by Ada Hoffmann
The gone people didn’t do anything. The gone people didn’t even understand spoken language. Surely the angels knew that – so why were they bothering to announce the rules? For show?
Yasira glanced at her. “I have to go.” She didn’t wait for a response before she slipped further into the crowd. The gone people quickly took her hands and she closed her eyes. All over the park they were taking each other’s hands, shaping themselves into the circle-like arrangement that they would need for their rites.
“This is your final warning,” barked the angel. “Disperse, or we will open fire.”
Without Yasira right there in front of her, it was easier for Tiv to feel the risks of this – not just to the people of Jai at large, or to her team, but to herself. If this didn’t work, she would die as easily as the gone people. More easily – she had no special abilities. And she felt her heart in her throat, her breath bated, as she wondered if it was really possible for it to work.
But it would work. It had to.
The gone people on all sides of Tiv, plus the trees and vines tangled at the sides of the park, blocked the angels from view completely. But Tiv could still see Yasira, holding hands with the rest of them, thin and fragile but dressed, unlike the gone people, in ordinary clothes. On her face, eyes closed, there was an expression of grim concentration. Not much hope, only the knowledge that she had come here for a purpose, and that denying it now would be worse than failing.
Yasira would never admit how beautiful she was. How much hope she carried for everyone who saw her, even when she left none for herself. But Tiv let herself witness it, in that one silent moment before the bullets came. Tiv looked at Yasira, with her long dark hair falling over her face, preparing to do the impossible, and, even through the fear, her heart soared.
Then came the unmistakable crack of a gun.
Yasira did not move. Tiv couldn’t see anything, not a twitch of her closed eyes, not a tightening of her hands where the gone people held them.
But the landscape leapt up around her, the way it had done when they fled in the forest before. Those vines and grasses burst upward, so quickly that they cracked the air just as the gun did, weaving themselves into something like a shell. It moved there, blocking all the little places where the angels might have crawled in, cradling the park inside itself, undulating strangely. Tiv had specialized in fluid dynamics for much of her career, but these grasses moved in a way that defied the laws she knew. Yet they held. The plant wall indented here and there like something was hitting it, crack after crack. A few bullets tore through and dropped to the ground, their momentum sapped, and the wall re-wove itself around them. Most of the impacts, bullets or otherwise, didn’t make it through at all.
Yasira’s face was tight with concentration. The rest of the gone people took out from their ragged pockets and their patchy satchels, the long thorns with which they were associated. They were beginning to move in synchrony, to murmur rhythmically to each other.
A light that did not look like light, a distortion in the air for which light was only the closest expressible analogy, bloomed in the gathering’s center.
Yasira could see as the gone people saw. She was not confined to one place. In this ritual, all groups of gone people were connected to all others. On rocky slopes, in forest clearings, in caves, on grassy hills and in treeless wastes: there were clumps of them everywhere, all aware of each other. All performing the same rite at the same time. From here, communing with just one of the groups, Yasira would be able to protect them all.
She could vaguely sense the ritual’s details, like the blueprint of some vast, spiritual machine. She could see the fractals of this world and their underlying equations, and the way the gone people, with concentration and supplication and sacrifice, meant to nudge those equations’ parameters just the tiniest bit. But Yasira could not concentrate on that. The Scientist peered into the fractal’s depths, fascinated, but even she could not focus enough to truly understand, not when she knew Yasira’s mission here was another kind of work.
Her true work here was defense.
She had pulled power from the core of herself: that infinite well of Outside that held all the other broken parts together. It had burst through her and thrown defenses up whose nature she could barely control. Now she concentrated, scattering the pieces of herself across space, letting the power flow through to all of them.
It took different forms in different places. In one park like this one, it was the air and not the grass: twisting tentacular shapes burst from the wind itself, much as they had in Yasira’s practice sessions, translucent, batting weapons away. On one rocky hill, the very ground caved inward, enclosing the gone people in a protective cave of strange, shifting crystal. In one forest, there was a ring of violet flame, hot enough to vaporize bullets, yet the trees did not burn.
And then, of course, there were groups of gone people who didn’t need defenses at all. Groups who, by chance or by cunning, had hidden themselves where the angels could not follow. Far in the wilderness, in caves and hidden places, some gatherings faced nothing but the work they had chosen to do. Yasira was aware of these, too, but she did not waste power on them, only watched in case the situation changed.
It took all the parts of Yasira, working in concert, to do this. It took the full will and determination of the Strike Force. It took the voracious curiosity of the Scientist, working out who needed a little more or less of Yasira’s power at a given moment, making adjustments accordingly. It took the deep-down parts who barely ever spoke, who were more Outside than human, seizing and guiding the power for the others to use. It took all the little parts who weren’t sure of themselves, but who knew the rest of Yasira needed them, so as to form the sheer numbers to be in so many places at once.
There were parts of Yasira who hated her and hated themselves, parts who still mostly wanted to die, and even these parts had a useful place. They flung themselves directly to the edges of Yasira’s power where the bullets were deflected, where the impact and effort of dealing with them caused real pain, and they took the brunt of that pain, shielding the others. The Strike Force had not thought to ask them to do this, but they went to it of their own volition, and they did not die; they only mentally convulsed and suffered and, strangely, exulted. This was better than death; this was pain with a purpose. Even their own brokenness fit here.
Yasira sent herself into every place where the gone people and the angels clashed, and she built up her defenses, and she hung on.
All over the Chaos Zone, people were rising up.
In Büata, Qiel and her friends had joined a line of protestors. All sorts of little groups like hers stood shoulder to shoulder, sweating in the heat as they carried their homemade signs. The signs said things like WE ARE NOT HERETICS and STOP KILLING US and LET US EAT. They’d picked a spot in the city square, beside the relief station. In better times, art displays and temporary markets had often been set up here. There were streets leading out in four directions and shop fronts on every side, some shuttered permanently thanks to the Plague, the rest temporarily closed in fearful anticipation of what was to come.
A line of angels in riot gear lined the side of the square, just across from the protestors, right in front of the relief station. The angels’ numbers, true to Yasira’s promise, had been thinned – so many of them had been called away to deal with the gone people. There were only about ten of them against hundreds of mortals. They refused to meet the protesters’ eyes. If it came to violence – when it came to violence – the angels would probably win. They still looked uneasy.
Qiel Huong stood in that crowd, leading a protest song. She’d mobilized almost everyone from her little group in the suburbs. Mes wandered through the crowd, clinging to the elaborate sign he’d drawn, passing out water and snacks. Bannah had one of the loudest voices in their group.
Protesting against the Gods was illegal, but protest against a mortal government was not, and thus the art of protest had never quite
been lost. Some gods, particularly Arete, encouraged it. Half the angels in front of them now were angels of Arete, their bronze-and-white livery shoulder to shoulder with the red-and-black of Nemesis, and it was those angels who looked most uneasy. They all understood how widespread today’s unrest was, synchronized in a way that should not have been possible for mortals like these, without access to ansibles. People here in Büata had decided on a peaceful protest, not an uprising, not an attack, just a show of solidarity for the other uprisings across the continent and a request for their rights. That was by no means the case in other cities. Would the angels really want to punish this crowd as the law allowed them to? Did they want to antagonize these citizens, the relatively well-behaved ones, even further?
Qiel stared into their eyes from where she stood in the crowd, and she couldn’t help but queasily wonder.
In Küangge – the city where Daeis had gone, where the angels held six hostages that the mortals wanted back – the mission was just beginning. The relief station had a single entrance, well-guarded, but there were paths and alleys in the dilapidated streets next to it, some of them half-covered by foliage. The team of mortals crept along those covered paths now, guiding each other with hand signals. There were eight of them, as large a group as it made sense to send without becoming too big to hide.
They loaded their guns now and they held their breath together in those shadows. They braced themselves, waiting for the angels who guarded the place to make their rounds. Waiting until they were at the furthest-out points. And then, at a gesture from their leader, the mortals charged.
Daeis hung back nearby, whispering mental suggestions to the small creatures they held in their hands. And those creatures called to others. As the mortals charged in, the angels in the distance whirled to face them. More angels poured out from inside the station. And in the distance, something else emerged: a monster larger than the building itself, a writhing mass of tentacles with a gaping mouth like that of a frogfish.
It lunged directly for the angels.
They turned to it, calling out in alarm. They aimed their weapons at what seemed to be its center. They probably called for backup, though Daeis and the other mortals could not know that for sure. They reached for bigger weapons. The monster took a hold of two of them with its tentacles and dashed them against the ground.
And because of that distraction, several mortals made it into the building, guns drawn, trembling.
There were other armed groups in those cities with the red pins stuck into them. There was one in Dasz, heading to the relief station to steal the food printer that Akiujal had wished for so badly before he died, and Weaver was not with them. Weaver had introduced herself to the group and offered to go with them, but they had decided she was too precious to lose. Instead she waited in their safe house nearby and watched them leave through the little soot-smudged window, shifting her weight anxiously. She wouldn’t know who was wounded, or how many, or how badly, until they returned.
Weaver wasn’t Savior; she had no illusions she could save everyone and no interest in doing so. She just wanted to do what she could, to know she’d given her all at this one moment in the grander tapestry.
But it was still hard to watch them go, not knowing how long it would be, or if they would return at all.
In Renglu, Genne Qun and her friends had chosen a method of protest very much like the gone people’s, though most of them did not know it. Mostly young and without any delusions that they could fool a team of angels, they had not bothered to disguise themselves. They had simply gathered in a field.
They stood in a circle facing outward and started to hum to themselves.
Food-growing was a common power, but it worked differently for different people. Some of them needed to mumble or hum or sing; some of them worked best with their eyes shut, some with their hands buried directly in the soil. And there was that one friend of Genne’s, of course, the one who grew such excellent mushrooms but had to work alone. That friend, like several others, had not shown up. It made her sad, but it didn’t matter. There were enough of them.
They’d settled on an easy, simple song. There was dissonance in it as some of the growers with more particular needs hummed something else, out of tune with the others. They stood or crouched or lay on their bellies, as their powers dictated. But they were all the more united for their differences; everyone, no matter their posture or their part in the song, was there for a common purpose.
Small fungi began to poke out of the ground, edible strains conjured by the form of magic they shared. Little creepers with red and violet berries. Thick leaves in particular patterns, promising chunky roots and savory bulbs just under the earth.
The pair of junior angels of Arete who’d been assigned to watch this group – the majority of the local angels being preoccupied with the gone people – exchanged uneasy glances.
They did not open fire.
A few of the Seven had remained behind in the lair.
Splió and Prophet’s powers weren’t much use in a fight. That wasn’t to say they couldn’t have fought, if it was that desperate – they’d stand as much of a chance as people like Qiel did. But their real strength was in seeing. Splió stood by the airlock, leaning on it, concentrating on one location for a few seconds, and then another, and another – scanning as best he could for places that especially needed help. It was exhausting work, like watching five news broadcasts at once, but someone had to do it and it felt right, being exhausted that way today. More like being in the battle for real, putting his body on the line.
As he saw new things, situations turning good or bad across the continent, he mumbled words. Grid, behind him, focused on putting pins on the map and taking them back out, maintaining the closest thing they could to a real-time display. Sometimes Splió stopped, disoriented, and looked up at that map, reminding himself what rounds he was making and where he was in them.
Prophet sat a little behind him, eyes closed, flickering behind their lids as if in a terrible dream. She murmured to him and Grid, every once in a while, when she saw something that told him where he ought to look. Occasionally she didn’t need him to look at all, only snapped her eyes open for a moment and stammered out a location and what Luellae ought to do there. But she was seeing far more than one person could make sense of.
“Huang-Bo,” she said, her eyes fluttering. “The alley behind the department store. They’re walking into a trap.”
It wasn’t so much that Luellae snapped to attention; it was that she’d already been on alert, barely having caught her breath from the last exertion. “What way do I take them?”
That was a question for Splió; Prophet didn’t have such fine-grained control of her own sight. He grimaced in concentration as his consciousness worked through the portal. “Angels waiting to the north of them. Take them south. South and… west a bit.”
“On it,” said Luellae, and she jogged through the portal and vanished into one of her usual twists of space.
Some people found Luellae’s way of travel overwhelming, disorienting; some got sick. Luellae, privately, loved it. When she moved so fast it defied physics, it was like gravity itself had let go of her for a moment. All the things that weighed her down, all the fear and frustration, and in the moment between physical places, she could not feel them. Only spinning and whooshing and sensations too strange for her to even remember upon landing, in the moment when reality settled on her again.
She found herself in an alley with a small gaggle of armed mortals. Badly-armed mortals; she wished the Seven had done a better job of arming these people from the start. If there were angels lying in wait for these people, already aware of their presence, they’d be slaughtered.
They stumbled back, gaping, when she materialized in front of them. Blur’s legendary arrivals couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.
So she wasted no time introducing herself, or saying don’t be afraid. Just held out an arm. “It’s a trap. Grab me, now.”
>
She had a split second to reflect on how strange it was, the way they all trusted her, before they reached out to grip her as instructed.
Somewhere not far away from Renglu, along the border, a group of refugees gathered, most of them teenagers and children. They carried their meager belongings in backpacks and sacks. They had worn good shoes and brought precious water. They had planned for this carefully. The angels who normally guarded the border were busy elsewhere. If there was ever any time to make a break for it, out of the Chaos Zone, surely it was now.
They remembered all too clearly what had happened to the last group. They knew that, even now, they might not survive.
They clasped each other’s hands a final time.
And they ran.
CHAPTER 17
Now
Yasira was far more than a physical torso, head, and limbs. If her body was what her soul inhabited then her body was everywhere, and she felt it like a new group of appendages, barely controlled. Every tentacular barrier that crystallized out of the air. Every blade of bulletproof grass that loomed up at her command. Every piece of the earth itself. And the bullets, flames, and other assaults that met them – certain parts of Yasira had volunteered to take the brunt of that pain, but all of her felt it a little. All of her knew exactly what would happen if a bullet got through.
And one did get through, every few minutes. She felt that as if it had torn through skin and muscle. But it was worse to see the effect: a gone person clutching the sudden red bloom of their body, falling to the ground, blood trickling into the grass.
Yasira had parts who could handle pain. She did not have many who could handle failure.
Yet the gone people gathered around each body, reverent and sad and accepting. They touched the blood with their hands, but they did not stop the rest of what they were doing, the humming, the focus, the ritual. As if to say: this was not failure at all.
