Sym was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital for Iseult to get her ankle imaged to determine if she needed a cast or just a boot. The skull was in her lap, wrapped up in Iseult’s bag for discretion. No need to alarm the kind nurses. It felt strange to be holding a skull in such a busy area. Like she was doing something illicit. And she kind of was. She had in her hands a technology, that if it was what they thought it was, could change the world. She ran her hand over the bag thoughtfully. She had never really believed in godseed, or gods for that matter, and even now she still wasn’t sure she was completely convinced. It had just seemed like a cool interest to have. Like zombies, an uncanny valley effect, a fascination with something that often looked human but wasn’t. The appeal of living by more base, primal instincts rather than the more complex and developed human ones. More simply put, it was a fun escape from the mundane, the humdrum of everyday life. Except now it was real, she held the godseed in her hands. She wondered if she would regret that yearning for something more exciting. Like a bomb, just waiting to detonate. For now, Sym thought as she yawned, she needed a break. It had been a long night.
‘Sym!’ She must be tired, she thought she heard her Grandmother for a moment. ‘Sym! Oh Sym, oh my gods, you’re here!’ Grandmother rushed to her side, tears pouring down her face, wrapping Sym in an all encompassing, too tight hug, her tears wet against the skin exposed by her dress. ‘How did you find out?! They just brought her in! Oh Sym, I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault.’ She was barely coherent, leaning, sobbing on Sym. ‘Oh Sym, it’s all my fault.’ She broke down into heavy heaving sobs, wracking her entire body. Sym felt a pit sinking in her stomach. There was only one person she could think of that would produce this level of anguish from Grandmother. She squashed the rising comprehension. No. It had to be something else. She tried to pull her arms out of Grandmother’s grasp in order to rub her back and calm her down, but her Grandmother was oblivious to her efforts. ‘Grandmother!’ She finally shouted, trying to get her attention, ‘what is going on?!’ Grandmother looked at her in shock, finally taking in her apparel and messy make up. ‘You don’t know.’ Her eyes filled with a new round of tears. ‘Sym. Sweetheart. It’s your mother.’
The world narrowed to a single point for Sym, collapsing around her like a fisheye lens until this moment in time was her entire world. This moment when she learned that her mother was mortal. She had known, academically, that everyone was mortal. Not even gods lived forever. But she had never really considered it in practice. Her mother had always been too alive, too cornerstone to her life, for Sym to entertain what it would be like if she died. Her world was breaking apart, caving in around her. Was this how Grandmother felt in the cave? She wondered. This squeezing feeling of suffocation, of her lungs filling with cotton instead of the oxygen they desperately needed. No wonder her grandmother tried to find something to numb it, something to distract from the horror of it.
‘There was an accident. She was exposed to a great deal of gamma radiation and, and they brought her here as fast as they could, but…but.’ Grandmother paused, trying to get a hold on her gasping breath, her hand shaking where she gripped Sym’s wrist, holding herself up, holding them both up with this one connection alone. ‘They have her in an induced coma right now, and they said…they said they would wake her up to say goodbye.’
Sym’s mind was finally catching up, ‘What!? How would she be exposed to gamma radiation?! That doesn’t even make sense.’ She snapped, trying desperately to find the faulty logic, the flaw that would reveal this all to be a grave misunderstanding. ‘She was working on some sort of private project for Veridia, it's why she was hardly home.’ Sym ground her teeth, ‘What project.’ Grandmother shook her head, watery eyes shaking. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Good news!’ Iseult burst out of the double doors, a crutch under her arm and a boot on her foot. ‘It’s just a…fracture.’ She took in the scene before her wide eyed, Grandmother’s anguished face, Sym’s enraged defiant look. ‘What’s happening? What’s wrong?’ Sym shook her head. She couldn’t wouldn’t say it. It wasn’t real, it was wrong, a lie. ‘I need to see my Mother,’ she said instead, peeling away from them and storming over to the nurses station, her grandmother and Iseult rushing to keep up.
The nurse led the three of them to her mother’s room, an isolation room protecting her damaged immune system, she explained as they walked. It was all just background noise to Sym. There was a flurry of action inside her mother’s room. A monitor making a chilling flat sound, an orderly handing the attending doctor a defibrillator. ‘It's useless,’ she heard the defeated sigh of the nurse outside as she continued, not noticing Sym, ‘she may as well have been dead when she came in.’
Grandmother and Sym dropped Iseult off at her gated entrance. Her muted ‘thanks’ the only sound between the three of them the entire car ride. The return home was interrupted by an officer pulling them over for not making a complete stop at a sign. He cheerily wrote them a ticket, seemingly immune to the aura of solemnity in the vehicle. They pulled into their company subsidized parking spot, the hover dipping them down to land awkwardly, rather than the typical smooth landing of a well-maintained vehicle. It had been fine just a day ago. Everything was wrong. It was as if the entire world had missed a step on the staircase and had righted itself to be just a centimeter off. And that centimeter was Posao. Grandma turned off the ignition and they both just sat there, in the car, quietly, for a long time.
‘What did you mean when you said it was your fault?’ Sym eventually asked, breaking the silence. She had been replaying every moment of the last few hours on a continuous loop. So many things didn’t make sense the way they should, but this one detail was the only one she could resolve right now. ‘It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.’ She repeated the platitude flatly. It was what someone was supposed to say when something like this happened, right?
Grandmother stayed very quiet, and then as if letting out a breath she had held for too long she finally said, ‘I lost my luck,’ She took another slow breath before continuing, ‘Ketsuri has always been my patron god, one night she came to me in a dream and asked to borrow just a little. And, fickle thing that she is, she ended up taking it all.’ She swallowed, looking straight out the window, eyes unfocused as if staring into the past. ‘I went to visit Posao today. I wanted to come clean about my…my problem. I don’t know why I didn’t just wait for her to come home, it just seemed so important at the time.’ She dabbed at her tears with a tissue that was more water than cloth. ‘It must have rubbed off on her, because as I was leaving I saw them wheeling her out.’ Her voice cracked as if holding back a sob
‘That’s not real Grandmother. Ketsuri and the gods are just, just stories to give people something to hold on to when things go wrong.’ At the back of her mind she questioned this, if they had found godseed, wouldn’t that make the gods real? But at this moment she wanted desperately for it to have been just some mundane fossilized skull, interesting but not revolutionary.
Grandmother shook her head. ‘I’ve always known Ketsuri would eventually want it back, what she gave me. When.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Down in the cave,’ she continued, firmly. ‘I dreamed about her. I screamed at her, begged her, promised her things I shouldn’t have. And it was when I said she owed me that she finally showed up. Said she would give me some of her luck, just a pinch. But she always says things like that. Just a pinch. Ha. What a joke. What is a little to a god. You know, part of why I gamble is because of her. Just want to check if her gift still works. I should have known I would notice if it wasn’t.’ She let out another strangled sob, her hand over her mouth.
Sym wondered if her Grandmother had ever really left the cave. If her mind was the cave now, trapping her in an endless torment of darkness. She wished she could be her light, but she was trapped too, in this endless joke of a moment where her mother was mortal. There would be no more light in her world.
Later, when she was going to bed, she checked the origami cochineal she had laid on the window sill all those nights ago with her prayer for Grandmother. The ink was still there, red as the night she painted it. She scoffed, it seemed Ketsuri truly had abandoned them both.
When Sym woke the next morning the house was ghostly quiet. No Grandmother moving about in the kitchen, no sound at all in the apartment. An eerie premonition came to her. She bolted out of bed, sprinting out into the hall, and ripped open Grandmother’s bedroom door with enough force that it bounced off the wall. Empty. And not just her bed, her closet was empty, her toiletries packed up, even her house slippers were no longer under the bed. Everything was gone. She stood in the doorway, still as stone, trying to comprehend what her eyes were telling her. Her Grandmother had left her. She had woken determined to eat, but she couldn’t bear to go into the kitchen, it would be too full of memories of her. She went back to her room, too empty to do anything else, picking up the note that she had somehow stepped over, missing as she raced from her room. She lay on her rumpled bed, splayed out, eyes staring sightlessly up on the ceiling, the note clenched in her hand. She could guess what it said. She had never believed in gods. Not really. Not even the zombie king. But clearly Grandmother did. And so, she had been abandoned. Perhaps Grandmother didn’t see it that way, saw it as protection instead. But Sym knew the truth. She would take all the bad luck in the world if it meant keeping her Grandmother, if it meant she wouldn't leave her too.
