When I Laid the Foundations (7/7)

Seven

     The sun was bright in the sky on the night when time collapsed into a single thread.
     Lucca checked her watch. Its bronze gears and the laws of physics told her that an unfathomable distance across the stars, the sun had already gone supernova. Death was inevitable—yet, somehow, no closer than it had always been.
     In her pocket was the weight of a single crystal. Never go anywhere without one. That was the rule she’d always lived by.
     And then, right on time, Lucca heard the footsteps she’d been expecting, and turned to look into familiar eyes. Eyes swollen with tearful rage at a tragedy that had seemed insurmountable. It still did. She remembered how she’d felt from the other side of those eyes.
     “What are you doing here?” the younger Lucca, barely an infant by proportion, asked.
     “Giving you a second chance.”
     “I wouldn’t have come here if I wanted a second chance.”
     Angry wind buffeted the mountain where they stood, tossing Lucca’s hair. She’d felt it then and felt it now.
     “You’re scared,” Lucca said and remembered herself saying. “You’re hurt. You’ve lost everything.”
     “If you think you know me so well,” the other Lucca shouted, “why are you here? You know exactly what it feels like. You know!”
     “I’ve never forgotten,” Lucca whispered.
     Silence passed between them. The wind continued to blow and the sun continued to burst, and time hung, meaningless.
     “As soon as you leave here, you can pretend this conversation never happened. Pretend you never came here. Go back to the woman you’ve always been. But look at me, and tell me that you don’t want this one day. Live for this.”
     They met eyes, and Lucca knew what her younger self was seeing. Compassion.
     “I’ll burn this world to the ground. You know I will.”
     “I know,” Lucca said gently, and she extended her hand.
     This was the grisly transaction that those nameless assassins from her childhood should have come to stop, tonight on this lonely mountainside. She knew the atrocities that the younger Lucca would go on to perform across a near-infinite number of Eventualities.
     She could shatter the crystal now and end it all. She could make this meeting, and millennia of her past, just another fluke of possibility.
     But the truth was that there was someone who needed her, a poor, unknown seller of glass trinkets on a nameless Sixth Epoch street. There were the other people she’d helped in the week of her life since then, across the ages, as she’d handed out bread and hope that the recipients never realized wasn’t grown in their time. In that week, wrinkles had begun to weather her face and innocence her eyes. Between the woman she was now and the contorted face of a younger self from millennia ago twisted in rage, somewhere between those two Luccas on the mountainside was an inexplicable salvation, locked up within this shimmering shard of the Comet she held in her hand. The bridge between good and evil swirled like smoke beneath its crystalline blue surface.
     How could she—or anyone—perform the calculus of redemption?
     Lucca turned her hand over, and her final chance at life slipped away as the crystal dropped into the other Lucca’s hand. She knew that she’d accept it. For an instant, she was both of them. Youth and age, passion and wisdom, loss and strength, memory and reality.
     “I’m sorry.”
     And one half watched as the other, a lost, vengeful, former self, vanished into the darkness.
     Lucca let out a deep, heaving breath. That was the last crystal she’d ever hold. As far as she knew, no one would ever leap again. This was the only Eventuality here, the last one. The future was hers alone.
     Lucca settled down on the grass and watched as, far below, the neon lights of the megacities slowly flickered out. A lullaby in color to all the humans who were laying themselves down to sleep and would never wake.
     For the second time under this sunset, millennia of her life apart, Lucca’s heart tore open and felt what death must feel like for people with blood in their veins. And there’s something about feeling that much emotion that causes the human muscles to shudder into laughter. Grief, joy, regret, hope, they all coalesce into a single bitter euphoria.
     Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
     It was as she laughed in pure freedom that she died in a brilliant sunset.