Unimatrix's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

Unimatrix woke on a cot inside the library's inner ring. The walls hummed. He had a roof and a leash, and he had a question the roof could not answer. He did not know what Intimatrix had become while he was gone. He had cut contact to protect her. Now the silence on his side of the bond felt like a door he had shut on a stranger. He found Venomcodex in a lower chamber, standing at the edge of a ring of dark polished stones. Green fire ticked in the crown on its head. A tall mirror leaned against the far wall. Its glass held a burned red mark, a flame around a black center, like something had pressed a soul against it and left a print. "I need to see her," Unimatrix said. "Not reach her. See her. From inside the walls." "That was not the vow." "The vow was that I do not reach for her. I want to look. One way. No signal out." Venomcodex studied him. "The stones will hold the direction. The mirror will hold the image. You will not speak. You will not push. If you push, the walls thin, and I close it." "Agreed." He stepped into the ring. The stones warmed under his boots. The mirror's burned mark dimmed, and the glass cleared, and then it was not glass. It was a small room he did not know. Intimatrix stood at a table, her back half turned. Her white hair was cut shorter. The suit she wore had thin violet lines he had never seen. She was writing something down in a careful hand, one word at a time, then crossing out every other word. He watched her stop. She lifted her head. She did not look at the mirror. She looked at the air beside it. "You are here," she said. Flat. Not a question. He kept his mouth shut. The vow held. "You lie less when you are quiet," she said. She set the pen down. "I lose minutes now. Whole minutes. I write them down after so I know they happened. I used to hear you inside those minutes. I do not anymore." She turned her face toward the mirror. Her eyes found the burned mark and held on it. "Do not plant anything in me again," she said. "I will know. I always know now." The mark on the glass flared. Venomcodex lifted one hand. The image folded shut. The stones cooled. Unimatrix stood in the dim chamber and felt the shape of what he had learned. She was not waiting for him. She was rebuilding herself in the gaps he had left, and she could feel him across a wall she had not been told about. Any reunion would meet a woman who tracked her own missing minutes and would count his lies before he finished them. He stepped out of the ring. The leash felt shorter now, and more his own.