Divination #2
“Totally aware, don’t date women who are scarier than I am, but thanks for looking out for me,” says David easily.
Their videogame avatars are moving again, racing faster and faster in their tireless pursuit of the finish line.
“I am happily single, and enjoying the swinging life of a college football hero. It’s not the worst position to be in, trust me.
” He pauses, coughs into his hand. “I mean, er. Study and get good grades and then when you get to college you can study more and get more good grades, and go into academia like your … I still don’t know what to call them in relation to you. ”
“We like ‘guardians,’” says Tim. “Legally, that’s what they are.
Biologically, they’re our closest living relatives, so there’s that, but they’re closer to siblings than aunt and uncle, and there’s no room in their lives for any more brothers or sisters.
So go with ‘guardians.’ You’re right about the academia, though.
I don’t think I could be happy anywhere else. ”
“Me, either,” says Kim grimly.
“You don’t sound like you believe that,” says David.
She shrugs. On the screen, her little cartoon car is knocked off the rails by one of the computer-controlled racers. It falls, hitting the ground below with a sickeningly metallic crunch, then bursts into pixelated flames.
David is pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that. If he listens closely, he can even hear her character avatar screaming. Kim puts her controller primly on her knee, eyes remaining fixed on the screen as she watches her brother circle the track. Her character doesn’t respawn.
With only one active player left, the game is over quickly, confetti cannons erupting as cheery balloon words spell out TIM WINS! across the bottom of the screen. He dutifully hands David his controller, then gets off the couch.
“I’m going to go see when dinner will be ready,” he says, and exits the living room with more speed than is strictly necessary—but then, he’s a teenage boy.
He may not be a particularly athletic one, but David remembers his own teenage years, which aren’t so far behind him as to have become anything other than crystal clear.
There were days when it felt like his legs didn’t know how to walk, like there was a lever somewhere deep inside the machinery of his body that had been permanently jammed in the “run” position.
He almost misses those days, now that his body is figuring out how to slow down. He’s young and strong and has all the stamina he could ask for, but learning how to walk when he could be running still feels like the first step toward learning how to get old.
He waits for the sound of Tim’s footsteps to fade before lifting the controller and pressing the start button to launch the next round. “Everything okay with you two?” he asks.
“Yes,” says Kim, automatically. Then she sighs, and amends, “No. I don’t know anymore. We know where we came from, right?”
“Same lab as built Roger and Dodger, right?”
“Same researchers, same research, different lab,” corrects Kim. “As if that part matters anymore. No one has our records. No one holds our patents.”
“And that’s probably for the best,” says David.
He’s trying to cheer her up without intentionally deciding that’s what needs to happen: he can hear it in his own voice, which means she can probably hear it too, hear the soft desperation to keep her from crawling any deeper into the hole she’s tearing open in her own heart.
“My mom used to say the world was wonderful with one of me, but one was exactly the right number. Two would be too many: none would be too few.”
“There’s already two of me,” says Kim, with audible frustration.
“No matter how you want to divide things, there’s two of me.
Tim and I are genetically identical, Dodger and I are both mortal manifestations of Math, even if she’s the only one who gets to do the job.
I have never been a singular person in my entire life. ”
“That has to be hard.”
She gives him a withering look. Every teenage girl he’s ever known has been capable of looking at him like he’s the slime beneath their shoes, but she’s perfected the art; he wants to slink away to think about what he’s done somewhere that she can’t see.
Actually … the strength of that impulse makes him pause and look at her more keenly.
Her withering look morphs into a frown. “What?” she asks.
“You’re pretty much baseline normal human these days, right? Since Dodger seized your half of the Doctrine?”
Kim looks momentarily uncomfortable. “We should really be more focused on the game.”
“No, we shouldn’t.” He pauses the race, his own cartoon avatar freezing mid-lap, and twists on the couch to face her. “We should be focused on whatever it is you’re worried about.”
Kim sags back into the couch cushions, eyes locked on the screen. “You’re an incarnate god, right?”
“We call ourselves Lunars, or Moons when we’re being informal, but yeah.”
“Why? It sounds just as silly.”
David shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s what we sort of collectively settled on, at least this century, and it works for us.
I am one current mortal incarnation of the Norse god of the moon.
I’m not the only one. Máni isn’t confined to just me.
He’s everywhere, like the moonlight or the wind.
” At least five other places that David knows of for sure.
There’s no divine hivemind between people who share the same divinity, no group chat or anything of the like, but the local pantheons talk to one another, and he’s heard of Mánis in other regions.
Judy says they’re all obnoxious blockheads.
He’s starting to take that to mean she likes him. She’s not nice to anyone.
Except for Roger, he assumes, and he’s seen the two of them verbally ripping strips off of each other whenever they get the chance. He can’t follow it more than half the time, because they don’t restrict themselves to English, but it has to mean something.
“And being an incarnate god means you have somebody else in your head with you, like, all the time?”
“Yes,” he says hesitantly. He’s really not sure where she’s going with this, or what she’s going to do when she finally gets there. It feels like he’s walking into a trap of some sort. He just can’t see the mechanism well enough to see it closing around him.
Kim’s smile is sudden and terrible, the rictus of a cornered, feral animal.
“It used to be like that for me and Tim. From the time we were born, we were inside each other’s heads.
Sometimes I only knew for sure that I was Kim because he’d go to sleep and I’d be able to feel the limits of my own skin until he woke up.
We were barely two people. We were never alone.
And then Roger and Dodger took their mantle.
Took our mantle. Imagine that there could only ever be one Máni at a time, and as soon as someone else became Máni, you wouldn’t be anymore. ”
David shudders. “That sounds like a very targeted horror movie.”
“Doesn’t it?” She shrugs, keeping her eyes on the screen, even though their cheery cartoon avatars aren’t moving, aren’t racing, aren’t doing anything worth watching.
She doesn’t seem to care. “One moment everything’s normal, and then the next everything’s ripped away from you, you’re alone in your head when you’ve never ever been alone ever before, not even for a second, not even when you might have wanted to be.
The silence is so loud that it’s the same thing as screaming.
” Her voice is dispassionate, not shifting tones or registers even as she continues.
“And there’s no putting things back the way they’re supposed to be.
You can’t tell Máni you’re sorry or make him come back, and even if you could, you’d be a monster for doing it.
Because the person he is now needs him even more than you do.
Doesn’t know how to be a person without him.
There’s no way for you to put yourself back together.
You just have to learn how to live with being broken, and if you can’t, that’s just too bad, because the person who’s responsible for keeping you alive takes his job very, very seriously. ”
David hesitates before he asks his next question. It feels like tossing a live grenade into the middle of a book club, like setting an explosive charge he doesn’t want to see going off. “Kim, did you try to hurt yourself?”
“No.” Her laughter is a brittle, terrifying thing. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t hurt myself on purpose. I can’t even stay up too late, or my eyes start closing on their own.
I can use a knife to cut my dinner, but if I think about using it on myself, I can’t move my arms. I can’t drink alcohol or even take an ibuprofen if I’m getting too close to the overdose line.
I can’t hurt myself. Neither can Tim. Roger won’t let us. ”
That sounds … David frowns. He can’t decide how it sounds.
Keeping a pair of depressed, distressed teenagers from hurting themselves sounds like a good thing, but it also sounds like mind control, and he’s pretty sure that mind control is always a bad thing.
People should be able to make their own decisions, and taking that away from them puts you in the same box as all the other villains.
He doesn’t like to think that Roger might be a villain. Judy’s sort of his boss, in a sideways kind of way, and she loves Roger, or Chang’e wouldn’t have said she did. Judy shouldn’t love a villain. They’re supposed to be the good guys.
“I’m sorry he did that to you,” he finally says, awkwardly. “I’ll talk to him. Or, well. I’ll talk to Judy, and she’ll talk to him. Maybe she can get Roger to stop controlling what you can and can’t do.”