The Fallen

by Ada Hoffmann

  Tiv nodded. “I’m Productivity Hunt. This is Blur. Kae Lam said you needed insulin?”

  He nodded, his eyes widening in relief and gratitude. “Yes. Thank you, Leader.”

  It didn’t take much to convince people in the Chaos Zone who Tiv was. The way Luellae moved through space looked as strange from the outside as it did from the inside. It didn’t look like anything anyone else could do. No one arrived in rooms unannounced this way but Tiv and the Seven.

  It made her heart hurt, how desperate they were for someone like her to believe in. How grateful they were for a simple delivery. How easily this man, too, would throw himself away to cover her escape, the way all of Akiujal’s neighbors had done yesterday.

  But normally Tiv was able to push through that unease, and to give people like the Lis what they needed. A kind, steady gaze. A humble nod, and a smile, and an acknowledgment. Normally she could say things like, we’re all in this together. Little platitudes that they would remember and value, not because they were really worth that much, but because someone as revered as Tiv had taken the time to look them in the eye and say them.

  It was all smoke and mirrors. They only revered her because she ran around with this group of people, because she happened to be able to make rounds like this and give them what they needed. And because, out of that group, she was the only one mentally healthy enough to look people in the eye and be polite.

  She didn’t deserve any of this.

  Tiv tried to refocus, but before she could find words, something distracted her. A television set, in the corner, flaring to life.

  The Lis had thrown a sheet over the television to muffle it – many families did, to tune out the upsetting daily broadcasts. Even people who’d stayed loyal to the Gods didn’t want public executions in their living rooms every day. But the Gods didn’t give them a choice. Even when there wasn’t regular electricity for lights and heat, somehow, there was this.

  “Sedajegy Utridzysy Akiujal,” said the tinny voice of the awful woman who was always the face of these broadcasts. Tiv knew what she would look like if she pulled the sheet from the set, crisp and severe in her red-and-black livery, not a fleck of makeup out of place. “You have been brought before the Gods–”

  Tiv froze.

  She’d thought that he might have survived. Splió had said that he couldn’t see Akiujal among the bodies. She’d dared to hope that might mean he’d escaped–

  “–you facilitated the escape of Productivity Hunt, the third most wanted mortal on Jai–”

  No.

  She wanted to lurch towards the television, to smash it into the ground, like that would fix anything. Her feet felt rooted to the floor.

  “–the people will rise up against you.”

  Tiv realized, fuzzily, that Luellae and the Lis were staring at her.

  “I have to go,” she said in a strangled voice. She couldn’t let normal people see her like this.

  Luellae stepped up and took her hand. But even Luellae wasn’t fast enough. Tiv was still rooted to the spot long enough to hear it, the swish and the thud of the axe coming down.

  “You were right,” said Tiv later, in the lair. Luellae had brought her back, sat her on a beanbag, and wrapped her in a blanket, which was Luellae’s way of being comforting. Luellae wasn’t any good at being gentle with her words, but she could do this part.

  “Right about what?” said Luellae.

  “We’re in a war.”

  Tiv hadn’t wanted to give out weapons. She’d wanted to wage a non-violent rebellion, as if that was different from a war. But Tiv had already become a part of something people would die for. She’d started a war already, complete with human souls as cannon fodder. And her side was losing.

  Luellae was closest, but other people had started to trickle out from the other parts of the lair to see what was going on. Picket and Grid sat nearby, concerned and focused. Tiv wasn’t sure where the rest of the Four had gone. Or where Yasira was. Her eyes guiltily slid to Yasira’s room, on the lair’s opposite side. Was Yasira even awake?

  “What do you want to do about it, Leader?” said Luellae.

  Her voice was a little sardonic, but not nearly as much as it could have been. Luellae knew, Tiv suspected, that there weren’t easy answers. Luellae wanted to fight, but unless people had the kinds of weapons that could turn the tide against the Gods themselves, it wouldn’t change anything.

  In galactic history, no one had ever had weapons like that.

  Well.

  Almost no one.

  Tiv stood up shakily from her beanbag chair and put the blanket down. “I’m gonna go find something.”

  Grid looked up warily. They could tell, of course, that Tiv wasn’t in a good mental state. “Are you sure–”

  “Yes,” said Tiv. Either this was the right time, or there would never be one.

  She turned on her heel and stormed to her room, to change clothes and pack a few things.

  These broadcasts are beneath my notice. Life is a lie; death is a lie. Why should I care? These people were always in the thrall of lies.

  And yet.

  I am trying to be more human, aren’t I? Yasira’s plan to save this world was more human than mine. I told myself I would learn from her.

  Today I saw a man executed simply for writing about what he saw.

  He was not one of the people trying to organize against the Gods. There are many of those here, and they bore me. They ought to be my allies, but their methods are too small to make any headway, and their motives are petty. This man was not an organizer. He was simply a naturalist. Before the Plague he had studied wild animals, and now he has turned to studying Outside monsters, watching them roam up and down the ravaged land here, watching how they move, how they prey on each other or on ordinary creatures, and how they recover from injury. His observations led him to certain conclusions about the nature of biological cells and of how beings inhabit space and time.

  He did not phrase those conclusions as I would, but they bore a certain resemblance to mine: life is a lie. Death is a lie. Movement and stillness and time are all lies.

  The angels killed him, of course.

  When I was a small child, I had no pretensions of defeating the Gods. I simply saw things other people did not. And that in itself was enough to earn beatings, electric shocks, a conscious attempt at forcible extinction of the Truth. From parents and a psychiatric system who, I am sure, would otherwise have loved me.

  I do not like to write about this. I have no patience for people who sit and feel sorry for themselves.

  But my mind circles back to the simple fact that I did this. I made a whole fifth of a planet this way, so full of Outside that even ordinary, boring, stupid people couldn’t ignore it. I made them see the way I had seen. And now they are being punished for it as I was. When I ought to be concentrating on physics and strategy and working out how to be more compassionate to people, I am distracted by the memory of the blade coming down on this man’s innocent neck.

  I did this.

  Did I?

  – From the diaries of Dr Evianna Talirr

  CHAPTER 6

  Two Months Ago

  “I need a new outfit,” said Akavi, breezing into the Talon distractedly. He was male again, and Riayin as usual, wearing an angular bespectacled body in its forties, like some reservedly pretty professor. “I need more information about the gone people, and that means breaking into communities where I don’t have an in yet. Some of them are still loyal to the Gods. I think I found a lead on one, but it will need a particular kind of identity. I need something white, something that looks like it’s been conspicuously washed and pressed and ironed but with vastly subpar materials. For a body about the proportions of this one, if you please. Do you have the new crop of fungi?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Elu, hurrying to the cabinet where he’d been keeping them.

  It seemed to Elu that some problem was brewing between him and Akavi. It wasn’t the long absences, o
r the quick, brief, task-oriented returns. Elu was used to those. Akavi had often trusted him to take care of something for a while, or to spend time developing his technical skills and helping Enga and the sell-souls, while Akavi was busy elsewhere. Vaurians were always needed for undercover work, and undercover work often meant sinking into the landscape for months at a time. Fourteen months, at the longest stretch, during which Elu had held down the fort and managed the Evianna Talirr mission while Akavi took Yasira outside the galaxy to hunt their quarry directly.

  He was used to Akavi not being around. So that wasn’t what bothered him, clearly.

  Akavi took the large basket of fungi and raised them to his face, inhaling their scent. “Excellent work, my dear, as always. The Quns are particularly fond of these.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Akavi had been using these tactics, compliments, endearments, and they felt strange. Elu didn’t know how to articulate why. He couldn’t say: I want you to like me, but not like that. He didn’t know what else he wanted the attention to look like.

  It felt like a mask. Another one of Akavi’s cover identities, this one designed specifically to please Elu. And he knew that, if he voiced that specific complaint, Akavi would only be quizzical. Akavi’s special talent and purpose in life was to mold himself into new forms. Why shouldn’t Elu be happy that Akavi tried to please him? Would he prefer something crueler?

  He didn’t, but it felt like Akavi was using compliments and brief kisses to dance around the real issue. They’d never had time to sit down and discuss what they wanted out of this new alliance, what they wanted to call it, how closely it should resemble the working relationship they’d had before. Akavi didn’t want to talk about that, it seemed.

  Akavi held the fungi out a moment longer, then took out his pack and began to efficiently stow them, along with the other provisions and supplies that Elu had prepared. “I have another idea. Can you make me look like a gone person?”

  Elu blinked and immediately opened a new file in a mental sketchpad. Most of the tools Elu used to design clothes, food, and technology had survived his surgery, so he still had an angel’s ability to while away the hours working on things in his head, tinkering with their functional or sensory details, getting it just right. That activity had sustained him lately more than Akavi did. The process of loading the designs into the printer was now more cumbersome, but the design process itself was familiar and comforting.

  “Of course,” he said. “That’s not hard. You just need tattered rags and some pigment to simulate that dried blood that they use. I can make you a primer on getting the visual patterns right. If you want to fool ordinary survivors, the hard part wouldn’t be the look; it would be moving like a gone person, copying their facial expressions. But that part’s up to you.”

  “Good. I want a disguise of that nature next time I stop by, and that white outfit.”

  Elu looked into the distance, distracted. “I don’t know how well it would work on other gone people, though. I don’t really know what sensory modalities they use to recognize each other. If they do communicate telepathically, you won’t have access to that. I don’t know how they’d respond to someone who looked like one of them but lacked that connection. Maybe they’d turn on you, but maybe they’d assume you were hurt somehow, or needed help.”

  He was still getting used to the lack of a network connection in his brain. Like being shut up in a small quiet room, without other angels to reach out and mentally touch. Even Akavi’s physical presence didn’t completely make up for that lack. Were there gone people who felt like that? Gone people whose connection to the group mind had failed somehow, and who still trailed after the other gone people, silent and forlorn, trying to feel something they no longer had the senses for?

  Assuming the gone people had those senses in the first place. Elu had seen Akavi’s videos; he knew the jury was still out on that point.

  “Excellent. Perhaps we’ll test that. But even if it only fools the normal survivors, it will be useful in an emergency.” Akavi finished sorting out his pack and hoisted it onto his shoulder; he paused, after a moment, and looked across the small room at Elu with an odd smile. “I like this planet. There’s so much to do.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Elu, who itched with the desire to do more, with the monotony of these long weeks alone in the ship.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t had time yet for that lesson I keep promising you. I’ll be excited to see your skills as an analyst improve. You’ve looked over the sensory videos I left?”

  “Yes, sir.” Akavi had been quietly recording what he considered to be the interesting parts of his travels, and since they could no longer directly send files brain-to-brain, he’d been loading them onto a device for Elu to review. Sometimes Elu learned things about the planet from those vids. Other times it felt self-indulgent, just Akavi showing off minutiae that interested him. Sometimes he resented it, being made to guess why Akavi took the circuitous path that he did. He didn’t know how to talk about that either: he should be happy, if Akavi valued him enough to share silly details from his days. It was a way of keeping him company.

  It was just that it all seemed to revolve around Akavi. Akavi came in and made his requests, shared his information, pointed out things that interested him. Very rarely did he ask anything substantive about what Elu had been doing or feeling, without him.

  But Elu liked Akavi. It didn’t make sense to complain that their encounters had too much of him.

  “You’ve been monitoring the radio channels?”

  “Yes, sir. Nothing much to report yet. I found what the local survivors are using, but it’s mainly a lot of chatter about who needs which supplies, nothing subversive. I think they know how easily the Gods could intercept the signal, so they’re playing it safe. But I’ll keep listening.”

  “Of course you will, and you’ll do well.” Akavi took a step towards the door. “I’m sorry I can’t stay, but my asset will be waiting for me. I’ll be back again in a few days. Come here.”

  He beckoned, and Elu stepped towards him willingly. Akavi leaned in and gave him a short, light kiss. His current body had chin stubble, and that felt interesting. Elu felt guilty for enjoying it, and ambivalent about what it meant, but it was over soon enough. Akavi pulled away after only half a second, looking him up and down.

  “This mission is going well,” he said, holding Elu’s gaze. “We’re doing well. I’ll see you soon.”

  And then he was out the door, walking away through the trees.

  Elu sank down into one of the Talon’s parlor chairs, breathing slowly.

  They were doing well. They’d both fully recovered from their surgeries. The Gods wouldn’t find them here. They both had useful work to do. Akavi appreciated him. Akavi was kissing him. He didn’t know what he had to complain about.

  But somehow it always felt like this, every time Akavi went away. Like being left behind in a little room, silent and suffocating, with only a lie for company.

  He might as well go back to the radio. He turned on the primitive receiving device he’d printed ages ago, letting it drift through the channels. Radio had never been forbidden to mortals, and, even before the Plague, mortal hobbyists had played with it, sending messages back and forth through the void. It wasn’t difficult to improvise a simple radio from available materials, so, in the wake of the Plague, the medium had flourished.

  He doodled in his head as he listened to the bursts of mortal chatter. He liked this newest project, designing a gone person disguise. Tattered rags were simple enough in theory, but if one wanted to print them straight out of a printer and make them look authentic, there were all sorts of delightfully fiendish details to get right. What had the clothing looked like when it was new? Where had it broken down over time? Where were the natural places for holes and thinning patches, and what did those look like in each chosen fabric? What sort of dirt did gone people encounter in their daily lives, and how did they interact with it, and what did its
stains look like on this particular material? It was very absorbing. He referred frequently to Akavi’s sensory videos of gone people, and, with the radio as background noise, this passed the time easily enough.

  The radio soothed Elu more than he wanted to admit. It wasn’t the same as the mental background noise he’d grown used to, back when he had his network connection: that had been less to do with sound and more to do with mental nodes and maps and movements, things that didn’t have an easy analogue in the mortal part of his mind. But it was good to hear people chattering. To know, in some dim remnant of a way, that someone else was going about their business just out of his sight.

  “We’re short on fuel,” chattered the radio. “Shi was hoarding it in the big tanks out by Wenna’s farm, and when they ruptured, it all went.”

  “That’s why you can’t store it all in the big tanks,” said an answering voice, disgusted. “We’ve been over this plenty of times. I don’t know if we want to keep donating fuel if you keep doing it this way.”

  “Aw, c’mon, man, you know how Shi gets. And how else are we supposed to keep the lights on?”

  Elu leaned forward, wondering how one of these speakers would dare to complain about the Gods – Who, as far as Elu could tell, had done very little to repair Jai’s infrastructure, except for installing some televisions. There had not long ago been webs of clean renewable energy all over the planet, like every other human-inhabited world, and the ancient, more dangerous fuels had only been needed for specialized tasks. Without the God-built solar plants restored, and with most of the power lines still broken, that was changing.

  Old Humans had used fossil fuels to very nearly destroy their world. It disturbed Elu to see modern people, in desperation, turning back to them. But the Gods had wanted the Chaos Zone destroyed anyway. It had occurred to him, and to Akavi, that the Gods were still pursuing that end.

  He hated it. Maybe Nemesis and Arete had calculated together that this was necessary for the greater good. But he hated watching Them slowly kill, by neglect, what Treaty Prime ought to have obliged Them to save.