MAJOR ARCANA: Part Three, Chapter 6

Them

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PART THREE

Chapter 6. | Them

By the late spring, both Ash del Greco and Ari Alterhaus had healed almost completely. A physical assault on the physical, a material assault on the material—these were not enough to subdue the physical and the material, to subject them finally to the kingdom of mind, of the cleansing force they’d read and reread about in Simon Magnus’s opus, Overman 3000. (They’d come to this conclusion half in words and half in the strange telepathy they had developed after having spent so much time together.) This was when they decided to become, each separately as well as both together, a “they,” a singular and a plural. For the ninth grade, they’d remained Ashley and Arielle, but at the beginning of the next school year, they transformed, first into Ash and Ariel, and then, for symmetry’s sake, into Ash and Ari.