Frustration fills me. How can I know whether to obey if I can't know why?
"I don't know if I can do this," I say when he leans against the windowsill, looking out across the skyline. "I feel so conflicted, so guilty, like being with you is wrong. Like it's a betrayal of my mother."
He says nothing, just runs his hand down from my shoulder to my hand, which he squeezes and that small show of caring makes my heart soften to him.
"It's like the world I grew up believing in doesn't really exist," I say. "It's all just a façade, and underneath is this really horrible world where monsters run things in collusion with bad humans. I always believed we lived with a system of justice. That our laws were what kept us from barbarism and arbitrary power. Without that system," I struggle to express myself. "Then, life becomes so insecure, dangerous, meaningless except for brute survival of the strongest."
"It's always been that way," he says, turning to face me and I can hear frustration in his voice. "Those laws are just meant to assuage your fears, keep you in line so that you live your lives out without causing those in power any problems. That's the truth."
"I realize that now," I say. "There is no meaning, no reason – for anything. No universal rights. Rights are what the strong say they are. Your life and my life? Accidents. Eyeblinks in the life of the universe. Random collisions between molecules. Nothing more. Your vampire mutation? Just a random accident of random radiation and cellular biomechanics. In the long run, nature doesn't care and will probably weed it out as unfit. The universe doesn't care. Life has no meaning and all that matters is power."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I do." I run my fingers along the glass windowpane. "Events would seem to bear me out. Soren has power. He can force you to do what he wants. The rest of us are helpless and nothing we can do will change it."
We stand in silence for a moment.
"Come here," he says and takes my hand. "I want to show you something." He pulls me behind him and I resist, not wanting to talk, not wanting to think. We enter into the main room and he pulls me over to the office area. Vasily sits at a desk, watching the monitors, playing solitaire on his computer.
"Can you excuse us for a while?" Julien says.
Vasily stands and leaves without a word.
Julien sits at a desk, an old oak dinosaur, the top worn and scratched. He opens a file drawer and searches through a dozen files in a holder.
"Here it is," he says, pulling out a worn folder, thick with contents. He opens it on the desk and on the top is a folded image from a glossy magazine. The edges and folds are worn from repeated use. It must have been folded and unfolded hundreds of times.
Spread out, the image is of a dark sky with what appears to be thousands of tiny blurs of light. I lean closer and see that amidst the points of light are small galaxies resembling images of the Milky Way I've seen before, some on their side, some face on, yellow, white, pink, blue.
"Is that the whole universe?" I say in awe. "There are thousands of galaxies."
He shakes his head and touches the image, his fingers running over it almost with reverence.
"No. This was taken of the emptiest part of the night sky. It's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image. If you held your hand up at arm's length, the area of the night sky they studied for this would cover only the tip of your little finger."
I lean over and examine it more closely. Galaxies of every conceivable size, shape and color are strewn against a black background. In the middle, one large bright star, its light refracted into points.
"I never knew there were so many."
"Each one of those specks? They aren't stars, Eve. They're galaxies with hundreds of millions of stars." He pulls me down so that I sit on his lap, his arms around me and although I want to resist, he prevents me.
"Look at it. That," he says, pointing to the bright star in the center of the image. "That is the only star. The rest are galaxies. The star's close – maybe thousands of light-years away in our own galaxy. The galaxies? Millions of light-years away. There are billions of galaxies. Each one has hundreds of millions of stars. They took that image from that position because they thought it was empty. Look at what they found in the emptiest part of the sky. Imagine that image taken and repeated to cover the entire sky."
He looks down at the image and shakes his head.
"There are too many stars – too many for us to be skeptical of the existence of God. Humans create such beauty and wonder that I can't believe that there's no meaning, no purpose. God may be beyond any of our puny minds but I do believe God exists, Eve. If I didn't, I couldn't imagine existence."
He squeezes me.
I don't want to hear his philosophy. I want to crawl into the bed and pull the covers over my head, block out the real world.
"That's so anthropocentric," I say, repeating some word I've learned in a class at university, never having a reason to even use it before. "What about all the other animals?"
"You can't compare that way, Eve. They're like steps on a ladder to us. The universe is billions of years old and in all that time it's been moving towards us. You've studied science. You should see it clearly – increasing physical complexity starting with hydrogen and helium, all the way to the creation of biological life and then consciousness, and finally an intelligence that can actually see back to the beginning. And now one that's immortal. It's like we are the universe's consciousness and given immortality, what can we do? It's limitless."
"That's a beautiful thought," I say and shake my head, my breath catching in my throat. "I thought you wanted all vampires dead. I can't believe it. It's too self-serving, to see us as the reason for the universe to exist."
"God put us here for a reason," he says. "I don't want all vampires dead. Just those who want Dominion."