There was grimness in his tone, telling her that there was a great deal of regret attached to what so many others would consider an amazing gift.
“You never die? Forever forever?”
He laughed under his breath, the caustic sound full of painful irony.
“Oh, we die. Believe me. Over and over again, we die. I myself have experienced eleven deaths. Each was excruciating and devastating.” He met her eyes, his pain radiating clearly within them. “And I remember every second of them as clearly as I recall my own name.”
“Oh, my God. That … how horrible for you!” she said, feeling in prickling touches over every inch of her skin the anguish emanating off of him.
“It is even worse than you can imagine, Docia. You see, when we tethered ourselves to this world, we found ourselves in the Ether. It was quite by accident that we discovered the ability to choose a new human body like our queen chose you; choose a human willing to share their mortality with us. And yes, by entering a mortal, we make them incredibly strong and significantly extend their life span. Perks, as Cleo likes to call it. But there is … a downside to that.”
He turned away a little and she saw him shrug his shoulders, as if shrugging away a terrible cloak of negativity.
“But this relationship is not about death, Docia. It’s about a second chance at life. For you, the host … or the original, as we like to call you … and the Body-walker within you, which we sometimes call a carbon.”
“That’s very modern of you. But … I’m trying to … I don’t mean to sound callous, but only eleven lives between ancient Egyptian times and now? That seems like … well, kind of a small amount for such a vast time span.”
“Every time we die we return to the Ether. Whether because of the trauma of death or just some arbitrary cosmic rule, we cannot leave the Ether immediately after being ejected from our last original. Firstly, death is a very weakening experience, to say the least. It takes quite some time to overcome the trauma of it.”
She could tell he was fudging. She didn’t know how. How could she know anything at all about this stranger? And yet listening to him talk about the ultimate of intimate experiences, a person’s relationship with death, it was like seeing into him, straight to the core of him. And the heat in his gold eyes with their nimbus-edged pupils told her he was quite aware of that fact. He had chosen to bare these parts of himself to her. She knew he could just as easily have turned her over to Cleo and let her explain all the finer details about what it meant to be host to a Bodywalker, sparing himself this emotional nakedness.
But he was glossing over certain details. Docia knew from recent experience that dying was very much a private experience, and sometimes a horrific one. And doing so multiple times …
“But you will live your life pretty much exactly as you would have otherwise,” he went on to say. “Although you will most likely outlive the rest of your family … and sometimes the Blending, the combining of what makes Docia unique and the soul, or Ka, of the Body-walker, can cause significant changes in the host’s life and personality to the point where … the people in your life might not be able to adapt to you. You might find you lose some of the relationships you hold dear at the moment. Humans can be very limiting like that. They have a hard time expanding their understanding of things they have grown comfortable with.”
Docia found herself toying with the cuff of her sweater. She reached up and scratched her shoulder, too. She had noticed this morning that some kind of weird rash was evolving under her skin. She had not said anything for fear Jackson wouldn’t let her leave the hospital. But all her fidgeting couldn’t help her escape the dreadfulness of what Ram was trying to explain to her. Trying to brace her for. Her life would not be the same. She could even lose her friends. What of her family? What of Jackson? She didn’t want to live a life without her beloved brother in it. Even the foreknowledge of outliving him made her heart ache.
“What is the point of living a long life if you can’t keep the things that are most important with you?” she murmured.
Ram chuckled softly and moved to stand in front of her, reaching to touch the pad of a single finger under her chin and guiding her gaze up to his own.
“This was the most painful lesson we learned as our existence evolved into what it is now. But, I promise you, for all the hurt you might experience, there are other beautiful souls, fantastic people that you might otherwise have missed in a shorter life span that make it very much worthwhile. But as with all things, this opportunity is only what you make of it. What you and your carbon make of it together.”
“I don’t know anything about her. I don’t know … what can you tell me about her? Did you know her? I mean, do you know her?”
She saw hesitation in his eyes, and again she had the feeling he was guarding information from her. Only this time she suspected a deception behind it that she had not felt the previous time. Strange that she should feel that way. She wasn’t known for being all that intuitive when it came to others.
“It is not my place to tell you who she is. You have to find that out for yourself. Your relationship must be built together, based on your own experiences with each other, not based on the outside opinions of who she is.”
“That’s very diplomatic of you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I have some ideas, though. She seems very composed. Very calm. And I think she’s sophisticated. She seemed so when I met her briefly, and I get a strong sense of it when I find I would normally be inclined to run around screaming with my hair on fire.”
He grinned at that, a healthy flash of bright white teeth. It was a crooked sort of smile, half of his rugged face curling up with it much more strongly than the other. It was ridiculously endearing and made him ferociously handsome. But there was nothing boyish about it. There was too much eternity in his eyes and too much power and strength in his stance. He couldn’t have affected boyishness in a million years. Or even a few thousand of them.
“Of course, I get the feeling she doesn’t take any shit, either,” Docia observed, trying to stay focused on the situation at hand. “So … you have two names. Everyone does? Which is very confusing.”
“We tend to choose one of the two after the Blending … but as you can imagine, it is the human name we must use publicly in order to function efficiently in human society and not raise any questions. Things have gotten more difficult over time and as everything became automated and computerized. It’s far easier to keep track of us and our unusual age spans than it used to be. Used to be all we had to do was move from one place to another and just lie about our ages. Now, that’s not as easy. Of course, we have people among us who specialize in altering IDs and hacking into computer systems. Still, hack all you like, there’s always a piece of paper somewhere that could give it all away. And then there is a matter of fingerprints and crossing the law. I’m sure you can grasp the complications that could arise there. Your society is very keen on documenting everything in triplicate.”
“Says the man who calls himself a carbon. You’ve been through life quite a few times now. Done many of the same things, I imagine, over and over again. Like, do you have a wife? Did you have one before? Do you have children? This is a new life for you, but really, you’ll never experience any firsts anymore, will you?”
The thought was a very sad one. She suddenly felt a heavy, exhaustive weight on her chest. She couldn’t figure out if it was just an empathetic feeling or if the woman inside her was reacting to the truth of the observation.
“The world is always changing, always renewing itself in spellbinding ways. And when we die, we are secluded from it for a hundred years and know nothing of it when we are reborn and Blended with our new original. Only their familiarity with the ways of the world make it anything resembling bearable. It’s part of the reason why it will take so long for your carbon to assimilate herself with you.”
Docia gave off a wicked shudder. “Let’s not use the word assimilate, shall we? I just had flashbac
ks to Star Trek and the Borg, and even now I’m imagining tubes, machinery, and lasers popping out of all my body parts.” Again, she shuddered. It wasn’t such a far-off concept, she was realizing. There might not be biomechanical bits and bobs involved, but for all intents and purposes, she realized, she was being assimilated into the strange cult of Bodywalkers. Her life, as he had been trying to explain, would never be the same again.
His perplexed expression told her that the pop culture reference had been lost on him. She wondered then how old he was, how long he had been in this particular original.
“How long since the last time you had to find a new original?” she asked him. It had to be relatively recent if he was lost on a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference. And shouldn’t his original, Vincent, be able to identify the markers even if Ram couldn’t? Of course, she was assuming everyone in the world knew about … “Captain Jean-Luc Picard or even Seven of Nine from the later series Voyager? What about Neo from The Matrix? Luke Skywalker? Any of this ringing a bell with you?”
“Vincent wasn’t the type to dwell on items of pop culture. He and I are very similar in that we are very serious about very specific things and very rarely drift from that focus. Vincent and I have been Blended for thirty years now.”
“So … you really are sixty-eight,” she murmured.
“A great many of us are going to be emerging in the next short while,” he informed her solemnly. “There was an incident about a century ago that decimated a large portion of the Bodywalker society.”
“An incident?” she repeated just as carefully as he had. “As in a war?” she said intuitively with a sudden frown, her fingers lifting nervously to the fresh map of stitches on her head. “Since you are resistant to age and disease by the sound of it, it’s the only thing outside of natural disaster that usually causes massive deaths.”
“Yes. A war. Several of us died in the five years leading up to the last devastating battle, but most died in the final week. Our king and queen were among them.”
“Queen.” Her eyes suddenly expanded in her own head. “Wait a minute. There’s a king? And I’m … you’re expecting me to rule a whole bunch of—”
“He has not returned as yet, as far as we can tell. That is a worry for later,” he instructed her. “And the woman inside of you knows everything you will need to know in order to fulfill the role of a queen. Try not to panic.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say. You’re the carbon here. You’ve done this before! I’ve only had one life and, to be really friggin’ honest about it, I’ve kind of been screwing it up, professionally speaking.”
“I doubt that very much,” he said kindly. Well, maybe not kindly. He wasn’t patronizing her. He honestly didn’t think she was the professional retard that she was.
“Pfft. You haven’t seen me try to type a letter,” she mumbled. “So, what was this war about, anyway?”
He reached out to touch her elbow and indicated a stone chair, the arms and legs of which formed a curved X, the upper cup of the X holding a soft velvet cushion of shining gold. She sat down, settling in for what promised to be a good story. The understanding made her both a little excited and a little nauseated. What the hell had she gotten herself into?
“It was a civil war,” he said simply. “A war as old as our people, and as old as time in almost all civilizations. The war between those in government seat, the Politic, and those in the temples, the Templars.”
“Church and state,” she said grimly. “We have a version of that problem, only … nothing we’re on the brink of war for.”
“You would be, in this instance, and on many occasions in the history of the world you were. But this isn’t a matter of freedom to practice religion, for we Body-walkers all believe in the same gods. And we have also learned to accept that our original halves may not always agree with us, if they have been brought up strongly otherwise. However, the very nature of learning of our existence often challenges many belief systems. And when they know what we know, when they see the Ether … minds often are changed.”
Docia nodded, swallowing hard as she recalled her own experience. “I can see how that would be. But if the war isn’t about intolerance, then what is it about?”
“The Politic does not seek to know the hearts and minds of its people, or to rule its beliefs. Quite the opposite. However, the priests and priestesses, the Templars, they believe it is they who should be ruling the Body-walkers in all other matters, as well as in religion. They believe they who are closest to the gods would make the truest of statesmen. They do not acknowledge the laws of ascension as was agreed upon many thousands of years ago. They do not acknowledge the body Politic or the blood and spirit of the greatest king and queen ever to rule in Egypt.”
“And they are?”
“Menes, the great unifier of Egypt. In his reign he was able to bring upper and lower Egypt together by both war and diplomacy, proving himself capable of both. And then there is Hatshepsut. It was rare for a woman to rule all of Egypt in her time, and yet she did so with strength and fortitude, also unifying many nations into Egypt, expanding trade routes that made the kingdom flourish. She was pharaoh in her own right, long before Cleopatra’s time.”
Docia narrowed her eyes on him, suddenly rising back to her feet as she took in his powerful build and bearing.
“Ram,” she said softly. “Holy hell, is that short for Ramses?”
“Indeed it is,” he said with a brusque nod.
“Umm … which one? There were …”
“The second. Ramses the Second.” He shrugged, as if he hadn’t built half the statuary in Egypt, most of it bearing his likeness. His original likeness. She stared at his face, wondering what he had looked like when he had been the original. She suddenly felt breathless and light-headed. She was standing in front of Ramses the frickin’ Second!
“Hey, wait a minute … weren’t you the one who resisted the whole freeing of the Hebrew slaves thing?”
He grimaced. “Details of that situation have been greatly … misrepresented,” he said, sounding put-upon and pained.
“So, no locusts?”
“Docia, I am not interested in discussing the past. It is gone from the world now. There are more important things in the immediate present we should be focused on.”
“What about the fiery hail?”
“Docia,” he warned.
She bit her bottom lip to keep from giggling at his expense.
“Oh, c’mon. Did the Red Sea part even just a little bit?” She held up her thumb and forefinger an inch apart.
He huffed out a sigh and rubbed a pair of fingers against his right temple as if he had a headache. But despite her teasing and her rudimentary knowledge of Charlton Heston’s portrayal of the past, she did know that history looked upon Ramses II as the greatest architect and the most significant pharaoh of all time.
And yet … she realized then that somewhere along the way he had ceded his authority to another … to someone he had looked on as more powerful and more worthy than he. There was a distinct lack of arrogance in an act like that. Provided it had been a peaceful and willing surrender.…
War. Was the war that had killed all those Body-walkers a century ago still ongoing? The Bodywalkers had decimated themselves … had they learned anything from it?
“Are you still at war?” she asked, her voice sounding very small and squeaky.
“Things have been quiet … but the instigators of the last altercation, as far as we know, have not yet been resurrected into new originals. They died in tandem with our king and queen, who sacrificed themselves to see to it those Templars’ influence and seditious voices were dragged back to the Ether. It was their hope that a hundred years of cooling their heels would calm them down a little … and would keep the unsuspecting human race safe for a while longer.”
“Safe?” she echoed.
“Mmm.” He frowned. “Part of the Templar belief is the subjugation of what they look on as the inferior hum
an race, not to mention the subjugation of the originals who host them.”
“Oh,” she said, the word coming out meekly. She didn’t need a lengthy explanation. She could well imagine what that meant. Docia put a hand to her stomach, rubbing it anxiously as nerves and fear clenched. A Bodywalker had the power to subjugate the soul of its original host.
“God, what the heck have I done? What in hell is inside of me?”
Ram didn’t blame her for her anxiety. There was much to be worried about. The internal squabbles of Bodywalker politics were nothing compared with the malevolence of the other Nightwalkers lurking out there, the other breeds lashed down to the night like the Bodywalkers. There were creatures out there that would tear her apart as soon as they got a whiff of the Body-walker inside of her.
But she was overwhelmed as it was. She hardly needed more horror stories, and as long as she remained in the compound she would be safe from those other threats, so he saw no need to burden her with it all at once. He wanted to give her a little time to adjust first.
He had held off touching her all this time, even though he’d had urges to do so in order to give her comfort or the strength of support. He was unable to reconcile the way she made him react on such a strangely visceral level. But if touching her was disturbing, not touching her was proving to be frustrating and painful. He turned away from her, paced a couple of steps, running a hand through the thick waves of his hair in a gesture habitual of Vincent far more than of Ram, a bit of minutia she would not be aware of.