Demeter doesn’t answer. She just leans back, as if in pain, and rubs her joints. “I’m tired, Sam. My body is old and my soul is ravaged. The closer we come to the perfection that drives us, the more we chip away at our souls. And what happens when we arrive there? What then? You look down from the mountain and see the carnage you’ve wrought.” She presses a hand to her chest. “But for now, I can still feel my soul, tattered as it is. Eventually, you realize what you should really be using it for.”
Sam looks at her and has a vision of herself, thirty years from now, her soul fragmented into pieces, her eyes sunken like those of Sebastian, her chest hollow and devoid of emotion, of what gives her life. Someday, she will sink into a shell of existence. Her soul will die a quiet death, and with it shall go her body.
“Get out of Angel City,” Demeter tells her in the silence. “Forget about your boy. There’s nothing left here for you. Go, and don’t look back.”
Sam doesn’t answer. She finishes her soup quietly, lets the woman inspect the wounds on her wrists and ankles, sees the stripes of damage done there by Sebastian. When Demeter leaves her alone again, she leans back against the pillows and thinks about the woman’s words.
It doesn’t end. It will never end.
She stares out the window. There is a brick wall there, but beyond it is a sliver of the city, and she can see that she is several floors up, overlooking a little street market. Clusters of people browse the goods, a father holding up his daughter so she can get a better look at the flowers, a young couple picking out apples and avocados. Sam watches and tries to feel the coming and going of their lives, souls blinking in and out of existence, so big and so fragile, filling living bodies so completely that no amount of nonliving material can match them.
She turns her attention to the window, notes the hinges, counts the number of floors. Then she closes her eyes. Darkness closes around her, but in this sun-drenched room, it has a reddish haze, warm and vigorous.
She thinks of Ari turning to her on that first day in the classroom andwhispering hello, his large, somber eyes. She remembers the feeling of his finger tracing the symbol for gold against her hand.
I like you the way you are, Sam.
In the red-tinted darkness, she makes a promise.
I’m going to save you, Ari. And if I can’t, if they take us down, then I will pull every single one of them with us.
As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm.
Of the Epidemicsby Hippocrates, around 410 BCE
