by Ada Hoffmann
She would remember all three of them from when they’d camped out in her yard, carrying out their doomed reconnaissance. Akavi, stern and pretty, pretending he had all the answers; Elu, soothing nerves and helping where he could; Enga, the heavy infantry, stomping along with them for protection. They’d been a good team once. He missed those days.
He’d kept it together all this time on the Talon, hadn’t he? He ought not to be falling apart like this now.
“Akavi – sometimes,” he managed, barely keeping the crack out of his voice. “Enga – no.”
“Tell me,” she urged.
It spilled out of him, hesitantly at first, the long and meandering story of how he’d gotten here. How Akavi had been sentenced to termination and damnation for failing to stop Yasira’s miracle; how Evianna Talirr had commandeered the Talon, briefly, for her own purposes; how Elu had used the resulting confusion to rescue Akavi and escape. How they’d both cut the ansible connections out of their heads. How Akavi was now running this way and that, pursuing his own ends, leaving Elu mostly behind.
He managed not to specify what those ends were. Elu wasn’t that much of a traitor. But once he’d begun to speak it was impossible to stop. He’d had these thoughts pent up in him for so long, and no one to share them with, not even Akavi, since Akavi didn’t ask. He was alive, he had no hierarchy holding him in place, and those two things ought to be miracle enough. But he couldn’t seem to end it, the stream of information that poured from him like a flood.
“That’s… huh,” Qiel said at last, looking at him sidelong. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But that’s a lot.”
“Not really.” He fidgeted nervously with his hair. “It’s not really that dramatic. Being tortured for failing, that would be dramatic. But we’ve avoided that.”
“So far,” said Qiel, wrinkling her nose again.
He waved a hand dispiritedly. “So far.”
Qiel drew her knees a little higher, closer to her in the grass. “You don’t have many friends, do you? Obviously being in hiding’s not conducive to that. But, like. Angels don’t. In general.”
Elu shrugged. “I had sell-souls working with me a lot of the time. I had Enga. It was… different.”
Most sell-souls were all business, eager to finish their assigned work and go back to their mortal lives, but some were friendly. Elu had made sell-soul friends on many occasions. Sometimes he could talk to them about his feelings. There were ways, if you were very careful, to talk about the loneliness or disappointments of angelic life without committing heresy. There were even ways, with the most extreme delicacy, to confess you didn’t always agree with what you were made to do. Elu had gotten used to those linguistic dances, and sometimes he’d heard sell-souls’ confessions in return. He’d liked that.
He’d even taken sell-soul lovers, once in a while, when there was interest. When pining over Akavi became too much for him. Sell-souls with crushes – working for Akavi, not Elu, not directly – were just about right for that. Not frightening like other angels, who were known to make use of pretty young recruits like Elu in unpleasant ways. Not frightened of him, the way regular mortals would have been. The power differential was small enough that he could close his eyes and pretend it wasn’t there.
“Do you miss them?”
“Yes,” said Elu, scrunching his knees closer to his chest, looking down into the grass. It didn’t mean he regretted his choice. Staying in the angelic corps, missing Akavi instead, would have hurt him even more.
“I miss a lot of things, too,” said Qiel.
“Tell me.”
“I miss my parents,” she said. Elu knew that both of Qiel’s mothers had died in the first days of the Plague. He remembered her and her sister and her little cousin, bearing griefs too fresh to touch, pushing on to save what could still be saved. “I don’t really miss school, but I miss… knowing there was a path. You’d go to school, you’d graduate, you’d get a job and a partner and you’d add more people to your family and it would all be how it was supposed to. I miss a lot of my friends who didn’t make it. I miss not feeling like everybody I know depends on me, even when I don’t know how to help them.” He looked up at her; she was shredding a normal blade of grass, picking bits off it with her fingernails and flicking them away. “And I thought the angels would bring those things back, you know? When I first met you and Akavi and Enga. That’s what I thought.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked over at him. “When Akavi was here, he said the angels had seen this before and it’d be easy to fix. He was lying, wasn’t he? That was a lie.”
He realized only then why she was bothering to talk to him, what was in it for her. Elu was a fallen angel. He knew this stuff, and he didn’t have a reason to continue the lie.
“Yeah,” he said, looking down again. “It was a lie. We had no idea what we were doing.”
“Do the angels know that now?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a while.” He squirmed out of his cross-legged position and flopped onto his back, looking up at the sky. Blue, for now, though in the Chaos Zone that could change. “We’ve seen other Outside incidents before. Buildings or even towns that were corrupted like this, but we kept them contained. They were smaller. They didn’t last this long. Jai is… different.”
“What do you mean, kept them contained?” Qiel asked, and Elu looked away, grimacing, before realizing that was an answer of its own.
“Oh,” she said, a small, shaken, betrayed sound. And then, after a silent moment, and another harsh intake of breath: “Oh. And us, too, right? That’s still your plan.”
“I don’t know,” said Elu, covering his face with his hands. He’d been trying not to think about it, trying not to guess. “It’s not mine anymore. It’s not my team. I don’t know what the plans are.”
“You want to corral us,” she continued, ignoring him. Reverting, probably, to the categories she was used to. “Keep us in one spot and too weak to fight back until you figure out the right excuse to get rid of it all.”
There was silence again, for a while, as her words echoed.
Mortals shouldn’t be thinking things like this. Elu knew Qiel was probably correct. But his old ingrained angel habits protested at it. Mortals shouldn’t know when Nemesis wanted to destroy them this way – not unless it was too late for them to do anything about it, and too late for them to tell someone else. Akavi wouldn’t want them to know.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably.”
“Am I wrong? I’m not wrong. What did you do to those other infected towns?”
Elu dropped his hands to the ground and pushed himself back upright. He didn’t look at her. He had bits of Outside grass stuck in his hair. “They were destroyed.”
“Well, okay, then, Mister Passive Voice. I’m not wrong.” She pulled up a bit of grass and threw it at him, childishly. “It’s not like this is news. People’ve been guessing that’s the angels’ endgame for a while now. I just didn’t have it confirmed by an actual angel. And I didn’t know.” Her voice quieted again; this seemed to be the part that truly disturbed her. “About the other towns.”
She was going to tell her friends about this, he suspected. Nemesis wouldn’t want that. Akavi really wouldn’t want that.
Elu could have denied it, he supposed. He was a bad liar, but he could have tried. He wondered why he hadn’t wanted to.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he wondered if he really was. Elu hadn’t liked those orders, and he hadn’t been the one to give them, nor to carry them out. But that was what it meant, being part of Nemesis’ machine. Catching the bad guys, as if bad guys could ever be caught without collateral. Did he believe there was a better way? He didn’t think he was prepared to say so, to try to guess what the better way was.
He noticed how she phrased it. That’s the angels’ endg
ame. Even in private, all but the most hardened of heretics phrased it that way. Blaming angels for their troubles. Angels, and not the much more dangerous names of the Gods who’d commanded them.
“How many?” she asked, heavy and dull.
“Four towns. That is to say – my team was involved with investigating four. We didn’t, um, do the actual destroying. We were specifically investigating Dr Evianna Talirr and the disasters she’d caused. Test runs for this one, I think, though we weren’t as clear about that then. I don’t know how many other people or places it’s happened to over the years.”
Qiel was still now, no longer throwing grass at anyone. Still the way Enga got, before a battle, coiled and reserving her strength. “Tell me their names.”
“I’d – rather not.”
“If you want me to treat you like a human, Elu, say their names.”
He sighed, bracing himself. “Svatsibi. Shiyetsa. Maku. Zhoshash.”
Qiel let out an angry breath. “Never heard of them.” Somehow that seemed to make her angrier. She was so young, and they were all small, isolated places, far from Jai. Of course she hadn’t heard.
“I sold my soul to Nemesis because–” He paused. Why was he telling her this? She was practically a stranger, and he’d never said all this straight out before. “I wanted to protect people. The way I’d been protected, once. I wanted to help. And by the time I realized it wasn’t that simple, it was too late. Orders come from on high and you carry them out. You can’t stop being an angel once you are one. I know that doesn’t excuse any of it, but that’s what happened.”
“But you did stop.”
“That’s – different.”
She was looking at him curiously, the anger banked for now. “Okay,” she said with a strange finality, like she’d only just made the decision. “I won’t tell the other angels about you.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Tell me one more thing,” said Qiel. “Tell me about Savior. That lady who was with you when you came down the first time, who could talk to monsters like a gone person. That was her, wasn’t it? She’s the – uh – the one they talk about now.”
“Yes. That was her.”
“Is it true? What they say about her?”
Qiel was so young. Elu would always look outwardly young, but Qiel Huong was actually only twenty, as naive as the age implied. She trusted him to tell the truth, even knowing what he was.
He’d tell her, he supposed. As much as he even understood the truth.
“I don’t know all of what they say,” he said. “She was very talented at working with Outside. More than any other heretic we’d seen, except maybe Dr Talirr. Talented in ways I guess we didn’t fully understand. We… tried to make her help us.” He winced slightly, saying it. He’d never liked it when they tortured people. Akavi never made him be involved, except by helping patch the victims’ wounds, but he still didn’t like it. “She had her own ideas about what that meant, though. She managed to change the Chaos Zone her way instead of ours. She made it safer here, kind of. Then a lot of things happened at once and she vanished. I don’t know where she is now. I’d be surprised if the other angels do.”
Qiel picked a few more blades of grass idly out of the ground. “Where are you living out here? Just out in the wild? You don’t look like you’re living out in the wild.”
“I’ve got a ship. Just a little one, but it’s God-built, so it meets our needs.”
“You’re not gonna tell me where, of course.”
“Of course not.”
She rolled to her feet, picking her basket back up. “So, do you want me to treat you like a human?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you were a human living out here, I’d offer to be friends. Ask if there was anything my group could do for you. Maybe ask if there was anything you could do to help out, too. It’s okay, though. I’m glad we talked. See you later, Elu.” She paused just before turning away, frowned. “Is your real name Elu?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him for another long moment, but he couldn’t bring himself to say, See you.
He paid more attention to certain things in the woods after that. He didn’t have tracking software installed, but he could look for places where fungi and herbs had been picked, where brush had been cleared away by hands other than his own. Akavi’s design requests weren’t that complicated, and he had time left over to spend on this if he wanted to. Qiel, or someone like her, seemed to come by here about once a week.
Having trees to look at, birds and small creatures to register in his mental database, had made him feel less alone. That one conversation with Qiel had, too. But knowing there were people nearby gathering necessities, and he didn’t see them, made him feel more alone than ever.
He printed a few small cameras. Not too small: about thumbnail-sized, so that he’d be able to find them again. He programmed them to be activated by motion, like a camera-trap for wildlife, and set them up in the branches of a few trees near the edge of the field. Elu no longer had the kind of network he was used to for tasks like this, the kind that would have let him monitor the cameras in real time like a second and third pair of eyes, but he could still download the vid data manually.
That data showed him little, but enough. Sometimes Qiel came by, foraging. Sometimes it was someone else. More often, it was some bird or animal, or some mobile Outside plant, setting off the camera by accident. Elu didn’t mind. He had time to go over the data.
Sometimes Qiel poked around in a way that didn’t look like foraging. Hunting, maybe, for where his ship might be. Hard to tell from the footage, though.
He could have left something out for her if he’d wanted to. Some scrap of food. Some little note. But he didn’t dare. Especially not with other people around.
After the second week, Akavi dropped by briefly. Elu had the clothes and supplies he’d requested, and Akavi kissed him. “Excellent work, my dear, as always.”
It embarrassed Elu how he’d begun to crave those brief kisses, how he wanted to lean into them. He wanted to be touched, to be held, to have Akavi’s attention on him as more than just an afterthought. But he knew better than to ask. This was already such a concession on Akavi’s part, an act that Akavi put on for his benefit. Push his luck, and it would fall apart.
He thought about saying, A mortal saw me. But he didn’t dare.
He thought about saying, A mortal saw me, and we talked, and she didn’t report me to the other angels. But he didn’t dare.
Akavi didn’t ask, anyway. Just dropped off the latest vids and a new set of instructions and waltzed back out, with the usual apologies, the promises to sit down and have a real talk soon.
Elu knew he wouldn’t.
And it was presumptuous, surely, to imagine that Qiel would.
One Month Ago
Elu was sitting in his chair on the Talon, fussing with the details of some new outfit Akavi needed – a rich person’s disguise, this time, formerly fine clothes now a little worse for wear, replete with all the new signals people used in the Chaos Zone now to signify their status, odd accessories and trimmings made from Outside objects – when someone knocked at the airlock.
He startled into full alertness. Akavi never knocked like that. Elu wished he still had his network connection; his cameras could have shown him who this was, but he couldn’t get to them from here. It could be Qiel, it could be the other angels coming for him, it could be anyone.
But if it was the other angels, running wouldn’t do any good. He could try to take off, but he’d be shot down before he could shake off pursuit. If it was the other angels, he was dead whether he opened the airlock or not.
He took a deep breath and opened it.
Qiel Huong, her hair plastered to her face with sweat, stood in the airlock. Hanging off her was a little child Elu thought he recognized, her cousin Lingin, cradling a badly broken, inexpertly splinted arm.
“I’m sorry,” she said immed
iately upon entry. “Sorry, I know you like your privacy here, I just–”
“What happened?” Elu asked, hurrying to them.
“I don’t know, Juorie turned her back on him for five seconds and he fell off something. I wouldn’t have bothered you, there are people back in our own group who can do first aid, but now it’s swollen and–”
She broke off despairingly. Both of them looked utterly exhausted. Qiel knew an angel like Elu would have supplies on his ship, including medical supplies. She still wouldn’t have come here, wouldn’t have put herself and an injured child through such a long search for an uncertain outcome, if there were other options.
Elu bent down, looking more closely at Lingin’s arm without touching him. It wasn’t only broken; it looked inflamed, infected, and there was a feverish flush to the child’s skin. “How did you get here?” he asked Qiel.
“I looked. Like, you’re hidden decently, but only because nobody knows there’s anything worth looking for in here, you know? Once you know it, if you’re any good at tracking, the signs are there. Still took a little while, but…” She shrugged self-deprecatingly. “Can you help him?”
He nodded. He refused to think yet about what this meant, what precedent it set, what Akavi would think.
“Hi, Lingin,” he said, turning his attention to the child. “My name’s Elu. I’m going to take a look at your arm, okay?”
“Okay,” said Lingin, in a voice quiet and shaky – maybe from general disuse, maybe only strained with pain and fear. He’d learned over the course of these six months to fear angels. Had Qiel tried to explain to him that Elu was different? Had he understood? Or did he only know that one of his oppressors was standing over him now, wanting to examine him in the ways that hurt most?
“Can you get up on a chair for me?” he asked, gesturing to the parlor. “I’m going to boot up some robots and they’ll give you something for the pain, and then we’ll do a bigger examination, okay?”
“Okay,” said Lingin, with more determination this time. He walked the short distance to the indicated chair with some difficulty and maneuvered himself onto it. Elu hurried to the medical bots and activated them.