When I had cried my last, I rose from my futon and stared at the glass, eyes swollen and skin raw.

I was a coward, and could not stand the thought of facing Ansei. I would snap into pieces without relief from the tension pulling me to two irreconcilable ends. Nor could Ansei endure our stalemate much longer.

After all the years of waiting, he would leave at last. He could not bear up forever. He would go away to fight a revolution robbed of its bloodless solution.

We met in the garden. His gaze caught mine, and I shivered. I sensed every vibration, read every thought as though it traveled across an invisible thread stretching taut between us. He read me similarly, and although it forged a mutual sympathy, it couldn’t meld us together.

His mouth opened as though to speak, but he couldn’t utter the words, and instead they flooded into my mind.

“I am going.”

“Where?”

“To my uncle.”

A tremor ran from my fingers to my toes. My knees buckled.

“Not to war!”

Ansei’s gaze dropped to the ground. “I don’t know what will remain of the revolution. Perhaps there will be a blood war, but perhaps not. Either way, I’ll report tomorrow.”

Tears stung my eyes, and I was forced to hide from him again until I could control the poisonous flood.

I crouched in the closet, folding into a tight fetal position, uprooted and adrift from convictions I had thought inalterable. At last, I asked myself which was better: loving Ansei and destroying him with venom, or banishing him to near certain death within a violent revolution.

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At length, I began to see that neither question was rational. I might as easily have asked whether it was better to suppress the life I might give in favor of the life I wanted to cling to. No answer would appear along this two-dimensional line.

I might fight forever between two points on a plane, each end pulling with equivalent force, until at last I understood that the solution must reach upward and outside, into a third dimension—neither to moralize nor to rationalize, but to become—to become the creature greater gods had envisioned me to be.

It was not enough to consult what my heart wanted. I had a spirit, a mind, and a spider’s nature as well. I struggled with all of them to see the creature I might be, and had never known.

I struggled hard, and yet failed. Confused and weary, I fell asleep and dreamt of an old woman whom I somehow knew, but couldn’t quite place in memory. She spoke to me with effort, her throat arid and her voice breathy. “I need a subject. Give me a subject.” Her hands reached as her glassy eyes stared. Cold, bony fingers found my hair, my shoulders.

She was blind.

An ancient loom occupied half of the room. I realized that she wanted an image to weave into a fabric. “It is my final weaving. My last before I die. I must weave it before I can rest.”

I offered her various physical objects for her to examine with her hands, but she cast them all away with contempt. Impatiently, I brought her half-withered hands to mine, and guided them over my face, over my hair and neck, across my collarbone and down the length of my arms. When she was finished, having examined me from head to toe, she sighed and turned away contented.

When I awakened again, I realized with a blink what the dream had meant for me. I needed a model. And at last I understood where I might look.

* * *

I found Ansei in the apothecary, packing up his collection of herbs.

“I will not forbid you to leave me, but I want to ask you to delay a little while.”

The light caught his eyes and I perceived his desperation for any excuse, any compromise by which he might justify staying.

“Tell me what you want.”

I drew a quick breath.

“Take me to the records.”