Chapter 294: Words for a Son.
He looked at me once and then turned away, facing the window.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at where I happen to be standing.
"You see, Abram."
He said my name walking toward the glass, not looking at anything but the trees. The green light moved across his face in soft, shifting bands. His shoulders were set the way a man sets them when the only audience left is the future.
I moved through the space between us and put myself directly in front of him.
He walked through me and stopped at the window. The air of his passage left nothing behind—no temperature, no displacement. Only the quiet certainty that I was not here to him in any way that mattered.
"Can you see me?"
"I know you’ve seen a great deal by now. And I know you’re judging me for it."
He wasn’t answering. He was talking into an empty room, on a day two decades before I’d be old enough to hear any of it. His reflection sat faint in the glass, layered over the moving leaves outside.
I came around and stood inside him, wrapped in the same space, looking out at what he was looking at. The overlap was complete. For a second the shape of our shoulders matched.
"Don’t worry. I can’t see you. This is the past and it’s finished. But I know that one day you’ll stand in this house, and that’s why I’m saying this now, into a room with nobody in it, like a madman."
Green outside. Trees moving in a wind I couldn’t feel. A world with weather in it—soft light, living branches, the ordinary business of birds crossing between them. Everything the plain had never been.
"By the time you’re here, you’ll already know that you’ve slept with your half sister."
I stopped breathing.
The words landed with the weight of something that had been waiting years to be spoken. The green light outside continued, indifferent. The trees kept moving.
"It’s all right, Abram. She was carrying something that can end the world. And out there is a girl carrying your child, and a great many people you love."
I turned my head fast and it did nothing, because there was nothing to turn toward. The room stayed exactly as it was—warm wood, quiet air, a dead man speaking into a future that had already arrived.
How do you know that.
The system had told me about Sherry four days ago. Four days. Standing outside an empty glass chamber in a sub-level with a camera in her hand and nothing on it. And here was a man twenty years dead, in a forest house before the walls existed, mentioning it the way you mention rain coming.
You knew before she did. You knew before I did.
Which means you knew it would be her. Or you knew there’d be someone, and your system was always going to make certain of it.
I looked at the side of his face and couldn’t decide which of those was worse. The line of his jaw was the same as mine. The set of the mouth was the same. Only the eyes were different—older, already carrying the cost of decisions that hadn’t finished landing yet.
"You know I wouldn’t have been anywhere near any of it," I said, "if your system hadn’t walked me into it."
He couldn’t hear me. I said it anyway. The words left my mouth and disappeared into the same empty air he was filling with his own.
"I’m sorry that I shaped your path the way I did." His voice dropped. The apology sat low and complete. "But I need you to know I’m proud of you."
That got in under something I’d thought was closed. The words moved through the space where pride had never been and left a clean, unexpected ache behind them.
Maybe there had never been another road. Maybe saving a world simply cost someone’s son.
"I’m sorry for what I’ve put you through." He turned from the glass. The green light left his face. "If my own father had carried what you’re carrying, you’d have had an ordinary life. A small one. A good one."
He started pacing. I stayed at the window and let a dead man talk at my back. The boards under his feet made no sound I could use. Outside, a bird crossed the light in a single clean arc and vanished into the leaves.
"I know you grow weary. I know you do things that don’t sit right with what you actually want." A pause. The silence that followed was longer than the sentence. "Be strong anyway. Please."
I didn’t move. I watched the life out there. Birds crossing between the trees. Light coming down clean. A world that had never needed walls and still didn’t know it was going to need them.
"I never got the chance to teach you anything. But you have in your hands the chance to give your son what I failed to give you. And if that day ever comes, I’ll be the happiest man who ever lived."
There was nothing to say back that wouldn’t just be me talking to myself. The words stayed in my throat where they belonged.
Down the corridor, Venna was still in that room with her mother and her own newborn face. The quiet between the two rooms felt larger than the house.
"I’m sorry about how you met your family. How you met Eleanor. I’m sorry I made you do every single thing I couldn’t do myself." He came back to the window. His reflection settled over mine for a second and then separated again. "I’m sorry about your sister."
Then, quieter:
"And I believe by now you’ve met Brahim. I’m sorry I made you kill him. You had to."
Kill him?
I turned inside him and stared at the side of his face. The profile didn’t change. The mouth kept its shape. The eyes stayed on the trees.
I have never killed anyone named Brahim. I met him for the first time two days ago, in an elevator, with no heartbeat in his chest.
"Don’t do it again," my father said. "It won’t help you. He comes back every time. And every time, he comes back stronger than he was before."
He stopped and looked at the floor. The light from the window laid a long pale rectangle across the boards between his feet.
"This isn’t your time. I know you’re nearly out, and I have so much left to say to you." He exhaled. The sound was soft and final. "I’ll keep leaving words wherever I can. I always have. Look for them—"
"Bram." Venna’s voice, from very far away. The sound arrived thin, stretched across whatever distance the libra used. "Let’s go."
I opened my eyes.