I, Cassandra

76 | AMADI EZENWA

The rain slants sideways, falls in blinding sheets until the pod's passenger is marinating in a pool of water. I can't see fuck all so I reach in to haul them out and half carry, half drag them to the shelter as best as I can manage under the healthy weight of someone fed on the food of another world.

Inside the shelter, I ease them to the ground. They're wearing a different kind of jumpsuit to the one I wore and theirs has a fitted head covering with openings for their nostrils and mouth. This much I can tell from the shape of them: they're female.

I check for a pulse through the material of her head covering. It's there, slow and quiet, but definitely there. I'm a little afraid to take the head covering off like somehow I am violating her, but I'm not sure if she even knows she's wearing it. Maybe it was put on her after she was put under. I decide to do it, to see who has travelled all this way to end up here, in this place with me, so I can prepare myself to greet her. I'm nervous, worse than nervous, feel sick as I unfasten the material from the neck of the jumpsuit. For a beat, I hold off, because this is it. This is where it all ends and begins again. I pull the covering off just as she stirs and opens her eyes.

She looks right at me, unseeing, unaware it's me. I can't speak. I can't even think. It's beyond what I can understand.

'Hello?' she calls, soft, so soft it breaks my heart.

I don't know what to do, what to say. It's her. It can't be her. But it's her.

'Where am I?' she asks, a tremor of fear touches her words, which shames me, but I am with a woman I believed was dead. Was told was dead.

'Please,' she continues in the voice I never thought I'd hear again, 'I can't see. I am blind.'

'You are here, with me,' I say, my heart aching as she recognises my voice, as her blinded eyes well with tears, 'ten thousand years in the future.'

She lifts her hand, searches for me. 'You're alive.'

I nod, then remember she can't see me. I catch her hand and press my lips against her fingertips. She closes her eyes and exhales, a trembling thing.

'I thought I had lost your forever.'

'And I believed you were dead.'

Her eyes open and she looks right at me. It's unsettling, to at once be both seen and unseen. I wonder how she went blind, but will leave it to her to tell me. I look her over, thinner than I remember. I can't believe she's here, alive, right in front of me in this fucking place. Her chest rises and falls as she breathes. I watch her, rapt, and wait for the dissonance to fade, to accept she's here, and mine again, my beautiful, perfect Adiana.

'I did die,' she says, so low I have to strain to hear her over the slash of rain against the shelter.

I wait. For a beat I am terrified she is like Ryan, an eternal machine underneath her flesh, then I realise if she was, she could see.

'But they brought you back?'

She nods. 'My father blamed you for what I did. He wouldn't listen, especially after it cost me my sight. He said it would be for the best. A fresh start in a new world, without you.'

I say nothing. I wonder how her father managed to secure a pod for Adiana so early in the game, then another memory comes to me, of the Prime Minister mentioning it had been four years since Adiana had died. At the time I didn't flag it—caught up in his plan to bury me in G-II for one thousand years against my will—that he would even know about Adiana, or how long I had believed she was dead, but now it's clear. He knew. He was giving me another chance—and I wanted to kill him.

I still have her fingertips against my lips. She touches the matted mess of my beard. A look of confusion passes over her smooth features. She's still the same as I remember her from our dinner at Le Circle, and I am sure she thinks I will be the same, too. While she has slept I have aged more than six years since the day I murdered a million innocent people and she took her overdose. She's still forty, but I am forty-eight.

I decide not to tell her how it all turned out. That everything is gone and we're back to the Stone Age, living in a shelter in the crater of what was once the most advanced city in the world. There will be time for that later. Right now all that matters is she is here, and so am I. We'll figure out the rest. We will have our children. We will have the life we were denied by the system that decided our fate. I am resourceful. I can make this work.

I pull her up to me as another flare of lightning sears a path light through the grey mist of the downpour. Beneath us, the hard-packed earth softens, turns to mud.

'Where are we?' she asks again as she settles into the circle of my embrace, both of us drenched. She shivers, and I tighten my hold on her. I need time to process how fast my life has changed, that the woman I mourned and believed dead for years is alive and here, now, in my arms and with me in this place.

As she explores my raggedness with the fingers that have become her eyes, I fall back into the habits that keep me sane: I make plans. Create order. I will take her to the lake. We will swim. And then we will go south, to the coast. We will build a home of stone. We will start again. We will be the first of a new race of humanity. And I will do what I always wanted to do—make the world a better place.

'Where we can be together,' I answer.

And then I kiss her, and we do not stop for a long time.