434: Shards of Glass

Ziggurat #349

"Don't be ridiculous," the apparition scoffed. It began to fish in its projected pockets for another cigarette in exactly the way that Lamont might when he was caught off-guard. "We've seen your life, Constance. We know who you are."

"But that ain't completely true, is it?" Constance countered. "There's something about me—and not just me, all of us—that confuses you. The whole is more than the sum of our parts. Am I wrong?"

There was something peculiar in the young woman's eyes, a kind of cold fire that he'd seen a glimmer of before when she had been sparring with Captain Carter. Lamont felt frightened by it.

"We have been trying to understand you," the apparition admitted. "Your motivations are obvious enough, to be sure, but there is something troubling about your memories. They're like shards of glass that can't be fitted back together properly."

Shards of glass, Lamont thought. He suddenly remembered the vision he'd had when he touched the sculpture in the garden. It was as if the tower had been trying to pull something out of him, a memory he didn't know he had. "Hail Mary," he whispered, "Full of grace…the Lord is with thee…"

"What is that?" The apparition asked, looking at Lamont. "We were looking for it. We saw it in you, but you had no conscious memory corresponding to it. We couldn't tell where it came from."

"It's a sort of prayer, I suppose," Lamont answered, his mind racing. "I couldn't get any sleep until I found someone who could teach it to me."

"The prayer was for her," Constance said. "The Nurturer Omega. You looked in his mind and you found her."

"You presume too much," the apparition rebuked her. "We are her children. We have preserved her memory. We have waited faithfully for her return. What do you know?"

Constance paced toward the specter, clenching her fists. "You said it yourself: here we are. After waiting for thousands of years, the voices of the chorus have brought us to you from a place impossibly distant. And all you can think to do is trap us like you trapped all the other poor flies that fell into your little web. More voices for the chorus! Can't you see by now that it's hopeless? The whole plan was wrong from the beginning!"

"That's not true!" The apparition protested. "It can't be. We were her attendants. We kept the faith when no one else did."

"You were given all the tools you needed to continue what she had started," Constance replied coldly. "But when she opened the playpen to let you out, all you could think to do was crawl back to it. You let everything she had built crumble around you while you erected a monument to her memory."

Something was happening to the apparition now. The particles that made it up were starting to drift in apparently random directions, causing the facsimile to lose its coherence. In the dark globe at its center, a red light began to flicker.

"Constance, watch out!" Lamont warned.