Mera declined to give me an answer about my offer, bluntly refusing even to discuss why she didn’t want to provide one. We talked about me instead; about what life had been like in the seventeen years I’d glossed over so blithely, mostly, and a little bit about how the last almost-fortnight had been for me in Shem.

She was, as I had realized before we’d even sat down in the refectory, terrifyingly insightful.

It wasn’t even that she could see through my deflections, or that she instantly threw back in my face any attempt I made to magnify the small things or minimize the large ones. I’d gotten counseling from professionals who could do that, though they didn’t all actually do so—but what they couldn’t do, and what she could, was to get inside my guard before I even had a chance.

She could be disarmingly profane about it, or sarcastic, or gentle. She could bait me into questions whose answers were pointed parallels, she could turn any reaction of mine into a full-blown analytical lens, and she could preempt me and deliver my own truths to me before I could gainsay myself by avoiding them.

But mostly she was acerbic, challenging, almost mocking. And so began your life of crime, she said witheringly at one point in response to a minor setback I’d had, and that wasn’t at all unusual. She wielded a form of humor that mocked the negative elements of my self-image and the ways that I abrogated on their behalf other peoples’ responsibility for the deliberate, premeditated harm they committed, and she did it well enough that I never saw it coming in advance.

And without being able to see it coming, it always struck home—and drew from me truths I hadn’t grappled with, along with pain that I thought I’d fully laid to rest.

That wasn’t all we discussed, of course. It was, for example, both charming and hilarious to have her carefully tip-toeing around whether Kelly and I were fucking, or whether I was falling in love with her. Maybe if I hadn’t seen so many people getting in catastrophic relationships with their bosses and managers, or falling in love with their caretakers and social workers, I’d have been insulted; but as it was, I was just cheered up by it.

Yeah, Shem wasn’t perfect, but at least they were careful about power dynamics and recognized that people, fallible as we all are, can fuck up handling them.

I probably had fallen in love with Kelly, inasmuch as I was capable of falling in love with anyone. I could say the same about James—God of my forebears, the man was adorable and cared about civics the way I used to care about antihyperglycemic agents—and Ketka, about Kan and about Tayir.

I wasn’t a romantic, I explained to her. Modern Shemmai had, awkwardly, a really small number of words for kinds of love, and Mera’s grasp of the Old Tongue was tenuous at best. Katn didn’t really have words for it as a noun, but unlike Shemmai, there at least were words for friendship that were distinct from romance, and somewhere along my ranting about linguistics she got the idea and, laughing, told me to stop digging before I couldn’t see daylight anymore.

She unbent a little bit, just enough to talk about herself in that light. As with everything else she did, it was impossible to know how much of it was artifice and how much was genuine; I had no doubt that every word she was saying was true and honest, but every carefully measured drip of personal information was no less calculated for that. She was deepening the rapport between us and opening me up to mirror her own vulnerability, and maybe just felt like telling me—or wanted to make a friend, rather than just a client, though that seemed far-fetched.

Whatever the reason was, she told me about dating under her mother’s shadow, about the reactions to her scars. About the way that she’d been unable to stop analyzing the people she’d tried to have relationships with through the lens of her professional sight, and how so large a percentage of her peers were unavailable because of her having had them as clients. I can’t avoid noticing, she’d said with an air of finality, the way the old folks treat me like a kid or pity me, and then she’d stopped to see my reaction.

I just shrugged at her. I’d had two non-overlapping social lives for a decade, and between the two, I’d been intimately familiar with the dynamic. The lab had been all coworkers who were technically my superiors, though in practice they had eventually started to feel more like ephemeral interns, and my queer friends, my sisters-in-persuasion…

… well, they’d been absolute disasters, every last one of them, but so had I in my own time. So I’d been the village elder, therapist, and career coach to a hundred girls going through vaguely-similar things to what I’d gone through, over that decade. I’d shared a bed with probably most of them, which by Shemmai standards was obviously unethical, and it wasn’t like I disagreed, but the intimacy and vulnerability made for some amazing, extremely temporary chemistry. And, well, I’d been safe, someone who understood and also who wouldn’t fall in love with them.

And then, of course, I realized that with thirty seconds of talking about herself she’d provoked me to share something I was and remained deeply conflicted about, something I might have gotten defensive about if she’d asked directly. It wasn’t the sum total of her reasons for saying it, I could feel the truth of that, but that was when my being impressed started to shift into my being amused.

By the time afternoon had become evening, I’d basically given up. I was sprawled across some remarkably comfortable purple flower-grass stuff with a vague bush-like structure, breathing in the mossy smell of the part of the garden we were in, head in Mera’s lap with my eyes closed. Her fingers on my scalp moved according to a rhythm that was literally divine, ringing with some sort of Skill that settled into my muscles all the way up and down my body, and we lapsed into silence.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She’d run out of questions, and we’d run out of time, and I’d run out of resistance. I’d poured out every last dreg of pain and history into the well of her presence, and it was only once we’d risen up to go to dinner that I realized that we shouldn’t have had nearly enough time for that.

She’d dodged the question, of course. Instead of answering it, she’d gotten me to yet again drag my dad, may a thousand strangers raise their voices in mourning for his passing. I’d taken the bait, and that had gotten me moving again and energy returning to my voice as I had a good old time denouncing him and—in this particular case—the shit-ass fake school my grandfather’s pride and my father’s vanity had worked together to found.

Before I knew it, while we walked back towards Fall and its refectory, I was ranting about the practice of the religion I grew up in. The way that the habit of praying with a speed bordering on incoherence was structurally performative, the way that so much of the liturgy was ritual untruth, the bigotry encoded in the practices and the sexism of the roles among the observant; there was a lot, and she had me on a roll.

She’d punctured it with one question, a knife made out of seven words that she slipped elegantly between my ribs.

And what faith will you build here?

I didn’t know, and that was the fundamental truth of it. I spent ten or fifteen minutes trying to express that in a way that was satisfying without any success, while something about her and about the afternoon we’d had maintained a distance between my emotions and my memory that let me grapple with it.

I didn’t know how to square the circle of my cultural faith, the faith I was raised in, with the realities of the Thousand; I didn’t know how to maintain relationships with all the Gods who kept popping up in my life and give honor to the commandment to have no Gods upon the face of God—that no other God should infringe upon Him, whose eternal omnipresence brooks neither successor nor peer.

Equally, I didn’t know how to reconstruct the positive elements of ritual in a way that would engender what I was yearning for. Maybe it was pure nostalgia, or maybe it was an indoctrination from when I was a child, but the euphoric sense of lift from a hundred voices raised in song or response was something I’d been hungering for since I’d fled across the ocean at twenty two years old. And that wasn’t the only thing, or even the main thing.

It was shared jokes, and shared ritual, and shared music. It was a common social context, familiar food, and social scripts that we could inhabit and imbue with meaning. It was the benevolence committee, coming by when I’d had a fever to just sit with me so that I knew I wasn’t alone; it was the half-year of someone always being around at least part of the time to bounce the baby so a new mother could sleep.

Not that the food in Kibosh wasn’t great, but it wasn’t chicken and rice and potatoes cooked slow to make the fat render out into the rice and then crust on the outside. It wasn’t lamb stew, redolent with garlic and full of beets; for that matter, even the stuff that felt familiar was strange, I knew it was strange, for all that I was doing my best to just not think about it.

I was pretty sure that if I let myself, I would wind up fixating on the fact that I had two different concepts of what zucchini was, what the word represented in everything from flavor to texture to botany. I was eating a stew with food that I had words for, and those words were right for what I was eating, but I had an entirely different, completely incompatible set of sense-memories about what zucchini was, or bell pepper, smoked paprika, or whatever the citrus was in the seasoning. If I let myself, I would try—and fail—to grapple with that and with the fact that I didn’t have an opposing set of flavor profiles for garlic and onion.

I explained this to Mera, and she just smirked at me and said well, it’s great that your memory for food is as perfect as your memory for however many words are in your sacred texts.

Three hundred and four thousand, nine hundred and one, I responded immediately, and then realized the enormity of what I’d just said. There was absolutely no way that, after seventeen years of consciously pushing away even the slightest thought or awareness of my practice, I remembered all of them; and barely less central to the faith were the quite literally millions of words of commentary.

Gone, all of it, unless Zqar could reach through with magic and pull them out of memories I no longer possessed. And even so, should those texts see the light of day again? They were full of histories of a world that I was never returning to, moral lessons that no longer applied, just-so parables that had been tendentious even to me as a child, and sages whose drunken ramblings had been imbued by the passage of time with an unassailable, graven pedestal of unquestionable correctness.

I would, I said with a careful shrug, just have to reconstruct my previous religion in a more appropriate form, as best I could. Not the minutiae of it, but the sense of it; the personal relationship with the divine and lack of an intercessor, the ever-present drive to question and to analyze, the way that the faith should, must, have precepts only inasmuch as those precepts create a better life and a better future.

I said a bunch of other things, too. Thank you was pretty high up on the list, in terms of how heartfelt I’d said it, because when the pressure of her Skills left me, I didn’t have a flashback or panic attack.

I wasn’t going back. I was building something new, instead.

God, I said to her with a somewhat crazed smile, not caring that there was no way she would understand the joke or that I wasn’t joking, gave us the law, but the law lives. It wasn’t in His domain, you see. It was ours. Ours to live with, to interpret, to change so that it could live with us, instead of ruling over us.

My mind buzzed with it inside my skull, like it was a mantra. It wrapped itself around me like a cloak as I ate dinner and kept me company as Mera left me, a smug, self-satisfied smirk on her face. I drifted home with it, and lay under it as I fell asleep.

As there, so here; it is not in the skies.