The Fallen

by Ada Hoffmann

  Akavi gave him a triumphant little smile. “We’re going to bring her on board, of course. It seems we have a bumper crop of prisoners.”

  Enga floated in a muted sensory landscape that she thought she’d never see again. She raged. Everyone – Akavi, Irimiru, Elu, Omhon – everyone had set her up for this.

  She couldn’t see the forest around her or the ship. She saw a muted, soothing, dark wash of color. She heard nothing. She smelled something faintly pleasant, like good food, and there was a soft pressure all over her body.

  None of it made her less angry.

  Enga had not been locked inside this sensory cell for years. She had asked Akavi to remove it, once she’d proven herself, and the bastard had agreed. She should have known she couldn’t trust him in matters like these. She should have known she was the wrong person for this mission, not in spite of her connection to Akavi and Elu, but because of it.

  She should have known, even so many years after Omhon and with so many commendations on her record, that she was stupid.

  She braced herself, but if Akavi killed her here and now, she wouldn’t even feel it.

  Eventually, her vision cleared. They hadn’t killed her outright. They’d brought her aboard the Talon. She recognized its interior, the little parlor that opened out onto the bridge. They had launched. The steady, untwinkling stars of space moved in blackness outside the window, ringed with the faint violent tinge of a warp drive. She struggled to move, but she couldn’t.

  Enga remembered her orders. Befriend him. Pretend to join his side. You’ll be contacted later so as to tell us what you’ve learned.

  Enga frequently hated her orders, but she followed them. That was what good angels did. That was how to survive.

  They’d let her live. She would do as she’d been told. And she’d make Akavi pay for what he’d done. Later. When Irimiru and their stupid bureaucracy decided it was time.

  But she couldn’t move yet, and she couldn’t speak, and she couldn’t connect to the network to text-send. So, for now, she would be still.

  She was sitting propped up in one of the parlor chairs. Akavi sat across from her in his true form, expressionless.

  “You can see me now,” he said – a statement, not a question. There was no way for her even to nod.

  “Now,” Akavi continued, “what are we going to do with you? Obviously, I can’t let you return to the rest of the angels to tell them anything. And I can’t let you run free in my ship, not with those guns for arms. The obvious solution would be to kill you, but I hate waste. You’re a valuable operative. And you follow orders, unlike some.” He glanced meaningfully to the side, in what Enga guessed was Elu’s direction; there was something in her peripheral vision that might have been Elu. She couldn’t turn her head. She didn’t know what Elu might have done to merit a look like that, and she didn’t care. They should both die. “So, here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to have Elu give you the same surgery he gave to both of us, disconnecting you permanently from the angelic network. I’m going to have him hack up a modification to your targeting programs so that you can’t aim a weapon at me. And then I’m going to have him print a translator that can be physically attached to you, so you can communicate. Don’t misunderstand – that’s step three.” He smiled, unnervingly pleasant, as if he wasn’t talking about physically and mentally mutilating her. “Then we’ll talk, once you’ve been modified for our needs. I think we could be a good team again, the three of us and Luellae. Don’t you think so, Elu?”

  “We could give her the translator first, sir.” Elu was often hesitant when speaking, but there was something different about his tone, something Enga couldn’t put her finger on. As if he was more afraid than ever. “She might have something useful to say.”

  “There’s no time for that,” said Akavi. “Until we do the surgery, the angels can track us.”

  Rage like yours is a gift, he had told her, fifty years ago. Turn it outward.

  Enga would not despair. She would rage. She would do her duty and follow her orders. She would see them both dead, as she’d been instructed to. And then maybe she’d go further. Maybe she’d kill Irimiru, who’d set her up for this. Maybe she’d bring the whole damned system down.

  Once, Akavi had given her hope. He’d made her think her talents could be valued, in spite of the damage in her brain, in spite of everything. But he only wanted Enga’s strength when it was useful to him. He had not wanted to see the true depth and the breadth of her anger.

  Akavi said another couple of code words, and Enga felt herself falling out of consciousness entirely.

  Later, masked and gloved, on the same makeshift operating table he’d used for himself and Akavi, Elu looked down at the cracked-open top of Enga’s skull, half-circuitry and half-brain matter.

  He himself had not done the surgery, of course. That was work too delicate even for an angel’s deft hands. It was bot work, and Elu had merely supervised. Everything that connected to the ansible nets had been removed from her. All that remained was for him to fiddle with the programs installed in her head. He could do that manually, though it was more cumbersome without the ansible connection. The bots had placed the appropriate wires and connectors into hidden ports below the titanium plates in Enga’s skull. The other ends connected to a tablet that Elu now carefully navigated with his gloved fingertips, making infinitesimally small, careful changes to an intricate set of parameters and commands.

  Each one of these changes would hurt her. Even the removal of the network connection would hurt her terribly, the way it had hurt him and Akavi months ago.

  Elu didn’t like anything about this.

  He hesitated over the tablet. He knew exactly what Akavi had asked him to do: install a blocking program into Enga’s sensory cortex so that she couldn’t target either of them with her weapons. Any movement pointing at them with a gun or preparing to slash at them with a blade, or anything else like that, would cause pain and a reflex that turned her away.

  It was a kind of program that had been installed in fractious angels before. It came in many standard varieties. His finger hovered, unwilling, over the command to install it.

  Akavi would ask him, of course, if he’d done this job. And Elu was a terrible liar.

  He closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.

  He did not enter the command.

  He navigated, instead, to a different part of Enga’s electronic brain. To the complex systems that helped her aim in difficult situations, locking on to moving targets, automatically judging distance and timing shots to fit through the gaps in any cover.

  He entered a blocking command into those.

  It would take effort – he might fail – but with any luck, Elu could go back to Akavi and tell him he’d followed his orders, with a straight face. It’s done, sir. She can’t target either of us.

  She would now find it impossible to lock on, with that software, to any target that she knew was Akavi or Elu. But she could still point a weapon at them, using the organic part of her motor cortex, and press the trigger.

  Elu looked down again at the helpless flesh and metal of her.

  Kill us if you can, he thought, in what would once have been a private text-sending, back when either one of them had been able to do that. If that’s what you want.

  He turned the tablet off.

  Is victory a lie?

  Is loss?

  – From the diaries of Dr Evianna Talirr

  CHAPTER 20

  Now

  It happened simultaneously in every city, only an hour after the end of the ritual, while the bodies still lay on the ground and the breeze blew debris this way and that. While the protestors were still mourning for their dead, and while Tiv and Yasira and the Seven still reeled, in their lair, at having lost Luellae. After the angel troops policing the protest had retreated, a single angel reappeared in each city, out of the nearest relief station or out of a ship, unarmed and unarmored, clad in the blood-red and midnight-black liver
y of Nemesis.

  Many of these angels were Vaurians, and they had molded themselves into a very specific shape. A tall, straight-backed woman with close-cropped silver hair. Her face was lined with age; her eyes were sharp and seething. Seven medals glinted at her collarbone; seven rings glinted on her hands.

  But there were so many cities, and not enough Vaurian angels available for each one. Where Vaurians were not available, the angels used whichever female member of their local team was oldest or tallest or most commanding. They went without the medals and rings in these cases – those were only for the angels who properly looked the part. Nemesis was not a human, nor did She take human form, but this was the form in which humans often depicted Her, and angels – even Vaurians – only used it in public when directly commanded to. For a purpose like this. For a message.

  Precisely in time with each other across the planet, each angel mouth opened and said the same words, in the same inflection, with the same facial expression. A message like this was not merely a list of words to say. It was a program which, for the necessary minute or two, took over the body completely.

  “People of the Chaos Zone,” they said, and each voice was artificially amplified to carry for hundreds of meters – in some places, for miles. The mortals had already vacated the immediate area, in most of these places, but there were enough of them watching at a distance, hearing the earthshaking words from inside their homes. Where there were television screens, wired to receive the daily broadcasts, the nearest angel shimmered into focus on all of them. In the lair, Splió – still watching the protests’ aftermath through the portal – heard the whole thing firsthand.

  “People of the Chaos Zone,” they said, “this is a message from Nemesis Herself. You have been heard. You have coordinated to voice your defiance against the Gods on a scale never seen since the Morlock War, and We have heard you. We will grant your wish. Since you so desperately desire not to be under the rule of the Gods, you will no longer be.”

  Every heretic and protester in the Chaos Zone simultaneously held their breath. This was an acknowledgment beyond their wildest dreams – and they knew enough to know it could not be a good thing.

  “Effective immediately, the forces of the Gods will be withdrawn from this part of your planet – all the land that has been touched in any way by Outside. We will not police you for heresy. We will not keep order in your towns. We will not provide food or water relief nor medical care. Our priests will not officiate in your temples, nor will we answer your prayers. Nor will Nemesis’ forces protect this world from outside threats, be they alien or Keres, further visits by the woman you call Destroyer, or mere natural disasters.” Each angel paused here – not quite uncouth enough to smile, but there was some faint relish in their voices. “As a parting gift, we will grant you some information. You are aware that the Keres has been interested in the Chaos Zone from its beginning. Only recently, we discovered a battalion of Her forces moving in Jai’s direction, far larger than those we have defeated here so far. The largest we have seen in hundreds of years. By our estimates, they should arrive in two weeks. As you prefer to solve your problems on your own, we will leave Her for you.”

  Across the Chaos Zone, in every home, on every doorstep, there was dead silence.

  The messenger angels raised their heads. “Goodbye, people of the Chaos Zone. Your destruction will be richly deserved.”

  [Time is a Lie]

  Yasira, by rights, should not have seen all this. She was asleep. She’d fallen into her bed almost as soon as she arrived back at the lair. Especially after hearing the news about Luellae, which had thrown her brief confidence back into disarray. It had taken a struggle for Tiv to get her to eat anything first – even though she knew how much worse it would be if she didn’t eat food after something like this. It had been difficult to move the food to her mouth, to chew and swallow.

  But in her dream, she was everywhere.

  Usually when Yasira dreamed, her body worked the way it did while she was awake. There was just one of it, and all her jangling, jostling selves were crowded inside. But tonight she was not in her body. She was something like a flock of birds moving in synchrony. She glided through the air together, unfettered, and she saw what was going on below her.

  She heard the angels’ speech, and she knew, at some deep Outside level, that this part of the dream was real.

  It’s our fault, said some of her. We tried to make it better, and we made it worse.

  That’s what they want you to think, said the Scientist, a bigger bird than most of the others, plumed like a raven. She was watching the speech raptly, trying to trace its strategic implications. This costs them something. They wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t feeling pressed, and they wouldn’t be feeling pressed if we hadn’t won today.

  We’ll fight them, the Strike Force promised in unison, a pack of hawks.

  We can’t, wailed everyone else. It was one thing to defend a few mortals. It was another to fight a being like the Keres who could scorch whole cities to cinders and glass. Yasira was strong, but not that strong.

  Was she?

  The whole flock turned on itself, angrily pecking. The landscape shifted, as it did in dreams. Yasira curled in on herself in pain, and when she uncurled she was in one body again, just a girl like she usually was. She was crouched on a plain of blasted rock, in a place that had used to be called Zhoshash, back when there was a village there with people and buildings and roads and it hadn’t all been melted to slag. It was very cold.

  She looked up, and there, standing over her amid the rock, was Dr Evianna Talirr.

  Ev looked the same as she had the last time Yasira saw her. She was tall, pale, and plain; she was almost old enough to be Yasira’s mother. She wore a scuffed white lab coat, and her hair fell down in a limp ponytail.

  “You,” Yasira said, voice hoarse, and she didn’t know which part of her was saying it. “You did this. You did this to the whole planet, you changed us so we couldn’t do anything except provoke the Gods or die, and then you left.”

  “Did I leave?” said Ev.

  “Yes, you fucking did. You left us to die.”

  Ev walked closer to her, crouched at the ground at her side. Yasira wanted to flinch away. She wanted to leap at her and attack. She wanted to collapse and beg for her mentor to return, to guide her, to fix this for her.

  “No,” said Ev. “You only didn’t want to see me. I’ve been right here.” She smiled, mischievous and confident, like a child about to get her own way. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I had always intended, from the time I started writing this book’s first draft, that the climax would involve an organized political protest. From relatively early in the drafting process, it was clear to me that this protest would be a large, coordinated movement, springing up all over the Chaos Zone at once. But the protest occurs late in the book, and you can imagine my surprise when I finally got to that part of the draft in the summer of 2020, only to find mass protests for racial justice springing up all over North America in real life. To try to do justice to fictional protest scenes in the shadow of this reality was daunting, to say the least.

  Black lives matter. If you enjoyed this book, I hope you will also look for books in this genre by Black non-neurotypical authors – including Akwaeke Emezi, Nalo Hopkinson, and Rivers Solomon, to name a few.

  I follow in the footsteps of other writers, as always, and a few books were particularly helpful to me in solidifying some of this book’s underlying ideas. Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene were instrumental in helping me conceptualize the daily life and attitudes of mortals in the Chaos Zone.

  Meanwhile, although I was already familiar with the concept of plurality, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater blew my mind wide open in terms of how plurality might be discussed and depicted on
the page. I am grateful to my autistic and plural beta readers, who helped me make sure I was writing Yasira’s experience thoughtfully, as well as to Noe Bartmess, Juliet Kemp, Hester J. Rook, Andrea Tatjana, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, who cheered me on and provided feedback more generally as the drafting progressed.

  My wonderful agent, Hannah Bowman; my structural editor, Paul Simpson; and the team at Angry Robot all helped to guide me through the daunting process of writing the second book in a series for the first time – not to mention writing under contract for the first time. (If you’ve been there, you know that the struggle is real.) All provided invaluable feedback that helped me take the character basics of the first draft and punch them up into something with the kind of external stakes the story deserved.

  Finally, I owe thanks to the people who were my close confidantes and supporters during the whole of the writing process, from beginning to end. To my dear friend Virgo, who originated the character of Akavi, from whom the whole rest of this fictional universe proceeds; to my family; to Jacqueline Flay, Dave Fredsberg, RB Lemberg, V Medina, Hannah Sherwood, Salie Snapdragon, Bogi Takács, my “friends at the pub” and my friends in fandom.

  Love to you all.

  ONE

  Julie’s eyes rolled. It was the end of the world, and the deejay had no better response to it than industrial techno.

  The invitation Ben had slipped her the week before described the fete as “The Party to End Everything” and promised twelve hours of music and madness. After all, the font screamed, “It’s all downhill from here!!!”

  All week, Ben had been referring to it as “The PEE.”

  Whatever direction the hill was headed, the music was too fucking loud. A migraine bass line, a rattle of synth-snare, choral loops, robot-assembler clashes, dark notes, and washtub thumps. Instinct demanded Julie crouch and cover her head, and she might have done had she been alone and had Ben given her room. “Quit stepping on my heels!” she said again.