by Ada Hoffmann
Riayin prided itself on being the best in the galaxy at dealing with neurodiversity. Tiv’s home country, Arinn, wasn’t quite that advanced. But Arinn and Riayin neighbored each other, and some of Riayin’s accepting attitudes had rubbed off. Tiv at least knew the names of most of the common forms of neurodivergence and some basic information about what a person with each one might experience, what they might struggle with, what they might need.
So Tiv knew what it meant to be plural – to have more than one subjective consciousness co-existing in the same mind. She wouldn’t have guessed it was happening with Yasira, but she could follow the description. The part Outside played was another matter, but it wasn’t necessarily weirder than how Outside interfaced with single people’s brains. Tiv wasn’t repelled, not by the actual content of what Yasira had said. But how could Yasira have hidden all this, something so fundamental to how she experienced the world, for half a year? Why had she thought she needed to do that – she could have told Tiv any time. Why hadn’t she realized?
She wanted to say thank you for telling me – that was the polite thing to say when someone disclosed something personal and upsetting. But Yasira had been beating herself up for not telling Tiv earlier, and she’d take it the wrong way. She’d think Tiv was being sarcastic.
“That doesn’t make you not human,” Tiv said instead, raising her chin mulishly.
“Yeah? Every part of me that isn’t a bickering little fragment is made of Outside now. What do you think it makes me?”
“I don’t know. Mentally ill and Outside-y, like all of us.” Tiv leaned back a little against the unforgiving metal wall of the airlock. “I like every part of you that I’ve seen. Before the Plague or after. Even when you’re laying in bed too sulky to do anything, I still care about you. Are there parts of you that don’t like me?”
Yasira looked taken aback, as if she hadn’t expected that question. Her eyes fluttered, unfocused for a moment, and Tiv had an odd feeling that Yasira was hurriedly taking a survey of everyone inside her.
What would they do if the answer was “yes”? Tiv hadn’t read up enough about plurality to know what people were supposed to do in situations like that. Would they have to break up? Would she need to awkwardly date some parts of Yasira while other parts sulked and stayed out of her way? Tiv didn’t like either of those options, not even a little bit.
She wondered what it was like when Yasira had to check with all her selves like this. She had a foolish mental image of a conference room, a dozen Yasiras sitting in swivel chairs around a long table. It probably wasn’t like that.
“No,” Yasira said at last, opening her eyes. “No, I don’t think so. Not the way you mean. There are some parts of me who don’t really care about anybody – they’re too fixed on their work, or on how they’re hurting, or on Outside. Not everybody here is big enough to be a full person. But everybody in here who can love, loves you.” She made an abortive motion, as if she wanted to take Tiv’s hand, then changed her mind. Or did that mean one of her wanted to hold hands and another didn’t? This was going to take a lot of getting used to. “Is that enough?”
“Yes,” said Tiv, nodding firmly. She didn’t reach to take Yasira’s hand. How did consent work when there was more than one person in there to give or revoke it? No wonder touching Yasira had been a minefield lately. “We’ll figure this out, Yasira. Don’t worry. We’re still–”
At that moment the airlock’s outer door opened and Luellae stumbled in.
A densely forested area was briefly visible behind her before the door shut. She almost tripped over the two of them. People didn’t usually sit in the airlock like this. Luellae was panting as if she’d been running or terrified or both, and her pale eyes were wild. Not just fear, Tiv realized, but rage. Luellae had a temper at the best of times, but this was more. Something had happened.
“Hey, are you okay?” said Tiv, moving to get up.
Luellae spent half a second catching her breath, staring at the two of them.
“We need,” she said in a strained voice, “to talk.”
“You’re sure?” Tiv asked, appalled. “You’re sure it was Akavi?”
They had brought Luellae into the war room, asked if she needed anything to calm down, water maybe, but she’d refused it all. She’d insisted that everyone in the lair – which was most of the team, at the moment – gather around immediately. They needed to hear what she had to say.
“She didn’t even try to hide it,” said Luellae. “She talked about things only Akavi could have known. I’m sure.”
“I killed him,” said Yasira. She looked a thousand miles away, staring at nothing. She was shaking. “I shot him.”
Most of the team looked nearly as shocked, in their own ways. Daeis had scrunched in on themself, holding a pink, striped, rabbit-sized creature tightly. Splió and Prophet had both retreated to their usual habits of staring into space – Prophet distractedly, watching some sensory display of the future that the rest of them couldn’t understand; Splió merely morose. Weaver, at the foot of the table, was picking at herself so furiously that Picket, himself pale and flop-sweating, had to practically sit on her before she injured something. Grid, one of the calmest in the room, was grimly focused on writing down every detail of what Luellae had said.
Weaver perked up a bit. Her thin fingers, laced through Picket’s, were still constantly moving. “People can survive gunshot wounds. It just depends on where the bullet goes in and how fast they get help. Where’d you shoot him?”
Grid shot Weaver a warning look, but Yasira answered, looking more dazed and hopeless than ever. “In the stomach.”
“Yeah, see, that’s a nasty one, but with the right kind of medical attention fast enough you can pull through. Sounds like he found help.”
Yasira rounded on her, blazing with sudden anger. “He couldn’t have. He was immobilized. He was alone. Ev did something to the Talon so it was undetectable by angel technology and she set it to fly away at warp speed in a random direction. He was lying on the floor unconscious when I left. He couldn’t–” She bit her tongue and broke off, looking away.
“It was him,” Luellae said with finality.
The room descended into an uneasy silence, marked only by the creak of Weaver’s chair as she rocked back and forth, and the emphatic scrape of Grid’s pencil on paper as they underlined something. Yasira’s shoulders shook. She was crying, and doing a poor job of trying not to let the rest of the team see.
Tiv would have reached out and touched her, but that wasn’t helpful when Yasira was this upset. She’d flinch away; they’d both end up feeling even worse. Tiv might have led Yasira out of the war room and found her a safer place to let it out, to talk if she wanted to or just cry. Except Yasira wasn’t the only one hurting. All of these people had once been Akavi’s prisoners. They’d been isolated, tortured, forced to do his bidding. Even Tiv had been his prisoner once, but her experience had been short and easy compared to the rest. For all of them, Akavi’s return was a nightmare come true.
And Tiv was their Leader. It was up to Tiv to handle this for all of them.
“So,” she said, “what does that mean? What are we going to do?”
Grid looked up. “We need to tighten our security protocols. I thought I would have noticed if something like this happened.”
Grid had detected it, in the early days, when Vaurian angels tried to befriend the Seven and gain access to the lair. Most of them had posed as survivors like Yonne Qun, and the Seven usually all rotated between cities, all of them scoping out each potential ally in turn. Grid had rooted out several agents as soon as they saw them. Grid could see the ansible network, and that meant angels, connected to that network through the uplinks in their heads, looked different. And they’d all agreed that no one but the Seven was allowed into the lair without Grid present to vet them as they entered. A Vaurian could disguise themselves as one of the Seven, but a Vaurian who hadn’t left the lair through the airlock wouldn’t be
able to use that method to come back in.
But Akavi had been cleverer than the agents they’d discovered. Akavi hadn’t tried to go in. Akavi had worked with Luellae and only Luellae. She’d found some way of convincing Luellae not to tell the rest of the Seven about her presence. Tiv supposed Akavi must have gotten good at telling Luellae what she wanted to hear.
“You’re all missing the point,” said Luellae. “It’s not just that Akavi’s alive and trying to track us down. It’s that he’s trying to influence us. I fell for it. All this time, when I said we needed to be more aggressive, actually fight instead of being a delivery service, I meant it. I always thought that. But Akavi – this person who I trusted, who I didn’t know was Akavi – was encouraging me the whole time. Telling me I was right. Telling me you were all fools if you didn’t listen. You know what that means, don’t you? You know what that means he wants.”
Picket turned to her. “He wants to stop us, obviously. What else would he want?”
“World domination?” Weaver suggested, unhelpfully.
“No,” said Prophet, still staring at nothing.
Everybody, even Daeis, turned to look at Prophet. She curled one of her small braids around her hand, pulling and fidgeting at it. She was very far into the trancelike state she got when she was seeing a lot of things at once. Too much data, not enough context or pattern to make sense of it.
“I don’t know what he wants,” said Prophet. “But it’s not just about stopping us. There are so many things he wants. They jumble together, and sometimes they’re in one order, sometimes another.” She covered her face, pressing her hands to her forehead as if it hurt. Maybe it did. “He wants to stop us, but that’s not all, and not right away. He wants to stop us and help us. He wants to stop Yasira and help her – I can’t tell.” Her hands dropped away and she shook her head violently. “I’m not even seeing what he wants. Just glimpses of things he’ll do, or did, or might do, and none of it makes any sense. I’m sorry.”
“We don’t need prophecies to make sense of this,” Luellae insisted. “It’s obvious. Akavi is a piece of shit who manipulates everyone, and he wants us to go to war. To start a revolution – that’s what she was always talking about when I was with her. And if Akavi wants us to do that, it must be because Akavi gets some advantage from it. Maybe it would make us off-balance, easier to control. Easier to hurt. I…” Her face twisted. She looked like she might cry, but Luellae was too bullish to let herself do so in front of everyone. “I believed going to war was the right thing to do. I still want it to be the right thing. But if Akavi wants it, then it can’t be. He hates us all. He must want us to destroy ourselves.”
“Must he?” said Splió, looking up from his morose reverie. “Seems to me Akavi’s the type who plays a bunch of head games at once. You heard what Prophet said. We can’t assume the stuff he said to you is his only–”
“I know what I heard,” Luellae snapped.
Grid held up a hand. “Not to change the subject, but before we make any big decisions, I want to know what happened with the gone people.”
Everyone looked between Yasira, who was still crying, and Tiv. Tiv opened her mouth, preparing to take responsibility. “We went out and talked to a group of gone people, but we were interrupted. I’m not sure–”
Yasira brushed her sleeve furiously across her eyes and sat up straighter. Something blazed in her expression. “I’m sure.”
There was a general, collective raising of eyebrows.
“The gone people don’t care about this war,” said Yasira. “They aren’t planning a fight. They’re planning a second miracle.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment.
“I’ve seen that,” Prophet whispered, moved or disturbed. “But I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
“Putting the Chaos Zone back in order, you mean?” said Picket.
“No,” said Yasira. “Don’t you see? There’s no order. Order is a lie.” Grid, who liked to work very hard to keep their team in order, frowned, but Yasira barrelled on. “Order’s what the angels wanted, having us all under their control, but there were always things out of place, even before the Plague. Break those things up and they’ll turn into crumbs, more and smaller. Angels can’t have order and we can’t either. But we can have a better chaos.” She wiped her eyes again, but her voice was low and urgent and clear. “That’s what I did. They can’t do something as big as what I did. It’s more about growing better food, better shelter, more of what everyone needs to survive. But it’s bigger than what anyone else down here can do alone. And it sends a message that things can change. Fighting a losing battle isn’t change. This is.”
The team stirred, absorbing this. Grid made several frantic notes.
Prophet opened her eyes, and for a moment it seemed like she and Yasira were having a conversation all their own, like they were examining a map together that no one else could see. “There will still be a battle.”
“I know.”
“The angels will try to stop them.”
Gone people were inherently heretical. The angels mostly left them alone; there were too many to easily exterminate, and they likely wouldn’t understand anything that the angels tried to do to them as a deterrent. But a big gathering of gone people like Yasira had described, doing something magical and obviously purposeful, that was another thing. Angels would flock to a gathering like that for sure.
Picket tilted his head, troubled. “Okay, but what does this mean for us? The gone people are doing something. The other survivors are doing something. We signed up for this so that we could make a difference in the Chaos Zone. We’re not going to sit at the sidelines and let them do it all themselves, are we? That’s not what you’re saying.”
“Better that than playing right into Akavi’s hands,” Luellae growled.
“No.” Yasira straightened up. It had been so long since Tiv saw determination like this on Yasira’s face. Maybe it was only one of the parts of her, but it still made her glow. “The gone people barely understand that there’s a risk. They’re doing the right thing, but they have no idea what they’re up against. I’m going to be there. I’m going to protect them.”
Splió drew back. “Do you think that’s a good idea? The angels will have guns. They’ll have–”
“I know what I’m capable of,” Yasira snapped.
This was not at all what she had just said in the elevator a moment ago. Tiv frowned, disturbed. But she did know Yasira was capable of miracles – she only hadn’t thought Yasira was so confident. Maybe some parts of her were confident, and some weren’t. She broke in firmly before the argument could escalate. “I didn’t have time to report it before Luellae came in, but while Yasira and I were out, there was an altercation between us and an armed angel. You didn’t see what Yasira did. She uprooted half the park. We got away without a scratch on us. If she thinks she can do this, she can do it.”
“Which doesn’t change the fact that it’s what Akavi wants–” Luellae argued.
“Is it?” Grid shot back. They stood up, capping the pen they’d been frantically writing with, apparently sick of this. “All we have about that is your word. And you’re the one who broke security protocols to talk to this person who turned out to be Akavi. How do we know this isn’t you betraying us–”
Luellae leapt to her feet, preparing to shout back.
Tiv banged her gavel.
“No one,” Tiv said into the sudden silence, “is going to accuse anyone else on the team of betraying us. Without a very good reason.”
Luellae and Grid – and most of the rest of the Seven, for that matter – looked at her resentfully.
Tiv took a deep breath. She felt shaky inside, but she didn’t want to let on. She was called Leader here. People would look to her to keep them all on track. “Here’s what we know. We know the gone people are planning something. We know Akavi is alive, and he’s trying to mess with us. We know Akavi is the type who messes with people’s heads.”
She pointed the gavel at Grid. “And who tries to turn them against each other. To make them doubt themselves. We’re not going to do that here. We’re going to do what we think is right.” She lowered the gavel, willing her hand not to shake. She hoped she was guiding the team in the right direction. She hoped any of what she’d said even made sense. “So, let’s stick to finding out what that is.”
Luellae and Grid looked back and forth, first at her, then at each other. Grid was the first to break eye contact, settling back down and starting to flip through one of the war room’s piles of notes. “If we do want to help the gone people, we can make this into an organized effort. Akavi won’t expect us to do that, since he didn’t know it was one of our options. We can let the survivors know what we’re doing. With any luck, we can find some way for them and the gone people to work together. Coordinate that, instead of just ferrying supplies.”
“We can heal them,” Weaver suggested. “You can move them around, Blur. We can use our powers to help.”
“The angels are finite in number,” said Prophet dreamily, staring into space. “Large, but finite. They can’t be everywhere at once. If there was a coordinated set of actions over a large enough area–”
“We can’t,” said Luellae. “Don’t you get it? If we fight, if we do anything even a little bit like fighting, we’re playing into Akavi’s hands–”
“I don’t care,” said Yasira. She stood up from her chair. “I’m done lying around in my bedroom, doing nothing about the problem I helped start. I can’t force any of you to work with me. But I’m doing this. And none of you can stop me.”
Luellae drew back. Many of the other team members, even the ones who’d been on board, raised their eyebrows.
Yasira stalked past them – towards her room, Tiv noted, despite what she’d said – and did not look back.
“Yasira–” Tiv started, reaching for her, but Yasira wasn’t listening anymore, even to her.
“Guess we’re not a team, after all,” Luellae muttered under her breath. “Savior.”
