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They walk in silence. Above them the stars are out, and the sea is on all sides, and lighthouses claw up into the sky. Neither of them speaks. They walk out over the waves, the smell of saltwater so heavy, like the air before a storm, and Elizabeth does not look back.
“Where are we?” Booker asks, because it seems like the thing to say.
Elizabeth doesn’t stop walking to answer. “Where do you think?”
And Booker doesn’t know what to say to that.
He wakes up with blood in his mouth and saltwater dripping from his hair into his eyes. Someone is screaming. He sucks in a breath, chokes on it, and nearly falls under again, down into the long dark black, before he puts out his hand and feels the grit of hard earth beneath his palm.
“On your feet, Dewitt,” someone says. They take him by the arm and help him up and press a pistol into his hand. The metal is warm, like a living thing with a beating heart, and sometimes Booker wonders if that isn’t the case. “You trying to get yourself killed, white boy?”
There’s something warm and wet on his upper lip, and his mouth still tastes like gunmetal. He swipes the back of his hand across his face, draws it away bloody. His blood is black as ink.
“Have a fainting fit later,” Daisy says, and she shoves him towards the alleyway and the other people already running there. “I thought you were supposed to be good at this sort of thing.”
An explosion and the smell of burning flesh. Booker follows Daisy when she starts to run. “And what is that?”
“Killing,” Daisy says, like it’s obvious. It is. “I seen you take out a dozen men on your own before when all you had was a pistol. Now get your ass out of here before I have to carry you out.”
There’s an ache deep behind his eyes, and the blood won’t stop coming from his nose. He follows Daisy, remembers following Daisy, struggles to focus through the fog that draws in around him all at once and wipes him clean.
It’s like waking up from the same nightmare over and over again, but each time the hue of the morning light coming in through his bedroom window changes. First blood-red, then orange, then yellow, then white. He thinks, that window doesn’t even face the sunrise. He wakes up in cold grey gloom and realizes he’s out of matches for the candles. The baby in the next room starts to cry, but when he throws the door open, there’s no one there, just a scattering of empty beer bottles broken against the wall. He wonders how long it’s been and checks the date on the newspaper lying on the floor. But there’s no way to tell how old the paper is, or if he’s still dreaming, or if it’s possible to ever wake up from nightmares at all.
He clenches his fist and the scars on his right hand turn white. He lets go and they fade almost entirely. When you make a choice, it leaves an imprint on the soul. Booker prefers the physical, things he can touch, but sometimes the physical reflects the metaphysics of it all.
He thinks: I shouldn’t be here. I wasn’t—I was Elsewhere. When he touches the tips of his fingers to his nose, they come away dry.
“It’s not real.”
He has his gun out before he even turns all the way around, and he lowers it almost as quickly when he sees who stands across from him. Her eyes are dark, her mouth turned downwards, and she hugs her arms around herself as she watches him stand illuminated in the light from the bedroom.
“Of course it’s real,” he says. “I’m looking right at it. I’m looking at everything.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s real,” she says. She seems familiar, and she is young, and she looks more sad than Booker can find the words to explain.
“I’m looking at you,” he says, “and you’re looking back. Isn’t that real?”
“You don’t understand,” she says, and shakes her head, once, frustrated. “Never mind.” The room takes a breath, bulging in at the walls. “Wake up, Booker,” she says, and then she pulls the world apart at its edges.
Together they fall through the emptiness between worlds. Instinctively, Booker reaches out for her hand, and she reaches back. In the space where their fingers might touch, a thousand thousand realities open up, and Booker falls through them all.
Booker!
There’s blood in his mouth and throat and eyes and nose and it chokes him; he drags in a breath and it tastes like whiskey gone down too fast, like hellfire, like nineteen years of living with a monster that slumbers inside of you and breathes ash into your lungs.
Booker, don’t die.
A cold hand presses against his forehead. A face fades in and out, and out again. A needle in the crook of his elbow, and his heart leaps up in his chest.
Can you open your eyes?
He’s not sure. He tries, and there’s a bright sudden flash of white pain, which clears, and he sees Elizabeth looking down at him, wide-eyed, her dark hair coming out of her loose ponytail and curling around her face. Her hands are covered in blood, and it takes Booker a long time to realize that it’s his.
He sits up slowly. Elizabeth does not reach out towards him. She looks as if she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.
“You almost died,” she says finally. Her hands are steady, but her voice shakes.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Booker says, and isn’t sure why he thought that would comfort her, nor why he’s surprised when she looks horrified instead.
He leans back and closes his eyes. The sun is warm on his face and his entire chest aches a low deep ache, but he can breathe. The blood in his throat is gone, probably all over Elizabeth’s steady hands, and he’s a thousand feet above the ground and all of this is just the prelude to the fall. “I get the feeling I’m closer to the end than I am to the beginning, kid. But how about I promise not to get there until you’re free of this place.”
Elizabeth doesn’t say anything for a long time. Booker opens his eyes to look at her again. She is pale, and small, and if that isn’t just the strangest thing, because she contains worlds.
“How about we leave that for me to decide,” she says, and Booker can’t quite tell what she means, the way the light hits her eyes and makes her whole face glow.
I know you, Booker thinks, but he doesn’t; but he does.
They are still walking through the forest of lighthouses on the sea. The sun does not rise or set, but days have passed, perhaps, or none at all. Time does not follow a linear path of birth to death and then rebirth. They all happen simultaneously and repeat until the pattern is right.
“How does this work exactly?” Booker asks Elizabeth, who walks ahead of him, leading him onwards. “The tears. The—doors.”
“How do you mean?”
“Are we—?” Booker struggles to put it into words. The frailty of it all, the insignificance of its undeniable immensity. “Do we move through the worlds, or do the worlds move around us?”
Elizabeth stops and looks back at him. The light of the doorways above reflects in her eyes like stars. She considers. “Go on.”
Booker struggles again. “How many of us are there?”
“Of you and me?” Elizabeth pauses. “Infinitely many, I suppose.” She pauses again. “And just one. Just us, here.”
Booker shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Elizabeth shrugs. The ends of her short hair are ragged, uneven, and they move in the low breeze. “It does,” she says simply. “We are. That’s all I can say. As for how we move between worlds—” She hesitates again. “There are constants. The variables I can change. The parameters aren’t exact. But—the constants do not shift.”
“What are the constants, then?”
Elizabeth almost smiles, a terrible dark angry bitter-eaten smile, then reconsiders. “I am,” she says. “Well, for you, I suppose. Haven’t you noticed that your nose starts to bleed every time you’re in a world where you can’t find me?”
He hasn’t. He doesn’t remember anything but waking up, and waking up, and waking up, and saltwater in his eyes and someone’s boot pressing the air out of his lungs. They are silent for a long time. Elizabeth walks, and Booker follows, and one by one the lighthouses around them disappear.
“What’s your constant?” Booker asks after a long while, into the quiet. “Since you know mine and all. Fair is fair.”
Elizabeth blinks. “You, I think. Finding me.”
“And when I don’t?”
Her mouth twists, wry with dark amusement. “I burn the world to the ground, and I pull its sickness out by the root.”
He wakes up with blood in his mouth, but his hands are clean. That’s not right, he thinks, and tries to thumbs the safety of his pistol and can’t. His hands are empty, he is on his knees, the sky is blood-red, and there is a pistol pressed to the back of his head, cold and hard and silent in this moment.
“False Prophet Booker Dewitt,” the voice behind the pistol says. “You are charged with seeking to lead the Lamb of Columbia astray and with the murder of the many righteous who stood against you. For these crimes, you are hereby sentenced to death.”
Panic. He starts to struggle, and someone kicks him in the ribs. He falls hard on the stones, loses his breath. Someone hauls him back to his knees and cocks the pistol behind him again, now right at the base of his neck.
“Son of a bitch,” someone else says in disgust. “Enough with the ceremony. Just shoot him and get it over with. We have other shit to do today.”
The sound of heavy boots thumping on the hard ground. Booker waits, paralyzed with terror. It’s not the dying that scares him.
“If you’re not going to do it, just give me the damn gun—”
Blood starts to drip from his nose before the pistol is fired. He thinks, blindly, without hope: Anna, Anna, right before the bullet goes through his skull.
“Sure was a blessing you showed up with that airship when you did,” Daisy says. She’s leaning forward against the table, surveying the maps and statistics and names before her that Booker is too tired and too abject to care to look at. He can taste saltwater in the back of his throat.
“What do you mean?” Booker says. He’s only half-paying attention. Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt. He had expected it to be simple. He hadn’t thought he’d need the help of an entire revolution just to reach her. He hadn’t thought he’d start thinking this revolution might not be such a fool idea after all.
Daisy smiles, crooked and wry. Her dark braids are pulled back from her face, and soot is scraped across one cheekbone. “You don’t much care for our cause,” she says. “That’s obvious. You fight for us anyway, but for your own purposes. That I can understand. That’s the way of white folk after all.”
Booker doesn’t deny it. He smells blood and remembers what it was like to stand in puddles of it, two inches deep across the ground and soaking the long grass red; but that’s long past. That was Wounded Knee. That was the day his gun burned so hot from overuse that he left the battle with scorch marks that never really went away, even after they faded.
“I shouldn’t like you much,” Daisy says. “In fact, I don’t. And yet here we are, the two of us.”
Booker looks back at her, thinks on how little he understands her devotion to this cause, her belief in a better world and the strength and power of change. That’s the sort of high-minded thought that Booker doesn’t bother with. That’s the sort of thing that Booker doesn’t believe. And yet here he is, looking back at Daisy Fitzroy and thinking, we shouldn’t understand each other, but they do.
“You got a pain inside of you, Booker,” Daisy says. “Pain strong enough to change the way things are. I’ve got a pain like that too. But instead of getting angry at the world like I did, you just got angry with yourself.”
“You should be angry with me,” Booker says. “If I didn’t need you, we might as well be on opposite sides of this whole damn war.”
“Maybe,” Daisy says. She smiles again, dark. “Probably. You ain’t Comstock, though. I don’t know if that means anything, or if it’s enough. But you still got your heart in you. Comstock ate his long ago.”
Booker shakes his head, but he can’t find anything to say.
Daisy pushes back from the table, turns to face Booker fully now. She’s terribly beautiful in quiet moments like this. “It’s good you’re with us. You can make a difference here, Dewitt. You can help the Vox make a difference. After you get your girl, well—you might want to think about staying on with us.”
A long silence. In the moments that fill it, Booker wonders if he ever could stay here with the Vox Populi and rebuild Columbia. If he could be a part of something good.
But Daisy doesn’t need him for that. She needs his skill in a brawl, his ease with killing, his familiarity with the weight of a gun in his hands and someone else’s pressure point beneath his thumbs. Once Comstock is dead and Daisy buries the seeds of a better future beneath the city’s streets, she won’t need Booker anymore. He doesn’t resent her for it either, and why should he? He understands it too. He can’t breathe life into the world; he can only suck it out. The only good thing he ever helped create is long gone, and all that’s left is what remains in his lungs, almost twenty years later—the unspoken sound of her name.
An alarm starts to blare. Daisy reaches for her gun. Booker already has his out, and he is on his feet, looking towards the door.
“Proximity alert,” Daisy says. “Comstock’s people getting too close.” She moves to the door and looks out, carefully. Booker can hear the Vox Populi outside assembling.
Daisy looks back at Booker. There’s gunpowder in her hair, and her bottom lip is split where one of Comstock’s men punched her before she took him down with her bare hands. She’s smiling.
“Booker,” she says, and nods towards the door. “Do your thing.”
And so he does.
He isn’t good at running. His life is a fixed point: one small shitty apartment. Two rooms. One bedroom with no bed. He sleeps on a thin mattress in the main room a few feet from his desk with empty booze bottles all over the floor. He might leave for days or weeks at one time for one of his jobs, but he always comes back. There’s always the room and the desk and the door that doesn’t open. He can’t remember whether it’s stuck or whether he simply doesn’t try to open it. The doorknob hasn’t been touched in years—like the place where his neck meets the line of his jaw, or the curve of his spine at the small of his back.
This is the epicenter, the axis around which everything else spins. Kingdoms could rise and fall and this room would still be here, and he would still be standing in it, and the doorway would still be looking back at him, and eventually he might understand what that means—why he thinks there will be someone waiting for him on the other side, if he could only get the nerve to go and see.
Elizabeth stops walking. Booker does as she does, two steps behind. She stares, close-mouthed, at the sky.
“We’ve been walking together for a very long time,” she says at last, quiet.
“Yes, I know,” Booker says.
Elizabeth shakes her head, sharply. “No. You don’t understand.” She tries to smile and clenches her jaw instead. “You’ve been trying for so long.”
His head pounds, and the sea swells beneath his feet. He can feel the haze threatening to surround him again, to drag him under. He holds on. “Trying for what?”
“You’ve been killed a hundred hundred times,” Elizabeth says, “in a hundred different ways. But you keep going through the doorway when they offer it to you.”
“I don’t understand,” Booker says, but he does, some piece of him must, because his heart starts to beat faster in his chest, and he can feel his pulse in his wrists.
Elizabeth turns away from the sky, all at once, and steps towards him. When she looks at him, she looks as if she does not recognize him. As if it hurts to see him still standing there. She’s close, too close now. He can see her but he does not see all of her, the weight of her hands, the galaxies between her fingertips, the maledictions she hides inside her mouth. She looks up at him, and she is immense, she holds everything between the two of them; her eyes flow like red fire, like the setting sun, and leave scorch marks on the fabric of the world.
“Why do you go through?” She speaks with the condemnation of millennia. She is ready to consume. “Why?”
They are alone in the universe. Around them, the Andromeda Galaxy rises over the horizon and hangs suspended above the sea.
Booker does not understand. He must go through the door. To not go through is anathema. He always steps through.
“Constants,” he says, because it’s all he can find to say.
Elizabeth stares at him, trembling. Her eyes are shining. And when she reaches out to push him under the water, her tears fall onto his hands.
“It’s quite simple, really,” the woman says.
“A doorway,” says the man. “To another world.”
“I’ve seen it before,” Booker says, and he has. A long time ago. It’s not something you forget. “I know what’s through there.”
“Do you?” When the woman smiles, the man on her right does the same.
“He’s still eager,” says the man.
“Indeed,” says the woman. “He always says yes. You’d think a part of him would remember what’s happened all the other times.”
“What are you talking about?” Booker asks, but he doesn’t look at either of them. He looks at the door and the light at its edges, and he can hear music from the other side, far off and far away. He keeps his Pinkerton badge in a box at the foot of his bed, along with an old photograph and a small piece of metal twisted into the shape of two letters.
“Heads?” asks the man.
“Or tails?” asks the woman. She holds out her hand, and when she opens it, there’s a coin that Booker has never seen before in the center of her palm. She tosses it up into the air.
“Go on then,” says the man while the coin is spinning. “If you think you know better than we, then tell us what’s through the door.”
“Anna,” Booker says, and the coin starts to fall: Anna, Anna, he says, and he steps through to see how she’s grown.