After Destiny

by Tanya Lisle

  “That was years ago. I was a hothead.”

  “You’re still a hothead.” The new wiring was in place. All she needed now was a clean filter and this job would be done. “Can you-”

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket before the ringtone started. Pocketing the tools and leaving the soldering iron aside to cool, she reached around on her perch and pulled out her phone. Miranda was calling.

  “Hello,” Ed said. “I’m in a ceiling right now. Can this wait five minutes?”

  “If it has to,” Miranda said. “Look, this princess you’ve dumped on me is driving me nuts and no one wants to discharge her. And no one wants to take her off my hands. Can you get down here and tell them that if there’s nothing wrong with her, there’s no reason to keep her here? Because there is absolutely nothing wrong with her.”

  Ed looked at Mac and felt like she could kiss Miranda in that moment, though she contorted her face into a grave expression. “I’ll be right there,” she said, waving Mac away from the ladder.

  Mac moved away, taking the ladder with him, and Ed jumped down the hole after him. She landed lightly on her feet and adjusted her tool belt. “This has been fun,” she told Mac. “You enjoy the rest of your weekend. I really have to take this.”

  She left before Mac had a chance to say anything, heading down to the first floor. She updated the log for the repair on her phone and headed for the Medical Wing, feeling much better than she should. At the very least, she didn’t want to deal with Mac when she wasn’t on solid ground.

  She knew Mac would continue to be a problem for her until he got his way. She would need time to come up with a solution to him, though, and so far she had come up with nothing. Mac was trained to deal with threats coming in from the outside, not smaller problems within Janus, and he grew restless. Though she may threaten it, she couldn’t get rid of Mac without causing several other problems, not the least of which was causing half of the Security team to revolt.

  On the other hand, she knew there was more to the woman than she claimed. Snow White definitely knew more than she let on, though Ed couldn’t get a sense of anything malicious about her. There was something almost childlike about the way she talked, even without that strange cadence with her words. She understood what was being said fine, but there was hesitation in her responses. It was like she wasn’t used to speaking; more than she wasn’t used to the language.

  And then there were the things she did say...

  Miranda waited for her at the front desk, shaking her head and typing furiously at the computer. She looked up as soon as Ed came through the door and got to her feet. She muttered something under her breath as she straightened up and met Ed around the side of the counter. “Thanks for this,” she said. “She’s driving me nuts.”

  “So what happened?” Ed asked. “You said she was fine.”

  “She is. There’s nothing wrong with her and no one wants to discharge her.”

  Ed frowned. “There can’t be nothing wrong with her. She went outside with no suit. Even if you gave her the shot, she can’t be fine.”

  Miranda opened up a document on her tablet. “Here,” she said, handing it to Ed. “Look at this. Her radiation levels are lower than pretty much everyone else in this place, including the newborns. She’s got no sign of diseases and there’s literally no reason to keep her taking up a bed.”

  Ed flipped through the document, though she had no idea what anything on it meant. There were plenty of numbers and charts, though she didn’t know what she was supposed see. There were a lot of low numbers, though, so perhaps that meant something.

  She nodded like she understood. “That is weird,” she said. “Why don’t you ask one of the other nurses to take her if you don’t want to?”

  “Oh, that would be real easy. You say that like I never tried. I did try but Jenn spent half an hour with her before she left crying and took the rest of the day off.”

  Ed blinked at that. “I needed to see her today anyway,” she said. “And check that lock on her room.”

  Miranda nodded and led the way. “You’ll see,” Miranda said. “She’s fine. I mean, I kinda wish she’d go back to not talking, but there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  Ed nodded and didn’t say anything. Miranda made it to head nurse by just continuing to show up every day, unlike many of the others who would find a way out over the years. In the time she’d been there, Ed learned that if Miranda wanted something, she had no qualms about exaggerating to get her way.

  When they got in the room, Snow sat on the bed with a tablet, flicking her way back and forth through pages and staring at it with wide eyes as she flipped through them. She didn’t look up when they came in, still enamoured with the screen. There was no smile on her face, but her eyes lit up at seeing everything move under her fingertips.

  “Hello Snow White,” Ed said.

  Snow looked up. “Hello Edwin Lintel. Hello Ms. Greenwood. I understand now why so many people spend so much of their lives staring at these screens,” she said with much less of the awkwardness with the language she had a day earlier. “I’ve watched them spend so much time and never knew why. I never thought about why. But now I understand.”

  “Edwin?” Miranda asked quietly.

  Ed shook her head, not really sure what to make of it. She was right, but even in all the systems, she’d changed her name to Ed a long time ago. Someone who had known her for a long time must have mentioned something to Snow.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Well,” Snow said. The tablet stayed in her hands, but rested now on her lap. “I will begin exploring your building soon.”

  “I’ll give you the tour once we’re sure everything’s okay with you,” Ed told her.

  “Everything is already fine.”

  “Did Miranda tell you to say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it’s true,” Miranda interjected. “You saw the charts! There’s absolutely no reason for anyone not to discharge her. I don’t know why they think they need to keep her here.”

  “The doctors have never seen levels of radiation as low, nor a woman my age who has no antibodies or sign of vaccination. They have also expressed confusion because you have administered vaccinations and they have vanished from my bloodstream. They call me an anomaly.”

  She was very observant for a woman Ed pegged as having brain damage yesterday. “How do you know that?”

  “I know many things.”

  Miranda smiled and nudged Ed to make sure she was paying attention. “Oh yeah?” Miranda asked. “Why’s Ed got a guy name like Edwin instead of a girl one?”

  “When Meeko Lintel was pregnant, she was told she would have a boy. When Edwin Lintel was born, her genitals were deemed more ambiguous, but Meeko Lintel decided to keep the name. When she grew older, she decided to keep her name Ed Lintel even though-”

  “Just Ed is fine,” she said. “And I shortened it to Ed.”

  Miranda gave Ed a look, her eyes combing down her body. “So what do you have down there, anyway?”

  Ed didn’t hear Miranda over the chill running down her spine from Snow’s words. That was a lot more detail about her than anyone would have passed on to Snow. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t that hard to surmise if she managed to get hold of her medical history. She played around with one of the Medical Wing’s tablets after all. She might have stumbled onto patient files. “Why does Miranda want to get rid of you so badly?”

  “Because she doesn’t need to be here.”

  “She would also like it if I didn’t mention that she went back to Taylor MacKenzie’s room last night while they were both intoxicated.”

  Miranda looked furious, but Ed gave her a warning look to keep her quiet.

  Snow’s attention turned to Miranda, though she seemed to be looking past the redhead rather than at her. “Soon after you both arrived in his room, you told him you were unimpressed with his erection and fell asleep on his couch. You didn’t realize until the
morning that you’d locked your son out of your apartment.”

  Ed looked at Miranda, the embarrassment and anger on her face validating Snow’s story. “You still haven’t given Brady a key?”

  “I’m not dealing with this anymore,” Miranda told Ed tightly, refusing to look back at Snow. “She’s fine. She doesn’t need to be here. Get her out.”

  She nearly bumped into Clyde as she opened the door. He didn’t deter her as she stormed off.

  Clyde leaned in and offered a nervous smile. “Hey,” he said. “I was just sent to make sure Snow doesn’t go wandering around unsupervised. Again.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Ed told him before she shut the door.

  There would be time to figure out how Snow learned as much as she did, but that was low on her list of priorities. For now, Ed had to decide what to do with Snow. She still didn’t seem dangerous, especially now that she had gone back to playing with the tablet. She just kept going back and forth between the screens of apps, never clicking into one and just seeing how quickly or slowly the screen would respond to her touch.

  Still she knew more than she should, given that she’d been conscious for all of a day. Besides her walk outside yesterday, she had spent the rest of her time inside the Medical Wing where she shouldn’t have any way of knowing what anyone was up to or heard such specific details about anyone.

  Ed felt better about Clyde standing out there to keep an eye on her.

  “Snow, how did you know all that?”

  “I know all. Well, most.” Confusion crossed her face for a moment and she turned to look at Ed. Her hands followed a moment later, handing her the tablet. “You will ask for this.”

  “Thanks?” Ed took the tablet and tucked it under her arm, telling herself that it was an obvious request. “Don’t go repeating anything that happened in here to anyone else just yet, okay?”

  “I will not,” she said.

  Ed turned away and left the room before she actually looked into Snow’s eyes. There was something unnerving about the woman that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It wasn’t even that she knew as much as she did. There was just something in the way she said anything, without any doubt or question in her mind. She stated everything like she was naming the colours of the walls, with none of the smug pride or embarrassment that normally came of knowing what you shouldn’t.

  Except for her name. She didn’t know everything about Ed’s name.

  “Are you okay?” Clyde asked. His eyes were on Ed’s hand where one finger kept tapping at the tablet under her arm.

  “Just make sure she doesn’t go anywhere,” Ed said, turning back to check the lock.

  “I don’t even have the codes to open the door,” Clyde told her. “If anything happens, you’ll be the second to know.”

  Ed nodded and turned away, already mulling over everything in her mind and trying to figure out what just happened. Snow didn’t seem like a threat, but there was something about her that she didn’t want to be allowed out just yet. At the very least, she wanted to know if Snow knew as much as she said she did.

  She dialed Mac as she walked and waited for him to pick up. “So you and Miranda?” she asked.

  Mac made a sound and Ed knew he was shaking his head on the other end. “Nothing ha — Wait, how did you know about that? Did Greenwood say something?”

  So it was true. That left Snow with only one omission in her knowledge so far. And even if she had somehow found out that they went back to his place, it didn’t explain how she knew about what happened within those walls. Miranda was tight lipped about her encounters and Mac couldn’t get close enough to tell her himself. There should be no way to know what happened from her room in the Medical Wing.

  “Ed?”

  Ed hung up. What was she doing? Why was she calling Mac? He would overreact to the situation and make things that much worse

  Snow was making her crazy. Ed needed to get back into a ceiling or something. She went through the queue on her phone, looking for another repair that needed her attention where she could think for a while.

  There was another job that required a good deal of rewiring and Ed went into Section K.

  An hour later, Ed could feel herself think more clearly again, though none of those thoughts were about Snow White. The wire work was the least of the trouble and she had to clean most of the connections and replace many of the parts. It was relaxing, keeping notes on the parts that she needed to bring back and repairing what she could in the meantime. There were better ways to do most of this and she added those notes to her list.

  She was almost ready to go retrieve replacement parts when her phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Ed?” Clyde sounded nervous. “So they tried to check on Snow and… she’s gone.”

  Chapter 5

  The mountain seemed so large to her before leaving it. It was her entire world, with catacombs to explore and animals running about whom never seemed that interested in interacting with her. There were visitors from time to time, but they only came with one purpose in mind. They wanted her answers and, once they had them, they left.

  That was her purpose. The Fates used her to create the future and store the past, playing a complex game with human lives. Since none of the three had a physical form, it was her duty to speak to humanity on their behalf. She was never to leave the mountain because she would take all of humanity’s fate with her and the Fates had no way to continue with their games.

  But now she was free, if only for a little while, and her new habitat was much more spacious than her last.

  The complex was large, yet so little of it was actually inhabited. When it was originally made it was designed to fit ten thousand people at capacity and thirty thousand in case of emergency. As it stood, there were currently only two thousand seventy four Upstairs and four hundred ninety three lived deep below the ground. Much of the space in the upper parts of the complex had been left abandoned since the fallout, which is why she walked them now.

  Before now, she hadn’t even thought about the things she didn’t know. They told her that she knew everything. There was nothing she didn’t know.

  And yet, she didn’t know how blue the walls here were. She had no idea how old the air smelled or why it smelled that way. She had never seen anything written on the screens before and, now that she had, she did not know how to actually read any of the letters. She understood them, yes, but she did not know how the characters possessed the meaning or why the arrangement of them meant one thing or another.

  She also didn’t know that Edwin Lintel changed her name to Ed.

  With every new thing she didn’t know, her excitement grew. She had never encountered other humans and not known everything before. When they would come up onto the mountain, they asked only simple things about time that had not yet passed before leaving her behind.

  These humans were even more obsessed with time. The tablet she was given always had a clock on the top of the screen. It had a way to bring up another clock to see the time pass by in seconds. She knew that the people here were constantly looking at those clocks, trying to determine the time for one reason or another.

  She was human as well. She had to remind herself of that. The whole reason she left the mountain was to see how other humans lived and the purpose of that would be lost if she continued to forget that she was one of them.

  It was only now that she began to realize that the others must have a purpose behind their actions as well. She’d never thought about that before. After so much time watching them, it never occurred to her that they were actually moving with their own purpose.

  People were sneaking into the abandoned parts of the building as they sometimes did when they were bored and she moved to watch them. She watched as four children covered in dirt followed their leader through the abandoned halls away from the collapsed passage they had been playing in a short while before, giggling all the way. Occasionally one of them would look behind them to see if they we
re being followed.

  The last one looked back and she let out a yelp of surprise. “Brady!” the girl, Olivia Fernandez, said from the back of the line, turning around and pointing back at her.

  It was strange to be noticed by the people she watched. Even though she knew it was coming, it was odd to have it actually happen. This was probably what it was like to have a present, this moment that the others around her lived in at all times.

  Brady stopped at the front of the line, looking irritated until he turned around to see who stood there. He ran quickly past them all to put himself between them and her, looking her carefully over. “You’re the naked lady,” he said.

  “I’m not naked anymore.”

  “They call you Snow White.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re looking for you.”

  “Yes.”

  Brady looked back to the other children before he turned to her again. “Are you gonna murder us?”

  “No.”

  He looked her carefully up and down before glancing back once more. “Follow us.”

  Olivia grabbed him by the shoulder before he could keep walking and leaned, whispering so loudly that her voice echoed in the silence. “But she’s an adult.”

  “But General Mac doesn’t like her,” Brady told her. “And that means she’s staying with us. Look, she’s not mean like he is. Do you really want him to find her and yell at her like he yells at us all the time?”

  Olivia backed down at that, Brady taking Snow’s hand and leading the way back through the halls. The kids followed in tow, not even bothering to question Brady any further. Instead, their eyes were on the adult among them. She knew she was odd in their troop, but her presence seemed to be the thing that broke the silence. They talked about her among themselves, though Brady was the one who demanded her attention.

  “Your name’s really Snow White?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  “That is the name I have been given.”

  “That means you’re Snow White,” Brady said. “I’m gonna call you Snow.”