She was flying over the longbow island, she was watching the fire mountain erupt, streams of molten lava pouring over the peak, rushing in rivulets toward the cities below.
She saw the lives crushed out, burned and flattened and transformed to smoke in an instant. And it was so easy, like blowing out a candle, like crushing a moth under her finger; she wanted it and it happened; she had willed it like a god.
As long as she remembered it from that detached, bird’s-eye view, she felt no guilt. She felt rather remotely curious, as if she had set an anthill on fire, as if she had impaled a beetle on a knife tip.
There was no guilt in killing insects, only the lovely, childish curiosity of seeing them writhe in their dying throes.
This wasn’t a memory or a vision; this was an illusion she had conjured for herself, the illusion she returned to every time she lost control and they sedated her.
She wanted to see it—she needed to dance at the edge of this memory that she did not have, skirting between the godlike cold indifference of a murderer and the crippling guilt of the deed. She played with her guilt the way a child holds his palm to a candle flame, daring to venture just close enough to feel the stabbing licks of pain.
It was mental self-flagellation, the equivalent of digging a nail into an open sore. She knew the answer, of course, she just couldn’t admit it to anyone—that at the moment she sank the island, the moment she became a murderer, she had wanted it.
“Is she all right?” Ramsa’s voice. “Why is she laughing?”