Anna opened her eyes when they reached the sh.o.r.e of the lake. The stars were beating in time with her heart. And then they went dark.
In that strange country, the moon rose from behind a cloud as though it was gliding. It illuminated every tree and every ripple of the lake and shone down on the ambulance that was moving along the road beside the waters. And over the Malonian eastern hills-over another, smaller valley-the moonlight grew brighter and sharpened to the same color, as if there was no division between the worlds anymore.
In the days after Ahira was a.s.sa.s.sinated, a hundred people would claim that act for themselves. Perhaps they were right. It was not really mine. It was as though someone else took control of my arm and my mind. I must have spent half a second aiming the rifle, but the bullet struck true. And Ahira fell, a long way away. I could almost have believed that it was someone else who shot him.
But I must be honest: in that half second when I aimed the rifle, I knew what I was doing. I felt as though things had become clear to me. It was not Ahira who I shot at, not only him. It was Sergeant Markey, for what he said about our mother, and the truancy officer who drove me back to school with threats, the sergeant in Ositha binding my hands tight enough to cut them, the men who closed the city and would not let me go to my brother"s grave, the two who knocked Grandmother down in the mud, the private who brought that warrant to the door and looked at us as though we disgusted him. And I fired the shot because they drove me to it. They brought it on themselves. That was how I felt in that half second of stillness. As though it was not me but him who was responsible.
The dawn will be rising soon, and still I sit here reading. You must be asleep by now, thinking that I have gone home. Or perhaps you are watching at a window. It is the darkest point before the sun rises, and I am the only one left now. The balcony is silent.
I remember how the city looked that night when I ran to the hills, strange and distant and too solid. I did not realize what I had done, not then. I have had enough time to realize it since. I wrote this because you asked me why I did it. You asked me to explain.
I would not have shot Ahira if Grandmother had not wandered out that night. If those soldiers had not come at that exact minute, when I was already desperate. If I had kept my mouth shut and not sworn at them. Even after everything, after Stirling was gone, I might not have done it. Was it just chance, then? I don"t know. In that moment, when everything stood still, I hated Ahira. Maria told me I would never get to hate him as much as she did. She was wrong. I did. I don"t know why.
I don"t have the heart to read on, but if I don"t, I"ll have to let you read this. And I can"t do that yet. Not after so long. I will read to the end, now that I have started. I cannot think what else to do anymore.
Out in the hills I sat up suddenly, without knowing why I did it. There was someone close by.
I let my finger fall from the trigger of the pistol, but left it resting against my head. A girl was moving along the other side of the valley. The moonlight turned her eyes to silver and carved deep shadows in her hair. Everything had brightened suddenly. The stars above made the whole sky clear blue; the stream shone like liquid silver. The moonlight was streaming through that small valley, flowing over the girl on that side and me on this side and every blade of gra.s.s between us. Even my own hand on the gun was shining. It made me dizzy. I sat motionless, watching her. Then she turned and saw me. "What are you doing?" she said. In the silence her voice carried clearly.
I realized suddenly that she was the girl I had seen with Ahira, the girl who had been haunting my dreams for weeks. "Anna," I said, standing up. I watched her in silence, and she gazed back at me across the valley, a ghostly figure shining in the dark. "Are you an angel?" I said then. She didn"t answer. "Who are you, then? The Voice?"
"What voice?"
"Are you a spirit? Are you dead?"
"I don"t know anymore," she said.
"How can you not know?"
And then I realized that I didn"t know anymore if I was dead either. Perhaps I had actually pulled the trigger. It"s easy to shoot even when you don"t completely mean to do it. Just a trigger you can pull with your little finger.
And when I thought of that, the hills vanished and Ahira was falling to the ground again. It was not just a vision-it was really in front of my eyes, and closer than before. I shook my head. It wasn"t me who fired that shot, I thought then. It was someone beyond the control of my mind. I didn"t order my hand to shoot, or will the bullet to fly straight. Perhaps a real soldier had been hiding close by in the dark and had fired at the same time I had, someone who could shoot faultlessly and was used to killing.
"What are you doing?" Anna said again, away on the other side of that small valley. I blinked and remembered where I was: out in the eastern hills in that strange bright moonlight, not lying in the mud watching Ahira fall. I didn"t answer.
"Don"t shoot yourself," she said.
I tightened my grip on the gun. "You can"t stop me," I told her.
"Take that gun away from your head."
"Why? No one would care if I did this."
"How do you know?"
I shrugged. "There are some things you just know."
"Take the gun off your head. Please."
I did it, but partly because my arm was aching. She was walking down the hillside toward me now. I hesitated, then began to walk down to meet her. "Why were you doing that?" she said. "Please tell me."
All the time we were walking toward each other, she did not take her eyes off mine. I told her everything that had happened in the days since Stirling had been gone. And then we were facing each other across the stream. I stopped still. The moonlight was caught inside the water; the stream was carrying it along in a bright channel. I switched the pistol from my right hand to my left and then back again. "Are you going to try to stop me?" I said.
She shook her head. "I can"t stop you."
"What are you doing out here in the hills?" I asked her.
"I don"t know. Maybe I"m dying. Everything went dark and now I"m here."
I ran my fingers over the cold barrel of the gun without really noticing it. "This isn"t heaven," I told her.
"No."
Time pa.s.sed. The water went on flowing between us. After a while I sat down on the bank, and she knelt opposite me. I stared up at the stars. They seemed to be sliding on their courses, as if they were not anch.o.r.ed anymore. "Do you even believe in heaven?" I asked her.
"What else is there to believe in if you don"t believe in that?"
"But that doesn"t mean it"s true. You are saying you believe in it because you want it to be true?"
"No-because when people die, they don"t just disappear."
"What does that mean?" I demanded.
"That there is somewhere else. It"s one of those things you were talking about, the things you just know."
I sat up straight and looked at her. "That"s where I want to be-somewhere else. Maybe heaven, probably h.e.l.l. I"ve had enough of this. I want to be somewhere else." I wanted to be somewhere my heart didn"t hurt like this, like it did now-pain too much to bear, that made the days seem months and the weeks seem years and turned everything bitter. "That"s what I want," I told her.
She shook her head. "What I want is more time."
"More time?"
"Yes. If I"m dying now, there"s nothing I can do to change it. I don"t know if I am. But I want to go on for a while at least."
"Why?"
She started telling me about her future, about how she wanted to dance. I told her that my mother used to be a singer and a dancer a long time ago. She started telling me about how fast things change and how fast time pa.s.ses, as if that would convince me to throw away the gun and go home. But thinking about the future made me the more convinced never to go back. The future to me was nothing anymore. Fifty or sixty more years without Stirling, and then without Grandmother either. And the guilt of what I had done would catch up with me when this strange tiredness lifted from my mind-and then what?
"There"s too much future," I told her. "I"m too tired. I can"t live for that many days; I"ll go mad. If I"m not condemned to death or put in prison ..."
"You don"t know what"s going to happen in the future," she said.
"I know roughly what"s going to happen in the future. And there"s no possibility that it can be good. I want to start again."
"But dying isn"t a new start with this same life; it"s something else."
"How do you know what it is?" I was suddenly angry. "And you can"t tell me what to do when you don"t know a d.a.m.n thing about me."
"I"m not telling you what to do. Listen-don"t people need you back at home?"
I shook my head. No one needed me; I had failed them all. I hadn"t run fast enough from the hills, and I couldn"t bring Stirling back. Grandmother had needed me with her, but I had turned my back and marched to Ositha and left her alone to grow frail and helpless. And I wouldn"t be able to stop the soldiers taking her away.
"Won"t someone need you in the future?" she said. I didn"t understand what she meant. She must have seen it in my face, because she went on: "There might be someone you"re going to help, or someone who will need you one day years from now, and if you were dead, you wouldn"t be there to do it."
"Did you ever wish you were dead like this?" I demanded. "No, I don"t think you did."
She didn"t answer. Then she said, "It was a long time ago, and I was only small."
"What did you do about it?"
"I started counting the days to make the time pa.s.s."
"Right," I said, without much interest. "And then what?"
"I don"t remember, but one day I must have stopped counting."
"Why did you count the days?"
" To teach myself how to survive in normal life, I suppose, when everything was different."
"How old were you then?"
"Five years old."
"Five years old and counting the days pa.s.sing?"
"It"s not a big tragedy. It"s just my life. Maybe there are reasons why you want to die and you don"t. Maybe there aren"t. I don"t know either way. But I lived ten years more after that and now I"m here talking to you."
She still seemed silver and distant in the rising dawn, as if she was not really there at all. I put out my hand to touch her, but I could not reach across the stream. And I didn"t dare to do it anyway. I thought that it might make her vanish. "You are some kind of angel," I said then. "So please, just tell me what to do."
"I"m not an angel. But I"ll tell you what to do."
"What?"
"Put down the gun and go home." And then she began to fade. "Listen," she said. "I don"t know if I"m dying or coming back. I don"t have any choice. Maybe I"ll regret all the things I didn"t do, but there"s no way I can change it. Everyone dies in the end. Everyone ends up in the same place, and usually they don"t have a choice about it. Killing yourself is not the same." She was speaking fast, as though she wanted to tell me these things before she left me forever.
She went on. "My father was twenty; he was a good man and he"s gone. My Nan was fifty and we all needed her, and we still need her, and there"s nothing we can do about it now. It doesn"t make sense. People die when they could have done so much if they had stayed alive. And for some reason I got more time and they didn"t. Maybe it"s just chance that I was left and they went, or maybe there"s a reason, but you can"t change it either way if you"re the one left to carry on."
"You haven"t done what I"ve done," I told her. "I"m fifteen years old and I shot a man. Now tell me how to carry on."
I didn"t say it bitterly. I wanted her to tell me. "Please," I said. "Tell me how to carry on."
And then she was fading. I reached out. "Take hold of my hand," I told her. "If you take hold of my hand and prove to me that you"re real, then I"ll put down the gun and go home."
She was too far away. I got up suddenly. "Don"t leave me yet," I said desperately. I stepped toward her, into the stream, and for a second I didn"t even feel the water around me.
And then I was alone in the eastern hills, up to my waist in a cold stream in the dark, with a gun in my hand. The moonlight was gone.
I began to lift the pistol again. And then I thought about Stirling, eight years old and gone, and all the things he would have done-and all the things he had done already, all the things that made me miss him like this now, like it was too much to bear. And then I thought about Ahira, and the moment when I realized he was dead and it was my fault-and no matter what evil he did, no matter how little his future might have been worth to the world, I had taken it from him and he could never do anything else again. And my heart hurt too badly for me to go on living, and the weight of what I had done was already too much to stand, but suddenly I couldn"t do this either.
Because some acts were easy to commit and yet could be regretted forever-that was what I realized then. I had shot Ahira and I would pay for it. And killing myself was too great a thing to do. It was the same thing.
I let go of the gun. The water carried it away, dashed it against a rock, and then pulled it beneath the surface. I felt more despairing than I had in all these past days since Stirling had died. It"s strange how easy it was to pull the trigger of the rifle and shoot Ahira. And how hard it was to get up, turn around, and walk back home.
Aldebaran brushed the tears from his face as he jogged down the steps of the English hospital. And Anna stirred and looked up into the light. She had been dreaming.
Ryan ran to her. She saw him drifting in her vision, his head still bandaged, and tried to sit up, then collapsed back down again, out of breath. There were tears on his face. "Why are you crying?" she murmured.
"I was worried. They said that you were all right, but I was not certain." He knelt beside the bed and watched her face. "Anna."
The surroundings were sharpening in front of her eyes. A bleak white room, with a large window. "Where are we?" she said.
"In hospital. Do you not remember?"
Her head was aching and the room still shifted in her vision. The early sunlight through the blind was lying in stripes across the floor. She put her hand to her face, then started when she felt the st.i.tches in her cheek. "Ryan, what-"
"They are just scratches, really," he said. "Gunshot wounds. One in your shoulder, one in your arm, one in your cheek, one in your side. None of those bullets. .h.i.t you, Anna. They only grazed the surface. How is that possible?"
"I don"t know. Am I really back here? Ryan, I thought I was gone."
She reached for his hand. There was a drip attached to her own, and he took it carefully. "You were unconscious," he said. "Aldebaran thought it was shock; you pa.s.sed into Malonia and back again, and it might be too much to do that. And the things that happened-Anna, I am sorry. I should have done something. I did not think they would take you."
"It was not your fault. You couldn"t have done anything."
He looked as if he was about to speak, then stopped and shook his head.
Anna put her hand to her neck, out of habit, and found the necklace there. "Aldebaran put it round your neck before the ambulance came," said Ryan. "He thought you might need it." He brushed the last tears off his face, but more fell.
"Don"t cry," said Anna. "Ryan, I am all right."
She tried to sit up again. He propped up the pillows behind her. "What did you tell Monica?" she said. "How did you explain these?" She touched the st.i.tches on her cheek.
"I said that we got lost out on the hills and fell in the dark. To explain the bruise on my head and your injuries. I don"t think the doctor believes it, but ..." He blinked the tears out of his eyes. "What could I have said? How can you tell the truth when no one would believe it?"
"I didn"t know if I would see you again," Anna said. "I didn"t think I would wake up. The last thing I remember, I was in the church and I thought I was shot. But I had the strangest dream...." She shook her head. "I can"t remember it now."
Then she thought of something. "But Aldebaran was here; I know he was."
"Yes, until a few minutes ago. When he knew you were going to be all right, he had to go home." Ryan glanced toward the window, but Aldebaran had already pa.s.sed out of sight. "He is going back to my country. Things changed, Anna, last night. They say it is a revolution. Lucien is dead, and the others-Ahira and Darius Southey and half the military leaders. Not Talitha. No one dares to kill a great one. But she is captured, and Aldebaran is no longer an exile."
A doctor appeared suddenly at the door, and Monica behind her. Monica stood for a moment and stared at Anna. Then she was running across the room, her heels clattering on the floor. "Thank G.o.d, thank G.o.d," she was saying, her own tears falling on Anna"s face. "What the h.e.l.l were you thinking? You wandered off into the hills without even telling me! Anna, I didn"t dare to phone Mich.e.l.le! You are all she has; what would I have said? And-"