New Title 1 (41 page)

Can I kill it? Can Chaos
die
? What would the repercussions be? Can the world exist without Chaos? And most terrifying: If I do kill it, what might appear in its place?

Doesn’t matter. My mind is set. The score needs to be settled.

I am unwilling to bend on this. Do I always have to answer violence with violence, take an eye where one was plucked? Am I incapable of turning the other cheek? Maybe so. In the end we always return to what we are. In the end, we find our truth.

Embrace it, I say.

Embrace it, hold it, never let it go. If we are defined, as individuals and as a species, by those deep-seated drives that make us who we are, then it is only a fool who fights that definition. There must be love. But there must be hatred, as well.

And there must—
must
—be vengeance.

The ship carries me forward. I go willingly. Like the fish swimming below, I relish the simple pleasure of forward motion. Soon the Syrian coast will come into view.

Yes, people can change.

But sometimes the old ways, the true ways, are the best ways.

And I am coming.

Coming to show you the truth inside the lie.

— | — | —

Patrick Lestewka is the pseudonym of Canadian writer Craig Davidson.
The Preserve
is his first book. He has a collection,
Rust and Bone
and a novel entitled
The Fighter
.