by Ada Hoffmann
At least it was only her, this time. Just herself that she was illogically risking, and not the lives of everyone else around her. Unless the Gods were smart enough to take hostages, and then– oh no–
Tiv was shaking.
She took a deep breath, getting herself under control. This wasn’t an angel, probably. This was just a human. She could be a Vaurian angel, but there were only so many of those. The Gods probably wouldn’t waste many of them on guarding random exit doors, in a touristy museum far from any present conflicts.
Nobody had any reason to expect people from Jai’s resistance here on Old Earth. This person wouldn’t specifically be looking for one. She didn’t have images of Tiv in her memory banks to compare with the faces of passers-by. She wasn’t secretly checking Tiv’s microexpressions. She was a woman probably not too different from Tiv’s old self, doing a boring job which sometimes involved looking for suspicious things, but which likely also involved a lot of real helping, soothing the distressed, summoning medical assistance when needed.
“I just–” Tiv stammered. “I just got overwhelmed a little.”
The docent smiled sympathetically. “Can I take your hand? It’s going to be okay. Are you from Ngweregwa?”
Ngweregwa, Tiv remembered, was the most recent human nation to be hit by a Keres attack. Someone Tiv’s age, from the right area, would remember that carnage firsthand. Tiv didn’t look or talk much like a Ngweregwan, but then there were minorities and recent immigrants in every country; it wasn’t impossible. The docent saw she was having a trauma reaction, and she’d assumed this was why.
Or maybe she was testing. To see if Tiv would use it, implausibly, as an excuse.
Tiv took the docent’s hand, but she looked at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to. Just breathe.”
Tiv counted out ten long breaths, in and out, trying to force her heart to stop racing. The docent had taken her hand in such a way that two of her fingers rested directly over Tiv’s pulse. Tiv had no doubt that she was counting the beats, measuring them against a count in her head. This might feel like an attempt at comfort, but it was still a test.
“You ready to go back out there?” said the docent at last, when Tiv had calmed herself a little.
That, too, was probably a trap. Say yes too quickly, too unconvincingly, and they’d want to know why you were in such a hurry. Say no outright, try to force your way to that unattainable exit behind the desk, and they’d want to know a lot more.
When had Tiv started thinking like this? She’d used to trust the Gods so deeply.
“Two more seconds,” she said to the docent. And took two more breaths, long, steadying. Then she looked up, forcing a smile, the most genuine one she could. “Yeah, I think I’m ready to go now. Thanks.”
“You’re very welcome,” said the docent, with a smile that did look genuine, as far as Tiv could tell.
Tiv walked back out into the Hall of the War still forcing that smile. She could barely focus on the maps, the diagrams, the vids of all the old heretics, all equally doomed.
She spent the rest of the walk through the museum carefully measuring her breaths, looking where she thought she was supposed to look, only vaguely making sense of what she saw. After the Hall of the War there was a final room, brightly colored and splendid, proclaiming Nemesis’ victory over the Keres. A depiction of Nemesis in human form – light-skinned and silver-haired, with seven medals gleaming at Her collarbone – stood triumphantly in that room. Tiv wasn’t the only one who shied away. Even the people who loved Nemesis knew how terrible She had to be, to stand between humanity and what threatened it. It wasn’t heresy to avert her eyes.
It was heresy to silently clench her fist, thinking of how Yasira had looked, bound to the chair where the angels had tortured her. Tiv focused on carefully smoothing her body back out, unclenching, letting her fingers hang free.
She managed to walk out of the museum without anyone confronting her, back into the hot crowded sunlight of the city square. She walked around the square’s edge, trying not to look too eager to find the door she’d arrived by. She didn’t know what she was going to tell the rest of the team. She’d come here looking for answers and found diddly-squat. They wanted a Leader, and she didn’t know how to lead them into what was coming.
She found the door, though: ostensibly the door into another, smaller tourist attraction. Something about fish. She took a deep breath, walked through, and vanished.
Back into the airlock, and then the lair.
Tiv wanted to collapse in the communal area on one of those beanbags, pull a blanket over her head and decompress. She started toward that area, but something was wrong. The Four were sitting there, leaning close to each other and speaking quietly, which was not unusual for them; Grid sitting straight and focused, Weaver fidgeting as she leaned close to Picket, Prophet staring warily in the vague direction of the airlock as if she’d expected something unpleasant to come from there.
They looked up as she approached and drew back, as if there was something to hide. As if there was a problem.
“Hey,” said Tiv, her brow furrowing. “What’s up?”
“Tiv,” said Grid, squaring their shoulders. “Listen, this isn’t as bad as it’s going to sound, but it’s not good. You need to know–”
“Yasira left,” Weaver blurted in the same moment. “She got mad and ran off.”
Tiv drew back, disturbed. “What – you mean for one of her energy things?”
Sometimes Yasira was overcome with Outside energy and needed to run out the airlock and deal with it. That, bizarre as it might seem to an outsider, was routine by now. But the expressions on the Four’s faces said it wasn’t that. Something very different had happened today.
“No,” said Picket, “she ran off on a mission this time. Said she didn’t want any help.”
Yasira could barely get out of bed most days. Running off wasn’t like her. Tiv swallowed hard, increasingly alarmed. “Why?”
And it was Prophet who answered, levelly returning Tiv’s gaze, her expression grave. “You know why.”
CHAPTER 8
Now
Yasira woke up that morning in a miserable haze. Something was acting up in the further-out, more Outside-y parts of her mind. Power that buzzed without an outlet. She might have to go deal with that today. She hoped not. She didn’t want to get up.
Tiv had come in a few minutes later, made sure she had breakfast and a drink of water, and said goodbye for the morning. “It’s a Keres day,” she’d said, “but there’s a delivery I have to make.”
Yasira had lain there in bed a while; she’d nibbled on her breakfast toast, but it didn’t taste very good.
Then, finally, the feeling of Outside fully took hold.
It was a physical urgency when she let it go this long. As bad as having to vomit or go to the bathroom. It was strong enough to overcome her usual paralysis; parts might argue over what to do and how to do it, but they didn’t really have the power to delay the others, not in the face of this. She stumbled out of bed and ran for the airlock.
It opened to a wave of her hand, and she paused inside for a moment, picturing the same thing she always did. An empty space somewhere in the Chaos Zone, a wild space, free from prying eyes. Different than the ones she’d used before. That was all she asked, and the meta-portal never failed her.
It let her out into a meadow ringed with trees. She was somewhere near the Chaos Zone’s northern extreme, and the winter air nipped at her face and hands. The meadow itself wasn’t much, a wide irregular circle of dry brown grass, waiting for snow that might or might not arrive. The trees around it were discolored and twisted, clinging to each other’s branches like lovers unwilling to be parted. The fused branches formed into strange shapes, Moebius strips, trefoils and arabesques, in deep translucent colors that had never used to be the proper colors for trees.
The sky was dark and cloudy, and lights
crackled through it that she could have mistaken for lightning if she didn’t know better. They weren’t quite the right shade for lightning, or the right shape, but plenty of things in the Chaos Zone weren’t the right color or shape anymore. The battle with the Keres, raging overhead, might not even be more dangerous than Chaos Zone lightning. Neither half of the battle was likely to bomb anything out here in the middle of nowhere. And she was too far from civilization to run into a patrolling angel. Probably.
Yasira fell to her knees in the middle of it and let her power out.
The transfer wasn’t visible, exactly. She couldn’t see the glow of energy flowing out of her, nor hear any sound. But there was a physical feeling, like screaming, like bursting into tears. Like finally saying painful words that had been pent up tightly inside her. She didn’t understand what it meant. But something had been building, and now it released.
She felt the effects spreading out from her like the stain from a spilled bucket. She saw the land around her respond. The trees grew taller before her eyes. Their branches stretched higher, twisted more elaborately. Fungi sprouted under her hands, blue and red and brown, spiraling up into a strange fractal shape. It was like watching a time-lapse vid, and it made her queasy. She shut her eyes, knowing she’d feel when it stopped. When nothing needed to pour out of her anymore. When the roil of otherworldly energy inside her went still.
When she opened her eyes again, panting, the fungi had grown into an arch like a bandstand over her head, multicolored and shimmering in the dim light. Fruit and flowers hung down from it, and Yasira knew two things instinctively. First, they were not any kind of fruit that had existed before the Plague; second, they were edible. Probably delicious. Above them, the branches had closed in a delicate layer of latticework.
Yasira didn’t know what any of it meant.
We’re connected to Outside in the core of our soul, the Scientist opined, and something comes through the connection sometimes. It’s like fluid dynamics. If there’s a lowering of pressure on one side, something has to flow through to fill the gap. That much, almost everyone agreed with. But the Scientist wasn’t able to help anybody with the morals of it, with the shoulds. What did it mean, having a power like this? How was it supposed to be used?
The Seven all had powers that were fairly well-defined. Blur could move around very fast; Splió could scry; Prophet saw the future. It was possible to be creative with powers like those, but their basic applications were clear. Yasira’s power wasn’t like that. There was just a lot of Outside inside her, and she didn’t know what to do with it, except throw it out into the world like this sometimes.
And she didn’t know the moral value of doing so. Was it a net good, making pretty things grow that bore edible fruit? Was it a net evil, adding more Outside corruption to an already-corrupted place? Was it simply a waste, taking energy that should have been used in some clever way to help people, and dumping it out at random instead? There were arguments on all sides. She hadn’t been able to test the possibilities much. She was too scared most of the time, arguing with herself too fiercely to make a coherent plan. And when it got to be too much and boiled over like this, there was no time for planning anyway.
She felt better now, though. Clearer, like she was a vid display. Like her body had been full of static, and now the picture inside it was crisp again.
There was a small wooden archway near the edge of the tree ring, the kind that might have been used for photo-ops on some cheerful pre-Plague hike through the forest, and that was where Yasira had come through. Maybe weddings or celebratory picnics had been held in this meadow once, but there was no one here anymore.
The Scientist made a mental note that archways without a closing door were still door-like enough for the meta-portal. The rest of her just walked to it and pushed back through.
She felt good now, mostly. She knew it was going to be one of her better days, now that the excess Outside energy had been dealt with. Maybe today she’d make out a plan for testing her powers more thoroughly. Or she’d go through the rest of the team’s notes and catch up on what they were doing. Or she’d clean her room, wash the dishes, get her sheets into the laundry to get rid of that musty smell. Maybe she’d decorate. Maybe–
And that was the trouble with being broken into pieces the way Yasira was. Everyone had a different idea for what to do. On bad days, Yasira argued with herself about how awful she was and how she’d failed at everything. On good days, the argument instead turned to what she should do with herself. It wasn’t as soul-crushing as a bad day, but the paralysis and frustration could be almost as strong. They could flip a good day back to bad, if she wasn’t careful.
Maybe she’d find Tiv. Tiv would be back from her errand by now; she might have an idea for what Yasira should do.
She walked back into the lair, looking around at its comfortable mess. The team really had done a good job, turning this from the industrial-looking chaos Yasira had inherited from Ev into something that looked livable and sweet. Colorful fabrics hung at odd angles. Beanbags and hammocks crowded cozily up against each other. Someone had hung some art in the kitchen – not real stolen art objects, Tiv wouldn’t have stood for that, but a print they’d nabbed from somewhere, and a stretch of heavy paper that looked like someone on the team had painted it themselves, an unrefined but expressive swirl of colors that resonated deep in Yasira’s mind. A swirl, not of Outside colors, but of colors that described how Outside felt.
She saw Daeis in the nest of beanbags taking a nap, and Grid and Prophet sitting in the war room, conferring over something. It looked like everyone else was out. The Seven often used Keres days to catch up on the errands that didn’t involve going to Jai. Refilling the pantry, for instance.
Maybe Yasira would make her own small rounds, just a circuit around the lair. A neurotutor had taught her that trick as a very young child. If she was overwhelmed with options and didn’t know what to do, she could walk around the room until she spied a task that called to her. Yasira’s five year-old self hadn’t been made of pieces, but sometimes she’d become overloaded in a more mundane way. Once she started walking, she had rarely completed even half a circuit through the classroom before some useful puzzle or book absorbed her fully.
She walked like that, through the nest of blankets, past the war room. She looked around, grounding herself in what she could see and hear and smell. Yasira spent so much time in her room, sometimes she forgot what the rest of the lair looked like. It wasn’t always real to her.
She could feel Outside, too, thrumming underfoot. That feeling had used to disturb her, but at some point, after long months of existing with a permanent connection to Outside in her head, she’d lost the desire to recoil. Outside would always be with her, even if she set foot on some pristine new world far from Jai. Yasira didn’t try to get away from her own skeleton, either.
There was the kitchen, upside down overhead. There were vaguely inadequate laundry and bathroom facilities to the sides. There was the storage unit, big and bulky and nestled in a corner near the airlock, where they’d stuffed everything of Ev’s that was neither junk nor a finished project. There were alcoves, too, sticking out of the walls at their familiar odd angles, where a few working heresies sat waiting to be used. A reverse-engineered ansible; a forbidden, but non-sentient, supercomputer.
And the dais, at the very far end of the lair, where the prayer machine sat in ruins like a broken-backed beetle.
Yasira had never let anyone else touch this machine. In the beginning, she hadn’t even told Tiv what it was. Tiv knew that she’d used a machine of Ev’s to put herself in contact with Outside, but she hadn’t said which one. Tiv hadn’t been able to make head or tail of Ev’s projects, back then. When she wasn’t attending to Yasira, she’d spent those first few days wandering the lair in a confused haze. Trying to use her own not inconsiderable intelligence to figure out what all the half-finished machines were for, and mostly failing.
But Yasira remem
bered what the prayer machine was for. She remembered the feeling of using it – the way a strange, alien light had bloomed in its center like a nebula. The way she’d put out the tip of her finger to touch it. The way she’d felt that she was dying, falling towards the end of the universe, breaking apart.
She remembered how she’d reached out into that feeling in desperation, knowing there was no other way to save her world. The brutal ecstasy of making direct contact with Outside for the first time – not just infected things, like the plants in the Chaos Zone, but the essence of Outside itself. The infinity of it, beyond time and space, in which Yasira’s own self and the way she screamed with it were too small to even notice. And the way she’d collapsed, afterwards, retching and laughing, barely understanding that she was back in her own body. Barely understanding what her body even was.
She had been so convinced that, once she used the machine, she would never be the same again. Her old self would be dead. It had been true, in a sense.
And soon enough, once she’d had enough time to explore the lair on her own, something had changed in Tiv’s demeanor.
“Yasira,” she’d said hesitantly, several mornings after they arrived. “If the Gods are after us because we know too much about Outside. And Outside is what you used to try to make things better. Then– shouldn’t we–?”
“No,” Yasira had said.
She knew what Tiv was asking. Tiv had just lost her religion. Maybe quickly, in those last few days, when the Gods had kidnapped her and threatened to hurt her to control Yasira. Maybe slowly, in the fourteen months before that, when she’d mourned for Yasira and no one had comforted her, because you weren’t supposed to mourn for heretics. Maybe both. Now Tiv was looking for something else to believe in, and Outside was like a God in some ways. Bigger than people. Ineffable. Possessing its own agenda.
Tiv could be a heretic if she wanted; she could rebel against the Gods if she liked. But Yasira would not let Tiv destroy herself.