Second Contact

by Guerric Haché, Keezy Young

  Ada laughed as she walked through the greenhouse, through rows and rows of shelves covered in living plants illuminated by bright lights above their heads. “I don’t know; they’re red. I just eat whatever Zhilik puts in front of my face.” She glanced back at Isavel. “My outer friend - he was standing outside.”

  The white-furred one. Isavel nodded. “They eat our food?”

  “Of course. Most of it.” Ada frowned as they sat down at a humble wooden table, with two very minimal and oddly-carved stools sitting next to it. “There are a few things that make them sick. Some flower petals, apparently, and quinoa of all things, at least unless you wash it really carefully. They don’t usually bother.”

  Isavel shifted on the somewhat uncomfortable seat, and glanced out at the tomatoes ripening in dense red clusters on the vine. She wasn’t sure how to start this conversation. She should probably just start with the truth. “Ada, you blew up that bridge.”

  Ada averted her eyes. “Yeah, I know. They killed sixteen people last night - outers, not that your people care about them.”

  “My people?”

  Ada blinked and stammered. “I - sorry, I meant the - the army people.”

  Isavel didn’t like being assigned to them. She could have let it slide, but she wanted to put everything on the table here. “I’m not with them anymore. I was actually leaving Glass Peaks when I saw the smoke and went back to see what had happened.”

  “Oh gods.” Ada’s eyes widened. “You weren’t on the bridge, were you?”

  Isavel skewed her head sideways at the strange question, and gave Ada a second or two to realise what she had asked.

  “I mean - of course you weren’t.”

  “I don’t think anyone was. You didn’t attack the city, either.” Isavel tried to read Ada’s face, but the coder was a bit closed off on this. “Why not?”

  “I wanted to scare them, not get them thirsty for revenge.”

  Something about the way Ada said that was too quick, too rehearsed. She pursed her lips, but didn’t push it. She would take what she could get. “Well, I’m pretty sure that backfired. What were you thinking?”

  Ada’s jaw set. “That I would scare them into leaving the outers alone. What do you think I was trying to do?”

  “Well, you got them riled up for a war.” Isavel sighed. “They’re planning on invading the island and sweeping south to attack this city. They don’t feel safe knowing you’re out here. You specifically, Ada, but also the ghosts, even the outers. Nobody knows anything about the outers, but people believe they helped the ghosts.”

  “They didn’t!” Even as she said it, though, Ada hesitated. “Well, they took them in after the last war. I kind of… convinced them. That was my fault. So was the bridge. The outers didn’t do anything.”

  Her defensiveness was clear; yet it was also strange. Everybody Isavel knew told her Ada was dangerous, untrustworthy, almost a rabid animal. Isavel didn’t see that in her - she saw a clumsy girl who could barely dance, a fiercely protective friend to these strange outers, a nervous and well-meaning person who made rash and impetuous decisions that didn’t take others into account. It was as though this Ada was an entirely different person to the one the coders had described to her.

  It occurred to her that she didn’t know for certain Ada had not been possessed by a ghost. The thought was unexpected, and Isavel felt a welling up of shame at even considering it, but at the same time she couldn’t deny that it was possible. Anything was possible.

  She tried to keep the thought hidden. “That may be, but nobody else knows that, and they don’t really seem to care.” She took a deep breath. What had happened to being forthright? She wanted to be clear with Ada, to avoid the pitfalls they had made when they first knew each other - the evasions, the dissimilation, the oblique conversations. “Ada, they all seem to think you’re dangerous. Really dangerous.”

  Ada glanced down at her hands on the table, flexing her fingers a bit, and smiled. “I mean, I like to think I am dangerous.”

  “I know you’re some kind of sorceress, I found that out the hard way.”

  “But you still beat me.”

  It was true - she had, and the genuine admission of loss tickled her a little. Isavel smiled and leaned back against the thick glass wall, stretching an arm into the air and bringing her hand behind her head, flexing her arm muscles deliberately. “I guess I did.”

  Ada’s eyes flicked up and down her arms and then back to her face, then back down to the table again. She suddenly seemed a bit more skittish. “You’re a good fighter. I guess you and Hail make a good couple.”

  “Couple?” The word startled her, and she found herself chuckling. “No, no, she’s my, um, she decided to be my bodyguard, sort of. I think it’s a religious thing. It’s not like that at all.”

  “Oh!” Ada frowned. “What about the clothes borrowing?”

  “I - oh, I can see how - that was also sort of a religious thing. She was starstruck meeting the Saint Herald of the Gods, and I needed a disguise.”

  “Right, of course.” Ada was staring off at the tomatoes, studiously avoiding eye contact. She seemed embarrassed, and fair enough - it was always awkward to make false assumptions about someone’s intimate ties. That very human uncertainty struck Isavel again, as did its dissonance with what she had been told to expect from Ada.

  “Why do the other coders hate you?”

  Ada’s eyes narrowed immediately, and all signs of her jitteriness were suddenly vaporized by laser focus directly on Isavel. The change was so sudden and powerful that Isavel found her gaze caught, staring into those eyes, their shape like wings spreading for the sky, the deep brown of their irises melding with her pupils like a portal into a dark night. “Who did you talk to? Elder Tan?”

  It took Isavel a second to regain her composure and realised Ada had asked her a question. “I’ve had a few of them tell me things. Elder Tan, yes. Two of the younger ones, too, Zoa and her brother.”

  Ada grumbled. “Ren is annoying, but Zoa is worse.”

  She could tell Ada was shutting down. This had been a bad idea, and Isavel scrambled to regain the tenuous connection they had had moments ago. “Nothing they say seems true, Ada. They talk about you like some monster, but you’re obviously not.”

  “I am a monster to them.” Ada smiled, but it was a more feral smile, hungry and fierce. “I want to destroy everything they love.”

  Isavel opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. She leaned back a little before she realized what she was doing, and leaned in on the table instead. She breathed in through her nose, then out again, and her silence seemed to catch Ada’s attention a bit. “You know, there was an old temple steward in Glass Peaks, always wearing a mask. She seemed to have a good understanding of the gods, and what they wanted. People didn’t like her, exactly, but they all valued her advice.”

  Ada frowned a bit, listening.

  “She told me I had to destroy that crystal, under the mountain. After I found out you were telling the truth, I went back and smashed her mask off. She was a golem, and claimed that for a thousand years she’s been trying to ensure ancient civilization was never rebuilt. I tore her apart and melted the bits of her that still worked into the walls of that ruin.”

  That story softened Ada’s hard edges and captivated her, pulling her in a little closer. “A golem? That remembers the ancients?”

  “I think she was one. Put in the golem’s body, somehow. And the gods never did a thing to stop her.”

  Ada stared off into space for a while, her mind clearly puzzling through the new information. Then she smiled. “Isavel, that’s… huh. That explains some things. I guess we both learned we can’t trust the damned gods.”

  Isavel snorted. “Seems like it. Are you still their Arbiter, whatever that is?”

  Ada blinked. “I guess I am, but I haven’t heard from them since then, and I don’t know how to contact them. And even if I did… Isavel, they played us against each o
ther. They didn’t care who won - it was all the same to them. They lied to us both. I hate them for that.”

  Isavel thought back to what the gods had said. Ada’s will, Isavel’s duty. Looking back on it, it made no sense. They had been used as pawns, and then discarded, both of them, without concern for what they would do going forward. What kind of gods were they? “So do I.”

  Ada smiled at her, still a bit tense, and they were silent for a moment. Isavel realized, as she sat there in the greenhouse watching small insects buzz along between the plants, that Ada hadn’t answered her original question, exactly. Why did the coders think she was dangerous? The evasiveness was subtle, but she wasn’t sure she was comfortable with it. Something about Ada scared her - not because she was dangerous, but because she was unknown. Isavel wanted to know what she was thinking, because if she didn’t… They were both unique players in the strange game being played out along this coastline. She needed to know what was going on inside Ada’s head.

  “Ada, you don’t want a war, do you?”

  Ada shook her head. “Of course not. I want… I just want to be left alone. I’m doing important work here, Isavel. Trying to fix old problems we’ve been living with for a thousand years. I don’t want people to die.”

  “So why lash out at the city? It’s only making things worse.”

  Ada thrummed her fingers against the wooden table, slowly shaking her head as though disagreeing with herself on why she had done it. “It hurts, to see people who took you in be attacked for no reason. It hurts more when it’s because of what I did, and it hurts more when the people attacking are humans, like me. It feels like it’s all my fault.”

  Not exactly an answer, but Isavel could tell there was sincerity there. It occurred to her Ada herself might not understand what she was doing. She may be clouded and confused; it wouldn’t be surprising. She clearly had a bad relationship to most of the humans she had ever met.

  Isavel decided to take a risk. “Ada, we’re on the same side.” She reached out and laid her hand on top of Ada’s, squeezing it.

  Chapter 5

  The touch was electric, and it startled Ada more than it should have. Her hand twitched under Isavel’s as she wondered what she should do with it.

  They were on the same side? Up until today, the very opposite had seemed to be true. What was different? What had changed? She took a deep breath. “What do you mean?”

  Isavel kept her hand there, but her eyes went searching elsewhere. “Something I wasn’t expecting about being the Herald was how… Nobody sees you as a person anymore. I was their Herald, but I wasn't Isavel. And I always will be, to them. I can’t go back and be a regular person, and not because I don’t want to. They just won’t let me. Even Hail - gods, Ada, it took me so long to convince her to call me by my actual name instead of one of those titles.”

  Isavel sounded exasperated, and the idea that she was sick of the worship and praise was deeply amusing. Ada thought she would have enjoyed such a life, but it sounded a lot less appealing when Isavel described it. There was no way to win for either of them, it seemed. She supposed that did put them on the same side. The losing side.

  “So you decided to run away.”

  Isavel nodded. “I thought if I got far enough from Glass Peaks, I could find people who didn’t know or care about me. People who would treat me like people, who wouldn’t treat me like I was too good to touch or talk to or be human with.” She shook her head.

  Ada pulled her hand out from under Isavel’s and reached over to poke her on the nose.

  Isavel’s eyes widened, and the corners of her lips turned up a bit. “What - what was that for?”

  “Just me showing you you’re not too good to touch.” Ada pulled her hand back and tried to smile. “You’re just okay.”

  “ Just okay? ” Isavel’s eyes lit up, but she was grinning. “That’s blasphemy, you know. You could get struck by godfire.”

  She stared up at the ceiling and was slightly, irrationally comforted to have a roof over her head. “I’d like to see them try.”

  Isavel shook her head. “Ada… can I ask you something?”

  An unpleasant question usually only asked to prepare someone for an even more unpleasant question. Ada winced. “Go ahead.”

  “What happened at the Institute, with Jinna?”

  Oh.

  Every time that name or the person attached to it had skirted the edge of Ada’s mind, she had locked it up again. Boxed it away. She had a system, and it worked wonderfully - every time her memory wandered down that lane, she stopped herself and imagined the scene turning into a diorama of puppets, then imagined herself putting the puppets in a box, closing it down and tracing a reinforcement sigil around it to ensure it didn’t open. For months the memories had stopped appearing in her mind, and she had been at peace. It had worked beautifully.

  “You told me it would work!” Jinna’s face was still marred with ugly tears as she yelled at Ada. “You told me it would seal the door!”

  She remembered the fear and anger she had felt. “I said it might! I hadn’t tried it yet! You know code can crash like that if -”

  Jinna pointed a finger in her face, accusatory and bitter. “What good are your stupid theories if they don’t work? Why do I bother? ”

  Why did she bother. In those words and their texture and tone, Ada grasped something she hadn’t understood for all the months she had shared her time and thoughts and bed with this girl. Jinna wasn’t enamored with Ada, or with her novel approach to code. She was enamored by the promise of power, by the promise of a blunt instrument she could wield against her parents to ward off their cruelty.

  In that simple question, Ada understood she was just a tool to Jinna, the only person other than her parents who had ever seemed to care about her. That realization spread like wildfire through the rest of her brain, burning everything it touched. She could never convince anyone to understand what she was doing. She could never be at home here. She would never be able to prove herself right, to redeem herself and be granted her rightful place as a leader. She could never trust anyone who claimed to want to be close to her. She could never rely on anyone. She was alone. She had to learn to be alone.

  The pain coursed through her brain down her spine and into her every limb. Her entire body jolted and she tried to stand up from the chair but ended up tripping and falling over instead, scrabbling against the ground, hauling herself up. Her ears were still rushing with blood, drowning out dim sounds from the outside world. She felt Isavel’s strong hands gripping her arms and helping her up, but Isavel could drop her any time, cast her off if she was useless or just to make a fool of her. She flailed and staggered deeper into the greenhouse, alone, pressing her hand against her head.

  It was all just a puppet show. Just a puppet show. Jinna was a puppet, the memory was a puppet, and Ada could cut the strings and put them away, if she could just focus .

  “Ada? Ada!”

  She wheeled around on Isavel, and suddenly felt her feet sinking into a steaming quagmire of shame. She was pathetic. She was weak. Everybody was alone, in truth, but nobody broke down as easily as she did. She felt blood rushing across her face as she shook her head, trying to be an adult, trying to not feel so completely broken.

  She felt arms around her. She tried to squirm away. She didn’t need help. She needed to learn to accept what she was, to stand alone, to not be pathetic. But Isavel was too strong, and with one hand she wrenched Ada’s head out of the fog and stared her in the face. “Ada! Stop! Breath, damn it.”

  Breath. In, out. In, out. She couldn’t look at Isavel, so she closed her eyes.

  “Ada, what the hell happened?”

  “I don’t -”

  “Tell me.”

  She opened her eyes again, trying to remember it without feeling it. “It’s stupid. Childish. It’s nothing.”

  “Clearly it isn’t.”

  Why did Isavel care? She didn’t want to hear some miserable sob story - she
just wanted to calm Ada d own, get her through this fit. “She… I thought she cared, but she just wanted to use me to figure out a way to -” Isavel just wanted to use Ada to figure out a way to stop a war.

  She stepped back. This time, Isavel let her go, watching her intently. Why? She couldn’t trust Isavel. How convenient was it that she showed up here, just when Ada was starting to learn she could never trust humans? She was weak and vulnerable, and suddenly Isavel needed her for something.

  Except that was ridiculous. She knew it made no sense. This was genuine. It had to be.

  If it wasn’t, Ada was still just the same idiot she had always been.

  Isavel took a step closer and glared at her, breathing heavily through her nose. “Ada, I’m trying to reach out to you here. I need your help, and I think you need mine. What’s going on? Talk to me!”

  Help. They needed each other’s help. Was that true? On reflection, it seemed to be - Ada needed to protect the outers for as long as she could, while they figured out whether to wait for an answer from the stars or leave immediately. She had to see it through to the end with them.

  Isavel needed her help, too. To keep people safe even as they charged into an unnecessary war, protect the humans like she always did. She needed Ada for that.

  Ada took a deep breath. “I thought she cared about me, but she was using me to try and get back at her parents. Nobody else cared either. That’s it.”

  “So you didn’t try to kill her parents?”

  “No, of course not.” She had endured hours of interrogation by the senior coders on that point, but nobody could prove she had tried to kill Jinna’s parents because Ada had been in an entirely separate part of the Institute that night, and had in any case never intended to kill anyone. The Institute found it easier to believe the lie than the truth, unfortunately. “I didn’t care. I thought I was helping her learn to understand code better. Turns out I was an idiot.”

  Isavel breathed deeply. “Your family died a long time ago, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. Seven winters ago.”

  Isavel leaned against the glass wall and exhaled, crossing her arms. “Mine died in the spring.”