by Ada Hoffmann
Weaver took a long breath, shut her eyes, and let it out again.
“Dasz,” she said. “They deserve it.”
Dasz, the city in Stijon where Akiujal had lived. Where he’d sacrificed a whole block full of lives, including his own, so that Tiv could escape. Because he believed, so fervently, that Tiv would help the people rise up.
For better or worse, they were all rising up now. She wished he could have seen it.
Tiv swallowed down the lump that had risen to her throat. “Yeah,” she said, looking down. “They do.”
In Qiel Huong’s home in Büata, she and her little group were conferring, crafting homemade protest signs and committing escape routes to memory. Qiel, and many others in Büata, had chosen to protest nonviolently. There wasn’t much in their particular city that could be gained by fighting, but freedom was as important here as anywhere, and the more places there were across the Chaos Zone where people demanded it, the better.
It was work that went long into the night, by the light of candles and makeshift lanterns. Everybody buzzed with a strange mix of elation and dread; everybody needed to talk to each other, to process what was coming, almost as much as they needed to make the signs. Nobody wanted to sleep.
Not until after midnight, when Mes De put the last finishing flourish on an intricate sign – SURVIVAL IS NOT HERESY, it said, the words stark black and white within a series of colored patterns and curlicues. Mes had found those kinds of patterns calming even before the Plague. He put the cap back on his marker pen, peered down at his handiwork with his tongue sticking out from the corner of his mouth, and then curled up over the top of it and was out like a light.
Bannah Nin looked down at him, her own legs pulled in tightly to her chest as she sorted water bottles and protective goggles into individual bins. She paused a moment, chewing her lip, and then looked up at Qiel.
“What do you think happened to that one angel?” she asked. “Elu? Do you think he’s okay?”
The lanterns were starting to flicker and die, casting the room into a deeper gloom than before. Qiel was one of the lucky ones; she had a big, undamaged house in the suburbs where she’d been able to invite a lot of her surviving friends to live. It was a good house, especially once they’d learned to use their Outside powers to keep infestations out. It was good because it was sturdy and comfortable, but also it was good because it was full of people, friends who would support and protect each other.
For all the good things Elu owned, Qiel didn’t think he’d ever had a house like hers. Whoever that person was, in the distance, who’d been storming towards them when Elu told them to run, Qiel didn’t think it was a friend.
But Qiel was a community leader, and it wasn’t always the right thing to do, wallowing and worrying like this. People like Bannah looked to Qiel when they wanted encouragement.
She looked up at Bannah with resolution on her face. “I don’t think any of us are okay until all of us are.”
It was a platitude, but it must have been the right one, because Bannah smiled sadly and nodded, like she’d said something wise.
* * *
“Are you sure you want to do this?” said Yonne Qun to his daughter, Genne. She had taken the copy of Yasira’s letter, when it arrived with them, and was holding it in a determined fist in the gloom of their living room.
“I’m sure,” she said, and it struck him all over again how young she was, barely a woman. She and her food-growing friends – many as young as her, but some older – had been risking themselves by using their powers in secret. He and others in the community had come to depend on them, despite the risk. To her, this new risk wasn’t any different. There were protests popping up all over the place, and she wanted to do her part. By growing food, in a gaggle of friends, right in front of the angels’ noses.
Qun had wanted to protect her. He had wanted Savior to swoop in with another piece of big, world-changing magic, precisely so that people like Genne didn’t have to risk themselves. Or, at least, to give them big enough weapons so that they stood a fighting chance. Qun did his best to protect his community, but the Plague had just been something that happened to them; it wasn’t their fault. Secretly, in his deepest heart, Qun didn’t think people like him and his daughter should be the ones who had to fix it.
But Genne felt differently. Genne had embraced this new form their community took, and when she looked at him now, she shone with purpose and determination. Genne wanted to fight for what she had. And she was young, but not so young that he could have taken that choice from her. Not too young to understand what it meant, or what the cost might be.
She looked at him now, careful and fragile. “You don’t approve, do you? You don’t want me to.”
Qun opened his arms and pulled her close.
“I just don’t want to lose you,” he confessed, when she embraced him back. He’d already lost her mother and so many other people, more than half the community. “But that’s selfish. My daughter, I want you to do what you believe in.”
Yasira didn’t want to be part of the planning. Her own role was unique, and it was complex enough to take all of her attention. If she had to think about everyone else who was rising up alongside her, risking themselves in a dozen different ways, she might falter.
Which was not to say she didn’t think about them. Plenty of pieces in the back of her head kept bringing it up.
She was outdoors, in the little grove with the archway, where she’d made the trees grow into strange shapes. It was lighter now, the sky a clear blue tinged with green, and, without the Gods’ battle raging overhead, even the non-Euclidean tangles of branches looked healthy and peaceful. In the open space at the center of the grove, Yasira practiced, barely understanding what she was practicing for. She had to shield the gone people while they did their ritual. She had a vague mental image of how that would work. She wasn’t at all sure how well that image would match up to reality.
Drawing on Outside, from where it always lay at the core of her being, she pushed energy out into a shape that felt like a shield.
The air shimmered in front of her in that shape. Little threads wove through it, in a shape a little bit like the branches above, twisting and solidifying in the air.
It can’t be that easy, something inside Yasira thought. We can’t just make things happen by thinking them. That doesn’t make sense. We can think of an infinite number of things – that would make us infinitely powerful.
I don’t think it’s infinite, said the Scientist, peering inward at where the power came from. Not technically. But it’s so big that it may as well be. The limiting factor isn’t the power itself, it’s our ability to focus and withstand it.
A little crowd of parts began to chatter at that. Masochistic parts of Yasira, those that weren’t even sure that they wanted to exist anyway. Is that so? We can withstand a lot.
The rest of Yasira quickly hushed them up.
Just because this looked like a shield didn’t mean it was one. Yasira bent down, picked up a pebble from the ground, and – concentrating on the shield – threw it. The pebble bounced off the shield as if it was a physical object, clattering harmlessly back down into the grass. Yasira didn’t feel the impact.
Behind her, she heard a familiar footstep, and she turned.
Tiv smiled sheepishly. She looked tired, but determined, and her hair was a mess. Tiv had been managing this entire operation, Yasira thought guiltily, while she’d been off in the woods or hiding in her room, navel-gazing. Tiv was beautiful and good. She was more than any of the parts of Yasira deserved.
“How’s it going?” said Tiv.
“I don’t know,” said Yasira. “Good. Maybe. I can do some of this, but I don’t know if it will be enough.”
“It will,” said Tiv, with a confidence Yasira didn’t think was based on anything intelligible.
What happens if it isn’t? said some part of her, deep down, something that rarely spoke. What if Yasira couldn’t actually defend all
the gone people single-handedly? The gone people would still do their ritual. The normal survivors would still rise up, everywhere, fighting for change. It would go a lot worse than it should, but they probably wouldn’t all die. The world, most likely, would still be changed.
What did the word enough even mean?
No part of Yasira, no matter how clever or anxious or confident or wise, had an answer to that.
Now that I have had the thought, I cannot get it out of my head.
I see them everywhere I turn. People who are like me now, because I forced them to be. People punished brutally, shot and gassed and starved and set on fire, for being like me. I did this to them. That is Truth.
The question, I suppose, is what to do about it.
Turn myself in? Flee in shame? These things would only embolden the gods. They are holding back now, in part, because they have not yet found me. They know that, were they to destroy this world, I could visit the same horrors on another, and another.
If I care at all about the people who were harmed here, I must see this through – I must keep the gods convinced I am a threat, about to strike again.
They are afraid of me.
Can I join the fight? Even though they call me Destroyer; even though Yasira does not want me back – could I use that fear to the common people’s benefit, instead of using them as tools?
But would that make it better?
Or worse?
– From the diaries of Dr Evianna Talirr
CHAPTER 16
Now
The day was deceptively bright and clear as Yasira and Tiv crept out of the lair to meet the gone people.
Yasira wanted to do her part of this alone – just her and the gone people. Her own presence, if discovered, would draw immense amounts of attention – and she was only risking it because she had the power to survive.
That was what the Strike Force insisted, at least, as they stepped out of the portal with Tiv at their side. They had the plan and the power. They’d tested their abilities as far as they could. They would make this work. But the rest of Yasira quailed, unwillingly drawn along. Their fear had grown more and more intense as this day drew closer.
Yasira did not want to admit how uncertain she was. She had made this whole plan based on a feeling. The Chaos Zone was her responsibility, but she hadn’t lived there, like the rest of the survivors. She hadn’t been going on missions there daily like the Seven. There was a lot about this that she couldn’t know in advance. She was just some girl, clever but out of her depth, the way she’d always been.
The portal spat her out from a little shed inside a woodsy park, with weedy flowers overgrowing the paths, strange little monsters the size of rabbits browsing in its tangles of leaves. The Strike Force immediately took in the setup, analyzing what might happen and what the biggest risks might be. A clump of gone people had gathered in an overgrown, grassy clearing in the park’s center, touching each other’s faces, milling around in some inscrutable form of preparation. There was enough around them, in the form of trees and tangled brush, to provide cover; they’d added to that, over the past day, tying vines and building earthen bulwarks to block the path of any strangers who might approach. From the outside of the park, what happened in the very center wouldn’t be visible. There were only a few paths by which there was room, for gone people crawling on their hands and knees under the vine-tangles and over the rocky earth, to enter the space. It would be relatively easy to defend those paths if angels tried to crawl in, and hard for angels to aim accurately if they shot from the outside. But those tangles of vines wouldn’t stop bullets or flame. And if the barrier was breached, it would be that much harder to make any escape.
Yasira hadn’t been sure if the gone people were aware enough to build even this level of defense, but it seemed that they were, and that calmed her.
Tiv had insisted on coming along, her head wrapped in one of those coverings that was so popular lately, her face masked.
“I’ll hide,” she’d said this morning when they argued about it. “I’ll creep into the bushes and no one will see me. I just want to be here for you.”
“If you’re coming,” said Yasira, “you should be in with the gone people and me, not in the bushes. We’ll be shot at, but you’ll be inside the area I’m defending. If you’re randomly in the bushes and something goes wrong, I can’t save you.”
“I won’t be randomly in the bushes,” said Tiv. “I’m not random. Besides, why would the angels look in the bushes when they’re focused on you?”
“Don’t do this,” Yasira bit out, rounding on her. This was not the Strike Force, but someone deep inside who spoke more rarely, someone angry and afraid. “Whatever you do, Tiv, do not put me in a position where I can’t save you.”
Tiv bit her lip, but nodded. “Okay.”
She held tightly to Yasira’s hand as they walked through the long grass, butterflies and stranger flying things taking to the air around them, to where the gone people waited. They were beginning to clump together into a formation of sorts, concentric circles standing together preparing to hold hands, with a gap in the middle just like the one in so many of the gone people’s religious rituals, a gap where some fragment of Outside itself might deign to manifest.
welcome Savior | kin of ours [amusement] have you come
to save us
Sometimes I/we think we came because you have saved me/us–
though you did not know
a planet is full of hope now
because of you
a planet is about to dissolve into flames
because of you
We have come to do what we can
Let us protect you
Please–
If all of this went down correctly, in the way that Yasira and the gone people intended, then the ritual the gone people did would reach deep into the world. It would rearrange it to be a little more habitable, in a softer echo of what Yasira had already done with her miracle at the beginning of the Plague. Yasira could feel that intent, even though she didn’t know exactly how far it would go. She wasn’t sure if even the gone people knew, or if they thought in different terms. They would do as much as they felt they could. If they succeeded, the change would last, and a good number of them would live to tell the tale.
If it failed – well, Yasira knew what that would look like. Bodies strewn across the ground, and no change to the world at all, not the kind that anyone would notice.
She was going to try to keep the bodies to a minimum. The rest of it was up to the gone people themselves.
The gone people guided Tiv to a spot near the middle of the group. She could see the way the place was set up, the little clearing with its tall grass and the trees and tangled undergrowth all around. In here, with gone people around her on every side, there was very little chance the angels would see her. Or Yasira either, for that matter.
Just because they couldn’t see didn’t mean they couldn’t hurt them, of course.
She had brought a peace offering, a satchel of cookies and snacks and some bottles of clear water, and she handed them over. The gone people accepted this with smiles she couldn’t quite read. Not the way people like Yonne Qun smiled, but like this was an interesting curiosity. Maybe they were just being polite. With gone people, who could tell?
It was almost refreshing. Tiv was just about done with people looking at her like she’d descended from the heavens to save them.
Yasira already looked distracted. Probably her mind was only half on the world around her and half in that trance, communicating the way the gone people did. Was it possible, Tiv wondered, for her to focus both ways at once? Some of the people in her head talking mystically, and others attending to the real world? Maybe, but Tiv didn’t think so. Whatever happened inside a soul, there was still only so much matter in th
e brain to support it.
Yasira kissed Tiv one last time as the gone people took positions, in those concentric circles of theirs, preparing to reach for each other.
“I’m not going to be able to talk to you after this,” Yasira warned. “You’re going to be on your own. I’ll be aware of where you are. I’ll protect you. But I won’t be… responsive. I probably won’t even hear anything you say.” She looked down. She didn’t look very happy, or even very confident in her plan.
But there were so many of Yasira now. It made sense that some of them would believe it and some wouldn’t. What would it be like to be a part of Yasira who didn’t believe in this plan, and to be swept along with it by the rest of yourself? What would it be like to be a part of Yasira who did believe, but who had to hold those people’s unhappiness in your mind with you at every step, to feel their fear and their complaints, to never be free of their doubts?
It was no wonder Yasira couldn’t act confident, if that was what it was like for her.
Tiv would just have to do the believing herself.
She kissed Yasira back, squeezing her as tightly as she dared, which wasn’t much – it would do no good to set off Yasira’s sensory issues at a time like this. “I won’t need anything from you but what you’re doing, I promise. I’ll be watching. I think someone has to do the watching. Someone has to come back from this who isn’t you, who could see you from the outside, who can talk about it in words. To tell the world how glorious you were.”
Yasira’s eyes were wide and conflicted. “I don’t think it’ll be glorious, Tiv. I think it’s going to be ugly–”
She was interrupted by an unmistakable sound from the edge of the park. The amplified voice of an angel. “Citizens, you are ordered to disperse.”
