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“I’ve been dead, remember?”
“So have I. Think about this. Maybe what you’re claiming is grace is you just wanting me to be more like you. You never knew me before and you don’t know me now. Maybe I’m what grace looks like when God forgot you and you crawled out of Hell on your own.”
“See? You’re still complaining.”
“And you’re still bragging. You had four hundred years to sit around and think about how you were going to save the human race, and you fucking loved it. Every minute of suffering. You’re no better than Lucifer at his worst. You’re up to your eyeballs in the sin of pride.”
“You’re going to talk to me about sin, Abomination?”
“I’m talking to you about ego. You poisoned yourself once and now you’re doing it again, you show-off. In L.A., you’re what we call a one-hit wonder.”
“And you have the grace of a three-legged elephant.”
“That’s the best you can come up with? My mom used to call me that.”
The Shonin’s kettle boils.
“Your mother sounds smart.”
“She had her moments.”
He nods and stirs his tea.
“Are you ladies done?”
We both turn to the door. Wells is standing there.
“I don’t know whether I should send you to your corners for the next round or take away your toys and put you in a time-out.”
“No harm done,” says the Shonin. “We were just discussing ontology.”
I look at him.
“We were?”
“I was,” he says.
“You were slapping each other like a couple of biddies at the old folks’ home fighting over the last dish of banana pudding. You’re done. Kiddie time is over. Grown-up time starts now. Understood?”
“Sure,” says the Shonin.
“Whatever.”
Wells comes over and glances at the Shonin’s notes. They’re in Japanese. He frowns.
I say, “What did the Dreamers want?”
“What do any of us want?” says Wells. “Order. The little one, Brown, says it’s getting harder to hold reality together. Poor kid. She barely eats. Her sleep is abysmal. Her parents want to pull her out of the Dreamer program.”
“That would be a disaster right now,” the Shonin says.
“That’s what I told them. Mom listened. I don’t know about dad.”
Stark goes to the whiteboard. Stops when he sees a check mark next to Akkadu’s name. He looks at me. I don’t like it.
“What happens if they take her out?”
Wells shakes his head and walks around the room.
