Truth of the Divine by Lindsay Ellis

Author:Lindsay Ellis [Ellis, Lindsay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789098020
Google: c3FfzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Titan Books Limited
Published: 2021-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

29

“Why did you do it?”

A nightmare didn’t wake her, but it might as well have. It was the feeling of a four-hundred-pound machine at her back, its limbs surrounding her, entwining her, and she instinctively balled herself into a fetal position, covering her face with her hands. She was still on the living room floor, having fallen asleep right next to Ampersand. She peeked through her fingers as he jammed his hand into the floor to raise himself up, balancing on his knuckles like a gorilla trying to steady himself.

“Why did you do it?”

Her eyes pricked with exhaustion. “Because he said he’d tell me the truth!” She pushed herself away from him, backing across the room toward the windows. “Was Čefo your symphyle?”

Ampersand stopped moving, and the focus of his eyes fluctuated like his entire system was restarting. Then he seemed to remember how to move normally, and pulled his arms and legs underneath his body, half on his side and half upright.

“He was Obelus’s. He was Enola’s. Was he yours?”

“No.”

She sneered at him, shaking her head incredulously. How many, how many times were they going to go through this? “Why lie to me about that?”

“I had to serve you a rationale I believed you would respect.”

“You are never going to stop lying to me, are you?”

“What information I withhold and what information I impart has always been with your best interest in mind.”

“My best interest?” she coughed. She got on her feet, backed away from him until she was almost against the window that opened into the backyard. “Is ‘suppressing memories’ to prevent me from talking to Sol my ‘best interest’?”

His focus was still hazy, still focused on nothing, and his head swayed like he was drunk.

“You want to act like you didn’t threaten to ‘suppress my memories,’ same as you did to Obelus. How is that protecting my interest? Then Enola tells me that you might just take it a step further, that if my condition worsens enough you would just . . . lobotomize me so you wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore. That you’d alter my brain if you couldn’t figure out how to control it, so my sickness would stop leaking into you. Is that why you were ‘studying’ me at all? Is that what those ‘monitors’ are for?”

Her throat grew hard as she said those words, her tired eyes tingling with heat. How cathartic it had been when Kaveh had put words to what she had been feeling, that she had been thinking of her pain like it was other people’s burden, obligating her to keep it hidden. But that was exactly how Ampersand saw it, so burdensome he might erase parts of her personality altogether.

He looked at her for a long moment after she stopped talking, and the focus of his eyes dissipated like a fading firework, and the crest on his head relaxed, closing like a tulip at night. “I do endeavor to cure your sickness. It does frighten me that I don’t even begin to know why our bond has mutual empathic effects.

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