The PowWow

We found her exactly where we'd started looking, which by that point in the week felt less like a good guess and more like the only fact about our lives that had held steady the entire time — Naomi at the nursery window, one hand flat against the glass in the spot Jacob usually occupied, watching David sleep like sleep was a performance she didn't want to miss a second of.

She turned before either of us said anything, which meant she'd heard us coming, which meant she'd been listening for footsteps the way you listen when you've stopped assuming good news arrives on its own schedule.

"Tell me," she said. Not hello either. Apparently that particular courtesy had gone out of style in this family sometime in the last week, along with several others.

We told her. All of it, in order, the way Curtis had made us tell it to him a few hours earlier — Mara's door, the thing in the hallway, Rachel's call and the four minutes and eleven seconds it took to end, the stretchers, the kitchen, the coffee gone cold, Curtis arriving with two monitors and a fury that had somewhere to go. Naomi listened the way she listens to everything, which is to say completely, without interrupting, filing details in an order I couldn't always follow but had learned to trust.

When we got to the hallway, she stopped us.

"Go back," she said. "Slower. Everything you remember about how it moved, how it looked, what it did and didn't do. I don't want your conclusions yet. I want your data."

Jacob, God bless him, actually seemed to relax slightly at being asked for exactly that, because data was a language he'd trusted longer than he'd trusted most people.

"It didn't breathe," he said. "Not once. It was cold enough that Levi and I both fogged the air walking in. It didn't."

"Pupils?"

"Fixed. Wide. It sighted the door once and left its gaze there, like — " Jacob searched for it. "Like a camera bolted to a tripod, not eyes that got tired."

"Did it blink?"

"No."

"At all? Not even reflexively, dust, air movement, nothing?"

"Not once, in several minutes of close observation."

"When you struck it — when it hit the wall, when you had your weight on it — any sound? Any exhalation, any grunt, anything you'd associate with an impact against a chest cavity with lungs actively working inside it?"

"None. Just the sound of the impact itself, the way you'd hear a bag of something hitting drywall."

She nodded, slow, the nod of someone confirming a hypothesis rather than forming one. "And Rachel's shot."

That one cost Jacob something to answer, and I watched him pay it. "Center mass, by her own account. It did not slow down. It did not react at all, as far as either of us has been able to determine from the little we know."

Naomi was quiet for a moment, looking back through the glass at David, and I understood, watching her, that whatever she was about to say next, she was choosing to say it facing her son rather than facing us, which told me something about how much it was going to cost her too.

"There's no pulse in any of this," she said. "Do you understand what I mean when I say that? I don't mean I checked one and it read zero. I mean every secondary sign you've just described to me is a sign of an absence of one. No respiration means no oxygen exchange, which means no functioning cardiovascular system driving it, which means whatever's moving that body isn't being kept alive by anything a body normally needs to stay alive. Fixed pupils, no blinking, no visible response to changing light or movement — none of the small autonomic work a living nervous system performs constantly without permission. No reaction to blunt-force trauma, no protective response, no evidence pain registered anywhere it mattered, which means, as far as I can tell from everything you've just told me, there is no brain in there doing anything a living brain does." She turned around to face us then, and her eyes were doing the thing Curtis's had done the night before — steady, controlled, a fury of a very specific, very quiet kind sitting just under the surface of the clinical language. "I am a scientist, not a theologian. I told you that once already this week, and I meant it, and I still mean it. I cannot tell you whether there is a soul in there, because I don't have an instrument for that, and neither does anyone else who's ever lived. But I can tell you, with everything I know about how living tissue behaves, that whatever your bodies are, they are not doing one single thing a living, ensouled human body does. Not one. That's not proof of the metaphysics. It is proof of the physiology."

"Motion without personhood," Jacob said, quietly, and I understood he was not asking a question. He was saying the sentence he'd been circling since three in the morning three nights ago, finally spoken by someone whose job it was to know, rather than guess.

"Motion without personhood," Naomi confirmed. "I'm sorry. I know which answer you were hoping for."

I hadn't realized, until she said it, how much of the last several days I had spent quietly, privately hoping for the other one — hoping that somewhere behind fixed, unblinking eyes there had still been a person, however corrupted, however far gone, because a man could still in theory be reached, and a weapon could only be stopped, and I had wanted, badly, for reaching to still be on the table.

"I know," I said, and it came out rougher than I intended. "I resisted it. I want that on the record. I wanted there to be somebody in there."

"I know you did," Naomi said, and something in her voice softened, just for a second, out of the clinical register and into something closer to the woman who'd forced Nathanial Lim's name into the open a few days ago because nobody else in the room would say it first. "For what it's worth, so did I. Hope is not a character flaw, Levi. It's just not always where the data lands."

We stood with that for a moment. David slept on, unbothered, days into a life that had started with violence and had not, since, been given much reason to trust otherwise.

"There's something else," Naomi said, and I heard the shift in her voice before she said it, the specific quality of a sentence she'd clearly been sitting on and had decided, only now, that we were steady enough to receive.

"Say it," Jacob said.

"If Suriel can do this once — take a man who's been dead and buried for months and put motion back into him, coordinate multiple of these things at the same time, keep them running with no apparent limit on duration or distance from wherever he's directing this from — I need you to tell me what stops him from doing it again. And again. As many times as there are bodies available to him." She looked at David through the glass, and then back at us, and I understood that this was the fear underneath every other fear she'd been carrying since the hospital called Rachel with the DNA results. "Two instruments already. That we know of. That is not a ceiling, Jacob. That's a floor. And I have not heard either of you, in anything you've told me tonight, describe a single thing that would stop that number from becoming five, or fifty, if he decided he wanted it to."

Neither of us had an answer for that, because there wasn't one available yet, and I had learned, across the last several days, that the worst moments in this family's history were reliably the ones where somebody asked the correct question a full chapter before anybody had the resources to answer it.

"We'll find a ceiling," Jacob said, finally, which was not a fact, and all three of us knew it wasn't a fact, and he said it anyway, because some sentences aren't facts yet. They're something to stand on until you find one.

Naomi didn't correct him. She just turned back to the glass, put her hand flat against it in the exact spot she'd had it when we walked in, and watched her son breathe on his own, in and out, the one uncomplicated true thing any of us had left to look at.