CHAPTER 1
Now (Six Months after the Plague)
The familiar door of Yonne Qun’s house stood tall in its doorway. If Tiv Hunt looked straight at it and not to the right or the left, it almost looked normal. Wooden and rectangular and solid, in a gray brick wall, set with the button of a doorbell – non-functioning now – a tin knob, a tin knocker. A mail slot near the bottom, a ramp running up to the threshold. Extremely normal, except for the way the mail slot curved, like a metal mouth, grinning or frowning or smacking its lips by turns.
If Tiv turned her head, of course, she’d see the garden, a mess of surreal plants that often moved of their own volition. The street the house stood on, with a surface that twisted and rippled, was walkable but no longer suitable for bicycles or electric cars. The houses next to Qun’s stood in various states of disrepair: one blasted long ago into a pile of picked-over rubble; one twisted into an impassable, un-houselike spiral; one intact, but somehow pink and dripping; a few others, like Qun’s, livable with their various blemishes and clumsy repairs. This was one of the better streets. It had been six months since the Plague, and Tiv still wasn’t entirely used to things looking this way. Maybe no one ever would be.
She raised a hand, shifting the heavy pack on her shoulder, and knocked. Three quick taps, a pause, and two more.
A moment passed, and the door swung open. Yonne Qun stood there: a middle-aged Riayin man, thin and lined, with medium-brown skin, very fine black hair, prominent cheekbones, and a quick, nervous smile.
“Leader,” he murmured in Riayin, giving a short bow. “Come in. Come in, please.”
Tiv bowed back clumsily, stepping over the threshold. She really wished people wouldn’t bow to her. Yasira had told her it was normal in parts of Riayin, like shaking hands. But in Tiv’s home culture, bowing meant submission, and combined with the “Leader” title, it creeped her out.
She’d learned not to protest about the title. Months ago, she and Yasira and their team had started calling each other by code names, in ways that she initially thought were a joke, but the names had proved meaningful in some weird ways, and more difficult to let go of than expected. Especially once the rest of the people in the Chaos Zone started calling them those names, too. But that didn’t mean the names were accurate.
Tiv didn’t actually lead anything. She organized more and showed her face more than the others on the team because the others had severe mental health issues and weren’t up to it as often, but the team itself wasn’t for the purpose of leading anything. Just connecting people. Helping them.
She shut the door and let her eyes adjust to the candlelit gloom. Like most of the Chaos Zone, Qun’s house hadn’t had electricity in six months. A large sitting room was still in reasonable repair, with armchairs and couches around the edges, boxes and piles of supplies stacked in the corners, and a central coffee table on which the candles and lamps gave their dim radiance. There was a small television in the corner which, incongruously, worked; the Gods had put a high priority on making sure people could watch their announcements every day. It was powered by some kind of God-built battery Tiv didn’t understand. Qun, like in most households Tiv saw, had thrown a blanket over it and ignored its presence.
“Thank you for having me,” said Tiv in polite Riayin. She was getting much better at speaking the language. She still felt self-conscious about her accent, but the people who called her “Leader” never seemed to care. She swung her pack off her shoulder and sat down in one of the armchairs, stacking up the pack’s contents as she listed each one. “I’ve got most of what you asked for. These are the water filters, the batteries, the baby food, the insulin.” She fished deeper, and brought out a pile of neatly folded, wrapped papers. “And these are the messages. From Babec, Küangge, Cheilu, Zhuon, Büata, Bolu, Lanne, Molu, Hunne. And Huang-Bo.”
The supplies were useful, but if supplies were all Tiv knew how to give, she wouldn’t have been called “Leader”. Angels distributed supplies in places like this, too, often in greater amounts. Tiv’s team just filled in the gaps. Many of the items were supplied by other survivors, in other cities, who had a surplus and were able to share. Others were stolen goods, palmed from warehouses and stockpiles elsewhere in the galaxy. That part still gave Tiv a guilty pause. It bothered her how easily she’d grown to embrace stealing, even to fill a desperate need.
The messages were what people like Qun really wanted. Communications in the Chaos Zone were patchy and heavily monitored. Travel by portal was prohibited, and overland travel could be deadly. Groups who weren’t completely in lockstep with what the Gods wanted didn’t have a safe way to find other such groups, to coordinate. That was where Tiv’s team stepped in. They kept tabs on things and held the lines of communication open. The messages in Tiv’s pile contained supply requests and offers, but also news of the kind angels didn’t want shared. Updates on a group’s efforts to resist the angels’ regulations, or to develop the heretical magical abilities that had arrived with the Plague. Stories of the angels’ atrocities. Essays and arguments about what it all meant, many diverging sharply from the dogma everyone here had been taught their whole lives.
Tiv didn’t know how to lead a resistance, but she knew how to keep one alive.
Qun picked up the sheaf of messages, cradled them to his chest in the gloom. “I’ll read these,” he promised. Some he would share with his community, as he did the supplies. Some, the most sensitive, he would memorize and burn. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” Tiv insisted. People like Qun were the ones who lived in the Chaos Zone full-time, steadfastly holding up their communities. Tiv’s team had no meaning without them. She often wondered, late at night, what it would have been like if it was just her and Yasira, alone against the Gods. Without the needs and lives of people like Qun to ground them.
Shuffling across the room, Qun put the messages down on an unused chair, presumably to look through as soon as Tiv left. He unlocked a small drawer and pulled out another sheaf of papers, each carefully folded and sealed, each with the name of a destination printed on it. “Here are Renglu’s messages. For Babec, Küangge, Cheilu–” He looked embarrassed. “Well, you can read it on them. But I had one more thing to ask.”
Tiv looked at him warily. When community leaders like Qun looked at her that way, with that hesitant, frustrated hope, it meant only one thing.
“Of course,” she said. “Ask.”
“We need weapons.”
Just what she’d thought. She looked in Qun’s eyes, feeling sympathy for the request even though she disagreed. He was a man under enormous pressure, trying his best to keep his community together under colossal threat.
She smiled sadly. “You know I have the same answer I always do. If you want to ask for weapons from the other communities, I’ll pass that message along. I’m not judging you. But my team doesn’t steal or make weapons. My team doesn’t fight.”
“Please, Leader,” said Qun. He didn’t look desperate so much as determined. He moved to the chair next to Tiv’s and sat, taking one of her hands in both of his. “Listen to me.”
Tiv looked at him doubtfully. Qun didn’t mean any harm. But there was nothing like sudden physical contact to remind her what she really was – an unassuming twenty-seven year-old woman, traveling alone through dangerous territory. Untrained. And without the uncanny abilities the rest of her team had, to protect her, if anything awful occurred.
“This is in the messages, but I need to tell it straight to you,” said Qun. “I need to know you understand me. You know we’re near the border here.”
“Yes,” Tiv said, uncertainly. The border of the Chaos Zone was guarded fiercely; angels believed that the surreal state of things here was contagious, and, thus, it was officially all under quarantine.
“This week,” said Qun, “a group of kids made a break for it. All orphans, none of them over twenty, Leader. The youngest, five. Across one of the unfenced stretches of forest. We all told them not to, but they were hungry and afraid and gambled that they could make it to safer territory. The angels gunned them down. Children, Leader. Do you understand?”
Tiv looked into his eyes and bit her lip. These were the eyes of a man who knew those children, who’d seen them playing in the creepy surreal streets and fighting over scraps, who remembered their faces and names. Who’d been trying to help them when he could, and who’d been powerless to save them. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen eyes like that.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Qun held her gaze. “There’s word that a crackdown’s going to start on the use of heretical abilities to grow food. As if they weren’t being harsh enough about that already. I know how to keep those things private, but so many of the young people here don’t. My own daughter has a talent for growing plants we can eat, and so many like her are tired of hiding what they do to survive. We need weapons, Leader. What else is your endgame if it isn’t a fight? You’re helping us survive, but it won’t be enough in the end. Not unless we can fight back.”
Tiv looked down, gently tugging her hand out of his grasp. “It’s not that simple, Mr Qun. Even if my team was in favor of violent rebellion, we don’t have any weapons that would stand a chance against an organized force of angels. Nothing we own now would do that, nothing we know how to make or steal, not even our powers.”
“I don’t believe that,” Qun insisted. “Ask your team, Leader. That’s all I’m demanding of you. Ask Savior.”
“Savior’s–” Tiv started, and then she bit down the words. Savior’s not a magic-dispensing machine.
Once, Yasira had radically altered the very structure of the Chaos Zone. It had been even worse before. People like Qun, for the most part, were only alive because of what Yasira had done. If they saw the toll it had taken on her, they wouldn’t have been so quick to demand it again.
But they hadn’t, and they were, and there was nothing Tiv could do about that.
“I’ll mention it,” she said.
There were six cities on Tiv’s itinerary for today, scattered across the vastness of the Chaos Zone.
Tiv didn’t have any magical powers. In the Chaos Zone, that made her something of an exception. Among random civilian survivors like Qun, about a third of them had low-level abilities of some sort. To grow edible food, like Qun’s daughter, to repel monsters, to do a hundred other tiny things that helped keep them safe. There were other, stranger groups in the Chaos Zone, groups that the survivors called “gone people” because they couldn’t talk or live in houses, and those groups had similar powers in a heightened form that nobody fully understood. And the other people on Tiv’s team had special powers, too. It was a result of their special connection with Yasira, a linking across time and space that Tiv didn’t quite understand. Yasira and the rest of the team had been Dr Evianna Talirr’s students once; they’d all been indirectly exposed to Outside ideas long before the Plague happened, and at the time Yasira needed extra power for her miracle, they’d been primed to give it. It hadn’t been possible to include Tiv in that linking, and sometimes she suspected that Yasira wouldn’t have included her even if it was. She would have seen it as something Tiv needed to be protected from.
Yasira herself was, obviously, special. But Tiv was just a normal person. She sometimes thought they’d called her “Leader” as a pity title; she might as well organize, since there wasn’t much else she could do.
She pushed her bangs out of her eyes, tired and sweating after her sixth meeting. Shouldering her pack, she looked right and left for observers, then pulled open the door to a half-broken storefront that no longer sold anything.
She stepped through, not into the thoroughly looted wasteland of shelves that actually lay within, but into an airlock. A clean steel space, rectangular and bare, like a closet. The door swung shut behind her. She exhaled carefully: this place carried the same underlying Outside eeriness as the Chaos Zone, a prickle below her skin that had become as familiar as sore feet, but the feeling here wasn’t as strong as on Jai.
The people that the Seven worked with knew they got around this way, but it was best to be careful. It was best to make sure that the angels, in particular, couldn’t see them doing it.
Dr Evianna Talirr had built this airlock. One of her many accomplishments was the construction of portals allowing instantaneous travel across space. Most of Dr Talirr’s portals resembled the ones that the Gods built, although the underlying mechanisms were stranger. But this airlock was her masterwork, a meta-portal. One end of it connected to Dr Talirr’s abandoned lair. The other would synchronize with any mundane door in any place the user visualized – or as close to what they intended as it could – and it would stay there, opening only to them and the people they willingly brought with them, until they returned.
The airlock was how Tiv and her team traveled so quickly between dozens of cities, across a wide and dangerous fifth of a planet with its infrastructure in tatters. The airlock, much more than any magic, was Tiv’s power.
The inner door opened, and Tiv walked through into the lair. No longer Dr Talirr’s lair, but theirs now. It was a cavernous, windowless space, and it had once been full of Dr Talirr’s half-finished projects, machinery and equipment strewn every which way. It really was everywhich way, even the walls and ceiling; gravity worked oddly here.
In six months of living here, Tiv and her team had remodeled a bit. They’d replaced the harsh, bluish lights that once washed out the room with warm, full-spectrum, dimmable ones. The tangles of incomprehensible wiring had been carefully packed away. A few devices, the ones that actually worked, sat cleaned and polished in their own nooks: an ansible, an old-fashioned non-sentient supercomputer, and the power generation and life-support machines that hummed under the floor. Plus one odd broken thing at the very far end of the room, a twisted metal something on a dais. Yasira called that device a prayer machine, designed to facilitate communication with Outside, and she had broken it herself, early on, before Tiv could work up the courage to use it.
In the remaining open spaces, Tiv and her team had made a home. A few private rooms, cubicle-like and clumsily decorated, dotted the lair at odd angles. But most of the team, traumatized from long isolation, had elected to sleep in the open instead. A central area, not far from the airlock, held their nest of ragged blankets and beanbags, hammocks and futons and cushions, a riot of softness and color and mess. Beyond it stood the working area where they organized. The team had started calling that area the “war room”, even though they were opposed to war – it was half a joke, and half maybe some suppressed frustration on their part. Tiv strode towards it, ready to record her activities for the day.
Five of the team were still out making their rounds. Daeis Jalonevar – a pale, squat, quiet Anetaian who went by the code name of “Keeper” – had been indisposed today. They sat more or less where Tiv had left them this morning, holding silent court in a pile of blankets with an armful of the squirrel-sized, bug-like Outside creatures who infested the space. Daeis had difficulty talking much, but they had a special affinity for Outside monsters, and could communicate with them mentally on levels unparalleled by anyone but Yasira herself. In turn, the smaller and more common of the monsters had become Daeis’s friends, and Tiv knew that they were now attempting to comfort them.
Splió spi Munu – code name “Watcher” – had made partial rounds but had returned early to care for Daeis, and he sat there now with a lethargic hand on their shoulder. Splió was a Gioti man with tousled hair and a cynical grin, who was usually seen around Daeis when not out working or sulking by himself. He looked up as Tiv walked into the space, and hauled himself up on his feet to greet her.
“Hey,” she said with an attempt at a smile. Tiv usually had more energy than most, but she was tired today.
“Hey, Leader. That bad, huh?”
“The usual. Everyone’s trying the best they can.”
That was a platitude Tiv had begun using often. No one needed the hanging buts spelled out: everyone in the Chaos Zone was trying their best, but conditions were awful. The Gods’ relief efforts weren’t keeping up with their needs, but any attempt to meet those needs in another way was punished severely. Everyone on Tiv’s team was trying their best, but they were only nine people, eight of whom were mentally ill enough that it affected the kind of resistance they could run. Even their heretical abilities were no match for what was out there.
It had been even worse when the Plague was new. In those first few terrifying weeks, it had just been Yasira and Tiv, alone against the world, and Yasira had been so ill that it sometimes felt like Tiv was on her own. The other seven, shambling into the lair one by one during the latter half of the Plague’s first month, had been a surprise. They were former students of Dr Talirr’s, like Yasira; they’d been captured by angels, just like Yasira, and they’d languished in captivity until Yasira’s magic set them free. Yasira had meant for them to go home to their families, but all of them, through some mysterious Outside homing sense, had instead found their way to her doorstep. All of them had offered their loyalty and their help.
Tiv could use all the help she could get, honestly.
“They asked you for weapons again,” said Splió. “You’ve got that look.”
Tiv abruptly started walking again, towards the war room, and Splió followed. Daeis seemed content for Splió to leave; they quickly turned their attention back to their Outside pets with a small smile. “We don’t do weapons. We are a non-violent resistance movement. We agreed.”
“Yeah, I know.” Though some had agreed more than others. Splió had been on the fence. Tiv had been the one who put her foot down, who’d refused to consider any other option. She might be a heretic now, but she wasn’t that far gone.
The war room was neither a room nor a place for planning war. There would not be a war if Tiv could help it.
What the war room did have, once Tiv passed the living nest and crossed the makeshift barrier dividing the two areas, was a large table and a set of even larger whiteboards and easels on which the team’s plans could be coordinated. Schedules, maps, lists of needed supplies. Incident lists. Tiv took a black whiteboard marker and methodically checked off her six cities. Then she moved to the incident list and hesitated, reluctant to write down what Qun had told her.
She lowered the marker and sighed, looking at the floor. Splió was still watching.
“The angels are shooting children,” she said without looking up. “At the border.”
“Eh, well, it’s not like arming the children’s gonna help.”
Splió’s primary mental health symptom, during his captivity, had been depression. He’d perked up a bit once he was free, but he still carried a lethargic cynicism which sometimes annoyed Tiv. Other times – like now – she found it strangely comforting. She gave him a warning look; she didn’t want him getting too morbid. “They wanted arms for the adults, not the children, obviously. It’s still…” She sighed shortly. “Fighting any way they understand isn’t going to help them, and they know it.”
Splió raised an eyebrow. “Then why’d they ask?”
Tiv looked back down at the table, squaring her shoulders. “Mr Qun asked me to ask Yasira.”
Splió gave a long whistle out through his teeth. “Good luck with that.”
People were always asking after Yasira, clamoring for another miracle. Tiv usually rebuffed them. Yasira had so little ability to deal with the world right now. There was no sense bothering her with wasteful or greedy or impossible requests. She’d say no to those, if Tiv gave her the choice, and then stew in guilt about it for weeks. It was rare for Tiv to actually pass a message along – much less a violent one.
She didn’t know why she’d said yes this time. She was stewing in guilt, too, maybe.
Splió shifted, leaning against a small partition strewn with tacked-up maps and notes. “Well, let all of us know how it goes, Leader.”
Tiv wasn’t sure if what she saw in Splió’s expression was resentment or frustrated hope. Some of the students were raring for a fight.
“I’ll let you know,” she said.
He detached himself from the wall and wandered back to check on Daeis. Tiv raised the marker, refocusing on the incident list, and jotted down a quick recounting of what Qun had told her. The list was already long, a thick easel pad with most of its pages used up and flipped over. Someday soon, she and Grid and Picket would have to go back through it and find a better way to organize the information.
She capped the marker and set it down, then tidied up a bit to steady her nerves. Realigned stacks of paper, wiped away jots on the whiteboards that were no longer needed.
Then she took a breath and walked up the lair’s wall, halfway around its radius,
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