Vikram left his parents sitting with the rest of the village around the communal fire. They were in shock, just as everyone was in shock, but they understood that he and Rachel had to be alone. Apart. Their grief, like their condition, was unique. They could share it with no one but each other. No one else could possibly understand.
Vikram had always struggled to control it, the condition that had been named mnemothesia just for him and his sister. He hated that name, how reductive and clinical it was, how utterly it failed to describe what had been with him almost from birth. Unlike Rachel, he had not benefitted from therapeutic education in how to manage the condition, instead living his early years in a chaos of recollection. He’d had to teach himself how to control perception, how to identify authentic experience and separate it from the total recall he carried in his head at all times. It had taken him years to learn how to unfocus the whole picture. How to choose information, interrogate it for value. It wasn’t until he’d begun the deliberate pursuit of polylingualism that Vikram had found a way to put it in order. The complexity of language had given him discipline in a way nothing else had.
He knew his metaphysical and philosophical versions were imperfect. His mother, who had been his first tutor, had given him the frameworks he needed to understand moral choices, to give context to pleasure, emotions, and other human experiences normally learned through socialization. She couldn’t help him now. No one could help him. He was in free fall, all of his mental discipline crumbling just as all human creation was now crumbling. Every waking moment was there in his mind at once, a mosaic made of shifting sand.
At first, it was all he could do to keep breathing. He hadn’t been able to keep food down, and the desire to claw out his own eyes had been almost irresistible, but then he’d seen his sister. The look in her eyes shook him, the way the whites were visible all the way around, like a terrified animal. Her pain was enough to give him strength, to refocus his mind. He caught her attention from across the table, and nodded his head to indicate they should go, that he would be along shortly.
It was a steep trail that led up the sky burial ground. This was where the monks had given the remains of the dead to the vultures, offerings that had been made for thousands of years, the traces of which no one would ever find. The Griffon vultures took the soft tissues, and the Lammergeiers cracked and ate the bones, devouring the last of the decedent’s remains, leaving little more than a stain to witness them.
Neither of these familiars were in evidence after dark, but Vikram could see the little fire in the near distance, a burning glow in the heavy, ozone laden darkness. He paused to look up. A thin, vertical streak of white light burned up from the horizon, disappearing into the cracked sky. Silent lighting still arced across the heavens like static, piercing the occasional wave of purple aurora. If this was disturbing, it was nothing to the dark ocean now lapping at the feet of the Himalayan mountains. It was illuminated in shades of pale green and purple, reflecting the lighting as it fractured the sky above.
It was impossible, he told himself. It was impossible that even the most powerful nuclear blast humanity was capable of inflicting on it could have so dramatically altered the surface of the planet. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to model the possibilities. The one thing they did know, the fact that encompassed all others, was that the ocean had surged up like God’s own wrath, and covered the human world, drowning everything Vikram had ever worked for, nearly everyone he’d ever known, and the society that had given him meaning. It had taken a day.
He thought very seriously about walking the twenty paces to the edge, and stepping off. His body would break on the rocks, a feast for the vultures. He wondered how long they would persist, those consummate survivors that were now the last of earth’s fauna. With an effort, he turned himself back to the path, and made his way up to where his sister waited.
Vikram found Rachel holding herself, her eyes wide and red as she stared into the fire, her cheeks stained with the tears that would not cease. She did not weep, or sob, but gazed unseeing into the flames. As he crunched through the gravel, she raised her head, eyes bright, her lips parted as though she wanted to ask, wanted him to tell her that what they had witnessed was not real. That it had not happened.
He helped her up and put his arms around her, feeling her shake with despair, feeling his own shock, his own terror infused into the sound of her pitiful weeping as she let herself go.
“Why would someone do this?” she whispered, nearly unable to find her voice.
“I don’t know,” Vikram said, wishing he could give her more. Wishing he could find an explanation for why any human mind would seek to bring about this end.
He could not understand. He could not give her understanding. He only felt pathetically grateful that whatever this judgement was, it had spared Rachel. He wanted to weep into her shoulder, but he held back. Her pain was more important, and as long as he held her foremost in his mind, he could hold back the tide of insanity threatening to consume him.
Crunching feet on the pathway made them raise their heads. Sergei picked his way towards their little camp, bottles of vodka in hand. They had not invited him, but Vikram was glad he’d come. Rachel turned to see him, and she too seemed glad, if only for the sweating bottle of Stolichnaya he held out to her.
Together they sat. Rachel did not object to Sergei’s closeness, nor did he seem inclined to antagonize her. Vikram noticed the mobile phone sitting next to her, but he could tell by her shattered state that she had no hope of her young man having survived.
Vikram raised his eyes to Sergei, who showed no sign of outward trauma, but was instead introspective, something very rare for him. Growing up, Vikram had acquainted Sergei with his own particular psychological profile. He’d amused himself by teaching Sergei how to approximate certain human expressions and emotions, though he’d never be able to truly impart their deeper meaning to him. Sergei was a psychopath, and thanks to Vikram, he was an especially high functioning one. But he did, also thanks to Vikram, look on the Kori family as kin, and as with most psychopaths, did not incline towards harming them.
The thing Sergei had for his sister had always troubled Vikram, but he felt that made it more important that he fashion Sergei into an ally — though neither of them would ever call the other “friend”. It was important to keep him well-disposed, and close at hand. And he’d been useful in other regards. Vikram didn’t relish the violent shuffling the new order would experience when the remainder of humanity arrived. Having a man of Sergei’s distinctive qualities might make a difference for his family’s future — such as it was.
“Sakhalin?” Vikram prompted, studying him. “Your mother?”
“No word,” Sergei said, taking a pull off the Stoli and then handing it to Rachel, who did the same. “Father’s losing it. Everyone’s losing it.”
“But not you,” Vikram said in a tight voice.
Sergei only stared at him across the fire, silently reproaching him for even bothering to mention it. They both knew Maria Vetrova was dead, and they also both knew that Sergei couldn’t care less. That was true on any day.
“Some must have survived,” Rachel observed a little thickly, though she didn’t seem that interested in the prospect. “They’ll come here, won’t they.”
“Likely.”
“What then?” she wanted to know. He looked right at her, saw the bottle of liquor dangling in her hand. She had ceased to relinquish it to Sergei, and now half of it was already gone.
He didn’t like the state she was putting herself in, wanted to stop her, but what was the point? He knew that she was hurting just as much as he was. Her experience of their condition was different than his, thanks in part to his own careful work in helping her learn to cope with it, but it was still damaging and painful for her.
She had an organic level of organization he lacked thanks to the early tools he’d given her— the counting, contemplation on the unquantifiable nature of chaos, and other diverting meditations. As a result, her behavioural and emotional development had been much more natural than his, but her mind was still a churning engine, burning on the fumes of the same infinity of now-irrelevant knowledge. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to intoxicate herself out of experiencing the death of meaning.
Instead, Vikram raised his eyebrows to Sergei, who shrugged. Vikram then turned his face towards the swollen sea, wanting some relief from the heat of the fire. He gazed out, his eyes picking out the horizon as though expecting to see the ships already making their way to this last little continent.
With any luck, the members of the Church of the Revelation had been killed by their own divine gesture, but Vikram had never counted on luck, nor would he start tonight. He knew they were responsible for hacking the satellite and driving it into the earth, but he did not yet have a unified theory. He doubted if he ever would. He couldn’t say what was or wasn’t possible, and it ripped him apart to be so powerless. He thought about Eugenia, his work, all the people he relied on, the people he’d manipulated, the people who needed him, nearly all of them gone.
The sound of glass on gravel raised Vikram’s head. The bottle of Stoli had slid from Rachel’s hand as her eyes closed, and her head fell back on her neck. He was about to get up, to go to her, but Sergei slid over to take her weight as she began to fall back, putting his arm around her shoulders. Vikram felt his throat close as Sergei let his knuckles brush under her jaw, barely touching her.
“She’s like a leopard that’s been sedated,” he said with a grin, letting his thumb move over her lower lip, then pulling his hand back as though expecting to get bitten.
He was evidently not concerned with what Vikram thought of his handling of his sister’s unconscious body. Vikram felt an exquisite bloom of horror unfolding inside him as he perceived the fondness in Sergei’s expression as he looked on Rachel. His brow furrowed as he moved a lock of hair away from her face. When her eyelids fluttered, he smiled as though surprised and charmed by this.
“Enough,” Vikram warned, pulling him from his reverie.
Sergei raised his eyes to Vikram, and Vikram could see the calculation falling into place. Eyes that had been full of affection now flattened into the pitiless blue, nearly black in this oppressive darkness. The smile broadened, twisting at one corner. Vikram knew, just as Sergei now understood, that the dynamic between them where Vikram had the means and the ability to protect Rachel from him had fractured. The look in his eyes said clearly as though he had spoken the words.
I can take her whenever I want, and you are not strong enough to stop me.
Vikram was surprised to feel the stick in his hand, the other end of which was burning brightly in the middle of the flames. He stared at his adversary, waiting to see what he would do. Sergei licked his lips, then tilted his head in what seemed to be respectful approval of Vikram’s signal of intent to do violence to him if necessary. With exceeding gentleness, he lowered Rachel to the ground, where she slept on, oblivious to the danger.
Sergei rose to his feet, looking down at her with that strange look on his face. Strange because such regard, genuine and without malice, was so alien to his features. Then he looked at Vikram, and his face resolved itself into that familiar cold amusement. He turned and headed back down the path, disappearing into the bruise coloured darkness.
Vikram held fast to the burning brand until he could no longer hear Sergei’s footsteps.
