Chapter Text
The first country to dare to bring charges against Eva Stratt was Argentina.
She had expected as much. Of course she had.
It was only logical: she had bombed Antarctica. The nearest landmass to Antarctica was Tierra del Fuego, which belonged to Argentina and Chile. That was where the protests had been most fierce. That was where the first rain had fallen after the explosion.
She had been waiting for this, ever since the day the Hail Mary had set off on its journey of no return.
She was always ten steps ahead of everyone. Why should it be any different now?
And thinking about which country would put her on trial and when was easier than thinking about Ryland Grace waking up one day, remembering, and cursing her…
I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I DON’T WANT TO DIE.
Chile was the second country.
Then the other countries that had at some point in their history laid claim to Antarctica. Then the USA, because the decision to drop the bombs had been made on American soil. Then Russia, because the USA had done the same. Then the European Union, which wanted to defend international law, and because by that point it had become known that Ryland Grace had not boarded the ship of his own free will, and someone had remembered the Geneva Convention. Then Somalia, because that was where the first of many horrific famines broke out and they needed a scapegoat, and she had decided many years ago to become the world’s scapegoat if that meant saving the world.
And after that, she stopped asking herself which country she would be travelling through in handcuffs next. In which language the next indictment, the next verdict, would come.
She had known that she would end up in prison. And she had known that the world’s prisons were not places one liked to be.
She had known that humanity’s anger would grow with every death from starvation, with every cold day, with every new piece of bad news from the scientific labs. And that people’s anger would be directed at the scapegoat, at Eva, who had brought all evil into the world. And that anger rarely consisted solely of words and court verdicts.
But she hadn’t known just how bad it could get.
Perhaps she had placed a little too much hope in the good of the people she had wanted to save – and she had to remind herself day after day that this good existed; that there was a purpose and a value in saving humanity; and that even the men to whom she was at the mercy of deserved to be saved.
That she had done the right thing.
“What do you have to say in your defence?”
“Nothing.” A murmur rippled through the courtroom. She lowered her gaze to her fingers, then looked up after all, into the cameras, into the eyes of the world. “I did what had to be done. It was always clear that humans would die; I couldn’t prevent it, nobody could have. But I prevented humanity from dying.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Of course.”
I would send him to his death again, even if it breaks my heart and his screams and pleas keep me awake at night.
“Do you regret it?”
“No.”
Forgive me, Ryland Grace, for not lying in court.
For not regretting it.
There is good in the world, became her mantra.
When they struck her in the face, she thought of the second-hand bookshop above which she had lived as a student; of the scent of old books, the rustling of paper, the quiet murmurs of customers amongst the crooked shelves, of the bookseller who had known just the right book for every occasion.
Whenever they kicked her, she thought of the deep German forests she used to roam, of the fairy tales and legends hidden behind every tree that her grandmother had told her to help her fall asleep, of the mushrooms her father had gathered with her, of the glistening dawn on the horizon, and of the scent of pine needles and damp moss.
When they paraded her before the press and the world and forced her to recount her crimes over and over again, so that everyone knew she was being treated as she deserved and no one would think of helping her, she recited poems in her head to stop herself from screaming — Goethe, Heine, Kaleko, Rilke, Schiller, Mörike, Hölderlin, Bachmann, letting the words flow through her body. The beauty of the human spirit. She had done what she had to do to ensure these words and thoughts endured.
When she tasted blood, the memory of hot chocolate helped; when her ribs were breaking, the memory of children’s swings and the feeling of flying when you jumped off at the highest point; when faced with insults, laughter (his laughter, because in recent years he had been the only one who had laughed genuinely in her presence – and constantly, God forbid, he had laughed so much and up there no one would hear it), whenever they spat on her, she remembered the signs of the cross on her forehead, every Sunday in church, sitting between her grandmother and her father on the pew, and every night after her mother had put her to bed.
When they assaulted her (and of course they did; she had expected as much; she was a woman and the guards were men, and it seemed to turn them on to have the woman beneath them who had once been the most powerful woman in the world, to know her helpless and bound and to be able to do anything to her), she tried to pray; forgive us our trespasses; pray for us sinners; thy will be done, will, be done… be done…
And when they left her lying there, sometimes for days on end in utter silence and solitude, she would hum songs, think of her choir, the excitement before a performance, the clatter of the baton, the giggles of her friends, the childlike innocence when neither she nor any other child had even suspected that the sun shining through the church’s stained-glass windows might one day die.
Nun danket alle Gott,
mit Herzen, Mund und Händen.
Der große Dinge tut,
an uns und allen Enden.
Der uns von Mutterleib
und Kindesbeinen an
unzählig viel zu gut
bis hierher hat getan.
And her cell echoed with the melody, just as the church where she once had learnt to sing.
Weeks passed, then months, then years.
It grew darker in every cell.
She did not know whether it was because her eyes had not seen light for so long, or whether the sun was fading.
The world’s interest in her waned. Every now and then she was dragged out again; the scapegoat was paraded in public and condemned anew whenever there was another drop in temperatures or a famine so severe it shattered the old norms, causing anger to flare up again for a moment, and they preferred to condemn her once more rather than overthrow the governments.
The guards’ interest did not wane.
Now that she rarely had to appear on the world stage, it was no longer so important to keep her reasonably healthy.
The memories grew fainter. Of forests and skies and seas and open spaces, of voices and touches that did not hurt, of the taste of mushrooms and fresh bread and strawberries and chocolate and… everything except blood and old porridge. She clung to every memory as if it were a lifeline she didn’t have, to every scrap, every word, with every wave of pain and loneliness.
The world blurred.
The memories dissolved, even as she dug her fingers into them before they could drift away.
Sometimes she would wake up and couldn’t remember her own name.
Sometimes she couldn’t remember why she was here at all, only a nameless terror and screams and pleas in her head
I don’t want to die. Please. Please don’t! I don’t want to…
She never forgot his face.
His laughter and his tears, and sometimes she hoped she could forget it, and sometimes she had panic attacks at the thought that she might forget him one day.
The man she had killed.
The man who had smiled at her when everyone else had been too afraid of her.
The man who wore the most hideous T-shirts in the world.
The man for whom she had packed those T-shirts, so that he wouldn’t have to die in someone else’s clothes.
Forgive us our sins, she whispered with bleeding lips. Forgive us, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Thou shalt not kill.
My great sin, my great sin, my great sin.
She beat her chest with scarred hands.
My sin.
Where was she?
When was she?
Was the sun still dying?
Was Ryland Grace still dying?
The loneliness was the worst thing.
And at the same time, the best.
Footsteps sometimes meant food, but mostly pain.
She heard footsteps drawing nearer. She ignored them. She withdrew into herself, as she always did now.
If she didn’t react, perhaps they would eventually lose interest. Or forget she existed.
And why shouldn’t she die of hunger, if part of humanity—and perhaps, one day, all of humanity—was doing so? If Ryland Grace, floating amongst the stars, was doing so?
If everyone could starve to death, then it couldn’t be that hard.
She’d tried it – not eating any more, so that she might eventually fade away.
Then they’d come with a long tube, held her nose shut so she’d swallow, forced her not to die, because the world had agreed on a scapegoat and she was needed to be beaten when the anger had to go somewhere.
Her throat still ached weeks later and her stomach rebelled, but if she threw up, they just forced her to eat again.
“You won’t starve to death, bitch,” one of them whispered once, one of the few things he’d ever said to her, “we won’t make it that easy for you. You’ll sit out the end of the world so you know what you’ve done.”
I don’t want to die.
The footsteps came towards her. Into the cell. She curled up, waiting for the pain, and tried to find a thought that might help her, one she hadn’t yet lost.
“My Love.”
She drew in a breath so sharply that her lungs nearly burst.
That voice.
Now she had finally lost her mind.
She felt a hand on her back and flinched.
“It’s all right, Love. It’s me. Just me.”
She turned her head.
In her cell, beside her, a ghost was kneeling.
Or an angel?
Back from heaven, where she’d sent him to die.
She saw his eyes, his hair, his face.
A memory, come to torment her.
But his hand on her back was so soft.
And he smelled just like the memory of him, as he leaned in close to her.
“Play along,” he whispered. “I’ll get you out of here.”
She wanted to say something, but her voice would no longer obey her.
She whimpered.
She felt him lift her into his ghostly arms.
And because this could only be a dream, she allowed herself to close her eyes, to let her head sink against his neck, where she could hear his heartbeat, a faint echo through the black vastness of the universe, and to dream on.