by Ada Hoffmann
So she’d waited until Tiv was out on a grocery run. She’d hauled herself out of bed, her muscles weak and aching. There had been a dissenting chorus in her head, even then, but the parts that wanted to do this most had stood firm. Tiv’s safety was at stake, and that meant Yasira would do what was needed, whether all of her wanted to or not.
She’d found a heavy crowbar in Ev’s piles of tools, and she’d methodically smashed the prayer machine to pieces.
It took her a few circuits around the lair, lost in various reveries, before she settled on something. It was a little harder for Yasira to settle down these days than it had been in kindergarten.
The war room looked useful, though. She hadn’t been in there in a while, and the balance of her felt drawn to it. Curiosity and guilt.
The Four were sitting at the table, working quietly on what looked like the schedule for tomorrow, and all four of them looked up as she approached. “Hey,” said Grid, inclining their head.
“Hey,” said Yasira.
“Hi,” said Weaver, waving to her. Yasira didn’t quite have the enthusiasm to wave back.
“Good day today?” Grid asked.
Yasira wandered to the whiteboard and looked at it in a vague, scattered way. She shrugged. “Better than some.”
“What’cha looking for?” Weaver asked, fidgeting as always, but Picket shushed her. It wasn’t actually rude to ask what Yasira was doing, but all of the Four knew by now that it wouldn’t help. Yasira in these moods wasn’t following any particular goal. The team had learned that, if they talked to her like she had a goal, she’d get embarrassed and clam up. Sometimes even withdraw to her room, where at least nobody could see her taking up space being useless.
Tiv was wrong when she used the word genius. Yasira had once been brilliant at her work, but now she was just a bunch of pieces, drifting.
She looked at the schedule drawn out, in Grid’s crisp handwriting, on the whiteboard. The Four were all working in the lair today – a combination of organizational duties, cooking, cleaning, and supply runs, none of which were trivial tasks in a patched-together household of nine people. Splió was out replacing their medicine supplies. Daeis was marked down as resting; Daeis’s mental health, most days, was almost as bad as Yasira’s. Luellae and Tiv’s names were listed next to a short number of errands, but the errands were checked off as already completed, and Tiv was still nowhere to be found.
Dread settled over Yasira. She had become very sensitive on the topic of where Tiv was and whether Tiv was okay. This wasn’t a threat, but parts of her were suddenly racing to come up with one.
“What’s wrong?” said Prophet softly behind her.
“Where’s Tiv?” Yasira asked. She was embarrassed that her voice shook. This was not a threat. She shouldn’t be panicking.
She left, whispered someone in her head. She got sick of you and made an excuse and left forever.
And that was an awful thought, but not the worst one. Not the one that scared her most.
She’s running into danger, said some other part, a little closer to home, and she doesn’t even want to tell you why.
“She’s out,” said Picket. “Fact-finding.”
“What facts?”
Grid seemed to be struggling to put this tactfully. “She came back from her rounds upset, and she said she had to check something. I’m not totally sure what it was or where, but I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”
“She saw someone else get hurt,” said Prophet. “She’s realizing she has to do more to stop that. Or that’s what she thinks she has to do, at least. She’s gone someplace that she thinks might have answers, but I can’t see it clearly. I don’t think it’s dangerous.”
Yasira pushed her hand through her hair. That all made sense. But she still felt like they were dancing around something. She could see the way Weaver squirmed harder than normal, as if she were trying hard not to say something she’d been warned not to say. She could see the way Picket looked sheepishly away. “I guess I just want to look around.”
“Okay,” said Grid, but there was something a little strained in their voice.
(I’ve done something wrong, chorused voices in Yasira’s head, disturbed.
They don’t want me here. This room is for the real resistance, not the people who lie around.
There’s something they’re afraid I’ll do. How could I have made them so afraid?
They’re keeping secrets from me, and they don’t want to admit it. Fuck them.)
She browsed the walls, leafing through the charts and notes. She was careful not to disturb anything; when she turned a page to look at what was underneath, she put it back as soon as she was done. She didn’t want to fuck anything up. She didn’t want the team to think she’d fucked up, and to bar her from looking through the war room ever again.
(A very small, very reasonable part of Yasira pointed out that the team had never told her she couldn’t look at something. They had avoided topics, but that wasn’t the same thing. The team had never controlled Yasira’s movements or redacted anything. Yasira knew who had done those things to her, and it wasn’t her team.
It was possible to know very well where a fear came from, and for that knowledge not to help even a little bit.)
She flipped through slowly, trying to pace herself; this kind of information could be tiring to take in. She looked at the lists of requested and delivered items. That side of the operation had grown in scale since she last checked. People were asking for all sorts of inventive things. Medicines. Baby supplies. Hammers and craft knives, needles, hand saws, sandpaper; tools for the kind of repair that everyone in the Chaos Zone had to do now.
There were a lot of requests for weapons, all denied. That was not surprising. It had been obvious from the start that some people wanted to fight. Against the monsters, mostly, at first; but as the angels’ deliberately incompetent disaster response dragged on, people had turned their anger against that, too. It was heretical, but a good chunk of the population was happy to turn heretical if their lives were on the line. Real torment to the body, in the present moment, was more urgent than torment to the soul. Most people, in an emergency, would react to protect their body first. Or the bodies of the people they loved.
Yasira remembered talking about that, early on. She remembered the first meeting when they’d discussed if they wanted to be a non-violent resistance or not. It had been long and angry. More than one team member had cried, that day. Tiv had cried, but she’d stood firm. Tiv wasn’t going to war. She was here to help people, not to get them slaughtered. Tiv had put her foot down, and eventually even Luellae had given in.
Yasira hadn’t taken a side in that meeting. She’d looked down at the table, barely saying anything; thoughts had whirled and tangled through her head without resolving into consensus. It had been the most depressing fucking meeting of her life. She hadn’t known how to express what seemed obvious to her: they were doomed if they didn’t fight and doomed if they did. The whole planet was. Yasira had bought them a little more time and made them a little less miserable on the way. That was all anybody could accomplish.
She sighed and put those pages aside. There was another pile of notes about magical abilities, but she had to put it down quickly. Yasira had given those abilities to the Chaos Zone’s survivors herself, but something about it still made her queasy. Someone had collated firsthand theological musings from the survivors, trying to sort them into groups based on their underlying theories and to draw connections between them, like a philosophy term paper, but that didn’t feel good to Yasira either. She’d seen Outside firsthand; she had Outside knitted directly into what was left of her soul. She didn’t feel like making a holy book out of it, telling people how to live, as if Outside cared about that. She wanted to leave it alone.
There was a note about the gone people, which was mildly interesting. The gone people seemed to be organizing, planning something, but no one could communicate with them well enough to figure out what.
Yasira had spoken to a gone person, briefly, when she was still working for Akavi. Speaking aloud hadn’t worked, but gestures and, in some strange way, imagination had. When she’d pictured what she wanted, the gone person had understood and responded. When the gone person wanted to convey things back, it had… worked, more or less. Her mind had been able to grasp it, at least in simple terms. Maybe Yasira was better at that, more like an Outside being, than everyone else. Maybe everyone else just hadn’t been trying enough. She didn’t know.
The rest of the pages weren’t much better. There were charts on the walls showing where angels had shot civilians most recently, where civilians were most eager to rise up. There was a list of awful, sad events, which had been updated just yesterday, listing the number of people the angels had shot in their attempt to get to Tiv.
It was a longer list than what she’d pictured. No wonder Tiv had sounded like a broken, dying thing.
(Maybe, whispered someone sensible in her head, it’s not about you.)
She was going to have to go back to her room soon, probably.
She picked up one last paper, more out of stubbornness than anything else, and her eyes were drawn to a word halfway down the page. Savior, said the paper. That was her name, sort of.
The paper said that in a lot of places.
Yasira refocused, trying to make sense of what she was reading. This wasn’t one of the official papers that kept a tally of something needed for the whole team. It looked more like a scratchpad, something a person had used to jot notes to themselves during a meeting.
They’d been talking about weapons. They’d been talking about what the people of the Chaos Zone really wanted, when they asked for things that could help them fight.
People knew, mostly, how ineffective guns would be against a battalion of angels. People asked instead, when the team let them, for magic. A power greater than their own.
A power that bore Yasira’s name.
People had asked for this, over and over again, and nobody had told Yasira. She hadn’t heard their prayers. The team had known, everybody on it had known, and they’d all somehow collectively decided not to pass it on.
Because she was useless, maybe. Because a broken person lying in bed all day couldn’t answer prayers, and the team hadn’t seen the point of trying.
Yasira looked up from the paper at the Four. Grid and Picket drew back slightly, and Weaver quickly looked away, but Prophet solemnly met her gaze.
“Tiv was trying to protect you,” she said.
As if that made it any better. As if any part of Yasira liked being so broken now, so useless, that she couldn’t even be told what people wanted from her.
When Yasira did her miracle, Outside had given her a vision. It had shown her the people she was helping – not all of them, even an Outside-augmented mind couldn’t hold millions of people in it all at once, but a convincing cross section. Enough to make her understand. Outside, for all its uncaring alien cruelty, had chosen to give her that mercy. To ensure she knew viscerally, whatever happened next, that she’d made the difference she’d set out to make.
She remembered all those people, each individual. And all those people, no doubt, remembered what she’d done for them. She couldn’t see them now, but she could imagine it, all of them in their shitty, falling-apart houses, hungry, doubting, oppressed by angels, praying for her. Needing her, not because she was much good for anything right now, but because they knew of nothing else that could save them. Because, the first time around, she hadn’t saved them enough.
Even Outside had given her the dignity of showing her who needed her. Even Outside had trusted her to use that information well.
There was a loud multitude wailing about this in Yasira’s head. Louder than usual. They hid this from me because I’m useless. They hid this from me because they hate me. Nobody should pray to me. I’m not even human. I shouldn’t exist. But there was something that rose in her, some impromptu coalition, that moved despite the noise. That knew how to ignore it for a little while, the same as she did when she had to release her power, because this was important. She felt herself drawing up, her face hardening. Her voice, coming out cold.
“She shouldn’t have,” said Yasira.
Grid looked at her impatiently. “Look, Savior, just because you don’t think you’re worth protecting–”
“You put so much pressure on yourself,” Weaver burst out at the same time, “and she thought it wasn’t fair for them to ask so much of you anyway, she thought you’d–”
“No,” said Prophet, holding up a hand to quell them both. “Let her finish.”
Yasira took a breath. “This is my mess. I’m still in it.”
That felt right, both to the parts of her who hated herself and the parts who had hope. Not this is my mess and I’ll fix it – that could be impossible. But when she lay in bed trying to protect herself from the mess of the Chaos Zone, she was still in it. Outside still bubbled in her mind, wanting to be used. Tiv had wanted to leave Yasira out of what could hurt her. But it was impossible to do. There was no way out of being what Yasira was. She could only choose how to move within it.
“This is my mess,” she said, more firmly. “They want me to do things no one else can do. So I’ll do them.”
“You sure?” said Picket, raising his eyebrows.
Prophet met Yasira’s gaze gravely. “Which ones?”
“You want to be a weapon?” Weaver guessed. “The way they were asking?”
“No. Not now, at least.” Yasira smiled slightly. It was easy to look at something like Outside and see only its capacity to destroy. But for six months, if only because the structure of her soul had forced her to, Yasira had been living with its other aspects. With a well of Outside deep in her soul that didn’t destroy her, no matter how she feared and hated it. A source of surreal, irrational, reality-bending power which, when unleashed, seemed to mostly make trees grow. “First I’m going to find out what the gone people are doing.”
Prophet favored her with a smile, silently approving. Grid took a split second longer to understand. “But – oh. That – makes sense. You think you can do it?”
“I think so,” said Yasira. A dozen voices in her head screamed doubt and dissent, but oh, she had a purpose now, for however long it lasted. She could overrule them a little longer. She turned on her heel and headed for the airlock.
“Wait, now?” said Picket’s voice behind her. “But–”
“Don’t you want any help?” Weaver called.
Yes, now, Yasira thought. Now, and without waiting for help to assemble itself. Before she stopped, and let arguments fill up her mind again, and got paralyzed. Exactly now.
But she didn’t pause to argue about it, even with the team, before she pictured the closest large grouping of gone people and stepped through the door.
CHAPTER 9
Two Months Ago
“You,” said Qiel Huong, startled into immobility. “I recognize you.”
“It’s not–” Elu stammered, holding out his hands. “Please don’t tell anyone.”
“What, that there’s an angel out here? Is this an angel-free zone? Are you trespassing? I’m the one who’s trespassing. Unless–”
She narrowed her eyes, and immediately Elu saw his mistake. If he wanted to pass for a real angel, the kind who was still in good standing with Nemesis, he should have acted imperious. Elu was, as always, a bad liar.
“You’re hiding from the rest of the angels.” Qiel wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“I-I’m not,” Elu stammered. “I–”
“Then it won’t bother you,” Qiel said loftily, “if I go right now to the nearest checkpoint and tell them where you are. I’ll say, ‘hi, angels, how are you doing, guess who I ran into today while I was foraging in the woods? Elu Ariehmu of Nemesis, that’s who–’”
And the way he involuntarily threw out his hand in defense was all the confirmation she needed. He felt the blood drain from his fac
e. He’d been so thoughtless, coming out here, when he knew how weak he really was.
“Please don’t,” he said. “Please, um. Don’t do that.”
It had been so long since he’d spoken to anyone but Akavi. He felt as though he’d forgotten how.
Qiel raised a considering eyebrow, then plopped down to sit on the ground, legs crossed, motioning for him to follow. He sat gingerly, full of dread. He couldn’t go back to the other angels of Nemesis. They’d never forgive him for having deserted, or for helping Akavi escape. There was only one thing that happened to angels of Nemesis who failed, and that thing was both torture and death.
“I won’t,” she said, “if you do something for me.”
He swallowed, imagining what it would mean if Akavi, or someone with Akavi’s kind of mind, said something like that in these circumstances. The threat would never be eliminated. The first request would lead to another, and another, and she’d always have the same power over him that she had in this moment, for as long as she wanted. She’d control him.
Did chatty little Qiel Huong have that kind of mind? Elu didn’t know. But the fact that she’d thought of this, so quickly, wasn’t a good sign.
“What do you want?” he asked, his mouth dry.
“Tell me why you’re here.”
He looked down at the grassy ground, dotted with fungi and other strange growths. “I, um–”
“Tell.” She brandished her basket. “Or I go and tell the other angels about you right now.”
“It’s a really long story.”
“I’m literally sitting in a field with you, Elu Ariehmu of Nemesis. We don’t have anywhere to be. You know one of the nice things about living in a post-apocalyptic commune with no functioning economy? No deadlines. I can stay out here all day and I won’t get anything back at home but a raised eyebrow. Do you have anybody waiting for you?”
He really didn’t, and that loneliness must have shown itself on his face, because her own expression softened.
“You don’t have Akavi with you? Or Enga?”
