by Ada Hoffmann
PRAISE FOR ADA HOFFMANN
“The Fallen explores solidarity and cooperation in extreme situations with thoughtfulness and poise, weaving together a breathtaking array of themes from cosmic horror to superpowers. Ada Hoffmann’s second novel brings action, excitement, and kindness surfacing in the strangest places. It warmed my tentacular heart!”
Bogi Takács, Hugo and Lambda Award-winning author
“The Fallen takes a look at what it means for something to be truly changed. Splintered and fragmented. The characters have been fundamentally altered, and the novel does a beautiful job of showing how and, more importantly, what the characters are going to do about it… It’s a complex and intricately woven tale of people finding and building community and being vulnerable to the right people in order to be unstoppable together. A sweeping sequel that builds on the first book and leaves me hungry for more!”
Charles Payseur, Hugo-nominated author of Quick Sip Reviews
“The worldbuilding continues, fascinating and compelling. The Fallen is a complex, nuanced book which engages thoughtfully with the costs, consequences, and decisions around resistance and rebuilding.”
Juliet Kemp, author of The Deep and Shining Dark
“The Outside is a fantastic debut. I can’t wait to see what Hoffmann does next.”
Locus
“Hoffmann confidently layers morality and disability rights into a breezily told adventure that bursts with sheer fun... This beautifully smart, uncynical space opera will charm fans of Charles Stross and Lois McMaster Bujold.”
Publishers Weekly
“With a boffo combination of hard science fiction, cosmic Lovecraftian horror, both cyber-and-god-punk, some ridiculously charismatic aliens, and a fascinating female protagonist somewhere on the autism spectrum, Ada Hoffmann’s The Outside feels like it was made to order for us.”
Skiffy and Fanty
“The Outside is a gripping examination of the battle between good and evil on a grand scale.”
The Guardian
“The Outside starts with a bang and ratchets everything up from there, giving us gods, angels, machines, mayhem, casual queerness, delicious ambiguities, and note-perfect character moments.”
Sarah Pinsker, Nebula Award-winning author of Our Lady of the Open Road
“There awaits wonders and horrors alike, wrapped in delicious prose and unforgettable imagery. And no matter how far into these fantastic and weird worlds we delve, there always remains a solid, comforting sense that we are not alone.”
A. Merc Rustad, Nebula Award finalist and author of So You Want to be a Robot
ANGRY ROBOT
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From the Outside in
An Angry Robot paperback original, 2021
Copyright © Ada Hoffmann 2021
Cover by Lee Gibbons
Set in Meridien
All rights reserved. Ada Hoffmann asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Sales of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
Angry Robot and the Angry Robot icon are registered trademarks of Watkins Media Ltd.
ISBN 978 0 85766 868 4
Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 871 4
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Virgo
To Citizenship Lake; to Nic Lysosy Grej, Nana Gao, and Simplicity Bird; to Temperance, Persistence, and Tact Hunt; and to everyone else who loves me and might need to hear this:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I had to leave so quickly. I know how it feels to be left this way, and I would have said goodbye in person if I’d been given the choice. Angels took me; you can guess why. I’m not with them anymore, which is why I am able to write this now. But I can’t come home yet. It wouldn’t be safe, and there’s something else I need to do first.
Please understand that I love you all, individually, unreservedly. All of you loved me even when it was difficult, when I was grieving and saying things that didn’t make sense. I’ll remember that always. None of what’s happened to me is your fault.
To Ship – especially, to Ship – I’m so sorry. We meant well, but we were trying to make a future by denying the present and past. I hope I will see you again someday, not as your lover, but as your friend.
Please understand that I am doing what I need to do. I am doing what I believe in. It won’t be safe, and I won’t be able to write often. But please, if you understand nothing else in this letter, trust that I know what’s right. My heart is where it always was, and I’m following it.
I am hoping with all the hope in me that we will meet again, in better times, and that you will be proud.
With love forever,
– Productivity Hunt
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Interlude
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
Now (Six Months after the Plague)
The familiar door of Yonne Qun’s house stood tall in its doorway. If Tiv Hunt looked straight at it and not to the right or the left, it almost looked normal. Wooden and rectangular and solid, in a gray brick wall, set with the button of a doorbell – non-functioning now – a tin knob, a tin knocker. A mail slot near the bottom, a ramp running up to the threshold. Extremely normal, except for the way the mail slot curved, like a metal mouth, grinning or frowning or smacking its lips by turns.
If Tiv turned her head, of course, she’d see the garden, a mess of surreal plants that often moved of their own volition. The street the house stood on, with a surface that twisted and rippled, was walkable but no longer suitable for bicycles or electric cars. The houses next to Qun’s stood in various states of disrepair: one blasted long ago into a pile of picked-over rubble; one twisted into an impassable, un-houselike spiral; one intact, but somehow pink and dripping; a few others, like Qun’s, livable with their various blemishes and clumsy repairs. This was one of the better streets. It had been six months since the Plague, and Tiv still wasn’t entirely used to things looking this way. Maybe no one ever would be.
She raised a hand, shifting the heavy pack on her shoulder, and knocked. Three quick taps, a pause, and two more.
A moment passed, and the door swung open. Yonne Qun stood there: a middle-aged Riayin man, thin and lined, with medium-brown skin, very fine black hair, prominent cheekbones, and a quick, nervous smile.
“Leader,” he murmured in Riayin, giving a short bow. “Come in. Come in, please.”
Tiv bowed back clumsily, stepping over the threshold. She reall
y wished people wouldn’t bow to her. Yasira had told her it was normal in parts of Riayin, like shaking hands. But in Tiv’s home culture, bowing meant submission, and combined with the “Leader” title, it creeped her out.
She’d learned not to protest about the title. Months ago, she and Yasira and their team had started calling each other by code names, in ways that she initially thought were a joke, but the names had proved meaningful in some weird ways, and more difficult to let go of than expected. Especially once the rest of the people in the Chaos Zone started calling them those names, too. But that didn’t mean the names were accurate.
Tiv didn’t actually lead anything. She organized more and showed her face more than the others on the team because the others had severe mental health issues and weren’t up to it as often, but the team itself wasn’t for the purpose of leading anything. Just connecting people. Helping them.
She shut the door and let her eyes adjust to the candlelit gloom. Like most of the Chaos Zone, Qun’s house hadn’t had electricity in six months. A large sitting room was still in reasonable repair, with armchairs and couches around the edges, boxes and piles of supplies stacked in the corners, and a central coffee table on which the candles and lamps gave their dim radiance. There was a small television in the corner which, incongruously, worked; the Gods had put a high priority on making sure people could watch their announcements every day. It was powered by some kind of God-built battery Tiv didn’t understand. Qun, like in most households Tiv saw, had thrown a blanket over it and ignored its presence.
“Thank you for having me,” said Tiv in polite Riayin. She was getting much better at speaking the language. She still felt self-conscious about her accent, but the people who called her “Leader” never seemed to care. She swung her pack off her shoulder and sat down in one of the armchairs, stacking up the pack’s contents as she listed each one. “I’ve got most of what you asked for. These are the water filters, the batteries, the baby food, the insulin.” She fished deeper, and brought out a pile of neatly folded, wrapped papers. “And these are the messages. From Babec, Küangge, Cheilu, Zhuon, Büata, Bolu, Lanne, Molu, Hunne. And Huang-Bo.”
The supplies were useful, but if supplies were all Tiv knew how to give, she wouldn’t have been called “Leader”. Angels distributed supplies in places like this, too, often in greater amounts. Tiv’s team just filled in the gaps. Many of the items were supplied by other survivors, in other cities, who had a surplus and were able to share. Others were stolen goods, palmed from warehouses and stockpiles elsewhere in the galaxy. That part still gave Tiv a guilty pause. It bothered her how easily she’d grown to embrace stealing, even to fill a desperate need.
The messages were what people like Qun really wanted. Communications in the Chaos Zone were patchy and heavily monitored. Travel by portal was prohibited, and overland travel could be deadly. Groups who weren’t completely in lockstep with what the Gods wanted didn’t have a safe way to find other such groups, to coordinate. That was where Tiv’s team stepped in. They kept tabs on things and held the lines of communication open. The messages in Tiv’s pile contained supply requests and offers, but also news of the kind angels didn’t want shared. Updates on a group’s efforts to resist the angels’ regulations, or to develop the heretical magical abilities that had arrived with the Plague. Stories of the angels’ atrocities. Essays and arguments about what it all meant, many diverging sharply from the dogma everyone here had been taught their whole lives.
Tiv didn’t know how to lead a resistance, but she knew how to keep one alive.
Qun picked up the sheaf of messages, cradled them to his chest in the gloom. “I’ll read these,” he promised. Some he would share with his community, as he did the supplies. Some, the most sensitive, he would memorize and burn. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Tiv insisted. People like Qun were the ones who lived in the Chaos Zone full-time, steadfastly holding up their communities. Tiv’s team had no meaning without them. She often wondered, late at night, what it would have been like if it was just her and Yasira, alone against the Gods. Without the needs and lives of people like Qun to ground them.
Shuffling across the room, Qun put the messages down on an unused chair, presumably to look through as soon as Tiv left. He unlocked a small drawer and pulled out another sheaf of papers, each carefully folded and sealed, each with the name of a destination printed on it. “Here are Renglu’s messages. For Babec, Küangge, Cheilu–” He looked embarrassed. “Well, you can read it on them. But I had one more thing to ask.”
Tiv looked at him warily. When community leaders like Qun looked at her that way, with that hesitant, frustrated hope, it meant only one thing.
“Of course,” she said. “Ask.”
“We need weapons.”
Just what she’d thought. She looked in Qun’s eyes, feeling sympathy for the request even though she disagreed. He was a man under enormous pressure, trying his best to keep his community together under colossal threat.
She smiled sadly. “You know I have the same answer I always do. If you want to ask for weapons from the other communities, I’ll pass that message along. I’m not judging you. But my team doesn’t steal or make weapons. My team doesn’t fight.”
“Please, Leader,” said Qun. He didn’t look desperate so much as determined. He moved to the chair next to Tiv’s and sat, taking one of her hands in both of his. “Listen to me.”
Tiv looked at him doubtfully. Qun didn’t mean any harm. But there was nothing like sudden physical contact to remind her what she really was – an unassuming twenty-seven year-old woman, traveling alone through dangerous territory. Untrained. And without the uncanny abilities the rest of her team had, to protect her, if anything awful occurred.
“This is in the messages, but I need to tell it straight to you,” said Qun. “I need to know you understand me. You know we’re near the border here.”
“Yes,” Tiv said, uncertainly. The border of the Chaos Zone was guarded fiercely; angels believed that the surreal state of things here was contagious, and, thus, it was officially all under quarantine.
“This week,” said Qun, “a group of kids made a break for it. All orphans, none of them over twenty, Leader. The youngest, five. Across one of the unfenced stretches of forest. We all told them not to, but they were hungry and afraid and gambled that they could make it to safer territory. The angels gunned them down. Children, Leader. Do you understand?”
Tiv looked into his eyes and bit her lip. These were the eyes of a man who knew those children, who’d seen them playing in the creepy surreal streets and fighting over scraps, who remembered their faces and names. Who’d been trying to help them when he could, and who’d been powerless to save them. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen eyes like that.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Qun held her gaze. “There’s word that a crackdown’s going to start on the use of heretical abilities to grow food. As if they weren’t being harsh enough about that already. I know how to keep those things private, but so many of the young people here don’t. My own daughter has a talent for growing plants we can eat, and so many like her are tired of hiding what they do to survive. We need weapons, Leader. What else is your endgame if it isn’t a fight? You’re helping us survive, but it won’t be enough in the end. Not unless we can fight back.”
Tiv looked down, gently tugging her hand out of his grasp. “It’s not that simple, Mr Qun. Even if my team was in favor of violent rebellion, we don’t have any weapons that would stand a chance against an organized force of angels. Nothing we own now would do that, nothing we know how to make or steal, not even our powers.”
“I don’t believe that,” Qun insisted. “Ask your team, Leader. That’s all I’m demanding of you. Ask Savior.”
“Savior’s–” Tiv started, and then she bit down the words. Savior’s not a magic-dispensing machine.
Once, Yasira had radically altered the very structure of the Chaos Zone. It had been even wo
rse before. People like Qun, for the most part, were only alive because of what Yasira had done. If they saw the toll it had taken on her, they wouldn’t have been so quick to demand it again.
But they hadn’t, and they were, and there was nothing Tiv could do about that.
“I’ll mention it,” she said.
There were six cities on Tiv’s itinerary for today, scattered across the vastness of the Chaos Zone.
Tiv didn’t have any magical powers. In the Chaos Zone, that made her something of an exception. Among random civilian survivors like Qun, about a third of them had low-level abilities of some sort. To grow edible food, like Qun’s daughter, to repel monsters, to do a hundred other tiny things that helped keep them safe. There were other, stranger groups in the Chaos Zone, groups that the survivors called “gone people” because they couldn’t talk or live in houses, and those groups had similar powers in a heightened form that nobody fully understood. And the other people on Tiv’s team had special powers, too. It was a result of their special connection with Yasira, a linking across time and space that Tiv didn’t quite understand. Yasira and the rest of the team had been Dr Evianna Talirr’s students once; they’d all been indirectly exposed to Outside ideas long before the Plague happened, and at the time Yasira needed extra power for her miracle, they’d been primed to give it. It hadn’t been possible to include Tiv in that linking, and sometimes she suspected that Yasira wouldn’t have included her even if it was. She would have seen it as something Tiv needed to be protected from.
Yasira herself was, obviously, special. But Tiv was just a normal person. She sometimes thought they’d called her “Leader” as a pity title; she might as well organize, since there wasn’t much else she could do.
She pushed her bangs out of her eyes, tired and sweating after her sixth meeting. Shouldering her pack, she looked right and left for observers, then pulled open the door to a half-broken storefront that no longer sold anything.
