The Burning Light by Bradley P. Beaulieu
Author:Bradley P. Beaulieu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Six: Loud like a Prophet
THEY GAVE MARCO TO THE WATER.
It was in the morning before the heat came on. The halo gathered in a little fleet of boats around Zola’s gondola on the East River. They were skittish. They’d waited two days before going back to the building to get Marco. His body lay on the stripped concrete where Chu had left it. Deflated, eyes milked over. He may as well have been dead a century. Now, on the river in their little boats, they sent nervous glances upriver, expecting Chu and her troops to materialize out of the morning mist and descend on them like Vikings. And yet all of them had come, the entire halo—what was left of it, anyway.
All except Jacirai.
Marco’s body lay on a board across the gunwales of Zola’s boat, wrapped in a white shroud painted with the sun symbol of the Burning Light. In Jacirai’s absence, a few others spoke tentative words.
“Mind of my mind, spirit of my spirit . . .”
“Be in the Light, brother . . .”
“Your mind was beautiful.”
“You will be missed.”
Drifting in turns alongside the gondola, the halo’s members kissed their fingers and, reaching out, touched them to Marco’s sheathed forehead. They touched Zola, too, brushed her cheek, her shoulders, placed tender hands on her head, lent themselves to her grief, like she was the mother of some saint. Tesh and Yessica and Dominga and Handel, all the others, broken and rudderless junkies who had just lost their anchor. Zola was numb; she had vertigo. In Latitude, when she’d earned pilot and they’d given her the high tower abode, she’d knocked out all the walls, first thing. All that space. Now, floating in the river outside the city, she was lost in open space. No boundaries, no connection to fill the emptiness between her and objects far away.
Their boats gradually formed a ring, prows pointing inward, the echo of a halo. Together, Tesh and Yessica and Zola stood over the body, and around them heads bowed. In silence, the sun rose. Light shot across the river.
“He gave everything,” Zola said finally. “I loved him with everything.” She kissed her fingers and touched them to Marco’s forehead. “Mi Sol.”
For a few seconds all the halo’s varied and stunted minds coalesced, a rush of love and grief and memories of light. Then Zola let Marco go. The body slid into the water and floated for a moment on the surface before the river took him.
Zola watched the spot where he had been, and there was nothing, and finally this broke her. She didn’t weep, she simply sat there, hollowed out, nothing left inside her but loss.
Around her, boats began to disperse, taking with them the whisper of the halo’s crippled minds—junkies, centerless now, scattering.
After some time, Zola realized she was alone. Marco’s halo was no more. She lay in the bottom of her boat, let the current take her, let the sun arc high overhead. She watched the city slide past, an immense and vine-covered ruin, a confused memory of itself.
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