I am alone on a stage in a dark theatre. Not alone, but with Ricca, and Miles, and perhaps Haggard. The rows of seats are empty, but at the back of the stage, where we are not allowed to look, there is a voice, so low and loud it can’t belong to a human being, but not to a beast either. It speaks constantly, and I realise that we are doing as it commands. The others pretend not to hear it, not to know that it is there. Every time I break out of the script, every time I turn to look directly at it, they look at me like I’ve gone insane, and carry on with their given lines.

I struggled to open my eyes and slowly rise up in my bed. I was tired in a unique way that comes from sleeping in the cold, that this was all I could coax my body into doing. I couldn’t tell how long it had been since I’d fallen asleep, just that it was long enough to dream, though I didn’t remember what my dream was about, only a vague feeling of dread.
Yitzhak stood by the edge of the cliff, bending over as far as he could, which was not much, to look into the water.

“What’s going on?” I tried to ask in English, but my voice had not yet returned.

“I see no woman,” Yitzhak said to Haggard, and for the first time I heard him speak Hebrew in terror. He was looking at the stream, as if ready to stab at it, but his head was turned toward Haggard. “Was it not a fish?”

I shook myself awake. “Should I enter the water?”

“Yitzhak, keep your eyes on her!” Haggard snapped, and Yitzhak promptly turned his worried gaze back to the water. “Jill, you stay. I’ll get…” Haggard ran into the centre of the room, past his bag, picked up one of the smaller statues, and ran back. It was almost comical, Haggard doing his best to shuffle silently while his slender, pudgy physique barely held under the weight . Yitzhak was so focused on whether or not someone was in the water that he didn’t even notice Haggard behind him, not even when he struggled to heave the carved stone over his head.

“I don’t see – ” He started to turn to Haggard, who swung the statue at his temple; stone striking Crystal.

There is a particular sound, when something precious is damaged in a way that cannot be unmade. Hear it once, and you’ll recognize it anywhere, no matter how superficially different it seems, for the manifestation of what it is. This was not that sound.

The statue fractured the Crystal casing around Yitzhak’s head. Shards fell over the cliff and into the water, and he turned around, shrieking in terror and betrayal. He swung his Crystal outgrowths to retaliate but Haggard caught the blades in his hands. Somehow, as soft and slimy as his hands seemed, the Crystal did not cut them—but he dropped the statue on the floor. His feet sucking on the ground, he pushed, pushed until Yitzhak‘s back foot was on the edge and then over it and he slipped and fell over the cliff his mouth open in an expression of sour surprise. He fell for a long moment, then crashed with that sound of no return, only a thousand time stronger than I’d ever heard it, the limbs of crystal breaking all at once and the man inside breaking with them.

I could not remember having stood up and moved to the edge of the cliff, but now I was standing there beside Moloch on shaky, frozen legs, my breathing shallow, looking down at Yitzhak. His eyes were wide but unseeing, his mouth moving but making no sound. He lay still as blood pooled out of every fracture in the crystal. “…full of mercy…” I thought he tried to say. It was not like in the tragedies I’d seen in theatre, where the hero sighs his last sigh. Yitzhak had not yet died, but was sinking rapidly in that dark ocean between living and being dead.

So much blood, in such a small body. I thought of going to him, not to stop the bleeding, for I’d probably injure myself in the attempt, but to be beside him and let him know that he was not alone, but I couldn’t move.

Moloch turned to look at me. His face was expressionless, but in his brown eyes the ferocious undercurrent of raw madness had returned, and my heart choked. More out of shock than courage it had taken me so long to look away.

The statue lay broken on the ground by his feet. For a moment, I thought that he would kill me, too. Why not? No one would ever know.

I took a step away from him, and something softened in his eyes, perhaps because of the confusion that must have shown on my face, the shaking in my knees. “We should get back,” he said. “As quickly as we can, before things get worse.” He licked his gums, wincing. My mouth also tasted of blood. We had been close to this unreasonable amount of Crystal for an unreasonably long time. “Are you good to walk?” he continued, conversationally. “You must be frozen solid after sleeping on that slab.”

A rage rose in me, and with a shiver I realised that I could kill him here. I was quicker, and hadn’t I brought him to exhaustion, when we swam? I could tire him, push him off. His slimy body could resist the blade, but could it survive falling from this height onto the pile of shards?

This was the kind of place we were in—a place where people could die; worse, a place where people could kill. I didn’t move, but I felt my body preparing, growing warmer with fury.

He sighed, and slowly started moving towards me. “Was that the first time you’ve seen someone die?”

“No,” I said, my voice barely audible in my ears.

“First time seeing someone killed, then.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Aye,” he said gently. And I couldn’t look at him. I looked away, and saw the skewers and fish bones by the tin can, its fire now snuffed out. After a moment, Moloch walked down the stairs and climbed backwards into the pool, scaring off fish, and started piling the Crystals on the edge. I followed him down, avoiding the body and the sharp debris around it, both with my feet and with my eyes.

Eventually Moloch retrieved seven chunks of Crystal from the pond, each larger than my fist. He took his head out of the water and sighed. “If we were to take only one of these massive chunks, that would have been considered an astounding success. But this…” He looked over at the body. “There’s no word for this.” He put his hands on the edge of the pool to start climbing.
The cold had completely evaporated from my bones. I stood above the pool, blocking his exit, and said, “We could have. He offered to give us half of what he had.”

He stopped climbing and looked up at me, brows arched. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you murdered him. I’m saying you shouldn’t have.” How does one express something so obvious, so fundamental? “Thou shall not kill.” My voice grew louder, steadier.

“Because he was a Jew?”

“Because he was a human being!”

“He was the enemy. We are at war.”

I managed to stay still. “Yitzhak was not the enemy.”

“Juan Sargasso stood between us and the Crown’s needs. He forced us to waste time, to leave half of the Celestine behind, and whatever was on his body. That’s an enemy in my little black ledger.” I truly couldn’t tell whether he believed that.

“How bloody hard would it have been to figure out something that didn’t involve killing anyone?”

“You’re a soldier. It’s a part of your job to stomach people getting killed. Dare I ask, child, if you remember what we’re harvesting this for?”

I ignored the attempted diversion. “I can stomach enemy soldiers being killed. Yitzhak may have stood in your way, but he was no soldier. We owed him a debt – he gave to us without hesitation, asking in return only that we keep him company.”

“A debt? Did you think we were here to make friends? We’re here to win a war!” He took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax like I’d imagine a disappointed father would. “Jill, move out of the way. I won’t ask again.” It was the tone of sympathy that infuriated me. I wasn’t going to kick in the soft, snail-like flesh of his head. No. There was nothing I could do to help Yitzhak, and we needed to get back home. I didn’t want to, but my legs, as if on their own, moved out of his way.

He placed two hands on the edge of the pool, ready to pull himself up, and stopped. He closed his eyes as if something internal demanded his immediate attention. He opened his mouth, and a sort of choked gurgle came out, as if he was trying to dislodge a chunk of slime from his trachea.

“Haggard?” I asked. “What is it?”

His hands answered for him: the flesh turned from milky to mistily transparent. His arms retreated into his body all the way to the elbow, and his fingers mashed together into thick, slimy paws. The bony ridges of his spine smoothed and rounded, his back curled, and its colour darkened, green and brown spiralling like a snail’s shell. His abdomen sagged like the gut of someone who’d lost a lot of weight, fast, but the flesh was muscular and tense, sucking on the stone with great force. His head was now almost translucent, and the brain I’d glimpsed before as a shadow was now visible, its clusters of nerves reaching down into the long, slick spine, or ear, or into the eyes that stuck out of his head on thin stocks.

One brown eye turned to me, unchanged. The other slowly looked the other way. “God,” he groaned through the horizontal, lipless gash in his face.

He crawled out of the water, and I realised it was only his voice that was weakened. His body moved more quickly than I’d have imagined, for a snail of that size. From the way all of the different muscles worked together, sucking and pulling on the surface, you could gleam a great strength driving those movements.

He opened his pack, apparently unhindered by the lack of fingers, and took out the remaining cans and let them drop, then arranged the Crystal inside his pack. Once he was done, he folded the pack’s seal, and began to crawl up the stairs.

“I’ll retrace our steps. Catch up to me when you can,” he exhaled, and before I knew it he was up on the higher level and sucking his way out of the cave, leaving me alone with Juan Yitzhak Sargasso’s body.

I tried not to cry. I didn’t deserve to. I was an accomplice in this. I didn’t pay attention. I didn’t see what was coming, as obvious as it was.

I knew I couldn’t stay there with him. It was only a matter of time before I too underwent another alteration, and I wanted to be as far away from here as I could, when I did. I bent down to one of the stone vases and picked up a single rose, painfully lifelike thorns at its sides, bent and crooked like a real thing. How he must have loved these flowers, to craft them so perfectly from memory.

I climbed the stairs, looking at the statues on the opposite sides of the wall. The archer god had not protected us from madness; perhaps the drunken one would stir us out of it. The facets of my God that are represented in these gods, that is.

I put the flower down by Dionysus’s feet, and hoped that, wherever Yitzhak of Clan Binyamin was, he wouldn’t be lonely there.

Quietly, forcing my voice to keep steady, I managed to recite the prayer of A Merciful God, feeling clearly then what I’d been suspecting for years—that it was myself I’d been talking to, that if anyone heard my prayer, it wasn’t the one it was addressed to.

After I finished the recitation, I left that place and caught up to Moloch. I walked close enough to see him, but far enough not to be exposed to the Crystal, and the man carrying it, any more than I had to. If some sense let him know that I was there, he chose not to show it.

Tears, at some point, began to flow, and wouldn’t stop.

He seemed to me to hurry, literally hugging the corners. I watched his convulsions as he crawled forward, and attempted to avoid the slimy trail he left. I hated that he didn’t seem to care what he’d been turning into, and I hated that I couldn’t go ahead on my own. I didn’t know what else lurked in this cave, or when my own alteration would strike, and leaving him alone would mean losing the Crystal. So I followed, feeling with my fingers the places where Yitzhak had marked the walls with his thorns. Not once did Moloch look back.

I went over and over the pictures that were now seared in my mind–Yitzhak looking intently at the water; his confused expression as he claimed that there was no woman in the water; the sound of stone on Crystal, then Crystal on stone; his face as the blood drained.

It was a strange thing, to know so early on that this guilt would haunt me for the rest of my life.

I almost didn’t notice that we’d reached the stream again, the same point where we’d crossed. My toes were suddenly at the edge, my ears drowned in the sound of water. I shook myself. Moloch was crawling on the cave’s ceiling, right above the water. His body adhered to the ceiling so effortlessly his movements did not seem any different from when he had crawled on the floor. The shiny trail testified that he had crawled up the wall, leaving the wall-bridge dry so that I could traverse over the water free of slime.

By the time I made myself place my hand in the fault Yitzhak had carved (for himself or hoping that someone like else would visit, I would never know), sticky with the dry slime Moloch had contaminated it with on our way down, he was almost on the other side.

The climb seemed easier the second time around, a series of measured movements. Or perhaps not easy—perhaps it was just that it didn’t scare me anymore.

Moloch twisted himself and went from the ceiling, over the wall, to the landing, more flowing than crawling. As he reached flat ground he turned one eye stalk, for the first time, towards me. I could not see his expression, as his face was turned away, and the gaze of one eye conveys less emotion than one believes. He turned it away and continued his crawl at a steady pace.

It was dead in the middle of the crossing that I felt a sudden heat flush my skin, then my muscles and guts, bone and marrow. Everything was too hot, too moist, as if my insides were bubbling with puss. My vision blurred. My head spun.

Haggard had carried the Crystals at a distance from me, but it was not enough. I was altering.

I looked down and saw the hungry, rushing water, the surface too disturbed to see how deep it was.

Shaking, I tried reaching for the next hand hold, to climb away, but my legs turned numb and my grip weak. I must have made a sound, because Haggard turned and shouted for me, but he was too far, too slow. My legs buckled, my fingers slipped, and I dropped into the gushing water.

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