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“I think it likes Henry O’Toole.”
Murtaugh groans quietly, not looking up from the paper he is writing. “Don’t talk about it like that, Liz.”
Across the room, Elizabeth demurely sets down the book in her lap where she has been sitting at the study. “Why?”
“It’s not a person. It doesn’t like or dislike anything.”
She hums quietly, tracing a line of text with the tip of one finger, the faded typeface leaving a light grey smear across the page. “What makes you think that?”
Murtaugh shifts in his chair to look back at her, an eyebrow raised. “It’s a machine, Liz. No more than an oven prefers one kind of bread over another, it doesn’t have preferences for what it takes.”
Unfazed, Elizabeth sits back further in the chair and picks up the book again, adjusting her reading glasses with one hand. “I don’t agree with you, but if you like, I have another theory.”
“And what is that?”
“It’s taking places where we are, or have been.” She looks up at him. “Or will be.”
He meets her gaze for only a short moment before moving back to his desk, dipping his pen in ink again. “We’ll see.”
---
Dear Murtaugh,
I’ve found a room in the sewers that I’ve never seen before. I have no idea how we could have missed it. It’s very small, and made out of brick like the rest of the lower levels, but strangely, it appears to be much, much older. I can’t be sure yet, but it may be older than the lighthouse itself. My colleagues assure me that we must have missed it somehow, but I can’t imagine how. I’ve been through every inch of this place a thousand times, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Must have missed you in your office - were you out and about? Good for you. I like to see you socializing with other people, it’s good for your health.
L.
---
The ruins feel different now. There is a new life in them. Something hums just beneath the surface, something alive and yearning. When she puts her hands to the murals and closes her eyes, completely alone, hundreds of feet below the earth in the dead silence of that which is long abandoned, she swears she can hear something. The hum spreads through her fingers into her hands and up her arms until it settles in the very core of her. She feels lighter. She feels like she is in many places. She is there, but she is slightly to the left, and she is back at the lighthouse study, and she is somewhere she has never been before, and it is transcendent. She feels like she is touching the face of a god.
She does not know how much time has passed, but it must have been significant, as an aid gently touches her shoulder to pull her away from the wall, looking concerned. She brushes off questions with something about losing track of time, but the hum is still there, muted now, but lingering curled in her chest.
---
Dear Elizabeth,
I followed your advice and have started tracking karmic veins in the Henry O’Toole sites. It’s hard to tell at first, but you were right. Each of the sites are inside the subnet. I can’t find the edges yet, but it seems like they were built using karma, not infused later like your sites seem to be.
I have the beginnings of a team organized, which I’m training to travel safely through the net using the machines. I can’t do this all on my own. The laboratory is stable enough to sustain all of them, I think. With any luck, things will be a bit clearer soon about where everything begins and ends.
Yours,
M.
---
“You’re a damn fool, Murtaugh.”
She’s seething with anger, and it scares him to his very core even as she stands as still as a statue in his doorway, immovable, inconsolable, too far to go back now. Her face is a stony mask of placidity.
“You don’t understand, I - “
“Do not tell me what I do and do not understand.”
He goes to say something, but at the look she shoots him, he shuts his mouth again.
Elizabeth walks to his desk measuredly, puts her hands on the edge, and leans over him. “This,” she says. “Is not what I signed up to do. Your god may be in the details, but mine is in reality, which you seem to be removed from.”
“My work,” he protests, “has expanded our knowledge of what is possible here beyond what we could have ever imagined. Is that not worth something?”
“Is that how you measure the value of human lives? By how far they can expand your knowledge? Is this what you see your group as? Human fodder to throw at the edges until something bounces back? Your converts - “ She pauses, taking a deep breath.
“I don’t think - ” he begins, then, thinking better of what he was going to say, tries again. “It’s more like an explorer’s club.”
“The difference between an explorer’s club and what you’re doing here is that most of the time explorer’s clubs don’t end with ninety percent of their crews dead or missing.”
Silence hangs in the room for a long moment. Elizabeth’s rage seeps out of her slowly, but she remains where she is, in his space and icily defiant.
“They are going to kill you, Murtagh,” she says finally, quiet as a whisper. “Those who have found their way back, and my people, at the Core. They think you don’t care how many people you have to lose, and I want to disagree, I really do. But I don’t think you care at all.”
Murtaugh curls one corporeal hand into a fist on his desk, then, slowly, releases it. “They can’t kill me, Liz. We both know we’re both beyond death here.”
“Then they’ll do something worse.”
He examines her expression carefully, considering. “Are you going to kill me, Elizabeth?”
She lets the question hang in the air for a long moment before she responds. “No, Murtaugh.” She straightens, stepping back from his desk. “I’m not going to kill you.”
The room hums. A shudder runs through the lighthouse, almost imperceptible. Just beyond them, the layer of light shifts just slightly before settling. Elizabeth looks around them, a hand reflexively on the navigator hooked in the pocket of her kurti.
Once satisfied that the shift has completed, she looks back to Murtaugh. “I must leave,” she says flatly. “Before the path becomes unclear.”
With no further comment, she steps to the door, and, suddenly panicking, Murtaugh shoots to his feet and steps around his desk to clasp her forearm desperately. “Elizabeth - “
“Do not touch me,” she snaps, and yanks her arm away, whirling to face him again. Her eyes burn with anger. “You have blood on your hands, Murtaugh. I won’t have it smeared upon mine.”
“Please,” he says, plaintive. “I cannot do this on my own.”
“You will have to.” She turns the doorknob and steps out into the hall, facing away from him again. In the last moment before she leaves, she calls back to him, “You would do well to stay here, Murtaugh.”
She disappears from view back into the depths of the ruins without looking back. Defeated, he moves back to his desk, sitting amongst the papers and artifacts he has collected. Almost absent from the action, he picks up an empty coil, the filament broken inside it. He smashes it against the door.
---
Dear Murtaugh,
Collapses in the outer rim took five more of our people today. The machine at those coordinates is unresponsive. We believe they are either dead or trapped in a closed loop. In either case, they are lost to us.
In turn, we found three of yours during a blind jump two days ago. What Shiva takes, it gives in return, I suppose. Their memories are almost completely gone, but they are still with us. It gives me hope to see that we can still save some.
Even so, our borders are closing. I believe Shiva will soon remove itself entirely from our world. Perhaps it will take another, or expand somewhere else, perhaps in space, more likely in time. The chaos of the outer rim is almost impossible to predict.
I’m getting headaches from the navigator again. I want to find a way to improve it, make it safer. Perhaps Shiva will show me the way.
L.
---
Dear Elizabeth,
I get it now. Buried alive. Collapses on the outer rim. It’s ironic. Give your followers my regards.
Shiva doesn’t care about you. Use science to fix the navigator. You have my old equipment. Replace the pins with a transmission gel and find a way to keep them in place. It should help.
Yours,
M.
---
The sight of her in the doorway knocks the breath out of him. It’s not possible, it can’t be possible, but she’s here. She’s replaced her usual kurti and churidar with a more traditional sari ensemble, the dark blue fabric shimmering with touches of tinged white that seem to move through it like light ribbons.
As if sensing his presence, she turns slightly to look back at him over her shoulder. Where she once wore the haphazard pieces of Murtaugh’s first attempts at a navigator, a elaborate piece of crafted jewelry rests at her temples and ties up into her hair before reappearing to connect to a smaller interface hooked to a band on her arm. Distantly, he senses the light that swirls around it - around her - like water around stones. She is beautiful. He does not know what she has become.
She offers a hand to him, her motions slow, seemingly tinged with a mournfulness that he now sees in every part of her presence, and he takes it, stepping to her side. He watches her as she turns back to the machine he has built: a massive array of wires and coils all connecting to one central conduit harnessed to the once operable light of the tower.
“You came back,” he says, barely above a whisper.
“I wanted to see for myself.” She refuses to meet his gaze, pointedly staring at the portal machine. “Before you left.”
“How?”
She smiles half-heartedly. “One last gift from Shiva.”
He furrows his brow, but does not comment. “Do they…”
“No, they don’t know I’m here, Murtaugh.” Elizabeth glances back to him. “My abilities are that unto a god. I do not imagine that they will even know I ever left.”
He covers their hands with his remaining free palm, the karmic light shimmering over them as he steps in front of her, his posture that of a beggar. “Liz, Elizabeth,” he pleads softly. “Do not do this. If you have any mercy left for me, let it be this.”
Her lips purse almost imperceptibly. “I do have mercy, Murtaugh,” she says. “But you have consumed more than that which you deserved these passed years.”
“I will never ask anything of you again, I swear it.” He drops to a knee, looking up at her. “Elizabeth, do not cast me from your side. I have told you a thousand times, I am yours, always yours.”
“And I,” she says. “Am not yours.” She pulls her hand away, stepping back.
He crumples, hands going to the floor and hanging his head. “Please,” he breathes. “You have to forgive me someday, I cannot spend the rest of my life trying to atone for this.”
“I will forgive you when you have earned it, Murtaugh. This,” She raises a hand to gesture to the room around them. “Is not atonement. This is a different version of the same behavior that brought you to this point.”
“I am not the same man who sent those people to the rim!”
“And yet you seek to travel there yourself, without heed.” She towers above him, glorious in fury. “I know what kind of man you are, Murtaugh, and you will kill those who trapped you here, and when I stand to defy you, you will kill me as well, given the chance. You will recruit again, you will destroy them again, you will break and smash and destroy until death or amnesia takes you.” She reaches to her navigator, pulling it from its clasp. “Goodbye, Murtaugh.”
“Elizabeth, don’t - !” he cries, but she is already fading into the pale light, disappearing from this layer faster than he can move. As he scrambles to his feet, she vanishes entirely, as if she was never there.