The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [162]
He stopped, stared at her, and suddenly the angry expression on his face wavered, his lip trembled, and tears shimmered in his eyes. “I can’t bring her back,” he said.
“No,” said Jez. “You can’t.”
She pitied him. Blinded by guilt, desperate to atone for the crimes of his past, he’d wanted to achieve the impossible. But Bess’s body was gone. He might have salvaged a part of her, but he’d never get back the girl he’d known and loved. Her skin, her hair, her smile—they’d rotted away in the grave. All he could do was move her essence from the vessel she occupied to another one. And that wasn’t any kind of solution.
But he had to try. He had to prove to himself that it couldn’t be done, that there was no way to save Bess. He needed to fail before he could be made to see.
“It’s not as simple as life and death, Crake,” she said. “You should know that. I’m technically dead. My heart doesn’t beat. But I am Jezibeth Kyte. I’m as much Jezibeth Kyte now as I was the day the Manes caught me.” She looked at Bess: an empty shell, her essence departed to wherever it went when Crake sent her to sleep. “All that you knew of your niece, all the things that made you love her … they’re gone. Gone for good. And what lives in that suit is not that girl.”
Tears had started to fall. Crake was beginning to sob. He wiped his nose. “Why are you telling me this, Jez?”
“Because you can’t change things, Crake. What you need to realize is that your niece died that night. That golem is just a memory of her. But it’s not your niece. Your niece is dead.”
Crake shook his head.
“Say it, Crake!” she urged him. “It’s been killing you every day, and it won’t stop killing you until you accept it.”
“She’s there!” he insisted, thrusting a finger at the armored suit. “I put her in there! It’s up to me to get her out!”
“You can’t!” said Jez, grabbing him by the shoulders. “That over there, that’s something else. And it loves you and it needs you to take care of it, but it’s not your niece.”
Crake pushed her away with a moan of anguish. He spun around and lashed a mass of chemical apparatuses off a nearby table, then snatched up the book he’d been copying from and hurled it at Jez. She stepped aside with ease.
“What do you know? What do you know about it?” he shouted at her. Spittle flecked his beard, and his bloodshot eyes bulged.
“I know the difference between being alive and being dead,” she said calmly. “Better than anyone, I reckon.”
Crake rampaged around the sanctum, knocking over anything he could see. When he’d smashed or thrown anything he could lay his hands on, he wheeled drunkenly against the wall and leaned there, sweating and red and spent.
“Say it, Crake,” she said relentlessly. “You can’t save her. You don’t have the power. She’s dead. Say it.”
“Alright!” he said. “She’s dead! I killed her and she’s dead and gone! Happy now?”
His words rang into the silence, and then his face crumpled and he began to cry. He hugged himself and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. “She’s dead,” he said again.
“You have to accept that,” Jez said. “Accept it. Make it a part of you. Move on.”
“Easy for you to say,” he muttered. He clambered unsteadily