Mantara

Death, it turned out, had a waiting room.

There were no clouds and no fire, and no light at the end of anything. It was a quiet place, like the pause between one heartbeat and the next, and it was lit by something that wasn't really light. It felt more like being looked at. I didn't have a body there. I couldn't feel my cold hands or the rain or the coffee. I was just there, thinking, and the thinking was very clear, clearer than it had been in years.

I knew I was dead. Nobody needed to tell me. What surprised me was how little I minded. I kept waiting to feel scared, or sorry, or angry about the report and the coworker and the thirty years I wasn't going to have. Nothing came. It felt like setting down a bag I'd been carrying so long I'd stopped noticing how heavy it was.

A woman stood in front of me. Or something that looked like a woman, the way a queen in her crown looks like a woman, and I knew without being told that she was a goddess. She was tall and still, and her eyes were older than any city I'd ever seen. When she looked at me, I had the feeling she could see everything I had ever done, every smile I'd faked and every report I'd finished for somebody else. I waited for her to be disappointed in me. She didn't seem disappointed. She seemed interested.

"You died," she said. Her voice was gentle, gentle enough that it made me careful. "It was quick. I am sorry for that, if it matters."

"I think it was a truck," I said, or thought. In that place, speaking and thinking were the same thing.

"It was." She didn't seem to find that part important. "You are not where you were meant to go. I brought you here because I have a choice to offer, and I do not offer it often." She tilted her head. "What do you wish to be in the next life?"

Memory came back all at once, everything together. The fluorescent lights on the fourteenth floor. The smiles in meetings. The soft knife of fine. The coworker's sticky note with its little heart. Greed in nice perfume, saying, "Let's be realistic." My phone face down on the table. The way everyone I knew called it business when someone got rich off someone else.

I could have asked for a lot of things. I knew the stories. I knew this was the part where people asked to be strong, or beautiful, or a hero, or rich, or loved. I thought about all of it, and none of it was what I wanted. I didn't want a better version of the same life.

"I just don't want to be human anymore," I said.

The Goddess was quiet for a moment. She looked almost amused and almost sad, and I couldn't tell which one was winning. "That is a clearer wish than most," she said.

"Anything else," I said, and I meant it with the last honesty I had left. "I won't go back to that. I won't smile for it. I won't spend another whole life pretending I'm fine."

"Anything is a large word," she said. "Some of what lives in the world I would send you to is small. Some of it is hunted. Some of it is the last of its kind. You may not like what anything turns out to be."

I thought about the documentaries, the animals that hunted and hid and waited. Small was fine. Hunted was fine. I'd been small and hunted my whole life. Nobody had ever been honest enough to call it that.

"I'll take it," I said. She smiled at that, for the first time. It wasn't a polite smile. I'd seen ten thousand polite smiles, and this wasn't one of them. "Very well," she said.

She lifted her hand and touched my forehead with two fingers, lightly, like someone pressing a seal into wax. I felt it even without a body. A warmth spread out from where she touched me, slow and deep, and with it came a word. It settled into me as if it had always been there and I had only forgotten it.

"Mantara," she said. "That is your name now. I give it to you, and it is yours. Not a human name, and not an apology. The forest will learn it before the kingdoms do."

"Mantara," I repeated. It felt strange and sharp, and it fit me better than my old name ever had.

"You will wake in a place called Red Orchard Hollow, where humans are afraid to go. You will wear a body that does not apologize for surviving. The System of that world will find you and claim you, and it will be honest with you, the way you always wanted. It will not be kind." She paused. "I will not be able to help you there. I can only send you."

"That's fine," I said. "I'm used to that."

"I know." Something moved in her old eyes that might have been pity, or might have been something better. "One more thing, child of refusal, and then you go. You asked to stop being human. You did not ask to stop being you. Those are not the same thing, and you will learn the difference. Try to keep the parts worth keeping."

I wanted to ask what she meant. I wanted to ask which parts. But the warmth from her fingers kept spreading, and the quiet place was getting thinner, like fog burning off in the morning. Her face began to fade. The last thing I saw was her watching me, still and patient, the way someone watches from far away when they want to see how a story ends.

Then the waiting room let go of me, and I fell. I don't know for how long. I tried to hold on to the quiet place, to her face, to the clear way I'd been thinking, but it all slid away like water through fingers I didn't have anymore. There was dark, and then warm dark, and then something pressing in on me from every side, tight and close. I felt a new shape closing around me, hard in some places and soft in others, with far too many edges. I felt the start of a hunger that didn't belong to anyone I had ever been.

My last thought as a human was the same as my last thought on the street, only this time I wasn't afraid.

"Oh," I thought. "Here we go."