by Ada Hoffmann
After the meeting broke up, Tiv got up to check on Luellae. There were a lot of people on the team right now who needed a check-in, but probably Luellae most of all. Tiv couldn’t imagine what she’d been through, being held captive by Akavi for so long, only to find out he was still influencing her even after she was freed.
Tiv wasn’t even sure Luellae was wrong about this. Maybe they were playing into Akavi’s hands. But Akavi was tricky; he was the kind of person who could want a lot of things at once – the kind who could take advantage of a situation’s outcome no matter what it was. It was good to think about what Akavi might do, but Tiv didn’t want the team to let that paralyze them. Not when Yasira, in particular, had finally found the wherewithal to do something.
She found Luellae sitting in one of the lair’s less-traveled spots, a nook next to the broken-down remains of the prayer machine. Luellae had curled in on herself on the floor between the machine and the wall, and her shoulders were shaking. Tiv took a step back. Luellae didn’t like people seeing her cry, and Tiv didn’t want to intrude on her like this.
But as Tiv backed away, she saw the Four approaching from the opposite direction.
“Blur,” said Prophet, who was walking ahead of the rest for once. She carefully knelt across from Luellae, and Luellae looked up at her, furious and embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”
Luellae wiped angrily at her eyes. “For what?”
“All you wanted was to be taken seriously,” said Prophet.
Prophet spoke strangely like this sometimes, assuming a shared context that wasn’t actually apparent to anyone who didn’t see the world seconds or hours or days in advance.
“That’s not it at all,” said Luellae. “Forget it.”
“We’re not going to forget it,” said Grid. Their face was sterner than Prophet’s, and their arms were crossed. “There were holes in your story back there. We had a protocol, you know? That any mortal down there who gets close to us has to be vetted by the group. We knew there were Vaurians out there. Why didn’t you tell us about this sooner, Blur?”
Luellae buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know.”
Picket stepped forward, leaning against the wall next to Prophet. “He’s a manipulator,” he said matter-of-factly – it seemed to be directed both at Luellae and the rest of the Four. “He’s good at what he does. You might not even have noticed what he was doing. But if you can figure it out–”
“I’m a manipulator,” Luellae snapped. She looked up at the four of them, red-eyed, defiant. “You don’t understand.”
Grid was not mollified. “Help us, Blur. Help us understand.”
“I’m not like you.”
“Not like what?” said Weaver, who’d been hanging back nervously behind the rest of the group, scratching at herself. “Not a prisoner? You were totally a prisoner.”
“I wasn’t a prisoner because of Outside.” Luellae bared her teeth, and it all began tumbling out of her. “I never studied that part of Talirr’s work. I studied normal physics. Non-heretical physics. But I was also studying you. That’s what Akavi wanted me for.” She took a ragged breath, then pointed at them, one at a time. “Grid, you can’t stand it if things are out of order. Picket, you use games and math as a coping mechanism; you’ll wither away if you don’t get them. Prophet, you manage people’s emotions because you don’t want to think about your own. Weaver, you’ll self-harm at the drop of a penny, and you don’t try to stop yourself because you know the other three will fix it for you. Akavi didn’t know you when he kidnapped you, but I did. He kept me a prisoner so I could tell him all about you. And the others too, Splió and Daeis and Yasira fucking Shien. So I could tell him your weak spots. So he could torture you better.”
She clearly expected them to flinch away, but they didn’t. Tiv did a little though, outside Luellae’s sight. Was that why Luellae had always been so standoffish, so reluctant to trust the rest of the team? Because she knew she’d helped make the rest of them suffer?
Prophet reached out and cupped Luellae’s face gently in her hand. “And he knew your weak spots, too. That’s how he got to you.”
Luellae jerked back. “Don’t play like that with me. Don’t pretend I’m the victim–”
“Aren’t you?” Picket countered. “He kidnapped us all. He hurt us all. You just got a different flavor.”
“Kick me off the team,” Luellae demanded. “You don’t listen to me anyway. Just let me go.”
“Do I get a say in this?” Tiv asked, abruptly.
Luellae whirled around to face her, going paler than ever.
“No,” she snapped. “You’re not a real leader and you never listened to me. And you’re not one of the people I hurt. You don’t get to forgive me.”
But this was so much like one of Yasira’s meltdowns, so much like the way Yasira liked to verbally beat herself up. Even though the cause was different, Tiv recognized it.
“You don’t have to stay,” Tiv said softly. “That’s never what I wanted. We’ve all been kept prisoner – I don’t want to do that to anyone else. If you want to leave, go somewhere else; we’ll support you. We’ll help you find a good place. If you want to sit out this mission and decide the rest later, I get that, too. But if you want to join, then of course you can join. I’ve been trying my best to keep everyone working together, but I never wanted to force anyone. I never wanted to be that kind of leader.”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” Luellae howled, burying her face in her hands again. “He’ll get us if we fight and he’ll get us if we don’t. None of it’s going to help. None of it. Ever!”
But when Prophet reached out gently to hug her, she hugged back, as violently as a snake crushing its prey. The rest of the Four joined in, and after a moment so did Tiv, all of them taking her in their arms, holding each other as best they could.
People of the Chaos Zone,
This letter is from your Savior.
I want you to know that the name you have given me is a lie. If I could, I would reach out my hand and press the universe’s levers to save every one of you. That is not in anyone’s power, even mine. The universe, Chaos or not, doesn’t work that way.
But I can help you save yourselves.
There are so many of you with the power to change things. The gone people, the ones that you least understand, have that power even more. In a week’s time, they will gather together and make a change. This change will not save you. But it will make the monsters a little smaller, the ground more full of fruit. It will give you just a little more room to breathe.
The angels are going to try to stop them.
There will be a fight. But, though the angels try to convince you otherwise, there are a finite number of them. Even they can’t be everywhere in the Chaos Zone at once.
You want me to fight for you, to lead you into deadly battle against the angels for a food printer or for the return of a prisoner or for freedom. It is not possible for me to do this, not for all of you, not for an objective that would be worth the cost. But there is another way.
When the angels try to stop the gone people, I will be there, joining that fight. It will be a fight that takes place in many locations at once. It will be a fight that is only possible with the gone people’s abilities and mine combined. And it will engage the angels, not all the angels, but many.
There will be that many fewer angels across the rest of the planet, guarding what they usually guard, enforcing what they always enforce.
If you have ever wanted to rise up, in large ways or small – to seize the necessities that the angels withhold, to protest openly, to make a break for the border, to rescue someone – do it in one week’s time. The Seven will work with you as they always do and will supply you as well as they can. Make no mistake: it will still be an immense risk, a deadly risk. But the angels will be spread as thinly as they ever are. If you ever wanted to take the risk, this is the time.
Change will come, again and again, in ways that some of us
can instigate but none can control. The angels want to control it by killing us. The secret they pretend not to know – the secret that Destroyer always knew – is that even killing all of us wouldn’t give them back control. The secret is that the angels have already lost this war; they will never have control again.
In a week’s time, let’s show them the secret is True.
CHAPTER 13
Now
As Enga Afonbataw Konum, Marshal of Nemesis, did her daily exercises, something in her internal circuitry chimed.
She hopped up from the training floor where she’d been doing variations on pushups with her elaborately modified mechanical arms, flipping dexterously from one position to another. It was a dim room, because Enga’s sensory preferences ran that way, with lines drawn across the floor to facilitate different exercises, and equipment stored at the sides. She was alone in it, which was a blessed relief. Enga had gotten no better, over these past six months, at training and leading other recruits. Maybe it was Irimiru’s way of punishing her for some unknown crime. Deliberately placing Enga in a job she wasn’t suited for, so as to have a sensible-looking reason to do something worse to her later. Overseers of Nemesis were famous for tricks like that.
Y, she text-sent in the direction of Irimiru, who had initiated the call.
Enga, sent Irimiru curtly. Somehow Irimiru was able to make even a text-sending feel curt. As you requested, I am informing you that one of our agents has sighted a Vaurian who she believes to be Akavi Averis.
Enga lurched up to full alertness. WHERE, SIR?
In a park near Hunne. Do not move to intercept him yet. The agent who identified him claims he used some Outside ability to teleport away. We have dispatched scouts and surveillance specialists to the area and are further analyzing the agent’s sensory recordings, but there is a seventy percent likelihood he is no longer there. You will be kept updated. Do nothing, but consider yourself on alert.
YES SIR, said Enga. She wanted more information, but the connection closed.
How could Akavi have gained some Outside ability? That made no sense. Only certain kinds of mortal heretic could do that. Angels like Akavi had filters built into their brains to stop them from perceiving Outside at all.
Maybe he’d modified himself, in his exile, more thoroughly than anyone suspected. But Akavi was disgusted by Outside and its heresies. To imagine him willingly welcoming it into his mind – that beggared belief.
Maybe the angel who’d spotted him was confused. Or full of shit. Maybe she hadn’t even really spotted him at all.
Enga scowled, and then threw herself into her calisthenics routine in an even greater fury than before.
Forty-Nine Years Ago
Long before the idea of becoming an angel had ever entered Enga’s head, she’d been a fitness instructor in a country called Kutaga, specializing in martial arts. She’d been non-neurotypical, but not very visibly. She could speak in words and smile at people when her profession required it. She’d been excellent at her job and very disciplined with its rules – the proper physical forms, the safety regulations, the rankings and tests that each student passed as they grew in skill – and despite her quirks she’d attracted a few friends and admirers. There had been one friend in particular. One man, about her age, also a martial artist, who’d arrived in town and become fascinated with her. He’d whispered flattering words into her naive little ears.
He’d introduced himself as Omhon Pejaydonay Uwkhew, a trainer from the nearby city of Yuyphunsiy. She’d thought at first that he wanted to date her, and she wasn’t interested that way. But he’d cleared up that misunderstanding with great ease and speed; he knew how to be direct in a way that made her feel comfortable, which was rare. He’d won her over. He wasn’t after a girlfriend. He was intrigued by her in another way.
“You’re wasted on fitness training,” he’d said, over drinks. “Look at your discipline, your precision. The way you endure, even when your brain overwhelms you. That’s rare. You could be much more.”
“I like fitness training,” she’d said, uncertain.
He’d smiled winningly. “Just think about it.”
Omhon had let the matter drop entirely for months. He’d trained alongside her. He was good at martial arts. And that was weird, since he’d called it unworthy. But Enga was a little lonely despite her successes. She wasn’t good with people. Omhon made her feel like she was good, at least, with him.
They’d developed a real trust. She’d opened up to him about things that she normally didn’t like to talk about. Her loneliness. Her fears. Her difficulty trusting people, or really even understanding them. Not a lot of people in Kutaga were open about being non-neurotypical. The ones that did talk about it tended to be interested in science, or in activism, reforming Kutaga’s disability assistance policies to better resemble more liberal countries like Riayin. Enga wasn’t interested in any of those things. She just wanted to fight, and that meant a lot of neurotypicals, and a lot of time being alone, recovering.
“You’re so good at this,” said Omhon – just once, months after he’d first mentioned it. It wasn’t pressure, surely, if he mentioned it so rarely. “I see why you love it. But there’s something exceptional about you, something the fitness industry can’t fully hold. Your intelligence, your discipline, your strength – those are something truly special. Bigger entities might want them. The Gods might. You could use those strengths in a way that means something.”
“Teaching people to defend themselves means something,” Enga replied, unnerved.
Omhon chuckled self-deprecatingly. “It does. I’m sorry, you’re right; personal development is meaningful, too. I just gush sometimes.”
“It’s okay,” Enga said. She wasn’t sure if it was, but that was the standard response neurotypicals expected, so she said it. And Omhon went back to being a pleasant friend who didn’t speak of such things.
For a week.
At the end of that time, the trouble started. It seemed to have little to do with Omhon at first. Only the local police, coming by for a random financial audit. She let them in, fearful as anyone would be when auditors came knocking, but she knew that everything would be in order for them. Enga followed the rules.
“What’s this?” said the head auditor, holding up a file Enga had never seen.
“I don’t know,” said Enga.
“You don’t know?” the head auditor said incredulously.
“What am I supposed to know?”
“Don’t play mind games with me, Miss Konum. This was in your own cabinet, locked with your own key.”
It was exactly as nauseating and surreal as a nightmare. She watched as document after incriminating document came out of her own filing cabinets, places to which only she had access. Clear evidence of embezzlement, and worse. Money that had gone into crime, into arms deals, into the pockets of child traffickers and other groups so vile Enga barely understood them.
“This is ridiculous,” she protested. “I would never do any of that. Someone’s framing me.”
“Anyone you know who’d have a motive to do that, Miss Konum?”
She blinked, bewildered. “No.”
“Well, it may be a frame. But we’ve been looking for the source of some of these financial crimes for a long time. You’ll get a fair trial, but at the moment I’m going to need to take you in to give a statement.” The head auditor fished out a pair of handcuffs. “Please don’t resist.”
Enga didn’t.
Jail was a sensory hell she could barely make sense of. There were noises, clanging and shouting and wailing that wouldn’t ever stop. Everything was hard and cold, too bright or too dark, and everyone was angry for reasons she barely understood. Enga spent most of it crying. So much for the physical and mental disciplines that Omhon thought she had. In a real emergency, Enga folded.
But it was Omhon who bailed her out the next morning, and who helped her into a car and a quiet room, all apologetic concern. He gave her a drink of
water. He let her phone her friends.
Her friends mostly did not pick up the phone.
One did, in such a torrent of tears that Enga could scarcely understand what she was saying.
“I don’t understand,” said the woman on the phone, who had taught kickboxing with Enga for years. “I thought I knew you. I knew you were weird, but I never thought this. How could you do this? How could you say the things you said–”
“Said?” Enga replied, more afraid than ever. She couldn’t remember saying anything bad to this woman. She understood framing people for crimes, even if she didn’t understand why anyone would do it to her. But faking communications – how was that even possible? “Rinba, what did I say?”
“Fuck you for pretending not to know,” said Rinba, and hung up.
The few other friends who bothered returning her calls were similar. By the end of it, Enga was in a worse state than she’d been in while jailed. She had begun to cry uncontrollably in front of Omhon, melting down. She slumped onto his table and started to hit her head against it, rhythmically. She did not understand any of this, and now she was humiliating herself over it, and that made it even worse.
“It’s all right,” said Omhon, his hand warm on her shoulder, as she wailed and hurt herself. “Enga. It’s all right. There’s a way out of this.”
That didn’t help much, so he stayed, undemanding, unjudgmental. How could he not judge her when everyone else did? She did not understand it. He stayed until the worst of the meltdown had played itself out, until the violent mental pain had receded to a dull ache, and she sat with her arms folded on the table, resting her sore head on them, no longer crying. Only blank and heavy and miserable.
“What way?” she said when she could speak. “What fucking way?”
“I don’t know who’s framing you, or what their motive could be,” said Omhon. His voice was very calm, very rational. “But I’ve seen things like this happen before. If you go back, tell them everything you know, get a fair trial – well, you could make it out. But a person clever enough to do this to you in the first place isn’t likely to let themselves be caught. Even if you’re acquitted of most of it, you’ll still have a record. More often than not, these things don’t end well. Not for mortals.”
