Then Laurel guided me, maneuvering me into a new role with strategic references. First into the FBI, then ViCAP, granting me access to the most sophisticated databases. Another way to perform, on another stage, choreographing another dance.
One of revenge.
As Laurel once told me:There’s no better way to hunt a predator than from the inside.
I lower Orion’s helmet over my head and buckle the chin strap, no longer fearing the dark, confining space. I turn the key, and the bike rumbles to life. I then mirror every action I watched Orion perform on his bike as I ride off, disappearing from Stonehurst.
Aggressive mimicry is how the female firefly lures males from different species. By mimicking their flash signals, she’s able to capture them, consume them. It’s more than sating a hunger—it’s survival. By eating her prey, she absorbs defensive toxins, protecting herself against predators.
And I’ve spent every moment since my death feasting on the vilest males of the most predatory species. Building up toxins. Strengthening defenses. Perfecting my survival skills.
Some monsters can only be hunted by darker ones.
As I throttle onto the empty stretch of highway, putting the ocean behind me, I search for that sense of closure I should feel in this moment, the completeness promised by Gestalt’s law of closure.
Our minds instinctively fill in the missing pieces to complete a whole, driven by the compulsion to perceive meaning in the fragmented, in the broken. It’s why artists leave negative spaces. Why storytellers leave their endings unfinished?—
Because the empty places haunt us.
Because absence leaves us hungry, wanting more.
Because we’re never truly complete or whole. And nothing ever ends, not really.
My life is defined by a before and after.
Before I took my last breath, andhim.
The man who killed me.
Now, twice over.
A derisive laugh chokes free. I didn’t think he could kill me more,that I had nothing else left to take. But now he’s stolen this, too—a second chance at life, with a man I could’ve loved?—
If only my heart wasn’t bad.
Yet in death, she will have her revenge.
And this time, I’m taking my killer with me to the fucking grave.
There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE,THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE
24
L'appel du Vide
CALL OF THE VOID
Then I defy you, stars!
—ROMEO
ORION: INTERLUDE ??
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth.
An aphorism that feels too immense, too infinite, to fully comprehend. Which is the intention, to feel that immensity, to recognize our fragile, wondrous existence grasped for a mere breath of a moment.
