Once upon a time—when I was drunk, and young, and stupid beyond belief—I cut my shadow, my *soul*, away from me in some desperate, adolescent bid to separate myself from my own mortality. And since then, I guess I haven’t really been much good for anybody but myself. I bound up my weakness and threw it away, not realizing that weakness is what lets you bend under unbearable pressure.
And if you can’t bend . . . you break.
My evil twin, I hear my own arrogant voice suggest to Carra, mockingly—and with a sudden, stunning surge of self-hatred, I find I want to hunt that voice down and slap it silly. To roll and roar on the floor at my own willfully deluded stupidity.
Half a person, Franz chimes in, meanwhile, from deeper in my memory’s ugly little gift-box. And not even the GOOD half.
No. Because it was the good half. And me, I, I’m—just—
—all that’s left.
My shadow. The part of me that might have been, if only I’d let it stay. My curdled conscience. Until it touched me, I didn’t remember what it was I’d been so afraid of. But now I can’t think about anything else.
Except . . . how very, very badly, no matter what the cost . . .
. . . I want for it to touch me again.
Thinking: Is this me? Can this possibly be me, Jude Hark Chiu-Wai? Me?
Me.
Me, and no fucking body else.
Thinking, finally: But this won’t kill me. Not even this. Much as I might like it to.
And maybe I’ll be a better person for it, a better magician, if I can just make it through the next few nights without killing myself like Jen, or going crazy as Carra. But that’s pretty cold comfort, at best.
Sobbing, retching. All one big weakness—one open, weeping sore. And thinking, helpless: Carra, oh Carra. Grandmother Yau. Franz. Ed. Someone.
ANYone.
But I’ve burnt all my boats, funeral-style. And I can’t remember—exactly, yet—how to swim.
The Wide World converges on me now, dark and sparkling, and I just crouch here beneath it with my hands over my face: Weeping, moaning, too paralytic-terrified even to shield myself from its glory. Left all alone at last with the vision and the void—crushed flat, without a hope of reprieve, under the endless weight of a dark and whirling universe.
Ripe and riven. Unforgiven. Caught forever, non-citizen that I am, in that typically Canadian moment just before you start to freeze.
Keeping my sanity, my balance.
Keeping to the straight and Narrow.