Day 15, 3:40 PM
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle
I taste blood, and my head spins from the phantom pain I dragged over from my past life. I stumble mid step and grab Manuella’s shoulder to stay upright.
“Your words for today are Girohaf, whatever that is, peach, and a speck of dust,” I say, and she freezes.
“What did you say?” She turns around, her face pale.
“Girohaf, peach, and a speck of dust,” I repeat. My voice is calm, my words even. Beads of sweat form on my forehead, and my heart is racing. “Peach is cheating, by the way. Peaches can have many colors.”
“How did you know?”
“I died, two weeks from now.” She stiffens, and I see goosebumps crawl on her hands and lower arms.
“Your words for tomorrow, if you planned them are anchor, rust, and a blade of grass. I can keep going, if you want.”
“How—” She swallows. “How did you die?”
“I rammed the hunting knife into my skull. You tried to stop me, first offering sex, then screaming about me being a child, unwell, unaware of what I’m doing.” My voice shakes as I speak. In fact, my whole person trembles.
“Don’t ever do that. I would rather leave you than have your pity. I literally just died because I prefer dying than having you pity me.” My hands are still shaking. Killing myself was the most brutal death so far. Getting stabbed by others hurt way more, I hardly felt a thing now, and yet I feel like this was the most savage way to go.
She covers her mouth, staring at me.
“How is it possible—” Blunt starts, but I clamp my mouth shut. How is it possible that my passionate, sincere lioness has become a condescending, petty bitch? Is it my fault?
I wonder, and I know it is. A flap of a butterfly’s wing and all that.
“Do you believe me?” I ask, and she nods.
“Do you really believe me?” She nods, but I don’t believe her. “I don’t want to be treated like a mental patient anymore. If you don’t believe me, tell me what I can do so you can believe me. For the sake of the woman I knew, I can die once more for who you are now…”
“I believe you. I was thinking what to do if you attempted suicide while we are in the forest.”
That’s what she says, and yet, something is missing. I don’t know what. My naivety? Lack of expectations? Camaraderie? Passion?
I don’t know what it is, but that one spark is missing, and my goddess is just a washed up, abused whore. I sigh and nod.
“We should keep walking. If I haven’t changed anything, we should have deer for lunch in two days.”
She leads the way in silence, and I follow, brooding over the unsurmountable difference, and thinking about the future.
It would be the peak of irony if we led a rebellion, fought wars, won, and became king and queen only for me to go around, humping maids because she has become a timid, frigid creature wasting away in a palace instead of a brothel.
My throat clenches at the thought, and for some reason the scene of a towering Native American smothering a lobotomized psycho comes to mind. She’s not fucking brain dead, she’s just not the woman you want her to be. That’s literally every relationship ever, and yet you don’t see men and women killing each other over failed expectations. At least you don’t see it often.
If you don’t like her and respect her, walk away. If you don’t even respect that goddess she was, then have her as your personal whore. The thought disgusts me. I would rather kill than defile the woman who was my partner in crime when we fled those bloodhowlers.
I am insane, I realize. She has the right to be whatever she wishes to be. She can be a whore, a peasant, a warrior queen. It’s her choice to make, and if our paths coincide, I will help her with everything I have. If not, we will go our separate ways, each with their own fate.
I break the silence when she stops for the evening.
“A bit further ahead,” I say. “If we camp in the same spot, nothing should change. We just took a short break, then walked five minutes longer.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“All right,” she says and keeps going, choosing our camping site from two weeks ago without error.
“What happened the first time?” she asks while I’m lighting the fire. “You seem to have extremely high expectations of me, and I can tell I am failing to meet them.”
A smile escapes me. She is smart. Always has been.
“You may hear things which may make you uncomfortable, and I don’t want to retell what happened without details, I can retell the story in a few words. We met, we loved, I died, and I hope you escaped.”
“I want to hear the details,” she said, her voice firm.
“There is also one more problem, you will hear my side of the story. Yours may have been completely different.” She nods in understanding, and I tell the story while preparing the evening stew.
We stay up late, and there are tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she says, her voice cracking.
She draws a deep breath, then another.
“You have set the bar incredibly high for me.” She laughs, and a tear slides down her face. “I do not believe I can meet your standards.”
I smile and also wipe away a tear. “They are your standards. I just told you what you did. I don’t expect anything similar. Not yet. I know it would be fake, and if you faked something like that I don’t know what I would do. So, please, act natural. You were not a real goddess, you went to the bushes to take a dump, you hurt, and stank like every normal human being.”
She makes a weird face, I guess I was too blunt.
“Do you know why this is happening to you?” she asks, and I nod.
“I do, but I can’t tell you. After you wrap your head around the fact that I do go back after dying, we can talk about more. And let me tell you, us getting here took a bout of depression so bad I rammed a hunting knife through my head.”
“Sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be,” I say immediately. “It hurt a whole lot less than it did when guards stabbed me dead. Both times.”
“Both times?” she asks.
“The guards killed me once when I intercepted them, and the other time before I even made it to Amplegord. They accused me of being a Teemur spy. That’s why I was so pissed at Leandra and killed her the second time round.”
She gazes at me with wide eyes. “That sounds beyond unbelievable.”
I shrug. “This time I knew better. Thanks to you, I understood her pain and her situation, so I brought her back safely. She’s a good kid. I even got more money out of it than the last time, when I robbed her.”
“Good night.” Unfortunately, she decides to drop the issue. I could keep going for hours. “We can talk more tomorrow.”
“Good night,” I say and lean against the tree. We’re safe and there’s no need to keep watch, so I go to sleep.
***
Day 31, 1:15 PM
Days pass, and we leave the forest. Redo has long since turned white again, and I believe Manuella trusts my story completely now. The foreordained deer dispelled her last doubts two days after I started over.
I killed the sucker with a stone I picked up half an hour before we ran across it. I even said, “If we find it again, I’ll be ready.”
No matter how crazy or good with drugs or mind-reading or whatever else passed through her head about me, I couldn’t have forced a deer to run across us when I wanted it to. And she knows it.
“Where are we?” I ask as my eyes get adjusted to the suddenly too bright daylight.
“I hope we are close to Holgord, but we have to find someone to ask to be sure.”
“So, basically, we are lost?”
“We are in the general area we wish to be in, maybe a day or two away from our destination.”
“You said we would take longer to get here, though?” I am doubtful about reaching my destination almost a week sooner than she said.
“I gave you my most pessimistic guess. And my stamina has improved.”
That much is true. She took about a week, but she has toughened up. Maybe it was me telling her she promised she would be my warrior queen. Maybe it’s just the long hours of marching that did wonders for her.
Her feet have suffered. I helped her wash and massage them every evening. That’s about as much physical contact as we had.
Can’t complain, she didn’t either. And the first time I did it, I couldn’t help but think about Vincent and the other mob hitmen, what’s-his-name, talking about foot massages in Pump Fiction. I almost laughed, but didn’t, good thing too. She would’ve thought me crazy or kinky. Well, more than she does already.
“You have a lot of those moments when you just stare silently into the distance, do you know that?” she asks, and I nod.
“You said that last time, too. You just caught it much sooner. I think three to four days after our escape.”
“Why is that?”
“I’ve got a lot of things on my mind. I’m thinking about the rebellion, how we should handle it. What happens if we fail? What happens if they capture me after we fail, and I can’t kill myself in time to change things. What happens if I can’t go back?”
That thought has been pressing down on me a lot lately. What happens if Redo is on cooldown when I die? I have started liking this life, and I would like to live it well. Grow old with Manuella, perhaps. Even as she is now, she’s not bad. She’s not my goddess, but at least she’s not the condescending, beat-up puppy.
She squeezes my hand and flashes me a smile.
“Does that not make you the same as everyone else? What is there to fear?”
I’m sure she wants to reassure me, but her questions punch me in the teeth instead.
I stay silent, and she speaks again.
“When do you think I will be ready to hear the rest of your story?”
Her voice is faint, but the interest in it is clear. She genuinely believes me, and she wants to know.
The thing is, I don’t want to tell her. Not about Mary, the kids, my idea of paving the way to the bright future with landmines. Not yet. I still think blood needs to flow. I believe it even more after meeting Manuella. I just think I went about it the wrong way previously. They were trying to enslave us with money and bureaucracy—
“You are silent again.”
“Sorry, I was reminiscing,” I say. “The rest of my story can be summed up in one sentence, and I think that would be best for now. Are you fine with that?”
She nods.
“In a nutshell, I remember my time in hell.”