The Fallen

by Ada Hoffmann

  “You want an objective? Here’s an objective. The angels have a printer with which they produce these supplies. An angel printer can produce almost anything. Imagine if we stormed them. Took them by surprise, pressed into that prim little building, and liberated the printer for our own use. Just one printer. No angel lives lost. Imagine the good we could do with that, if we were armed enough to do so.”

  Tiv ran her fingers down the tunnel’s rust-caked interior, next to the crack she was looking through. She and Akiujal could both see that the angel bodyguards had guns of their own. Not just better weapons than anything Tiv’s team knew how to source, but better training, better reflexes, better tactics, better aim.

  “What would be ‘enough’, Mr Akiujal? Even with guns, you wouldn’t win that fight. It would be a massacre.” And the surviving population would be punished again, even worse than they’d been punished for the protest.

  “For this, I am not asking for guns. You know what I am asking for, Leader. The same thing everyone else is.”

  Tiv did know. She was determined to be polite to people like Mr Akiujal, to be kind; they were all so desperate and so brave, and it wasn’t their fault that they needed what she couldn’t give. But she felt the uncomfortable sting of rust under her nails, against the metal, as she involuntarily made a fist.

  Three Months Ago

  When Akavi was finished with the Quns she wandered out of Renglu, looking determined to magically grow some more fungi for the good of the community. She was about to do no such thing, of course; that was Elu’s job. Instead she walked into the surrounding wilderness until she was alone, and then she shifted into another body, a Riayin woman of about forty, older and more authoritative than the body she wore with the Quns. Finding some privacy between the trees, she dug in her pack and changed into clothes that better suited this new form. A knee-length skirt, a simple blouse, classic shapes that must have once looked elegant before the harsh conditions of the Chaos Zone wore them down. Now they were a little worse for wear, but with their holes carefully darned and their stains scrubbed out to near-invisibility. This was the garb of an intelligent, upper-class woman, someone whose educated opinion was to be trusted, someone who still clung to reason and respectability even after a disaster that had all but erased them.

  In that body, she set out for the spot just outside of town where she had arranged to meet Luellae Nyrath.

  Luellae was Akavi’s contact among the Seven. Meeting her, in the first few weeks after his and Elu’s landing, had been a stroke of luck – or as close as Akavi ever got to luck. She’d already set the stage by ingratiating herself with the more resistance-oriented pockets of the nearest communities, making herself useful, proving herself devoted and loyal to the cause. She’d worked out where and when the Quns met with members of the Seven, and she’d finagled her way, using the identity under which the Quns knew her, into observing one of those meetings. And when she saw Luellae, she’d known that she was even more fortunate than she’d planned. Luellae had unique weaknesses, and she would be even easier to control than the rest.

  Back in the days when Yasira and the Seven studied with Evianna Talirr, Luellae had been a perpetual student. Quiet and observant and a bit of a perfectionist, toiling away at a doctoral project that kept getting delayed. A more conscientious mentor might have guided her to reduce the scope of her work, but Talirr wasn’t interested in reducing the scope of anything. She’d been entirely blasé about letting Luellae stretch out her studies to five years, six, seven, ten. Luellae had worked diligently despite an inability to finish, and she’d attended social functions with punctilious consistency; she’d gotten to know each of the other students, polite enough in her standoffish way, watching and learning.

  Luellae’s research hadn’t been heretical, and for a long time Akavi had ignored her in favor of other prisoners with more insight into the forbidden parts of Dr Talirr’s work. But eventually, reaching an impasse with the other six, Akavi had ordered Luellae brought in as well. He’d put her through a different set of interrogations. Less about Dr Talirr – though that was in there – and more about her interpersonal observations. She’d watched each of Akavi’s other prisoners at their work for years on end. What were their weaknesses? What distressed them most? What could be used to guilt or coerce them into continuing?

  The other students didn’t know that Luellae had betrayed them in these ways, making each of their torments a little bit worse so as to avoid torments of her own. Akavi’s cover identity had no way of knowing that either, but she wouldn’t have been a proper Vaurian angel if she didn’t know how to capitalize on it indirectly, to befriend her knowing those mental weak spots and slowly exploit them.

  For Luellae, Akavi presented herself as a scholar – not a physicist, Akavi didn’t have enough specialist knowledge to fake expertise in Luellae’s own field, but a professor of political science and law. Universities weren’t really a thing anymore in the Chaos Zone, although survivors passed books and tracts of thought to each other when they could. Law wasn’t really a thing either, without the infrastructure for mortals to enforce it; serious crimes were dealt with informally by the community, and the rest were ignored.

  But this woman Akavi pretended to be had not given up on her gifts. Instead she was using them in something parallel to the way the Seven used them. This imaginary woman knew how revolutions worked, and how the groundwork had to be laid for them, in ways a mere physicist never could. And with her own research, her own network of contacts, she claimed to be patiently putting that groundwork in place.

  Today, she’d asked Luellae along to help her observe the gone people. And after their usual brief greetings and one of Luellae’s lightning-fast bursts of motion across the miles, that was where they went. Akavi lay carefully, mindful of further damage to her outfit, in a field of yellowish, corkscrew-bladed grass. Luellae, sprawling more casually, lent her a pair of simple binoculars.

  “They’ve been doing this more and more,” she said now, as Akavi watched the gone people milling in the field about a hundred feet away. “Gathering for a purpose we don’t understand. Before, we saw them doing spiritual rituals together, but this is different.”

  The gone people had lived through the onset of Jai’s plague, just like the people who got to be called survivors; they still looked human, dressed in tattered rags that had once been casual wear or business suits. They were humans of all ages and types, old and young and in-between, male and female and other genders, Riayin and Stijonan and the smattering of other ethnicities that the Chaos Zone possessed. They were also no longer people in any sense that mattered to Akavi. They did not speak. They lived in nests like animals, constructed out of strange Outside materials; they ate only the Outside plants and animals that naturally occurred here. They appeared to lack individuality. They could explore and survive on their own, but when they gathered, they moved in synchrony, appearing to share their minds on levels even angels couldn’t match.

  Even the Seven had difficulty connecting to the gone people. Some people had a rudimentary ability to communicate with Outside monsters: Daeis, a member of the Seven Akavi hadn’t met yet, had a particularly advanced form of that ability. Such people could get across simple concepts to the gone people, things like danger or come here or stay back. But the gone people’s more complex group mind was inaccessible even with magic. Whatever their heretical ceremonies felt like to them, however they saw the world and whatever perverse beliefs they cherished, nobody knew.

  The things that the gone people were best-known for, of course, were heretical rites. They involved bloodletting and the summoning of formless Outside energies. But the gone people in this field weren’t doing that. Instead, they crouched together in small shifting subgroups. They weren’t speaking, but every so often they made strange gestures that looked more explanatory than ritualistic. As if giving directions, mapping something out on the grass below them.

  “Curious,” Akavi said, keeping the binoculars fix
ed to his eyes. “They look like they’re planning something.”

  “They do, don’t they? But I wish we knew what.”

  Akavi shook her head. “Everyone worth knowing in the Chaos Zone is planning the same thing, of course. Revolution. The only question is how they intend to achieve that aim.” She passed the binoculars back to Luellae. “Do you see how they’re gesturing? As if they need to illustrate something visually to get their plan across. I’d always assumed a group mind wouldn’t need that.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” Luellae agreed. “They only started doing this a week or two ago.”

  “Has your team discussed it?”

  “A little. Nothing useful. Mostly it’s the same debates over and over again. Circular. They’re a bunch of physicists; they work with numbers; they don’t have insight.” Luellae rested her chin in her hand, frowning as she watched. Luellae was a physicist too, of course, but she had been a careful observer of people even before Akavi misused her for that end. It would frustrate her, naturally, that the Seven seemed more interested in debating abstract ethics than in figuring out the motives of the most odd and crucial creatures on the planet.

  “But surely you have people who could try to open communications,” Akavi pressed. “You have Daeis–”

  “We tried Daeis. They did a better job than the rest of us would have. But they don’t have the kind of rapport with the gone people that they do with monsters. They got impressions, feelings, things we could use if we were writing an anthropological study on what gone people are like, but they couldn’t get plans.”

  Akavi hesitated delicately. “What about Savior?”

  Luellae tossed the binoculars down and flopped her head into the grass. “Savior won’t get off her ass. And Tiv keeps her there.”

  It was a point of small satisfaction to Akavi, that Luellae had never once in her presence called Tiv Hunt “Leader”.

  Akavi sighed. “I wish your group listened to you more. It’s not your fault none of you were trained for this, but you have such resources. It’s a waste.”

  “Tiv’s so concerned about not hurting anybody.” Luellae looked up at Akavi mutinously. Luellae was such a naturally suspicious person anyway, after what she’d been through; she’d been primed for these conclusions, and it had been so easy, pleasant and effortless to lead her to them as if they were her own idea. “But we’re already in a war. Even some of the others are starting to see that. Every time she tries to shield someone from harm it only splashes the harm out to everyone else. She tries protecting Savior, and Savior just stays lying there depressed in her safe little room, and she suffers, and everyone who needs her help suffers. She tries to say we’re not fighting a war, because she doesn’t like that people get hurt in a war, and that’s why we’re going to lose the war. Because we can’t see it for what it is.”

  Akavi looked at her, understanding and calm. “But you can.”

  Eventually, Luellae’s frustration with the Seven and with Tiv in particular would grow to the point where she could be induced to make her own bid for power. When that moment arrived, Akavi would encourage her to openly rebel against Tiv and to wrest control of the whole Jai resistance from her hands. By doing so, she would either destroy it, or would forge it into a newer, crueler, more reckless entity – a group even easier for Akavi to exploit. A group from which the elusive Yasira Shien could finally be pulled – because Luellae, at least, would not let her hide from the world forever.

  Akavi could feel that moment coming, perhaps in the next few months, and oh, how she savored it.

  Luellae flopped back down in the grass again. She spent much of her time with Akavi acting petulant like this. Childish, really; but with Akavi, Luellae knew that her petulance would meet a sympathetic ear. “They don’t listen to me.”

  Akavi reached out and clasped Luellae’s shoulder, warm and reassuring. “But they will.”

  They call me Destroyer, but I am not sure what I am supposed to have destroyed.

  Infrastructure? Perhaps. Lives? Of course. Sanity? That was always a lie. Angelic hegemony over Jai as a planet? That is what I meant to destroy, but it is still here, if in an altered form.

  I walk these streets, trying to understand what I have done, and how I could have done it better. I feel regret, if only because I have failed Yasira Shien. I meant to make her understand the Truth, and she did understand it, but she did not like how I looked to her in its light. She saw the Truth, and still held on to something like morality, and in her eyes I was found wanting. I am still chewing over that in my mind, as I look at the houses ruined and repaired, the common people adjusting to their new lives, these strange fruits of my labor and hers.

  I am not prepared to apologize. If you are reading this, you already know what the Gods did to me. I still intend to pay them back. I meant for this, the Jai Plague, to be the first true strike in a war over the cosmos themselves.

  And it will be.

  – From the diaries of Dr Evianna Talirr

  CHAPTER 4

  Now

  Tiv and Akiujal were nearly home again, all the way back to the small suburb where Akiujal had his apartment. They’d crept through the disused tunnels and back up to the surface, and it was only a block further. It had been dangerous to strike out so far from one of the team’s known safe places, away from the airlock that would bring her safely home. And Tiv hadn’t learned from it any of what she’d hoped she’d learn. The problem of weapons was no more tractable than before. Akiujal and everyone like him still wanted the impossible from her. And, more importantly, from Yasira.

  Even if Yasira had been in perfect health, glowing and eager and determined to help in the fullness of her power, it might still not have been enough. She’d miraculously changed the landscape once, but that didn’t mean she could pop into every location where people needed her. It didn’t mean she could fight the angels in each of those places and emerge unscathed. Yasira had given the Chaos Zone its miracle, and now everybody thought of her as a miracle and not as a person. Not a person whose abilities might be finite. Not a person who might, themselves, be harmed.

  Let alone a person who was desperately ill.

  Stijonan architecture was slightly different from Riayin. More curlicues, flatter roofs, drabber colors. Akiujal’s apartment wasn’t in the busiest center of Dasz, but its neighborhood was fairly tightly packed, in places where the Plague hadn’t made it unusable. Tenements and townhouses crowded side by side, jagged like teeth at their tops, where some of the apartments had vanished and others were arbitrarily left intact. The survivors in this neighborhood were good at making do with what they had. The building next to Akiujal’s had partially melted when the Plague hit, fonts of liquefied brick and stucco frozen on its walls like tear-streaked makeup. It was inhabited anyway, by a gaggle of ordinary determined people who’d used both magic and masonry to tidy it back into a vaguely livable state. The small gardens in front of the houses were inhabited too, with groups of people determinedly coaxing vegetables from their plots of soil. Ordinary vegetables, not heretical ones: nobody here was bold enough to use food-growing powers in the open.

  It was absurdly dangerous to walk out exposed like this, and Tiv had worn a partial disguise. Not enough to fool God-built technology, but enough that these random people in their gardens wouldn’t immediately identify her as Leader. A wrap around her head and shoulders, of a type that was common here for keeping out the sun. A bit of makeup, applied by Akiujal’s wife, to slightly distort her Arinnan features.

  “Freeze,” said an electronically amplified voice from the other end of the block. An angel’s voice.

  “Fire!” Akiujal bellowed at the same time, nearly as loudly as the angel. “The gas main’s about to burst! Run!”

  The people at work in the gardens scrambled in every direction. In the confusion, Akiujal shoved Tiv toward the building they’d been walking towards – his own apartment building, as streaked and stuccoed and uneven as the rest. “Run, Leader. You’l
l make it. Remember what you saw here.”

  Too panicked to question, Tiv ran.

  “You are harboring a fugitive from Nemesis Herself,” the angel’s voice called out behind her. “Freeze, or I will fire.”

  There was further shouting and hubbub, and the people around her ran aimlessly. Tiv rushed to the apartment entrance. She heard gunshots behind her. She wasn’t sure why they didn’t hit; an angel’s aim was supposed to be good. Shouldn’t she be stopping to check if the other people here were okay? But she couldn’t stop running.

  She reached the door and ran in, slamming it behind her. She could still hear the chaos outside, more shouting, more shots. The apartment building’s anteroom was dim and dingy, the lights that once illuminated its brownish tiles and potted plants having long ago lost their power. She turned.

  She had come into this building this morning, using the meta-portal, through the main front door. If she focused, her motion through the portal would reverse the process and return her to the lair.

  There was another series of shots and screams behind the door. Tiv had a wild urge to open it again the normal way, face the chaos like a warrior. But she knew she couldn’t hesitate. As soon as the angel finished plowing through the crowd, it would open the door itself.

  She pictured the lair, yanked the door open, and stumbled through.

  The sounds immediately ceased. The feeling of the Chaos Zone around her lightened. She was in the airlock’s interior, a bare metal closet-like space. She sank to the ground there and shook, unwilling to go further.

  Tiv had never had an escape this narrow before. She’d known the dangers; she’d known she was the second most wanted person on Jai, and she’d had smaller scares. A few others on the team had been shot at like this before. Luellae had experienced it several times. Luellae’s abilities let her flit from place to place in ways even the airlock didn’t allow, so she’d scouted and risked herself more than the others.