by Ada Hoffmann
Where the blood soaked into the ground, that was the first place where everything visibly changed. The Scientist tried to catch a glimpse of the patterns underlying it, but they were too intricate to analyze without abandoning the rest of the work. Yasira could only watch its physical signs. The tendrils that came up from the ground, and the colors that shifted across it. New plants began to bloom, more profuse and more varied than the ones that the protesters in Renglu called up. Thickets made for shelter, trees bursting with fruit, and stranger things. Vines, circling the edge of the space where the ritual had started, flecked with spots of crimson.
death was always going to be part of this | necessary | inevitable
microbe tree animal us grass you insect fruit and the new creatures here that you have no name for, all occupy finite time, all are smaller than the collective
smaller in space
smaller in time–
call this humility
you have made the death smaller and kinder | let this be enough
Savior | to save yourself | remember what you saved
and not
the rest
of everything
In Büata the protest still stood at an uneasy stalemate. The angels had not moved; they didn’t even make eye contact. It was eerie, standing and shouting and chanting and demanding attention from a line of armed beings who didn’t even acknowledge your existence. Qiel almost wished they would bark orders, the way she’d grimly imagined in her head, demand that the protestors disperse, but of course she didn’t really wish for that. She didn’t want this to be any more dangerous than it had to be.
So she just kept everyone chanting, one hastily-composed protest slogan and then another, and then the first one again, as sweat dripped down their faces in the hot sun. She thought Mes, with his containers of snacks and water, was doing a lot more to keep things going than she was. But Qiel was the one her friends looked to for direction, and she would give it, as best she could.
She kept looking at the short line of heavily armed angels, wondering how many of them were like Elu. How many had become angels with good intentions, and realized their mistake too late? How many didn’t truly want to be here?
She couldn’t know. And as long as they kept following their masters’ orders, it wasn’t relevant. Qiel still worried about what might have happened to Elu, but she needed to take care of her mortal friends first.
But as the heat and fearful tedium of the protest wore on, she kept wondering. If they were given the order to fire, how many of them, deep down, wouldn’t want to? What if she could reach those ones, somehow, with some especially good song or slogan or sign? What if she could get them to lay down their arms? What then?
Qiel’s friends and neighbors looked at her with respect, these days, and she knew that was partly Outside. It had favored her in this particular way, as it favored other people with the ability to grow food or talk to monsters. Qiel couldn’t do any of those flashy things, but after the miracle people had suddenly started to listen to her more. She was grateful for that. But even Qiel couldn’t come up with words persuasive enough to solve this problem.
She wished she could.
Daeis waited, crouched in the bushes near the relief station, willing themself not to be discovered. They had monster friends they could call on if that happened, but they didn’t want to risk it. They didn’t like confrontation.
Somewhere inside the station, Küangge’s little rescue team was dashing around as fast as they could, looking for the prisoners. They might find them. They might not. The team might not come back at all, and Daeis didn’t know what they were supposed to do if that happened, how they were supposed to know it was happening.
They’d wanted to ask that, among many other questions, but Daeis wasn’t very good at talking and the Küangge team had explained only as much as they thought needed to be explained, in a language Daeis only partly understood. Splió hadn’t been around to smooth things over.
So they just waited, hugging a smooth-skinned, rabbit-sized creature tightly to their chest, and tried not to be afraid.
“Put down your weapons,” said the pair of angels of Arete who’d confronted Genne Qun’s group of plant-growers just outside Renglu. “Cease this heresy.”
But they didn’t cease. Nor did they bother arguing, pointing out that these plants were what kept their family and community alive. The angels had already heard all those arguments, and they were hearing them again, across the Chaos Zone, in every peaceful protest. Genne’s group were unguarded on purpose. They were too busy singing. They were too busy using their powers for good.
All across the field, under a blue sky twisted with the Chaos Zone’s unnatural oranges and greens, things were blooming and growing. Good things, or at least things that seemed good to Genne – she had no idea how they looked to the angels. Fat bright mushrooms, shining berries, delicate flowers dripping nectar. This was more than Genne had expected. She had grown food together with people before, but she had never assembled a group so large, and she was surprised how it multiplied the effect. Maybe that was because of the gone people, working synchronously with them in so many faraway places. Or maybe they were more powerful together than she’d thought.
All she could do was keep singing, as the fronds and leaves wound their way up her legs, past her waist.
The angels trained their weapons on the group of them, wary, uncomfortable; but they were Arete’s, not Nemesis’, and these were a group of unarmed young women making flowers grow. For whatever reason – whatever ineffable angel calculation was in their heads – they did not fire.
Genne only hoped it would stay that way.
“Is it time?” Picket asked, tense and waiting in the lair. His fingers were so tight around the arms of his chair that the edges of it hurt him.
“No,” said Splió, brow furrowed with the effort of watching dozens of protests and armed missions, in dozens of cities. “There’s not much fighting, except around the gone people.”
“Not yet,” Prophet said darkly.
Meanwhile Luellae flitted from place to place, stopping by the lair only long enough each time to get her next orders. There were civilians who had to be whisked out of the gone people’s crossfire, commando teams who’d been backed into a corner, wanted heretics who had to be spirited out of the angels’ view. There were refugees in a few places, running for destinations outside the Chaos Zone, and it was even odds if the welcome they’d receive back in normal human space would be any better than what they’d get if the angels caught them; but Luellae was glad that they tried, and she caught up as many of them as she could, picked them up over ravines and past walls, finding safe places for them to stumble to a halt and catch their breath.
She wasn’t sure if this was going to work out in the end, but she had never been more in her element: moving, running, flying, so fast that no one would ever catch her again.
Wherever the gone people gathered, bullets rained, and flames. The stern shouts of heavily armed angels – angels Enga had trained – fell upon ears incapable of hearing them. The forests burned, the sand dunes melted, the caves collapsed in explosions and showers of stone, but Yasira stood firm. The Outside shields she’d built, in all their locations and in all of their varying forms, still held. And the gone people, within them, were reaching deeper and deeper into the structure of the world, so deep it ached.
The ritual was working.
For now.
Even if every minute or two another bullet did breach the barrier. And an instant was all it took for a gone person – as human as any other person, even if they didn’t see themselves in the same way – to clutch at the sudden blood welling up from their body, and to fall.
Irimiru Kaule, Overseer of Nemesis, sat in his buzzing throne glaring at nothing. His metal-plated fingers da
nced along the arms of the throne, data flowing through them in visible and tangible sparks of light. The bee-like bots that held auxiliary mental calculations danced around his head, their swarm intelligence quickly decoding and collating patterns in what he saw, faster than even an electronic mind could.
For the past five minutes he had made his body comically unassuming, a small slender milquetoast of a man. Aside from the pretty features – Irimiru, admittedly, was a bit vain – he should have been a bean-counter or a pencil-pusher in some petty, useless mortal bureaucracy. That was how it felt to Irimiru right now, because he was nominally in charge of a good number of angels, but he no longer had full authority to direct them. Ever since the Plague, the Chaos Zone had become important enough to be administrated by archangels of several Gods in concert – Nemesis and Arete keeping the immediate threats under control, Eulabeia and Epiphron gathering data about the zone’s properties, Agon venturing in to assist in the most dangerous zones, Aletheia asking more fundamental questions about how it worked and Techne extrapolating how it might be put back together. Other Gods pitched in as needed. Even Philophrosyne, who hated violence, had helped put together the communications infrastructure that Nemesis needed for Her broadcasts. The result was that, although Irimiru was a perfectly good Overseer capable of coordinating many teams of Inquisitors and Enforcers, he had little authority to do anything except pass the Archangels’ orders down.
He was rapidly becoming convinced, however, that in this case the orders were wrong. Or – since that, taken literally, was blasphemy – that the situation had evolved in such a way that the orders were no longer appropriate.
He watched the feeds and updates from the dozens of teams assigned to him – only a fraction of the forces of Nemesis deployed to the planet, but a sizeable fraction. Every few seconds a semi-conscious process of his mind collated the data, summarized it by focusing on the moments that had drawn a particularly strong neurological response, added any commentary he chose to add, and passed it up the chain to an Archangel of Nemesis. This was not always standard procedure, but during an active operation of this size it was necessary.
They were putting all their resources into trying to break the gone people’s ritual. But the gone people, despite their spectacular heresy and the supposed involvement of Yasira Shien, weren’t even really doing anything. The Outside forces they’d summoned, so terrifying to behold at first, were only acting as a shield. They had not lashed out to destroy any angels even after considerable provocation. And the results of the ritual, as far as any of the angels in the field could see, were no more dramatic than many of the minor, non-violent heretical rites that mortals did elsewhere. Merely making some trees bear fruit.
Which was still heretical and deserved death, of course – but meanwhile the actual mortals of the Chaos Zone, the ones who were still people, were doing vastly worse things. Armed insurrections, in some instances. And being met with a very depleted defense.
Of course they’d predicted this would happen – it had been trivial, with the Vaurian spies they had in place, to intercept a copy of Yasira Shien’s letter. And wasn’t it interesting that Yasira would finally show her face at a time like this? But they had assumed, following analysis of the letter, that the gone people’s ritual would be as fundamental and horrible as the beginning of the Plague itself. That making it stop would be worth all the losses elsewhere. And that Yasira herself could be apprehended in the process – but so far, no one had even worked out which grouping of gone people contained her. If any of them did.
Irimiru was underwhelmed.
With a shiver she rearranged her features into a more feminine form. Irimiru got restless if she stayed with a single face too long. She grew taller, and she let her hair curl into an authoritative, classical shape.
Requesting that we redirect our forces, she text-sent, up through the most official channels, to the Archangels themselves. The gone people are a diversion. The real threat is from the mortals who can actually plan things.
The request was more complex than that, of course. It was an interlinked structure connecting to the moment-by-moment reports. Each word called up a dense network of video summaries and prior analysis, bolstering itself with its own nuanced evidence in a way that transcended mere speech. But the words were the essence of it.
The Archangels hesitated only a second and a half before responding. Archangels were creatures who had once been human, but they had worked their way up the hierarchy even higher than Irimiru, the highest that an organic being could possibly ascend, and they had been rendered down to nothing but brain tissue and circuitry. The Gods Themselves were made of different stuff, but Archangels lived in sufficient communion with their Gods to viscerally feel some small part of the God’s mental state. For Archangels of Nemesis that meant torment, of course – glorious torment. Constantly hovering at the very edge of damnation, yet with such power at their beck and call.
Irimiru had always thought she would like to be an Archangel one day.
Agreed, said an Archangel at last. Of course this was not a mere word, either; it came with its own dense structure of references and implications. Like all direct communications from Archangels, it came in a mental blast of pain and glory. Irimiru shut her eyes, savoring it. Here are your orders.
Yasira could barely feel her actual body, sitting in the grass somewhere supported by the gone people. But she felt the attacks from all sides, and she felt when those attacks suddenly lessened. They didn’t stop, they just got smaller, everywhere at once – a squad of twenty heavily armed angels dwindling to two. A squad that had been trying to gas the gone people to death in the ravine where they stood, suddenly turning off their machine, picking it up and marching away, leaving only a skeleton crew behind.
There were still bullets coming in. Less of them, but a bullet was a bullet. She still had to keep up all the shields around all the groups of gone people. She couldn’t get a message to the other mortals, or the rest of the Seven, warning them. She didn’t have the energy to spare.
But she faltered for a moment, realizing what this meant. Realizing what a danger there was, here, to all the people she’d chosen not to protect.
I can’t, something wailed inside her. This is wrong. It’s my fault they’re out there. It’s my fault they’re going to–
And it was the gone people, their hands still tight around her hands, who drew in to calm her without words.
She’d planned for this. Everyone, gone and mortal alike, knew the risks. Everyone had chosen their part of it. There was nothing she could do, except keep doing her own part, and have faith, and hang on.
Qiel had been starting to hope that maybe a standoff was all it would be. Maybe they’d march here and chant their slogans for a few hours and then they’d all run out of steam and go home. Maybe it was selfish to want that, but at least it would mean that no one got hurt.
So her heart sank when she saw new lines of angels, more heavily armed than the first ten, almost all of them in Nemesis’ red-and-black livery, advancing from the sides of the square.
The crowd around her shifted uneasily, unsure what to do. They could see what was going on as well as she could. They did not want to be seen giving up so easily, but they did not want to be boxed in. This could get very bad, very quickly.
Qiel glanced at the angels: there were shielded rows of them now in three directions. The fourth might work. She made her choice.
“Come on,” she whispered, inclining her head in the direction she’d chosen. “We need to head back.”
Her friends followed her. A lot of small groups were beginning to quietly exit, threading their way through the crowd. Others, die-hards, stood firm.
They were only just out, slipping into the mouth of a nearby alley, when they heard the new angels beginning to speak.
“Citizens,” said one angel, in an unnaturally amplified voice. “You are engaged in illegal insurrection. This is your final warning. Disperse now.”
&nb
sp; Qiel paused, pressing herself back against the alley’s wall. So many people she knew were still out there, holding their protest signs with white knuckles, sweating in the heat, chanting. She could not quite bring herself to turn her back on them.
And then the shooting started.
When it was two junior angels of Arete, Genne Qun’s group had been able to stare them down, singing, letting their magic do its work.
They faltered when two more angels approached from the other direction, picking their way through the now-overgrown tangle of foods and flowers, these ones in unmistakable reds and blacks, and with bigger guns.
And another two, circling them, boxing them in.
The song ground to an uncertain halt. Genne shifted uneasily, wondering if she could run through the lush growth she’d created, or if her feet would be caught and rooted to the spot. She picked up one of her feet and put it down, and it moved that way, but only with difficulty, tendrils wrapping around it as she did so.
This was very bad.
The angels aimed and readied their guns.
“Citizens,” said the largest of them, a pale-skinned man with several more weapons attached to his red-and-black belt, titanium shining unnaturally at his temples. “You have been ordered repeatedly to disperse. And you have refused.”
Genne felt two of her friends stepping nervously backwards against her. She didn’t think any of them knew what to do.
The angels trained their guns directly on them, one muzzle pointed at each unarmed head.
“Don’t move,” said the angel, with a cruel smile, and with his other hand – the one that wasn’t holding a gun – he picked up a lighter. Flicked it on, and let the flame dance in his hand just a moment, let it sink in what he was about to do.
One of Genne’s friends, no older than her, moved the tiniest amount, just enough to whisper to her, “I think we should run.”
