by Ada Hoffmann
She watched as Yasira threw out her hand, and the entire landscape splintered. The ground rose up skyscraper-high, and the trees with it, uprooting from the ground and unwinding from each other, to wave with their grasping branches at everything that posed any threat to the woman who’d commanded them. The gone people, suddenly exposed, scattered.
For a moment Akavi could not move as the enormity of what she was seeing sank in.
She had heard, of course, the rumors that Yasira would return and save everyone. But Akavi had seen firsthand the toll Yasira’s first miracle took on her. She’d had the help of a heretical prayer machine based on Talirr’s own designs, and of angels whom she’d tricked into helping. The effort of it had still broken her. She’d managed to overpower Akavi after the miracle, but Akavi had her doubts as to whether that level of power had stayed. It had seemed like the last gasp of the miracle itself, and she’d seen how the life drained from her afterwards, how she’d sagged in confusion with barely the strength to walk. The next time Yasira met an angel, she would be weaker. Akavi would get the better of her next time. She would be prepared. That was what she’d thought.
And yet– this.
The ground roared up at her, a tidal wave of grass and roots and soil. This was more than the power Akavi had seen before, and there was not even a machine to mediate it. This was impossible.
With this kind of power, and the right strategic mind, even a battalion of angels might fall. The common people with their prophecies had been right, in a sense: Yasira was a threat to the Gods Themselves.
And hadn’t Akavi wanted revenge against Them, too?
There was no time to leap clear, but Akavi could at least leap at the right angle to avoid the worst damage. She calculated a trajectory quickly in her head. The wave’s movement was unpredictable, but if it hit her side-on–
She leapt.
It hit her.
There was an impact, and a horrible earthy scrabbling, a rolling. Further impacts knocked her breath away. Alarms blared in her mental circuitry, warning of damage, but there wasn’t time to process what they said. The whole mass that carried her rumbled on and on until it ground to a halt and she lay prone, panting, reassessing.
There was air to breathe, at least. She’d been frightened she’d be buried, but she’d chosen her angle correctly, and she was still at the surface of the heap. A whole half of the park had uprooted itself, and Akavi lay dazed in the wreckage. Yasira and Productivity were nowhere to be seen.
She assessed the alarms. Abrasions and what would soon become bad bruises, some bleeding, but no organs badly damaged, nothing broken. She took a moment to think through what she’d seen.
Akavi had wanted to manipulate Yasira from afar. She wanted revenge against many targets, and Yasira was the easiest to start with. She’d wanted to separate Yasira from her existing support, drive her to desperation, provoke her into reckless acts that would destroy her. Her whole cultivation of Luellae had worked that way, gaining the unfortunate girl’s trust and convincing her that recklessness was the only way her group could make a difference. But if Yasira was this powerful–
Yasira should not be destroyed, not yet. She should be preserved. She should be used.
But that would require Akavi to undo all of her previous scheming and induce the opposite, very fast.
She rolled over, briskly extricating her legs from the mound of dirt that covered them. Across from her, in a somewhat worse state of health, lay the other angel. This one had been grabbed directly by those waving branches, and she now fought to extricate herself. Her gun had a bayonet attachment and she hacked at the branches efficiently, ignoring the blood that soaked half her body and the ominous dent in the plating at her left temple. Angels of Nemesis did not succumb easily.
For a moment, her eyes met Akavi’s. Then they flicked down to Akavi’s fingertips, which still carried those telltale long, pointed climbing claws.
“Vaurian,” rasped the angel, through what sounded like a badly injured throat. “Identify yourself.”
“No,” said Akavi, retracting the claws back into her humanlike hands. She moved, quickly now, to get up.
Vaurians like Akavi were disproportionately recruited to do angels’ work, but some lived as civilians, spread across a variety of worlds. Merely being Vaurian wasn’t incriminating in itself. But any angel of Nemesis assigned to this area would know that Akavi, a former Vaurian angel, was wanted for her failures and crimes. That she, with her angel circuitry and stolen God-built tech, posed a greater threat than most mortal heretics. And that she might well have reasons to be hanging around this area covertly.
Akavi’s ankle buckled unexpectedly as she tried to rise. She lost her balance.
The other angel whipped out a hand and grabbed her.
They fell into a heap, scrabbling at each other in the disturbed soil. One of the other angel’s feet was still trapped in that assemblage of branches. She was more injured than Akavi. But she had a gun and Akavi did not. She brought it up again to aim, and Akavi grabbed her wrist, the claws instinctively coming out again. She raked at the other angel’s face. The angel punched her, pushing the breath from her bruised ribs and throat.
Someone was running toward them. That must be Luellae. That was Akavi’s ticket out of here, if she could survive the next few seconds.
Akavi threw out a hand and twisted the other angel’s wrist, pushing the gun so it pointed away from her. Instead of pushing the muzzle of the gun back toward Akavi, she slammed the side of it down against Akavi’s bleeding head, repeatedly, jarring her until she saw stars.
Luellae had run nearly into arm’s reach. She hung back now, wary of the fight, but ready to pull Akavi away once she didn’t have another angel attached to her.
“Vaurian,” the other angel growled again. “Identify yourself, or your identity will be assumed.”
But she’d stopped hitting her while she talked. Akavi gave her a hard shove, ignoring the twinges of warning from her circuitry and the dizziness that nearly overtook her, and scrambled away. The angel’s foot was still trapped. If they could teleport out of here before she aimed the gun again–
“Get us out of here,” Akavi commanded, grabbing Luellae’s hand. “Quickly.”
“Akavi Averis,” said the angel, oddly emotionless. As if reading it off the readouts in her head. “You are the only Vaurian wanted by the authorities in this region, so you have been identified by assumption. You are wanted for continued and egregious failure in a mission of critical importance to Nemesis, and for desertion–”
But Luellae had already started to do something. The world twisted around them, turning inky black.
They emerged in a desert. Just rocks and half-hearted shrubs in every direction, twisted in their typical Outside ways. There were wells that went down at improbably twisted angles into the ground, and stacks of stones that looked as though the laws of physics shouldn’t have let them hold themselves up. Akavi wasn’t sure where they were geographically, what direction the Talon might lie in, or how many hundreds of miles away.
Luellae snatched her hand away from Akavi’s as soon as they emerged.
“Fuck you,” she said, her already pale skin paling. Mortals had slower reaction times than angels. She’d initiated travel before fully processing what the angel had said, it seemed, but she’d heard it well enough. “You asshole. Fuck you.”
Akavi narrowed her eyes, giving Luellae an assessing look. Her head was still swimming, but she could think well enough to analyze her current plans. This was not the first time that Akavi’s cover had been blown during a mission. Luellae knew who Akavi was now; that meant she would not trust Akavi anymore, and would potentially go back to her team to reveal compromising information about Akavi’s plans. That was undesirable. Under many circumstances, Akavi’s next logical move would be to kill her.
But that would not help Akavi now. After all, she’d just decided that she needed to reverse all her plans. If Luellae turned against her
now, at this precise second, then actually that might be the most efficient way to reach Akavi’s new goal.
If Luellae made it back to the Seven alive, then out of sheer spite she would reverse her earlier positions and begin to urge caution. Without her influence to stir things up, the rest of the Seven would become more cautious and pacified, more like what Tiv had always wanted them to be. Yasira would be preserved. And Akavi would be able to infiltrate their group again, later, when the dust settled, for an even better revenge than before.
Though first she had to get out of this desert. And find some first aid. Her internal readouts weren’t alerting her to anything worse than twisted ligaments, lacerations and bruises – but the pain was annoying.
“I can explain,” said Akavi, easily masking her feelings with a set of expressions more appropriate to the situation. She had to appear chagrined by all this, to pretend she still believed in her old plan, or it wouldn’t work. “Please, Luellae, listen. If anything I’ve ever said has meant anything to you–”
“Fuck you,” Luellae said again, unimaginatively. “You tricked me. You lied.”
“You can hate me, but you know what I’ve said is true. The Seven need you. They need insight like yours. They need real leadership, not this dithering. You know it, Luellae. I’ve only tried to make it clear–”
Luellae backed away, empty revulsion on her face.
Akavi let her expression transform from appeal to contempt. “Or do you want the rest of your team to know how you really behaved while you were with me?”
“What do you want?” Luellae snarled.
Akavi held out a hand. “Take me back to the wooded area where we first met. That’s all. Do that for me, and I won’t trouble you again. You’re not sufficiently rational to listen to me anyway. Fail me, and as soon as I make it back to civilization I’ll ensure your time pretending to get along with your little team is over. Am I being understood?”
Luellae hesitated, and Akavi waited it out imperiously, showing no fear. If Luellae left her here, she’d have to find another way out of the desert very quickly. Angel bodies were in many ways more durable than those of mortals, but Akavi could die of exposure or thirst out here as easily as anyone else.
But those old reflexes Luellae learned in captivity were still with her. She knew, at a level deeper than mere logic, that Akavi must be obeyed. She knew it was wrong, but she reluctantly, distastefully took Akavi’s hand.
The world twisted into blackness and there was a sense of motion. They both landed stumbling, careening to a halt, in the woods not far from where Elu had parked the Talon. Luellae snatched her hand away from Akavi’s as soon as she could, as if the Vaurian’s skin burned her.
“You’d better mean it,” she said venomously. “About not troubling me again. You’d better.”
Akavi looked at her coldly. She could come to Luellae again in another disguise. She could do it undisguised, pull her this way and that with further threats and coercions, if she chose. There wasn’t much Luellae could do about that. They both knew it.
Luellae said nothing else. She turned, and then she was gone, in one of the blurs of motion she was named for, leaving Akavi to make her way back to the Talon alone.
CHAPTER 12
Now
Yasira and Tiv ran as fast as they could. It was all Tiv could do to keep up, her hand in Yasira’s, stumbling along as Yasira raced forward in a rage. The earth moved before them. The street split open. Obstacles as large as buildings tilted to one side, space itself warping to let them through.
Tiv didn’t even know if they were being chased or not. There wasn’t any room in her head for that, only terror and amazement and the burning need to run.
Finally, Yasira reached the door she’d left the lair by, a nondescript shop entrance. She threw it open and rushed in, dragging Tiv after her. Tiv had a brief glimpse of alarmed shop patrons diving for cover and then they were falling into the airlock as the door shut.
They both sank to the floor, too overwhelmed to go further. Tiv felt her hands shaking. Yasira pulled her knees to her chest, tucking her head down, trembling as violently as a girl with a fever. She let out a strange, broken sound as if she wanted to burst into tears, but her eyes looked dry.
Tiv tried to catch her breath. She had not expected this when she saw the angel. She’d thought it would be like what happened with Akiujal. Either both of them were about to die, or dozens of gone people were about to meet bloody, pointless deaths in their stead. She had frozen in terror. But Yasira…
Tiv had seen the rest of the Seven at work, all of them with powers more impressive than those of the general population. She had never seen anything like what Yasira had just done. This was a literally earthshaking power, one that had upended the entire landscape just to get them away. And there had been precision in it. She’d seen people running, screaming, and she’d seen the angel pulled away by twisting, grasping bark-lined tendrils. She couldn’t be sure, given how fast they’d gone, how blank her own mind had been in its panic. But apart from the angel herself, she hadn’t seen a single person injured.
Even by the Chaos Zone’s standards, this had been dramatic. Angels would try to suppress the story, but Tiv didn’t think they could do it, not all the way. People, awestruck and confused, would talk.
People would say, Savior has returned.
Tiv looked at Yasira, huddled pitifully on the floor of the airlock, shivering so hard she might hurt herself.
“It’s okay,” she said. She wanted so badly to reach out and touch Yasira, but she knew that in a state like this it would only panic her more. “It’s okay, Yasira, we’re safe now. You did it.”
Yasira’s voice was as shaky as the rest of her. “Did what?”
Tiv frowned. Maybe Yasira’s mind had gone even further afield than she thought. “Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.” Yasira squirmed. “I was talking to the gone people. An angel came. So we ran away. And… I don’t know what I did. I just pushed.”
“Well, whatever you did, it worked. I’ve never seen anything like that. You saved us.”
Yasira curled her knees to her chest more tightly. “Did I hurt anyone?”
“I don’t know. It didn’t look like you did, but it was hard to see. We could ask Splió.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Yasira said miserably.
“Hey, none of us do. It’s okay. You did good enough.”
This didn’t seem to reassure Yasira. She looked up again, her eyes wild and frightened. “The Seven at least know what their powers are for. I don’t know that. I have this power in me, and it – comes out. It changes things. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to be changing. I don’t know if the changes are good or bad.”
Tiv knew about the episodes Yasira had sometimes, where the power built up in her and needed to be discharged back into the Chaos Zone. The usual effects were harmless enough: things grew, things took new forms. As far as she could tell, the thing Yasira had just done was similar to that. She’d pushed out energy and the energy had changed things, made them burst their old seams. Except this time the energy had been directed, just a little. This time, things had changed their form in just the way Yasira needed.
“Is there a ‘supposed to’?” Tiv asked. “It seems to me we’re all on our own. Deciding for ourselves.” That was both the freedom and the terror of it. Tiv didn’t have powers of her own, but she knew the weird uncertainty of not having a God to tell her how to behave. The terror of knowing, not only that she might choose wrong, but that maybe no possible choice was enough.
“You don’t know anything,” Yasira snapped, shifting moods mercurially as she so often did these days. “You don’t even know what I am. I told you that in the park and you’ve already forgotten. I’m not even human anymore.”
Tiv frowned. She had not forgotten; she’d just gotten distracted, what with having to run for their lives. Tiv had apologized to Yasira for hiding things from her, and Yas
ira had retorted that she’d hidden things, too. Tiv wanted to know what those things were. But she couldn’t imagine why Yasira might think she wasn’t human. “What do you mean?”
Yasira looked away. Her fingers tapped at each other, a nervous tic. “I never told you. When I did my miracle six months ago, when I called on Outside and changed the Chaos Zone, instead of destroying it, it broke me.”
Tiv paused. There was something about this that didn’t add up. Everybody on their team was broken – if “broken” meant traumatized and in poor mental health. Yasira had a worse case than most, but everybody had it. And everybody with powers was struggling with what those powers meant. Could that be all? Maybe Yasira was just taking those two facts a little harder than everyone else.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Everybody here’s a bit broken. Everybody’s traumatized. It’s okay. I sort of noticed.”
Yasira wasn’t looking Tiv in the face – she usually didn’t, at times of high emotion – but her eyes were wild and urgent. “I don’t mean it gave me trauma. I mean it literally broke me. Into pieces. There is more than one person in my head now. More than one piece of who I was. I don’t even know how many. That’s why I can’t get out of bed in the mornings. It’s not just that I’m sad; it’s that we’re all arguing. We can’t even agree on what to do. You think you love me, but there’s no me anymore. Just a bunch of pieces floating around. And between the pieces, there’s Outside. That’s how I can do things like what I just did. It comes up whether I like it or not. Through the gaps between the pieces. It’s part of me because I’m broken.” She huddled in a little closer to herself. “Even Ev wasn’t broken like this. You can’t understand.”
Tiv’s eyes had gone wide. But she thought that she did understand, a little.