USA, 2022 AD
And, just like that, Andy dies.
It’s a few months after the trouble with Merrick; a few months after the team began throwing themselves at the world’s injustice with a renewed sense of purpose. This job should be routine: in and out, a straight up rescue op. It begins easy enough; they take out the three guards no problem and clear the room where the prisoners were kept. Joe and Nicky escort them to safety and Nile holsters her gun, grinning at Andy like she always does when she gets off a couple of good shots. Andy smiles back at her, shoulders relaxing, when suddenly there’s a pop, and she’s down, a bloom of blood spreading on her left side. Nile draws her weapon in one smooth motion and takes the guard out in two shots, pop pop.
But it’s too late. Nile yells for Joe and Nicky who come running back, their faces darkening with grief as they see. Each has died enough times to know when a wound is fatal.
Andy knows it too. And fuck, it hurts.
Joe gathers Andy up in his strong arms, lifting her off the ground just as he has so many times before. Nicky quickly clears tools off the closest workbench and Joe lays her gently down.
They surround her, her team, trying in vain to stop the bleeding, even though they all know it’s too late. She lays one hand on Nile’s wrist where she’s attempting to staunch the flow of blood, and reaches for Nicky and Joe with her other hand.
She remembers a day, so long ago and yet, somehow, not so far away, when she held Lykon’s wound together, both hands pressing against flesh torn asunder.
“We’re here, boss,” Nicky says, bringing her back into the present, a sad smile softening his lips.
“Andy, no, wait,” Nile says, choking back tears. “You can’t go! I don’t… I don’t know how yet.”
Andy tries to smile at her, reassure her that there will be time enough to learn whatever she still needs to. Someday she’ll lead the team, or perhaps a different team entirely, Andy’s certain of it.
The truth about death, though, the truth they know all too well, is that it isn’t pretty. Andy’s reassuring smile turns to a grimace, and she can feel her limbs begin to lose feeling. All the years, all the millennia hit her, all at once, and she is tired, bone tired with the weight of all the ages. Her vision begins to darken at the edges, and she knows it won’t be long now.
And then she knows nothing. She is small and infinite all at once, her consciousness bleeding out of her just as surely as her heart pumps her blood from her body, and this is what it is to finally die, one last time.
And then, just like always, Andy wakes up.
Elsewhere. Ago.
Andy coughs, gasps, and returns. She blinks her eyes, and wherever she is is black, pitch black, and there is the sound of waves crashing.
Could it be that Nile and Joe and Nicky were right all along? That there is a hereafter waiting in the beyond? That she has reached some sort of shining shore?
She groans and pushes herself up, but there’s something oddly tangible and familiar about this place. She breathes, taking in the smell of sea and salt and blood and decay, and she’s pretty sure this isn’t heaven. The cloth against her skin is a finely woven linen, and she sniffs lightly at her sleeve. All at once, a memory is triggered, and it is at once both fresh and old, so old, and her breaths start heaving in her chest. It smells of coriander and myrtle and a home by the sea and her mothers and sisters.
Memories come crashing in now, in a language Andy hasn’t spoken in four millennia or more, a wave of cresting experiences from back before her life truly began, before she knew who she was. Her mother, her home, her sisters, all suddenly and somehow more present and real than they have been for thousands of years. She can feel the memories filling her up, pushing aside old/new thoughts of her team, trying to replace the confusion of waking up again after what she thought was her final death with the fresh confusion of waking up at all.
She has been here before, in this cave by the sea. She died her first death near here, fighting the invaders who came for her home. She woke up here for the first time, freshly immortal and very confused, both thousands of years ago and just now, just here.
She looks up and sees a small sliver of light shining bright. She knows the way -- of course she does -- how many times had her feet trod these stones? She steps out from the cave near the sea, into the cool sunshine of the first new dawn of her true life.
Standing upon the rocky shore, she looks down and sees a hole torn into her tunic under her left breast, half a hand’s width across, soaked with drying blood. She had been shot there -- no, that’s not right. She had been shot there, yes, but this hole was from a stab wound dealt to her from a stinking tribesman with a dagger who had attacked in the night. As she looks at the now-unmarred flesh of her flank, the memory of her bullet wound faded, replaced much more clearly by the memory of the face of the man who stabbed her.
Andy squeezes her eyes shut, the memory of his stinking breath and rotten teeth suddenly fresh in her mind, a memory both old and intensely new scrambling to the front. She sits down upon the stones and breathes hard, in through her nose and out through her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut against the crashing memories. She opens her eyes once more and gazes upon the grey line of the horizon, her mind in turmoil as thousands of years of personal history tried to map onto a self that had known but scant decades.
Andy had died for the last time. She died! She had felt her life slip entirely away, a sensation both familiar and brand new. It had been so final. If she concentrated, she could still see the faces of her team: the tears pooling in Nile’s eyes, the small, sad smile on Nicky’s lips, the anguish on Joe’s face.
But then, after she died for the final time, she awoke once more. For the first time. Here and now, well before.
It is so impossible. It is inconceivable. It is too much for one life to bear.
She stands now, body and head aching, and begins to stride down the cliff toward the rock-strewn shore. She has always thought better in motion.
Is it beginning all over again? How can that be?
Two selves, two maps of memories, smashing together in her mind. Memories of her family, lost for centuries, come streaming back: her mother’s soft kindness that belied a spine as hard as flint, her youngest sister’s sweet smile and feisty wit, her middle sister’s worry lines between her brows.
She gasps as she remembers how they had died, both last night and thousands of lifetimes ago. How their small farm had burned. How she had tried to avenge their deaths. How she had failed.
Tears sting her eyes as she feels old wounds freshly open.
And yet, as these memories came flowing through her, she feels other memories fading. Not everything, not the important bits: she remembers the way Nile smiles when her favorite song would play on the radio, the way Joe’s eyes meet Nicky’s when they thought no one was watching. But she is beginning to forget details -- where had they been when she had gotten shot? Why were they on that mission? How had they arrived there? What had they shared for breakfast? Those memories are no more, gone like the waves of the sea below.
Instinctively, she reaches to check that her gun is still tucked in her waistband, only to realize that she has no waistband in this tunic, no gun, and no one to rely on for backup.
Andy looks at her surroundings with fresh eyes. There is something she must know.
She looks at the sea far below, at the rocky shore directly beneath her path. She backs up until her back is against the wall of the cliff, takes a deep breath, and runs, launching herself into the air.
Falling feels like it always does. Dying feels like it always does.
Waking up feels no different.
Andy lies on the shore as her bones knit together slowly, achingly slowly, and tries to think. It is all happening again. She is back. Her family is nowhere to be found, a millennia away. Her other family had only yesterday been slaughtered. She finds it is hard to hold these two thoughts together in her head.
She sits up, flexing and unflexing her hand, trying to feel it out. Her healing is slow, as though she were brand new. She is brand new. This is all both brand new and so, so old. She pulls her knees to her chest and hangs her head between them.
She snaps her head up, realizing. If it really is all happening again? If it really is starting over from the beginning? She could make different choices. She could change things. She could build different outcomes.
She can save Quynh. She won’t have to lose a soldier. Not anymore.
Andy sits by the fire that night and makes a plan. The time she has left, the time she still has to go, stretches before her like an endless sea, lit only with a few recollections here and there. Her clearest memories are from what her body remembers as yesterday, the day the invaders came. The day her village burned. Her next clearest memories are of a job gone sideways, and a team clutching at her as the life bleeds out of her. But even as she coaxes those memories to the front of her mind, they are less clear. Her team, her family, seems farther away than ever (they are). She reaches for their memories, but even as she does so, she realizes that’s not as important as what she has to do.
She takes a deep breath, and clears her mind.
Memories are a strange thing. She knows better than most the limitations of the flesh when faced with a concept like eternity. Yesterday, her yesterday, she did not remember her mother’s name. Today she does remember her mother’s name, Apasia, and she remembers her warm hugs and the flavorful bread dipped in the wine she favored.
She knows she will not remember everything. She knows she will not remember most things. There is so much she wants to remember. She wants to remember Nile, the one of whom she has the fewest memories, the one she will need to wait nearly a full lifetime to meet again. She wants to remember how she saw the purpose of what they did, there in Copley’s office. She wants to remember the way Nicky’s hugs feel, and Joe’s laugh in her ear as he sweeps her off her feet. It will be some time before she can hear them again.
Hell, she even wants to remember Booker, his dry wit and his obsession with old texts. She thinks about trying to set books aside for him, to try and keep them safe until she can find him again. She thinks about trying to keep him from betraying them, from kicking that whole mess off to begin with.
But that’s not really important. If it comes right down to it, there is only one thing Andromache the Scythian would change if she could. When she can.
She can.
There is one thing she must remember. It may be extra difficult, coming at it from this direction. It was a long time ago or will be a long time from now; both things are true.
She cannot lose Quynh. She will not lose Quynh. Not this time.
She will make sure of it.
But this notion of not losing Quynh must live inside her, no matter what. Even if she forgets the rest of her family. Even if she forgets Joe’s hugs and Nicky’s soft laugh and the way Booker’s eyes crinkle when he does that rueful smile and the way Nile’s eyes light up when she’s fighting--truly fighting--and throws herself all in. Even if she forgets Quynh herself.
Andy thinks about how to remember, how she has remembered. What she has kept through all these years. She has lost so much. Though, now that she thinks about it, she need only be patient enough to find it again. She will see everything again soon enough.
USA, 2022
Andy sits with Nile and Joe and Nicky in a camp a few clicks out from the target, tomorrow’s mission a distant thing still.
“You were alone a long time, huh?” Nile asks, as they stare into the fire.
It’s not a new conversation, but Andy indulges Nile. She knows Nile is full of anxious energy, just like she always is when she has to wait for this kind of a job. Nile is the youngest, and she knows it. She knows Andy will die now, and Andy can feel her thinking that someday, she’ll be the only one left.
“I was alone for a long time,” Andy said. “I had others -- mortals -- companions, friends,”
“Lovers,” Joe breaks in, “many lovers.” She knows he's raising his eyebrows at her, but she purposefully isn’t looking. Let him waggle them at Nicky instead.
“Yes,” Andy chuckles, “lovers. I never quite had a family, though. I never had this. Until…”
“Until you found Quynh?” Nile asks.
“Yes. Until I found Quynh, and then Lykon, and then these two idiots,” Andy is sitting near enough to Joe that she can bump his foot with her boot. He smiles back at her, warm and easy. “Until we found you.”
“How long was it?” Nile asks.
Andy thinks about it, all the time, telescoping backwards behind her. She thinks about what it was like to wander the world in that time. The days did not go any faster or slower, and the years passed at the same speed years always do. And yet, when she looks back, she lived more than half her life alone.
She suppresses a small shudder.
“Long,” she says.
“You always say that!” Nile says. “ How long?”
“Long enough that I had had every lifetime I ever wanted, and more. Long enough to see everyone I loved die thousands of times over.” She uses her Other voice, the voice she used to convince the people in near Phonecia to worship her as a God. It’s deeper than her usual voice, and it carries the weight of centuries -- millennia -- within. “Long.”
There’s a moment of silence as Nile tries to comprehend what life that long would mean. The four of them gaze into the fire, watching the sparks fly up to join the stars overhead.
“Andy’s as old as gold,” Joe says, and it’s so incongruous that Andy gives a disgruntled scoff.
“What?” Nile and Nicky ask in unison.
“No, really, I looked it up,” Joe says. “People began working gold back when Andy was wandering the world.”
Andy rolls her eyes and shakes her head, but inwardly wonders if that’s true. She certainly can’t remember seeing a lot of gold when she was young, but, then again, her family was not royal or priestly, as far as she could remember. She would have had no reason to see that gold.
“Holy shit,” Nile says, “I don’t even know how old that is. Like, pharaohs had gold on their sarcophaguses, right? So… yeah, wow.”
“Yeah,” Andy says.
They stare into the fire a little longer before Andy says, “I was alone for a long time. And then I had someone. And a little while after that, I had a family. I had… this.” She pauses, looking at each of them in turn.
“This is better,” she says.
Elsewhere. Again.
It is the fire that does it. She is alone again near the sea in the country of her birth, sitting by the fire she had built to roast the rabbit she caught for dinner. She’s staring up at the sparks leaping toward the stars, when the chants come back to her, as they always do at times like this.
There were many they would sing and recite: chants for the changing of the seasons, knowledge of when the harvest came, small songs about small things and big, long songs about big things. Several times a year the community would get together and remember themselves, their story, everything that had come before. Everyone took part.
Andy remembered most clearly the story song she and her mother and sisters would sing by the fire. She had forgotten her mother’s name, her sisters’ faces. She had forgotten the way home. She had even forgotten most of her mother tongue. But she remembered the chanting, as she always did:
O, sing of my people who dwelleth at home
Sing of the warmth of hearts and hearths
Sing of the seas and the ships and the foam
Sing of the family that does gather there…
Andy began to think, to try and remember the details. Or, if not the details, the shape of it.
She and Quynh had been captured in the New World the day after Joe and Nicky had gone to travel alone for the winter. The mob had caught the two of them alone and unprepared. She hadn’t known the rumors of their uncanny abilities to come back to life had crossed the ocean. She still didn’t know how they knew, if it was fate or dumb luck that the witch hunters had found them.
She could decide to let the New World be, and travel somewhere else. She and Quynh could return to Damascus for a time, or carry on to the east along the Silk Road. But what then? Would she build herself a superstition about crossing the Atlantic? A distaste for boats? That could be harmful in the long run.
There had to be another way. She would build contingency plans. She had time.
She began composing a new chant, one she would sing to herself over her fire every night.
O, sing of my lover I found in the eastern desert
Sing of her heart and mine, forever entwined
Sing of how I must not let her go
When accused of witchcraft we live and die…
Andy began to walk. She had thousands of years to fill and nothing to do but hold fast to memories that she knew would try desperately to fade.
Byblos, 3500 BC
There are many things a warrior goddess can do. She can drive her enemies from her sight, command armies, retake lost territory, depose kings, destroy those who would seek to harm her people and innocent people everywhere.
She can (and does!) take lovers, full harems with men and women alike. She has ecstatic orgies full of the most beautiful people she can find, all oiled up with olive oil. She drinks wine and learns new tricks with the the new weapons; she had never been as comfortable with a spear as she would have liked, and she now has the time to practice and learn. She finds as many teachers as she can, and tries to pass on her knowledge to others in turn. She pulls together councils of her most trustworthy deputies, honest and good people, and leaves them to set up governance when she and the horde move on.
Here is what a warrior goddess cannot do: die. Speed the passage of time. Remember everything she knows she must.
Her memories have faded, as she knew they would, though she tries to hold fast as she can to them. She sings herself the song over every fire she builds, although she has forgotten the name of the one for whom she sings. She can remember flashes: a young woman warrior, just a baby in the world, fresh and new but fierce and proud. Two men she knows well, and has known for a long time, though their faces are fading. Yusuf is one, he has a beard, she recalls, and the other, lighter hair, kind and true… the name she cannot remember but she does not forget the feeling of his strong warm arms wrapped around her. Another, a man, she thinks of every time she smells a certain combination of alcohols, though what combination and why she remembers him ruefully she cannot say.
And she remembers her.
She remembers her, as hard as she can. She knows they will meet soonest of all, that she will find her in the eastern desert. Her name is never far away, though she cannot quite recall it, her mouth traces the sounds she tried so hard not to forget.
When she meets a Latin speaker, they sometimes find her more curious than she means to be, as she traces those sounds: qui? Quid?
Her own name, Andromache, is one she does not forget. But she cannot help but feel she had another, once.
Luxor, 2100 BC
Andromache walks the streets of Luxor lined with shining obelisks and temples, and everywhere she looks she sees something shimmering, something spectacular. All around her, adorning the hair and arms and hands of everyone she sees, glimmering, gleaming objects, splendid and sparkling. The yellow metal is linked in chains and pounded into cuffs, woven in threads through plaits and dangling from ear lobes and waists. Gold, she thinks, though she has rarely seen its like, and certainly not in such quantities.
And then, unbidden, a voice from the distant past.
The voice is light, familiar. High and low at the same time. It comes with a name she once knew, but now exists only on the very final edges of her memory.
“As old as gold.”
She looks around at the sparkling baubles on the people she passes on the street. This memory is one of those, the different kind of forgotten memories. It brings with it a tickling thought that she has met this voice, she has loved this voice, yet she has not yet met this voice. These memories fray at the edges of her mind, important but veiled. She thinks she will meet that voice someday, and she knows he will be full of warmth.
That voice belongs to a man who is very proud of his beard, she thinks, and for some reason, the thought makes her smile.
Troy, 1135 BC
Andromache of Scythia cannot die, this she knows. But sometimes she also has the ability to tell the future. It is beyond her conscious control, but she is a seer, revered in some centuries, feared and reviled in others. Unlike many seers, however, her visions are not a possible future. They are as certain as memory, or at least as certain as a memory can be.
Something is coming, she thinks. Something is getting close. She can feel it looming large and heavy in the corners of her consciousness. When she sits around a fire, a tuneless song she has long since forgotten the words to comes, unbidden, into her mind. It is important, she knows that much. And it is coming. Soon, soon, soon, it sings to her, although “soon” is a strange concept to one who has known so much time already. It feels less like a memory than a wish.
It is during an evening fire that it happens. It feels like her eyes snapping into focus and she remembers with certainty, all of a sudden, that raiders from the sea are preparing to land on their shores. She can smell them in the air and she knows what will happen if she does not act.
She sounds the alarm, crying through the camps for all to Take arms! Take arms! She does not wait to see if her countrymen are behind her but grips the handle of her now-favorite labrys and flings herself into the fray, slashing with all her might.
As she fights, she remembers a different version of this night. She was awoken by the sound of screams and came out to find her camp crawling with invaders. They took no prisoners, preferring to bludgeon and rip and rend flesh from bone. She had grabbed her labrys, she had tried…
She died many times that night. Tonight, she dies not at all.
She does not save everyone -- her alarm was not enough to quell the rising tide of invaders. Her troops were not victorious. And yet, unbidden, her memory raises a notion. Last time it was so much worse.
Last time? she thinks. It does not make a lot of sense, but none of this does, really. Another thought rises.
Things can change.
She knows in that moment that she is old. She has so much left to do.
That night she dreams with clarity for the first time of the woman with hair as dark as a pond on a moonless night.
She wakes up gasping, more confused than when she wakes after death. She knows this woman, she knows her. It feels as though her head will split in two. She must… she must find her.
A fragment of song rises in her memory:
O, sing of my lover I found in the eastern desert...
She can’t remember the rest. She knows she must go east.
Ghashuun-Gobi, 1133 BC
Andromache is looking in the desert. She has been looking in the desert for her lost love for nearly two years.
Each time she travels somewhere new, the world gets a little smaller. It is only a matter of time, she thinks, before she has walked it all. She is so, so thirsty.
She always carries an extra flask full of water. Even after she has drunk all of her own supply, she carries this flask full of water through the desert, its weight on her hip a constant reminder of the woman she seeks.
She sees the desert in her future-memory, remembers how the woman she dreams of every night looked up to her with parched lips. She imagines being able to share the flask, pouring the water directly into the woman’s mouth.
Except, she cannot find this woman. She feels she must know her -- there is too much of this person in her head otherwise -- but at the same time she knows nothing. It is as though her dreams and her memories of another life (yes, something inside her breathes, a lifetime ago ) has conjured her from thin air. She is disappointed.
It is not the loneliness that drives her from the desert so much as the frustration of being so disappointed for so long. She is mostly frustrated with herself. She has wandered this world alone for millennia -- what made her think there was someone who might walk with her? What made her think for even an instant that she wasn’t the only one whom death forgot? Perhaps this woman was just an imagined figure, a manifestation of deep longing for companionship.
She hummed the words from the long-ago song she would sing by the fire:
O, sing of my lover I found in the eastern desert...
Fuck this, she thinks, and begins her journey out of the desert.
She has no need to prepare for what comes. She does not bring extra water. It is uncomfortable, and she dies of thirst many times, and she barely notices. She is consumed by her own exhaustion, her thirst, her solitude. She walks steadily east, and in the moments just before death or on the verge of slumber, she has visions. Of the woman who existed only in dreams, yes, but also of other things. She remembers seeing the tops of clouds from a small window. She remembers stroking her hands through the imagined woman’s hair. She remembers terrible terrible loss and the pain that follows.
Or perhaps that is what she feels now. She is delirious and it is night and day and night again.
When she sees her face, Andromache welcomes a death that does not come.
Instead she feels a strong hand tilt her head back, and cool water flows between her cracked lips.
Yin, 1132 BC
They travel in near-silence for almost a week until they reach a river. Andromache is weak with thirst, and the other woman is faring poorly as well. They drink until they can drink no more, and lie down to rest.
Over the morning fire, Andromache and Quynh (for that is the woman’s name, Quynh, and the sound of it sings in Andromache’s mind over and over) sit, two steaming mugs of tea in hand. Andromache finds herself unabashedly staring at Quynh, drinking her in in every sense.
She is the woman from her dreams, yes. She is the woman she was born remembering. Seeing her in the flesh is nearly more than Andromache can bear.
Quynh notices her stare, and stares right back.
“Who are you?” Quynh asks.
Andromache understands her language despite never having heard it before. This happens often -- Andromache finds nearly every language flows easily on her tongue, almost as though she has learned them all before. “Why is your face in my dreams?”
“I am Andromache of Scythia,” she says, “and I have been waiting for you all my life.”
There is relief in finding her, this woman she has known only in whispers of memory all her life. The part of her that remembers has been locked away for so long; it is so fresh and new to see her here, drinking tea, just like a person.
“You cannot die, correct?” Andromache asks, and Quynh whips her head up to stare at Andromache.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“I am the same,” Andromache says.
“Impossible,” Quynh says, her eyes narrowing.
“Yes,” Andromache agrees, and removes a blade from her belt. She pricks a finger, showing Quynh the welling blood. She waits a moment for her skin to mend back together, then wipes the blood away and holds her hand out to Quynh for inspection and sees Quynh’s eyes widen as she inspects Andromache’s hand for injury.
It is the first time they have touched since Quynh tipped Andromache’s head back to pour the sweet water into her lips. Andromache's heart flutters and her stomach drops down to her feet. It is divine.
Andromache feels something within her settle, like a cat returning to pleasant slumber. For the first time in her long life, the time she is biding is her own to enjoy.
She knows the feeling will be back when she needs it.
Outside Salem, 1688 AD
Two thousand years is a long time, but it passes much more pleasantly with companions.
The self that dwells inside herself, the keeper of her secret past and knowledge of her coming future, has made itself known only rarely. It reared up in joy when she and Quynh met Lykon and wailed in sadness and pain when Lykon died his final death. She heard its call once again when she and Quynh finally found Nicolo and Yusuf for the first time, well after the two had found each other and made for themselves a peace.
It has been a half a millennia since she had felt its presence within her. She could well forget that it existed were it not for the feeling of deep disquiet that began to take hold of her when they had landed on the shores of the New World. She can feel it stirring, pacing within her, feeling like a captured beast -- uneasy, uncertain, taut like Quynh’s bowstring.
Immediately after disembarking, the four of them take to the woods, on Andromache’s suggestion, and made peace with the local elders, demonstrating that they were not interested in warring or taking more than what they needed to survive. She still does not trust this land, but she trusts these people more.
And oh! The land. It is invigorating. Andromache has not been anywhere new for quite some time, having walked the Old World from end-to-end many times. Here is a land with extravagant abundance, both well-cared-for and wild, where she and her family can live many lifetimes without having to explain away any awkward questions about age.
Andromache should be content. But her unease continues to grow and fester within her.
It comes to a head one morning when Yusuf approaches, carrying a fresh rabbit for breakfast.
“Andromache, Nicolo and I will travel south,” he says. This happens, from time to time. Without concrete plans, the four of them often split into pairs to explore, taking space and time away for themselves.
Yusuf nods toward Nico, who is tending the fire. Next to him, Quynh works on her arrows, fletching her arrows with the feathers of these new birds. “The cold is beginning to get to his old bones,” Yusuf says, which Andromache knows really means Yusuf is the one who is weary of the cold.
Andromache smiles at him. “Of course,” she says. “We must be cautious with the elderly.” They laugh together, and something shifts inside of her.
Suddenly, the scene is laid out before her as though she were viewing it from above. The jolt wrenches her stomach and she retches. The piece of herself that had been walled away, kept secret and safe for millennia roars to the surface. The weight of another lifetime drops upon her all at once.
There’s nothing for it. Andromache faints.
When Andy awakens, hours later, she finds herself lying by the fire and Quynh holding her hand. The sun has set and a chill has set into the air.
Her body feels as though she were thrown from a horse. Her head aches and mouth tastes like something died in it. She feels old, older than she’s ever been, and it all comes back in a rush, all of it, all of this lifetime and the other lifetime too, mirrored onto each other like a photograph and its negative. She starts, realizing she knows what a photograph is.
It has been millennia since she remembered what a photograph is.
She can feel Quynh’s hand in hers. Good, that’s good, she thinks, and she isn’t too late. The memories jostle around in her head, trying to get into an order that makes any kind of sense, and she can feel Yusuf tell her that he and Nico will leave. She can feel that twice.
She closes her eyes, willing it all to make sense. After Nicolo and Joe left, the next day…
She gasps, sitting bolt upright. It makes her head spin for a moment and she pauses, willing herself to stillness. Her heart is beating rapid rhythms in her chest, and her breaths come in ragged gasps.
“You’re awake,” Quynh says, smiling a little until she sees Andy’s terrified eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nicky,” Andy gasps out. “Joe. Have they left?”
“Who?” Quynh asks, momentarily confused. “What?”
Andy wills herself to be calm and tries to remember. Quynh never knew them as Joe or Nicky. “Nico and Yusuf. Are they still here?”
She hears stirring from the other side of the fire and sees Joe’s head pop up from behind Nicky’s still-prone form.
“Wha?” he asks, still half asleep.
Andy lets out a long, shuddering breath. She wasn’t too late. She remembered in time. She can change it. It doesn’t need to happen this way. Not again.
The mob is still coming. This time she is ready.
USA, 2022
“Is there anything you would change?” Nile asks. “About your life?”
The fire is glowing now, just coals. Tomorrow is still a lifetime away, though, and Andy is still entertaining Nile’s questions.
Andy looks around at her family, at Joe and Nicky, who have dozed off cuddled in each other’s arms, at Booker’s sleeping form, and over at Quynh, who has fallen asleep with her face turned toward the firelight.
Andy meets Nile’s eyes and grins.
“Not a damn thing.”