Intimatrix's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Intimatrix sat on the cold stone floor and tried to count her own thoughts. She got to four before one slipped. It was not gone. It was just not hers to reach. Since the split, her mind ran like a page with holes punched through it. She wanted the page whole again. She wanted him back in it, on her terms, not his. Above her, the statue of two shadows held each other in stone. She had come to this chamber because the shape of it matched the shape she wanted. Two halves, one press. She placed her palm on the woman's carved back. The stone was warm where it should have been cold. The bond opened. Not wide. A crack. A thought arrived. Step through the portal. He is on the other side. Reach. Behind the statue, the gateway of black water and broken mirrors turned slow in its frame. She had not lit it. It was lit. She held still. The thought felt like hers. That was the problem. Every thought Unimatrix had ever planted in her had felt like hers until she checked it against what she wanted. She wanted to merge. So the test failed. The planted thought and the true thought pointed the same way, and she could not tell them apart. If she stepped through on his push, he would hold the shape of the merge. She would wake up inside his mind, not their mind. She pulled her hand off the stone. The portal kept turning. "Unimatrix," she said out loud. "Speak first." Silence. Then, through the crack, his voice. Flat. Close. "I'm here." She felt under the words for the lie. There was none. He was not lying. That did not mean he was not steering. "Did you put the step-through in my head?" A pause. "Yes." The honesty landed harder than a lie would have. She breathed once. "Then take it out. I'll decide when I move." "I can't take it out. You have to." "How." "Want something else. Anything else. For one second." She closed her eyes. She thought of the shard of snow she had watched fall that morning, the way it broke into smaller snow before it hit. She wanted to see another one. Small want. Hers. The pull toward the portal thinned. The planted thought detached and sat in her mind like a stone she could pick up. She picked it up. She set it down outside herself. The portal dimmed. "Good," he said. Quieter now. "That's the rule. You lead. I follow. Or we don't do this." "We do it," she said. "But not tonight. Not through your door." "Then find ours." The bond stayed open a finger's width. She stood. The statue's two shadows still held. She had a rule now, and no place yet that fit it. She had to build the door herself, and she had until he lost patience to do it.