“It was always going to be you.”
“No.” A scream now. Everything now. “No?—”
“You knew.” Quieter. Worse. “Some part of you always knew what your hands would do to the things you love. You’ve always known. That’s why you watched from the shadows for so long. That’s why you kept your distance. That’s why you built walls and protocols and rules?—”
“Shut up?—”
“Because you knew what happens when you get close. You know what you are. And you let her in anyway. You let her in and look?—”
I look at Sophia. At her white shirt.
At the red.
At my hand.
At the blade.
Something in me—the last thing, the thing I’ve beenholding together with her name and the compass and the memory of muffins in a Paris kitchen and a pink lollipop on Halloween night—that thing gives way.
Not loudly. Quietly.
The way the worst things always go.
“You are the thing?—”
“—that destroys what it loves,” I finish, and my chest gets torn open. Flesh torn off my bones. Too hot. Too tight. Too much.
“Valeria didn’t make you this,” Mary continues. “She just found it. Shaped it. Gave it a blade?—”
“—and a purpose and called it hers.” I look at the karambit again.
“I did this.” Not a scream. Not even a thought really. Just a fact arriving. Already finished before I knew it had started.
I did this to her.
The way I did it to Mary.
The way I do everything.
The way I will always?—
The room tilts. The weight of what hasn’t happened yet—of what I might do, of what I’ve already done—coils tighter and tighter in my gut until I can’t breathe.
“I didn’t mean to…”
The hallucination fractures. Sophia is gone. Mary is gone. The room is just the room again.
Stone. Gray. The smell that never leaves.
My hands are empty. The karambit is gone.
I turn my hands over. Check. Turn them over again. Check again. Because the blood was there. The blade was there. I felt it. The weight of it. The specific familiar weight of a thing I’ve held a thousand times.
And now it’s gone.
Like Mary.
Like Sophia.
