyone was pressed into the same mold. He felt ashamed, because he had been thinking of the dead, and Robbie was alive and needed him. If he died, Robbie wouldn't mourn. Preston didn't find the thought comforting. "If you'll excuse me. I have an appointment."

"Of course." Robbie stepped aside, then continued down the corridor to the room he shared with his little sister, Lisa. Soon he'd be too old, but by then, he'd be ready to move into the dormitories to continue his schooling. "John?" Robbie called, hand ready to push the door open, and Preston became aware that he was staring at his own son.

"Yes?"

"Are you all right?"

Are you all right? Preston wanted to fall to his knees, slide his hands along the floor, and scream. He wanted to shake Robbie, as if that would make him feel. He wanted to run to the Palace of Justice, gain admittance by force, and demand Mary's release. He wanted to grab Viviana's shoulder and turn her around so he could see her face instead of the back of her red-clad form. "Remember me," she'd say, and then they'd take her away.

"Of course," he answered instead. "I was just..." He felt his jaw working, and he forced out the rest of the thought. Best to tell the truth whenever possible. "I was just thinking about your mother."

Silence lengthened. "Yes," Robbie said at last. "I think about her often."

"Me too," Preston said. He wasn't the only one who remembered Viviana, then. It comforted him. He ducked his head and turned. "Excuse me. I really must go."

"John?"

Preston turned back. "Yes, Robbie?"

"Your hair is mussed. You should check it in the mirror on the way out."

"Yes. Thank you."

He heard Robbie's door shut as he reentered the bathroom. His hair was indeed untidy, likely from the vigorous toweling he'd given his face. How had he not noticed? His hair, loose, reminded him of Jürgen's, despite the contrast in color. "Look at you," he said softly. He wet his hands and smoothed his hair. His own dark eyes stared back at him. "Look at you."

4. I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

"Will you do it?" Jürgen asked. Will you kill Father?

Preston had decided, but he still had to say it. "Yes."

Jürgen circled. The light blue laborer's coverall he wore looked nothing like the white embroidered open shirt he'd worn in Preston's dream. It struck him as odd that he had dreamed of Jürgen wearing such a thing. The dream shirt had left the cleft at the base of his throat exposed. Preston blinked, suddenly thinking of the gunshot wound he'd seen in the morgue. "Can you?" Jürgen pressed, demand in his words, but the demand went beyond the question.

He told Jürgen the truth. "I don't know."

He might be Jürgen's best hope, but he had to consider the possibility that, good as he was at his discipline, if he walked in, he wouldn't be able to walk back out. The details Jürgen had just given him had encouraged him: Jürgen's people could execute their plan with very little notice. They had been planning this for a long time, just waiting for an opportunity or a distraction. If they knew to keep an eye out for a disruption—a delayed newscast, for example, or a sudden slowdown in monitored communications traffic from the Tetragrammaton or from Equilibrium—they could implement the plan. His sacrifice would not be for nothing.

Preston continued, "I've been charged with finding the resistance. If I give them something big, I can then get an audience with Father himself. I've already mentioned that I want to meet him. That's been set into motion." He took in Jürgen's two associates, a woman and a man, who sat on either side. He hadn't been told their names, just as he knew Jürgen only as Jürgen. A man playing security guard sat to one side, but he didn't seem to be paying much attention. Maps lay scattered across the table and pinned up on the wall. All of Libria lay around them. He had sworn to uphold it, and now he knew that he had to rip it down. It was more than Father's recent abdication of consensus and due process. It was the result of becoming sensate.

"Something big?" the woman asked, exchanging a wary look with her colleague.

"Something very big." He held the eyes of each of them for a long moment, one by one, Jürgen last. Jürgen didn't blink. Somehow that encouraged him. "Something like the leader of the organized resistance and his cell, his closest confidantes."

He spoke to Jürgen, but the man to his right sat back. "Us." He shook his head. "I see. You want to give them us."

"Are we walking into a trap, Cleric?" the woman asked, a sneering stress on his title, just as Jürgen spoke.

"Don't you see?" Jürgen tapped the table for emphasis. "It has to be us. Cleric Preston has told us that they've interrogated Mary O'Brien. I'm her contact. If they followed Errol Partridge, then they know about me through him as well. The trail ends here." He leaned forward, hands on the table, radiating intensity like an aura of silver and white. "We can be ready in a day. Then you need merely give us the word."

Preston nodded, pleased. "You have a day, but not much more than that. We don't have much time." The Tetragrammaton suspected him, he knew it. Yet his first thought hadn't been "they suspect; they may move against me before I can act," but rather "the members of the resistance must say goodbye." He pushed aside his memory of the photograph of Mary O'Brien with Errol Partridge smiling at her, in love and happy.

"You three." Jürgen carefully never spoke their names. "Out. I need to talk with Cleric Preston alone for a moment. Go." He watched them shuffle out, the security guard peering at Preston distrustfully over his shoulder, as if Preston would suddenly turn on them. Preston pressed his lips together. It was almost a smile. He could have killed them all with his bare hands in seconds.

Preston rose to his feet. "It's not just my sacrifice," he said neutrally to Jürgen. "It's yours too. They may execute you summarily, perhaps right here, in this room. In fact, recent changes in policy make it likely."

"Yes, they might." Jürgen left the table and paced, and Preston turned to track him. He'd noticed that Jürgen liked to walk while he thought. "But I doubt it. I think in this particular instance, they will want to interrogate us."

"If all goes well, I can disrupt communications. That will be the signal for your saboteurs. I may also be able to free you."

Jürgen smiled without mirth. "Yes, thank you. I find it reassuring. And it's encouraging that you're thinking beyond Father's execution. You may get out of this yet. We'll keep your complicity away from our questioners as long as possible—to our deaths, if necessary."

Preston nodded understanding. "Why did you want to speak to me alone?" he asked.

Jürgen hesitated. "It's about Mary," he said at last—Mary, who was scheduled to make her final trip to the Hall of Destruction tomorrow for her immolation. The guards made the condemned walk into the furnace. They burned them alive, without sedating them first. Preston had seen it in the countless executions he'd witnessed, including Viviana's. Preston made a chopping gesture with his hand, demanding silence, and Jürgen did not continue. Instead, he ceased his pacing, a sudden, calm stillness descending over him. His pale eyelashes caught the light. He looked like what he was: a laborer. Nobody.

Preston asked the question that haunted him. "Why wasn't it Errol Partridge?"

The resistance had previously had access to another Grammaton cleric first class, his former partner, and yet Father still lived. Partridge had not died in an act of resistance—in fact, quite the opposite. He had sat quietly, and although he had his weapon ready, he had not fired. Preston had shot him through a book of Yeats's poetry. It seemed a fitting end. Yet Preston did not want to consider the idea that Partridge had allowed Preston to kill him. If Partridge had given up, he didn't want to know. "It was because of Mary, wasn't it? Because they were in love?"

Jürgen stood, hands relaxed at his side, utterly still, totally focused on Preston. "Yes," he said, but in such a way that Preston understood that he meant "no." "That's as good a reason as any. We were saddened at Errol's death. But a good thing came out of that sadness. I think that you are the better tool."

"I came out of Partridge's death? That's what you're saying? My decision to become a...a sense offender?" He hadn't thought of that when he'd skipped his first interval.

Jürgen inclined his head in agreement. "Yes. Errol, after Viviana. Both of them."

Of course Jürgen knew about Viviana. Hadn't he said that they had been watching him? But in his dream, he realized, Jürgen hadn't said "we." He'd said "I," as if he, and he alone, had been watching him. "One other thing. You said that you had been watching me."

Jürgen nodded. "Yes, we were, partly as Errol's partner, and partly because of your unerring ability to feel—in this case, to feel sense offenders. We thought you had the potential for empathy."

"No, I don't mean you, the resistance. I mean you, Jürgen." Preston stepped closer, hoping his proximity would rattle Jürgen, but it didn't. Jürgen merely waited, his quietness unruffled. "You, Jürgen, want something from me. I know what the resistance wants of me. I have said that I would do it. What do you want from me? You yourself?"

"Nothing that affects Father's execution," Jürgen answered evenly. "Nothing that matters." His calm remained intact. Preston hadn't been able to surprise him into revelation, then.

"I dreamed about you a few nights ago." Preston gazed down at his gloved hand, then worked the glove off his right hand, tugging at one finger at a time, ending with the thumb. He peered at Jürgen as he did it. Jürgen watched as he drew the glove off, but Preston couldn't read his face. "In my dream, you took my gloves off. You took my hand." He showed Jürgen his hand, as if in illustration. "You took me to the window, and you disappeared in a blaze of light."

"Prophetic, perhaps?" Jürgen asked lightly. "My turn in the Hall of Destruction? My combustion? My fate? What will happen to me after you betray us to the Tetragrammaton?"

Preston lifted his left hand, still gloved. Jürgen's eyes followed it. He had managed to rivet Jürgen. "I don't think so." He rotated his gloved hand, palm down, then palm up, and offered it to Jürgen. "And I think it might matter. Take it off." When Jürgen didn't move to obey, he spoke again, more sharply. "I said, take it off."

Jürgen hesitated, but he did as Preston demanded. "It's about Mary, isn't it." Jürgen made it a statement rather than a question. His fingers trembled as he took Preston's hand, but his eyes were as unreadable as ever, blue fringed by pale lashes that caught the light. When they'd first met, Jürgen had said of Mary, "What you feel can only be satisfied by folding yourself into her."

Preston kept his eyes on his gloved hand. He didn't answer. Jürgen tugged at each finger, one by one, loosening the glove. He felt the pressure of touch along each finger, the tug of the fabric lining against his skin, the faint pinch at his fingertips when Jürgen pulled. When the glove came off, Jürgen's thumb caressed the center of his palm, even as Jürgen's eyes stayed on his face, as if looking for an answer. He felt a rush of warmth from his arm to his knees, but he was able to keep his face calm. He didn't know this man, and yet Jürgen understood him, offered him something. He was with another sense offender who was capable of holding his emotions in check while acting against how he felt. Jürgen had been right: they were the same.

"It's never been about Mary," Preston managed. "It's about Viviana. It's about finding something, only to lose it a moment later. Do you know how that feels?"

He knew the answer to that. He said it only to make Jürgen react. Jürgen wanted him—wanted to enfold himself in him, wanted to lean on strength other than his own. When Jürgen spoke of Mary, he spoke of himself. Jürgen's reaction to Preston, and to Preston's questions, had told him everything he needed to know.

"Yes," Jürgen said, just as Preston had said "Yes" when Jürgen had asked him to kill Father, with the same intensity and knowledge. "Yes. I know what that feels like." His mask fell, and Preston felt Jürgen's hand convulse, gripping hard, entwining their fingers. "I fear that it will happen again." He broke off, his oddly colorless eyes searching Preston's for an answer. "You're in love with your wife," he stated.

It was true. Preston had loved her even when he was insensate. Now, sensate, love and loss had combined into something new. He didn't know the word for it. "She's been dead for four years," Preston said instead. He took in Jürgen's desperate, avid face. He knew that feeling, just as he knew that touch could assuage it. He dreamed of human touch, palm against palm. "It's all right," he whispered, willing Jürgen to take the next step. He needed touch, or he might die.

Jürgen stepped so close that Preston could smell him, a faint, masculine warmth. "It's all right," Jürgen repeated, perhaps speaking to himself, seeking reassurance, and he kissed Preston.

Sensation exploded at the touch of Jürgen's lips, the bump of his nose. Jürgen's mouth opened and he fell in, briefly insensate, until Jürgen's free hand came up to touch his neck, sliding up so Jürgen could run his fingers into Preston's hair. The caress bloomed, and Preston clenched the hand he clasped, holding on. The sensuous pressure of tongue against tongue was almost more than he could bear. He understood Viviana's desperation now, when she had rolled him onto his back in the dark and straddled him. Love and touch and escalating pleasure—it could not be borne. One could die of the extremity of wanting, of needing. One could die of the need for this, tongue against tongue and palm against palm, bodies pressed together hard, warm mouths speaking. He understood his dream now.

The fire, the white heat, started at his mouth and moved to his groin. He opened himself to Jürgen, wrapped him in his arms and used his mouth on lips, cheek, jaw, throat, sending the stillness fluttering, making the calm white glow red with flame. He in his black and Jürgen in his light blue—his white; he with dark hair, Jürgen blond; he a cleric, Jürgen a common laborer—they were a study in contrasts, and yet they shared this in common: the power of desire, sense, and need.

"No," he said in response to Jürgen's question, the slight pull back. "Please don't stop. Please."

The warmth in his body, of Jürgen's touch, drove away the cold of the floor, the touch of air against bare skin as clothing was undone and pushed away. He held Jürgen in his arms as Jürgen rocked against him, mouth against his neck, until wet heat jetted across his belly. He was helpless under Jürgen's hands, under the onslaught and completion of Jürgen's desire, of sensation so extreme that when Jürgen's mouth covered his center of pleasure, heat wet against his hardness, he exploded. He had to cry out because he could not contain the sensation. He had not known. He had never understood until now what his body was made to do. He had discovered this in time to lose it. This fire would be traded for the literal one.

He lay on the cold floor just as he lay on his mattress at home, head pillowed on his arm, watching Jürgen watch him. Jürgen's stillness had come back. He jerked at the sudden noise of someone banging on the door, and a male voice inquired, "Jürgen?"

Jürgen turned his head toward the door. "In a minute," he called.

With the interruption, Preston was suddenly able to move again. "They know, don't they?" Preston pulled up his pants and fastened them. "He'd just come in otherwise."

"I think so, yes." Jürgen watched Preston button his shirt. "Does that bother you?"

It didn't bother him, not in the slightest. "Not really, no. Should it?" Preston stood up and found his jacket.

"No." Jürgen let Preston pull him up. He reached for his pale blue coverall. "I want to show you one more thing before you go."

Jürgen's associate, the man who had sat at Preston's right during the meeting, turned his head when they exited. He leaned against the wall, one leg propped up. He must have heard everything, Preston realized, remembering how he'd called out in pleasure when Jürgen had put his mouth on him, and the very thought turned his knees to water. The man, their new guard, pushed away from the wall and waited, looking to Jürgen. Preston watched him, wondering what he thought. Were he and Jürgen friends? Did Jürgen do this kind of thing often? But their guard gave no clues, and when he glanced at Preston, the flicker of attention was disinterested.

"This way," Jürgen said, pointing, and Preston fell into step beside him. They kept space between them, as they had before they had shut the door. Somehow, Preston thought that they trailed white and black, like in his dream. The guard followed them. "The Tetragrammaton burned the Mona Lisa recently," Jürgen continued.

"I was there," Preston said neutrally. He hadn't been struck one way or the other by the portrait of the woman with her enigmatic half-smile. How would he feel now if he saw it, now that he was sensate? He'd discovered that the portrait was famous. He hadn't known that when it was burned, along with the rest of the items in the cache under the floorboards. "So many beautiful things destroyed. Historical things. What happens when they find it all, when there's nothing left to burn?"

"This." Jürgen stopped at a doorway and waved Preston in.

The dimly lit room seemed to be a storeroom. It smelled strongly of some kind of chemical that Preston couldn't place. Shelves lined the walls. Surprisingly, it was free of dust. "What is it?" Preston asked, just as Jürgen turned on the light, and the dark rectangles stacked on the floor suddenly glowed with color.

"Look," Jürgen invited him, and Preston chose a stack of canvases at random.

"Paintings," Preston said, flipping through them. He saw the fountain in Libria's Liberty Square; the ocean as seen from the port at South Docks; birds wheeling in the sky, the top of the Equilibrium building off to the side; the circular stairs outside the Tetragrammaton as seen from above, their starkness somehow made beautiful. These and the others in the stack had clearly all been created by the same hand. Thick swirls of heavy, dense paint caught the light as he worked his way through, until the combined weight of the canvases grew too heavy and he had to gently push them all back. He leaned back on his heels. "I know these places. These paintings are recent." He looked questioningly at Jürgen. The things he burned were old, relics of the past.

"Everything in this room is recent—within the last fifteen years, anyway." Jürgen watched as Preston moved to another pile, this one of landscapes done in some kind of pale wash of color, then to another of portraits and still lives. In addition to the stacked canvases shelves containing artwork done on thick paper, each image separated from the other with a thin film that reminded him of the plastic he'd ripped from the window in his dreams. In one corner, he spotted artworks as large as the doorway, held upright by special wooden brackets on the floor. What looked like altered religious iconography from an ancient painting stared at him, head pierced by a crown of thorns, hands extended in supplication, body incongruously dressed in leather with metal studs. Jürgen, following his gaze, said, "It's not just paintings. Artisans make statues, pottery, needle art, textiles, computer-generated pieces like those large ones—all of it."

He hadn't known. Preston stood in the storeroom and circled slowly. He couldn't possibly take it all in. There must have been hundreds of pieces of artwork in this room, stacked on three levels of shelves. It had honestly never struck him that people in Libria might create art. "What do you do with it?" he asked.

Jürgen shrugged. "We store it. Sometimes people take them and display them. Some are mixed in with the items the Tetragrammaton finds and are seized or burned. I regret to say that most of these are from artist's collections, after the artist has been killed."

Preston nodded. Humanity still created, and as long as that happened, the Tetragrammaton would never capture and destroy it all. He found it hopeful. "I understand," he told Jürgen, who nodded.

"You should go," Jürgen hinted.

They were done, then. He'd seen what Jürgen wanted him to see, and it was time to set into motion what Jürgen wanted him to do. Preston followed Jürgen to the exit he'd used before. He understood that the building—the underground—held secrets he would never be privy to. They protected themselves because they had to. Mary O'Brien would slip off her red robe and walk into the furnace in the Hall of Destruction, and it would be Viviana all over again. Jürgen would be among the men and women who would be taken away when Preston made the call tomorrow. If he wasn't immediately executed, he would probably die in the white-hot heat of the furnaces, just as Mary would. He too would slide off the red robe. When he walked in, he would be wearing a heavily embroidered white shirt, and his throat would be bare, as if granting them permission to cut it.

He had never watched the recording of Viviana's incineration. Viviana's face, Mary's face—if he saved Mary, he could save Viviana. Speaking to her would be like speaking to the dead. He could say what he needed to say, the tetragrammaton, the four-letter word, uttered four years too late.

The guard, who wore nondescript light blue just like Jürgen, went out first. Preston followed, but to his surprise, Jürgen touched him. He stopped and turned. "Don't," Jürgen said, intensity in his voice. Again, for the second time, the mask of control he wore slipped, and there it was on his face: what he wanted. His coverall was fastened all the way to the top, concealing the cleft at the base of his throat. Preston remembered covering that spot with his mouth. Somehow, the thought reminded him of Partridge, lying dead in the morgue. Jürgen continued, "Seeing her one last time will only make it harder for you to do what you have to do."

They understood each other. He turned and left and did not look back. Everything between them would be burned away in a day. Everything he had been had just been burned away. He was sensate. His feet made a kind of percussive music as he walked, just as his heart did inside his chest. He increased his pace until he broke into a jog, and then he ran, footsteps ringing in the space between buildings, breath coming faster and faster, people scattering out of the way like birds taking flight. He ran toward the Tetragrammaton because he had passed through the white heat and he was alive.