by Ada Hoffmann
The mission came first. Elu had vaguely hoped that would be different now, but why should it? Akavi didn’t owe him anything. She was here with him because that had been the available option: run away with him, or stay behind and be terminated. She had never been the kind of person who valued other people romantically, or even as respected friends. That wasn’t going to change, and neither was her need for activity, for some overriding goal to drive her onward. Even without their ansible uplinks, they both were what they were.
Akavi hesitated over him a moment longer. Something in her face looked uncertain. As if she was weighing up several difficult options.
Then, with swift decisiveness, she leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips.
She’d never done that. Akavi could be seductive towards mortals when a mission required it, but she had barely ever laid a hand on Elu, even in the most unromantic, practical ways, in all of their half-century together.
He was too exhausted to try to work out what it meant.
“Be good,” she said, shouldering her pack. The Talon’s airlock slid shut behind her before Elu could formulate a response.
The local greenery rustled under Akavi’s feet as she walked away from the Talon. One enterprising shrub curled around her ankle, tugging like an attention-hungry child, and she shook it off.
They’d landed in a rustic little hole in the ground, all mossy boulders and winding trees. The Talon would be well-covered and the land here wasn’t especially corrupted by the Chaos Zone’s standards. The undergrowth that wound around Akavi’s feet was still mostly green, and had recognizable parts like leaves and stems, even if sometimes the leaves verged to blue or red or spiraled into strange patterns. The air was humid but not unpleasantly warm, and the sounds that buzzed and hissed around her were at least vaguely the right timbre to be insects and birds. If Akavi had installed any naturalist software she could have analyzed the sounds, classified those that matched known wild creatures and flagged those that were unfamiliar. She lacked that, but there were small animal paths here just as there’d be in an ordinary forest, and she had enough map-reading and positioning software to be able to follow one in an appropriate direction.
She had about an hour of walking to do before she reached inhabited areas. That gave her time to think, which was not necessarily ideal. She was not at all sure that kissing Elu had been the correct choice.
Elu had been, for fifty years, a known quantity. He had been a loyal assistant, attached to her by the angelic corps’ usual hierarchy. Intelligent in many ways; weak in others. Constantly and pathetically in love with her. Loyal, though. She’d valued Elu’s loyalty above almost anything else. Most angels of Elu’s rank were hungry for promotion and power, even to the point of betraying their superiors. Elu was different. Elu was that rarest of creatures, an angel she could trust.
But Elu had worked for Akavi because they were part of something bigger. They had a hierarchy, and Elu was attached to Akavi by that hierarchy, not merely by his own emotions.
And the structure that the hierarchy provided was gone now. No Overseer was here to hand down assignments and check that they functioned correctly as a team. Elu and Akavi had nothing now but themselves and a vaguely adequate spaceship. Elu couldn’t realistically go anywhere, but there was no external force in place to make him follow Akavi’s orders now. Nothing forced him to agree to her plans, to call her sir as he’d done, with that new uncertainty. Nothing but Akavi’s will and Elu’s old habit.
It was only a matter of time before Elu figured that out.
Twigs snapped under Akavi’s feet as she pressed on. The forest wasn’t dark; sunlight filtered easy and bright through the leaves. But she saw branches curling in her direction, warding or beckoning. Once or twice one reached and touched her shoulder, and she batted it away. Mortals would not enjoy entering this area at night, she suspected. So much the better.
Akavi did not love Elu, but she valued him. So she had acted, despite misgivings, to give him a reason to obey a little longer.
That tactic wouldn’t be effective forever. Human hearts were fickle things, and she couldn’t count on the effect to be permanent, no matter how far she took it and how well Elu was fooled. Sooner or later he would need–
She didn’t know, and that made her uneasy. It wasn’t just sex, or even a facsimile of love. He would need something as unshakable as the whole angelic hierarchy, as dear to his heart as the God he’d followed, and even Akavi didn’t know where to get a thing like that.
She resented having to think about it. Having it turn over and over in her mind, when she should have been strategizing, all through the long walk to Büata.
Here is the unofficial story of the Chaos Zone: the one seen in dreams by the Chaos Zone’s newly minted mystics, repeated in hushed tones, scribbled on heretical broadsheets. To speak the story this way, in the hearing of angels, is to die:
Once there was a woman named Destroyer.
(That was not her birth name. She was known to the Gods as Dr Evianna Talirr. She never called herself Destroyer, and neither did They. But stories simplify, even when they are true; in a story, sometimes the best name for a person is a simple truth that they deny.)
Destroyer was born unlike other people, and the Gods tried to destroy her for it. True to her name, she tried to destroy Them back. But Gods are not so easy to destroy. What fell into her crosshairs instead, as an opening gambit, was our world. She uprooted the life that we knew, killed us in the millions and took apart our homes. She sent the Plague to Jai and created the Chaos Zone, on our world which had once been so orderly and simple.
But Destroyer, no matter how powerful, was human. And Destroyer was lonely.
Once there was a woman named Savior. She was a student of Destroyer’s, and Destroyer summoned her, wanting friendship, wanting help. But Savior had been born on Jai, and she loved her world as Destroyer did not.
“Help me,” said Destroyer. “For we are born more powerful than other people, and the world will never do anything but hate us. Together, let us take the hateful world between our hands and tear it open.”
“I will not,” said Savior.
So the Gods took up Savior instead, into their immaculate ships, at the helms of their most fearsome weapons.
“Help Us,” said the Gods. “For We are more powerful than any human, but we are not infinite. We must rip out threats by their roots – threats to humans, and threats to Ourselves – and a threat like Destroyer is difficult even for Us. You have some of her power. Use it with Us, to destroy the Chaos Zone entirely, to murder every human who survives there.”
“I will not,” said Savior.
So Savior was thrown into Outside, the place that breaks the sanity of anyone who sees it, where she and Destroyer and the Chaos Zone all had their terrible origins. The Gods meant to break her.
“Help me,” said Savior.
And Outside turned, in its terrible ineffable might, and saw her.
Outside joined its own incomprehensible power to Savior’s. Savior joined her own desperate, compassionate soul to Outside’s. There was no longer any true separation between them. Savior was Outside made manifest. But Savior remembered her will.
Savior reached down, into the heart of the Chaos Zone of Jai, and did what she could.
Nothing that is done can be fully undone, even Outside. Savior could not erase what Destroyer had done. But she could alter it. She turned the Chaos Zone’s roaming monsters less deadly, its disruptions to the shape of things less violent. She stopped its border from further expanding. And, most merciful of all, she made a change to a third of the people who lived here. She gave us powers of our own, small echoes of hers. Power to bring forth fruit from the strange ground, to see the truth in dreams, to protect our loved ones and survive.
Then, exhausted from her struggle, Savior went far away.
“We have stopped the growth of the Chaos Zone,” said the Gods. “We have made its effects less deadly. You may stand by
for further improvements.” But They had nothing to do with what Savior had done. They did not even understand it. Their angels walk the Chaos Zone now, making Their paltry attempts at help and control, but it will win Them nothing.
Destroyer walks the planet now in disguise, a lone woman speaking to no one. Shamed by Savior’s courage, she seeks now to remember her humanity and to learn what she can. One day she will return, perhaps to earn something other than her name.
Savior hides now, half-awake, licking the wounds she incurred for our sake. A small group walks the planet in her stead, gifted with fragments of her power, helping where they can. It will not be enough, but it will keep us alive, in spite of all the Gods’ efforts otherwise.
One day Savior, too, will return, and save us fully.
CHAPTER 3
Now
Yonne Qun had asked Tiv for weapons yesterday, her hand clasped in both of his, his eyes grief-stricken and desperate. She had promised him she’d ask Yasira about it. And then she’d chickened out. All that night, as Yasira sulked and mumbled, she’d wondered if she should ask. But Yasira could barely get in the shower without Tiv’s help on nights like this; there was no way she’d be up for a talk about actual violence. About a desperate populace that would always want miracles from her, not knowing or caring the toll it had already taken.
The morning hadn’t been much better. Tiv had delivered breakfast but she hadn’t been able to drag Yasira out of bed in time for the weekly planning meeting. So Tiv and the Seven had assembled in the war room without her. Everyone but Yasira sat hunched over in their chairs or their beanbag nests; eager, wan, tired or anxious as their individual needs dictated, all looking to Tiv to direct them.
A thin, light-skinned, short-haired thirty year-old stood next to Tiv, arranging and rearranging their various notes. Ulutrujcy Unaczysy Jasl, code name “Grid,” was one of the more organized of the Seven, and the most useful when preparing for meetings like these. Something like a team secretary, although nobody here used that title. They’d spread the reports out and arranged them by category: modest piles of notes about monsters, food shortages, inadequate God-built supplies. A small pile of violent incidents between competing groups of survivors; the bands of raiders and other criminals which had inevitably arisen; clashes between normal survivors and gone people, who were a law to themselves. A medium-sized pile of the survivors’ own reports about their growing abilities, their newly developing heretical ethics and metaphysics, which had led to its own series of clashes. And a much larger pile of violent incidents involving angels.
Angels who’d shot mortals on sight for using their newfound magic. Angels who’d shot mortals for trying to cross the border, or for entering other areas unauthorized. Angels who’d injured mortals, under the guise of crowd control, when there was a shortage at a relief station. Angels who’d captured mortals and made them disappear, to be interrogated or punished or whatever else the angels had in store.
Not long ago, most mortals in the Chaos Zone had trusted angels completely. It had taken only a few months of such violence for that trust to fall away.
Tiv, sitting in a cheap folding chair, tapped a small gavel on the table. It was an item one of the Seven had stolen for her as a joke, calling her “Leader” with an amused grin, back in the early days when their code names hadn’t felt quite so settled. Tiv wasn’t leading much of anything, but getting the Seven to do something could be like herding cats, and Tiv seemed to have a knack for it, gently pulling distracted people back to their tasks. So the gavel had been given to her, and the ability to set agendas and start votes.
“Well, good morning,” Tiv said. Some of the Seven were still eating breakfast; she’d already had hers while trying to wake up Yasira. “Thanks for showing up. Does anybody have anything urgent to say before we dive into the agenda?”
“Just the weapons,” said a sardonic alto voice from across the table. This was “Blur” – also called Luellae Nyrath, an Anetaian woman even paler than Grid, short and round and with a habit of being unamused by everything. She’d finished her breakfast long before the meeting and was now leaning back in her chair, arms crossed. “But I’m guessing that’s on there already.”
“Yeah, that’s… most of the agenda.” Requests for support with forms of violent rebellion had been increasing from all sides, not just Yonne Qun’s. Luellae herself had been fielding more than her fair share, and the rest of the Seven hadn’t been immune. Even if Yasira wasn’t up to discussing it, this was still a problem needing attention from all of them. “Want to get started?”
There were general nods and attentive looks, and Grid made their way back to a beanbag seat at their own side of the table. Three of the other students reached for them, leaning on each other and holding hands as their group of four was reunited.
Years ago, Luellae, Splió, and Daeis had each been captured individually by Akavi’s team, and they’d spent the long years before Yasira’s arrival in isolation. Only the occasional visit from Akavi for interrogation, or Elu to check up on them, or a sell-soul psychiatrist to study their deterioration in detail. The other four students had been captured all together and locked in a four-bedroom suite: an apparent attempt, on Akavi’s part, to disambiguate the mental strains of solitary confinement from the mental strains of Outside. It still made Tiv angry when she thought of it, the way the angels had treated whole lives and souls as nothing but data.
The Four – as they now called themselves – had developed a bond even stronger than that between the rest of the Seven. It wasn’t romantic, not like Yasira and Tiv’s relationship, or Daeis and Splió’s. But it was still a bond that had them looking eerily like a collective of gone people at times, moving in unison, responding to each other without a visible prompt. The Four used their code names more than their real names, which somehow accentuated the effect. Four aspects of one entity. Grid, thin and serious, constantly organizing and rearranging. Prophet, anxious and childlike, often distracted by images even the other three couldn’t see. Weaver, petite and vibrating with energy; she was sitting in the pile of beanbags with her groupmates for now, steadied by their presence, but it was a rare team meeting that didn’t eventually see Weaver rocketing up, pacing or running about the room. And Picket, pale and sickly, frowning into empty space as he listened.
“Okay,” said Tiv, tapping her gavel again. “First item on the agenda is: weapons. We’re coordinating a peaceful resistance, but people on the ground want guns. We need a better way of handling that, because it’s only getting worse. Thoughts?”
Splió raised a hand. “It’s not guns they want, you know.”
Tiv sighed shortly. It was somehow easier if she called it guns. Guns were concrete, and she knew how she felt about them. ”Okay, Yonne Qun asked for Yasira, not guns. Let’s see if we’re all on the same page about this. How many requests for actual guns have we been getting, and how many for magic?”
“Me,” said Weaver immediately. Weaver had messy hair that flopped down into her eyes, and she was bouncing up and down in her seat. “They ask me for magic. But my magic is for healing, so it’s a little different, I guess – but they ask me for that. And guns. And Savior. All three.”
Splió waved a desultory hand. “Most of mine don’t ask for Savior. Not directly. Magic, though. More than half want magic. They start with guns, and when I tell them why guns won’t work, they ramp it up. If they don’t want Yasira, they want some of us, at least.”
Picket leaned forward, a wistful frown on his pale face. Picket was chubby and shy, and he’d liked video games, back in the days when life was more mundane. War games, which were an odd, nostalgic genre, since humans very rarely made war against each other anymore. He had a corresponding odd, game-theoretic way of picking through advantages and disadvantages in any conflict.
“I don’t think they really understand the way our powers work,” said Picket. “I could use my powers in a fight, maybe. It’d hurt both sides and be pretty imprecise, but I theoret
ically could. Daeis could. Blur might, sort of, I guess. And then Yasira’s in whatever league of her own that she’s in. But the rest of us? Nah. We’ve got specific things we can do that most people can’t, but it’s healing like Weaver said or it’s recon stuff. We’re not some kind of battle team.”
“You can’t call it recon if we’re not a battle team,” Weaver shot back, fidgeting by picking at the backs of her hands. “Recon’s a battle word.”
“It’s a military word,” Grid corrected, gently guiding Weaver’s fingers away from the spots where they might do damage.
“Military schmilitary. You all know what I meant.”
Each member of the Seven had a smattering of the modest magics that were common in the Chaos Zone, plus a specific power of their own, something that had blossomed in them as a specific result of how they’d been connected to Yasira when she performed her miracle. As near as Tiv could understand it, each of them had lent their mental strength in a slightly different way, something that made sense for that individual based on how their mind worked, and some part of Outside now lived in that part of each of them, both maddening and empowering.
Picket’s power was precisely adjusting the level of Outside contamination around him, from horrifying eye-crossing surrealism to seeming normality, or whatever in-between point he liked. Using that ability to hurt people might be possible, with the right kind of cruel creativity, but it wouldn’t be straightforward. Weaver’s powers were purely about healing and repair. Grid could sense the presence of angels and God-built technology, through a second sight which detected the shape of the local ansible net. It was very useful; it had stopped Vaurian angels from infiltrating their group in the past. But in a battle, unless someone tried to sneak up on them, it was nothing.
“Okay,” said Tiv, redirecting them to the original question. “Who else has been getting requests for magic?”