On your last day on Earth, the person you became meets the person you could have become.
“Am I supposed to feel bad, seeing you?” You ask. The other you is taller. She doesn’t have the rake of werewolf claws running down her cheek, both her eyes are clear and blue, and she’s wearing classic biker leathers.
She shrugs. “You’re not supposed to feel anything.” Her eyes follow the line of your body, from the twist of your twice-broken collarbone, to the flap of your summer dress, to the converse you’ve got laced too tight. She smiles. “I think it’s safe to say that I’m the better hunter though.”
You stare at her perfect, unblemished face. Her eyes are smug and it infuriates you to know that—when you had both your eyes—they looked the same. “Because of the scars?”
“Well,” she says, “a werewolf never got close enough to touch me, much less maul me. Plus, clearly something went right with my development, squirt.” She touches the top of her head and pulls out her hand to where yours would be if you were the same height.
Comments about your height normally infuriate you, but there’s something about being so close to death that really mellows you out. It does more than that—it gives you insight. You know this other you better than you should having just met for the first time.
The same works for her.
“you actually tried college?” She asks, raising an eyebrow. “You should have listened to Puma, gotten the training you needed. Maybe you could have saved more people if you did.”
The dead behind you—acres of them—surge like ocean waves. You can feel them pulling at you, whispering to you, living here like they couldn’t live in the real world. You can see the girls from Atlanta, the ones who died under vampire fangs and your name on their lips. You can see Mark, your brother in arms, limping forever towards you, gargling seawater. You can see the couple from Dansville, forever burning.
You feel angry enough to answer her at her taunting, but something catches your attention first. She’s smiling at you, tall and beautiful and unscarred and behind her—
Behind her is an army. Your mouth runs dry as they come into focus, lurching through the fog until you can see each still, grey form.
“Can you see them?” You ask. Your voice is as rough as your mother one day promised it would be. “Can you?”
She looks over her shoulder. “See who?” When she looks back at you, her eyes are just as clear, just as blue.
They look like statues, her dead. Muffled and swaddled in stone, their faces smeared and wiped out by a careless sculptor. They appear this way because this is how she remembers them—bits of clothing, terror in their eyes, concrete around their feet. Too slow to be saved. Not her problem.
You’ve cried as much blood as you’ve spilt these past few years. Asking why your parents would leave you a legacy of violence and pain, why they hadn’t given you as a child to Puma to train, why they hadn’t prepared you for the wars to come. You’d resented the burden of your responsibilities to the world, a human police of the supernatural, but now—
This is what you would have been without your parents’ lessons. The perfect soldier, the perfect hunter, capable of standing so tall and strong and looking just like every single one of Puma’s army. Carbon copy.
Blind.
“You didn’t even try,” you say to her. “In Danville—did you walk into the fire? Or did you just watch it burn?”
“Nothing can stop a djinn fire,” she says. “Why try?” She sounds careless and unconcerned. Her eyes are watching you.
“Because—“ you bite off the word. Why? It’d never occurred to ask yourself what the point of trying to save them was. It’d been natural. You’d heard the screaming of the family inside and you knew you had to try.
She looked at the fire and knew she’d be risking her life before she even thought about who might be inside.
Maybe you could yell at her for this. Tell her that she has no right to stand there looking whole when she’s never felt the sting of loss. Of death. She has no right to act like she’s better than you—has done more than you—because she’s never had as much to lose.
But this is the edge of death and you’ve got a lot more to do before you find your way back here.
“Let me guess,” you say to her, “you fell honorably in battle?”
For the first time, there’s a different expression on her face. Unease. “They’ll pull me to safety before it’s too late.”
You watch the stone figures behind her. There are cracks running along their crowns and a white light is beginning to shine through. She won’t make it. Her dead won’t stay unconfronted for much longer. “That’s the real difference between you and me. I’m not afraid of my own mistakes.”
Her brow furrows. “What mistakes?”
You don’t answer her. Her world isn’t yours and you’re never going to be her. You turn and let your dead embrace you, whisper to you—forgiveness, hate, sorrow— and carry you back.
You have more work to do.
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Cheloneuniverse 