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Kala eats pomegranate seeds on the floor of Sun’s cell, and Sun tastes the tartness on her own tongue.
“I don’t feel any different, you know,” Kala tells her, tipping her head to the side, her mass of curls spilling over her shoulder like water. “I thought I might. Logically, I should. I have never used science to do anything but heal people before.”
“There is nothing logical about killing,” Sun sighs, remembering the feeling of splinters in palms that weren’t hers, the scent of rust overwhelming her senses.
“No, there is not,” Kala agrees. She digs deep into the fruit to find the last few seeds, and there is something vicious in it, in the hard set of her mouth, the red juice dripping steadily onto her skirt, the careless destruction she wreaks with delicate fingers.
“When I was little,” she tells Sun, “I liked best to play in the garden behind my father’s restaurant. That way my mother didn’t fuss at me to keep out of the way, but I still got to be a part of things, I could see and hear what was going on in the kitchen and the dining rooms. And I was always safe, there is a big wall surrounding the whole thing, with a big padlocked gate. My parents said the only rule was that I could never go through that gate.”
She sets down the pomegranate and then they are in her family’s kitchen, cold cement replaced by stucco and sunlight, tangy with spices and slightly rancid butter, a radio playing pop music off in another part of the house.
Sun thinks Kala’s whole world seems like a garden, a cloistered little hothouse perfect for growing for rare and beautiful blooms like the woman who perches across from to her, doe-eyed and pensive.
The aforementioned yard she glimpses over Kala’s shoulder, small but fecund, overflowing with a million brightly colored plants she recognizes like family members, led in their clamorous procession by honeysuckle and jasmine, surging high over a sturdy brick wall.
“I never went through it,” Kala continues, shrugging. “Sometimes I wanted to, so badly. If you stand close enough to that gate it seems like the whole of Bombay is calling to you, honking their horns at you, like, ‘come on, Kala, come see us! We’re waiting for you!’” She sends a small smile at the countertop. “But I never did. And now…”
Kala looks up and meets Sun’s gaze levelly. “I feel like I finally went through that gate, and suddenly realized why my parents were so afraid.”
“Are you afraid?” Sun asks, perhaps a bit harshly. Anxiety prickles up the back of her spine, then she blinks and they are back in a Seoul prison, sitting across from each other, so close their knees press together.
“Yes,” Kala shudders and Sun’s own legs shake. “Yes, I am very, very afraid.”
“Do you want to go back inside the gate?”
Kala answers immediately, her enormous eyes narrowing and turning fierce.
“Never.”
The emotion that swells in Sun then is Kala’s, but also her own, and maybe Nomi’s or Riley’s, too. A longing so old and deep she wants to cry out, tear her uniform off with her teeth and bend the iron bars with her bare hands.
Freedom, she wants freedom. She wants a lover, she wants an enemy, she wants fear and pain and madness and joy. She wants to peel back her ribs and show her beating, bloody heart to the world.
Kala is smiling again, with a quirk to her lips that says she knows exactly how Sun feels.
“Theologically speaking,” she says, leaning back onto her hands, “I think it could just be possible to argue that the gods have given us a miraculous opportunity.”
“An opportunity – to do what?”
“To live all our lives at once,” Kala replies solemnly. “To feel the wheel moving, every emotion, every choice, every ending and beginning… and feel it not as one person but as many. Maybe – maybe we are already learning what it is like to be part of the universal soul.”
“If we are living all our lives now, in this moment,” Sun asks, “what will happen to us when our moment is over?”
Kala lunges suddenly, grabs Sun’s hand with fingers cooled by their contact with the prison floor. This time Sun can almost feel them traveling, south and west with the wind, back to the kitchen where her friend must still sit, listening to Bombay calling her.
Kala blazes, backlit by a setting sun.
“I don’t know,” she says, holding tight to Sun’s hand. “I don't know anymore. What I do know is if I am going to live all my lives at once, then – to hell with it. Just – to hell with it.”
Sun understands.