He thought of grading classwork, hunting trips on cold mornings, and attending prayer sessions while he thrust into her. He needed to stay under control. He also needed to pay attention to Gentiola. He could feel her writhing under his grip. She wanted to be in control, touch him, use her hands. He altered his angle; she liked it. This was a game of catch-up to her; he had to bring her back to where she’d been before he’d interrupted.
She was getting close again. It was tempting to forget himself and just keep going.
She got to that point; any second now and she'd come. Charlinder pulled out, pressed Gentiola's wrists into the mattress, and forced himself to stop moving.
"Would you do it again?" he demanded.
"What?!" Gentiola reacted, eyes flying open.
"Would you create another Plague?"
"You're bringing this up
now
?!"
"You never answered my question."
"I told you I didn't expect to live long enough to see the same conditions!"
"But that wasn't the question," Charlinder pressed on. He was far from comfortable like this. His shoulders and upper back were cramping up, and he wanted nothing more than to act like nothing had happened and pick up where he’d left off. "I didn't ask you how long you think you'll live.
If
human beings got back to the same numbers they had in the early 21st century, and
if
they made a wreck of the Earth in the meantime, and
if
no one was willing to do anything about it except what was convenient for them, and
if
you were still around to see it happen,
would
you create another disease to wipe them out?"
She didn't answer right away. She didn't push him off, she didn't tell him to finish fucking her and they'd talk later. Instead, she looked off to the side and began to cry. It wasn’t just a few polite tears, either; her face contorted into a knot of agony like he’d seen in one of her memories. Her body shook with each raw, choking sob that tore from her throat. It took over her and didn’t let up; she could not run out of tears as she grew tired, and she could not merely get it out of her system and calm down. She seemed not just unhappy but in physical pain. It was a sensation he couldn’t ignore; he let go of her hands but otherwise didn’t move and didn’t look away from her. She pulled her hands in and wiped her eyes.
"No," she moaned at last.
"Why not? What would be different the second time around?"
"It was...awful," she said. She looked up again, still with tears pouring from her eyes. "I knew there would be death, but I never expected the suffering."
"You created a virus that ravaged the internal organs, and you didn't think there would be suffering?"
"I don't mean the sickness," she explained. "It was...the mass suicides, because people were afraid of the disease. The looting and rioting, the suicides when people lost too many loved ones, all the funerals held in the same church in a day..." she went on while struggling to bring her crying under control. "I knew there would be pain, but to see that much...
misery
. I won’t do that again."
"And if the goddess in Earth spoke to you again, and told you to do something, like She did in 2010? What would you do?"
"I wouldn’t make another Plague," she sobbed. "I’d think of something else to do. I don’t care how She’d punish me, I won’t be a part of that again."
Now it was Charlinder's turn to pause. He hovered in his tense, uncomfortable position while he let her answer sink in. Did he believe her? Could he accept her answer?
"Yeah," he whispered. Yes, he believed her. Gentiola took deep breaths, and soon enough, she was mostly calm.
"Char, I want you to finish," she said.
"As in, you want me to get back inside you?" he asked. He was still hard, and she was never one to lie about what she felt, but after the memories he’d just brought up... "Are you sure?"
"Yes," she breathed. She brought her hands around and stroked his upper arms. "I’m sure. I want to feel something other than this."
She responded just as agreeably as in their first time; she rose to match his thrusts and wrapped her arms around his back, closing her eyes and sighing in pleasure.
They stayed in bed, lying together under the sheets without talking, for a long time afterwards. Gentiola lay draped over Charlinder, clinging to his side. Her face looked downwards so he couldn't tell if her eyes were open, but he was certain she wasn't asleep.
Soon enough, she lifted her head and looked up at him. "I noticed you were looking at my scar," she said.
"It doesn't look like something you got accidentally," he explained.
"As long as we're here," she began, and rather than complete that thought, she went on, "I didn't get it accidentally. After the Plague was finished, I thought--well, first of all, in the middle of the pandemic, I destroyed my lab. I think you know enough about what I felt at the time, so I don't need to explain that. Anyway, when the pandemic was over, as I told you, I used the globe and told the survivors it was safe to come out," she recalled. She held her chin just above her hands which overlapped on his chest. Her affect was perhaps as calm and neutral as he had ever seen her. He could have been listening to one of his spinning buddies in Paleola relating a conversation with her mother. "There were several hundred thousand people left, and it took a few days. I didn’t sleep and barely ate until I was finished. And then I thought, that was enough," she said with a flourish of the hand that belied her understated tone. "I thought I would join the Plague victims, and relieve the survivors of my presence. So, after I was finished telling the survivors to come outside, I went up to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife, and went outside. I magicked open a little trench in the ground, sat down in it, and used the knife to...open up the femoral artery. The insects could have my body, I thought. It hurt like hell, and it bled like a faucet, which was the idea, and soon enough I lost consciousness and I went under thinking, that was it." Another flourish of the hand. "Then I woke up early the next day, just before sunrise, in a puddle of my own blood and a world of pain."
Charlinder shifted out from under her, but kept his eyes on her to show he was still listening. Gentiola sat up and continued talking.
"It must have been three-quarters of my blood volume on the ground, but there I was, waking up."
He pulled on his shorts and trousers.
"So I started screaming--no words, I just screamed, and it scared away a lot of birds. I felt like a train had run over me for at least a week afterward, and I couldn't walk normally for a month, but I did walk out of that trench and I haven't aged a day since."
That was enough for Charlinder; he was covered in cold sweat and his stomach was churning. He rose from the bed and made for the door.
"Char, you're all sweaty and gray," she observed, "and your aura's going crazy."
"I need air," he said.
"After everything else I've told you..." she said, clearly puzzled as he clambered out of the room.
He stumbled through the hallways, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other until he found the back door and got outside. After everything else she'd told him, indeed, he shouldn't have been surprised, and he wasn't. However, the image of Gentiola laid out in her shallow grave had brought up the memory of another thirty-seven-year-old woman lying on the ground with her leg torn open. Her brother held her hands together and flinched at her screams, and her teenage son held her good leg to the ground to keep her from thrashing about while an elderly white man set her broken bone.
Charlinder leaned on the outside wall, looked at the ground, and vomited up the day’s meals.
There was Gentiola, now dressed, holding out a glass of water. She looked at him like she didn't fully understand what was the matter, but she stroked his back while he rinsed the bile from his mouth.
Chapter Thirty
Aftershock
"I'm not a terrorist," Gentiola said later in the day. They were outside, taking care of the bunnies on a small folding wooden table that stood at waist height. Charlinder combed Nevila while Gentiola plucked Enkelejda of her molting wool. Another, Zamira, waited her turn. The statement caught him off-guard because neither had spoken since they'd set up the table, and neither had mentioned terrorism all day. "I never was a terrorist."
"Did anyone ever say you were?"
"You sort of implied it, the day after I told you about the Plague." Charlinder tried to recall making this accusation, and Gentiola caught his blank look. "When you were talking about Eileen and her friend Patricia."
"Patricia! Right," he recalled. He had, in fact, brought that conversation from Eileen's journal up to Gentiola that day, but the later confusion had pushed it into the background. "No, Genti, I don't think you were ever a terrorist."
"Because terrorism isn't about taking lives," she continued, regardless of Charlinder's response. "It's about using violence to control living people. The terrorist's real target isn't the casualties of his attack; it's the survivors, the bereaved and the witnesses."
"And you didn't intend to leave any survivors," he observed, without malice.
"I didn't want anyone to be afraid of me," she replied.
"You accomplished that much," said Charlinder. "No one knew what hit them."
He called his Anima again that night. She entered the room with raised eyebrows, wearing a sort of what-does-he-want-now? expression.
"I haven't even said anything," he said defensively upon seeing her face.
"I know what happened today," said Eileen.
"So you don't need me to explain it to you," Charlinder responded.
"Well, yes I do," she returned. "I still need to hear about the events in your own words."
"Yeah. My own words. Okay, then. Gentiola answered my question today. She says she won't do it again."
"And she said this while you were in bed with her."
"Well, she wanted to shag again," he pointed out. "This morning I wondered if I would ever hear an answer. Now it's here."
"And I suppose Genti should have thought about that before she asked you to put your cock in her again."
"Hey, I can't believe she told me. For a moment there I thought she was about to pop my balls off."
"But she did
not
pop your balls off, Char, she gave you the simple yes or no you had requested."
"Yeah, and she says no. And she’s obviously had a lot of time to think about this, so I can’t help but think it would have been so much easier on both of us if she’d just told me that when I asked the first time."
"It would have been easier for you, but easier for her? That’s disingenuous and you know it. She hasn't had anyone to talk to in over 120 years and she knows exactly how she brought that isolation on herself. You can't expect that anything about the Plague is an easy question to answer, or even to hear."
"Okay, I'm sorry. The point is, she says no, and of course that was the answer I was hoping to get, but now it feels weird."
"You didn't honestly think that was an easy question, now did you?"
"No, I guess it wasn't. Only, okay, great, she won't do it again. She says she won’t give in to the voices in her head if it comes to that. Is that supposed to be it, now? Am I supposed to say, just, 'Well, that's all settled, then,' and go my merry globe-circling way?"
"Char, are you trying to figure out what other questions to ask, or wondering how much longer you want to stay here?"
"Neither, actually."
"Anything else you want to know from Gentiola probably won't have an answer until long after you're dead. So, how about those three things we put on the chopping block?"
"What about them?"
"Have you thought about it?" asked Eileen.
"You mean, is she dead on, delusional or deceitful?"
"Yes, which one is it? Since you were so dead set on asking her if she’d create another Plague, I guess that means you accept she wasn’t lying about that."
"Oh, I never really considered that. It’s like you said; if she were going to lie about anything, she didn’t have to tell me that she created the Plague, of all things. And like you said earlier, she didn’t benefit from any of this."
"And you keep referring to the voices in her head, so I guess that means you’ve decided she’s delusional."
"Of course she’s delusional," said Charlinder. "Creating a disease that destroys nearly all of humanity? That’s not the behavior of a person in touch with reality."
"But it would make sense for her to commit a singular act of destruction with no benefit to herself," Eileen explained, "if there really were a goddess in the Earth who instructed her to create the Plague. How are you so sure she isn’t right about that?"
"Because the whole idea is preposterous," he answered. "This is the planet that’s already seen the Black Plague, smallpox, the Spanish Flu, and HIV. If there really were some conscious power living in this planet, and She wanted a new disease to wipe out humanity, She wouldn’t need Gentiola’s help."
Eileen looked satisfied, maybe even impressed. "Okay, then. You don’t doubt her sincerity. What if she was right about the big picture, though? Suppose humanity really was about to destroy itself even without her help?"
"I have no doubt she knows a lot more than I do about the situation at the time," said Charlinder, "but she didn’t even know that her Plague would lead to rioting and mass suicides. She couldn’t predict what would have happened without the disease."
"Fine, that’s settled. So why did you summon me again?"