He woke to the sound of rain.

By now, Sadik had grown so used to the raining of blood, so inured to the sky brimming with a grim red haze, that he immediately knew what was falling upon his face, even as consciousness struggled to rise. The drops were as heavy as pebbles. They oozed between his fingers, his hair, the creases of his mouth, the folds of his joints, always wet but never slick, gradually forming into smears and crusts. He opened his mouth to breathe, and his tongue was battered with a warm, salty taste.

When he opened his eyes, a giant eye blinked down from above, nestled in the belly of a blood-red storm.

He tried to sit up. When he pressed his hands to the ground, he felt the softness of a linen dress beneath him. Before he could react, Kavaia gasped for air, opened her eyes, and sat up so quickly that she nearly launched Sadik from the confines of her lap.

“Mare’s cunt,” she said.

Sadik tried to untangle their legs.

They were no longer beneath the dome of stars. Instead, they sat upon a desolate length of beach,  where the rings of sand seemed to stretch forever. To their side, insects buzzed above a scum of seaweed. A lonely sun was setting across the ocean, and the waves were little more than folds in the tide, crawling over the shore in thin, quiet films.

There was a stillness in the air. Only the patter of blood seemed to disturb it. When Sadik looked up again, the eye of the storm was continuing to watch him—its eyelashes were composed of thousands of arms, and its pupil was so large that it almost appeared as an eclipse of the sun. Perhaps it was, in a way.

The air waited. Clouds hung above.

Kavaia jostled his armor.

In the distance, a solitary figure sat upon the sand, in the flat expanse between the wind-swept dunes and the gentle crawl of the tide. Her legs were hugged to her chest. She did not move.

“Can you stand?” Kavaia asked.

He checked his body. His limbs were whole, his skin unblemished. All his injuries were gone. He was not sure if that was part of the vision—the simulation—or if the surgery bed was already healing his wounds, far away in the real world. For now, it didn’t matter.

He stumbled out of Kavaia’s lap. She rose to her feet, clumps of sand falling from the chines on her tail. He leaned against her thigh, steadied his balance, and slowly began to walk.

It took them several minutes to reach Calisto. They journeyed from the soft sand down to the wave-beaten barrens, taking care not to slip on the pebbles and seaweed. As the human grew closer, as Sadik was able to make out more and more of her person, he felt a mixture of emotions surging within him, each one wrestling with the other.

He still held some awe for this woman, this machine that had created the gods and blessed them with Glimmer. He felt an instinctual need to bow and pray.

He felt some pity at the sight of her.

He felt a deep, seething rage.

Gradually, with every step into the sand, his anger began to win.

She had ruled Acheron beneath a cloak of lies, taking great pains to keep the people distracted and faithful. She had slaughtered Aleph in the ruins below the surface. When her plan to find a successor failed, she had murdered Ilios with great cruelty, and attempted to cast the blame upon Rushan.

As he drew close to the sitting woman, the full scope of her crimes seemed to wash over him at once, like the waves creeping across the sand. It was all her fault. She had made his entire life meaningless. All his battles, all his sacrifices, everything he had ever held in faith. How could he have ever thought of forgiving her?

How could he stand her pleas for mercy?

How could he ever. . . .

Kavaia began to walk faster. When he looked up at her, she gave him a quick glance, her hard scales and leathery throat growing soft in the dim twilight. Saffron eyes reflected the gloom.

Let me speak, her expression said.

Sadik blinked, unclenched his hands, and fell into step behind her. Just ahead, Calisto rested her chin against her knee, strands of blonde hair falling across her face.

“Hello,” she said.

They stood an arm’s length away. Here, sitting on the sand, so close that they could reach out and touch, Calisto was a small and diminutive figure. Her head barely reached the height of Kavaia’s knee. She stared at the ocean with a deep, weary exhaustion.

Far away, over the miles of silent ocean, a small sun was cresting toward the horizon, bathing the sea in a dying light.

The wind curled Sadik’s hair.

“You know,” Calisto said. “It’s funny. You think about making a speech, for someone. You run trillions of simulations. By the end, you’re convinced that you have this perfect thing to say, when you finally get the chance to talk. To someone. Anyone. You’re ready, you’re waiting, you want to get it out of you more than anything else in your life . . . and now it’s all gone. Suddenly, the words don’t feel right. They’re clumsy, they’re not good enough. It just makes it worse. Why did you ever think it would matter?” She made a noise in her throat. “If either of you take any lessons from me, it’s that things stay the same, but they always change.”

Kavaia clasped her hands together. Sadik wiped blood from his cheek.

“What a fucking curse,” Calisto said.

Above their heads, the eye of the plague bristled between the clouds. Thousands of hands pulled the eyelid apart. Lightning rippled like tendons.

Calisto leaned to the side, scooping sand between her fingers. “So, yeah. Greetings. Welcome to my prison. Never mind the death storm hovering above—Aleph has finally penetrated my inner matrix. It’ll reach the anchor station, in the near future. For now, it’s just taunting me.”

“I don’t think so,” Sadik replied.

Calisto opened her palm, letting a trickle of sand fall against her boot.

“It seems,” Sadik said, “that the plague is ever-changing. It has built a city from memory. It has sought my mind for lessons and truth.” He gestured. “It isn’t a taunt. It wants to learn, from you.”

“The rain of blood began with you,” Kavaia said.

Calisto tossed the sand away, scowling.

Above their heads, there was a sound of splitting flesh. The hands were still pulling on the eye. It no longer seemed as if they were keeping it open—instead, the thousands of limbs almost appeared to be holding it in place, or preventing it from growing further. Voices thundered beneath the rain. Words were indistinct.

“Calisto,” Kavaia began, “I think—”

“Diana.”

“. . . pardon?”

For the first time in their conversation, the woman looked up at them. “My name. It’s Diana.” She gestured. “Just, uh . . . yeah.”

Waves murmured across the sand. Flies surrounded a rotting husk of seaweed, gorging on the blood and decay. The woman looked down at herself, across the desolate beach, and back up at the two of them, as if peeking for their reaction.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Diana,” Kavaia said. “As it happens, my name used to be Zolzaya. There is a certain power in changing your name, isn’t there? The mask begins to mold your face, even as you wear it.”

“Is Zolzaya your real name?” the woman asked, quietly.

“Not anymore.”

“It’s the name you were born with.”

“My tribe is gone. So is the young woman who bore that name. It’s . . . not who I am, any longer.”

“Well,” the woman said, “my name is Diana.”

“Even still?”

The woman nodded.

“Hm. Very well. It’s a lovely name, I think.”

The woman looked away, hugging her knees to her chest. Kavaia stepped forward, lifted her tail, and sat on the sand beside her, her white dress mirroring the color of the woman’s lab coat.

“Diana,” Kavaia said. “Tell me of this place.”

The woman glanced at her, then out toward the ocean. After a moment, Sadik walked a few steps to the side, blocking her view of the waves. He folded his arms across the scales of his armor.

Around them, rain scattered and heaved.

“Purgatory,” Diana said. “In the myths, Acheron is the shore of a river, but I thought the ocean served it better. If you think about it, there is an ocean between us and the rest of civilization. A very, very big ocean.”

“The stars,” Kavaia said.

Diana gestured toward the horizon. “This is a simulation. I’ve kept it running since I took command of Acheron, and I always come back here, after I’m done peeping at the surface. I’ll just sit here, waiting. Trying not to think.”

“Does this beach bring you comfort?” Sadik asked.

“No. God no. Jesus Christ, I fucking hate this place.”

“Yet you always return,” Kavaia said.

“It’s a reminder. Like the bodies in the anchor station.” Diana swiped a stand of hair. “If I made a perfect simulation, where I was happy and had friends and wasn’t stuck on this godforsaken rock, then I’d lose sight of what I’m doing. I’d forget the point of all this. No matter what I do, I’m stuck in an endless purgatory, like all the people of Acheron. So I sit here, and I suffer.”

“The dead that have not died,” Sadik said. “Unable to cross the ocean, but still wandering through the shores, aimless and abandoned.”

“A good metaphor, don’t you think?”

Sadik kept his arms folded. Diana shifted her gaze away from the ocean, returning his stare without any challenge.

“I’m curious,” Kavaia said. “Were you always a machine?”

Diana gave a dry laugh.

Kavaia gestured at the woman’s clothes, tracing the fabric of her coat down to the laces of her boots. “You certainly don’t present yourself as such.”

“I’m a wetware AI,” Diana said. “Alpha level ripcore. In layman’s terms, I am directly modeled off the neural patterns of a real human brain. My source code—her name was Diana. My name is Diana, too. Our technology could replicate the trillions of connections so accurately that I consider myself the same person, functionally speaking.”

“A clone,” Kavaia said.

“Yeah. So what?”

Kavaia began to lean closer, still towering above the woman. “What happened to your . . . source? The code of your soul?”

“The real Diana, you mean?” She took a deep breath. “It’s a long story.”

Sadik grunted. “Your vest.”

Diana looked down at her chest, brushing sand off the dark, hardened fabric. “What about it?”

“It’s armor. Like mine. You were a soldier—or, at least, you were drawn into a conflict, against your will. The same one still lying out there, in the true world.”

She waved a hand. “Like I said, I was a non-essential software engineer. I programmed nanites. Kept the Doorway from being severed. Just another face in the crowd, for a while. When the conflict got bad, I was put in charge, because everyone else was dead. When the conflict got really bad, I made the decision to make an AI of myself, because someone needed to stay in control of the vital systems, and it didn’t look like I was going to live through the week.”

“Is that what happened?” Kavaia asked.

“No. We pulled through. Got a little awkward, after that. Alpha level ripcores are extremely illegal across civilized space, for reasons that are a little obvious once you think about it. Plus, you know, it’s kinda weird talking to yourself.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Eventually,” Diana said, “the real Diana—me—she heard a report that our secondary spaceport could still be salvaged, far away to the west. She took a team of engineers and left Acheron behind, promising to come back and help once she repaired some of the atmosphere trawlers.” The woman shook her head. “Didn’t work, apparently. Never heard from her again. Later on, we got additional reports that the people out there had gone fucking crazy, starting this . . . death cult that worshipped the nanites. Resurrection, salvation, whatever. They were killing people for their ‘souls’.”

For a moment, Sadik thought of Isaac.

“It was weird,” Diana said. “Basically turned into a cargo cult, praying to airlocks and dead xenofauna and whatever. Like, imagine? I knew these guys. I went to their birthday parties. Jesus Christ.” She blew out a sigh. “I mean, at that point, all of us knew we weren’t ever leaving Janus again, so I don’t know how much I blame them, really. Why not go a little crazy? Honestly.”

Kavaia hummed, letting blood trickle through her teeth. “You’ve outlived your progenitor.”

“I’ve outlived everyone.”

Sadik glanced up at the storm. By now, the giant eye had splintered into dozens of smaller organs, each of them blinking through the sagging vapor. Arms struggled against the churn. If he watched closely, it almost seemed as if the cloud was eating itself alive.

Slowly, beneath the breeze, he began to hear voices.

“No!”

“Kill her!”

“Mercy!”

“We can preserve—”

“Destroy it all!”

“No more violence!”

Sadik turned his gaze back to the sandy shore, blinking several times.

“The thing you have to understand,” Diana said, “is that civilization is fragile. Its weakness is its complexity. One system fails, and another goes with it, and now you have a cascade, and there’s nothing a single person can do, because these things are larger than people, and they have a lot of inertia.”

The air quivered with pressure. Blood fell in gushing sheets, like the opening of many wounds.

“You would think,” Diana continued, “it’s easy to start again, since people are still civilized at heart, but that’s not how it works. In a developed society, people are specialized. They don’t know everything, the people that did know things are dead, and now we can’t rebuild what we don’t understand. It’s like scooping water in your hand—you’re always going to lose something. Once the next generation is born, once the years start slipping on, the gap between the past just keeps growing larger.”

Insects fled. Pebbles sucked into waves.

“I did my best. I—” She opened and closed a fist, as if trying to grab a memory from the air. “I really tried. You know? I was fair. I listened. I kept the peace. For a while, I let the people govern themselves, and I always obeyed their laws. Meanwhile, I’m doing everything I can to send a message back to Earth.”

A bubble of screams ripped across the sky.

“They never answered,” Diana said. “To this day, I still don’t know why.”

When Sadik raised his head, the clouds had become less of a storm, and more of a fleshy pustule, the tendrils and bulging nodes seeming to cling to the very firmament of the world. Faces moaned across the surface. After a moment, something black began to spread across the center.

“And . . . and. . . .”

Diana took a breath. Her face was pale, her hair limp and disheveled. Kavaia raised a hand, hesitated, and drew it back.

“And civilizations are fragile,” Diana said. “Oh, you have no idea. How easy it is to fall. The things I had to do.”

A face bulged from the fleshy mass. There were sharp ears, a toothy snout, eyes brimming with gold. Around this face, the others began to scream.

“They all died. Every time. No matter what I did, no matter how well I organized, or compromised, or rationalized, the people of Acheron always found a way to fall apart, and I would have to start again, leaving the ruins buried in the darkness around my station. They would kill each other. They would run away. They would starve, or grow decadent, or try to rebel against me, and, I mean, when they try to invade my complex, just because I’m a spooky machine, and they don’t like being ruled by a computer, I have to defend myself. Right?”

Rushan peered down from the sky, his black fur bristled with red.

“I can’t let the torch go out. You know? When push comes to shove, I have to act.”

Hands leaped from the flesh. Voices cried.

“At first, it was horrifying. After a while, it became infuriating. And, even longer after that, I decided not to give people the chance anymore.”

“Diana,” Sadik said, still looking at the sky.

The woman did not glance at the looming, snarling jackal. Instead, she shrugged her shoulders, continuing to stare across the ocean. “Do you understand why I killed Aleph, the first time it grew conscious?”

Kavaia seemed to consider running.

“It’s exactly the reason why AIs like me are illegal. Superintelligence. An uncontrollable god. You let them free, and they will explode. Entire star systems gone. Just like that.” Diana held a hand to her chest. “At the very least, you can understand me. Right? We can talk to each other.” She pointed above. “Do you think this thing is understandable? Do you think it’s even close to being human?”

Rushan opened his mouth. Faces came spilling from his throat, as if his tongue had become a pink, throbbing mass of souls, where thousands of hands reached from the central mass, grasping at his teeth, pulling on his gums, blinking and moaning. The jackal clamped his jaws. He chewed. Blood slabbered across the sky.

The storm heaved and morphed, as if reeling in pain. Faces screamed in desperation.

“Stop him!”

“Please!”

“Forgive! Forgive!”

Below his chest, a colossal eye emerged. It was the same eye Sadik had seen upon awakening. It focused its gaze upon the world, as a true god would rule their domain.

“I did my best,” Diana said, looking only at the waves.

Sadik felt a surging of tension, an immensity of pressure. For a moment, the entire world seemed to shudder, as if the tendrils of the storm were leeching into the fabric of reality, and they would suck the marrow of Calisto’s world until nothing at all remained.

Aleph glared down at the woman. Wind and flesh surged before it. Across the waves, a sun crested toward its death.

“I kept us alive,” Diana said. “I did.”

Rushan opened his mouth again, and the bodies of thousands rained from his jaw, screaming as they fell.

“Diana,” Sadik said, stepping forward.

“If you were in my position,” Diana continued, “if you knew what we had lost, if—if you had been forced to make the same decisions that I—”

“Diana!”

Something snapped. The woman blinked, tearing her gaze from the ocean. She looked at him, pale, wide-eyed, the skin of her face sagging with exhaustion.

“Look at what you’ve done,” Sadik said.

She breathed. Her gaze snapped back to the ocean. For thousands of years, she had come to this beach in search of solitude. It was a refuge. A comfort, in its own way. Her eyes searched for the distant horizon, as if some manner of rescue would come across across the waves, if only she kept watch.

He knew now, more than ever, that she was utterly terrified.

Sadik took another step forward, standing above the seated woman. He pointed at the sky. “Look at what you’ve done.”

Diana closed her eyes.

After a moment, Kavaia leaned to the side, placing a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Please.”

She took a long breath, opened her eyes, and gazed up at the sky.

There, above the world, a mass of flesh twisted with life, its skin studded with faces, its belly weeping with blood, a jackal’s complexion rising through it all, his eyes like moons, his growling like claps of thunder, eclipsing the voices of the desperate, and the screaming, and all the souls lost within the churn.

Beneath it all, the eye of Aleph stood unmoved by the surrounding souls, watching its creator with all the intensity of a newly risen sun.

“Oh, God,” Diana said.

“Listen to me.” Sadik took a knee upon the sand, coming down to her level. “You have to answer my questions.”

Diana kept her neck craned, taking ragged breaths.

“Did you rule Acheron,” Sadik said, “knowing the ancestors would never return?”

“Yes.”

Rushan’s face split into a snarl. The wind screamed across the sand.

“Did you create the gods to control the people?”

“Yes.”

Kavaia withdrew her hand, gazing at the waves.

“You took away our democracy. You made use of slaves. You had us kill thousands of barbarians, just to hoard the last of your technology.”

“Yes,” Diana said, barely a whisper.

Sadik gazed at her for a moment, his face solemn, his hair blowing long in the wind. “You murdered Ilios.”

Her voice cracked. “Yes.”

“You did everything you could to kill Aleph.”

“Yes.”

“If you had won this war, if all of us had died in its fighting, you would have buried our corpses, somewhere beneath the world. You would have just created another Acheron, never acknowledging the past.”

“. . . yes.”

Sadik gazed at her again. Slowly, Diana lowered her head from the sky, meeting his gaze with an expression that was plainly afraid.

“Why did you choose me as your replacement?” he asked.

“Because you were a leader,” Diana said, “who had made . . . bad decisions. You had innocent blood on your hands, and you were so ashamed of yourself that you wanted to die. I thought we would understand each other.”

“I don’t want to die anymore,” Sadik said.

“I know.”

“Do you still want to die?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She looked down at her trousers, the laces of her boots. “I’ve lived too long. I’ve made too many mistakes.” She opened her hands. “I’m so tired.”

“That is selfish,” Sadik said.

“I guess it is, yeah.”

“You will only cause more suffering by your absence.”

“Really?” Diana asked. “Look at me. Look at this.” She waved a hand over Sadik and Kavaia, up toward the sky. “I have nothing. Everyone hates me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Sadik said.

She shook her head, wiping blood from her cheek.

“In fact, I think you were right, Diana. I think we have understood each other.”

Above their heads, the storm was changing. Hands emerged from the central mass, leaping over the bodies of thousands, all of them reaching for Rushan. His colossal face was slowly drowned beneath a bubbling tide of souls. There were snarls, a gnashing of teeth, a defiant rage to the end. Voices cried in celebration.

Through it all, the eye of Aleph continued to examine the world below. Its gaze was unmoving, its pupil a piercing black sun. It watched with rapt attention.

“Diana,” Kavaia said.

The woman lifted her gaze.

“You created the gods.”

She nodded.

“Even if I was not born a god, in essence, you have created me.”

“I would say so,” Diana said.

Kavaia looked down at the woman, the length of her throat beginning to bulge and expand. “My divinity was a harrowing existence.”

“I know.”

“I was shunned, and loathed, and so consumed by my loneliness that it destroyed the person I was. I don’t know that I’ll ever truly heal.”

Diana did not answer.

Kavaia took a small, wavering breath. “You did this to me. On purpose. My suffering was by design.”

“Yes.”

For a moment, the crocodile seemed unable to speak.

“It’s how the system works,” Diana said. “I didn’t want the gods to rebel, so I created divisions between them, gave pleasure to some and suffering to others, all to breed resentment and local conflict. That way, they were too busy fighting each other, instead of me.”

Sadik looked between the two women. Behind him, a wave whispered its way across the sand.

“One more question,” Kavaia said, her voice quiet. “Did my existence have a purpose? Did my suffering bring any small good to the world?”

There was a pause.

“I wanted it to,” Diana said.

The wind cut across the dunes. Pebbles rolled in a foamy tide.

Kavaia looked at the woman sitting beside her, trying to keep a composed expression. After a moment, her face broke apart, and she was not the former deity who had fallen from the heavens—instead, she was the goddess of death once more, whose powers brought her agony, and whose duties brought her scorn, and whose immortal life had been so miserable that she had felt compelled to take Sadik hostage. All the pain seemed to spill from her at once.

She breathed, working her jaw, clenching fists against her knees.

Diana watched her calmly.

With teeth bristled along her snout, Kavaia tore her gaze from Diana, looking across the sand at Sadik, who was still kneeling in place, watching the two with a careful expression. He gave her a single nod.

She released her breath. Their eyes lingered. Eventually, she returned the nod.

“Diana,” Kavaia said.

The woman raised her brow.

“One thing I’ve learned,” Kavaia said, as if her voice might crack at any moment, “is that forgiveness is not only a gift to your enemies, but a gift to yourself. It is allowing your soul to heal. It is a chance to free your mind from the shackles of the past. It’s not easy, and it may not be righteous, but . . . it is a kindness. It is an end, and a beginning.”

She looked at the woman beside her.

“I forgive you.”

The woman blinked, opened her mouth, seemed unable to find any words, and looked away, her hair falling in messy strands.

Above their heads, the legion of hands had consumed the visage of Rushan, dragging it back into the ocean of malleable flesh. The black anger receded. Skin breathed free. Below, the eye of Aleph was turning, shifting rapidly between the three figures. Its pupil dilated with surprise.

Diana wiped the hair from her face, adjusted her coat, and turned to Sadik.

He took a moment to think. Slowly, almost absently, he realized there was no need. He had already made his decision.

Long ago, he had been a boy from a poor village, who had suffered great hardship to reach a land of promise. He had abandoned his family, served as a soldier, risen to power, made a number of poor decisions, and now he was an older man, looking back on his life, wondering where he had gone wrong, and what could have been better.

He was just like her.

He understood her decisions, her mistakes, her desire to end it all.

And if you understood a person, you could not truly hate them.

He looked over to Kavaia. She gave a single nod. He felt his love for her, and the love carried him through.

He reached forward, pulling Diana into a hug.

“I forgive you,” he whispered.

She trembled, returned his hug, and slowly began to cry.

The wind kissed their hair. The waves murmured at their feet. Around them, the air was cold, and the sand was wet, and the sun was bleating the last of its light across a desolate sea, and Diana wept at the sight of it all, weeping for the prison she had built for herself. When Kavaia wrapped her arms around the two of them, joining their connection, she began to weep all the harder.

Somewhere, far above, the rain ceased to fall. A colossal shadow vanished, letting a small twilight fall upon the sand. Sadik did not glance at the sky, but he felt the absence of pressure, the lifting of a fearsome gaze, and he knew the storm of flesh had already disappeared.

Aleph began to speak, like a klaxon blaring from the heavens.

FORGIVENESS

Soon, it was gone, and they were alone, stranded upon a beach.

“End simulation,” Diana said.

The world shuddered. The waves froze in place, the wind ceased its blow. All the colors began to drain, and the smallest texture of the sand began to dull, moving into a blur, becoming a smear of substance, until all of it was gone, and there was nothing left behind, like ashes to the wind.

They held each other until the world was gone.