How poetic also, then, to add this black note to their ledger, to begin to balance unmaking with making. If past destruction was inevitable, then so to is this enlightenment, this pseudo-Damascene, mid-journey conversion. Sniper neutralizes gods, Sniper makes angels.
Nina's hand closes shakily around the book and sweetly, softly, in a moment of absolute grace, she is subsumed. OA's breath leaves her in a rush; tears spring to her eyes. The loss is... all-encompassing. Absolute. All the shining things she could have been, grand and glittering thing that Nina Azarova was, crushed all over again. Year after year of darkness. A dozen, a hundred uneventful deaths. The mundanity of evil. Once again the hands of malicious others, some faceless, some not, fold her up and compress her, dust to diamond. Sniper is only the latest.
"Oh, God." Long ago some child's hand inscribed in marker, in blocky, overlapping letters, on the inside cover of this book a name. She doesn't have to open it to know. Over and over again, she'd practiced, the wet of the marker against her left hand as she'd guided the marker along it. P R A I R I E. A name she'd sign just as clumsily to a note thirteen years later, the day she walked off, the day she vanished.
This is not the cruelest way in which OA has had her potential stripped, clipped, stolen from her. It's near to, but not the worst. It is the first for which she has been, in spite of her abject devastation, in spite of the grand inevitability of mourning, grateful.
"I remember," she says, and her voice is thick with emotion, raw, angry, accusatory, thankful. "I remember all of it."
And then, rage and awe, the sharp edge of wonder: "You came and found me."
She tightens her grip on Sniper's hand, pinning them to the world, that same awful act of mercy returned.
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Nina's hand closes shakily around the book and sweetly, softly, in a moment of absolute grace, she is subsumed. OA's breath leaves her in a rush; tears spring to her eyes. The loss is... all-encompassing. Absolute. All the shining things she could have been, grand and glittering thing that Nina Azarova was, crushed all over again. Year after year of darkness. A dozen, a hundred uneventful deaths. The mundanity of evil. Once again the hands of malicious others, some faceless, some not, fold her up and compress her, dust to diamond. Sniper is only the latest.
"Oh, God." Long ago some child's hand inscribed in marker, in blocky, overlapping letters, on the inside cover of this book a name. She doesn't have to open it to know. Over and over again, she'd practiced, the wet of the marker against her left hand as she'd guided the marker along it. P R A I R I E. A name she'd sign just as clumsily to a note thirteen years later, the day she walked off, the day she vanished.
This is not the cruelest way in which OA has had her potential stripped, clipped, stolen from her. It's near to, but not the worst. It is the first for which she has been, in spite of her abject devastation, in spite of the grand inevitability of mourning, grateful.
"I remember," she says, and her voice is thick with emotion, raw, angry, accusatory, thankful. "I remember all of it."
And then, rage and awe, the sharp edge of wonder: "You came and found me."
She tightens her grip on Sniper's hand, pinning them to the world, that same awful act of mercy returned.