"I love her. I can take care of her, like I take care of Butch."
"Your love will not change the outcome, nor your facility with the Omega's remnants. This is forbidden!"
He wheeled on his mother, hating her and her stupid fucking yin-and-yang bullshit. "You want balance? A trade? You want to stick it to me before I can do this? Fine! What's it going to take? You saddled Rhage with his curse for the rest of his fucking life, what are you going to do to me?"
"Parity is not my law!"
"Then whose is it! And how much do I fucking owe!"
The Scribe Virgin seemed to take a moment to collect herself. "This is beyond what I may gift or not. She is gone. There is no return once a body has been left fallow as hers has been."
"Bullshit." He leaned back over Jane, prepared to cut open her chest.
"You shall condemn her ever after. There will be nowhere for her to go but to the Omega, and you will have to send her there. She will be evil and you will have to destroy her."
He looked at Jane's lifeless face. Remembered her smile. Tried to find it in the pasty skin.
He could not.
"Balance…" he whispered.
He reached out and touched her cold cheek with his good hand and tried to think of all that he could give, all that he could trade.
"This it is not just about balance," the Scribe Virgin said. "Some things are forbidden."
As the solution became clear to him, he didn't hear anything else from his mother.
He lifted up his precious, normal hand, the one he could touch people and things with, the one that was as it should be, not some cursed burden of destruction.
His good hand.
He put it down on the altar, splaying the fingers out and flattening his wrist. Then he took the blade of his dagger and laid it on his skin. As he leaned in, the weapon's sharp blade cut right through to the bone.
"No!" the Scribe Virgin screamed.
* * *
Chapter Fifty
Jane was out of time. And she knew it in the same way she knew when a patient was taking a turn for the worse. Her internal clock went off, her alarm starting to beep.
"I don't want to let go of him," she said to no one.
Her voice didn't travel far, and she noticed that the fog seemed more dense… so dense it was starting to obscure even her feet. And then it dawned on her. They weren't obscured. With cold dread she realized that unless she did something, she was going to dissolve and take her place within the wall of ambient-nothing. She would be forever alone and lonely, pining for the love she'd once felt.
A sad, shifting ghost.
Now she was finally struck by emotion, and it was one that brought tears to her eyes. The only way to save herself was to let the yearning for Vishous go; that was the key to the door. But if she did it, she felt as if she were abandoning him, leaving him alone to face a cold, bitter future. After all, she could imagine how it would be for her if he died.
In a surge the fog grew even thicker and the temperature dropped. She looked down. Her legs were disappearing… first up to her ankles, now to her calves. She was leaching out into the nothingness, dispersing.
Jane began to cry as she found her resolve and wept for the selfishness of what she had to do.
How did she let go of him, though?
As the fog crawled up to her thighs, she panicked. She didn't know how to do what she must—
The answer, when it came to her, was painful and simple.
Oh… God . . . Letting go meant you accepted what couldn't be changed. You didn't try to hold on to hope in order to coerce a change in fortune… nor did you battle against the superior forces of fate and try to make them capitulate to your will… nor did you beg for salvation because you assumed you knew better. Letting go meant you stared at what was before you with clear eyes, recognizing that unfettered choice was the exception and destiny the rule.#p#分页标题#e#
No bargaining. No trying to control. You gave up and saw that the one you loved was in fact not your future, and there was nothing you could do about it.
Tears fell from her eyes into the swirling mist as she released all pretense of strength and let go of her fight to keep her tie to Vishous alive. As she did, she had no faith or optimism, she was empty as the fog around her: An atheist in life, she found in death she was the same. Believing in nothing, now she was nothing.
And that was when the miracle happened.
A light fell from overhead, sheltering her, warming her, suffusing her with something that was just as the love she had felt for Vishous had been: a benediction.
As she was pulled upward like a daisy plucked from the ground by a gentle hand, she realized that she could still love who she loved, even though she wasn't with him. Indeed, their divergent paths did not dissect and desecrate what she felt. It layered her emotions with a cloak of bittersweet longing, but it didn't change what was in her heart. She could love him and wait for him on the far side of life. Because love, after all, was eternal and not subject to the whims of death.