Terrence didn’t answer for several seconds. “They are related to the tattoos.”
Obviously he didn’t want to talk about it. Erin decided not to press the issue. She paused, trying to figure out how to ask the next question. “Have you been visiting any other worlds during your stay?”
Terrence raised an eyebrow at her. “How would I do that?”
“I’ve read the police reports on you. They say you claimed to have come from another world. That you travel between worlds.”
“Yes, but I’ve been in prison for the past three years. How exactly am I supposed to build and power a world-jumping device in my cell?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you needed to build a device. The police didn’t mention finding any devices at your campsite.”
“I’d only arrived a few days before. I hadn’t started building one yet.”
“Why didn’t you bring it with you when you came here?”
Terrence shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. A world gate is like a gun, firing its contents through the fabric of reality. You could, of course, load a world gate inside of another world gate with you, so you didn’t have to make one when you jumped, but I didn’t have the foresight to do that when I came into your world.”
“I see.” Erin nodded, her eyes locked on his, hoping to draw more out of him with her curiosity.
“This isn’t the first time that I’ve suffered for that oversight,” Terrence reflected, leaning back in his seat. “Once I wound up on an undeveloped world. Metal was scarce, highly prized, and a pain to work with. I ended up using water as my conductive device, and charged it with a bolt of lightning. Took me forever.”
“I bet.”
Terrence shook his head. “Doubtful. People never believe me.”
Erin considered arguing the point, but didn’t feel comfortable lying to him. For all his quirks, he seemed unusually perceptive.
Instead she moved on with her questions. “Did you ever expect your travels to end this way?”
“What way?”
Erin stared at him for a moment. “With you dying. Being executed, I mean.”
“Oh, right, that. Believe it or not, the thought did cross my mind. I’ve contemplated the possibility of being destroyed by gravity or the vacuum of space, being eaten by unspeakable monsters or consumed by aggressive microorganisms, drowning, dying from exposure, drawn and quartered, killed in a duel, shot in a battle, vaporized, buried alive. To name a few.”
“All of those?”
“Absolutely. Of course, my biggest concern has always been the microorganisms. I came up with some protective measures, but the thing about bacteria and viruses, they can be quite creative.”
Erin nodded. “Interesting. Tell me, do you miss your home?”
“From time to time. I’d been through about eight worlds over the course of seven and a half years before I came here. This was supposed to be my last stop before I went home.”
“Instead it’s your very last trip,” Erin lowered her voice and pushed as much sympathy as she could into her tone.
Terrence thought for a moment. “It certainly looks that way.”
Behind her, Erin heard the guard unlocking the door to the interview room. She reached for her recorder and tried to think of some meaningful last question to ask.
All she could come up with was, “Is there anything you want me to do for you?”
Terrence thought for a moment before responding. “Are you coming to the execution?”
“I’d planned to.”
“Wear sunglasses.”
Erin stared at him blankly as he was shackled and led away.
***
Before being taken to the viewing room, Erin got in a few more interviews, two with guards. One of them considered Terrence a genius who had probably been set up, while the other thought Terrence was a know-it-all who probably did a lot of terrible things in his life and deserved worse than he would get. She also spoke to one of the protestors outside the gate, an elderly woman who bemoaned the fact that after years of protests and petitions, the state hadn’t simply kept killing people, but had sped up the process.
Inside the viewing room, Erin saw a dozen or so people that she hoped to talk to later, but she’d learned very quickly that trying to get someone to talk on record in the moments before an execution was a fast way to get on a lot of peoples’ bad sides.
Instead she sat silently, keeping all expression off her face, for fear of offending anyone who might be up for a conversation afterwards.
She waited until they darkened the viewing room and revealed the room where Terrence would be executed to put on her sunglasses. It made it a lot harder for her to see what was going on, but it had been, quite literally, his last request, and as much as she’d become jaded in the course of this project, she couldn’t bring herself to deny him something so small as this.
Having attended several executions before this one, Erin was well acquainted with the routine, but she watched carefully anyway. Much of her book would be quotations, the main place that she’d be able to sneak her own voice in would be in observations like these, and the smallest moment just before a man died could be the most poignant.
As the guard pressed the wet sponge against Terrence’s head, Erin noticed, for the first time, that the scarring on top of his head was a bit denser than the scars that ran across the rest of his body.
The guard spoke softly to Terrence, undoubtedly telling him that this was his last chance to say anything he had to say.
Erin leaned forward. While her interviews would constitute the majority of her book, it was pivotal moments, like this, around which her work centered.
Terrence nodded, his expression surprisingly relaxed as he looked out over the people who had come to watch him die.
“Good bye.”
And that was it.
Erin grimaced, it wasn’t bad, in terms of what she wanted for her book, but she didn’t think it would the feature, or the title.
A few more moments of preparation passed, and then all eyes moved to the clock. Why it was that a man sentenced to die needed to die so precisely, she couldn’t begin to guess.
The minutes ticked by.
Erin’s eyes moved back to Terrence. She’d been interested primarily in his tattoos when she saw him, but seeing him with his arms strapped down and his head held in place, she couldn’t help but focus on his scars. They were surprisingly precise. She hadn’t realized it when he could move about, but now they looked as though they had been measured out by someone who knew what they were doing.
The odd thing about them was how dense they were, like someone hadn’t simply cut into the skin but had irritated the cut somehow.
The mood of the room shifted, and Erin turned her attention back to the clock.
They were down to the last seconds.
What had he said in the interview? He wanted to build a world gate, but he needed the materials and the energy to power it. Three years might have gotten him the materials, but what could possibly power something that required energy in the neighborhood of a lightning bolt?
Erin’s mouth went dry and her entire body rigid.
The second hand hit the twelve, and three men simultaneously hit three buttons, only one of which triggered the completion of a circuit.
Erin knew what to expect. She’d seen it before, men spasming as electricity coursed through their bodies.
Instead what she saw was a white light. For almost a second the entire room filled with light, and then it was gone.
Everyone else in the room still covered their eyes, blinded by the flash. Erin’s sunglasses had given her enough protection to recover before anyone else.
She ripped the glasses off and leaned forward.
Terrence was gone. In his place she saw his prison garments, smoldering from contact with the thin wires that sat in the chair, forming, for a moment suspended in time, the vague outl
ine of a man. The wires lay exactly where Terrence’s scars had sat.
As Erin stared the clothes moved from smoldering to fully on fire, and the wire collapsed under the weight of the burning cloth.
***
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