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Part 11
Page 19
Dark.
It was so dark.
Burning. Fire in her throat, in her useless eyes.
Every part of her body.
Even though it felt so cold.
Carless elevator shaft. Out of use for years.
She'd fallen five stories. Basement floor.
Her death was nearly instant on impact. The fall
shattered most of her bones, shredded organs. Major hemmorhage in the brain.
Thick black blood streamed from her mouth when she tried, with the last
few blinking moments of life, to breathe.
A minute. Maybe two. That was generous.
No tears, even then. Even in death, Xiao Shujuan
wasn't the kind of girl to let herself cry.
Less than a minute. The moments ticking down. Heartbeat
slowing.
Dth-thump.
Dth-thump.
Dth-thump.
Dth-thump.
Dth---
Kanzeon Bosatsu coiled the time threads around hir
finger. Lines thinner than the quarks of atoms, laced through gaps in space
so thin that they very nearly didn't exist. The world's finest violin strings.
Se stood at the doorway and watched that frozen
last second in her niece's life. The cusp of a final heartbeat.
The problem with being a god is that you have no
one to pray to.
Or curse.
The gods save no one. This was a rule. It wasn't
policy or even bureaucracy. It was a law of karmic design. No one was allowed
to cheat death.
But she was nothing. This girl. A fragile little
leaf in icy winds. Carved down to nothing.
If she died, there would be no rebirth for her.
There would be nothing left. No memories, no identity. No soul.
If she died now, Kanzeon would never see hir nephew
again. In any shape. At any time.
Even a god couldn't grasp the idea of a death that
final.
But se couldn't save her. Was not allowed to save
her. That was the rule. There were no extenuating circumstances. No explaining
to the Jade Emperor that old family ties still tugged strong.
You wanted the best for children, whosever they
were. You wanted to see them grow and change. You wanted to see their evolution
before your eyes. To know and understand your love, no matter what form
it took.
Things that did not evolve were terrible.
A thing that spiraled back into its own oblivion
was a sin.
It was hir fault. Se should have seen it sooner.
Stepped in sooner. Done something, before it had all come down to this.
The last tick of a clock held suspended by aural wire over their heads,
and nothing to be done, nothing se could do, because the gods did not
save anyone.
And still se couldn't let go.
Se decided.
So it's not the act of a god. And it's not even
an act of mercy, and maybe not even love. And if it was hir love, it wasn't
necessarily anyone else's.
Kanzeon knelt beside the girl's shattered body,
and let the force of the lifestream flow through.
Forced the bones back into place. Mend between them.
Knit the skin as whole. Draw the blood back into its veins. Rebuild tissue
and fluid, repair the circuits, the systems, the central nervous networks,
the brain. Push air into her lungs. Pray, in some undefined, so unthinking
way.
And then let the threads of time go and move how
they pleased.
--thump.
Shujuan breathed. No shocking cough. Ragged, but
from a constricted throat.
She had failed.
Everyone was gone.
She was at the bottom of nowhere, vision spinning
and falling in and out of focus, everything stiff and sore past all possible
fatigue.
There was something hovering over her. Some sort
of shape. Impossible to make out. Indistinct for the water in her eyes,
the darkness, the strange character to the face that seemed so familiar
somehow, something she had seen before.
She squinted up at it, but it didn't help. Watched
the lines of the face move, the curve of the nose, the eyebrows, the lips,
dark hair, the fingers tracing her cheek in soft comfort, a gesture that
she knew. Couldn't possibly forget. Couldn't ever, ever forget.
"Mom?" she whispered up at the figure.
She couldn't see Kanzeon Bosatsu hide a wince and
try to smile.
"Close enough."
Didn't hear it. Didn't hear the words, just the
sounds, that warm voice that resonated right to the core, that shook everything.
That had the sting in Shujuan's eyes rise up in full. And then the tears
started, and she wrapped her arms around hir and buried her face against
the goddess's breasts.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Mom--"
"Shh. Shhh."
"--It hurts. I don't want this. I can't do this,
Mom. Please." Heaving, wailing against hir. "Please make it stop. Make
it go away. It hurts so much."
"I can't, hon," Kanzeon said into the girl's ear.
"You have to deal with this on your own."
"But it isn't fair."
"No," said the goddess, closing hir eyes. "It never
was, not even from the start. But you chose it, dear. And you've had to
live with it. And..."
The words. The words se'd kept from saying for a
thousand years, had believed for most of that. The hardest words possible.
"...And I'm sorry."
If Shujuan even heard hir, if she even understood,
Kanzeon couldn't tell. As the girl shook against her, unloading a thousand
and sixteen years of pain she might or might not have known she had.
And Kanzeon let her.
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