The shade, the windless silence, the stillness of lifeless plain and birdless sky were such a relief that for a few minutes, none of them spoke.
Finally, Dylan raised what seemed to him to be if not the most immediate issue before them, then certainly the most important. ‘Back there after he fell into the pews, when you said you were pissed, you meant it like you’ve never meant it before in your life – didn’t you?’
She breathed the stillness for a while, gradually quelling the tumult within. Then: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You know.’
‘Not really.’
‘You know,’ he insisted quietly.
She closed her eyes under the weight of the shade, tipped her head back against the tower wall, and tried to hold fast to her tiny piece of property in the great state of denial.
Eventually she said, ‘Such a rage, such a white-hot fury, but not consuming, not stupid-making like anger can be, not negative… It was… it was…’
‘A cleansing, exhilarating, righteous anger,’ he suggested.
She opened her eyes. She looked at him. A bloodied demigoddess resting in the shade of the palace of Zeus.
Clearly, she didn’t want to talk about this. She might even be afraid to talk about it.
She could no more avoid this subject, however, than she could go back to the comedy-club life that she had been leading less than one day ago. ‘I wasn’t just furious at those three evil bastards…. I was…’
When she reached for words and didn’t at once find them, Dylan finished her thought, for he’d been the first of them to experience this righteous rage, all the way back on Eucalyptus Avenue, where Travis had been shackled and Kenny had hoped to put his collection of knives to bloody use; therefore, he’d been given more time to analyze it. ‘You were not just furious at those evil bastards… but at evil itself, at the fact that evil exists, infuriated by the very idea of evil allowed to go unresisted, unchecked.’
‘Good God, you’ve been inside my head, or I’ve been in yours.’
‘Neither,’ Dylan said. ‘But tell me this… In the church, you understood the danger?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘You knew that you might be shot, crippled for life, killed – but you did what had to be done.’
‘There was nothing else to do.’
‘There’s always something else to do,’ he disagreed. ‘Run, for one thing. Give up, go away. Did you think about doing that?’
‘Of course.’
‘But was there one moment, even one brief moment in the church, when you could have run?’
‘Oh, man,’ she said, and shuddered as she began to recognize the burden coming, the weight that they would never be able to put down until they were in the grave. ‘Yeah, I could’ve run. Hell, yeah, I could’ve. I almost did.’
‘All right, so maybe you could’ve. Maybe we still can run. But here’s the thing… Was there one moment, even one brief moment, when you could have turned your back on your responsibility to save those people – and still lived with yourself?’
She stared at him.
He met her stare.
Finally she said, ‘This sucks.’
‘Well, it does and it doesn’t.’
She thought about that for a moment, smiled shakily, and agreed: ‘It does and it doesn’t.’
‘The new connections, the new neural pathways engineered by the nanomachines, have given us some clairvoyance, an imperfect talent for premonitions, the folding. But those aren’t the only changes we’ve gone through.’
‘Sort of wish they were the only changes.’
‘Me too. But this righteous anger seems always to lead to an irresistible compulsion to act.’
‘Irresistible,’ she agreed. ‘Compulsion, obsession, or something we don’t have a term for.’
‘And not merely a compulsion to act, but…’
He hesitated to add the last five words, which would express the truth that would shape the course of their lives.
‘Okay,’ said Shep.
‘Okay, buddy?’
Gazing out of the tower shade toward the blazing land, the kid said, ‘Okay. Shep isn’t afraid.’
‘Okay then. Dylan isn’t afraid, either.’ He took a deep breath and finished what must be said: ‘The righteous anger always leads to an all but irresistible compulsion to act regardless of the risks, and not merely a compulsion to act, but to do the right thing. We can exercise free will and turn away – but only at a cost in self-respect that’s intolerable.’