by Ada Hoffmann
Tiv hadn’t stopped to think about it in her panic, but now that she had a moment to breathe, she understood what had happened. Akiujal had stirred the whole neighborhood into a panic so that Tiv could slip away in the confusion. She’d seen that technique in vids. Popcorn action movies, silly things Tiv had used to enjoy, because their kind of violence didn’t seem real. The line about the gas main had been almost too obvious to believe; the neighbors might not have listened, if not for the fact that Akiujal was well-respected, a leader in his community. He’d had their loyalty. And he’d used it to–
To sacrifice them all, in the blink of an eye. To put his neighbors in the line of fire between the angel and Tiv.
And the angel had fired.
Tiv felt her stomach clench, and she leaned forward, suppressing a dry heave. As soon as the worst of it was over, she hauled herself up. She had to understand this. She had to know for sure.
She stepped towards the airlock’s inner doors, which parted for her automatically, and into the warm confusion of the lair.
Splió was sitting just inside, doing something in a notebook. He startled as he saw her and put the book down, striding towards her. “Tiv, are you–” She could see the word “okay” die on his lips; obviously she was not. “What happened?”
“Angels, with–” Tiv was shaking harder than she’d thought. She wasn’t usually the type who lost verbal speech under stress. But she’d never had this kind of stress before. Not when the angels had briefly captured her, before she was Leader, as leverage against Yasira; not even in the Pride of Jai disaster, when she’d watched the lifeboat’s doors shut behind her even as another handful of doomed crew ran towards them. Those things had been horrific, but they hadn’t been about her. “They– shot–”
Splió’s eyes widened even further. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I–”
She nearly doubled over again as her stomach twisted. She wasn’t hurt. Because she was called Leader, and the people on the ground thought that meant something. She faffed around delivering packages and wringing her hands about weapons. She was connected to Yasira. And Akiujal had sacrificed a whole crowd of people to save her. Just for that.
She straightened herself as best she could and faced Splió, still shaking. “I need you to look at something for me.”
She didn’t like using Splió like this, but he was the only one who could safely do it. Splió’s code name was Watcher. Anyone could use the airlock to move themselves, but Splió could use it in other ways. Splió could use it to see.
“Anything, Leader,” Splió said gravely, and there was no irony in his voice this time as he used the title. Tiv wanted to crumple up the word “Leader” and throw it far away forever.
“I just came from Sedajegy Utridzysy Akiujal’s house in Dasz. Angels came, and Mr Akiujal created a diversion, and I ran. I couldn’t look back. I need you to look there. I need you to tell me if… How bad it is.”
Splió nodded and stepped to the airlock. Splió liked being useful in this way, which didn’t make Tiv stop feeling guilty about it; she was asking him to peer into horrors that were hers to contend with, not his. Splió looked higher-functioning than Daeis on the surface, able to talk lucidly and be charming in his cynical way, but he still couldn’t muster the energy to make his rounds most days. Some of the time he spent with Daeis, who needed individual care, and some he spent listlessly reading or staring at the wall. Sometimes he went on long jags cursing himself and his lack of ability. Using his powers to help, even in painful ways, helped him feel better about himself. That didn’t make it right.
Nothing about this team or this planet would ever be right.
Splió raised a hand to the metal door, but instead of going through, he leaned on it, contemplative. He closed his eyes, and Tiv watched the twitching under his eyelids, as if in the throes of a dream. After a moment she heard him gasp, just a short, chagrined intake of breath. Nothing more dramatic than that.
“They’re dead,” he informed her flatly. “The angel’s gone. About… a dozen people shot, it looks like.”
“Mr Akiujal?”
“I don’t see him. Probably means he got away, but I can’t tell for sure.” His eyelids twitched a little more, and then his shoulders relaxed and he pulled away. “Sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry.”
Splió opened his eyes and looked at her flatly. “Yeah, how dare you wade out there and shoot all those people?”
Tiv’s breath was coming faster. She’d thought knowing would make it better, but of course it didn’t. “They died because of me. I took a stupid risk and they all died covering my escape.” All those human beings, snuffed out. Because someone – because Akiujal had decided Tiv was worth more than that number of ordinary lives.
“Yeah? Did you ask them to do that?”
“You know why they did it,” Tiv snapped, her voice raw. “You know why.”
She’d known she was taking a risk, but she’d thought she was the one taking it. She hadn’t been thinking at all.
Splió sighed softly. “Hey. I’m sorry. I’m shitty at this part. Come here.” He opened his arms, hesitantly, offering a hug. “Or do you want to be with Yasira? I think she’s awake.”
Tiv bit her lip. She should want to be with Yasira. If only she could collapse in Yasira’s arms and cry on her shoulder. If only they could whisper to each other that it would be okay. But Yasira wasn’t well. Yasira had been too distraught to even get out of bed this morning. Tiv hadn’t even told her yet that people were asking for weapons. How could she explain what had happened now? Yasira couldn’t handle this.
She flopped forward and let Splió hold her. He rubbed her back. “Hey, you’re safe. It’s okay. I mean, it’s not okay, but – this all just sucks, and we’re doing what we can. It’s not your fault. You’re trying. You’re good. You’re brave.”
A second pair of arms wrapped hesitantly around her from the side. Daeis, pale and quiet as always, had entered unnoticed. They didn’t have Splió’s platitudes, but they were warm and soft, and between them and Splió it felt like being carried. The two of them, in concert, could almost hold the weight of her.
Tiv leaned against them and dissolved into loud, howling sobs.
Yasira had been dozing, too groggy and listless to do anything but not quite unconscious. Sometimes she lay awake and let the dozens of conflicting thoughts in her head argue it out; sometimes she dreamed, formless dreams that transcended any waking concept. Outside dreams.
Yasira was mostly Outside these days. Very little of her, on the inside, resembled the mental shape she’d once had. She had told Tiv most of the bad things that had happened to her, but she had never told her the last and worst.
After her miracle, six months ago, Outside had offered to destroy Yasira’s soul. Alive, she was likely to be captured and tortured again; dead, her soul would be in Nemesis’ clutches, which was even worse. But if her soul did not exist, if there was nothing left capable of feeling or understanding enough to suffer, then she would be safe.
Yasira had, in the core of her mind, said yes.
She’d felt herself starting to crumble. And then, at the last second, she’d thought of Tiv. She’d changed her mind. Outside had allowed that, too; it had sent what was left of her soul back into her body. But the parts that were already broken could never be fully restored. The structure of her physical brain held things together, but Yasira was no longer a single soul. She was a collection of pieces which shifted and jangled, chaotically, in and out of place.
Tiv understood neurodiversity. Yasira would never have dated a woman who didn’t. Tiv understood that people’s minds could take different shapes, and they could still be important and worthy of love. But Yasira hadn’t been like this when Tiv fell in love with her. And she feared what Tiv might think, what Tiv might say, if she understood how deep the change really went.
It was hard to make a lot of jangling pieces work together properly. But it didn�
�t make her incapable of hearing. And so she had been startled awake by the sound of Tiv crying, loudly, somewhere else in the lair.
Something awful had happened.
With a creeping sense of dread, Yasira tried to push herself up to go and investigate. Then an entirely different thought occurred. Something awful had happened to Tiv. And Tiv hadn’t come in here to tell her about it. She’d decided not to do that – for now, or maybe at all.
When Tiv had been in distress before the Plague, she’d gone straight to Yasira. Held her, cried on her shoulder – that was the way it worked. That was what Yasira did, in reverse, when she was in distress. But Tiv was out there, not in here.
Of course she isn’t in here, came the thought immediately. You’ve been lying in bed barely alive for months. Why would she think you could comfort her?
You should go to her, urged another mental voice. If she doesn’t think you can help, prove her wrong.
If she wanted your help, she’d be here.
Maybe she thinks you’re asleep. Maybe she just doesn’t want to bother you. Doesn’t mean you can’t go out there and offer.
Don’t go out. You can’t go bothering people who don’t want you around. That’s rude.
It’s ruder not to. She’s doing it so you’ll hear. What do you think she’ll say tonight if she knows you heard her crying and did nothing?
I just want to know what happened.
Yasira pushed against her blankets and rolled out of bed. She landed in a crouch on the floor. Her muscles were weak – that’s what you get for lying around all the time, said someone – and for a moment she couldn’t move further.
Every piece of Yasira these days had its own thoughts, and the thoughts crowded in her head so thickly that it was hard to do anything else. There was no central, Real Yasira who could decide to push forward and ignore the other ones. Nobody had that authority. When Yasira moved, or spoke, it was simply one or more pieces taking over for a minute. They could lose that control just as quickly.
Yasira had heard about plurality and split-personality disorders. She’d been born and raised in Riayin, which prided itself on accepting every neurotype. Plurality was no worse than anything else. But Yasira wasn’t sure if she was even plural in the usual way. Plurals were either born or made through trauma – a natural predisposition to dissociation and fragmentation, magnified in response to gut-wrenchingly awful events. And it was true that Yasira had been through something awful. But Outside had literally reached into her and split her up. Outside was inherently a part of her now. Most plurals weren’t that way. Maybe the techniques that worked for most plurals, improving communication and teamwork between all the parts of themselves, wouldn’t work for a person like Yasira. Maybe real plural systems wouldn’t even want to be associated with her. Maybe, if she called herself that, it would only bring down angelic retribution on all the other plurals, in case they were plural because of Outside things, too. Maybe they’d want to run away from Outside the way everyone else did. The right diagnostic category for Yasira was “Outside madness” – everything else, once that level of unreality got involved, took second place.
There were things Yasira could still have done to look up the techniques that worked for other plurals, to find answers to some of those “maybes”. But the idea of doing them made her rise up into arguments with herself even louder and angrier than the usual ones. She’d never managed it.
So, in the meantime she had a mess of different parts of herself who rarely ever got along. Only a few of the largest of them bothered with names. There was the Scientist, for instance – a biggish chunk who was mostly made of curiosity. She was the one who just wanted to know what had happened. But most of Yasira wasn’t as coherent as that.
There were pieces too small to keep track of, who rose to the surface to say or do something and immediately sank again. There were pieces who lurked in the background, thinking seething dangerous Outside thoughts. Yasira carried Outside itself with her, in ways that had previously only been accessible with the help of Ev’s technology. She could draw on it at any time, if she chose to face the consequences. Sometimes it drew itself up through her, in a wild conglomeration of energies seeking release. Yasira usually managed to stumble out of the lair when that happened, through the airlock, into some uninhabited part of the Chaos Zone where she wouldn’t do any harm.
She’d spaced out on the floor, thinking about all this, instead of moving further. It was hard to focus on the physical world when her head held such cacophony inside. She tried to move again.
Don’t you dare, said a small dissenting chorus of pieces. You’ll bother her. Do you think she’ll keep coming in here and taking care of you if you bother her?
Let her stop, said one of the seething, background pieces. What’s the worst that can happen if she stops? We die, right? That might be nice. A chorus of other pieces quickly hushed that piece. Most of Yasira did want to live, despite everything.
No, said another part of Yasira to the first one, ignoring the angry one completely. That’s the other way around. Good people are supposed to reciprocate. I should try to take care of her back.
Yeah? Since when are you good?
But I want to know what happened, the Scientist complained again.
Before Yasira could get a semblance of working order into her limbs, the door opened. It wasn’t Tiv, but Prophet. A waify, stick-thin trans girl with the dark straight braids of a woman from Ahti. Yasira had known Prophet in grad school; she had gone by the name Exatlia then. She and Yasira hadn’t been close – Yasira hadn’t been close to anybody, really – but sometimes they’d sat together at department events, making awkward conversation, both equally uncomfortable with the room around them for their differing reasons.
Prophet wasn’t autistic, but she often stared into space the way Yasira did. Prophet had a lot of conflicting senses. At any given moment she was seeing some variable amount of time into the future – usually not long, a few seconds at most, but sometimes leaping ahead very far, sometimes seeing events in some other place, often seeing multiple things at once. Most of it wasn’t especially useful, nor easy to interpret. She and Yasira were similar in that way, both inundated with information, both a little spacy when it came to what was actually in front of them.
Prophet knew Yasira’s secret. Yasira hadn’t told her, but she’d seen it, dimly. That meant that Grid, Weaver, and Picket – the rest of the Four, who didn’t keep secrets from each other – also knew. Beyond that strange circle-within-a-circle, no one had breathed a word.
“I knew you’d hear,” said Prophet, without preamble, staring at the wall.
“I should go out. I shouldn’t go out. I want to know – I don’t know what to do.”
Prophet sat down and arranged herself on the floor, so they were both at the same level. She squirmed around, seeming to have difficulty getting comfortable. “She’s keeping secrets from you. Not, like, bad secrets. No one’s betraying anyone. But I don’t think you should go out there right now. She’s gotta tell you when she’s ready. When she’s in shock and crying, it’s not the time, you know?”
Yasira managed to look at Prophet directly. Voices of alarm rose sharply in her mental background. Tiv wasn’t just upset and seeking comfort elsewhere. She was upset because of something that she actively didn’t want Yasira to know.
Tiv was keeping not only a secret, but a terrible secret. Not a betraying one, maybe. But still a secret bad enough to make her howl like this, outside Yasira’s room, without being able to explain why.
“Is she hurt?”
Prophet shrugged uncomfortably. “Not physically. But… yes, I think. Running a resistance hurts. We all feel that sometimes.”
Yasira flopped forward and buried her face between her knees. “Except me. Sorry. I just lie here–”
“I meant you, too. I did mean that.”
Yasira hunched more tightly in on herself.
You’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself whil
e everyone else puts their lives on the line, said some cruel but accurate piece of her. You’re the reason they’re risking themselves in the first place.
It would be better, said some of those ugly buzzing parts in the very back, if we weren’t here.
Yasira literally couldn’t get up and help. She’d tried. On a good day, she could walk around the lair and have reasonable conversations with the team. She could wash dishes and stuff. But she’d tried making rounds the way everyone else did, or stealing supplies, or organizing plans and supply lists, or even helping redecorate the lair, and she couldn’t. Not even for a day. She got overwhelmed and had to stop almost immediately, sometimes in a torrent of self-recriminating tears, sometimes in pure blankness as the arguing in her head drowned out the rest of the world.
“I mean, the Four don’t keep secrets,” Prophet rambled from her corner of the room. “Not from each other. But that just means we know how we’re all hurting. And there are good things as well; we share those, too. It’s not all pain. But even the rest of the Seven have secrets. I haven’t figured out what all of them are, but I can feel them there. I think most people don’t even know how many secrets they’re keeping. You’ll feel better when Tiv knows your secret. It’ll be harder, learning hers, but you’ll get through it. Tiv’s not gonna give up on you, Savior. I don’t always see real clear, but you two are together in every future I see.”
Yasira tightened her fingers in her own hair. Sometimes it was easier to just let all the parts speak at once, to drop any pretense of coherence, and with Prophet, she could do that. “I can’t tell her yet. It’s not the right time. I should have told her before. I’m not good enough for her now. She shouldn’t have stayed. I’m so fucking stupid.”
She heard Prophet shifting where she sat, and she wondered if she’d made her uncomfortable. But Prophet’s voice was the same as usual, gentle and wry. “Nah, there’s no ‘good enough’, Savior. There’s just love.”