The Destroyer (3 page)

Authors: Tara Isabella Burton

BOOK: The Destroyer

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If the others suspected what she had done, we never spoke of it. To condemn her was to condemn her works; we could not afford to lose her genius now.

I was her keeper, in the end. I was the one with keys to her laboratory; I was the one who knew what she had built, who knew how it all worked. I was the one who taught the others how to secure buildings, far from the seven hills, how to keep the spores out.

I was the one without flesh, and so I was the one who could walk in the old city, unharmed. They sent me to count the dead, to take names and photographs, to remember them. I was the one who reported to them that my mother had died with the rest. I lied.

Her face is withered; her skin is green. She rasps when she speaks, and it is only because I know her so well that I am able to understand her. She lives on the Capitoline, in an empty tramcar, waited upon by the sightless servant who bears my face. She inhales poisoned air and engineers her own temporary remedies. I bring her pills, in as many different flavors as I can invent, and she insists that I am lying to her.

“That's not how it happened at all,” she says. “There was nothing wrong with it. I checked itâtwenty times. I made no mistakes.” Her story changes. Sometimes she insists that it was Caesar's conspiracy, that he altered the formula behind her back, that he was jealous of her power. Sometimes she insists that I must have tampered with it in the laboratory, that I must have turned a dial too far in the wrong direction and forgotten about it, and so this is why the world has been destroyed. Sometimes, the worst times, she tells me that we are better off now, that this is only a temporary setback, a necessary ellipsis between the world in which I was born and the world she knows that I deserve.

She asks me about the laboratory, about my research. Sometimes, when I reach an impasse in my experiments, she is the one who tells me what to do next. She slips me formulas, chiseled into slate, and reminds me to polish her inscription at the gates. I carry the weight of her on my back when I go.

“You're alive,” she says. “And that's what matters. You're alive, and they know us now. By our works, they will know us, and you will lead them into tomorrow.”

They made me Caesar. I never told her. It was the only way I could think of to punish her.

Last night I told the Senate that I have found the cure, that I have made perfect my mother's research. I told them I have engineered a device that will destroy all the spores and purify the air once more.

There is only one problem, I said. We will have to destroy it first. We can't risk a cell, a speck, a single gangrenous dot remaining. We will atomize the ruins, the colonnades, the vines; we will level the seven hills, and thenâwhen everything is ashâwe can rebuild.

They murmured “hail,” and licensed me to do as I see fit.

Tomorrow, I will put my seal on the decree, and then men in gas masks will tear down the ramparts of my childhood places; tomorrow I will erase my mother's footprints and the sound of her voice from the face of the earth, and in the smoke of the earth I will bury her. I will walk out into the world she has left for me, and then with two sticks and a match I will build her up again.

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