The light of the sun fell across the road. It touched the ruined bus, the cratered asphalt, the scorched walls of the half-constructed building. It touched Rowbotham's face as he watched the man in the black pastor's suit raise a blade of liquid sunlight.
Cover us, holy one, in the light of your sun.
He had believed, once. Not in the Index. The Index was a structure, a hierarchy, a system of obedience that demanded nothing of the soul. He had given his compliance to the Prescripts because compliance was simpler than choice. But belief was different. Belief was the thing that had been taken from him, or perhaps the thing he had never been given. The holy one whose light was meant to cover him had turned away before he was old enough to understand what turning away meant. She had left him in a world that was flat and finite and without corners to hide in.
Purified in the flood, in the fire of your love.
There had been no purification. Only the slow, grinding erosion of a child learning that the world would not curve to meet him. That horizons were edges. That what fell off them did not return.
The liquid sunlight blade came down.
Rowbotham met it with his greatsword. The impact rang out across the empty road, and for the first time since the fight began, Rowbotham's stance broke. He staggered back, one step, then another, his boots cracking the asphalt beneath them. The greatsword had held. The black steel was undamaged. But the force behind the blow had been different. It had been equal.
Kamina pressed forward. The pastor's suit shimmered with veins of molten gold, each pulse synchronized to the rhythm of his heart. The liquid sunlight blade left trails of brightness in the air as he swung, and Rowbotham found himself fighting head-on, no longer able to simply absorb or deflect. He had to respond. Each clash sent shockwaves rippling outward, cracking the road surface, shattering what remained of the nearby windows.
Why have you forsaken us?
The question had no answer. It had never had an answer. He had stopped asking it years ago, had buried it beneath the Prescripts and the certainty of his belief. The world was flat. That was a truth he could hold. The curvature others spoke of was a lie, a comforting fiction for those who could not bear the reality of edges. His mother had been an edge. She had been the place where the world stopped, and he had fallen off her, and there had been nothing beyond.
Shmuel watched from the sideline.
His left arm was still sparking. The internal damage was significant, the servo housing cracked, the response time lagging by fractions of a second that would get him killed if he re-entered the fight. His right arm was functional but stressed. He could feel the metal fatigue in the joints.
He watched Kamina match a Proxy of the Index.
He flexed his right hand. The servos whined but responded. He watched Kamina's liquid sunlight blade describe a blazing arc toward Rowbotham's head, watched the Proxy's greatsword come up to meet it, watched the shockwave crack the wall behind them.
He catalogued his limitations.
Mother of this sacred dream that burns in us, will you hear our voices, make us glorious?
Rowbotham's mother had not heard his voice. She had not made him glorious. She had made him nothing, and he had filled that nothing with the Index and the Prescripts and the absolute, unwavering certainty that the world was flat. It was the only thing that had never turned away from him. It was the only mother he had left.
Kamina's blade came in low. Rowbotham parried, the greatsword sweeping down to intercept, and the liquid sunlight screeched against the black steel. He turned the parry into a riposte, the greatsword's tip driving toward Kamina's chest. Kamina twisted, the blade passing through the space where his ribs had been, and answered with a horizontal slash that Rowbotham had to throw himself backward to avoid.
They moved through the street like a storm.
Kamina's boots touched down on the roof of an abandoned vehicle from a person who fled from here and launched him forward. Rowbotham met him in the air, the greatsword and the liquid sunlight blade exchanging three blows before gravity reclaimed them both. They landed on opposite sides of the road, and the asphalt between them was a ruin of craters and gouges and the long, scorched lines where Kamina's weapon had kissed the ground.
Rowbotham's white cloak was in tatters. The scorched fabric hung from his shoulders like a flag that had survived a war. His chest was bare beneath it, the skin blackened and cracked where Imogen's combustible round had struck. He was breathing hard now, his ribs expanding and contracting with a rhythm that was no longer controlled.
But his eyes had not changed.
The polyphonic wailing iridescent in the skototropic figures, blooming in the light.
There was a beauty in it, he thought. Not the fight. The belief. The absolute, crystalline certainty that he was right. It was the only beautiful thing he had ever owned. It was the only thing that had never abandoned him. The world was flat. The world had edges. And anyone who claimed otherwise was not merely wrong, they were attacking the only structure that had ever held him.
Kamina's blade came down in an overhead strike. Rowbotham raised the greatsword to block.
And at the last instant, Kamina shifted.
The overhead strike became a thrust. Rowbotham's block met empty air. The liquid sunlight blade drove toward his throat, and Rowbotham had to twist, had to abandon his stance. The blade passed so close to his neck that he felt the heat of it sear his skin.
He did not panic. Panic was for those who doubted. He adjusted. His greatsword came around in a tight, controlled slash, and he caught Kamina's blade on the return swing. The parry was perfect. It was flawless. The liquid sunlight blade was forced wide, and Kamina's chest was open.
Rowbotham cut him down.
The greatsword described a diagonal line from Kamina's left shoulder to his right hip. It was the cut that had ended eighty-two others. It was the cut that the Prescript had demanded.
The blade reached Kamina's head.
And Kamina combusted.
Purified in the fire.
The explosion was not fire. It was light and heat and the particular, overwhelming presence of something that refused to be contained. Molten gold erupted from Kamina's body in all directions, a sphere of liquid sunlight that caught Rowbotham's greatsword and flung it back, that caught Rowbotham himself and hurled him across the road. He hit the asphalt and rolled, his cloak smoking, his skin blistering where the molten spray had touched it.
He came up on one knee. The greatsword was still in his hand. He was still alive.
But he had been pushed back.
Kamina stood in the center of the molten aftermath, the pastor's suit still pristine, the gold veins still pulsing. But his face was different now. The grin was still there, but it was strained at the edges. His eyes were bright with something that was not entirely confidence. The veins of gold were pulsing faster, less synchronized, as though the heart that drove them was working harder than it should.
I just want to wake up.
Rowbotham had wanted to wake up once. He had wanted to open his eyes and find that the world had curved while he slept, that the edges had softened, that the mother who had forsaken him had returned. He had stopped wanting that. Wanting was a wound that would not close. Belief was a scar. It was harder. It would not bleed.
"You fight well," Rowbotham said. His voice was hoarse. He had not spoken in several minutes, and the words came out rough. "But you are burning yourself. I can see it. That form is consuming you."
Kamina's grin widened. It did not reach his eyes. "Yeah, well."
"Why do you persist?" Rowbotham rose to his feet. The greatsword came up into a guard position. "You have no belief to anchor you. You claim the world is both round and flat. That is not a belief. That is an absence of conviction. You are fighting for nothing."
"I'm fighting for them." Kamina jerked his head toward Shmuel and Imogen. "And for the brat's list.. And for a bunch of other stuff that doesn't make sense if you try to fit it into a single box."
"That is not a belief system."
"It's a life." Kamina's grip on the liquid sunlight blade tightened. "And life doesn't have to be a system."
Rowbotham was quiet for a moment. The greatsword trembled slightly in his hands. Not from fear. From the accumulated strain of a fight that had demanded more of him than any in recent memory.
"The world is flat," he said finally. "It is a truth I can hold. It is a truth that holds me. Without it, I am nothing. I am the space between edges. Your world, your round world that is also flat, it has no structure. It has no certainty. It is chaos pretending to be philosophy."
"It's perspective." Kamina began to walk toward him. The liquid sunlight blade trailed behind him, dripping brightness. "The world looks different depending on where you're standing. That's not chaos. That's called being ALIVE."
Rowbotham's jaw tightened. Mother of this cursed rage that burns in us. The rage was old. It had been burning since before he understood what burning meant. It was the rage of a child who had been left, who had been told the world was one thing and then discovered it was another, who had built a fortress of certainty because the alternative was drowning.
"If the world changes," Rowbotham said, "then nothing is true."
"If the world doesn't change," Kamina replied, "then nothing is alive."
They stood facing each other across the ruined road. The afternoon light fell across them both. The liquid sunlight blade dripped gold onto the asphalt. The greatsword drank the light and gave nothing back.
Cover us, holy one, in the light of your sun.
Rowbotham's mother had not covered him. She had not purified him in any flood or fire. She had left him in a flat world with edges he could not see past. And he had built a life on those edges. He had become a Proxy of the Index. He had asked eighty-four people the same question. He had killed eighty-two of them.
The eighty-fifth was standing in front of him.
And the eighty-fifth was burning.
"Then show me," Rowbotham said. His voice was quieter. The rage was still there. "Show me how your world changes. Show me how your perspective survives."
Kamina's grin returned. This time it almost reached his eyes.
"I thought you'd never ask."
Sing our hearts awake in us, floating through the sky, see the stars, they yearn for us. Meet us here.
Rowbotham raised his greatsword. Kamina raised his blade of liquid sunlight. The distance between them shrank, and the road beneath their feet began to crack, and the walls on either side bore the scars of everything that had come before.
And somewhere, in a place Rowbotham had long since stopped believing existed, a mother's voice was silent. It had always been silent. It would always be silent.
He had made his peace with that.
He had made his peace with nothing else.
Rowbotham's greatsword came around in a horizontal sweep, and Kamina ducked under it, the liquid sunlight blade trailing gold as he moved. The road beneath them was a ruin of cracks and craters, the walls on either side scarred with the evidence of their passage. Rowbotham pressed forward, the greatsword describing a tight, controlled arc, and Kamina gave ground, his boots sliding across the shattered asphalt.
"The world should be flat," Rowbotham said between strikes. His voice was strained but steady, the words coming in the brief gaps where steel did not meet sunlight. "It should have corners. Places where the living softens. Places where kindness can hide."
Kamina sidestepped a thrust and closed the distance. His free hand came up, not the blade, just the fist, and he drove it into Rowbotham's jaw with the full momentum of his forward motion.
The impact cracked through the air. Rowbotham's head snapped to the side, and he staggered, one hand coming up to touch his face. The skin was unbroken, but the force had been real. He looked at Kamina with not quite surprise.
"A round world can have corners too," Kamina said. He was breathing hard, the gold veins in his suit pulsing erratically. "You just have to make them yourself."
Rowbotham's greatsword came back up. He advanced, and Kamina met him, liquid sunlight against black steel, the clash ringing out across the empty road.
"How?" Rowbotham demanded. Edged with frustration of a man being asked to reconsider a foundation he had built his entire existence upon. "How do you make a corner in a world that has none? How do you create an edge where the surface simply continues?"
Kamina grinned. The strain was visible around his eyes, the effort of maintaining the Synchronized form eating at him from the inside, but the grin was genuine. "Simple."
He disengaged. The liquid sunlight blade coming down to point at the ground between them.
"You stab it."
Rowbotham's brow furrowed. The greatsword remained in its guard position, but his stance shifted, uncertainty creeping into his body. "That is not an answer. Stabbing the ground does not create a corner. It creates a hole."
"Same thing," Kamina said. "A hole is just a corner pointed downward."
"That is…" Rowbotham stopped. His mouth opened and then closed. The logic was absurd. It was nonsense. And yet he found himself unable to immediately dismiss it. "That is not how it works."
"It's just a perspective." Kamina raised the liquid sunlight blade. "And perspective changes depending on where you're standing."
He drove the sword into the ground.
The blade of liquid sunlight pierced the asphalt and kept going, sinking into the earth beneath as though the road surface were no more substantial than water. The gold veins in Kamina's suit flared bright, pulsing once, twice, three times in rapid succession.
Then the ground beneath Rowbotham erupted.
A column of molten light and displaced asphalt that launched him upward with the terrible, irresistible momentum of something that had decided he did not belong on its surface. His white cloak billowed around him. The greatsword remained in his hand. His body rose, and rose, and the road fell away beneath him, shrinking to a ribbon of grey, and the ruined bus became a toy, and the buildings on either side descended into the geometry of a map.
He was high. Higher than he had ever been without the mediation of structures or vehicles. The sky was around him, vast and indifferent, and the afternoon sun was a distant coin of pale light.
And he saw the horizon.
It curved.
The perfect arcs of planets drawn on boards. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, the kind of bend that could be dismissed as a trick of the light or a failure of vision. But he was high enough now, and his eyes were sharp enough, and the truth of it was simply there. The world bent away from him. It did not end at an edge. It continued, and in continuing, it curved.
Rowbotham began to fall.
His descent carried him across the district, over buildings and streets and the small, scurrying figures of people who did not know they were being passed over. The wind tore at his tattered cloak. The greatsword was heavy in his hand. He did not try to alter his trajectory. He simply fell, and the world rose to meet him.
The roof of a building caught him. It was a flat surface of concrete and gravel and he struck it with enough force to crack the surface beneath him. He lay there, on his back, staring up at the sky from which he had just descended. The greatsword was still in his hand. His body ached in ways he had not felt in years.
He did not rise. Not yet.
He lay on the roof and looked at the sky and thought about corners. About a man who claimed the world was both round and flat. About a fist driven into his jaw and a sword driven into the ground. About the curve of the horizon and the silence of a mother who had never answered.
He thought about these things for a long time.
On the ruined road, the liquid sunlight blade dissolved.
It did not shatter or fade. It simply ceased to be, the gold light unraveling into the afternoon air like steam from a cooling surface. The black pastor's suit followed, the fabric losing its structure, the molten veins dimming and then vanishing, until Kamina stood in his ordinary clothes, the red cloak settling around his shoulders, his katana a simple steel blade once more.
Kamina swayed. His hand found the hilt of his katana, using it as a makeshift cane, the tip pressed into the cracked asphalt. His vision swam. The world tilted and then righted itself, but the righting was provisional, a temporary correction that could fail at any moment. His mind felt like a muscle that had been overextended, stretched past its capacity and now refusing to contract.
He took a breath. It came shallow. He took another. It came deeper.
Then he turned to Shmuel and Imogen.
"He's not done," Kamina said. His voice was rough, scraped raw by the exertion of maintaining a form that had never been meant for him. "That guy. He's going to think about what I said. And then he's going to come back. Because that's what people like him do."
Shmuel was already moving toward him, his damaged left arm sparking intermittently. Imogen followed, the Barrett-11 cradled in her arms, her blue dress unstained by the combat but her face still marked by the dried tracks of blood from her eyes.
"How long do we have?" Shmuel asked.
"Don't know." Kamina straightened, forcing his spine to obey. "Could be minutes. Could be hours. Depends on how hard he thinks." He looked at the direction Rowbotham had been launched, a distant speck against the sky that was no longer visible. "But he'll be back. And when he comes back, he'll have new questions. Or the same questions asked differently. Either way, we need to not be here."
Imogen was already scanning the road ahead. "The next bus stop is about twenty kilometers. If we run, we can make it before the next scheduled departure."
"Then we run." Kamina sheathed his katana and began to walk. The first few steps were unsteady, his balance compromised by the lingering exhaustion in his mind, but by the fifth step he had found his rhythm. By the tenth he was moving at a pace that could be called a jog. "Shmuel, you good to move?"
"My legs work." Shmuel fell in beside him, his sparking arm held close to his body to minimize the strain. "My arm needs attention, but it'll hold until we're on the bus."
"I can look at it once we're moving," Imogen said. She was already ahead of them, her shorter legs carrying her at a surprising speed, the rifle case bouncing against her back. "I've been reading about mechanical repairs. The theory, at least."
"Theory's better than nothing."
"Not by much."
Kamina laughed. "Ha!" It came out thin, lacking the usual volume. "Theory's where everything starts. You can't drill through a mountain if you don't first believe there's a way through."
They ran.
The road stretched ahead of them, empty and cracked and bearing the scars of everything that had just happened. The afternoon light lay across it in long, flat planes. Behind them, the ruined bus sat abandoned, its passengers scattered or fled, its driver gone. Ahead, the next bus stop waited, a small shelter of corrugated metal and a single bench, the timetable posted on a flickering digital display.
Twenty kilometers.
Kamina's mind was exhausted. The Synchronization had demanded more of him than he had expected, pulling at threads of sanity he had not known were load-bearing. He could feel the edges of himself fraying, the way a rope frayed when asked to hold more than its rated weight. He had held. But he would need time to recover. Time they did not have.
Kamina ran.
Behind him, the road was empty. Above him, the sky was indifferent. Somewhere far away, on a rooftop he could not see, a man in a tattered white cloak lay on his back and looked at the sky and thought about corners.
And ahead, the bus stop drew closer.