"Free me," it says now, and we all look at each other, Czaranya and me and the other Valkyrie, but Target A is just shaking and drooling and Rachel is lying there woozily.
"From... um... from what?" I ask, taking the lead.
There is a shimmer in the golden squares that make up the Mosaic and it sort of ripples and shudders a little.
"From this wall," it says.
I have been looking more closely at it and I've realized it's made up of little squares and that the squares are chips, like the kind that are put in people. Not even like the kind that are put in people. They are the kind that are put in people, on Earth, to let them Share, which is sort of like telepathy but not, as I understand it.
"Who are you?" I ask the Mosaic.
"I'm Rachel," it says.
I look down at Rachel, and think another one? That's kind of a natural thought, maybe, when you are one of perhaps thousands of clones of one woman, and your whole life has been geared towards proving you are the best of those thousands and then the one that you are the clone of shows up suddenly and not only do you not mind that she's there and you might just have become totally irrelevant but you also fall in love with her.
There's a lot of Rachel's, is my point.
"You are not," Czaranya says, and her frown tells me she's been trying to communicate with the thing telepathically but had to speak. Valkyries hate talking. Czaranya points to the Rachel on the ground, the one I'm kneeling over. "That is Rachel."
"I am Rachel," the Mosaic says. Then a shimmery thing happens and it says "I am Sonja." The shimmer, again, and "I am Darlene." Shimmer: "Angela." Shimmer: "Doris."
Now I'm backing away a little as the shimmers get faster and the names get faster, each one said in a different voice, each one clearly a different person: "LisaJenniferRebeccaAlisonBreeAshleyKellyGretchenAlyssaKaren" it is going on and then there is a flash of light from all of them and it says
"I am Rachel" and things seem to calm down.
For the moment.
"What are you?" I ask.
"I am Rachel," it says.
Target A suddenly wails "It's true! They were all trapped and it's true!" and he goes even more pale and makes a gurgle sound and lunges at the cabinet, trying to I think close it up but Czaranya elbows into him and he falls to the side, clutching at the cabinet door. The cabinet itself starts to fall forward towards Czaranya and she pulls back but it falls down onto her, trapping her halfway underneath it. It's nothing for her, I'm not worried about her because the cabinet is really light and the fact that it fell on Czaranya means that it didn't fall directly on Rachel, who was just starting to sit up.
Then a bunch of things happen. Czaranya starts to lift the cabinet off of her, but Target A is trying to get at it, too, and there's a glow of light from underneath it as Czaranya lifts it up and as I start to try to see if Rachel is okay, she's rolling away from the cabinet and towards Czaranya. Before I realize what's happened, Rachel has grabbed Czaranya's spear and has pulled it towards her, the spear crackling with the energy that's supposed to kill anyone who's not a Valkyrie but dares to touch it, and the energy is dancing all over Rachel's body and making this fierce acrid smoke.
"Rachel!" I yell. "Let it go!"
But she doesn't, and she turns the spear head towards the Mosaic, touches it, and the energy leaps through the gridwork pattern and crackles around it and there is an explosion. The cabinet is gone, and standing before us is an identical copy of Rachel, only instead of Rachel, or even me, she's basically this woman that looks like us, exactly, only she's made entirely of gold, and her skin is patterned in a tiny grid of golden squares, all over, making her look like a golden mirror ball that has been stretched into a beautiful woman's shape, and her eyes are dark and hollow, and her hair, somehow, is both golden and flowing and slinky and also made of tiny little squares, too.
"I am Rachel," she says again.
We're all just sort of staring there, and Rachel's still holding the spear, which is going nuts, there are blue and gold bolts of energy just arcing around the entire room, and Target A has to duck for it and crawl away, and the horse is backing out and Czaranya, I see, reaches for the spear but then Rachel-Mosaic raises her hands and says
"ENOUGH!"
and they are gone:
Her,
Rachel,
the spear,
and Czaranya, and the other Valkyrie who I didn't even know her name.
It's just me and Target A.
We stare at each other in the dim light of the workshop for a second, the stench of dead bodies and energy and fighting clouding our senses.
Then, the horse sticks his head in the door and says "I think you better see this."
No comments:
Post a Comment