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You stand together, in the middle of what used to be your street, and you watch your city being unborn.
Before you, a two-hundred-year-old wall marked with a century and a half of soot and seventy-five years' worth of bullet holes is subliming into vapor. Concrete becoming abstract. It's happening fast enough to see now. Half a kilometer a day, and accelerating. Accelerating fast.
If you're going, you need to go soon.
There are so few reasons left for you to stay. Everyone able or willing to leave has already done so, not that the places they've fled to will last much longer or be anywhere better to die. Among those who remain, there is no order left to keep. The spirit that animates Revachol has fallen silent. There are no more visions on the wind. Your city is dying or dead, and there is nothing you can do for her this time.
There really is only one reason remaining. You turn to him.
He removes his glasses, tries in vain to wipe the end-of-the-world mists from his lenses, and puts them back on. He's quiet. He's quiet for a very long time. You let him be.
"Fuck it," he says, finally. It's what he says whenever he makes a decision his rational mind tells him he shouldn't want. It's what he said the first time he kissed you. "Fuck it. Let's go."
You don't look back. You don't need to. All your funerals have already been held. You've been saying your goodbyes for months, over and over. Continuously.
You get into the Kineema, the same lovingly preserved vehicle that woke you, once, into a new and better life. You drive down the street that once was yours, Kim's hands as sure and steady on the controls as they ever have been. You make a left, and you drive off the collapsing cliff of the world.
It's funny, how your wheels turn on the nothingness. You've read books attempting to explain it, tried to come up with theories of your own, but all the answers boil down, in the end, to "nobody knows." That's all right, though. You love mysteries, even ones with no solution. The interrogation, after all, is always more interesting than the collar.
Whether or not you understand how, you drive on. Answering at last to your old, old longing, you are taking the Motorway South.
But what you're seeking from it now, you think, is precisely the opposite of what you wanted then. The Harry of those former moments hoped for oblivion, eradication. To be unmade. To be forgotten by the world, and to forget everything in it. But the you of this moment knows how impossible this is. There is no annihilation. There is only change. The imprint of this animal you were will persist through the amnesia of the world, the same way that imprint of your longing persisted through yours.
Kim, you think, is enjoying the drive. Having chosen to embrace an insanity, he has, in typical, lovable Kim fashion, given his whole self over to it. And here, in a place without distance or time, he somehow still manages to capture the exhilarating essence of speed. He is on the ride of his life.
You don't have a latitude compressor. You don't need one. You have no destination, and almost all Pale is Deep Pale, now. Only the motion matters. Only the will to move forward.
Under his breath, Kim chants to himself. A volta do mar. It won't help, not now, but he seems to find it comforting, words like tidy lines of text scratching themselves across the notebook of his mind. Well, we all have our methods. You have voices in your head reminding you who you are, even now, and he has this.
You reach out and take his hand. Your seat is behind him, but geometry means nothing here. You are behind him, above him, beneath him, beside him. Mostly that last one. The Kineema keeps going even without his hand on the lever. It's more of an idea than a motor carriage now. A strong, fast, powerful, loved idea. It's the ride of your life, too.
The memories come faster than you expect them, but maybe that's the way memories always are. And they feel like yours. They are yours. Because you are human, they are yours.
You are a soldier, a poet, an explorer, a priest, a superstar, a king. You are a young man with a whistle, cheering on children as they race the hands of your stopwatch. You are an orphaned boy curled up in a corner, losing yourself in a book until your inadequate eyes begin to water with the strain.
You are ordinary people, most of all. You live the quiet, complicated lives the world was always made of. You feed a baby, scrub a floor, hold the hand of a dying man, wake up and watch the sun rise as you ready yourself for work.
All of that is here, still. You see? All the babies and the sunrises, all the deaths and the floors, the stopwatches and the books. It's all here, somewhere. Unforgotten.
Kim's hand tightens in yours.
"Are you scared?" you ask him.
The pause before he answers isn't long, because there is no time. "I don't know," he says.
"Don't be," you say. "You don't need to be. All those things I used to say, about the end of the world. You remember? I was wrong about them. It's not the end. It's never the end. There's no such thing. You and me, Kim, we're gonna live forever. When the next world comes, we'll be there. Condensing out of the mist. Old atoms in new bodies. Old thoughts in new heads. You and me. Together. And Kim. Oh, Kim." You raise what used to be his hand to what used to be your lips. What you do to it is still a kiss. "In that next world? Baby, we are going to dance."
He looks at you with what used to be his eyes, and you can see all the memories in them, all the pain and joy and love. You can see that he believes you.
"Disco," he says. He squeezes your hand. And, together, you dissolve into whatever may come next.