Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  In the dark between the air lock and the city, while Morgan was too far ahead and the wind was too loud for her to hear, Alyssa said, “You know her, don’t you.”

  There was only ever one “her” when people spoke like that. Ivan said, “Yes.”

  “Who is Matthew Gale?”

  “He’s the friend I’m going to find.”

  “Abigail Hunter?”

  “Dead,” Ivan said.

  Where Alyssa was pressed against him, Ivan could feel the faintest traces of warmth. She said, “Why are you looking for her?”

  “Because she’s my friend,” Ivan said. “Because all this—” He nearly stopped, remembering whom he was speaking to, but to continue to lie to Alyssa seemed an effort not worth making against someone who had stood beside him over the frozen graves in the dark. “Because all this is something that I helped her do, and I wish I hadn’t.”

  “She must’ve made some of her choices on her own,” Alyssa said.

  Ivan chewed over her words as they walked. The shapes of the Aquilonian houses were growing nearer, and Morgan glanced back every now and again to make sure they were still behind her.

  “A part of me thinks I should kill you. A part of me thinks I should follow you until you find her and then kill her.”

  Ivan glanced down at the top of Alyssa’s head. Both of her hands were curled around his arm as if she were balancing herself with him as a counterweight now that her gun was gone. “And?”

  “I don’t think I will,” Alyssa said.

  Morgan had stopped ahead of them, at the edge of the town. She was speaking to a few men who had materialized out of the houses at her approach. Revolutionaries. Morgan turned around and waved a hand to hurry them along.

  “How is it you haven’t found her yet?” Alyssa asked, and her grip slowed Ivan’s steps just slightly to leave them enough privacy to speak for a little longer. “She’s got the biggest army in the solar system.”

  “She’s been moving fast,” said Ivan. “We’ve been following her, but always one step behind.”

  “She hasn’t left you a message to tell you where she’s going next?”

  “She thinks I’m dead,” Ivan admitted.

  Alyssa said, “Or she doesn’t want to be found.”

  BACKWARD

  Constance Harper was tall and pretty, though she was attractive more by way of manner than by way of facial symmetry. Ivan had met few people who could match her quiet aura of proud confidence. But that was about the extent of his knowledge of her: she was proud and self-assured; she pretended to be a bartender but was actually, according to Mattie, a thief like him and Ivan. And that was it. Ivan had never even known she’d existed until about a week ago.

  “I have to run,” Mattie said halfway through the impromptu tour of the Annwn he was leading. Ivan was immediately suspicious. Ten minutes earlier, when he’d begun the tour for his foster sister’s sake, Mattie hadn’t had anywhere to go.

  Brightly, as if the idea had only just occurred to him, Mattie said, “Ivan, why don’t you show Constance the piloting room?”

  Constance Harper looked as unimpressed by Mattie’s unsubtlety as Ivan felt. “What’s so suddenly important?”

  “I saw someone looking a little lonely in your bar, and it’s very important that I go keep him company.”

  “Of course,” Ivan said.

  Mattie was already climbing down the ship’s sideways hall. “Have fun!” he said, and then heartlessly abandoned Ivan with his sister.

  “Mattie’s never been especially subtle.” Constance was looking after him, a Miranda-tinged fondness shining through the dryness of her learned Martian accent.

  “I’d noticed,” Ivan said, and then switched easily into charm. “I guess I’d better show you the piloting room.”

  “You’d better. I know the man back at my bar; he’s boring. If we don’t get to know each other, Mattie will complain to me about his sacrifice.”

  But not to me, Ivan thought with a strange twist of perception. Mattie would complain to Ivan about Ivan not being able to take the hint that he wanted him to bond with Constance, but Mattie wouldn’t complain to Ivan about the quality of the man he was even now flirting with. This woman whom Ivan didn’t even know knew a side of Mattie that Ivan never would.

  Ivan had reached the door to the piloting room and opened it for Constance Harper, who climbed easily down the hall beside him and swung her way off the ladder and into the tilted piloting room.

  “It’s not much.” Ivan switched on the light, illuminating the gray panels and ceiling, which were choked with dials and screens, every inch filled. Bits of tape neatly inscribed with Mattie’s blocky handwriting defined the function of several of the less-used panels.

  “It’s very nice.” Constance seated herself in Mattie’s chair. She propped her chin on her hand and studied him. “It’s more than Mattie’s ever owned.”

  She had a remarkably direct, piercing gaze. It was out of the ordinary for Ivan to simply have to get to know someone. He usually didn’t get to know someone without there being a purpose to it: information he needed, or the other person’s regard. Somehow, though, Ivan thought that Mattie would be annoyed with him if he set about attempting to deliberately dazzle his sister.

  Failure wasn’t an option, either. Ivan had few illusions about where he ranked in the hierarchy of Mattie Gale’s affections relative to the sister he had protected so loyally. Unable to be dishonest and at a loss for immediate honest connection, Ivan sat across from Constance Harper in a strange, strained silence.

  Constance said, “The name of this ship. How do you say it?”

  “The Annwn. ‘Ah-noon,’ ” said Ivan.

  “That,” Constance said with a flicker of elusive humor. “That’s not Mattie’s word. What’s it mean?”

  “It’s a name. Welsh.”

  “Welsh?”

  “Wales is a place on Earth. My father’s mother was from Wales, far back. I used to read a lot of Welsh mythology when I was a child.”

  “You must have liked it.”

  “I liked most myths.” His mother had had a little book of them. Ivan knew that it once had belonged to his father just as the System did not. “They’re full of beautiful and terrible things. Like Tam Lin, who was taken by fairies as a child and forever fought to escape. Or like the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  This was surer ground now, the certainty of a story. Both of Constance’s brows lifted in silent indication that she was content to hear him tell it.

  Someone else’s story always was a safer ground. “Once upon a time, thousands and thousands of years ago, there was an ordinary woman.”

  “On Earth,” Constance said with a peculiar slant to the word.

  “On Earth,” Ivan agreed. “She was just an ordinary woman for all that she had noble blood. And she loved to hunt. And it was during one of her hunts—when her hounds had run down the fox and she had its blood and its pelt—that she smiled up at the sky and she said to God, ‘If there is no hunting in heaven, I reject it.’ ”

  Ivan drew in one breath, two, long enough to lure Constance Harper in. She watched him intently, dark eyes, and some secret buried beneath.

  Ivan said, “There is no hunting in heaven. There is no killing on high. And so when God heard her, he granted her wish, cursing her to never see paradise. But the demons and the fairies welcomed her and she became the mistress of their hounds, and now she hunts forever. She is the one who drives the fairy hounds in the Wild Hunt. She is the one who hunts down the damned souls and drags them to hell. There is no arguing or bargaining with her. Her pursuit is relentless. She is vengeance and justice made spirit, and there is no way to escape her once she has begun her hunt.” He smiled at Constance, who had leaned forward slightly, something catching the light in those proud eyes of hers. “They say that in a thunderstorm on Terra, sometimes you can still hear her dogs howl.”

  “Only on Terra?”

  “Where else are the damned souls?”
<
br />   Constance smiled.

  “Are there any myths on the outer planets?” Ivan asked. “I only know the Terran ones.”

  “There are. There must be.”

  “Tell me one.”

  “I don’t know any,” Constance admitted. She straightened up and pushed her hair back over her shoulder with an impatient hand. “I didn’t listen to stories much as a child.”

  “It must have been difficult growing up on Miranda.”

  “It must have been difficult growing up on Earth, the son of a rebel.”

  “I managed,” Ivan said.

  “How?”

  The directness of the question startled him. Constance said, unembarrassed, “If you’d rather not answer, that’s all right.”

  “No,” Ivan said from a reflex of politeness, “that’s fine.” Get to know her. It mattered to Mattie.

  But although Constance might be able to approach the subject directly, Ivan could not commit himself to anything but a roundabout explanation. He said, “You learn to play the cameras. Like you’re playing a crowd. It’s a performance. You have to adopt a role and live that role as deeply as you can. Forget who you are and what you really want if you have to, the better to convince them that the role is true.”

  “You’re not losing yourself?”

  “The goal is to make them think that you’re innocent, not that you’re good at hiding. You have to control the situation: what they know. Make them think that they know everything that they need to know so that they don’t look for anything else. People’s biases can make them incredibly blind.”

  Somewhere the spirit of his mother herself must be shuddering with the passage of her hard-won wisdom. He smiled again, involuntarily.

  “Mattie and I had a foster sister once,” Constance said. “Her name was Abigail. She died—she was murdered by our System foster parents.” An old and festering hatred surfaced in her voice. “The way that she died, her body was never found. So whenever I…steal something, like Mattie’s told you I do, I use her name instead of my own. I pretend to be her.”

  “Very clever.”

  “But even when I pretend to be her, I never forget myself,” Constance said. “How do you do that, become someone else so completely that you forget who you are and what you want?”

  He gave her the respect of careful thought and an honest answer, taking his time to assemble the words neatly into their cleanest and clearest order.

  “Power is a comparative, not an absolute,” he said, and Constance lifted a brow in question but waited for him to explain. “The System will never let go of any of its power. It will never let things even out between Earth and the outer planets. It will never slacken its surveillance. I can’t change the System. My situation can’t be changed, and people can’t be changed, either.” He leaned forward, toward her. “But I can control them.”

  “Can’t be changed?” said Constance Harper. “I don’t agree with that.”

  FORWARD

  Past the first round of guards, Aquilon was peopled but not defended. Groups of revolutionaries moved through the streets but did not seek to stop Ivan or Alyssa, and not solely because of Morgan’s presence. There were, Ivan saw, civilians there still: dirty and furtive people who watched the revolutionaries with a wariness not dissimilar to the way they once must have watched the System.

  Ivan had thought that he was past caring about such things or that he had never cared about them to begin with, but looking at those people now, he knew he had been wrong.

  There would be another security checkpoint, he knew, closer to the center of the city, where the revolutionaries had set up their stronghold. A security checkpoint would separate him from Constance Harper: it might be possible to slip past the guards into the shipyard, but it would never be possible to slip past them to get to Constance. He would have to stay with Morgan.

  Alyssa, though, was another matter.

  Ivan evaluated his situation, lifting it, viewing it from all angles. If he went in with Alyssa, he had the best chance of making it through, at least for a little while. As long as he could answer all the questions and keep her silent, he could keep these people believing that he was Matthew Gale and she was Abigail Hunter—well, until Constance came, and then the lie would be unraveled as a matter of course.

  But what then? He doubted that Constance would give Alyssa a ship without question. And he doubted that Alyssa could pass as a revolutionary once she was questioned. No, Constance would soon realize that Alyssa had been System, and from there, Ivan could see the situation slipping rapidly from his control.

  But if Alyssa left him now, slipping away into the city, she might be shot. And if she was seen to run, Ivan would be immediately suspect. His escort shortly would become his captor.

  Yet Alyssa was good at hiding; she had kept herself out of sight in Mara for weeks.

  It came down to this, Ivan realized. If Alyssa slipped away before they were brought inside the rebel camp, she would have a chance at survival. But if Alyssa came with him into the center of the revolution, she would certainly be killed.

  Ahead of them vast and makeshift walls came into view. It looked as if the backs of System buildings had been wedded together with debris to form a fortress in the center of the city.

  “Your best chance is to go now,” Ivan murmured to Alyssa, too low for Morgan to hear.

  “What happens to you if I go?”

  “I can talk my way through it.” All he had to do was stay alive long enough for Constance to arrive.

  Alyssa was looking at the shadowed height of the makeshift tower they approached, her hand still tucked into the crook of Ivan’s arm.

  She said, “I hope you find your friend.”

  “I will.”

  “I hope—” She cut herself off, then said in a lower and more careful voice, “Don’t get too lost looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.”

  There was no response to that. Instead, Ivan said, “The Mallt-y-Nos never went to Luna. I don’t think the System still exists, not the way it did, but if there was someone you loved on Luna, they might be still alive.”

  There was a sort of opening in the wall ahead where the edges did not quite overlap; it was growing rather near. Alyssa was staring up at him, a wild and beautiful look to her face.

  “Thank you,” she said, like the breath of the wind, and then she was gone, gray and vanishing between the rubble of the fallen houses. She might have never existed but for the ghost of her warmth on Ivan’s arm.

  He expected to hear a gunshot. He expected to hear the terrible sound of her death all the time until he didn’t. Something lightened in his chest.

  Morgan reached the edge of the wall and called up a greeting, one that was returned. She turned to Ivan and then looked around.

  “Where’s Abigail?” she asked.

  “Gone,” Ivan said. “She does that.” He shrugged at her glance, as if Abigail’s tendency to vanish into the wind frustrated him, too.

  Morgan said to the guards, “Search the area. He had a companion.”

  “You won’t find her.”

  “I think we will,” Morgan said sharply.

  “Don’t hurt her,” Ivan warned the guards. “That’s the foster sister of the Mallt-y-Nos.”

  “If she’s the foster sister of the Mallt-y-Nos, why did she run?”

  “Perhaps she had orders you weren’t privy to.”

  “Or perhaps you’re not who you say you are,” Morgan said.

  “Morgan, who is this?” said one of the people at the gate, a petite round-faced woman with a cap on her head.

  “This is the foster brother of the Mallt-y-Nos, come to rendezvous with her,” said Morgan, her attention still sharply on Ivan, her hand resting now on her gun. “He says his name is Matthew Gale.”

  “Matthew Gale?” said the woman at the gate.

  “What is it, Tuatha?”

  Tuatha said, “A man named Matthew Gale arrived here just a few hours ago.”


  The relief that surged through Ivan then was so powerful that he forgot the danger to himself. He laughed.

  Had he imagined that this city was so much warmer than it was outside? No, he hadn’t; he hadn’t imagined that for all the shadows the houses cast, there was no darkness of ice in here the way there had been out on the tundra. Mattie was alive. Mattie was here.

  “Take him in,” Tuatha ordered, then shouted at a different guard to get someone named Niels, and Morgan was at his side before Ivan could move even if he wanted to. He hoped he hadn’t blown Mattie’s cover.

  Tuatha led them in. The inside of the walled camp was choked with tents and people, with metal barrels full of fire melting the ice they stood on. People stared when they saw Ivan, craning their necks around one another, but Ivan’s captors did not pause. They marched him toward an old System building on nearly the opposite end of the plaza, a building that, Ivan realized, once had been a house for visiting dignitaries. It was right beside a gap in the wall that led to an open area, and in that open area Ivan could see landed spaceships: the shipyard of Aquilon.

  Ivan had been taken nearly to the base of the steps of the old System building when three figures came running out of the shipyard.

  One was the guard Tuatha had sent out to summon Niels. Another was an unfamiliar man.

  The third was Matthew Gale.

  Ivan’s steps slowed. Morgan’s grip on his arm—harsher and not as warm as Alyssa’s had been—pulled him sternly forward. Mattie burst out into the plaza, his head swinging, but he was looking toward the gate, and he had not seen Ivan yet.

  In a minute, Ivan would be inside the building and Mattie would not have seen him at all. Ivan looked toward him, yet for a moment he could not make his throat create sound. As if his lungs had turned to ice, as if his breath had turned to soundless wind, as if Ida’s chill fingers were clapped over his lips and the dead Domitian’s hand rested heavily on his shoulder still.