Illumination 10.2: The Kindness of Strangers
Seth started his search at the open market nearest to the outer barricade, where people were still going through the motions of daily life despite the alien portal occasionally visible through gaps in the buildings. People still needed to eat, after all. Life went on.
The market was very crowded, even though some stalls looked abandoned. Off-duty soldiers congregated at corners, and refugees clung to the stalls of friends and family to tell stories of what they’d escaped on the other side of the wall.
The latter were what Seth had come to the market to find. He had no expectation of finding Natalie herself in such a well-protected and populated region. But Natalie always stood out in a crowd, and she’d stand out even more in a world of monsters. If she was on the other side of the barricade, somebody would have noticed.
A whole mythology around the portal had sprung up, though. Seth heard about a devil drinking down all the bars beyond the barricade, and the Duke of Hell and the Consort of Hell and the King of Hell himself recruiting for their infernal domain. And he heard about why some people were remaining behind the barricade, or returning after picking up supplies from the market. It was a test from God, one they must endure. And they knew they were meant to endure it, because alongside the devils was the Lady, sent by Heaven to protect them.
Seth insinuated himself into some of these discussions, asking questions here and there. The Lady didn’t speak, which made sense; Natalie hadn’t studied Spanish. The Lady appeared and disappeared; she didn’t eat or drink, but only killed monsters. She was a ghost, she was a wraith, she was a lost soul trying to make up for something she couldn’t forgive herself for.
The last came from an older man, tall and with accented Spanish. He noticed Seth listening on the edge of the group, his gaze lingering on him.
Being noticed wasn’t part of Seth’s plan, so he ducked away and continued down the market. But the man followed him. “Boy,” he called, in English as accented as his Spanish. “I recognize you, boy.”
Seth stopped and let the man catch up. He walked with a limp, and he had a fresh cut on his face. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“Ah, but I have seen the other one myself. The Lady. You look like her. I thought she was only human, and now I know. Just a girl, confused and angry. You are looking for her, yes?”
“Well, yeah,” said Seth, giving the man a wary look. He wasn’t used to this.
“I have encountered her,” said the man calmly, brushing his fingers across the wound on his face. “So has a family of my acquaintance. When I left them, she was sleeping on a blanket in their home.”
Seth’s hand flew out to grip the man’s arm. “Where?”
“I will take you there,” the man said. He hesitated, then said, “Boy, do you know what she has gone through?”
Seth blinked again. “Do you?”
“I have seen her eyes,” the man said gravely, as if this meant everything. Seth relaxed.
“If you get me to her, I’ll take care of her.”
“We will see,” he said, but he guided Seth down a narrow alley and through a crevice between two buildings, and down another alley, and so they made it into what might as well have been the first circle of hell. The man passed apartment buildings and abandoned storefronts, until he came to a collection of buildings that looked so poorly constructed that they should have fallen down in a stiff wind. Fortunately, they were all leaning on each other already. At a door of rust-red, Seth’s guide knocked.
The door was immediately opened by a young woman holding a baby. She frowned at the man before looking at Seth. Then she sighed and said, “She has already left.”
Seth was too cynical to be surprised. “When? Which direction did she go?”
“An hour ago?” the woman said, waving her free hand vaguely. “She woke from a nightmare, and the nightmare chased her away from us. I was not surprised. She was not meant to rest.”
Seth frowned and peered over the woman’s shoulder. The house seemed completely clean of Awakened, and he wondered if the woman meant that nightmares had literally chased her away.
“She had her holy sword out,” the woman volunteered. “Who are you?”
“I’m her brother,” said Seth, flashing a grin.
The woman recoiled and the older man put out a hand to steady her. “It’s as I told you. She may be chosen but she is only mortal.”
“What direction did she go?” Seth repeated, his smile fading.
The woman pointed over Seth’s shoulder. He nodded at the man, then turned and took off jogging in the indicated direction.
They’d played Hide and Seek when they were younger. He’d always preferred to hide and let her do the seeking. But he knew his sister. She wouldn’t stay someplace safe when there were people in danger. She would always fight, as long as she could. She wasn’t just his sister, she was everybody’s elder sister. He’d always teased her about that. So it wasn’t the direction that mattered as much as looking for the trail she left behind, and listening for the sounds of a fight.
But there was nothing: no monsters, no people. And given all the abandoned buildings around, finding her without any trail was like looking for a needle in a haystack. He couldn’t even call her name, not if what the bird cambion had said was true: She hides from the name she had before.
He needed Jehane. But he didn’t have Jehane, so he went for the next best thing: height. He cut the lock off the nearest tall building and ran up the internal stairs, scrambling up through a trapdoor to the roof. Then he laid down near the edge and looked down.
There. Movement in a half-collapsed shack. The source was unclear, but the area just outside the shack positively swarmed with Awakened. And in the center of them sat a familiar big-pawed cat, looking around with Natalie’s eyes.
He barely remembered his descent from the building. When he arrived at the ruined shack, many of the Awakened had vanished. But the cat still sat there. He looked at it warily, and it yawned at him then paced away. “She won’t see you,” it remarked. “She isn’t seeing anybody. She’s busy. But you’re welcome to make the effort. Maybe she’ll make up her mind.”
“About what?” Seth called after the cat.
It vanished behind a wrecked car, but its voice drifted back. “About who she is.”
There was a clatter from within the shack. The front half of the building had collapsed into a pile of rotten timbers and rusted metal, leaving the back half of the building fully open. Seth edged around the side, until he could see within.
Natalie was crouched on her heels. She stared intently at the anima weapon in her hand, while her other hand moved. She seemed to be coated in shadowy cobwebs, and as Seth watched, she twisted the cobwebs around her free hand and began to shape an Awakened, never once removing her gaze from her weapon. She had a long, raw cut on her face, from her eye to her chin.
Seth leaned on the broken edge of the wall. “That looks sticky,” he offered.
Her head jerked up. She stared at him, wild-eyed. Then she said, “No!” and flung the half-formed Awakened at him, before fleeing across the urban wasteland.
Illumination 10.1: Tracking Targets
Elian’s device was contained within a small, plain box made of the same polymer as the Tower itself. “Don’t open it until you’re within 10 yards of the portal,” he’d told Ajax, with more than a little anxiety. “It might help if Jehane is present.”
“It’ll be cool,” Ajax told Elian. The kid clearly needed some encouragement. But now that he was wandering the edges of the barricaded zone, that wasn’t as clear.
He didn’t have much trouble understanding the language; his mother and grandmother had both spoken Spanish with him regularly. And, eavesdropping on conversations, he was starting to understand just how hostile the ‘Hellgate’ was. There were multiple levels of barricades. Scientists and soldiers filled the space between the outer barricade, which kept the afflicted region mostly isolated from the rest of the city, and the inner barricade, which was an attempt to slow down the monsters steadily disgorged by the Hellgate. They seemed incapable of completely stopping the monsters at that point, because Ajax watched a patrol between the middle and outer barricade shoot down a rhinoceros-like creature.
Technically, only approved personnel were allowed beyond the outer barricade, but there were too many alleys and back streets, and too many people who weren’t willing to give up what little they had just because monsters had moved in. So in practice the area around the outer barricade, both in front and behind, was a gradation of inhabitants rather than a clear line.
“At least the monsters look like monsters,” Ajax overheard one soldier tell another. “At least there’s that small mercy.”
But the number of Awakened in the area had skyrocketed, too, and the men with guns were tense and very frightened. Most of them didn’t have the Awakened guardians he’d seen on the squads in Detroit and Ajax had to resist the desire to help them out. His giant scythe was ridiculously conspicuous. He was avoiding attention so far, partially by keeping his head down and walking like he knew where he was going, but mostly by not being an alien.
Unfortunately, after a few hours of this, he was pretty sure it was nearly impossible for him to get anywhere near the big portal. The outer edges of the problem zone were fluid, but the middle barricade and beyond was full of lights and scientists and big machines and even bigger guns. If he could steal a uniform— but none of the soldiers wandered around alone and unarmed. That was inconvenient.
He hadn’t seen Hatherly or any of Hatherly’s allies. Ajax wondered if they were blending in just like he was. He could see Hatherly doing that, but probably not the others. And yet— Hatherly was the one who mattered; Hatherly and his weaponized cambion, that walking field generator. It was like Hatherly was walking around with a bomb, and nobody knew it.
Ajax stood in the upper floor window of an abandoned building within the outer barricade and watched the activity beyond the middle barricade. They were trying to communicate with the Hellgate, as far as Ajax could pick up. It seemed crazy. Troops and scientists from many different nations were arriving constantly, and he wondered how long they had before the military started to expand the Absolutely No Civilians zone just to have room for the official people.
They were getting better at managing the wildlife projected by the portal, at least. Bullets worked, if they used a lot of them, and there was quite a pile of corpses under a tarp. They’d tried communicating with the wildlife at first, too, Ajax had heard, but after four savaged scientists they’d given that up as a lost cause. The entities created by the remains of Tower Effa were frightening, and Ajax found the thought of them as troops directed by a non-broken mind both terrifying and exhilarating.
His stomach growled. It was probably time to head back to one of the meet-up points they’d established, away from the poorly camouflaged gate right outside the third barricade. He could find out if Seth had encountered Natalie or Jehane, and if anybody else had found Hatherly.
But as soon as he stepped outside the building, he realized he was in trouble. Two long-barreled guns pointed at him, and a uniformed figure leaning against the side of the building straightened up. “And there he is. I knew it was him.” It was the leader of the fireteam he’d briefly worked with in Detroit.
Ajax glanced at the two soldiers pointing guns at him. He thought he recognized one of them, but the other was new. A fourth member of the team was facing outward, weapon readied but not pointed at anything in particular.
Raising his hands slowly, Ajax turned toward the speaker. Definitely the same guy. “Hey, Corporal. I never caught your name before, which is hardly fair, because I bet you know mine.”
The corporal snorted. “Yeah. Martin. So. Can’t say that I’m surprised that you’re here. What do you know about that?” He hooked a thumb at the portal.
“Should you be asking me these questions? I mean, shouldn’t you be hauling me into your superiors or something?”
“Well, you know, I’ll probably do that. But as soon as I do, there’s going to be a dogpile over who gets to actually ask you those questions, what with this being an international operation. Plus,” a chilly smile passed over Martin’s face, “We were brought in ‘cause last time we got results. So it doesn’t hurt to get ahead of the game. You can put your hands down, by the way. We know what you can do.”
Ajax did so. “I know a little about the portal,” he admitted. “But it isn’t the biggest thing I’m worried about. It was opened by the same guy we faced before, and he opened it so he could do something much worse than what he did to Detroit.”
“Some of the troops have spotted him,” said Martin. “He’s been impossible to approach. He’s still got that… thing he had last time. The weapon that made us all feel like blowing our brains out, when we could even concentrate enough to think. As far as we know, he’s staying close to the portal.”
Ajax thought about that. “For protection, I guess, if the monsters aren’t attacking him. Damn. That’s going to make it even harder to get to the portal.”
Martin’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you want to get to the portal?”
“Uh.” Elian’s box was nestled in Ajax’s pocket, and he was suddenly pretty sure it’d be confiscated if he mentioned it. “I want to go through it.”
“You know what’s on the other side?”
“Basically. Maybe you and your guys could get me close?” he suggested, without much hope.
“Not a chance. Ask again after we’ve dealt with the real target.”
“What, when I’m in the middle of the dogpile you mentioned?”
Martin stalked closer. “The thing I don’t think you understand, kid, is that this is it for your secret organization. We survive the latest threat, your group has to come out of hiding. This,” he waved a hand at the soldiers pointing guns, “is friendly in comparison to what you’ll get if you don’t.”
Ajax threw up his hands. “Fine. I’ll wave my magic wand and make it so.” Then Martin caught his hand and snapped something around his wrist. Almost before Ajax was aware of what happened, Martin was stepping away again, and the guns were suddenly very focused. “What the hell is this?”
“GPS tracker. You duck out on us again, like you did in Detroit, we’ll find you. In fact, please try. It’ll be nice to see where you call home.”
Ajax would have snickered, if he wasn’t so annoyed. Somehow he didn’t think a GPS would track him back to the Tower. But it would track him back to the poorly hidden gate, which had so far escaped notice. It’d track him back to the meet-up points and the others.
“I can see you’re thinking it over.” Martin pulled out another silver ring, this one a bit larger. “Look, I want to be on the same side. I don’t want to use any of these other toys. So why don’t you stick with us for now and we’ll go see what the status of our common enemy is, eh?”
“Fine,” Ajax snapped. If they could get him close enough to the portal— or close enough to Hatherly’s biomechanical cambion— that could be enough.
Milestones
Hi there. Long time, no non-story-post.
I ran away from home this weekend in order to have a writing retreat. It was very useful. My first royalty statement showed up while I was away, and I finished writing and pre-posting Nightlights.
I started Nightlights about eighteen months ago, after I declared Matchbox Girls done. I toyed with several ideas, settled on one, then switched to Nightlights a day before NaNoWriMo started. I used NaNoWriMo to write a 50,000+ word outline for the series. I called in my zeroth draft. In January, I started turning that into a real manuscript. At first, I was pretty lazy in writing it: I aimed to get a scene done 3x a week, just as I planned to start posting it in June. This went along for a while, until May, when I sold Matchbox Girls. Then a project I’d expected to spend a year or two writing suddenly needed to be finished up much more quickly, so I shifted to writing a scene 6-7 days a week.
As I approached the end of the story, I was quickly approaching burnout. And when I reached the antepenultimate scene, I just… stopped. “I’ll finish after I finish Matchbox Girls edits,” I said. “I want some time to think about it. I want to see how readers react. And I’m tired.”
My beta reader and editor was furious. About every week for the last six months, he’s said, “Have you finished Nightlights yet?” and he said this knowing I hadn’t touched it.
Well, now I’ve finished it. And I think it’s pretty good. And it feels momentous. It isn’t the first thing I’ve finished, but even taking into consideration my six month delay, it’s the first thing I’ve finished earlier than originally intended. All of my other finished projects were planned for 6 months-1 year, and ended up taking 2-4 years instead. And there are so many unfinished projects, too. Nightlights is the first story I wrote where I didn’t get lost along the way, where I had a schedule and stuck to it. Where I treated writing like my actual job, rather than a hobby I wanted to turn into a job someday. And I think that’s why it feels amazing to be done.
It’ll take a few weeks for the ending to trickle down to you guys, although I did go ahead and schedule the penultimate and ultimate posts to go up the same day. At that point, why wait? I hope you enjoy it.
And if you haven’t been able to keep up, or haven’t liked the format, don’t worry: I’ll be packaging the whole thing up as an ebook to sell in June.
Diapers cost money!
Illumination 9.9: Jehane and the Void (double length!)
“You lied about knowing Malachi, didn’t you?” Kwan had asked her, as they waited for a car.
“Everybody lies,” Jehane had said.
The teacher didn’t argue. “I just want to understand why.”
“Because we have something in common,” she said, and Kwan had raised his eyebrows. That was a teacher for you, never willing to accept an answer. “I don’t know what. Maybe we spoke the same language before we were born. I can feel it when I’m with him.”
The teacher opened his mouth to argue with her, be reasonable at her, and she didn’t let him. “I thought he’d come and find me before this. I thought he’d deal with things and get away. And he hasn’t. I don’t know everything. But I do know, after we open the emergence point, I’m going to find him and… I’m going to make sure nobody else has to fight him. Somehow. We have something in common, and I owe him that.”
Now, as she clambered across a landscape that looked more like a war zone than a living city, she remembered the conversation. She had to find out why he hadn’t left Hatherly, and she had to solve it.
She watched the bird drift ahead of her, and wondered what part of him it represented. It seemed to shed feathers constantly, with new ones growing to take their place, in a wide variety of colors. She picked up one of the crimson feathers and it melted in her hand, nothing but a dream of color. It didn’t look back at her as she followed it, instead looking around with a keen but quiet interest. But it never got too far ahead.
She passed other people, but not many, and monsters fled before the Cambion, so that all she had to do was navigate around the shanties and the crumbling apartments, the burned out cars and the furniture abandoned in the streets. Oh, and the bodies.
She tried not to look at the bodies. She tried not to think about closing the gate, removing the source of monsters. She tried not to think about the distant sound of gunfire. All she wanted to do was deal with Malachi.
Finally, the rainbow bird settled on top of a ragged building with a broken window still displaying half of a bottle of beer. When she pushed the door open, it crunched over the debris on the floor. Malachi sat at a table, many glasses in front of him. An old man stood behind the bar. Malachi had his sword held loosely in one hand, and there was a big and shiny gun on the counter. The old man stood as far from the gun as he could. His eyes widened as Jehane stood in the doorframe.
“Go away, girl,” he said urgently. “The devil drinks here.”
Malachi’s head was on his chest, like he was asleep, but he pointed the sword at the old man. “I wish I could be the devil.” Then the sword turned unerringly to point at Jehane. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” Jehane picked her way toward his table. It was one of the few tables remaining in the bar, and the wreckage of the others made the floor dangerous to navigate.
He raised his head. He was unshaven and dirty, with bloodshot eyes. “Find Natalie. There’s hope for Natalie.” His voice was flat and empty.
“Why are you sitting here drinking?”
Instead of answering, he narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” she said. The Tower records had said he was twenty, just barely twenty when Emily had died. She felt embarrassed and off-center by his question.
He transferred his baleful gaze to the bartender. “Give her a drink.”
The bartender ducked his head. “Yes, sir.” He poured amber liquid into a glass, then absently drank from the bottle himself before scurrying around the bar to put the glass in Jehane’s hands. As he did, he whispered, “He is bound here until I run out of alcohol. I challenged him. I challenged the devil, to keep the devil here.” There was a terrified pride in the old man’s face. “But I am sorry you have been pulled in, too. God keep you, child.”
He retreated behind the bar again. Malachi kicked the other chair at his table out. “Sit down.”
Still off-balance, wondering at the bartender’s words, she said, “I don’t want to drink. I want to talk to you.”
He gave her a scornful look, and she suddenly felt the lightness of all her fifteen years. So few of them had been lived as a normal girl. He could read everything about her, but she knew nothing about him, despite what she’d told Kwan. Anything they had in common had drowned long ago. She wanted to run away and cry.
He kicked the chair he’d offered her again, this time so hard that it broke, and she felt bad for not just sitting down. She felt like such a child, and this was not the encounter she’d imagined. It hadn’t smelled as bad in her imagination.
“I thought you were going to come back to me,” she finally got out. “I thought you wanted to see me again.” And she quivered inside, waiting for him to laugh at her.
Instead he took a drink and said, “How could I do that when Hatherly and his alpha dog own my soul? A little dog may bark at the moon but it doesn’t mean he’s free.”
“They don’t,” she burst out. “You’re here, instead of out doing whatever they want. They’ve seen Tainter with the monsters, encouraging them, and you’re not doing that, you’re not chasing down Natalie—”
“But I’ve taken you out of the picture, haven’t I?” he said softly. “The one person who could track him down wherever he hides. All he has to do is whistle when he needs me.”
That hurt. That hurt a lot, and despite her best efforts, tears sprang to her eyes. “Is this all just a trap?” He just stared at her, his thick eyebrows drawn together.
Jehane scrubbed at her eyes. She hadn’t come here to just talk to him, anyhow. Talking wasn’t what she was good at. She’d come to take him out of Hatherly’s arsenal, any way she could. She walked over to him, setting the drink she still carried down beside the empty glasses. He didn’t seem as drunk as the number of glasses suggested, and she wondered if the bartender was watering the drinks. “Get up. Come with me.”
He picked up her drink, looked at it, and drank it. “Jehane,” he said, as he’d said her name once before. “I wish I could.” Then, unexpectedly, he pulled her into his lap and wrapped his arms around her. As he buried his face in her neck and hair, he said, “Let’s just stay like this until there’s nothing left.”
He definitely smelled, but it wasn’t all bad. She sat stiffly on his lap, resisting the part of her that wanted to melt against him, to kiss him again and see what happened next.
“Why,” she managed, “why did you tell us to find Natalie if you think it’s all going to end?”
“Nobody should face the end alone,” he murmured. His words against her neck tickled interestingly.
“But you weren’t going to come find me,” she said, plaintively.
He pulled his face against from her neck. “I’m nobody.”
She shifted and put his face between her hands. “I was nobody once, too.” Then, regretfully, she slid off his lap. He let her go, but she realized his Cambion, the rainbow bird, occupied the door. One way or another, they weren’t going to let her leave.
She studied the Cambion again. It must have been born around the time Emily died. She wondered if its continuing existence was why he couldn’t leave Hatherly. It seemed strong and beautiful and free, but maybe what it had been made from was his own freedom.
Perhaps there was some way to give what the Cambion had taken back. Jehane remembered Valeria talking about her own brush with falling, and how she’d reclaimed herself by killing her creation. Jehane didn’t think that Malachi would kill his bird— perhaps he couldn’t, if he’d given it what she thought— but maybe if she destroyed it, he would be whole again.
She listened for the chord of her weapon, twisted her hand, and made it appear. Malachi leaned back in his chair and said, a touch of sadness in his voice, “Are you going to kill me?”
Jehane ignored him and advanced on the Cambion. It tilted its head and made a soft trilling noise, but made no move to fight her.
She hesitated. Except when she’d attacked Seth— and she hadn’t been entirely in her right mind then— she’d never started any successful fight by attacking. She knew how to defend herself, but if the enemy didn’t attack, she was lost. That was unfair.
She circled to one side, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Malachi put his arm over his face, as if he had no interest in what happened, and a mild headache to boot. Then she looked at the bird again, which still wasn’t interested in fighting her.
She scowled. Then she made her weapon vanish, stepped forward, and wrapped her arms around the bird’s neck. It trilled again. “Sweet girl,” it said gently.
“Why don’t you go back into him?” she asked it. In response, it only rubbed its beak on her cheek. But she felt better, somehow. Malachi was all screwed up, but the manifestation of his disturbance seemed to have its head on straight, and it thought she was a sweet girl. Even in the mental ward of her childhood, she’d gotten along better with some of the monsters than the people.
She moved back to Malachi’s table. “I still want to hear about Emily.”
He dropped his arm and hunched up. “She’s dead.”
Recklessly, she said, “If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask Tainter. I’ll ask Hatherly.”
He straightened up, as if she’d struck a nerve. “No, you won’t. You’re not going near them.”
“How are you going to stop me? Sitting there, full of self-pity?”
He stood up, knocking his chair over, and his sword appeared in his hand again. “I should have killed her in the beginning rather than let what happened to her happen. I won’t let it happen to you.”
Now what, clever girl? She was pretty sure that if he wasn’t too drunk to stand, there was no way she could win a fight against him. She wasn’t strong like Ajax, and she wasn’t skilled like Natalie and Seth, and Malachi was better than her in both ways.
He advanced toward her, and she backed away. If his reflexes had been slowed down, she thought she could at least stay away from him. The Cambion was watching both of them carefully, still blocking the exit. If only she knew the words to use. If only she could think of anything that would reach him. So many ifs….
Instead, she avoided him, doing her best to use her awareness of him to stay well beyond his reach on the cluttered floor. He stalked her rather than struck at her, in no hurry to reach her, his gaze focused intently on her.
Eventually, she realized that he’d maneuvered her so that her back was to the bar, near where the shiny big gun was. It didn’t belong in a bar; it looked like something left behind by a soldier. And there it was, right there, right to hand, and now he was pressing her. From somewhere behind her, the bartender said something, but all she caught was “The devil, the devil, he brought the gun—”
Jehane listened, understood, and laughed breathlessly. Malachi swung at her, but he was slow, lacking the speed of the absolute focus field, and slowed further by the watered drinks. Jehane ducked under the blade and let her own weapon vanish. Then she stepped close to him and caught the hand that held his weapon. She slid her fingers under the weapon against his palm until they were interlaced with his and there was no room for the sword. It faded away. “No,” she said firmly. “I won’t shoot you, and you won’t kill me.”
Suddenly his weight pressed her into the bar. “You’re right,” he breathed, his dark head bowing so it touched hers. “I won’t. I couldn’t then, until the end, and now all I can do is hope I die first.”
“You?” she whispered. “You killed Emily?” Horror mixed with compassion in a black cocktail.
“In the end,” he repeated. “They wouldn’t let her die.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “She’s dead. I didn’t kill her the first time they gave me the chance, so they hurt her. He hurt her so much. She was crying, and she wanted me to save her, but all I could do was kill her.” He added, in a low voice, “And I was happy I could do that for her, before… before she went the other way.”
Jehane squeezed his hand. “Don’t think about it. You’ve thought about it too much. Try to think of her before.” She hesitated, then added, “That’s what I’d like to hear about.”
He pulled his head back and looked at her blankly. “Before? She’s dead. There’s nothing left. She’s dead.”
Jehane sighed, and wrapped her arms around him. “Oh, Malachi. She had a whole life, a lot of it spent with you. Before she died, she lived.”
He stared at her, his eyes wide with shock.
Illumination 9.8: Monsters and Invisible Things
Natalie wandered through a world of faces she didn’t recognize, under a sky that seemed too far away and too full of light.
At first, it didn’t bother her. The faces spoke words she mostly didn’t understand, and fled from her sword, but there were monsters, too. And she was very happy to fight monsters.
They seemed more real than the people, and when she found them attacking the unfamiliar faces, she understood that very well. But sometimes the people fled from the monsters, and sometimes they didn’t seem to realize they were under attack. Sometimes the monsters bled red, and sometimes they bled clear. She didn’t understand that.
It was all like a dream, anyhow. She was pleased to be away from Hatherly, but it wasn’t enough. She looked into each face she encountered, and each face was not Hatherly, but nor was it… something else. Something had whispered inside her that now she could find them, but all she could think was that she was looking for the source of pain.
Or maybe the pain was that they weren’t there?
She neither rested nor ate. It didn’t seem important, not when there were so many monsters around.
Then she realized what hurt most was when she saw a face in a reflective window. It was a good face, a face people loved. It wasn’t the face of somebody who broke all the rules, who violated taboos, who gave up, although at some angles it seemed close. And seeing the face hurt like nothing before, because it was everything she’d lost.
The next time she fought a monster, she didn’t dodge when it clawed at her face. The pain was real, as hunger and weariness weren’t, but it was good, too. It made her believe in change.
But the next time she looked in a glass, it still wasn’t the right face.
Rain splashed in her eyes, stinging and running over her lips. She found a sheet in a basket of abandoned laundry and wrapped it around herself, covering her face so a chance reflection couldn’t touch her.
She started looking into the faces of the strangers now, as she stalked among them and they stumbled out of the way. They were as frightened of her as they were of the monsters, but she didn’t mind. She was starting to get angry. She couldn’t find what she was looking for, and sometimes she thought she ought to let all the other faces get as clawed as hers.
A moth fluttered near her, feathery wings immune to rain. She raised her hand to it, and it drifted away. It existed to torment her with the promise of what she could never have again, she thought resentfully, and turned and stalked away down a narrow alley. It was closer to the great portal, and deep within the region the monsters had infested. People still tried to live here, among the monsters, because where else could they go? She understood that, even if she only understood a few of their words.
Something growled, and something else sobbed and babbled. Near an intersection of alleys, the one narrow and the other barely more than a fissure, a young woman had fallen to her knees. She had a baby tied to her, and a basket spilled beside her, and she was urging a small child to his feet. But the child had hurt himself, and he was wailing, and the woman was speaking rapidly and the monster growled and inched ever closer.
Natalie’s sword came to her hand, but she hesitated, remembering the moth. She was alone and broken, and even if she killed the monster, the humans would see her as another monster. So why?
A shriek split the air, and feet pounded up: another child. This one was older, maybe eight, and she positioned herself between the monster and the young woman, holding a weathered plank with a rusty nail at the end. She yelled a string of angry words at the monster, and it switched its attention to her, crouching. She was very small compared to the monster., but her expression was fierce and defiant. Behind her, the woman screamed, “No, no!”
Tears sprang to Natalie’s eyes. In the little girl’s face, in the woman’s voice, she finally saw something she recognized.
She stepped forward, bringing her sword around with a hum. The monster sprang at the child, but Natalie pushed her feet against the ground and hit the monster with her own shoulder a heartbeat before its jaws snapped closed on the child. It was big, heavier than her, but she had momentum, and she’d found something to save. That made the battle different than a fight just to kill monsters. Her sword was sharper, her reflexes faster.
Angry, it swiped at her, trying to knock her down so it could tear her throat out at its leisure. But she didn’t go down, because the clawed paw never reached her. The furred foot went flying, which shocked the monster. But only for a moment. It only had a moment left to be shocked in.
When the monster had collapsed onto the ground— red blood, she noticed— Natalie turned slowly to look at the family she’d saved. They were still there, staring at her. The smaller child had gotten to his feet, clinging to the woman’s hand, and they all looked at her.
She looked back at them, her gaze roaming over their faces. They weren’t faces with names, she didn’t know them that way. But what stretched between them, as invisible as her sword when she didn’t hold it— that she knew.
With a roaring in her ears, dizziness and hunger rushed over her. She fell to her knees, and all at once, the family scrambled over to her. The woman spoke in a scolding tone, and the girl pushed her cowl away from her face. Natalie flinched away from this, but then the tiny boy held up a loaf of bread from the spilled basket, and she remembered the existence of food. She snatched at the bread, devouring it almost before she was aware she’d picked it up. Then she looked up at the family again.
They’d watched her silently. Then the woman said, “Thank you.” Natalie remembered that much, at least, of the language they spoke, and the words hurt. She remembered her rage at the unfamiliar faces, and wondered if the fierce love she’d recognized lurked beneath each one.
She touched the girl’s face. “Why?” she asked. Why are you here? Why did you come back? But she didn’t know the words. “Why?” she repeated.
The little girl smiled, and spoke. Natalie didn’t understand, but she seemed to realize that. She kissed the woman on the cheek, then the small boy, then the top of the baby’s head. Then she kissed Natalie on the cheek, too. “Home,” she said. “Family. Love.”
Natalie stared at her, then put her face against her knees and started to cry.
The moth whose wings were immune to rain fluttered near her, not to torment, but to hold her secrets.