CHAPTER 2

Five Months Ago

Elu Ariehmu, no longer of Nemesis, looked down at Akavi Averis nervously as the other angel stirred on the operating table, beginning to open his eyes.

Akavi was in his true form, that of a Vaurian shapeshifter, delicate and androgynous, with translucent, vaguely metallic-looking skin. His hair was a soft gray-white that had nothing to do with age. His eyes, when they fluttered half-consciously open, were pale, and the lashes around them paler. He had a white blanket draped over him for modesty, and bandages around his forehead where the medical bots had reached in to modify the neural circuitry that made him more than human. He was very beautiful, and even though he was not quite awake, he already looked faintly annoyed.

“How are you feeling, sir?” Elu asked. The bots had indicated that everything went according to plan, but they weren’t sentient, and this wasn’t a surgery in the official angelic repertoire. The principle was simple enough, but if Elu had misprogrammed something or forgotten a crucial detail, he might not know until the telltale symptoms of a mistake appeared.

Akavi made a small nngh sound. The microexpression software in Elu’s visual cortex dutifully logged his emotions: exhausted, in pain, dismayed by his own vulnerability. A second later Akavi collected himself, squared his jaw, and said, “I have no complaints.” His syllables came out slow, slurred with the aftereffects of anesthesia.

Elu smiled fondly. Akavi never would admit weakness, not even at a time like this.

“Can you feel your ansible uplink?”

“I– hm.” His brow furrowed again, and he was lost in thought for six and a half seconds, long enough that Elu started to wonder if he’d fallen back asleep. “No. It’s not just dormant but gone. Cleanly, it seems.”

Elu let out about half of a relieved breath. “Are you feeling well enough to run diagnostics? Are any other systems affected?”

“Stand by.” A longer pause this time. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. “No, everything else appears normal.” The corner of Akavi’s mouth quirked, something that might have been a smile if he’d had more energy. “You are competent, as ever.”

Elu sighed out the rest of his breath.

It had been several weeks since the Plague. For most of that time they’d been on the run from the Gods in a stolen God-built spaceship. The Gods had expected Akavi to prevent the Plague, then They’d expected him to solve it, and then They’d ordered him terminated for failing at both. It had been Elu’s idea, not Akavi’s, to escape.

A stray bit of magic from an encounter with Evianna Talirr had given them the head start they needed. She’d meant to hide Akavi from the Gods long enough to reckon with him herself. But that attempt had failed, and, when she left, her magic stayed behind. For an unknown period they’d been hidden from all the Gods’ sensors. And they’d used that time to run.

It was anyone’s guess how long that magic would hold up. So Elu, who had some facility with cybernetics, had been making his own arrangements. He’d removed and disabled everything that connected the Talon to the ansible nets, and all the failsafes that might allow the Gods to override its controls. He’d used bots and printers to modify the ship’s exterior so that it resembled a small civilian transport, not the sleek God-built marvel that remained within. And he’d planned, painstakingly, a neurosurgery that would make the corresponding modifications to him and Akavi. The ansible connections in their brains would be removed, leaving them crippled by the standards of angels, cut off from the network where they’d stored so much of their knowledge and community, but safely anonymous for that very reason. They could go where they wanted to, once they’d recovered from a surgery like that.

Well, almost. The titanium plates at Elu’s forehead, marking where his circuitry went in, would still be there. Even aside from being an angel, Elu looked distinctive – frozen by angelic anti-aging treatments at nineteen, when most angels joined the corps in their thirties or forties. With an order out for his and Akavi’s arrest, that would be the first thing everyone would know to look for. He’d have to stay on the ship or hide his face completely. Akavi was luckier, but he’d still have to watch that his shapeshifting abilities and his more-than-mortal intelligence didn’t give him away.

Elu had wanted to go under first. If there was a bug in the software, let it be him who suffered the consequences and not Akavi. But Akavi, uncharacteristically, had insisted otherwise. Elu was the one who understood medical software; he needed to watch the first surgery with all his faculties intact. That way, if something did go wrong, he’d have a fighting chance at setting it right.

The surgery had mostly involved the inorganic part of Akavi’s brain, but recovery from such a procedure could be nearly as complicated as the organic version, as mind and soul struggled to accommodate the changed shape they inhabited. Exhaustion, confusion and incredible headaches could be expected for the next several weeks. And, for the next few hours, there’d still be the leftovers from general anesthesia.

“Let me get you some water,” Elu said. Akavi murmured something in acknowledgment. It was the work of only a few seconds to grab a glass of clear, pure water from the food printer. By the time Elu returned with it, Akavi had already fallen back asleep.

“I want revenge,” Akavi said to Elu later. He was sitting up now, looking out the Talon’s window at the stars. They were in his quarters. Akavi sat on a chair that had been folded out into a stretcher and covered with a sterile sheet. There was no bed. Angels rarely needed to sleep; they had other means of maintaining neurological homeostasis. It was only when profoundly exhausted, in the wake of surgery, illness, or injury, that the biological version overcame them.

“I know, sir,” said Elu. They’d talked about it before.

“Yasira betrayed me. Irimiru betrayed me. Nemesis betrayed me.” He hissed out that last name: the name of a God. It was blasphemous to speak a God’s name in anger this way, but Akavi was already slated for termination and damnation. He could say whatever he liked. “The guilty must be punished, and that is our nature.”

Elu tugged nervously at his long black hair, which he kept carefully brushed out of his face. He understood Akavi’s argument. He was hardly going to object on moral grounds; he and Akavi had done many things more terrible than seeking revenge. It was just…

He’d had a vague hope, maybe, that life on the run would be different. They’d find some different things to do, on their own terms.

But he wanted to be with Akavi much more than he wanted those vague, half-formed things. Elu had happily followed Akavi’s orders for fifty years.

“I don’t know how you can punish a God,” said Elu.

Akavi frowned slightly. His gaze was still glassily fixed on the stars. He hadn’t recovered from the anesthetic yet, but with his straight spine and sharp words, he was trying very hard to pretend he had. “No, I haven’t found a promising avenue yet. We’ll start with Yasira; she’s an easier target. A broken heretic on the run, without support.”

Elu would have quibbled about the without support part. Yasira had taken her girlfriend with her when she escaped. And she had Outside abilities whose precise nature remained unknown. But he knew what Akavi meant. Irimiru was a powerful, high-ranking angel protected by a massive divine apparatus, and Nemesis Herself was even more so. Yasira didn’t have those things. Like him and Akavi, she was making do as best she could.

“What about Talirr?” Elu asked carefully. “Did she betray us?”

He liked the idea of keeping up the search for Talirr, much more than he wanted to hunt Yasira down. He wasn’t sure how they’d do it; they’d tried before, with the full resources of an Inquisitor in good standing, and still failed. He knew they couldn’t work their way back into Nemesis’ good graces. Forgiveness wasn’t what Nemesis did. But Talirr had hurt hundreds of millions of people, and making her pay for those crimes still felt like a good thing to do. The right thing to do.

Elu had seen what serving Nemesis, the God of punishment, was really about. But there was still a childish part of him, deep down, that just wanted to catch all the bad guys and make the world safe.

Akavi flicked a hand. “We’ll add her to the list with Irimiru, if you like. We’ll – ugh.” His face contorted slightly. Elu rummaged in his supplies for another painkiller. “What did you say was the estimated recovery time for this procedure?”

“It’s hard to say, sir,” Elu replied, as he found the appropriate bottle and shook out two small tablets. It still felt natural to call Akavi sir, but should he? Akavi wasn’t technically his commanding officer anymore. They were outside that whole structure, but that didn’t make them equals. Maybe he should ask.

He didn’t quite want to, though. Not while Akavi was still in recovery. The question was too big, too connected to too many other things.

“My simulations indicated a few days to basic functionality,” he continued, refocusing. Akavi took the tablets and the glass of water by his bed and easily swallowed them. “A couple more weeks for any lingering pain, mental unease, or disorientation. But we won’t really know until we’re through it. A slower recovery isn’t necessarily a warning sign. What would be more worrying is if you display any symptoms that aren’t on the predicted list, so we’ll be monitoring that carefully.”

Akavi made a small hmph sound, looking away from him.

“Where do you think Yasira is?” Elu asked. “We won’t need a full recovery just to start looking.”

“She’ll be on Jai. Or near it. That much is obvious.”

“Is it? I almost think she’d run off and hide somewhere. Have a bit of a rest.” Yasira had been traumatized and exhausted the last time Elu saw her. And the Chaos Zone of Jai wasn’t going to be a restful place for anyone.

Akavi gave him a contemptuous glance. “Of course she’ll rest at first. But Yasira Shien rebelled against us precisely because of her desire to help. She’ll keep that desire, no matter how exhausted. That’s doubly true if her lover is with her. When we’re sufficiently recovered, we’ll go to the Chaos Zone. We’ll take stock of the current situation and of who’s being helped, in mysterious ways, against the Gods’ orders. That’s where we’ll find Yasira, rest assured. And when we find her, then the fun begins.”

Elu gave him a doubtful look. “Fun, sir?”

Akavi smiled sharply; his gaze had already returned, out the window, to the stars. “That’s when we destroy her.”

A line of warrior angels, wearing the red-and-black active-duty livery of Nemesis and the bronze-and-white uniform of Arete, stood at attention in front of Enga Afonbataw Konum, marshal of Nemesis. Most held God-built firearms, sleek and heavy, in their hands; a few, like Enga, were modified so heavily that they did not need them. Some dragged larger weapons behind them in the training field, a rectangular area of short dry grass not far from the angels’ encampment. Border Camp 342-6J, this was called, one of an irritatingly long line of makeshift stops all around the edge of the Chaos Zone. All devoted to the same purposes: to keep the Plague-ridden area from expanding, and to serve as a home base for missions further in.

Enga stood as straight as the rest of the warriors, with the alien Spider known as Sispirinithas waiting at her side, and an ungainly makeshift target just behind her. Enga was a distinctive-looking angel, easily picked out even if she hadn’t worn the elaborate piping of her recent promotion. Enga was tall, muscular, dark-skinned, and silent. Where most angels had arms, Enga sported the most elaborate customized prosthetics in the angelic corps, a tangle of muzzles and manipulators sprouting from her shoulders, which compactly contained dozens of deadly weapons along with nearly any other tool she might require.

Her new rank of marshal was as high as she could go without vaulting all the way into administration: as prestigious, in its way, as the rank of Inquisitor. She’d been racking up commendations for decades, and her performance during the Plague, combined with her previous supervisor’s failure, had finally pushed her all the way up here. She had been the first angel to demonstrate that Jai’s largest monsters could be killed. She had been one of a very small number to survive field placement in the Chaos Zone at all, back when it was still cut off from off-planet communication and support, and she’d directly saved the lives of half a dozen other angels on the return journey. Now that the Chaos Zone was opened, she’d been given the role of training the rest of the infantry who served here.

Enga did not feel proud, the way she had a right to feel, being granted all these honors. Enga felt lonely and bored. She could see all the angels in front of her, not only with her eyes, but with her circuitry, which picked them all out as bright points of light in the surrounding network, living nodes temporarily suborned to hers. But grunts were just grunts. Enga didn’t like any of them. She was lonely for something else.

She wanted Elu and Akavi, but they were gone, and they were never coming back except as corpses.

READY, she text-sent to the line of infantry, and she watched them shoulder their weapons with precise efficiency. No one form of weapon could be guaranteed to work on every Outside monster. Each was unique. A heavy armor-piercing missile would do the job in a pinch, but those were cumbersome to carry around, and they were in many cases overkill.

AIM, she text-sent, and the angels pointed their weapons in unison at the practice target. Just a black circle cobbled together from scraps, at about the height of one of the medium-large Outside monsters. It bobbed slowly in the air, imitating movement patterns that had been extracted from Enga’s own sensory videos.

She paced the ranks, examining the way each angel scoped out the target, the way they kept their eyes half-averted. She paused meaningfully by one, a curly-haired man in Nemesis’ colors, who was staring too directly at the stupid black circle, too focused. She telescoped an appendage out to grab that one by the chin.

DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THEM, IT CAN FUCK UP YOUR VISUAL CIRCUITS, she instructed.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” said the recruit.

Enga let go, and watched him snap back to attention, nearly losing his balance. TEN, she ordered, before walking away down the line.

The man obligingly dropped to the ground and began a short set of pushups.

Enga didn’t care about honors and ranks, but there was something satisfying about being addressed as “sir” in that frightened way. Getting to dole out punishments, even in these small ways, as she saw fit.

“Sir,” said another of the angels, also of Nemesis, a woman almost as large and strong as Enga. Enga could have looked up her name on the network if she’d wanted to. “Question.”

MAKE IT GOOD, said Enga, who did not like being questioned. Long ago, before she was an angel, Enga had worked as a fitness instructor. There was enough of her old self left that she faintly remembered what that was like, and why responding to questions was important. But she didn’t enjoy the process anymore. Being an angel wasn’t like doing martial arts for fun. When you were an angel, it was safer to obey without thinking.

“Sir, why are we bothering to do it like this, to go out into enemy territory and pick off the monsters one by one? Why bother shooting carefully at what we think is their head? We have the weaponry to do better. We could burn out a whole district at once, the monsters and the heretics alike.”

Enga glowered, because she actually agreed. She would much rather bomb the whole place into oblivion. Not long ago, Nemesis had come very close to doing it Herself: orbiting the planet with a convoy of Ha-Mashhit-class warships and melting every square foot of affected land back to magma. Starting again clean.

But there were reasons why She hadn’t gone through with it. Gods relied on human worship. They consumed human souls to keep Themselves alive; without that process, They would only be very advanced machines. They could do it without individual humans’ consent, but if humans ever did rebel – if they started a second Morlock War – they could force the Gods to destroy them in Their own defense. And the Gods would be diminished afterwards, with only a remnant of the human population to give them sustenance. It would take hundreds of years to recover.

So the Gods could only use Their power in certain ways. The most brutal acts were done in secret – or to targets that could be painstakingly justified. Worse than any individual heretic going unpunished was the risk of crossing some moral line and becoming, in mortal humanity’s eyes, an enemy.

Some of the Gods, like Nemesis, restrained Themselves for that reason alone. Other Gods had more complicated feelings. Arete, who fought so often at Nemesis’ side, didn’t like to dirty Her hands; Arete genuinely wanted to be a benevolent master. Enga could see some of Arete’s angels in the group, shifting slightly, giving uncomfortable looks to the angel who’d asked.

So bombing out whole cities at once, in the Chaos Zone, was something the Gods had decided They couldn’t do. But Enga wasn’t impressed. Everybody in the Chaos Zone was a heretic, right? The Gods were already busy elsewhere, carefully crafting propaganda vids that showed why the Chaos Zone couldn’t be saved. They were either building up to a large-scale bombing eventually, or They were stupid. And in the meantime, angels like Enga were having to waste their time pretending that individual fights with monsters even mattered. Enga did not like wasting time.

Another problem was that Nemesis’ forces were spread thin. The Keres, the Gods’ ancient enemy, had scented blood here. She was beginning to make Her own forays into the area. Nemesis’ forces on the ground often had to shrink their own efforts because personnel were needed to fend the Keres off.

But Enga didn’t like that argument either. Personnel would be less of an issue with a different approach; it didn’t take a lot of angels to just bomb the shit out of something. It did take a lot of angels to do what she was doing – recruit and train endless troops to patrol an area, dealing with threats one at a time.

But the third argument, the one Enga was least able to dispute, was that bombing the shit out of the Chaos Zone wouldn’t solve anything. Not until they’d found Evianna Talirr. She was the one who’d done this to the planet. And she could do it again. Clean up Jai’s Chaos Zone too quickly and neatly, and Talirr would only make another one somewhere else. There were only a few dozen populated planets in human space; pretty soon they’d start to run out. The Gods had to find Talirr, along with Yasira Shien, who was capable of something similar. Then, maybe, They could bomb what remained.

But that meant that Enga and the troops in her care were only buying time. Spinning their wheels uselessly until some other part of the angelic corps got its act together. Pretending what they did here, until then, mattered.

Enga hated feeling useless. And she hated having to explain things she hated to subordinates who hated them as much as she did. Having to pretend – because protocol demanded it – that she thought those things were good.

WE ARE KEEPING ORDER IN THE CHAOS ZONE, Enga replied, NOT BURNING IT. THAT IS NEMESIS’ COMMAND.

But the junior angels could probably feel the frustrated rage under her text-sending. She couldn’t help it; she’d never learned to filter her feelings out completely, as the most skilled angels could. And that was going to make everyone question more, not less. She was fucking it up.

NO MORE QUESTIONS, said Enga, and she turned on her heel and walked away.

She heard Sispirinithas, behind her, picking up the slack by diving into a lecture. “The maddening quality of Outside monsters isn’t solely conveyed through the visual system,” said the characteristic whispery voice from his translator. Sispirinithas was an alien, one of the vanishingly rare non-humans who worked for human Gods. He wasn’t literally a giant spider, but he looked like one, with ten spindly legs radiating from a rounded, many-eyed, heavy-jawed body. “If you don’t have sensory filters installed – hm, raise your hand if you don’t have sensory filters installed? No one? Good. You might notice those filters apply to all your senses. That’s because you can be driven mad with any of them. Even species who don’t share any specific human sensory faculties can be driven mad by Outside. The filters prevent that, but if you focus too intently on the worst kinds of Outside monster, the filters’ processing capabilities can overload and glitch, causing a general loss of vision or of whatever other sense. By the way, I believe the field commander is asking for a short break.”

Enga had asked for no such thing, but Sispirinithas knew how to pick up on her patterns. They’d worked together a long time. When Enga was promoted, Irimiru had some concerns about how she would fare in her new rank, given her neurological oddities, so she’d assigned Sispirinithas to her as a minder. It was an unusual assignment, especially since Sispirinithas wasn’t a military expert. He was a folklorist with some minor background in cross-species linguistics. But Enga didn’t like to talk much, even over text, and Sispirinithas was happy to take over the talking when necessary.

Now he pranced back and forth with his ten-legged gait, while Enga stood in the corner of the field, trying to pull herself together. Occasionally he veered too close to a recruit, mandibles clacking, as if by accident. Sispirinithas found it very funny when humans – mortal or angelic – flinched.

“Anyway,” he said, “as the marshal was saying, you shouldn’t look too closely at Outside monsters, and your sensory filters will block you from seeing anything useful if you try. You might think that this puts you at a disadvantage, not being able to tell one part of their anatomy from another. Where’s the head, for instance? Where are the vital organs? What you’ve got to remember is that no one else can answer that question either. Outside monsters don’t have a sensible anatomy. That’s why you can’t be too clever with your aim. Just hit them with the biggest thing available, as close to the center as you can. I have a very informative slideshow prepared to illustrate this point. Let’s go indoors a bit, shall we, morsels?”

The grunts followed him, and even Enga, standing in the corner, did not miss the looks they gave each other. Sispirinithas was happy to cover for Enga as much as she liked, but even his skills were beginning to slip. Enga was ninety-five percent sure he’d shown them this slideshow before. If she’d bothered to search through her sensory recordings, she could have checked and made it a hundred. If she actually cared.

She began to hit her head, lightly and rhythmically, against the makeshift wall.

The loss of Akavi and Elu reverberated in her like a hollow-point bullet, but that wasn’t the only reason why Enga was failing. There was something about teaching that did not suit Enga anymore, even on days when her mood was good. She could wade through a hellscape of enemy fire and mud, she could fight as long and as hard as she had to; that was a stress her body understood. She couldn’t always face all these able-bodied angels in a peaceful field, looking at her skeptically and expectantly, like they wanted her to prove what the marshal’s livery implied. To make them strong.

Enga was alone. She was too stupid to do the job she’d been assigned, and too swayed by useless emotions to focus. She hit her head harder, twice, against the wall. She couldn’t even pull herself together.

Attention, said a pop-up notification inside her brain. Minor self-inflicted bruising detected. Please desist before incurring further injury, or your Overseer will be informed.

Enga paused, and then pushed herself away from the wall with a venomous, directionless FINE.

When Enga had still been in training, she’d had an off switch. Akavi had installed a restraint program in her because of her neurodivergence and the heavy, deadly weaponry she carried around. If she had a meltdown like this, if she was about to be violent to herself or others, then the restraint program would have detected it automatically, frozen her body, and numbed her senses to the point of blindness until she calmed down. Enga had always hated that program, and she was glad not to have it anymore. Her systems still monitored her, like any angel’s, but they couldn’t shut her down that way. They could only give warnings like these, both to her and, if necessary, to her superiors. Enga’s superiors placed a lot of trust in her, giving her authority and violent power.

She had a feeling she was going to make them regret it.

Enga sent a request in Irimiru’s direction and then stalked through the field, past the building where Sispirinithas was helpfully showing his stupid slides. Past everything, through the portal at the heart of Border Encampment 342-6J, and into the throne room on a spaceship millions of miles away.

Irimiru Kaule, Overseer of Nemesis, was a Vaurian shapeshifter like Akavi. At the moment Irimiru looked like a tall, gaunt woman with long twists of black hair hanging down her ragged body. She had been taking forms like this more often since the Plague, forms with off-putting or sinister features, as if to better express a general displeasure with everything. She sat on a throne of twisted metal, and her metal-plated fingertips danced up and down its arms, coursing visibly with electricity as unfathomable amounts of information passed into and out of her organizing mind. A swarm of tiny, flying bots, like bees, filled the air around her, carrying auxiliary processing space between them.

Just as Enga’s body was altered to make her better at her job, overseers were altered in their minds. Overseers’ souls no longer resided solely within their skulls, but in an interplay of thought distributed through the network: the throne, the bots, the face-bearing body almost an afterthought. The promotion process to Overseer, in which the soul was coaxed to adjust to this state, was correspondingly excruciating. Enga didn’t want that one yet.

Overseers still had physical bodies, unlike the ranks above them. And so Irimiru was able to glare directly at Enga in greeting.

MY LADY, said Enga, genuflecting. I WANT TO BE DEMOTED.

Irimiru crossed one leg over the other and leaned back, becoming a languid, bearded man, the kind who might lounge around in an old-fashioned fiefdom listening to the peasants’ disputes. “That’s the thirteenth time you’ve asked in the past three weeks. The answer is still no. You know what is required of you.”

WHAT IS REQUIRED OF ME IS STUPID AND I AM FAILING. DEMOTE ME. OR KILL ME FOR FAILING. OR PUT ME ON THE NEMESIS-DAMNED SEARCH FOR AKAVI AND ELU WHERE I BELONG.

She had, in fact, asked this basic question twelve times before, but not as strongly. This version was suicidal for several reasons, not just the “kill me” part. The blasphemy was unacceptable. The word “fail” was never said aloud, by an angel of Nemesis, in reference to themselves. It was a show of weakness, and it would inevitably lead to whatever punishment one’s superiors thought was funny at the time.

Unless, of course, one’s superiors thought it was funniest to keep one right where one was.

Irimiru raised one hand from the buzzing arm of the throne and examined his metal-plated nails with seeming idleness. “After Akavi’s failure, it took a good deal of work to keep the punishments contained to him and not to literally everyone else on my team. Your good performance helped. You are an asset to me, and I need to be seen using you as your accomplishments demand. Putting you on yet another search team, all signals analysis and no shooting, would waste you. Then my superiors would ask why I am wasting you. The assignment that you have been given is prestigious, and will lead to yet more honors and awards for you as soon as you stop pouting and actually do it.”

I CANNOT DO IT, I AM STUPID, said Enga.

Irimiru raised his eyebrows, and, with a smooth shift, he became the type of person who might have taught kindergarten on Enga’s home planet; dark-skinned, soft and somehow motherly-looking despite an indeterminate gender. Their penetrating gaze didn’t soften to match.

“I’m not going to make soothing sounds,” they said, “and tell you that you can do whatever you put your mind to. Maybe you can’t. You are brain-damaged, after all. But, based on the video files I’ve reviewed, you haven’t actually tried. You’ve done a passable job for an hour or two at a time, and then stormed off and had your little sulks. That’s not incapability. It’s insubordination.”

THEN TERMINATE ME, said Enga.

She half-meant it. She really wanted Akavi and Elu, not death. But right now everything felt gray and heavy and intolerable. She wanted to shoot and destroy everything, anything she could, even herself.

Irimiru sighed out some odd, wistful emotion, bringing their free hand to their mouth. “You know I love to hear my subordinates begging for death. But I’ll refer you to what I just said. The archangels want to know that I’m handling my part of this competently. If an angel of your talents is not playing a leading role in our development of Chaos Zone-appropriate skills for our infantry, they’re going to ask me why.”

Enga, against her own better judgment, took a step towards Irimiru. She let her arms whir a little, slightly unfolding and resettling themselves into a different configuration, the way she did when she wanted to unsettle mortals.

Akavi and Elu had always described Irimiru as somehow terrifying, which was very funny to Enga. Elu was afraid of everything anyway, and Akavi normally preferred to be the one who terrified everyone else. But Enga wasn’t afraid. Maybe because she wasn’t good at reading faces and bodies the way the two of them were. She could turn on programs to help her interpret them, but, maybe on some visceral level, Irimiru’s intimidation tactics were based on little facial and vocal signs that went right over Enga’s head.

Or maybe it was something much simpler. She’d often suspected that Irimiru had a soft spot for angry women. Maybe Irimiru saw that in Enga and liked her.

YOU MEAN YOU NEED ME, she said.

Irimiru narrowed their eyes. “Hardly.”

But the damage had been done; they’d said it. They’d told Enga that Enga’s good performance was one of the things keeping Irimiru safe.

GIVE ME WHAT I WANT, said Enga. PUT ME ON THE SEARCH FOR AKAVI AND ELU. OR TERMINATE ME. OR ELSE I WILL GO BACK TO THE BORDER ENCAMPMENT, SHOOT EVERY OTHER ANGEL IN RANGE, DESTROY THE ENTIRE FACILITY AND LET THE MONSTERS OUT. AND THEN YOU CAN EXPLAIN TO THE ARCHANGELS WHY THAT HAPPENED.

She was half-convinced Irimiru would terminate her for real for making such a threat. Instead, Irimiru paused, then let out a long, low, appreciative laugh.

“You’re feisty,” they said. “But it wouldn’t work. All I’d have to say is that you were tragically driven mad by all your close encounters with those Outside monsters.” They sat up a little straighter, regarding her carefully. “I’m going to throw you a bone, though. Only because I like you. And because I really would like you to actually train my infantry rather than having increasingly vivid fantasies of murdering them, or delegating the work to an unqualified Spider. I’m going to tell the team tracking Akavi and Elu that, when we locate them – and not an instant sooner – you’ll have the first crack at bringing them in. That’s as much as I can offer.”

Enga heaved a sigh and squared her shoulders. This was not as much of a relief as it should have been. She still itched to shoot something that wasn’t a dummy made of scraps. THANK YOU, MY LADY.

Irimiru shifted again, becoming an eerily exact likeness of Elu. The long hair, the gangly limbs, the soft facial expression. Even his eyes looked gentle and kind like Elu’s. Only the voice – Elu’s in timbre, but Irimiru’s in tone, sharp, mocking – gave it away.

“Go, then,” he said. “But I’ve made my offer. And if you don’t quickly begin to do your actual work, I can take it away.”

Four Months Ago

Akavi’s recovery had gone rougher than expected. The effects on his soul, from an alteration as simple as removing an ansible uplink, should have been mild. But there were aspects of angelic medicine, key details about how the connection between brain and soul and circuitry functioned, that were hidden even from angels like Elu. To discourage exactly this kind of illicit tampering, no doubt.

It didn’t surprise him, then, when Akavi periodically doubled over with cluster headaches, strong enough to crack even the former Inquisitor’s careful control. Or when he slept, exhausted by pain and medicine, only to wake in a night terror. Elu knew it would pass, the way the symptoms of their long-ago ascensions had gradually passed. But he didn’t know how long that would take. All he could do was treat the symptoms and wait. Analgesics, nerve agonists, anxiolytics, sedatives.

He steered the Talon closer to the surface of Jai. Now that the ship was disguised it was not difficult to fall into the civilian transport lanes, to print the kinds of identification codes that would get them waved through Jai’s local portals as traveling merchants. And, from there, to surreptitiously take sensor readings of the area. He studied the Chaos Zone’s current state and the movements of its populace, and drew up charts, which Akavi examined, on his good days, with a thoughtful frown. Eventually he found a place for the ship to settle – a calm and out-of-the-way area, not far from the city of Büata, where it could hide among mossy crags. On a suitable day, when it was foggy and the sky was aurora-filled enough to confuse the Gods’ sensors, he navigated down there and landed.

Akavi was doing better by now, active and impatient, only occasionally falling into his spasms of pain. And the Outside magic – as far as Elu could tell – was beginning to flicker. The protective aura around the Talon’s sensors and transmitters had been faintly visible to him, a black mist that activated his sensory filters, and he could see it gradually thinning and shifting as the days wore on.

“Do you think you can handle it?” he asked Akavi, indicating the medical setup. The bots, equipped with Elu’s program, would do the most delicate work on their own, but it still took mental focus and emotional fortitude to supervise. To wait and make sure Elu woke up properly, to check his symptoms and do all the other small tasks of recovery.

Akavi gave the bots and the stretcher an unimpressed look. “I can, but do you believe it’s wise? You haven’t worked out how to correct for the side effects.”

Elu sighed. He’d been trying. But he had yet to come up with a change to his procedure that he felt confident about. And if he dithered much longer, their protection would fail.

“It’s our only option at this point anyway,” he said. “I’ll live.”

He came out of anesthesia in a haze of blue; he’d decorated his personal quarters in light, cool colors, and that was the first thing he was able to focus on, the sky-blue of the ceiling. The subtle copper filigree that ran across it, in an abstract pattern like a rippling stream over smooth stones. He liked the color. His vision swam; his head pounded with something that wasn’t quite pain yet, only a disorienting pressure, a sense that something wasn’t right.

He felt the surgery’s wrongness deep in his bones, on a level no anesthesia could touch. The same way he’d felt it, so many decades ago, after his ascension. Something about him had been irrevocably changed, and some part of him even deeper than his physical body wanted to fight it.

Akavi said something, but that felt wrong, too. He didn’t know what was wrong, how a voice that had been his anchor for over half a century could feel harsh and unwelcome in his ears. He was so preoccupied trying to figure it out that he missed the actual words. By the time he thought to ask Akavi to repeat himself, he’d fallen back asleep.

When he woke up again, Akavi’s form had changed. She was a Riayin woman now. Average height, average build. Elegant and poised, like most of Akavi’s forms, but without any specific qualities to make her stand out from a crowd. Her clothes were the kind of shabby that suggested once-well-made garments subjected to months of harrowing strain.

This was the kind of body Akavi would use for undercover work down here. Which meant–

Which meant Akavi was leaving. Soon.

Elu tried to form a question, but it came out as a vague groan. Akavi turned and looked down at him with a calm, disinterested expression. “You’re awake.”

Elu nnghed in agreement. He liked the way Akavi looked, no matter what form she was in. He always liked it. He probably shouldn’t stare up admiringly like this, but he was very tired and fuzzy-headed, and he could either focus on this or fall back into the pain that was rapidly growing behind his eyes. Real pain now, oh dear. He didn’t suppose it would wear off any quicker for him than it had for Akavi.

“I’ve been monitoring your vital signs,” said Akavi. “So far you’re recovering at about the same rate I did. I’ve ensured the bots are equipped with all the fluids and medicines you might require. I believe they can take it from here.”

Elu tried to thrash upright, and immediately regretted it, as a wracking pain bloomed all down his head and neck. Was she leaving? She couldn’t leave. He wasn’t even well enough to move or speak yet.

Akavi sighed slightly, looking down at him. “I’m sorry, Elu, but we’ve wasted enough time already. Yasira is still out there, doing Gods know what to this planet, while we sit and do nothing. I need to be out there. Scouting, making contacts, lining up the kinds of resources I can use. The longer I wait, the more we’ll both fall behind. I’ll be back later and keep you updated, I promise. And you’ll be safe here.”

Elu lay back on his pillows, hating himself. Akavi was a proper angel of Nemesis, even now. Akavi could not tolerate weakness, and Elu was being weak. Clinging like a child, wanting to be fussed over and cared for, when there was nothing medical Akavi could do for him that the bots couldn’t.

The mission came first. Elu had vaguely hoped that would be different now, but why should it? Akavi didn’t owe him anything. She was here with him because that had been the available option: run away with him, or stay behind and be terminated. She had never been the kind of person who valued other people romantically, or even as respected friends. That wasn’t going to change, and neither was her need for activity, for some overriding goal to drive her onward. Even without their ansible uplinks, they both were what they were.

Akavi hesitated over him a moment longer. Something in her face looked uncertain. As if she was weighing up several difficult options.

Then, with swift decisiveness, she leaned down and kissed him lightly on the lips.

She’d never done that. Akavi could be seductive towards mortals when a mission required it, but she had barely ever laid a hand on Elu, even in the most unromantic, practical ways, in all of their half-century together.

He was too exhausted to try to work out what it meant.

“Be good,” she said, shouldering her pack. The Talon’s airlock slid shut behind her before Elu could formulate a response.

The local greenery rustled under Akavi’s feet as she walked away from the Talon. One enterprising shrub curled around her ankle, tugging like an attention-hungry child, and she shook it off.

They’d landed in a rustic little hole in the ground, all mossy boulders and winding trees. The Talon would be well-covered and the land here wasn’t especially corrupted by the Chaos Zone’s standards. The undergrowth that wound around Akavi’s feet was still mostly green, and had recognizable parts like leaves and stems, even if sometimes the leaves verged to blue or red or spiraled into strange patterns. The air was humid but not unpleasantly warm, and the sounds that buzzed and hissed around her were at least vaguely the right timbre to be insects and birds. If Akavi had installed any naturalist software she could have analyzed the sounds, classified those that matched known wild creatures and flagged those that were unfamiliar. She lacked that, but there were small animal paths here just as there’d be in an ordinary forest, and she had enough map-reading and positioning software to be able to follow one in an appropriate direction.

She had about an hour of walking to do before she reached inhabited areas. That gave her time to think, which was not necessarily ideal. She was not at all sure that kissing Elu had been the correct choice.

Elu had been, for fifty years, a known quantity. He had been a loyal assistant, attached to her by the angelic corps’ usual hierarchy. Intelligent in many ways; weak in others. Constantly and pathetically in love with her. Loyal, though. She’d valued Elu’s loyalty above almost anything else. Most angels of Elu’s rank were hungry for promotion and power, even to the point of betraying their superiors. Elu was different. Elu was that rarest of creatures, an angel she could trust.

But Elu had worked for Akavi because they were part of something bigger. They had a hierarchy, and Elu was attached to Akavi by that hierarchy, not merely by his own emotions.

And the structure that the hierarchy provided was gone now. No Overseer was here to hand down assignments and check that they functioned correctly as a team. Elu and Akavi had nothing now but themselves and a vaguely adequate spaceship. Elu couldn’t realistically go anywhere, but there was no external force in place to make him follow Akavi’s orders now. Nothing forced him to agree to her plans, to call her sir as he’d done, with that new uncertainty. Nothing but Akavi’s will and Elu’s old habit.

It was only a matter of time before Elu figured that out.

Twigs snapped under Akavi’s feet as she pressed on. The forest wasn’t dark; sunlight filtered easy and bright through the leaves. But she saw branches curling in her direction, warding or beckoning. Once or twice one reached and touched her shoulder, and she batted it away. Mortals would not enjoy entering this area at night, she suspected. So much the better.

Akavi did not love Elu, but she valued him. So she had acted, despite misgivings, to give him a reason to obey a little longer.

That tactic wouldn’t be effective forever. Human hearts were fickle things, and she couldn’t count on the effect to be permanent, no matter how far she took it and how well Elu was fooled. Sooner or later he would need–

She didn’t know, and that made her uneasy. It wasn’t just sex, or even a facsimile of love. He would need something as unshakable as the whole angelic hierarchy, as dear to his heart as the God he’d followed, and even Akavi didn’t know where to get a thing like that.

She resented having to think about it. Having it turn over and over in her mind, when she should have been strategizing, all through the long walk to Büata.

 

Here is the unofficial story of the Chaos Zone: the one seen in dreams by the Chaos Zone’s newly minted mystics, repeated in hushed tones, scribbled on heretical broadsheets. To speak the story this way, in the hearing of angels, is to die:

Once there was a woman named Destroyer.

(That was not her birth name. She was known to the Gods as Dr Evianna Talirr. She never called herself Destroyer, and neither did They. But stories simplify, even when they are true; in a story, sometimes the best name for a person is a simple truth that they deny.)

Destroyer was born unlike other people, and the Gods tried to destroy her for it. True to her name, she tried to destroy Them back. But Gods are not so easy to destroy. What fell into her crosshairs instead, as an opening gambit, was our world. She uprooted the life that we knew, killed us in the millions and took apart our homes. She sent the Plague to Jai and created the Chaos Zone, on our world which had once been so orderly and simple.

But Destroyer, no matter how powerful, was human. And Destroyer was lonely.

Once there was a woman named Savior. She was a student of Destroyer’s, and Destroyer summoned her, wanting friendship, wanting help. But Savior had been born on Jai, and she loved her world as Destroyer did not.

“Help me,” said Destroyer. “For we are born more powerful than other people, and the world will never do anything but hate us. Together, let us take the hateful world between our hands and tear it open.”

“I will not,” said Savior.

So the Gods took up Savior instead, into their immaculate ships, at the helms of their most fearsome weapons.

“Help Us,” said the Gods. “For We are more powerful than any human, but we are not infinite. We must rip out threats by their roots – threats to humans, and threats to Ourselves – and a threat like Destroyer is difficult even for Us. You have some of her power. Use it with Us, to destroy the Chaos Zone entirely, to murder every human who survives there.”

“I will not,” said Savior.

So Savior was thrown into Outside, the place that breaks the sanity of anyone who sees it, where she and Destroyer and the Chaos Zone all had their terrible origins. The Gods meant to break her.

“Help me,” said Savior.

And Outside turned, in its terrible ineffable might, and saw her.

Outside joined its own incomprehensible power to Savior’s. Savior joined her own desperate, compassionate soul to Outside’s. There was no longer any true separation between them. Savior was Outside made manifest. But Savior remembered her will.

Savior reached down, into the heart of the Chaos Zone of Jai, and did what she could.

Nothing that is done can be fully undone, even Outside. Savior could not erase what Destroyer had done. But she could alter it. She turned the Chaos Zone’s roaming monsters less deadly, its disruptions to the shape of things less violent. She stopped its border from further expanding. And, most merciful of all, she made a change to a third of the people who lived here. She gave us powers of our own, small echoes of hers. Power to bring forth fruit from the strange ground, to see the truth in dreams, to protect our loved ones and survive.

Then, exhausted from her struggle, Savior went far away.

“We have stopped the growth of the Chaos Zone,” said the Gods. “We have made its effects less deadly. You may stand by for further improvements.” But They had nothing to do with what Savior had done. They did not even understand it. Their angels walk the Chaos Zone now, making Their paltry attempts at help and control, but it will win Them nothing.

Destroyer walks the planet now in disguise, a lone woman speaking to no one. Shamed by Savior’s courage, she seeks now to remember her humanity and to learn what she can. One day she will return, perhaps to earn something other than her name.

Savior hides now, half-awake, licking the wounds she incurred for our sake. A small group walks the planet in her stead, gifted with fragments of her power, helping where they can. It will not be enough, but it will keep us alive, in spite of all the Gods’ efforts otherwise.

One day Savior, too, will return, and save us fully.