“Did I get it all?” she said.
“No. The Death-Boy got it.”
“Tommy-Ray? Oh Jesus. So now the Jaff has a son and a half.”
“But you were touched too,” Raul said. “So was I. It got into my hand. Climbed up to the elbow.”
“So it’s us against them.”
Raul shook his head. “I can’t be of use to you,” he said.
“You can and you must,” she said. “There’s so many questions we have to have answered. I can’t do it on my own. You must come with me.”
His reluctance was perfectly apparent without his voicing it.
“I know you’re afraid. But please, Raul. You brought me back from the dead—”
“Not me.”
“You helped. You wouldn’t want that wasted, would you?”
She could hear something of Kissoon’s persuasions in her own, and didn’t much like the sound. But then she’d never experienced a steeper learning curve in her life than in the time she’d spent with Kissoon. He’d made his mark without so much as laying a finger on her. But if she’d been asked whether he was a liar or a prophet, a savior or a lunatic, she couldn’t have said. Perhaps that ambiguity was the steepest part of the curve, though what lesson she’d gained from it she couldn’t say.
Her thoughts went back to Raul, and his reluctance. There was no time for involved argument. “You simply have to come,” she told him. “There’s no getting out of it.”
“But the Mission—”
“—is empty, Raul. The only treasure it had was the Nuncio, and that’s gone.”
“It had memories,” he said softly, the tense of his reply signalling his acceptance.
“There’ll be other memories. Better times to remember,” she said. “Now…if you’ve got people to say goodbye to, say it, because we’re rolling—”
He nodded, and began to address the women in Spanish. Tesla had a smattering of the language; enough to confirm that he was indeed making his farewells. Leaving him to it, she headed up the hill towards the car.
As she walked the solution to the puzzle of the flipped body appeared in her head, without the problem being consciously turned. In Kissoon’s hut she’d imagined herself the way she most often saw herself: in a mirror. How many times in her thirty odd years had she looked at her own reflection, building up a portrait in which right was left, and vice versa?
She’d come back from the Loop a different woman, literally; a woman who’d only ever existed as an image in glass. Now that image was flesh and blood, and walking the world. Behind its face the mind remained the same, she hoped, albeit touched by the Nuncio, and by knowing Kissoon. Not, in sum, negligible influences.
What with one thing and another she was a whole new story. No better time to tell herself to the world than the present.
Tomorrow might never come.