An orange light fades in, accompanied by a faint damp smell. It is quiet apart from a faint ringing in my ears. I’m not too uncomfortable. My limbs are heavy but from tiredness rather than malevolent influence.
I sit up. I’m in a single bed in the corner of a small room—in the opposite corner there’s another person, still asleep. The light is dim, but I know it’s Rowan. I watch her for a moment until I’m sure she’s breathing.
I climb out of the bed and stretch. I am not alarmed as I should perhaps be, having been brought so close death. This place feels safe. Which is not at all to be taken as an indication that it is—in fact, quite the opposite. Yet still, I can’t bring myself to panic.
Rowan seems uninjured too. Her breathing sounds normal as far as I can tell. I gently push her shoulder until she rouses. Once she is awake, her mind switches on immediately, though I can tell by her eyes she is as tired as I feel, and she begins questioning me about where we are, what happened, where the dying thing is, and all sorts of things.
I answer all her questions with a single, “I don’t know.” I suggest we look for our stuff.
Rowan nods, then makes her way to the window on the opposite side of the room, from which the orange light is pouring out. She pauses for a while before muttering, “You have to see this.” And so I come over to look out the window with her.
There are trees and grass—but not as we’ve seen them before. Or not as we’ve seen them recently—for hundreds of years.
Somewhere slivers of recognition—more from pictures and the odd video than from what I had actually seen as a child—come to me; this flora is ordinary. Young oaks spread out in rows, and birds—birds whose heads are not weapons, who don’t feast on children who have lost hold of their souls—fly between them. A breeze ruffles their leaves.
Rowan opens the window and the air—oh the air! It is a pleasure to breathe, it makes my throat tingle. I inhale fast and hard to get it all in, to let it clean my lungs, and I become dizzy and have to sit down. All I can do is stare into the blue sky. Rowan is breathing and laughing and she can’t stop. She sits next to me, grinning. Even she is rendered speechless.
This is before the monsters were woken up. The light too must be what we had only experienced for that brief fraction of our life before the sun was eaten up—it is off because it is unfamiliar. For a moment, I wonder if we succeeded in killing the Waker and the world is restored—only we can’t remember.
This speculation is soon proved wrong.
“Do you like it?” a familiar voice says.
Rowan and I look behind us to see a shadow with a glowing smile.
The longer I look at her, the less like a vague shadow, and the more she seems like a person. A very indistinct person. I can make out thick, dark hair, and the suggestions of her head and facial features.
For some reason, I can’t bring myself to attack her. I know that’s what we came here for but it’s an inappropriate response somehow. Instead, she takes us to her living room. There we sit on beanbags in her cabin and sip orange juice she provides us. It’s so good I gulp the lot down at once—like I care what the Waker thinks of my manners—and ask for another. The Waker refills our mugs and seats herself down in front of us, on the opposite side of a glass table.
“I’m sorry to ask again, but I really want to know. Do you like it? What you saw out there?”
Rowan nods and takes a sip of her orange juice. “It’s … stunning. That doesn’t do it justice, but it is stunning. How … is it real? Or an illusion?”
I make a small noise of agreement.
The Waker gasps, laughs, then covers her mouth, flustered. I’m caught off guard by the sudden change in demeanour and stare—although I believe I might have been staring for a while anyway. “Yes! Yes, it’s real! I’ve … I’ve been working really hard on it.” I’m about to ask for clarification. She stops us. “But don’t get your hopes up, please. It’s not stable. The world out there is encroaching on it and it might not last.” She breathes slowly, composing herself, though she can’t rid herself of the grin. “Still, if you like it, if you really like it, then that’s a good sign.”
And now it’s the Waker’s turn to stare at us. She looks at each of us in turn. It’s silent—and I feel uncomfortable—but she doesn’t look uncomfortable. Eventually her face lights up in realisation. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re the people who sent the messenger, right? You must have wanted to meet me for a reason, and I’ve been asking you about your thoughts on my project—please go on ahead and tell me what brings you here?”
Rowan looks at me before she says, “Could we hear a bit more about this project first?”
“I really shouldn’t waste any more of your time, especially after the ordeal you went through. I have to apologise for my husband—he hasn’t been well. I’m hoping he’ll get better if the project works.”
“What is the project?” I ask. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
The Waker purses her lips for a few contemplative seconds. “If I tell you—and I’m only doing this because I really, really want to talk about it and you seem so curious—will you tell me why you’re here? I don’t mean to be pushy. It’s just I feel very bad about what happened and wasting your time—even if you don’t think I am—just feels awful. I’m sorry. It’s terribly selfish of me whatever I do here.”
“We have all the time in the world.”
For once, the Waker has no hint of a smile. “Yes. I’m sorry for that too.” She perks up immediately. “But the project? You might have already guessed, to be honest; I’m trying to restore the way the world. I started a garden using what I could find in the corpses. Whatever they had eaten that hadn’t been digested or contaminated yet—and oh, the things I found were awful. Have you ever seen half-digested sadness? Or a sludge of liquified personalities? It was so confused, it just didn’t know who or what it was, or what it was doing, and it couldn’t decide if it liked me or wanted to kill me. But it gave me an orange seed and I managed to grow a tree from it.”
The Waker hmms to herself.
“Anyway, I started the garden, pruning away all the contaminated bits as they came up. It took so long to get all the bad bits out. I was so worried it would die: life is so fragile—it expands, it preserves, yet when it is small it is fragile and I don’t know if we’ve yet reached the point where we can be sure it will go on expanding.”
The Waker takes a long sip.
“Is that enough explanation?”
“No,” Rowan says, “but it will have to do. We ought to tell you why we came here now.” She looks at me.
I nod. It is fair that she knows. So, I stand and look at her. I don’t owe her courtesy after what she did, yet it feels wrong to sit in her seat, in her cabin, sipping her beverage when I tell her. “I came here to kill you and Rowan was kind enough to help me. I hoped it might … restore the world.”
“Oh,” The Waker says. “Yes, I can understand that. I wondered once if killing myself might help. But by that point too much damage had already been done.”
“I don’t forgive you,” I say. I’m not sure why it. She’s considerate and she saved us and she’s trying to restore the world, but that’s not enough for me. And I feel like I should let her know. Whatever she’s doing—for us, for the world—isn’t enough.
“This might sound cold,” the Waker says, “but I don’t really care about forgiveness at this point. I’m doing this to make amends, not to be forgiven. And for my husband, specifically. Despite everything, I don’t regret my choice.” The Waker me in the eye and the Rowan. “Tell me, do you think people can be happy still?”
“Yes,” Rowan says quickly. And I agree. I don’t have to think about it; despite everything, I have been happy.
“Then you believe you could be happy again. If you’re willing to postpone trying to murder me, I’d like to continue with my project—if you could, I’d be grateful for your help.”
I sit down. Rowan agrees and then she and the Waker both look at me, waiting. Again, I don’t need to think very long or hard. I chose to do something not futile.
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