by Ada Hoffmann
The examination proceeded straightforwardly. Lingin’s problem was dangerous and difficult for mortals without a doctor, but not too challenging for God-built technology. The break was a messy compound fracture and the splint – applied by someone in Qiel’s community, with first-aid training but not much more – hadn’t been nearly enough to address it. The places where the bones broke the skin had been badly infected.
“Doesn’t the Chaos Zone have doctors anymore?” he asked Qiel. “Hospitals?” The vids that Akavi sent back, and the snippets he’d heard on the radio, had been uninformative on this point. Mortals could have dealt with the kind of injury Lingin had, but those mortals would have to be trained professionals, with something vaguely resembling proper equipment, and time would have been of the essence.
Qiel gave a half-hearted shrug. “Some, but they’re short on space and equipment, and they have angel guards. You know.”
He didn’t really, but he could make the inference. He imagined a hospital with armed angel guards, checking IDs, asking intrusive questions. Qiel and the child both had Outside abilities. If he’d been using those abilities at the time he was hurt, or if the angels wanted an excuse to bring Qiel in for any other reason…
“I can treat him,” said Elu, “but he needs surgery. It’ll be messy. He’ll be knocked out, and you won’t want to look at it.”
Qiel bit her lip, but nodded. “Okay.”
Last time they met she’d blamed him for the murder of thousands of people. Now she trusted him so easily with the life of a child. She was young, he supposed. Too trusting, like him. And out of other options.
It was only later, when the surgery was already in progress, that he remembered to wonder what Akavi would think. Nothing good, surely. The Talon was secret, and secrecy was crucial to the mission.
To Akavi’s mission.
It was crucial to Elu’s survival, too. But he didn’t regret helping. He liked feeling useful, and he felt more deeply useful now than he had with Akavi in a long time. Maybe it was wrong, but turning Qiel and Lingin away, after they’d come all this way, would be worse.
“Can I–?” said Qiel. She’d come up next to him in that parlor, while the robots did their work on Lingin in one of the bedrooms. She was looking up at him now, biting her lip. “Can I bring other people here? If they really need it? I won’t tell anyone who doesn’t really need it.”
Elu looked back at her, uncertain. “You know what will happen if the other angels find me.”
It was virtually inevitable, if he went this way.
No. It was inevitable anyway. He’d given himself and Akavi a respite from damnation, and they might stretch it out a long time, if they were careful and clever. They wouldn’t age. They might last decades, centuries, longer than any mortal lifetime. But one day, through sheer statistical inevitability, their luck would run out.
He’d known that as soon as he deserted. In a way, he’d known it half a century ago. There was no going back once you started being an angel. Nemesis would get Elu’s soul when he died. Nemesis, if he’d displeased Her, would torment him for all the rest of his immaterial existence. And the dark joke inherent in that, the one that the angels all knew, was that everyone had displeased Her. Some just didn’t know it yet.
Yet Elu didn’t want to say no.
He didn’t even want to say, let me check with Akavi. That wasn’t fair, surely; he was putting both of them at risk. But Akavi had already made so many decisions for him. It was petty, it was beneath him, but Elu wanted this choice to be his.
“What do you want in exchange?” Qiel asked, startling him. Seeing his hesitance, maybe, and misinterpreting. “We all, um – like, we don’t really do money very much here. We don’t talk a lot about what someone owes us for the favor we did. We don’t hassle people about pulling their weight, because how do you know what someone’s weight is, really? We just give people things if they need them. But this is – a lot. What you can do here. And I guess you can print your own supplies pretty well but if you want, I don’t know, help with something, or information, or…”
“Friends,” he said, surprising himself.
“Oh. Yeah, of course. But friends you can trust, right? Friends who can keep your secret.” He nodded, and she looked around speculatively at the Talon, its incongruous comfort in such isolation. “I can swing that for you, yeah.”
He made an excuse and crept away to check on Lingin again. He was very bad at this, he thought. He didn’t know his goals the way Akavi did; he couldn’t think rationally about how to get there. He would not think about where this might lead, or what Akavi would think of it. He would not. He would not.
CHAPTER 10
Now
Yasira emerged, blinking in the daylight, at the edge of a park. It wasn’t a park she’d seen before, but similar to many like it. Wide cobblestone paths, curving banks of trees, all a little worse for wear now that the infrastructure to maintain them was no longer in place. The trees had gone feral, both in the usual ways of trees and in Outside ways. In this park, their trunks had split from the simple, thick shapes they’d once held and become intricate lattice-works, honeycombs of bark, a maze of openings occasionally large enough to crawl through. The path still wove through it, though the branches often closed into a tunnel overhead. But not many normal people ventured down paths like this anymore. This park belonged to the gone people.
She could see it in the details: nests of leaves and other detritus in the largest crevices, big enough to cradle a human form. Extinct Old Earth apes had built nests like these, in trees or on the ground, to be used for a few nights before moving on, and gone people had picked the habit back up.
Yasira didn’t know what was up with gone people and roosting outdoors. There were plenty of rundown, abandoned, broken buildings in the Chaos Zone. Normal survivors had reclaimed many, rebuilding them as best they could or just squatting inside. Any animal, Outside or otherwise, would take shelter in the ruins of a building if it could. But she’d never heard of gone people going indoors, even in the worst weather. It was as if they’d not only lost their sense of civilization but had actively rejected it.
She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do here.
A chorus of voices in Yasira’s mind urged her against this. There were too many dangers. She wasn’t going to accomplish anything. She was going to accomplish too much, without understanding what she was doing; she’d make contact with the gone people but it would have repercussions beyond anything she’d planned. The angels would catch her. Tiv would hate her for risking herself like this, or for a dozen other far-fetched reasons.
But when she looked at those papers a few minutes ago, something new had begun to form. Not a new part of Yasira, but a new coalition of existing parts. So many of her were tired of sitting around not doing anything. They leapt at the chance to act, meaningfully, in a way that might influence the whole resistance. Those parts of her had banded together, seized control, and they planned to hold onto it as long as they could. They had Outside power behind them, in some way that she didn’t fully understand. A deepness, a rightness, pushing her on. A purpose.
They were thinking about choosing a name.
The Strike Force, maybe. That sounded right, conveying action and urgency. Was it right to give names to a group like this? Could names be collective? Yasira was a collective, but it felt strange to make further sub-groupings.
But they did want the name.
Yasira walked forward into the tangle of trees.
The path twisted and turned and the tree-honeycombs closed in around it. She walked, more on instinct than on much of a plan, until she was out of sight of the outer road. Then she knelt, one hand on a thick twist of bark, one in the dirt.
She didn’t know what she was doing, but she knew that, when she’d communicated with gone people before, they’d responded only to pure thought. The first gone person she’d met had responded to what Yasira pictured in her head – not the intent, but the
image – and so did other Outside creatures. And Yasira was able to connect to Outside more deeply now. She could reach into the roots of things and make them burst into new shapes.
“Talk to me,” she whispered into the trees, into the ground. “Please.” She pictured the gone people. Whoever had made these nests, whoever was nearby, approaching her peacefully with news.
Mental imagery was different for Yasira these days. The groups within her had to do it collectively. In some ways it was more vivid than before, more detailed, every willing part of her mind lending its own individual strengths. But it was also more difficult to hold on to, shifting, mutable, unfocused.
She felt… something. The weight of her intention settled in to the places she touched. She had been heard.
But the gone people still had free will. They might decide not to respond. They might not appear immediately. They might be far away. It took time, probably, to navigate these honeycombed woods. Yasira would have to rein in her impatience, listen to her feelings. Wait until she felt she shouldn’t wait anymore.
She breathed deeply, letting the voices of worry and dissent in her head argue it out. Until she heard quick footsteps on the path behind her.
Yasira turned.
It wasn’t a gone person. It was Tiv. Panting as she ran up the path, slowing her steps as she neared the spot where Yasira crouched. Yasira looked up at her in confusion, and she dropped to her knees, bringing herself down to Yasira’s level.
“There you are,” Tiv panted. “I found you. I– they said you just ran off somewhere, and I–”
Yasira looked up at her. She had achieved something very similar to calm, but at the sight of Tiv it evaporated. She loved Tiv, she wanted things to be okay between them, but they weren’t. Tiv had tried to protect her by lying to her. And here was Tiv, trying to protect her again now.
“Ran off?” Yasira snapped. “Is that what they called it?”
“Because of me,” said Tiv, catching her breath.
“I didn’t run off. I went out to work, just like you. I came out here with a purpose. You didn’t tell me how bad it was, Tiv. Not even when you almost got killed. You didn’t tell me everyone’s been praying for me to do something about it.” Yasira turned away, back to the twisted roots. “Now I am.”
“I’m sorry,” said Tiv.
“Sorry for what?” She didn’t want to accept an apology yet. She didn’t know if Tiv really understood what she’d done wrong.
Like you’re any better, said her thoughts. Like you’ve even contributed anything, up until today. Like you haven’t lied.
Tiv didn’t flinch. “For not telling you the truth. For thinking you were too weak to handle it. I was trying to keep you safe, but instead, I shut you out, and that was wrong.”
It hit Yasira like a blow to the gut, pushing her breath out. This was what she’d thought she wanted to hear. But she couldn’t accept this apology. She’d been shutting Tiv out, too. She’d thought Tiv was too weak to handle the truth. They’d both lied. And now Tiv had patched up her part of it before Yasira was ready to face her own. Yasira was the worse person, out of the two of them here.
Tiv didn’t even know who she was talking to.
“Yeah?” she blurted, and it wasn’t the Strike Force anymore. It was someone deeper down, more hateful. “Well, I did all of that to you, too. So don’t be sorry.”
“What?” said Tiv. “When did–?”
But then there was another rustle further off, and Yasira turned towards it, the Strike Force taking command again. She could see – no, she could feel a gone person coming closer. She hadn’t expected to be able to feel it so viscerally, like a dream presence. Like an errant part of herself returning. It hadn’t felt like this, that first time she’d talked to a gone person, in the suburbs of Büata. When had she learned how to do this?
You know when you learned it, said a chorus of mental voices, rolling their imaginary eyes.
She could see it now with her eyes, too. More than one gone person was making their way to her through the trees, in that aimless-looking way they had. They were still only blurs, faint humanish shapes mostly obscured by the leaves, but she knew what they were.
She put a finger to her lips, glancing back at Tiv. “They’re here.”
Akavi was back in the middle-aged woman’s form that she used when speaking to Luellae. She stepped out onto the deserted street where they’d agreed they would meet next, looking cautiously around at the Outside-influenced architecture. Akavi was no longer unsettled by the way things looked in the Chaos Zone; she’d lived here for six months, and it had become routine. But routine still involved a healthy respect for how quickly Outside could become dangerous. This was a street too badly affected by the Plague to see much human use. Most of the buildings had long ago been reduced to rubble, and those that remained jutted up from the concrete in shapes so ominous that no rational person would venture inside. Fleshy buildings with toothy doors. Scaly ones that oozed an odd slime.
Akavi’s visual cortex contained filters that would block out the sight of anything actively maddening. These buildings had dimmed and darkened patches, through the filters, but by and large their shapes were just this side of rational. She didn’t feel maddened when she looked at them – but she did feel angry. The people of Jai wanted to build some sort of life in these ruins, but the idea was inherently an affront. Who would fight for the right to live in this slime, in this dust?
She’d arranged to meet Luellae at precisely this time, but she wasn’t prepared for the agitation with which Luellae jogged towards her when she came into sight, pounding the pavement aggressively with her feet. She was angry, but Akavi’s microexpression software also picked up intriguing overtones. Fear. Surprise. Something had happened. Something big.
Akavi was intrigued.
“What’s wrong?” she called casually as Luellae approached close enough to hear.
“Ugh. Nothing.” Luellae slowed as she neared Akavi, brushing at her arms as if dust had settled there. Maybe it had; some parts of the Chaos Zone contained all sorts of airborne particulates. “Team stuff. You don’t want to hear it. The team’s all fucked up anyway. I had to make an excuse to get away in time to meet you.”
“They didn’t hurt you, did they?” Akavi asked, holding out her arms.
“No, nothing like that.” Luellae didn’t take hold of her immediately, and Akavi’s visual circuitry highlighted the signs of hesitation. The mental dithering a person might do when they wanted to talk about something, but weren’t sure it was safe.
“I’m just concerned about you,” said Akavi, feeling the appropriate expression slide onto her face. After so many years doing infiltration work, this sort of manipulation was second nature. A gentle show of sympathy, and then the tiniest of prompts for the subject to grasp. “I wanted to believe the Seven could change anything down here, but…”
Luellae looked up at her. “Honestly? We haven’t been. But Yasira might be.”
Akavi drew back slightly in surprise. Luellae had described Yasira as useless before, hiding in her room in a depressed fog and doing nothing. Had that changed? “Go on.”
She listened as Luellae explained. She had immediately turned on a sensory recording program to store this conversation, but in the moment she was only half-listening. The details faded away into the background as her mind fixed on the really important part.
Yasira was outside the lair, and vulnerable, now. Not only satisfying some brief need; she’d gone out alone on some dangerous and foolhardy mission. This was the moment. Akavi had planned to stoke Luellae’s desire for rebellion first, to tear apart the Seven from the inside so that Yasira would emerge. But if Yasira was here, now, then they could skip all that. If Akavi could find her, Akavi could strike.
Akavi grasped Luellae by the arms, leaning in. She let the full scope of her urgency show on her face. “Take me to her.”
“What?” Luellae squirmed slightly, and Akavi realized she’d been over-eage
r. “Why–”
“You can’t understand how important this is, Luellae. Just, please – I need to be there. Now.”
“You can’t make her see reason by bursting in on her like that. She’s not that type. It won’t work.”
And there was the real opening. Like so many marks, Luellae had already filled in an explanation for Akavi’s strange outburst on her own. Akavi schooled her features into an expression of solemn determination. “I have to try.”
Luellae looked at her sideways, but she had already relaxed into a decision. The next complaint was only a formality. “It might not work. I don’t know exactly where she is.”
This was not as much of an obstacle for Luellae as one might have thought. Luellae’s movements didn’t always conform to the laws of causality. If she had a firm objective in mind, even if it wasn’t exactly a specific place, she could often take herself there. Not as reliably as the meta-portal could, but it happened.
“Understood,” said Akavi.
Luellae bit her lip, nodded back, and then space twisted around them.
Akavi’s visual filters instantly turned everything inky black, and she shut her eyes. She felt wind whipping past her face, and she felt herself being pulled, as if Luellae was running headlong, trailing Akavi behind her. She allowed her legs to move stumblingly as they willed. She held on tight.
At last, with a lurch, the feeling of movement stopped.
She opened her eyes in a forest somewhere far from Büata. The temperature had dropped a few degrees and the shape of the trees was strange. All of them contorted, multi-branched, knotting around each other. The clearing where Akavi and Luellae had hit the ground was barely big enough to hold both their standing forms, and there weren’t any clear paths in and out. Only routes where one could crawl or climb through that branching superorganism, in some meandering direction.
Akavi did not see Yasira. She was unsure at first where to go from here. But that question answered itself with a shuffling sound to her left. She whirled around and saw a gone person – a child barely more than ten, barely clothed, barely human – painstakingly making its way in a certain direction. Not toward Akavi, but straight past her.