The Waking Engine

by David Edison

Genres: Epic Fantasy; Visionary & Metaphysical

Synopsis

Welcome to the City Unspoken, where Gods and Mortals come to die.

Contrary to popular wisdom, death is not the end, nor is it a passage to some transcendent afterlife. Those who die merely awake as themselves on one of a million worlds, where they are fated to live until they die again, and wake up somewhere new. All are born only once, but die many times . . . until they come at last to the City Unspoken, where the gateway to True Death can be found.

Wayfarers and pilgrims are drawn to the City, which is home to murderous aristocrats, disguised gods and goddesses, a sadistic faerie princess, immortal prostitutes and queens, a captive angel, gangs of feral Death Boys and Charnel Girls . . . and one very confused New Yorker.

Late of Manhattan, Cooper finds himself in a City that is not what it once was. The gateway to True Death is failing, so that the City is becoming overrun by the Dying, who clot its byzantine streets and alleys . . . and a spreading madness threatens to engulf the entire metaverse.

Richly imaginative, David Edison's The Waking Engine is a stunning debut by a major new talent.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: February 11, 2014

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 400

Sample

1


My braying heart continues in spite of itself: I am. I am. I am.

I do not know why I am here, but it is clearly not to Die. I see them, the Dying people, spiritually aged, faces bleached of all color by worlds of weekdays; I see them stumbling through the cathedral forest beneath the Dome. My God, I think they are like birds. Piloted by instinct.

I'll spend hours birdwatching there, watching them Die—their bodies evaporate like smoke and the last look on their faces is peace, the first true peace they have known in dozens or hundreds or thousands of lives. Peace comes like a broken clock.

I hate them for that, the idiot birds who get to Die. If it were within my power to deny the Dying their Deaths, I would. Why should they find peace while I find none?

—Sylvia Plath, Empty Skies & Dying Arts


Cooper opened his eyes to see a spirit shaped like a woman, who cradled his head in her hands, her hair a halo of pink light that fell over his face. Angel eyes the color of wet straw looked down on him, and she smelled of parchment and old leather. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that her freckled skin was tan, nearly brown, and for a long moment Cooper waited for her to speak. This is heaven, she would say. You will find peace here, and oblivion. We will heal your hurts, friend. Welcome home, she would say. You have been away too long. Cooper would smile, and submit, and she would guide him somewhere radiant.

He did not expect the slap to his cheek. Nor the second that followed, stinging.

He did not expect the angel to drop his head onto the hard ground and declaim, "I can do nothing with this turd."

"My friend was not wrong, Sesstri," a man said, cursing. "That is what makes him my friend and not my dinner."

The woman pulled away and light came pouring over Cooper's eyes, almost as blinding as before. Struggling, he could see that it wasn't the light of heaven needling through his pupils—the sky above was jaundiced and cloud-dappled, and he lay in the rain on an odd little hillock that bristled with yellow grass. Above him, the two strangers just stood there, glaring down at his body.

And suddenly his body was all Cooper could feel: lit up with pain, scalded. How had he thought himself dead, let alone at peace? His bones ached and his bowels shuddered, and an abrupt crack of lightning overhead seemed to pierce his skull and live there, screeching agony between his temples. He tried to sit up but couldn't. He couldn't even roll onto his side, and when Cooper opened his mouth no words came out—he jawed like a fish in air, and flopped as helplessly. Flocks of birds pinwheeled across the sky. Bells rang and rang.

What happened? Cooper scrambled inside his head to reassemble some kind of continuity of experience. The last thing he could recall was drifting through a borderless sleep into a half-dream of lightless depths. He recalled sensing bodies in motion, masses larger than planets drifting through the murk below his dream-self. He could not see them, but somehow—he knew them. And maybe then he had passed beyond shadows. Maybe then he'd seen a city.…

"Bells for the abiding dead, what a waste of my time!" The man standing above Cooper cursed again and raised his boot. Cooper had time to blink once before the crunch of boot-heel slammed him back into darkness.

When he next opened his eyes, Cooper could tell by the quality of the light that he'd been moved indoors. He heard voices, the same man and woman from earlier, still arguing. He'd been dropped onto something hard but covered in padding, and when the wood creaked beneath his weight and a pillow found his cheek, he realized it was a sofa. Something about creaking wood and narrow cushions felt instantly recognizable; for half a second, Cooper worried that he'd broken the furniture, an old, familiar thought. He closed his eyes before anyone could see he'd come around, playing detective with his senses as rapidly as his addled mind could muster. He smelled kitchen smells—soap and old food—and something pleasant, like flowers or potpourri. Peeking out from between his lashes, Cooper saw a blurry image of his saviors—captors?—the man and woman who'd taken him home.

"I've finished examining him, Asher. You can come back in." The woman, who sounded annoyed, smoothed strawberry-blond hair so pale it fell past her shoulders like a bolt of pink silk. "I cannot help you with this. Anything your friend said you'd find on that hill is between you and the sheep guts, or whatever absurd claptrap he employs to disabuse you of your coin. I'm not going to rifle through every corpse that wakes up south of Displacement and Rind for you, anyway, so you'll have to do the dirty work yourself."

"Fine, forfeit your fee, Sesstri," said Asher, and Cooper noticed that the tall man, broad-shouldered but gaunt, had skin and hair the pale gray of old bones or nearly pregnant clouds. "I'd pay you for examining his body, but since I carried him back to your house, I think we're even."

Cooper squeezed his eyes shut again and felt them approach, felt them hover over him.

"He's as heavy as he looks," said the gray man.

Sesstri made an unhappy noise. Cooper didn't need eyes to feel her scrutiny.

He kept still when she jabbed his chest with her finger.

When she spoke, Cooper could tell that Sesstri had turned away. "He is just a person. He's just like everyone else." She hesitated. "A little green to wake up here, but nothing unheard of—I only died twice before I came here myself. Whoever he may have been, he is not the ‘something special' you are looking for. He will heal no wounds, diagnose no conditions, and answer no questions." She left the room, seeming more interested in the singing teakettle than the men defiling her home. "Muck up the place all you like," she called out, "I haven't seen the landlady since the day she handed me the keys."

Asher knelt close and brushed Cooper's face with his hand. "You can open your eyes now, friend. We don't need her." He whispered, tobacco on his breath, and Cooper peeked through his eyelids. The face so close to his own was a silver mask that smiled: "Welcome to the City Unspoken, where the dead come to Die. In my city, everything old is made new again, and anything new is devoured like sweet eel candy."

Cooper looked at Asher's ghostlike hair as he pulled away and turned to stir something at the sink beneath the window. Over his shoulder, the window showed a square of lemony sky and an unfamiliar, pale green sun. When Cooper sat up, head throbbing, Asher turned to him holding a tray piled with buttered toast and two steaming mugs. His gray skin was smooth and his eyes flickered like strange candles, red and blue and green together. He was handsome and repulsive at the same time, like a great beauty embalmed. Something wriggled inside Cooper's head, an instinct trying to name itself. It didn't come.

Nothing came, Cooper realized—no panic, no outrage, no bewilderment or dispossession at waking to find himself … well … wherever he'd found himself. Nothing came but fog in his mind and an empty-headed sense of confusion.

Asher smirked when he saw Cooper awake, but said nothing, content to lean on his hip and observe the new arrival. The moment stretched. Then it snapped. "What…" Cooper blurted, then faltered, unable to pick one question from the dozens that crowded his tongue. "Why is the sun green?"

The last thing Cooper remembered was lying down fully clothed on his own bed after another long day of work and text messages. But these weren't his friends, this wasn't his apartment, and he certainly hadn't been sending texts to any ash-skinned thugs. All he knew for certain—this was no dream. It hurt too much, and the logic didn't follow itself moment-to-moment as in a dream.

"Welcome to the waking," Asher said with a smile. "Drink this." His long-fingered hands were huge.

"Sesstri's taking notes." He handed Cooper a mug steaming with the scent of jasmine and spice. "I left the room while she strip-searched you, though, if that spares your ego any."

Cooper looked down at the mug shaking in his hands and fought the urge to throw it in the stranger's face. His gut, as always, told him to say "fuck you," and, as always, he said nothing. He grimaced, though the tea and buttered bread smelled like heaven.

"Drink it," Asher commanded.

Jasmine and pepper filled his mouth, hot and real. And it did bring Cooper back, clearing some of the fog from his head. He began looking at his surroundings in earnest while rolling sips of tea across his dry tongue. They sat alone in a room, the wallpaper calligraphed with unfamiliar symbols. On a wooden table against one wall spun an odd-looking Victrola, its mouthpiece carved from a huge spiral horn, and a low table piled with books. In fact, every available surface seemed piled with books. Asher handed him a plate and this time Cooper accepted it eagerly.

"This is a living room," Cooper said before filling his mouth with toast. It was bliss.

"Ah, yes. It is. I'm Asher." The gray stranger introduced himself, nodding.

Cooper reciprocated through a mouthful of buttery ecstasy. "Maybe you could … tell me … where I am?" he added.

Asher watched Cooper scarf down the toast and drain the spicy tea, then held out a hand. "Can you stand? Come upstairs with me, and I will show you."

Of course I can stand, Cooper thought before trying—and falling back onto the couch. He frowned and grabbed another slice of toast as Asher lugged him to his feet, but a few steps later his legs weren't so wobbly after all.

He followed Asher up a narrow stairway that turned at odd angles and led higher than Cooper felt it ought to. At one pinched landing stood an end table where an armful of foxglove shoots wilted from a china vase. "She can't be bothered with flowers…," Asher half muttered, shaking his head.

At the top of the stairs, the gray man opened a splintered door with a kind of reverence. Sweeping one smoky hand, he ushered Cooper through the portal.

As he stepped out onto the wooden widow's walk nailed to the roof, a chill passed through Cooper's body. A city lay spread out before him. More than a city—a comment on a city, on all cities, a sprawling orgy of architectural imagination and urban decay. Buildings and blocks stretched to the horizon, and Cooper's head reeled to take it in, from the spired heights that pierced the distance to the crusts of abandoned blocks, smoldering and dark where they lay. He turned and turned, but the city was all he could see, opening itself to him. There were wards that seemed to bustle with life, but there were also dead zones—whole precincts left to rot within the girding chaos. What he saw seemed to be the very idea of a city, barnacled and thick with itself.

Veils of fog hung at various altitudes within the air, draped over the city in colors of rock crystal—smoky quartz, amethyst, and citrine. The wind was strangely warm, and Cooper smelled a dozen different flavors of incense on its shifting gusts. A song of competing bells tolled point and counterpoint across the metropolis, sending flocks of birds wheeling into the air at intervals.

And competing skies. The pale yellow sky that Cooper had seen through the window downstairs seemed to have slid off to one side of the heavens, following its tiny green star. In the east, heavy clouds played peekaboo with a bluer firmament, and a yellow sun seemed to emerge, fading into and out of existence as he watched.

The skies, he marveled, watching them change.

Asher led Cooper, dumbfounded, to a weathered spyglass mounted upon a pipe at the edge of the walkway. Cooper hesitated—did he want to see? Did he want to accept the reality of this fever-dream? But he put his face to the glass and opened his eye to the city, despite suspecting that once he saw the details of this nightmare, once he knew its shape and aspect, it would be irreversibly real. The city would be real and he would be well and truly lost within it, unhinged, a ghost among ghost-men.

Through the telescope he saw snapshots of the whole: monuments and mausoleums pitted and scarred with age lay tilted, stone and gilt akimbo as the growth of the city slowly devoured them. Mansions hid behind walls that sheltered riotous gardens and skeletal gazebos. To the west, a sculpture of a weeping woman worked entirely in silver sat buried up to her massive head in newer stonework—a garland of exhaust pipes about her neck belched bruise-purple smoke into the air from below. Not far from that, an alabaster angel blew his shofar before a ramshackle square that brimmed with black oil, summoning a host that would clearly never come. And chains, everywhere chains—thick as houses, exposed by canals, or pulled up from belowground and winched like steeples over bridges and buildings, draped across districts, erupting from the tiled floors of public squares.

Panning, Cooper saw wide boulevards lined with sycamores, elms, and less familiar trees, avenues that glittered darkly or pulsed with traffic. The larger thoroughfares led from a shadowy axis that reminded him of an orb spider's web. At the center of the web, near the horizon, a vast plaza yawned. The plaza itself must have been huge to be so visible from this distance, but what lay beyond was bigger still: was it a structure, or a mountain, or something still more bizarre?

Above the central space loomed a dome that would dwarf a hundred arenas, a hemisphere worked in copper and glass that looked like lacework but whose struts must have been the thickness of a city block. It commanded the horizon like a fallen moon, and was strung with banners and limned from within by a green-gold glow. The great dome sat at the heart of a cluster of smaller spheres, bubbles of stone and metal that adhered to the central structure, bristling with arched bridges and needle-thin towers.

"Who lives there?" Cooper asked, pointing to the dome that dwarfed everything.

"In the Dome?" Asher wrinkled his nose. "Fflaen the Fair—at least, he used to. The Prince."

"Oh," Cooper said.

"He rules here." Asher bobbed his head and said no more, gaze lost in his city.

"Where is here?" Cooper asked at length, trying to keep the welling terror from his voice. The gray man didn't answer his question. Instead, his eyes drifted to the distance. Fires flickered out there, in the towers of the city. Towers that burned but never fell.

That was a sight that made Cooper's gut twist. Could he hear crying? He looked to his acquaintance. "Where is here?" he asked again.

Asher's eyelashes were the color of smoke, and the silence stretched until it became an answer of its own.

Cooper made it back down to the living room in a blur, where Sesstri explained matters more thoroughly. "Listen to me very carefully. This may sound complicated, but it's not: the life you lived, in the world you called home, was just the first step. A short step. Less than a step. It's the walk from your house to the barn, and what you think of as death is nothing more than the leap up into the saddle of your trusty pony. When you die there, you wake up, well, not here usually—but someplace else. In your flesh, in your clothes, older or younger than you remember being, but you, always you."

Cooper nodded because it was all he could do.

"There are a thousand thousand worlds, each more unlike your home than the last. Where you end up, or how you get there, nobody really knows. You just do. And you go on. Dying and living, sleeping and waking, resting and walking. That's how living works. It's a surprise for most of us, at first. We think our first years of life are all we'll ever see." She paused, her thoughts turning inward. "We are wrong."

Cooper said nothing. He was dead and he was going to live forever?

Sesstri considered him and drew a long breath, raked her fingernails through her morning-colored hair. "Life is a very, very, very long journey. Sometimes you go by boat, sometimes by horse. Sometimes you walk for what seems like forever, until you find a place to rest."

"So…" Cooper drawled, deliberately obtuse because humor seemed the only way he could go on breathing. "I have a pony?"

Asher chuckled. Sesstri didn't.

"There is no pony!" she snapped. "The pony was a mere device. In the country of my origin, we smother our idiots and mongoloids at birth. You are fortunate to have been born into a more forgiving culture." Asher's chuckle grew into laughter.

Sesstri rested her palms on her knees and made an obvious show of being patient. "Let me say this as plainly as possible. There are a nearly uncountable number of universes—universes; mind you, when we speak of ‘the worlds' we speak of whole realities—most of which are populated to a greater or lesser extent with people. Universes with planets that are round, or flat, or toroid—and others with space that conforms to no geometry or cosmology you or I would recognize from home. On most of these worlds, people are born, and live, and die. When we die, we don't cease to exist or turn into shimmering motes of ectoplasm or purple angels or anything else you may have been brought up to believe. We just … go on living. Someplace else."

"People call it the ‘dance of lives,'" Asher interjected, miming a jig.

Sesstri cocked her head for a moment as if tucking away a fact, then widened her eyes to ask if Cooper followed her so far. He nodded, hungry for Sesstri to continue even though he had already swallowed a bellyful of follow-up questions. Toroid? Which was it, worlds or universes—or was that distinction itself subject to variation? She was a much better instructor than Asher, and Cooper's only option was to learn.

"There's little logic behind where we go, although a great many thinkers have spent a great deal of time failing to prove otherwise. I might have succeeded. We live and die, then wake somewhere new. We live on, die again, then wake once more. In a sense you're right—it is a kind of prison sentence, and life will exhaust you at every opportunity. It's a slow and painful way to travel, but that's life: painful and slow. And very, very long." When she finished, she looked at Cooper with a mixture of doubt and expectancy, waiting for the inevitable reaction of shock and confusion, but it did not come.

* * *

"Welcome to the Guiselaine!" Asher sang out, his arms spread wide. "The best worst district in the whole nameless sprawl." He and Cooper stood atop a brick bridge that straddled a foaming brown canal. Foot traffic, rickshaws, and carts of every design pushed past them toward the warren of crooked alleys and side streets that comprised the Guiselaine, and Asher grabbed Cooper's wrist, pulling them into the crush. Cooper resisted, but Asher dragged him along anyway; the man was strong. The crowd eddied around a small fountain square at the far side of the bridge before swarming into a tangle of shadowy lanes where the walls tilted overhead, hiding the sky behind half-tunnels of stone and wood and daub.

The two men waded through a river of dirty faces, citizens of a dozen flavors—the rich mixed with the poor mingled with the alien, all distracted by conversation or the challenge of a swarming market at noon. Asher steered through the crowd expertly, his gray face and white-crowned head breaking above the rabble like the prow of a ghost ship, fey and proud—a ship of bones, a ship of doves.

"The City Unspoken has many quarters, but for my money, the Guiselaine is the one to see," Asher confided to Cooper as they ducked onto one of the broader thoroughfares. "A most deplorable gem of a borough." He waved a gray hello to friendly faces Cooper was too distracted to make out. "All tangled streets and hidden treasures. Harmless fun during the day, quite another story after dark. Which is, of course, when I like it most." Asher spread his hands in a mock-spooky gesture, and Cooper grinned in spite of himself. He took Asher's hand and gripped it tightly as they darted through the busy world. Whatever had happened to him had dispossessed him wholly, and Cooper found his head full of odd whispers. The crowd didn't seem to help.

They stopped to stare into the window of a shop that displayed an array of the strangest stemware Cooper had ever seen: scrimshawed goblets carved from human skulls, pale leather wineskins that bore the sewn-up eyes and mouths of human faces, and a ghastly masterpiece that dominated the display—a silver decanter set within the corpse of a toddler boy, plasticized by some grim process, whose split skull and abdomen cradled the silver vial while shining filigree slithered around its chubby limbs. It looked like some metal parasite had emerged to gorge itself upon the child, slipping silver tentacles around every spare feature of flesh. Looking at the decanter, Cooper felt detached from the horror, somehow, his head running a line of practical questions. How do you cleave a child so cleanly from crown to belly? How do you work silver so intricately, without burning the flesh or ruining the composition? How do you get a child to make such a beatific expression as you bisect the front of his face? There was no life here to sense, no sensitivity. Just art, artifice, and commerce.

Those were things he could understand, at least. He'd spent most of his life thus far as a consumer—why should life change, wherever it went? Wasn't that the gist of Sesstri's lecture?

"Come on, Cooper," Asher complained, tugging at the newcomer's wrist. "Bells, but you're slow."

A man with black skin—not brown, black—knelt over the body of a child, a boy, who stared at the sky with an uncomfortable intensity. ComeOnSabbiComeOn, the man said, except he didn't. Cooper wasn't close enough to hear and, in any event, the man hadn't moved his lips. SabbiSabbiLookAtDaddy, Cooper heard again as they neared—the man felt terrified.

How do I know what that man feels? Cooper asked himself. But he did.

Cooper looked to Asher to see if he'd heard, too, but Asher appeared oblivious. Cooper looked to the black man as they passed him, but the man did not even see them, cupping his son's cheeks in his carbon-dark skin. SabbiComeBackAround! DaddyNeedsYou!

The passersby did not hear, either. Cooper thought he would have known if they heard the man but ignored his suffering, because he saw that every day in New York. No, he'd heard words that hadn't been spoken. Him, and only him.

"Asher," Cooper began, beginning to freak out as they turned a corner into a ramshackle courtyard where a dusk-skinned woman in a tattered dress leaned against the wall by an alleyway, pressed by a rat-faced man with bulging eyes and shaky hands. Her hair was curled and coiled atop her head but was caked with dust—like a wig left out of its box for a decade or two.

Something stopped Cooper in his tracks. Asher looked back, impatient, but Cooper stared in horror at the woman and her accoster, distracted from his own thoughts.

She had a sad face painted brightly to obscure the truth, and she laughed like a schoolgirl every time the small man spoke, flashing a smile that never touched her eyes. He cupped a hand to her breast and she held it there, whispering encouragement. He drew a lazy line across her throat with one finger and dripped words into her ear. She licked her lips and pressed against him, but inside she was screaming. Cooper knew, because he could hear it.

NoNoPleaseNotAgain. He could hear it. Words that weren't spoken. Fear.

NoNoNeverICan'tBreathe ICan'tBreatheKillMePleaseKillMe, KillMeDead,

AndMakeItStickThisTime, MakeItStickThisTimeICan'tBearToWakeUpAgain.

"Stop it!" Cooper yelled, dashing forward. "Stop! Asher, help, he's going to kill her!"

Asher barked a laugh, and caught Cooper's arm as he shot by. "Of course he is, Cooper." He waved an apology to the woman and the rat-faced little man. "Apologies, do carry on." They did.

Asher pulled Cooper close and growled, "Please don't do that. You neither know our customs nor have the moral authority to intervene. And you make me look bad."

"What is she?" Cooper asked, aghast, as the woman and her paramour withdrew into the gloom of the alley.

"She's a bloodslut," Asher said coldly, but his eyes were downcast. "A life-whore. A stupid girl who signed the wrong contract somewhere along the way, and now she's stuck here. She can't die, so she sells her body and life to any jack with two dirties to rub together. He ruts her, guts her, then fills her mouth with coins."

"Wait, what?" Cooper's brain couldn't quite gear itself up for the question of death. That poor woman didn't seem dead, merely exhausted. But her thoughts, if that's what he had heard … her fears …

"She can't die," Asher said, pointing to a pair of figures picking each other up from the dirt. One kept her gaze low, the other leaned against the bricks trying to catch his breath. Both looked too thin, too worn. "Not properly, anyway."

"That's horrible." Cooper was shivering. "Her job is to let dirty little men kill her for money?" He couldn't keep the disgust from his voice—what pathetic creature could survive that way, let alone turn a profit? Then again, if she couldn't die, he supposed she had no choice but to survive. If that were the case, maybe it was no wonder her brutalized thoughts scraped the inside of his head.

Asher nodded. "Kill her, and whatever else they want to do to her. For money. Why else? Hurry up." Asher nearly dragged Cooper down the street as bells began to toll in the distance. Bells and bells and bells, a city of them.

But Cooper's thoughts were back in the alley with the woman who looked more … used than should have been possible. Here that seemed to be normal. What other nightmares were normal, here, that should be awful? Was hearing the fears of strangers as inconsequential as screaming inside, screaming for peace? He'd heard her, heard her panic inside his head. What did that make him? Deathlessness aside, Cooper couldn't figure out what unnerved him more: the contents of her head, or the fact that he'd been exposed to them.

A few moments later came a brain-piercing scream that trailed off wetly. No one on the street seemed to notice. Asher saw Cooper's discomfort, flashed his winning corpse smile, and pinched Cooper's arm. "Don't worry, really. A few hours from now her body will jerk upright, skin whole if not new—she'll spit out her wad and be open for business again."

"Oh." Cooper's stomach convulsed and he nearly tossed his toast. "No wonder she was screaming." He smelled fried bread and crispy fish from a hawker they passed, and swallowed hard.

Asher gave him a funny look. "It's just a little death, Cooper."

"So death means absolutely nothing." His body felt numb.

Asher shook his head. "No, that's not at all what I—"

"—All my life, all everyone's life, we're so scared of—what, a travelogue? Death is a game, just part of the economy, and my life means—meant—means nothing?" Cooper bit out the words accusingly, like the City Unspoken and its deathlessness were all Asher's fault.

Asher put his hand on Cooper's chest and pressed him into the brick wall of the lane. His force was controlled and guided, just this side of dangerous. "Don't say that. Don't say that; death is the worst thing that can happen, so don't ever say that." This, too, passersby ignored; these were a people inured to every kind of disturbance. Had any of them been New Yorkers, once?

Cooper let that fuel his indignation. This metropolis was worlds worse than ignoring indigents and stealing taxis. "The worst thing that can happen is a nap and a brand-new body, are you kidding me?"

Anger clouded Asher's gray face. "Every time we die, a whole world dies. What do you think they're saying about you right now, Cooper?" Asher shook his head in disbelief. "Is it ‘Oh, Cooper stepped off to another universe for a brief visit but we expect him to return shortly. Canapé?' Or do you think there's a funeral somewhere with your fucking name on it?" Asher was livid, but his skin showed not a pulse of blush. He let Cooper go, who doubled over at the thought of what his family and friends must be feeling.

Now came the fear and confusion that Sesstri had expected earlier. Cooper pictured his mother, obliterated by losing her only son. His father, cracked in half with grief. Life had been dull, but it had been. Cooper's head reeled. How could I forget that? he screamed inside. How could I, for one single moment, doubt the totality of my death, back in the world where I lived?

"I apologize," Asher nearly stammered, "I associate honesty with anger. It … explains a lot. Are you crying?"

Cooper couldn't breathe. His family and friends—what nightmare must they be enduring? Sheila and Tammy would be screaming when they found his body in the apartment they shared. Mom would be turning in place, trying to put right something that could never be fixed and was the heart of her world. His dog, Astrid—would she sit by the door, waiting for him, wondering why he never came back to her? She wouldn't understand, just ache. The same went for Cooper as for those he'd left behind. No understanding, just pain and loss and a false promise of peace at the end.

"This is sickness," he choked from his knees, "how could they not be my first thought? This is sick, sick, sick." He looked up at Asher, stringy-haired and chisel-faced, the piss-colored sky going blue behind him. Quicksilver clouds gathered, not minding the schizophrenic heavens above them. "Can't you see how sick this is, or are you too dead to notice?"

The colorless man closed his eyes and to