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But for all their carefree chatter, there was something else going on, something secret. As I watched, Messenger slipped something to Ariadne. No casual observer would have made out the object wrapped as it was in newspaper, but I was no ordinary observer and I saw the revolver clearly. Then he kissed her and quickly walked away down an alley while Ariadne continued on.
I had a choice of whom to follow, but it was impossible still to resist following the young man who would someday become my teacher, my master. It was as he stepped into a small open square with a flower market exploding in brilliant spring color that the two Gestapo agents emerged from a doorway. They fell into step with him and then seized his arms. They searched him, rough hands everywhere, and when they found nothing they slapped him across the face, leaving a red welt.
Even now I had the powers that Messenger had taught me to use and I scrolled quickly ahead, watching them take Messenger, watching him sitting frightened in a small, bare room, shackled to a steel chair, helpless. He had been capable of fear then; he had been only human, just a boy.
When the guards slapped him he cried out. When they punched him and blood sprayed from the ridge of bone above his eye, he sobbed.
And when they slowly, dramatically, opened a canvas sheath and drew out the brutal instruments of torture, he broke.
“Ariadne,” he said, weeping. “I gave it to Ariadne to pass on to the Resistance.”
I closed my eyes, unable to bear the sight. He had been weak, as I had been weak. He had destroyed Ariadne, as I had destroyed Samantha Early. This was the evil he had done. The weight of it crushed me. How many times over how many years had Messenger told himself he had no choice? How many times had he played that scene again and again in his head? How many times had her name haunted him with a guilt he could not forgive himself for?
I knew what came next and I wished I could look away, but it is a messenger’s duty to witness, so I moved through time in that effortless way I had learned, and found I was in the same room. But this time, it was Ariadne shackled. And it was her face that bled from the hail of fists.
She gave them an address.
Her terrified voice said, “If you want the Jew, the one who gave us the gun, he’s at Sixty-Eight Rue du Cercle.”
They released them both, Messenger and Ariadne, but at different times, and they would not see each other again until much had changed.
I saw Messenger-before-he-was-Messenger standing at the edge of the train tracks, tears streaming down his face, steeling himself to step in front of that onrushing steam locomotive and end his life. I wanted to cry out, “No!” but of course I already knew he was not to die this day.
A mist, a yellow mist, closed around him and he was gone.
I wondered if I had the power to see the moment when he met his own messenger. When he first faced the Master of the Game. And when, shattered as I had been shattered, he refused freedom and chose instead the same terrible penance as I had.
He would not have known that his duties would soon require him to confront Ariadne with the evidence of her own betrayal. He would not have known that she would fail the Master of the Game’s test.
Was it not cruel beyond all imagining to make him pierce his true love’s mind and find the fear that destroyed her?
I froze the world around me then, closed my eyes, and fought to hold on to the newfound strength I had shown in resisting Oriax. I was not afraid, I was just terribly sad. I was sad for the two young lovers, for the evil that had pushed them to betrayal, at the guilt that had eaten at them both for far longer than I had ever imagined. There had always been something ancient concealed beneath Messenger’s boyish looks. He had been frozen in time, not aging in his flesh but aging terribly in his mind, accumulating ever more regrets, ever more suffering.
I did not need to see more. I understood. Messenger had betrayed his love and Ariadne had betrayed a neighbor to his death and the death of all his family.
Ah, but I still did not know the full weight of these events. I thought I had learned all there was to know, but secrets still remained.
Ariadne. I spoke her name in my mind and in hers. I felt her brutalized consciousness turn slowly to me, as slowly as a flower following the sun.
Have you been in this place since then? I asked.
Since then, she answered.
It is time to leave.
I cannot.
You can. If you forgive.
I can forgive all but one.
You must forgive her, too, Ariadne. You must earn that forgiveness and you will be free.
I betrayed him. I betrayed him and his family. All dead because I was weak. All dead because of me. All save one.
The Jew. If you want the Jew . . . His entire family. All but one.
All but one.
