“Aenea,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy, “es igitur paratus?” Are you ready, therefore?
“In nomine Humanitus, ego paratus sum,” said Aenea, looking into the Cardinal’s eyes with her one good eye. In the name of Humanitus, I am ready.
Cardinal Lourdusamy waved his hand. All of the gas jets flamed high at once. Flame engulfed my darling and the Albedo cybrid.
Aenea stretched in agony as the heat engulfed her.
“No!” screamed Albedo from the midst of flames and walked from the burning grate, his synthetic flesh burning away from his false bones. His expensive gray clothes rose toward the distant ceiling in burning wads of cloth and his handsome features were melting onto his chest. “No, damn you!” he screamed again and reached for Lourdusamy’s throat with blazing fingers.
Albedo’s hands went through the hologram. The Cardinal was staring at Aenea’s face through the flames. He raised his right hand. “Miserecordiam Dei … in nomine Patris, et Filia, et Spiritu Sanctus.”
These were the last words that Aenea ever heard as the flames closed on her ears and throat and face. Her hair exploded in flame. Her vision burned a bright orange and faded as her eyes were fused with flames.
But I felt her pain in the few seconds of life left to her. And I heard her thoughts like a shout—no, like a whisper in my mind.
Raul, I love you.
Then the heat expanded, the pain expanded, her sense of life and love and mission expanded and lifted through the flames like smoke rising toward the unseen ceiling skylight, and my darling Aenea died.
I felt the second of her death like an implosion of all sight and sound and symbol essence. Everything in the universe worth loving and living for disappeared at that second.
I did not scream again. I quit pounding the walls of my high-g tank. I floated in weightlessness, feeling the tank drain, feeling the drugs