God War (27 page)
Brigid had ducked out of the celebrations early, migrating to her old quarters, which, like everything else in the redoubt, were sprinkled with a light dusting of rock debris, new growths and lumps along the walls and door frames.
She swept wreckage from her bed and sat down, feeling the great sadness inside her. It was a sadness she simply did not know how to address. She had been someone else for a while, her body working to the commands of the shadow self that Ullikummis had created, the character known as Haight.
Brigid had remained largely unaware of Haight’s actions, but she sensed the things that had been done in her name, death reaped across the globe, friends turned upon, shot. Haight was some rabid part of Brigid, what happened when disease took control of the body. In this case the sickness was a god, a false god fallen from the heavens to reshape the world for his mother.
Brigid had used a mind trick to hide her true self, focusing on a mandala she had seen months before in a Soviet bunker. The mandala, a meditation tool capable of sending a person’s mind to another plane of existence, had been weaved on a Persian rug that now resided somewhere in Lakesh’s private quarters. The rug design showed the sky, colored blue with golden rings running through it in concentric circles, highlighted here and there with reds and greens. Brigid’s eidetic memory had stored its design, and when Ullikummis had come at her in the cavern cell, breaking her down and rebuilding her thoughts in the manner of the Annunaki, Brigid had re-created the mandala in her mind’s eye, sending her personality to that other plane of existence once she knew she could not stop him.
Every time Haight had seen blues and gold and green, it had been like an alarm clock ringing in her mind, trying to reawaken the real woman hiding within: Brigid Baptiste.
Brigid lay back on her bed, trying to remember what it was to be normal, trying to feel at home in a body that had been turned against everything she stood for. There, amid the debris on her bedside unit, Brigid spied an ancient paperback book—
The Bell Jar,
by Sylvia Plath. It was one she had read before, not that long ago. Reaching out, Brigid took the book and flipped it open to the first page. It was a comfort, reading words already familiar.
In spite of her eidetic memory, Brigid knew that sometimes a book only revealed its true meanings on a subsequent reading; sometimes the real story was only clear once you had put it all together for yourself.
Alone in her ruined room, Brigid lay back on the bed and began to read.
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781459235298
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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