Two parrots had died in my bare hands.
Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.
You get to remember that first kiss: two hours of standing in front of the house on a cold winter night as your boyfriend worked up the courage to go through with it. You can remember how you shifted back and forth from one leg to the other, shivering because you were only wearing a short skirt and stockings, and you can remember how many times you almost gave up hope, how you hated him for being so stupid, how you hated yourself for being too scared to grab him and kiss him before you died of frostbite. But do you remember the elation when it finally happened? Do you remember how you lay awake for hours with a huge smile on your face, as you counted the ways your life had changed? No—your memory is too busy skipping ahead eight months, when suddenly you and your boyfriend can't agree on anything, you know he makes up excuses to avoid seeing you, and when the two of you do get together it's only because you're hooked on those hour-long petting sessions on that couch in your basement. You get clean, clear memories of all the people you hated or feared, but the people you loved? Only the times they annoyed you.
Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.
Then imagine doing the same thing with two men watching.
One of the men is a lunatic. The other is so innocent you can't bear him to see your life, the many petty ugly things you've done.
But that's not the end. Imagine reliving someone else's life while you're reliving yours. A life with two strands, lunacy and naïveté. Oh, yes, relive a childhood so tormented that your personality crumbles to fragments, then a dozen harsh psychological treatments intended to heal you, then the blood-red fury of the Singer suppressed but not extinguished. Every memory from infancy to adulthood seen through two sets of eyes that never agree, every tenderness seen as weakness, every love dismissed as infatuation.
Reliving everything through a black filter.
Imagine doing all that in the time it takes a parrot to die.
My eyes met the Singer's at the moment I smashed the parrots against his head. We shared the parrots' deaths. We shared our own lives.
Then white noise. Static. The Singer screeched and reeled blindly away from me, staggering backward toward the fog machine. He collided with the nozzle and grabbed at it, seizing it with both hands. Maybe he was just catching his balance, maybe he was trying to break something, I don't know; but he gave another scream and wrenched the nozzle loose from the machine, setting free a bloom of fog that had built up inside. Berserk, he began to smash the broken nozzle down on the machine, over and over, howling all the while.
The Singer wrapped in fog—a gaunt silhouette in the night, backlit by beam-lamps. THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.
Then the noise changed, the sound of his howls. I had parrot blood on my hands and maybe the sound I heard was only in my mind, but the explosive fury was overlaid with louder moans of pain: not from the Singer, but from Alex.
All this time I hadn't moved. My head was swimming, and like Roland after the parrot died in his hands, I was on the verge of passing out. But when I heard Alex's cries, his pain and terror, I forced back the edge of my dizziness and clumsily crawled off the altar. Fog was billowing everywhere, spreading fluidly over the grass. I staggered into it, the cold, dusty-smelling CO2 fog, trying to stay on my feet long enough to reach Alex.
I found him in the heart of the fog bank, sprawled across something my muddled mind didn't recognize at first—a box, some kind of open box, like the one Alex and I had found on the hill. But as I stumbled closer, I saw it was the hopper for the fog machine, its lid smashed off in the Singer's rage. Steam boiled off the dry ice inside, curling and churning around Alex's prone body. He lay flat across the exposed ice, his bare chest pressed against it.
He screamed as the intense cold burned him like fire.
I grabbed his ankles and pulled weakly, trying to drag him off the ice pile. He didn't budge; I wondered if he'd actually frozen in place, like flesh bonding to sticky-cold metal. Then his legs kicked feebly out of my grip and I heard the voice of the Singer in my mind. "No, milady. I have sought the cold and found it. Cold, true cold, bright cold."
Alex howled.
"You're killing yourself," I shouted to the Singer. "You can't survive in there. God only knows what it's doing to your heart."
The Singer just laughed.
"Lyra?" Alex whispered. A real voice, forced through his lips by lungs that could scarcely breathe.
"Yes, it's me." I fumbled around to the other side of the hopper, only managing to stay on my feet by clinging to the edge of the bin. "Yes, Alex, I'm here."
His hand moved slightly, but his palm seemed stuck to the ice. I could feel him steeling himself, Alex's voice in my mind muttering, Do it, do it. Then he heaved the hand upward, ripping off most of the skin as he freed it from the ice's grip. Bleeding, he held it out to me. "Lyra."
I took his hand, holding it high above the ice. My fingers still dripped with parrot blood; Alex's blood mingled with it, in the fog and the cold.
The Singer's thoughts crooned with the cold, but I could hear nothing from Alex. Whatever went through his mind was too gentle for parrot blood to transmit.
"Alex," I said. Then a fresh surge of dizziness washed over me and I sank into its blackness.
I woke groggily, roused by burning pain. When I had fainted, my arms slumped across the dry ice, still holding Alex's hand.
His hand was as cold as the ice. Fog filled the hopper and dribbled out over the sides.
I looked down at my hands, still lying against the ice. Their skin was white and puckered, and they didn't ache much; the serious pain was higher up, near my elbows. I knew that was a bad sign—so much nerve damage in my hands, I couldn't feel how badly I was hurt.
That was when I realized the night was silent—no sound of thoughts. Not Alex's, not the Singer's, not mine. Parrot blood glistened on my fingers, parrot blood crystallized to ice; but my hands were too injured for the blood to work.
Pulling my hands off the ice left strips of skin behind. I scarcely felt it. For a moment, I considered pulling Alex's body out of the hopper, but I couldn't move my fingers. I couldn't grab him, I couldn't hold him; and it wouldn't make a difference if I could. It was far too late for anything to make a difference.
I took one last look at him lying there, burned and blue, silent on a bed of fog. Then I began plodding back to camp.
My hands will never move again. Jerith's medi-bot works on them daily to stave off gangrene, but repair is out of the question; that has to wait till I get to a populated planet. The bot says a good med center might be able to cut off my arms at the elbows and put me in a tank till they grow back.
No one knows what to do with the others in our party, still marked by parrot blood. A week has passed, and the telepathy shows no signs of wearing off. One of the roadies tried to cut away his bloodstained skin with a knife, but he passed out before finishing the job. Now the medi-bot keeps him under sedation.
Sedatives are handed out freely these days—the bot can synthesize enough to keep everyone subdued until the rescue ship arrives. The ship is scheduled to land an hour after sunset tonight, and the Planet Protection Agency has a good record for punctuality.
They've reclassified Caproche as TPI: Total Permanent Interdiction. Jerith will have to start over, another dig, another planet. He says he doesn't mind.
Jerith spends a few minutes with me every day…but with blood on his hands like everyone else, he mostly stays out in the wilds—a long way out, where he can't hear anyone else's thoughts.