A/N: I debated whether to put this in the same part as the last chapter, but it seemed very long that way. If you put the book aside for a little while rather than continuing to read from the last part, then you might need a quick recap: what follows is a vision Cristo gives to Leander, showing him an answer to most all of his questions about Soliara's past.

"I wasn't born yet when these things happened," said Cristo, "but it turns out memory transferral is a cinch. Enjoy."

Leander didn't feel anything, but when Cristo walked away, he could remember exactly how the entire population of Soliara became immortal, and he remembered being very, very angry about it.

XLVII. A Memory From Marius

Spring in Soliara is damn hot and the sun feels strong, like its rays can just blast through anything, and a crowd's no place to be standing in that kind of swelter, but Justin wouldn't choose to be anywhere else. Gaia Solin needs military support — not the fighting kind, but the kind that makes the home front feel like they owe a debt to the peacekeepers, and today the peacekeepers cash in.

The softer hearted were allowed to stay home (unlike in a real battle) but that wouldn't stop anything. No one'll notice. There are enough rows of uniforms, straight backs and high chins. Justin has a loving hand on the hilt of his gun. He prefers the fighting kind of support.

The soldiers stand with the gnomon of Soliara's central sundial at their backs, and the president's podium in front of them. They face a clustered crowd of less than straight backs and chins raised straining to see the action at the front, some on tippy toes, all in disorder, a mass of some thousands that would have been countable if they would just line up in a damn row, but they won't, so they aren't.

The disorganized mass mess also had a choice to be there despite the smoldering heat they bathe in, and they brought their children along, daughters on shoulders and infants on hips and how that body heat must rival the solar heat and Justin's grateful his fellow soldiers spread out in spaced lines and their uniforms are a little airy because there's, thankfully, a half decent breeze.

Trumpets blare, and the soldiers salute. It all looks very impressive. As one the little army about-faces so that every soldier turns toward the president in a chevron.

That mere humans can achieve such perfection in a matter of steps impresses the mess of crowd. Worried faces light up a little.

Gaia Solin speaks to the receptive audience. What she says isn't important. Justin pays no attention to the speech. That's just about impressions, and those Justin can live without. He made good with the truth a long time ago — on the battlefield.

Them, they just kept attacking. They lit up the night with flesh on fire, and lights that crashed and boomed. We wanted to kill all of them, a mass cleansing of a violent people history would eventually forget — it wouldn't even take that long.

It hadn't always been like that. We came with healing hands and building tools but they destroyed our righteous intentions and now we destroy them so we can purge our guilt along with them. Burn our good intentions along with corpses and just forget.

But we also had the power to restrain, and when our good intentions healed along with our initial wounds, we put the pistols away and tied up our enemies with magic ropes, and so many prisoners of war you never did see.

The prisons were full, overflowing, because execution would be wrong. There has to be another way. Was it any more wrong than overcrowding dirty cages we can't build fast enough and a life of castigation? Miserable places where it seemed like it was always night, looking back, six or seven prisoners in a cell built for two. But you wouldn't want us to release them, not even the peaceful protestors back home, now that there was peace in the region, because trust me, then there would be no peace.

Us, we wanted no more blood and no more booms — rosy meadows and sunshine and shit like that. Them, they wanted the world to burn, their own people, their own land, even the jails that held their own heroes. Some called them animals, but animals don't believe that hard. They don't hate that hard and they don't kill that hard.

In that mad house, I can't say we were innocent either. You can bind a person's hands and feet just as quick and easy as you can put holes in him, but sometimes you need more finality than that and sometimes you're tired of night shifts as prison guards, but for the most part, we captured, because we didn't have to kill any more.

With magic, we captured thousands. Screams, terror and shadows lit by fire still tear at my nightmares, but it was probably the cleanest war ever fought in the end. The question was, what were we still doing over there when the fires were all put out and what were we giving up our lives for to bring them food and water and keep them safe and comfortable in their cells? If they weren't going to die, they would need to be taken care of, and guarded. And they had some serious numbers. In fact, there were almost as many enemy prisoners as there were citizens of Soliara.

That was what the speech was about, but no speech could convey my nightmares to these dreamers.

"Magic is the power to show mercy," President Gaia Solin says. "But there's no power in this world that can make our enemies merciful. We keep them in prisons because they make the world a worse place. They don't have the mercy we're capable of.

"The troops behind me are home now, and rather than leave the situation overseas as we found it, undoing the work that our heroes have fought and died for, I see this volatile situation as an opportunity to fulfill another election promise I made."

Opportunity. The word is both risky and callous. That rhetoric's a gamble; she can't possibly convince them that way.

" Constellation has invented immortal life, and now we have the fuel to grant it to every citizen. These are not people, but animals. Animals don't possess mercy, so why should we have any for them?" That wasn't the truth, it was a rationalization, but the crowd leaned forward on their toes to hear more.

But they aren't the only ones deceiving themselves. Justin and the crew take to a pub afterward to celebrate, to pretend like great things're coming, but soon they commiserate over their pint glasses.

"I'm all for becoming immortal," Justin says to his best mate, "but I didn't expect it to go down like this. You thank a sacrifice and show it your gratitude. We're going to disrespect and dehumanize them so we can wash our hands clean as if it was only pigs' blood."

When thousands or millions die at war, the world forgets, eventually, and what was tragedy to one generation's just history to the next. This time's different. The prisoners line up to the slaughter, and when their deaths give eternal life, there won't be any forgetting.

Justin's wife is pregnant at the time the whole world is asking, "Will there be enough to go around?" Her belly bulges with new life inside, and if the mother is going to live forever so must the child, or what would the point be? One death for each immortal life, but what of the next generation? Will they grow old and die? Will we live forever in grief and mourning?

The last prisoner steps up for his humane murder while thousands more Solari starve for immortality and Justin's hungry wife goes into labor there in the crowd. Surely the infant of a member of Soliara's army, that is to say Constellation's army, who made all of this possible in the first place, will have some priority. Justin yells for them to stop and wait, and save the slaughter animal for his unborn baby, but the sacrifice was offered instead to some besuited company executive in his later years who waves to the crowd and spits on the man about to die for his eternal life. An entitled old executive whose face Justin will never forget because in his mind, that man killed his wife, too.

The child was born, a son, the first since the populace of Soliara became immortal, or at least most of it.

The crowd — Justin imagines it's the same one — waits outside the hospital, as barbarically clustered a mess as ever, to see what would happen, though there would be no sign for months to come.

The next time spring comes she's weaker; the child blooms with the year's flowers, and she withers too soon. She ages. As quickly as he grows, she grows old; his son's still only a child when they bury a crone.

"We have seized enemy lands," the president says in her next address. "But you would not have me kill innocent civilians for Solari benefit." Thousands in the crowded mass would, a hundred thousand in the city and a few million more throughout the empire — but they were in the minority. The majority had already become immortal. "When the civilians die natural deaths, you may have their lives, but not before." A five-year plan. No more bloodshed, just good politics and bureaucracy. To amend immortality. "Every citizen in Soliara will become immortal." A false promise. Gaia Solin promised to repair the flaws in the process, but she never would.

Leander saw all of this, knew all of this, in a millisecond — had experienced the memory all in one go and could now recall any bit of it as if he had been the one there. As if it were his own memory. The only question he was left with was how Cristo came into possession of such a memory.

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