Sunyi Dean

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times. We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write.

Mind eaters destroyed themselves with their own hunger, for the process of feeding consumed them even as it fed them. An ouroboros was the perfect representation of that bleak concept. Even if given Redemption, which enabled mind eaters to feast on books instead, the desire for mind eating never went away.

“Girls don’t have girlfriends, stupid.”

“Some girls do,” she said, because she’d read about lesbians in books she wasn’t supposed to touch.

“I’ve been married fifteen times and signed eight divorce papers,” Cai said, with the unflinching directness of a five-year-old. “I have been four different kinds of religious and not religious at all. I’ve almost died twice and passed twenty-two driving tests. I remember going to war and killing a civilian by accident. Her blood ruined my uniform.”

“I remember those things even though I haven’t done them. I suffer those sins without committing them—that’s how the vicar would say it. I am not those people and I’m also not me. I can’t ever be me, I’m too full of other lives.”

“Twenty-five times you’ve asked Are you a good person? You asked them, not me, but now I’m all of those people and the question is mine, twenty-five times over.”

“Isn’t it? Every person I’ve ever consumed thought I was a monster, in their final moments. They were afraid of me.”

“Well, I’m twenty-five grown-ups, so I can say bad words twenty-five times more than you,” Cai said.

“Hes, don’t bother with the board, it’s platform six.”

“Are you sure—”

“I’ve eaten the train schedule. Let’s go.”