Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The dark within was unsullied by Dusk. It stood apart from the twilight standing without.
The understanding was immediate and absolute. It came before her eyes drank in the faint bioluminescence rising from the stone walls beyond the entrance, casting a faint, ghostly cerulean into a dark that drank in light with a fullness. It came before the smell of water betrayed its location within the hollow space between the stone. The burden that rested on her neck since the shootout at the camp three or five days before, was simply absent. Not lifted. Gone — the yoke had never existed, never had been slung across her neck, never pushed her body to the ground.
It was in stillness that she stood just within the threshold dividing the entrance between the gloaming and this new, fresh darkness, letting the feeling wash over her in waves.
She crossed over in fullness.
The cave opened ahead of her, drawing her in to the cavernous space beyond with the promise of refreshment by way of an ancient kind of coolness that the wastes could neither promise nor deliver. The ceiling rose higher than the squat entrance had suggested — the sound of her boots on the stone returning to her, in the way her own breaths returned to her after a delay. The air was cool and smelled of water, stone, cold and vast depths. Beneath her feet she could feel the movement of water deep below, its charged current rising beyond the stone. She smelled the faint mineral quality in the water’s scent. It was something that had traveled a long way through rock to arrive in this place.
The crow had followed her into the deep shadows under the mesa without announcement, already settled near the water before she had found it in the dark. She did not greet it.
The water source was set into the cave floor at the far end of a natural basin where the stone had worn smooth over by the hands of time. A contact spring — the water welling up through a fissure in the rock rather than flowing in from outside, fed by something deep and old that moved beneath the desert without the desert’s knowledge. The water did not pool stagnant, nor did it flow out. The water simply arrived, cold and clear, filling the basin to a level determined by some equilibrium she had no way to calculate, and stayed.
The water was as much of the cave as the stone surrounding it.
The stranger walked up to the edge and looked into the depths with lapis eyes that could perceive shadow and shape within the depths of the pristine and clear water. Through a fissure in the bottom, she could see the faint ripple where water pressed into the basin from below.
She set her water skin down and did not reach for it immediately.
Instead, she did what she had been taught to do at any water source that had been sitting long enough without human contact to have become of itself rather than a resource. Placing her palm flat on the stone beside the basin, she knelt there, not touching the water. She held her hand still in the gathering silence, not in prayer — she had nothing to address and no words for it — but her action had the quality of acknowledgment that correct practice required before taking from something that had not been asked. Intent made through stillness rather than gesture. The water continued to arrive at the fissure and fill the basin and stay, as it had been doing, indifferent to her and her palm on the rock beside it.
She waited until the waiting felt complete.
Then, and only then did she fill her flask with the water from the basin. She took a long draught, tasting the steel of the flask, but also the flavor of limestone and the deep places under her, and something that she had no word for. Distance, maybe — a tremendous, long journey through dark stone. It was the best water she had tasted since before Nod.
She took another long drink from the flask and refilled it. Then, her water skin.
The crow fluttered to her shoulder as she filled the skin.
She was gathering edible fungus from the cave wall near the water basin, when the voice came from the other side of the spring.
“She carries the gun.”
The stranger did not startle. She went still.
The voice had not been there before. Nothing stepped from the darkness, there had been no sound of approach. One moment the other side of the spring had been empty cave. The next, it was not.
The crow made no sound perched on her shoulder. It cocked its head to one side, listening closer.
“She carries the gun,” said another voice, from somewhere behind her, to the left, “and does not know what she carries.”
“She knows some of it.” The first voice, across the water. Conversational. As though the stranger were not present. “She knows the weight of it.”
“The weight.” A third voice — ahead and above, from a height that should have been cave ceiling. “The weight is not the Knowing.”
And then, a long silence left lingering, aching and unresolved.
“Already, she is less than she was.” Another voice, or perhaps the second.
“She was always going to be less. That is how the carrying works.” Young, this voice. Not a child, but only just more than a child.
She turned slowly, trying to pinpoint the sources of their voices. She could not place them. Not their number, not their position, which shifted without rhyme, reason. The cave’s acoustics had been clear a moment ago. Now they were doing something that had nothing to do with the cave’s geometry, something that twisted the angles and flats in weird ways.
The crow watched the darkness around them, very still. Not alarmed, but something else. It was a stillness she had seen before, in a situation she could not account for, and she had not known what it meant at that time either.
“The crow knows,” said a voice from across the water. Perhaps it was the first voice. Maybe a different one.
“The crow has always Known,” said the no-longer girlish voice from some height above.
More silence.
Then, from somewhere she could not locate at all, another observation that may have come from the same voice as one of the others, or may not have.
“She has not asked the crow,” it said.
She held her head up, speaking to the dark. “I am here.”
She was not sure why, but it felt necessary to say. Her statement seemed to be received — not answered, not acknowledged. Just received. The cave changed slightly in quality. Something that had been reading her from one angle shifted to read her from another.
“Here.” The first voice. Across the water, in the dark.
“Yes. She is here.”
“She is also elsewhere,” said the second. “And she has gone to the elsewhen.”
“She has been elsewhere for some time.”
“It is as I have said. She went elsewhen.”
“She does not know how long.”
“She is beginning to know how long.”
A sigh. “…such longing…”
“Something follows the same road,” said a voice she could not place for all of its familiarity.
The stranger filed it, forcing her breathing even, her heart rate to slow.
“…aching too…”
“The gun remembers.”
“It will remember more than she does.”
“…aching to be…”
The voices continued as though neither observation had been made. She had the sense of several conversations occurring simultaneously, each proceeding according to its own logic, none of them directed at her, all of them about her.
“…ashes all fall and scatter down… the aching… the ashing… ash…,” sang a childlike voice, sounding with a teeth-clenched grit.
And then, the crow was not on her shoulder.
She had not felt it leave, she had not seen it go. It was there one moment and gone the next, an absence of weight registered, but not the movement.
Looking around, she found the crow settled on a ledge of stone to her left, looking at something in the darkness that refused to resolve itself into shape or form. Its manner was not the manner of a crow having found a comfortable perch, but of one mesmerized by something it recognized.
The cave went quiet in the particular way of spaces where quiet is not the absence of sound but a quality in its own right.
“The thorn is still in the ground.”
The stranger could hear her own heartbeat for the silence.
“…the thorns were thick and the thorns were wide…”
“Thorns do not stay in the ground.”
“…no one could see what lay inside…”
None of this was addressed directly to her. It was unclear if anything said was addressed to anyone she could perceive. She did not know what thorn was meant, or what ground, or what the singsong was meant to convey — if anything at all. She filed it beside the road remark and kept it there, unexamined.
“It has been following longer than she has been Walking.”
The voices moved on.
“Daughter of None.”
This voice addressed her directly.
The shift in register landed in her chest before she had processed the words. Not warmth. Not threat. Simply the quality of something being said that was intended to reach her rather than describe her to someone else.
She did not answer. Answering was not what was being asked of her.
“You are about to be asked something,” the voice said. “You have been about to be asked it for a long time. It grows impatient to be asked.”
Without warning, the register of the voice fell back to speaking as if she were not there.
“She will not understand it as a question.”
“She will understand it as something that is happening to her.”
“That is the same thing.”
“It is not the same thing.”
“It will feel the same.”
From somewhere, of the many voices she could no longer track, “She has not been called.”
“She has not allowed herself to be called.”
A pause, brief and precise, “There is a difference.”
And then, quieter, as though this were the observation that mattered least and most, “She does not know there is a difference.”
The cave shifted in slipstream again. The cold within deepened without the temperature changing. The fissure in the basin floor continued its quiet arrival. She became aware that the crow had not moved from the ledge. It still watched a thing she could not see, and that the crow’s stillness had the quality of bearing witness rather than that of waiting.
Somewhere in the dark, what was about to happen — simply began.
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