The Meadow 47 “No!” I shout all at once. Then his head is gone. An explosion of red mist, and the bone sticking up from his ragged neck. Then his body slumps and falls, in a way I’ve seen too many times before. That arterial blood is black as pitch, dilating out from his body, spraying across the magenta abstract oil, dripping from the tomblike slabs of granite counter. Juniper is next to me. I’m breathing hard. I haven’t felt such terror and grief in two decades, since before that day with my father. Nausea washes through me, but I know how to control it. When I try to access my rage, though, to do what needs to be done, I find that it’s fully depleted. All that’s left is a horrible choking heartsickness that bites like sharp teeth. I don’t know if I’ll survive it. “Are you going to kill me?” I ask Juniper. Before she answers I say, “I couldn’t do it. Something is broken. I’m no good to you.” I almost hope she will kill me. I’m overcome with sorrow. My breathing is ragged. “Something is broken.” Juniper’s posture changes. She puts the gun on the ground and reaches out for me, exactly as she did on the landing, when I was fourteen and covered in the blood of my kin. I let her touch me. “No,” she says softly. Her dreadlocks have so much gray in them. So many years gone. Her eyes search me. “Something is fixed,” she says. We’d never embraced before, but we embrace now. She caresses my hair. When we pull apart, she says, “This has been coming for a while now. You got your soul back. You don’t need blood anymore.” I begin to cry softly. My body is hollow. It is fragile. Life is a filament within me, thin as a butterfly’s wing. “I don’t know how to be human,” I say. “Time to learn,” she says. She pushes me away from her,
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