My hand flies to my chest, or rather, tries to. My shoulder twitches and my left arm flails. Half my chest feels numb, though I can make out something heavily thudding inside me. Thoughts stumble and stagger in my clouded brain.
“What... my heart... the Goddess...”
He laughs, a sound I never thought to hear again. “Your heart of flesh and blood is in Her. Whatever good that does Her now.” As he moves into view, I see him as though for the first time. His hair has been crudely shorn close to the scalp; he looks different without the shock of beads and wire augments. His shadowed eyes seem smaller without the dark lines. I notice again the sharp angles of his face, the sharp arch of his brow, the length of his lashes. The numbness in my chest deepens.
“She needs a heart,” I murmur. I do not know if he can hear me.
Itztli arranges me into a sitting position. He is gentle, but it matters not. I can barely feel his touch. We are in a narrow corridor, dark but for a flicking light some paces ahead. Cables and pipes run the length of the walls and there is a low, persistent humming. There are numbers and markings, but they mean nothing to me.
“Why, when Her mind is stored in coiled databanks, does She need a human heart?” asks Itzli. “Why when they can make Her blinking wire-framed eyes and pulsing plastic innards can they not make Her a heart? It is nonsensical.”
“But it is Her heart.” The colours at the edge of my vision threatened to overwhelm me, flitting brilliance across my eyes.
He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter now. She won’t survive it. I’ve...” There is an alien note of bitterness in his voice. “Don’t you want to know how I saved you?”
“I’m supposed to be...” I grit my teeth; I did not want to use the word.
“I’ve put a part of Her in you.” He glances down the corridor. “It’s not exactly Her heart, but there really isn’t much more to a heart than a series of valves and pumps. So it wasn’t hard to adapt. There was so much blood. I was scared... After I took out yours –”
“It is not mine. It is Hers,” I insist, though my voice sounds hollow, like an echo. It is strange to think that there is a part of the divine machine inside me. He says nothing and the silence is heavy between us. Though my mouth is dry, I swallow. “Why did...”
I try to pull myself to my feet, but cannot.
“You’ll need to be carried,” he says and folds me into his arms. I do not protest. I lean heavily against him. He smells of disinfectant, blood and beeswax. “Neither of us can go back. Because of what...” He does not finish the thought; he can no more speak of it than I can.
“I don’t... I... why?” I force breath into my restricted lungs. “Why did you do that?”
“You saved me. That matters.”
“The Goddess saved you.”
“No.” His voice is a whisper, but firm. I can feel him swallow. “She damned me. And you. It doesn’t matter now. It is all sophistry.”
“Of course it matters. It’s the Goddess. She sees everything.”
He gives a brief, bitter scoff of a laugh.
“She does. She listens to our suffering. She knows you. Her heart loved you because She saw your suffering. She understands.” The pain that was vague and distant before is beginning to coalesce into a heavy, thudding knot in my chest. “She knows you did whatever you did. She knows we are down here. She allows it.”
Pain devours up the numbness inside me; the shock is almost electric. I choke out a cry.
“The anaesthetics are probably... don’t move. Just don’t move.” He swallows, trying to calm himself. “It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.” He slurs the words as though they were a litany. Fleetingly, he seems again that priest who taught me how to read, how to pray and how to drag a rope of thorns through my tongue.
My eyes flutter shut, but through the angry, mechanical rhythm of the thing inside me, I hear the clink of glass and metal. I hear the needle and syringe rather than feel it. Raw, wild colours roar through my vision before subsiding again into the black behind my eyelids.
When I reopen my eyes, the shapes in the dark seem sharper and cold, more keen.
“She hears us. Every day.” I mouth to Itztli. “If She allowed this. Then this is. This is Her plan.”
He closes his eyes. His face contorts; more emotion than I have ever seen him show in our years together. “We should keep moving.”
I say nothing and he carries me down the corridors. I imagine we are in the disused underbelly of the ziggurat, but I do not do so with certainty. Itztli picks his way through increasingly twisted passages.
The outside is nothing more than shadows and shapes at the edge of my blurring vision. Itztli presses me close to his chest. I can hear his heart beat against me now. It is a closeness that I had previously hungered for.
The street corner speakers declare the hour. I guess it to be late given the colour of the lights. Judging from the quality of the speakers, we are in a rough quadrant of the city. I allow my eyes to drift shut and the pain to claim me. If I think only of the pain, concentrate on its myriad shades stretching and clenching inside me, I can keep from crying out. It hurts more when he sprints, but thankfully he does not do that often.
Itztli pauses several times before continuing. Each time, I hear his voice through the haze: “It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”
Leaning on an archaic door to open it, we enter into a building. Voices greet him. Frantic, heartfelt concern melts into indistinct congratulations and curiosity.
“Is that it? That why you joined us?”
“I thought she’d be –”
“It’s not as though the Goddess Herself is a looker.”
That got a laugh from the others, though I can feel Itztli’s grip on me tighten at the blasphemy. He sits but he does not put me down. I feel a wall against my back, but his arms are still around me.
The voices around us plan and plot. I follow more the cadence of the voices than the substance of their plans. There will be a new world and a new age, one without light and without a sun, watched over by no God.
•
Days pass. I am bundled in the corner of the room, half-forgotten by most of the heretics. Itztli has been playing surgeon for them and he tends to me. I remember little but for a certain warmth of arms, a constant constricting pain and thin soup against my lips. I remember choking on blood and vomit. I remember needles and colours too bright to be real.
I also remember this:
“Are you awake?” Itztli whispers against my ear. I am still. I try to speak, but my throat contracts. The beat of the thing inside my chest feels odd and alien.
