by Ada Hoffmann
Now
Once they got back aboard the Talon, Akavi sealed the airlock and resumed his natural Vaurian form, the translucent, androgynous appearance that Elu had once found so beautiful. The blood on him didn’t disappear, though.
“Let me get a medical bot–” said Elu.
“I’ll get the medical bots. I don’t trust you right now, for obvious reasons. Sit.”
He gestured to one of the chairs in the little parlor. Elu sat on it and watched numbly as Akavi fired up the medical bots and disappeared into his room.
He should have realized earlier that, with Akavi, this was how it would be. He’d known perfectly well for more than fifty years the kind of person Akavi was. Akavi saw people only in terms of the levers that could be pulled to make them useful. He’d been kind to Elu, doling out just enough praise to keep him infatuated and grateful, all these years. Not because he liked Elu. Not because he liked to be kind. But because Akavi collected people and used them for his own ends, and Elu had a capacity for loyalty he’d found desirable. If that strategy stopped working, cruelty would serve Akavi’s ends just as well. If Elu’s loyalty stopped working, then he would be worth nothing in Akavi’s eyes at all.
Akavi had never made a secret of any of this. He’d named his very ship after it. The Menagerie – a collection of life forms, kept as possessions.
Elu had watched him manipulate mortals, in his job as an Inquisitor, for fifty years. Of course he’d manipulated Elu and Enga and literally everyone else around him in just the same way. Elu had known that already, on some level. He’d had all the information needed to know it. He didn’t know why he hadn’t acted as though he knew. He’d still loved Akavi and tried to save him from termination, tried to build a life together. Tried to accept the kindness and affection he doled out, even when he knew already that it wasn’t real.
Maybe Elu was just stupid. Maybe Elu deserved this.
CHAPTER 15
Now
Tiv sat curled up at the foot of Yasira’s bed, her legs folded under her on the floor, her head resting on the bedspread.
“They’re in,” she said. “Most of them. It took some arguing, but the team’s in. We’re going to make this plan work.”
“That’s good,” said Yasira tonelessly.
It seemed like Yasira had been able to push herself so far, and no farther. She’d been so powerful and forceful today, from the moment she set out to find the gone people to the moment she stormed out of the meeting. But it had taken a lot out of her. Now she lay nearly motionless on her bed, knees pulled up to her chest, eyes half-shut. She had pulled her weighted blanket up over herself and only half her face was showing.
“How’s everybody?” Tiv asked. “In there.”
She was still getting used to the thought that there was more than one of Yasira now. She still didn’t know much about how it worked. Were there some people who had energy and wanted to go do things, and others who didn’t? Or was the exhaustion a physical thing, more or less evenly distributed?
It felt like it would be rude to pry about things like that. Or was it the opposite? Maybe it was rude not to ask. Maybe not asking would mean she was ignoring the truth, refusing to think about any part of it that affected her.
“I don’t know.” Yasira waved a hand vaguely. “All kinds of ways.”
“Does it bother you when I ask?”
“No.” Yasira hesitated. “Yes. Some of me. Not for the reasons you think. Some people–” She pulled the weighted blanket a little further up over her face, muffling her voice. “Some people really want to do this. Those are the people you saw in the park. Some people don’t, but they were overruled. I’m not used to overruling myself. I don’t know if this is how it’s supposed to work. But I’m done with the overruling for now, so everybody’s just a ball of chaos again.”
Tiv smiled slightly up at her. “Can we make it a better chaos?”
Yasira paused, under the blanket, and then rolled over onto her belly. “We can’t. Maybe me. If I could get my shit together.”
“You’re Riayin. There must be books about this. How to get everyone to live together and be functional. I know it’s not the same as having a neurotutor who shares your experience, but I could steal you some books, at least.”
“Why are you doing this?” said Yasira. Her face was still partly under the weighted blanket, and it muffled her words. “Pretending to be nice to me.”
Tiv frowned deeply. “Yasira…”
At the beginning of their relationship, Yasira had said things like this all the time. Tiv would say something kind or caring, and Yasira would accuse her of not really meaning it. Of being a “good girl” – whatever that meant – and saying what was expected of her, rather than meaning it in her heart.
Tiv understood where that came from. In spite of all of Riayin’s supposed success with neurodiversity, Yasira had been bullied growing up. She’d experienced all sorts of fake kindnesses. She’d probably had to fake kindness herself, even to the bullies, when she’d rather have fought back. It was natural that she couldn’t always trust kindness.
It was natural, but Tiv hated it. Tiv didn’t say things that she didn’t mean. She’d had a talk with Yasira, long before the Pride of Jai imploded. When you say things like that, she’d explained, you are calling me a liar. Is that what you want to call me? Is that what you think I am? And Yasira had said, no, it was not what she really thought. She had agreed to stop saying it. But Tiv could tell she still thought it, sometimes, at moments of great distress.
Maybe some parts of her were thinking it and others weren’t, now. Tiv was still trying to wrap her head around this.
“We’ve talked about this,” said Tiv. “I know it’s hard for you to believe. But I don’t make things up just to be nice. When I tell you I care about you, it’s because I do. When I tell you I want us to make it through this together, it’s because I do. And when I tell you we might be able to find resources to help us, it’s because I just realized we can do that and it seems like a good idea to me. Okay? I know trust is hard. You don’t have to trust me to the end of the world. But I wish you could trust that I say what I mean.”
Yasira pushed herself up, with some difficulty, to sit. She hunched there in the bed, pulling the blanket clumsily around herself. “How can you love me when there isn’t even a me? Just a bunch of fragments floating around, and a whole shit-ton of power that nobody understands.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” said Tiv. “But everybody’s at war with themselves sometimes, right? You just have that a lot more. I love what I see when I look at you. How brave you are, and how much you doubt. How you saved me back there, and on the Talon too. How you try so hard to save everybody, even when you’re so weak you can’t get out of bed. And I feel love. I’d like to understand you more, I’d like to get to know the different people in there for themselves, but I don’t think you have to understand why someone is the way they are, or how it all works, to love them. It just happens. You just do.”
Yasira gave her a small, frightened, wistful look, and then she curled further up, staring down at the blankets. She took a long breath, building up to say something difficult.
“I try to be Savior,” she said at last. “But I can’t fucking save anything. You’re the one who saved me. Without even doing anything. You don’t know it, but you did.”
“How?” said Tiv, but she understood a thing or two about how mentally ill people might be driven to harm themselves, and she had a sinking feeling that she already knew.
“When Outside broke me. On the Talon. It could have broken me further. It could have broken me into nothing, so I wouldn’t feel anything the angels did to me. It gave me that choice. But I remembered you were still on the ship, a prisoner. You – needed me.”
Tiv let out a long, painful breath. That was the kind of thing she’d thought Yasira meant, but it still felt like being punched in the gut.
“I still do,” she said. “You haven’t been down there with the
survivors. You don’t know how much you mean to them. So much of the time, that’s what keeps them going. Just knowing there’s a Savior who exists out there. You’ve already done so much, and now you give them hope by living, even if you never do any other miracles again. You give us hope, too. The team. Me. We all need you.”
Yasira looked back up at her, her long black hair hanging in tangles over her face. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
She nodded, and sat up straighter. “But I will do more. I can.”
“I know.”
“Will you be there with me?”
“Yes.” Tiv ached to take Yasira’s hands, to press her close and reassure her with her body, but she knew better. “Promise.”
“Even if it means–” Yasira took another breath, shivering slightly. “To do this thing I’m doing with the gone people, I’m going to have to use my power more. I should have done it already. I’m scared to do it. I shouldn’t be doing it without knowing what I’m doing. I don’t know what this power means. What it will do to me. I could change even more, and I don’t know…”
Tiv wanted to say, yes, I promise. I will stay with you no matter what you become. It would be true in all the ways that mattered to Tiv, because it was what her heart felt. But Yasira was literal by nature, and she could easily come up with far-fetched scenarios in which Tiv shouldn’t promise a thing like that. Unlikely imaginary futures where she turned into a monster who couldn’t talk or think, or a ravening murderer, or any number of other kinds of things Tiv shouldn’t stay with. Tiv didn’t seriously think those things were possible, but the fear of them might be very real in Yasira’s heart. They were dealing with Outside. Who knew what was really going to happen?
“Then I’ll be with you while we figure that out,” she said instead. And that was true enough for both of them; she felt it in her bones. “Together. Promise.”
Yasira shrugged out of the blanket and crawled forward on the bedspread. She took Tiv’s hand. She leaned in, and she kissed Tiv, long and hard, with a sort of desperation. As if Tiv was the floating thing she clung to in an endless stormy sea.
Tiv kissed back. She didn’t know if this was all of Yasira, or just one of her, or a group like the group that had taken charge in the park. She would learn to figure those things out. But here, now, this was enough. They were together. They would find the way through.
As the week drew on, Tiv sat at the head of the table in the war room, feverishly drawing and re-drawing charts and plans. She was Leader, and it was the Leader’s job to coordinate this mess, even if this mess was a patchwork of different grassroots efforts that covered the whole of the Chaos Zone. Grid sat at her right hand, flipping through an ever-increasing sheaf of papers and charts. Every time someone went out to make their rounds, more offers of help and requests for backup came in from more and more cities. So many people in the Chaos Zone had wanted to rise up like this, if only Tiv and the Seven would help them instead of telling them to keep their heads low. So many people saw the opportunity now, and the strength in numbers they’d have if they and the gone people rose up all at once.
But there were drawbacks to scheduling a rebellion like this. Grid knew how to keep Vaurian angels and spies out of the lair itself, but Grid had failed to stop what Akavi did to Luellae. And the local groups that the Seven were in contact with didn’t have a Grid. Writing a letter to them all, as Yasira had, put them all at risk; it was virtually certain that the angels had already read the letter and were planning their own next moves accordingly. In the days before the protest itself, Tiv was sure they would see more raids, more captures, more brutality.
They were in a war. People were going to die no matter what they did. Tiv just had to hope that the deaths would be worth something.
At Tiv’s left hand, Prophet sat, curled halfway into a ball on her chair, fingers pressed to her temples. It wasn’t fair to ask Prophet to sort through every possible action, to tell them with certainty what would work and what wouldn’t – Prophet’s powers didn’t work that way. But Prophet saw things, and now that the group was moving forward with something big, she was seeing more. She was trying the best she could to sort through all the conflicting visions in her head, to distil them into useful information when she could.
There was a big map of the Chaos Zone up on one of the war room’s makeshift walls, bigger than it had any right to be. It would overwhelm Tiv if she let it, the thought of just how big a fifth of a planet’s surface really was, how many cities, how many people. Even with Prophet and Splió’s vision, with Luellae’s ability to flit from place to place and the meta-portal’s ability to connect them all, Tiv would never see most of those people’s faces or hear their names. She would never even know most of the consequences of what she was doing.
They had a box of different-colored pins, and every time a new bit of information came in about a specific place, Grid got up and stuck a pin into the map. Red for a group that was planning an active, violent fight. Blue for a group that wanted backup for a nonviolent protest. Yellow for a group that requested weapons or special supplies. And so on. They weren’t all the way through yet, but there were already so many pins. And only nine people to handle them all – the Seven, Yasira, and Tiv.
Less than nine, since Yasira would be with the gone people, doing her own esoteric things.
There was no foolproof way to choose who could do the most good where. Each of them would have to go with their gut and then live with that choice. It was Daeis who chose first – getting up from where they’d been sitting, and pointing decisively at one red pin. A city called Küangge.
Splió, never far from Daeis’s side, stood up and took them gently by the shoulders. “Are you sure, hon?”
Daeis nodded once, decisively, feet planted.
Grid stuck a black pin next to Küangge’s red one. They only had nine black pins. Küangge was one of the cities with a good reason for violent uprising, and a specific goal. In the building that anchored Küangge’s relief station, where the meager food and water rations for the survivors were kept, the angels had also been keeping hostages. Six of them, women and children and luminaries of the community, who they’d declared would be tortured if the citizens continued in their heresies. Maybe put on those daily broadcasts, to make an example out of the whole city.
The other survivors were going to get them back.
Daeis knew how to communicate with Outside monsters – bigger ones than the little creatures they kept as pets inside the lair. In a battle like the one in Küangge, Daeis’s monster friends might be able to turn the tide. But it was risky; they’d never actually tried to lead monsters in battle before. And angels could defeat even the biggest monsters, given sufficient firepower and a bit of luck.
Luellae stood at the corner of the room, as standoffish as usual, arms crossed. Her confession with the Four had taken a weight from her shoulders, and she’d decided she wanted to fight, after all – better than sitting and feeling sorry for herself. But Luellae was still very aware of the stakes here, and of how easy it would be to fail.
“I can go to a lot of these places in a night,” she said. “I can get people past guards and barriers, pull them out of trouble if they need rescue. I could do more good that way than by fighting directly, but only if I know where to go, otherwise I’d just be running around aimlessly. Splió, if you’re by the door, will you be able to tell me where to go?”
Splió ran an anxious hand through his thick hair; he was still preoccupied with Daeis, his other hand remaining firm at their shoulder. “I mean, I can’t, like… see everything at once. I can’t tell you where the best place is; that’s too subjective anyway. But I know where all the places with the pins in them are. I could cycle through them and let you know when I see one that needs you.”
“Good enough,” said Luellae, rolling her shoulders in resignation.
Weaver fidgeted wildly in her chair, peering over Grid’s shoulder at the requests from the different cities. S
he was starting to pick at her skin damagingly. Picket scarcely moved, even paler than usual, staring into space.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Who’s going to need me? I… My powers come with collateral. It needs… specific circumstances. I don’t know…”
Picket had been fascinated by the mechanics of war, back when it was an intellectual exercise. He didn’t seem so fascinated now. Picket’s powers could be helpful in a fight, but only in an area of a certain size, only by changing that area so drastically that it became deadly to the people inside. Even if angels were openly attacking people, it would have to be a certain kind of attack for Picket’s powers to be a good option. They would have to do it in a specific way.
“You can stay here,” said Splió. “If I’m looking for openings for Luellae, I can look for openings for you, too. We’ll figure something out.”
Picket nodded grimly and buried his face in his hands.
“You don’t have to do this,” Tiv added, more gently. “I’m not going to make anyone fight.”
“What about me?” said Weaver, her voice rising to a nervous squeak. “I can heal, I want to heal, but everybody’s going to need healing. Prophet, can you see who’s going to need healing most?”
Prophet shook her head, wincing. “Everybody,” she murmured.
Splió and Daeis exchanged an uneasy glance.
“I could carry you around with me,” Luellae offered, but Weaver shook her head. Her powers were draining to use. A single small group of people with serious injuries, in a single place, was probably all she could heal before collapsing.
Tiv stared at her hands. These kinds of choices were inherently heavy, and she felt that weight, too. Tiv didn’t have special powers, just her own brain and her words. She didn’t know if that made the weight better or worse.
“I think,” she said, “we have to stop looking for the one best solution. Even if Prophet could see everything, I don’t think it works that way. If a bunch of different people are going to die without us, and there are more of them than we can actually help, there isn’t a solution to that. And it’s insulting to them, to the ones we don’t pick, to pretend that there is. You’ve seen the map and the battle plans. Where do you feel like you want to help, Weaver? In your heart.”
