Five
“Have the gates of death been revealed to you?’” the young sorcerer read.
Death. Everyone died. A few of them made something of themselves before they died, made themselves remembered for one or two or maybe ten generations if they were lucky, before their legacies crumbled to nothing. Some were just nothing to begin with. The billions and trillions born in other Eventualities were dead. Everyone died and was forgotten. That fact was clearer to Lucca than to anyone else; she had seen eons of humans live their brief little meaningless lives before the short, inevitable end. Everyone died, everyone…except Lucca.
“To me?” Lucca said. She spoke honestly. “No.”
The sorcerer shut the book. “Then that’s as far as we’ll get in the Book of Job.”
What? She felt a sudden stab of anger—was it this easy to get her hopes up? “What was the purpose of all that? What was the rest of the book?”
“The rest of the book is the answer to Job’s suffering.”
“And?” It was ridiculous, but something within Lucca needed her to read the rest of the story. It was a foreign emotion, something beyond the rage that had swelled up within her against the absurd god of Job’s world, who punished the innocent and ignored human pain by showing off his own power.
“Why? Why did Job suffer?” Lucca pressed.
The sorcerer lifted his head to look her directly in the eye. For the first time in her life—her cursed, immortal life—someone was looking into her insides, and could see who she was. Just another one of the humans she loathed.
“‘Where were you,’” he said, “‘when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.’”
“Oh.”