Quietus

by Tristan Palmgren

  There was a second kick to his head, and then another to his stomach. And then nothing.

  It was almost anticlimactic how fast it happened. He was alone, in a void. Still conscious.

  When he died, he had always expected company, even from condemned spirits of Purgatory. The solitude undermined him immediately.

  Isolation was something he expected only of the outer darkness, cut off from God. A moment here felt as an eternity, as if he were clawing the inside of his head. He’d made a mistake in coming here. He understood that with a clarity like a thunderclap.

  He instinctively fought his way back to the world of sensation. It was not done with him yet. It yanked him back, stubborn, like knee-high mud tugging at his shoes. He gasped at the pain in his chest. Wet clay clogged his nostrils.

  He’d been tossed into a muddy ditch like a broken doll. Close, slick walls bundled his arms. He leaned up, choking for air. Another hard impact against his head knocked him back down. Someone trampled on his hip.

  Then, there was a second thunderclap. He hadn’t hallucinated the first after all. His ears stung.

  One bolt after another blended into a continuous, terrifying noise. Someone’s panicked footfall rolled him onto his side just as his vision returned from the end of the tunnel. He gaped at the clouds – at the hole opening between them.

  A black bird soared out of the rain, splitting a seam across the sky. White and gold stars burned on every edge of its body. They hurt to look at.

  The rain landing on Niccoluccio’s face turned to steam. A burst of dry, freezing air chilled his skin.

  “Not now,” he mouthed. Though he couldn’t hear himself, he knew somebody else could. “I don’t want this.”

  In spite of the thunder, Habidah’s voice was clear as daylight. “You don’t need to be afraid.”

  Niccoluccio said, “I’m not afraid. I don’t want to be saved again.”

  “I’ll help you understand,” Habidah said, like she was soothing a child. He had never heard her sound like that before. “You won’t fight when you do. You’re a good man, Niccoluccio Caracciola. And I’ve chosen you to help me with my work.”

  27

  The shuttle’s sensors pierced the clouds and rain, revealing a street-spanning infrared blob. Several dozen people, hot red on a cold blue background, clustered around the source of Niccoluccio’s signal. The shuttle’s NAI drew a yellow outline around the blotch it had identified as Niccoluccio. The two nearest men were kicking him.

  That was all Habidah needed to see. Her safety harness released with a snap. She bolted out of her seat. Her demiorganics took over her sense of balance, keeping her upright – barely.

  Joao and Kacienta boggled at her. The shuttle buckled in the wind. She stumbled past their couches and through the control cabin’s doors into the ventral corridor. A burst of deceleration nearly knocked her back. The distance to Niccoluccio’s signal ticked at the edge of her awareness: five hundred meters vertical, two hundred horizontal.

  Habidah hadn’t heard anything from him since his first call for help. She tried again to contact Niccoluccio. Nothing. She grasped for a handhold along the folded-up boarding ramp. “Cut our camouflage and noise bafflers,” she sent.

  “Have you lost it?” Joao asked.

  She would have done it herself, through her demiorganics, but there was no way that she could stay on her feet and control the shuttle at the same time. “Cut the fucking camouflage and noise bafflers!”

  Joao listened. The roar of the thrusters changed pitch, reverberating through the deck. The distance to Niccoluccio ticked down slower.

  The ramp began extending when the shuttle was twenty meters off the ground. Cold, misty air gusted across Habidah’s cheek. She edged down the unfolding ramp, keeping a tight grip on the bulkhead. Steam billowed from the thruster exhausts. The cold stung her skin. The air roared, and whipped at her hair and clothes.

  Wind jerked the shuttle away before she saw much, but infrared showed her some blotches that looked like people, running away. She spared no pity for them. She hoped they were terrified.

  Fury burned in her breath.

  The shuttle couldn’t land. The buildings on either side of the street didn’t offer the clearance for its wingspan. Habidah didn’t wait. She leapt off the edge of the ramp, meters in the air, and landed with a sharp pain and a roll.

  The shuttle hovered overhead, fire-tinged, casting its shadow over half the block. A meteorite frozen just before impact. The thunder of its thrusters must have carried over all of Florence. It ground her bones and teeth against each other.

  Niccoluccio lay in a ditch. She hardly recognized him. His face was smeared with mud, and his hair might as well have been made of it. A long cut ran across his cheek to his chin, a bruise sprouted under his eye. She scrambled to his side, crouched. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing. His pulse was erratic, and his body temperature had spiked.

  More than that, his elbows were bony, his cheeks sallow. The bugs she’d planted in him now reported significant dehydration, starvation, fever. She’d set them to alert her long before it should have gotten this bad.

  “Not now,” he mouthed. Habidah only heard him because he had inadvertently triggered his subvocal transmitter. “I don’t want this.”

  She looked about, craned her neck to follow the shuttle. The shuttle drifted farther down the street, tilting to bring the hovering end of the boarding ramp closer. But the ramp would never reach the ground, not without knocking over some of the houses.

  She lifted Niccoluccio, one hand under his knees and the other supporting his back. Again, she depended on her demiorganics to disguise the strain of his weight. He’d let some of his tonsured hair grow back out since she’d last seen him.

  The ramp scythed through the air, a meter and a half off the street. Either Joao or Kacienta pushed the shuttle forward. When the ramp was about to pass her, Habidah allowed her demiorganics to take over. She crouched, and leapt onto the edge of the ramp.

  Red-hot pain flashed up her calves and thighs. She’d torn muscles. Her demiorganics flashed warnings and numbed her legs. She limped halfway up the ramp, and then slid Niccoluccio to a seat, half-held, half-cradled.

  The ramp’s retraction carried her and Niccoluccio the rest of the way inside. When the ramp at last shut out the wind, she sent, “Get us away from here.”

  “I’m turning the stealth fields back on first,” Joao answered, pointedly.

  Their ascent wasn’t smoother than the descent. She braced herself and Niccoluccio against the wall. Her demiorganics fed her some of the exterior camera feeds. The shuttle pierced the clouds. A rain-streaked gray smothered the cameras.

  Kacienta came out to help Habidah finish carrying Niccoluccio to a couch. Habidah retrieved an emergency kit from under her couch. A spasm of turbulence nearly toppled her into him. She kept upright, holding onto to his couch for balance while she applied the first medical patch.

  Kacienta said, “I’m getting bad déjà vu. Is this why you saved him the first time, so that he could do it all over again?”

  Habidah was too busy reviewing the patch’s diagnostics. Nothing was right. The bugs she’d planted should’ve been screaming for her before his condition became this bad.

  Kacienta said, “He obviously doesn’t know how to use these chances you keep giving him if you need to save him this many times.”

  “He was being beaten, Kacienta,” Joao muttered.

  “None of us knows what happened to him,” Habidah said, but at the same time, she saw what Kacienta did. His face caked with the dirt of several days. The patch found days-old fatigue toxins. All this had happened recently. There were no signs of malnutrition, dehydration, or starvation older than a week. His hair and fingernails were well trimmed underneath the grime. He hadn’t called her when any of this had started to happen.

  Joao said, “These people kill each other all the time. Read my report from Strasbourg? Where they herded hundreds of Jews into a
house and burned them alive? Terrible violence is an inherent part of their lives. We can’t save them all from it. So why do you keep interfering with this guy? What makes him more important than anyone else?”

  Habidah didn’t need to look up to sense Kacienta watching her, too. They thought they already knew the answer. They were wrong. The truth was that Niccoluccio had been her breaking point.

  After making sure that Niccoluccio’s condition wasn’t worsening, Habidah retired to her couch. The sky was no clearer over the field base than in Florence. The shuttle rumbled through its descent, bouncing Habidah’s legs. Her nerve blocks couldn’t cut the pain in time. She groaned, and squeezed her eyes. She was going to need a day of rest to allow her demiorganics to stitch her muscles back together.

  When the shuttle landed, she scraped together enough contrition to ask Joao and Kacienta to carry Niccoluccio. She staggered down the ramp after them. When she looked up, she saw how the shuttle must have appeared to the people of Florence: a titan, a dragon, steaming and hissing. A hammer from the forge of God, about to fall.

  She caught Joao looking at her. Habidah couldn’t meet his stare. She had nothing to say for herself.

  Joao lifted Niccoluccio onto one of Feliks’ beds. He said, “I doubt you’re going to send him back again.”

  “If he asks to, I will.”

  “And if he doesn’t? What are you going to do with him then?”

  He hadn’t asked because he expected an answer. Habidah didn’t give him one. He and Kacienta left her alone while she set to washing him. She ordered the base’s fabricators to stitch together an imitation monk’s habit. It wasn’t until she finished dressing him that she noticed his eyelids flutter.

  Soon, he was staring at the ceiling lights. He had to know where he was, of course. He’d spent so many days in this office that he must have memorized every detail. Habidah stood out of sight. She gave instructions to the medical patches to soothe his blood and brain chemistry, and waited until he was fully conscious.

  She said, “I hope you know that you’re safe.”

  “I still don’t feel hungry,” he said.

  “We’re helping you recover from the effects of starvation. It’ll be a day or two before you should eat solid food.”

  He pushed his eyes back to her. “You don’t understand. I haven’t been hungry in days. I thought it was a sign, that I was doing the right thing.”

  “Starving yourself?”

  “I shouldn’t have left Elisa. I thought I was giving my life to God. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, to get away from myself. It works for a while, but all it does is lead me here. Or the dark.”

  “The dark?” Habidah wanted, and didn’t want, to ask who Elisa was.

  “Alone,” he said. “Cut off from God. Worse than Hell.”

  “You’re not alone now.”

  He looked back to her, eyes shimmering. Her demiorganics warned her of rapid spikes in his brain activity. “You don’t understand. All this – this world, all our words, and sensations – is just a skin over darkness. I’ve felt it. I’ve been there. It’ll swallow me eventually. All of us, probably.”

  Habidah hesitated while she tried to think of the most delicate way to answer this. “I can’t tell you what you experienced while you were being beaten, but you never went anywhere. You never died. Your mind can play very strange tricks on you when it’s under duress.”

  “I know when I’ve died.”

  Niccoluccio told her more. After being abandoned by his brother, he’d devoted himself to gravedigging, a profession second only to nursing the sick in its risks during a time of plague.

  “I saw the whole world die.” Niccoluccio’s voice was calm, detached. Good. Habidah’s caretaking of his blood chemistry was leveling him out. “After Sacro Cuore, I thought I might be the only mortal left in the world. Even after you found me, I stayed in that moment. All I heard was news of wave upon wave of death crashing upon the shores of Christendom. My brother and his cadre were going on as they always had. They were living in the world as it had been.”

  Habidah said, “When you got home, nothing you saw must have seemed real.”

  “Before that. I should have gotten sick long ago. In Sacro Cuore, when all my brothers were dying. I took the same risks that I did in Florence. Tending to the sick, burying the dead.”

  Habidah echoed herself: “All you wanted to do was help, but you didn’t have the power.”

  “The only thing I could do amounted to very little in the end.”

  “Why did you call me if you didn’t want to be rescued?”

  After a pause, Niccoluccio said, “I didn’t call you.”

  “You did. You called me to come save you.”

  “Maybe in my sleep. It doesn’t matter.” Niccoluccio reached his hand across the top of the bed. Even after she’d washed him, his fingernails still felt grubby to the touch. He asked, “Do you know often I hoped you were listening?”

  She would only have been able to listen if he’d activated his transmitter deliberately. She smiled, but decided against explaining. “I’d like to think that I understand a lot about how you feel. But the need to forever be watched and judged is always going to elude me.”

  “Don’t you have any higher power governing your life?”

  “Oh yes. Nobody feels very reverent toward them.” After a moment’s consideration, she added, “Almost nobody.”

  “Is there nothing in your other worlds to be reverent about? Ever since you told me that God is not a part of your lives, I’ve wondered.”

  Habidah held his gaze for a long moment.

  She asked, “When did I ever tell you we came from another world?”

  Niccoluccio didn’t hide his surprise. “Months ago.”

  “I never said that. Or told you that God wasn’t a part of our lives.” The nagging thought that she was missing something caught up with her again. The medical bugs should have warned her that he was starving.

  Her throat itched. “How many times have we spoken over the past few months, you and I?”

  Niccoluccio shrugged. “Many.”

  She queried his medical bugs. Then she repeated it, but this time bounced the signal off one of her team’s communications satellites. That was how she would have gotten the data while Niccoluccio was Florence.

  The results looked similar to the first. She could see all of the chemicals she’d poured into his system, but they were in subtly different proportions. They were what she might expect to see rather than what was actually there.

  “And did you spend much time thinking over what we talked about?”

  “Yes. You helped me find my way.”

  “Find your way to where?”

  He considered. “My way here, I suppose.”

  She swallowed past her tightening throat. “I think you should get some rest for the time being. I’ll be back to talk more about this when you’re feeling better.”

  “I feel fine now.”

  “Only because our medicine has tricked you into feeling that way.”

  His eyes flicked over himself, to the bruise creeping down his shoulder and the hollow curve of his stomach. If he hadn’t felt alienated from his body before, he would now. “Oh.”

  Sometimes she didn’t think he was sufficiently afraid of her and her people. There was certainly a lot to fear. More than she’d known.

  She squeezed his fingers, dosed him with more tranquilizers, and left the office.

  Before the doors shut, she queried NAI to see if there had been any change in Ways and Means’ activities. The planarship had dispatched fifteen more satellites over the past two hours, but it had been doing that at odd intervals since its arrival. A shuttle had dropped toward Shangdu, probably carrying more agents. If the amalgamates were setting her up, they hadn’t done anything yet.

  There was no way to tell how long she’d been receiving a false signal. And, of course, no way to tell if the information she was receiving now was accurate.
<
br />   Niccoluccio said he hadn’t called her. She’d thought she’d been getting to know him. But it had been just one more way she was being manipulated.

  Someone had impersonated him to warn her about the danger in which he’d put himself. If Ways and Means had, for whatever reason, just wanted her to pick him up, all it needed to do was allow the signal from his medical bugs to reach her.

  It had wanted her to come, but only at a specific time. When Niccoluccio was at his weakest and most vulnerable.

  She called Kacienta and Joao into the field base’s conference room.

  The room felt a lot emptier without Feliks. Kacienta raised her eyebrow, waiting for Habidah to speak first. “I think I’ve made an awful mistake,” Habidah said.

  “No shit,” Kacienta said, dryly.

  “I’ve let us all be set up.” Habidah glanced at the ceiling. There was never any way to tell if the amalgamates were listening. She’d already given away that she knew, though, when she’d queried the bugs in Niccoluccio’s system.

  She told them what she knew so far: “Niccoluccio claims he never called for a rescue. He also said we’ve had several conversations that I don’t remember. I don’t think I’ve spoken to the real Niccoluccio since he left us.”

  “I don’t understand,” Joao said. “Why would the amalgamates care about him?”

  “Osia seemed to think that she could still talk us into helping colonize this plane.”

  “Never,” Kacienta said, her voice steel.

  Habidah said, “Exactly. I can’t think of any other reason why it would fake Niccoluccio’s signals, though.”

  Kacienta tapped her middle finger on the table. “I can’t believe the amalgamates could have manipulated you into picking him up the first time. They’re not that subtle.”

  Joao suggested, “Maybe they’re taking advantage of a situation you created yourself.”

  Habidah asked, “To do what?”