by Ada Hoffmann
Genne wasn’t sure if her limbs would obey her, if the plants she’d grown would move smoothly out of her way as they would for a gone person. Or if she was the one who’d boxed herself in. She felt an awful, sinking fear.
The guns were still trained on each individual person in the group, scaring them still. The angel turned over his hand and dropped the lighter. The flames began to lick at the plants that entangled them.
All across the Chaos Zone, the strongest pockets of resistance outside of Yasira’s defenses – all the ones that had, so briefly, seemed victorious – had now turned into battle zones. Bullets flew. Gas made its way through the crowded streets, choking and stinging.
This was what Picket had been fearfully waiting for. He felt it like a brand to his nerves when Splió, eyes closed, concentrating at the edge of the airlock, gasped and said, “Found one.”
“Is it the worst?” Picket tremulously asked, because where to help was a very important problem. Tiv had said that there wasn’t an optimal solution to that problem. But he wanted one.
Splió’s expression darkened. “I don’t know, but it’s the worst yet, and it’s set up in a way you can handle. Go.”
Picket obediently rushed through the airlock, trembling a little. Trusting Splió to operate the meta-portal and spit him out in this mysterious place where he was needed.
He emerged abruptly into a hail of bullets, flames, and screams. He’d come out through a maintenance door onto a rooftop, and he immediately flattened himself, crawling to the edge and peering over. He could see what Splió had meant when he said this one was set up right. The angels had boxed a group of mortals in on all four sides – maybe peaceful protestors, maybe an armed group, Picket couldn’t tell from up here. A space the size of the city block was full of them now, a crowd desperately trying to take cover or escape, and the angels were firing into it.
Trembling harder than before, Picket reached out, called on his powers, and made a slow and deliberate fist.
The ground under the angels – and not, by and large, under the mortals – changed.
Picket had no control over exactly what his power did. No matter how he’d experimented, it seemed to him that there were only two adjustable parameters: where and how much. Where was very clear from up here. As for how much, he’d turned it to maximum; it was all he could think of to do.
The pavement of the street itself liquefied under the angels, reached up with strange sticky tentacles to drag them down, drown them in its black mire or tear them apart. Holes opened in the ground, fissures that went eye-crossingly deep, with an unearthly orange glow at their core, and the angels stumbled to avoid them or went tumbling in.
Picket watched it all with wide eyes, willing himself to continue. He was acutely aware that this was not a game. Every part of it was real. Even with the careful way he’d marked out the bounds of the effect, some mortals who’d directly clashed with the angels were too close to its edge; some got sucked into the affected area, and they died, too. There were no points awarded for this, no scorecard he could check to see if he’d made the right move or not. There was only the actual reality of what he was doing, and the screams.
Picket wasn’t doing the same thing Talirr had done when she first began the Plague – that burst of unimaginable, surreal horror that had wiped out tens of millions in a few minutes. He wasn’t her, and he hadn’t made the kinds of pacts with Outside forces that she had. His powers were more localized and temporary. But to the mortals on the ground, cowering and terrified, he knew it looked exactly the same.
Elsewhere, Luellae was moving as fast as she could. In a multitude of city squares, in hails of bullets too slow to catch her, in rains of choking gas that didn’t have time to reach her lungs, she bent reality to enter, grabbed as many injured, terrified mortals as she could, and bent reality to get out again. Leaving them wherever she could, in parks and gardens untouched by the protests, in safe residential neighborhoods that might or might not have been their own; she didn’t have time to check. Even moving as fast as Luellae could, she didn’t have time to save everyone.
The team in Küangge had almost made it out of the relief station. They had found the prisoners. They ran for it, hand in hand, the prisoners limping and tripping as their abused bodies tried hard to keep up with their rescuers. They had made it past the door. There was a copse of trees nearby. If they could get there–
There was the sound of multiple large weapons being readied at once. Two lines of angels emerged, one on each side, a third emerging from the trees themselves. This was far more angels than the number that had been here when they began. The rescuers froze; the prisoners sagged against them in despair.
“You are surrounded,” came the announcement, projected from the angel in the lead, a hulking armored man in Nemesis’ colors. “Drop your weapons.”
The rescuers dropped them.
From further back in the woods there was a sound, unearthly, like a thousand blended screams.
For a split second, the angels hesitated. In the next second, a tentacle whipped out from under the trees, thirty feet long, textured like a rotting log but strong as steel. It caught ten of the angels in its path and bowled them over.
The rest of the angels turned, aiming their weapons at the emerging creature. The mortals dived for cover. They crawled over each other on the ground, shielding as many as they could with each other’s bodies. Gunfire and screams blocked out all other sound.
The monster was taller than the canopy it had hidden beneath, even bigger than the one that had covered their entry. Above its massive tentacled limbs there was a head of sorts, with features as twisted and irregular as the knots of an old, gnarled tree. It seemed to shift intricately in a way that might have been a trick of geometry or lighting, or might have been actual shapeshifting. One moment it looked like a deformed human skull with awful, brown, sharp teeth. One moment it looked like an unearthly undersea creature. One moment it was a roundish shape with no features, as meaninglessly pitted as the moon; the other views, surely, could only have been pareidolia. There was nothing for a human to recognize here.
Crunching greedily, it shoveled the angels – hail of bullets and all – into what might or might not have been its mouth.
The mortals were not foolish enough to consider this monster their friend. They knew the rules of the Chaos Zone. They knew that if they approached too close, antagonized it, or even just fled too enticingly, it would eat them with the same horrible ease. They held their breaths.
Daeis, hiding in the bushes behind the relief station, pressed a hand to their mouth to suppress a smile. When the monster stomped close to them, its tentacles flailing, they reached out, thinking in the special way they used for Outside creatures.
It reached down to them, with one awful, knotted, rotting-log limb, and they moved their hand gently against its underside, as easily as scratching a pet cat under its chin.
CHAPTER 18
Now
Akavi was there, of course.
He was angry with Elu, and didn’t want to leave him alone in the ship for too long at this delicate stage. Then again, perhaps learning to sit in one place and be obedient for once would be good for the boy. Meanwhile, Akavi had a more important anger. He had worked as hard and as quickly as he could to manipulate Luellae into the right position for his plans, and it had not worked. He had tried, through reverse psychology, to convince the Seven not to risk themselves and rise up, and yet here everyone was, rising up.
Even Yasira was out here somewhere, if that letter was to be believed. Maddening. She would be with one of the groups of gone people, but there were dozens of those across the continent, and no one seemed to know which one she was hiding with. Without Luellae to oblige him, Akavi’s travel options were now very limited. So far, he hadn’t even been able to find Büata’s group of gone people – assuming Büata had such a group at all. He was reduced to wandering at the edges of the mortal protest, hoping one of the Seven would be th
ere.
The city square was in ruins, people fleeing and dying everywhere. A few sensible mortals had seen what was coming and managed to escape ahead of time; the rest were trapped. Even Akavi wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t trapped, as he edged along a wall, knowing enough about typical angel crowd control measures to stay out of the line of fire. Several of the nearby shopfronts had collapsed when an angel threw a grenade in that direction, falling to deceptively heavy splinters and shards. There were people trapped in that rubble, long steel beams pressing their broken limbs to the ground.
And because Akavi was keeping to the edges and out of the line of fire, because his angle of view was therefore not the same, he saw it when the other angels didn’t.
A blur of motion in the air. A shapeless inky blackness that moved almost too fast to track, and that resolved into the form of a woman.
“Come on,” said Luellae to one of the trapped mortals, a man conscious and groaning with his legs trapped under roofing tiles. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
The man made a small whimpering noise, his eyes wide and awed; he knew, as did everyone who laid eyes on Luellae, who she was.
It was a stroke of luck for Akavi that he’d picked a place like this. Luellae might otherwise have burst in and out of view too quickly for him to do anything about it. But with a trapped man like this she had to scramble a moment, her thick arms heaving as she effortfully pulled the tiles away. Other mortals, seeing who she was and what she was doing, had run to the scene to help her.
So it didn’t raise any eyebrows when Akavi ran in that direction with them.
Luellae didn’t see him coming until he pounced, his arms cinching tight around her in the chaos, sharp nails extending from his fingers to form claws at her throat.
She froze. Luellae would know who he was. She could use her powers to flee this scene, but unless she managed to dislodge Akavi from her body, she would take him with her.
“You disobeyed me,” Akavi hissed in her ear.
“I didn’t,” said Luellae. Akavi could feel how her breath sped, how her heart hammered with panic; that was satisfying. “I did exactly what you fucking said.”
True, in a sense – that was the trouble with reverse psychology – but it missed the point; she hadn’t done what he wanted her to.
“If you want to live,” Akavi continued, unruffled, “you’re going to take me back to my ship. And, there, we’ll talk more.” The points of his nails pressed sharply against the pounding pulse of her neck.
“I’ll get away,” Luellae promised, her voice shaking. “I’m good at that.”
“We’ll see.”
It was so very satisfying when the world twisted around them and went black.
At the end of it, there were bodies lying everywhere. In all the town squares and streets where the protesters had stood toe to toe with the angels. In the corridors where mortals had taken up arms and fought.
There were angel bodies, too, here and there.
Something in the world had changed – something too subtle for sensors like Irimiru’s to pick up on yet, but its earliest signs were beginning to show themselves. Even far from the protests themselves, new fruits were beginning to emerge from the trees, new streams diverting themselves to make little cascades of clean water. Little spots in the woods and plains, little crevices in the crags and the desert, had moved as things always moved in the Chaos Zone, opening themselves to offer shelter. This world would never get the Outside out of it – entropy itself prevented that. Nor would it ever be gentle or safe. But when Savior did her first miracle, she had given control of this world to the people, gone and otherwise, not to the incomprehensible horrors that made it this way in the beginning. And gradually, painfully, in the face of unspeakable danger, the people were figuring out how to use that control. How to make their world into something they could live in.
Qiel and her friends had made it back to their safe house, though not before hearing the grenades going off, the screams, the creak of the building collapsing. They huddled together in her candlelit living room now, shaking and hugging each other. Qiel felt guilty; had it been selfish, leaving the way she did, just before things got bad? If she’d been willing to sacrifice this whole group, would it have accomplished anything more?
Bannah Nin, her face buried in Qiel’s shoulder, moved only enough to give herself the air to speak. “Do you think it meant anything? Do you think, when we wake up tomorrow, the world will be even a little bit different?”
Qiel closed her eyes.
She didn’t have the flashy kind of Outside power, not the kind that changed things physically around her, but she knew she had something. And when she closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could feel the change. She knew that, however the angels might try to deny it, their world had just become a little bit less hostile, a little bit easier to live in. Most of that was because of the gone people, not them. But they’d done something. They’d spread out the angels’ forces, which might otherwise have had nothing to shoot at but the gone people themselves. They’d made it clear, through sheer numbers, what the people of the Chaos Zone wanted.
“Yeah,” she said, moving her hand to Bannah’s hair. “I think it will.”
When the angels were all gone, Picket unclenched his fist. He brought the street back to its usual state. Broken bodies lay scattered across it, some of them in more than one piece, some of them twisted into unrecognizable shapes. An angel’s body had been stretched out like taffy, a long brilliant-yellow ribbon twisting over the ground in place of a midsection. An arm stuck up limply into the air, the rest of its previous owner swallowed up by the pavement.
Most of the bodies were angels, but not all.
Picket watched from the rooftop as the surviving mortals picked themselves up off the ground. They were shaking. They were making noises he could barely hear from up there. Pairs of them hugged each other; small groups scurried away in strange and gingerly ways, like they were expecting the ground to erupt and swallow them again at a moment’s notice.
If he calculated it all according to game theory, then this was a good result. A few lives lost, on his side, and all of the enemies defeated. When the alternative was that everyone on his side died. But this wasn’t a game. He looked at the mortal bodies splayed on the ground, and even the twisted, barely recognizable forms of some of the angels, and they weren’t numbers. He couldn’t add or subtract them from each other and declare victory that way.
He felt sick.
It was a good thing that none of the mortals had seen him up here. Nobody looked up as he ran back to the little service door he’d come here by, back to the airlock, back into the lair that he shared with the rest of the Seven.
He needed the rest of the Four. Picket often felt like only a quarter of a person. He wanted Grid’s practicality to ground him, Prophet’s gentleness, Weaver’s enthusiasm. But Weaver was still out there, healing people. As he burst into the room, sweating and shaky, Prophet was still hard at work, eyes shut and dancing under their lids, clearly distressed by what she was seeing. Her head was pressed together with Splió’s as they conferred about something neither of them liked.
The battle wasn’t over. The little pocket of it where Picket had fought was over, but there were more pockets, more crises. He could feel that viscerally as he looked at the two of them. Picket didn’t want to go back out there and do what he’d just done over again. If Prophet told him in that moment that he needed to, that it was either that or let a whole block full of mortals die, he didn’t know what he’d do. He’d probably grit his teeth and go and do it. But he didn’t want to.
He started towards the two of them. It was Grid who stopped him, with a soft, firm hand silently pressed to his arm. It was Grid who led him to the upside-down kitchen, and gave him a warm drink, and let him breathe.
Something seemed wrong to him, though, as he sipped his drink and recovered his wits. As he looked up at the common area, upside down from his perspe
ctive, where Prophet and Splió looked distraught, and where something seemed to be missing. As he watched the grim look on Grid’s own face. He knew Grid so well, another quarter of the person that he was.
“Wait,” he said. “Where’s Blur?”
And the haunted look in Grid’s eyes told him everything he needed to know.
Yonne Qun leapt to his feet at the knock on his front door. It took all his presence of mind to look out the peephole instead of simply flinging it open – it could have been angels, after all. It could have been something bad. But all that he wanted to do was to know that his daughter was okay.
What he saw, in the waning, shifting evening light, was a gaggle of girls Genne’s age. Genne’s friends, a smaller group than the one he thought he remembered setting out this afternoon, all of them scorched and bruised. With Genne herself, sagging and bloody, like a sack of potatoes between them.
He didn’t know what he was thinking as he opened the door. He was full of insistent, irrelevant thoughts. These people must be hungry, thirsty, they might need first aid; Qun had supplies for all of those purposes in his house. That was what Qun was good at, distributing supplies and connecting people, like his own miniature version of the Seven’s team, interfacing between them and the community. There hadn’t been a large-scale, general protest in Renglu as there had been in some other cities; the majority of Renglu’s community had judged it too dangerous. It was only small splinter groups like his daughter’s, groups with particular magical purposes, who had insisted on their own little parts of the uprising. Qun didn’t have those powers. He could help them; that was what he was good for. He could maintain a safe space.
Genne sagged like an unliving thing between her friends’ hands. The bullet holes in her body had long ago stopped bleeding, and her skin was cold.
