by Ada Hoffmann
Yasira stirred, looking up at Tiv with bleary eyes, as soon as Tiv opened the door to her room. Tiv slipped in and shut it behind her, kneeling beside the bed. “How are you doing, hon? I’m sorry I couldn’t come in earlier.”
“I’m all right,” said Yasira. Her voice was morose, but she was sitting up without prompting, blearily swinging her feet out toward the floor. The bad phase she’d been going through these last few days might be nearing its end. Yasira wasn’t healthy even on good days, and the bad days would come again soon enough, but Tiv still felt hopeful. She lived for these little improvements. “Have you been all right?”
“Not… really,” said Tiv. She didn’t trust herself to explain the whole problem to Yasira right now. But she wouldn’t lie. “Things have been pretty stressful.”
“Running a rebellion. Yeah. I warned you.”
Yasira scooted a little closer to Tiv, and Tiv laid her head on the mattress. Loving Yasira could be hard, but there was something about it that grounded her. Yasira had gone through much worse than Tiv; she’d faced equally big decisions and felt equally lost. And then she’d changed the course of a whole planet’s history. She’d become a living miracle. Tiv’s ambitions weren’t quite that grand, but it was comforting to lie down in Yasira’s shadow, knowing all of it.
“You were, um,” Yasira added after a moment. “You were crying.”
Tiv grimaced. “Yeah. Sorry. I… had a close call. With an angel. I made it out, but… most of the neighborhood didn’t.” She felt herself choking up again just saying it. Her big howling first fit of tears was done, but she wasn’t over this. She didn’t know if she’d ever be.
“Shit. Fuck. Sorry.”
“Don’t cuss,” Tiv chided automatically.
“I’m gonna fucking cuss. You almost died. Shit. Sorry. I… I wasn’t even there.”
Tiv raised her head and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. She wasn’t sobbing again, not out of control, but tears were leaking down her face. “I’m glad you weren’t there,” she said forcefully. “I’m glad. I ran home and – and at least I knew you were safe.”
Yasira sighed. Tiv shut her eyes, trying to control herself, and to her surprise, Yasira’s hand came tentatively down on her hair. Stroking it, comfortingly, in the way that had once been second nature.
Yasira wasn’t really safe, though. That was the thing. No one was going to shoot her. But even on a good day, Tiv could see something eating away at her from the inside. She could see a kind of fragmentation she didn’t quite have words for, as Yasira seemed to seesaw back and forth between so many contradictory thoughts. Tiv tried her best, but she knew a day might come when no caregiving could be enough. Yasira might die of this, one day, as finally as from a bullet.
“I started this mess,” said Yasira.
“You did not. Dr Talirr did.”
“Same thing. You know what I mean.”
Tiv didn’t really, but she wasn’t in the mood to argue with survivor guilt. Tiv had enough survivor guilt for one person right now.
“Hey,” said Yasira, smoothing her hair back. “Hey, I don’t want you to die. Or to hurt. Or to feel you can’t tell me what happened. Or – I’m here for you, Tiv. I’m shitty at it. But we’re both here for each other. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Tiv.
She wondered, for a nauseous second, if Yasira knew. If all her efforts, trying to shield Yasira from the truths that would hurt her, had been pointless. Yasira was so powerful, despite her illness. Maybe she’d known all along. Maybe Tiv was being silly, trying to keep it from her, when people like Qun and Akiujal clamored for her help. Maybe she heard them, like a God receiving prayers through the ansible net, every time.
Or maybe she knew Tiv was hiding something, because she’d heard Tiv crying from across the lair without coming to get her, and she’d drawn the obvious conclusion.
Yasira leaned in and kissed her.
They kissed so rarely these days. Yasira had used to love being touched, but it was difficult now. Her sensory sensitivities were more than they had used to be; that happened sometimes when autistic people burned out. And some forms of touch were trauma triggers. Yasira had been physically tortured in the angels’ care, and the accidental scrape of a fingernail or jostle of an elbow could send her to curl, shrieking, in on herself. It wasn’t a sexual trauma, not in the usual sense, but it made intimacy difficult in something close to the same way.
On good days, though, they did get to kiss like this. Yasira pressed her lips to Tiv’s, moving slowly, with a tension that felt less like fear and more like carefully holding something back. As if she wanted more, but didn’t trust herself. Tiv held still, kissing back with only the subtlest motions, and let Yasira set the pace. Tiv loved being touched, too. She’d learned to savor all these small things even more, to honor the risks Yasira took and the pain she held in when she offered them.
This time Yasira ended up on the floor with Tiv, arms wrapped around her. Tiv leaned gently into it, letting herself soak it up. Hugs from the rest of the Seven felt good, warm and comforting and present, but there was something else to it here. Something sacred. She closed her eyes and imagined Yasira as the God everybody wanted her to be, an omnibenevolent presence twining in amid the chaos and death, holding her on a level that transcended the physical. Promising help would come if she’d just hold on.
Whispering in her ear, the way Gods whispered to Their angels and priests, what to do.
But Tiv no longer believed in Gods. Obviously They existed, but she no longer believed They would help her at all. She sometimes caught herself reaching back for those beliefs, on instinct, trying to find something where they’d used to be. She missed feeling like there were higher beings looking out for her, knowing all the answers before she did. But nothing was there. No one was going to decide what Tiv should do anymore, but Tiv.
“I don’t always know what to do anymore,” she confessed in a whisper. “The problem’s so big, and sometimes it feels like everything we try only makes it worse.”
Yasira sighed against her. When she spoke again, it was a resigned, tired echo of what Tiv had said to Yasira six months ago.
“Maybe we can’t fix it,” said Yasira. “But do you want to try?”
CHAPTER 5
Now
Ilva Rovaki, Inquisitor of Nemesis, looked down in distaste as Sedajegy Utridzysy Akiujal was shoved in front of her, falling to his knees.
The cameras were rolling, their hungry lenses perched on tripods or swooping through the air autonomously. Somewhere in the next room, other angels were editing the live feed, splicing together different shots from the most exciting angles. Off-camera, Akiujal had already been apprehended and interrogated. He’d already confessed. It took time, sometimes, to extract a confession from heretics like these, but Akiujal was the type who wanted to confess anyway, defiantly spitting out an account of his crimes as soon as he understood he wasn’t getting out of here. The other inquisitors on the team had tortured him a little anyway, for form’s sake, and had scheduled him for the broadcast the next morning.
The Gods were strictly limited in their response to human heresy in the Chaos Zone. At least half the population, by Ilva’s reckoning, met the technical definition of heresy. But genocide was off the table for now – both for optics reasons and because the teams hunting for Evianna Talirr had not yet found her. So, the angels of Nemesis found themselves needing to keep order by other means. To set examples, so that those heretics who could be scared into submission – or scared, at least, into keeping their beliefs a bit more private – would be scared.
So, every morning, there were the broadcasts. Every television set, intercom, and radio receiver in the Chaos Zone was wired to receive them, whether the owner wanted to or not. The angels’ aid efforts had prioritized electrical and mass communications infrastructure for precisely this reason. Every morning, out of all the heretics in the Chaos Zone who were slated for termination, one was brought before the cameras
and shown to the world.
Ilva tilted her head, looking down at him. Akiujal’s responses, according to the annotations in her optic circuits, were well within desired parameters. Enough defiance to forestall pity; not enough strength to inspire accidental loyalty. Most angels could read microexpressions, but for broadcasting what mattered were broader expressions and their complicated, contextual implications for the viewer, and Ilva had extended her own programming accordingly. Akiujal was bleeding slightly down one side of his face, and his hands trembled, but his gaze back up at her was a glare.
“Sedajegy Utridzysy Akiujal,” said Ilva, each syllable precisely correct. “You have been brought before the Gods for dozens of counts of heresy, including the formation of illicit gatherings for heretical purposes and incitement of the use of supernatural Outside abilities, the very nature of which destabilize our already fragile reality. But your largest crime goes beyond any of these. You facilitated the escape of Productivity Hunt, the third most wanted mortal on Jai, the accomplice of Yasira Shien herself, and the leader of the band of arch-heretics known as the Seven. Yesterday, she could have been brought in to face justice for her crimes against your world. Instead, she resisted arrest, and you covered for her by sacrificing the lives of twelve of your neighbors. Members of the community, heretical and non-heretical, who had trusted you. Do you confess to this perversion of justice?”
Akiujal raised his head, resigned and spiteful. Sometimes people on the broadcast tried to protest their innocence, and that was tricky to handle. But Akiujal was the type who would use it to grandstand – and, thus, announce his guilt.
“Your angels,” he said, “are the ones who pervert justice. And when the time is right, the people will rise up against you.”
“If so, they’ll die.” Ilva gave a little shrug, unconcerned. “As will you. And your punishment after your death will be far worse than anything we can do to you in life.”
She picked up her favorite blade from the low table before her: a heavy tungsten carbide weapon the size of an axe, oddly curved. Broadcasting wasn’t a very difficult job, and a lower-ranking angel could have done it if pressed. But Ilva had a talent for exactly this sort of thing. Her red-and-black livery was always spotless and crisp, her makeup applied without a flaw. Her voice was clear and sonorous and made people sit up and listen. Before there’d been a need for any broadcasts in the Chaos Zone, she’d been known to break heretics just by saying the right words, at the right moment, commandingly enough.
“I ask absolution,” said Ilva solemnly to the camera, “for what I am about to do.”
Even Akiujal stilled at the sound of the Litany of Inquisition. Normally, this was the prayer Inquisitors said before torture. If they were just killing people, in private, they didn’t bother. But mortals knew these ritual words, and mortals knew to fear them. Besides, in a way these broadcasts were a form of torture – not for the heretics who were terminated each day, necessarily, but for everyone else.
“I ask for the power of Nemesis to flow through me; the precision of Nemesis to guide my hands; the vengeance of Nemesis to steel me for what must be done. I ask that the suffering of this one fallen mortal bring mercy and benefit one hundredfold to those I am sworn to protect. I ask all this in the name of Nemesis who built me, who may unbuild me again if I falter. So it must be.”
Akiujal closed his eyes, bracing himself. Sometimes they panicked at this point, struggled, tried to flee. Not him. Defiant to the end; defiance was another crime to be added to his list, but she had a grudging respect for it.
With a satisfying swish and thunk, she brought the blade down. Akiujal fell, and the cameras caught every bright drop of blood as his head rolled away from his body.
That morning, the sky over the Chaos Zone had begun to roil. Not an Outside effect, this time, but a battle. It was happening more and more frequently. The Keres, the Gods’ ancient enemy, had always loved to swoop in and worsen the chaos when something in human space went wrong.
For all the awful things they did, the angels of Arete and Nemesis were consistent about this. Jai was a human world. They would defend it with their lives.
In practice that meant; the relief stations closed. Everything locked down. People were confined to their homes, with a tiny skeleton crew of angels patrolling the streets, just enough so it would look like enforcement. If ordinary mortals didn’t have enough water or food rations to last out the battle, well, that was their problem. And the sky above crackled with something akin to lightning, as the Gods’ ships and the Keres’ ships waged war high above them. If everyone was lucky, that would be all it was. No fires would rage. No buildings would fall. No cities would be accidentally bombed from orbit in the crossfire, hit with one of the Keres’ bizarre weapons before the Gods could stop them.
Tiv heard about the lockdown first thing in the morning. It was a planetary order, the whole Chaos Zone and beyond. On days like this, the Seven stripped their rounds down to only the essentials, only things that would save someone’s life. Otherwise, with no ordinary people milling around and no crowds to get lost in, the risk of being seen was too high.
So they found themselves in the war room, hastily going through their notes and charts, identifying the highest priorities.
“Here,” said Tiv, flipping through to the page she remembered. Huang-Bo had one of the Chaos Zone’s worst medicine shortages, and the heretic group that the Seven were in contact with there contained several people who needed daily medicine to live. They rationed it out carefully, taking less of it than they should have, awaiting the days when medicine would arrive at their relief station. Today was supposed to have been that day. It was anyone’s guess if it would arrive tomorrow – if the battle was even over tomorrow – or if this month’s supply would be cancelled.
Medicine was harder to find on short notice than most things, but the Seven could do it.
“Luellae,” Tiv said, looking up. On days like today, they needed Luellae’s abilities. The meta-portal would take them to their usual landing points, the homes of community leaders like Qun and Akiujal who’d normally do the rest of the distribution for them, but on a day like today they’d have to go directly from house to house. “You up for a meds run?”
Luellae crossed her arms. “I’m up for it, but are you?”
Tiv bit her lip. She knew what Luellae meant. Tiv had slept badly, reliving yesterday’s narrow escape over and over. She didn’t want to go out and face the same danger again, but she knew she needed to. The angels were trying to scare the Seven away from their work, and scare ordinary mortals off from working with them. The Seven couldn’t let them succeed. The longer Tiv waited before she swallowed her fear, took some deep breaths, and got back out there again, the worse it would be.
“People didn’t die just so I could hide in the lair,” Tiv said.
Luellae quirked an eyebrow. Luellae was the most hawkish of the Seven. Keeping people fed was a stopgap; real change, in Luellae’s opinion, would be violent, and she didn’t like that Tiv had ruled those options out. Tiv could imagine what she wanted to say: People didn’t die just for you to deliver groceries, either.
But that wouldn’t be fair; this wasn’t just groceries. People’s lives lay in the balance with this, too, just as much as they would in a shooting fight.
Which was probably why Luellae didn’t argue, this once. Just nodded. “That’s fair. You ready to go?”
Enga had been put on street-patrol duty. She hated it the same way she hated everything else. All the guns and other devices built into her body were for ground operations, not space battles, so she stayed on the ground.
She plodded along. The lockdown was stupid. A hit from a Keres weapon was a hit from a Keres weapon, and it’d destroy a whole block, whether people were in their houses or not. But keeping the mortals inside at least stopped panic. Meanwhile Enga got to be alone for a while, and to appreciate the fireworks in the sky without anybody bothering her.
Everybody knew that N
emesis wanted the Chaos Zone to go away. Irimiru had explained why they all had to pretend otherwise. But why all the effort? Why not let a stray bolt through, every once in a while, just enough to flatten a city or two? Sure, the Gods had to manage Their image. But why couldn’t they say something like, Oops, we missed that one! Good thing we blocked the other ninety-nine or that would have been a whole lot worse. Enga could imagine ways to say things like that diplomatically, and Enga was pretty stupid. The Gods ought to be able to do it even better.
She saw a blur of motion in the corner of her eye and turned to it, clicking her guns into a ready position. But before she could focus well enough to aim, it was gone.
Travelling with Luellae was easy. Nerve-wracking, but easy. All Tiv had to do was hold on, and the world twisted around her – a different kind of twist and lurch every time. Today it was a kaleidoscopic swirl of colors. It made Tiv a little woozy, and she was pretty sure it would have given Yasira the biggest sensory overload headache of all time, but there was something nice about a little brightness on a day like today, when artificial thunder rolled in the darkened sky.
She stumbled as they made their fourth or fifth landing of the day, straight into someone’s living room, which wasn’t how Tiv liked to do things. Tiv liked to land outside a home and knock politely, but they couldn’t do it that way today. A family of five had been huddled around a small cluster of candles – a young mother, two children, and two older male relatives – and they visibly startled when they saw Tiv and Luellae. The community leader Tiv normally spoke to, in Huang-Bo, had told her where to find these people, but Tiv had never actually met them before.
“It’s okay,” said Tiv in Riayin, holding out her hands. One was empty, palm out; the other held today’s small bag of medicines. “Don’t be scared. Are you Xiel, Ranah, Zaory, Fonsa, and Dacca Li?”
The oldest man in the group nodded, fear turning to hesitant hope on his face. He was stick thin and his skin was discolored. “Are you–?”
