CHAPTER 58 - SABRA

The aftermath of The Engineer’s attack was just about as chaotic as the main event itself. By the time the word had gotten out and people had flown, teleported, or translocated in, everything was over save for the recovery efforts. How long that would take, Sabra had no idea.

Pavel and Sam had gone off to find Jack. Pavel to check the list of dead, wounded and missing, and Sam to do whatever it was she did. Either way, they would account for Jack somehow. And there were so many others in need of help. So, she’d leapt straight into the recovery efforts, going block by block, watching and listening.

The storm had concealed so much of the damage: buildings that had collapsed, some that were nothing but ruins with skeletal rebar poking into the air like fingers reaching for oxygen. And then, there, a store that’d only suffered a ruined facade. How could the difference between apocalypse and inconvenience be just a few feet?

She didn’t know what she was doing, but she had to do something. What if this had been her city, what if that had been her mother wailing and screaming on the sidewalk? She had hands to help, and so that was what she was doing.

There had to be survivors, and she had to find them now, before hunger and thirst and crush syndrome set in. She let her awareness fall into the currents of the world around her, that space between vision and memory, and walked as if it were a dream.

There was a cluster of people around a building that a crane had fallen through—or had someone used it as a weapon? The building might come down at any second, they were saying, don’t go in, someone’s on their way to stabilize it. Sabra ignored them. No matter what she did, it wouldn’t come down. It wasn’t in the pattern yet.

“Hey,” someone called, “Are you insane?”

Maybe she was.

It was an apartment complex or had been. Lights hung from the ceiling like a row of hanged men, water trickling from the fixtures. She exhaled and, when she inhaled, the awareness of the future flooded her like a gentle tide. She saw herself see herself and what lay beyond, like vast shapes moving through an underwater abyss that stretched forever, and stretched forever, and stretched forever, until everything flashed with the birth cry of a newborn sun.

“Miss Kasembe,” Blueshift said.

Sabra turned toward him, scowling. He had a new uniform on and his arm in a sling. His good hand was up by his shoulder, clenched. A subtle corona warped around his fist. So, he was keeping the building up. A myriad of people followed in his wake. “Check every inch of every floor,” he told them. “And be thorough. This building will not come down while I am here.”

The irony was hideous. Did anyone even know?

Sabra wanted to hit him. She wanted to hurt him, to punish him. But the fire in her breast was tempered by the cold fact that he was SOLAR and he could do whatever he wanted, and so many more people—like Revenant, like her—depended on his good graces.

“Got a survivor here,” someone called.

The rescuer stepped out of the doorway, trailed by someone less than half his size. A child, a little girl. No more than five or six years old, maybe even less.

He led her by the hand. The girl was clutching a cat to her chest, the animal limp and only moving in the sense that its legs swayed in time with the girl’s shuffling movements. Under the dust and dirt and blood, Sabra spied the shades of pink and purple, pleasant pastel pajama colors.

“Parents?” Blueshift asked, but he had to know the answer, just as she did.

The worker shook his head.

“Damn,” Blueshift muttered.

You might’ve been the one to make her an orphan, Sabra wanted to tell him, but she turned and stalked away up the stairs. Nothing good came from when you challenged someone who held the cards and made the rules. Asclepion had taught her that. SOLAR, Sentinel—power was power, and the difference was just what costume they wore.

She’d been stupid to ever think differently.

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Sabra worked the speed bag with her fists, and it responded to her like a lover. And, like a lover, there was no need to think before she acted: there was just the familiar rhythm, something you gave yourself to and yet controlled at the same time.

The bag swings-

-left, and she nailed it with a cross. It was all so predictable. It was all in the pattern of how it swung between the tethers, of where she placed her fists, of how she altered her strikes. It was so strange that she hadn’t realized it earlier.

Or had she? Hadn’t she always known? The simple perfect arc of a three-point shot or the scything parabola of a haymaker. For years, she had gazed up at the poster of Ironheart above her head and marveled at the contemptuous, roguish way that Scotland’s most famous warrior-maiden held her claymore across her power-armored shoulders. Hadn’t she known then?

She held her dance, never messing step or strike. When she let her mind relax and her body take over, there was an infinite depth where intention and thought and action and reaction became nothing but a snarled, tangled knot of futures-possible and future-definite.

All she had to do was unravel it. Avoid the future of fire and ash, escape the visions that Promethea had said she was bound to.

The door to the precinct gym opened with a soft hiss. She saw Blueshift step through, reflected in the mirror, and approach her. She pretended to examine her wrapped hands, like she hadn’t seen him.

“Defiant,” he said, and she socked him in the jaw—hard.

Blueshift lurched back, blinking, and raised a hand to his lips as he centered himself again. His fingers came back bloody, and his dark eyes settled on her. He smirked.

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“It’s been a while since someone made me bleed,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me that I’m still human.”

“I bet you are.”

She checked him with her shoulder as she stepped past, heading for the door, catching Blueshift waving his good hand in a lazy motion and slamming it closed. Sabra turned to face him and braced for the fight.

“Got something you wanna say, Blueshift? Or was one building full of people not enough for you? Go on, take your best shot—but you won’t get a second.”

He didn’t move a muscle.

“Revenant said you treat your name more as a mission statement than a designation,” Blueshift replied. “Tell me, is this self-righteous bravado something you had to practice, or does it come naturally to you?”

“I don’t know. Same way you ended up being such a smug asshole, I guess.”

“We are all a product of our environment.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“I didn’t say it was. What happened this afternoon was a tragedy, but the world balances upon the edge of a knife. Had we not stopped The Engineer, the consequences would’ve been demonstrably worse.”

“I know,” Sabra said. “But that doesn’t justify it. The ends don’t justify the means. They can’t. They can’t ever.”

“This isn’t about justification,” Blueshift replied. “In truth, the need for justification is just another excuse for inaction. If you want to change the world, then the necessity of an action is the only justification to consider. If you insist on anything else, then you’re seeking nothing but absolution.”

“How amoral of you.”

“My perspective is no more amoral than your precognition is.”

“So,” Sabra said, “you know about that.”

“I do.”

Sabra frowned. “Revenant made it sound like something bad would happen to me if you found out.”

“It still might,” Blueshift said. “That depends on how this conversation goes.”

“Blackmail, Blueshift?”

“I hope not. What I hope, Defiant, is that you share my perspective.”

“I think we’ve established that I don’t.”

“Is that so?” he asked. “You were born on Asclepion to refugee parents. You were, like everyone on this planet, born and placed within a system of atrocity and exploitation before you ever existed, before you had any opportunity to choose it. Would you change it now, if you had the power to do so? If the choice was between stopping a madman and tearing down the system that created him, which one would you choose?”

An awareness of paths splitting, currents twisting around a jagged spire, that she’s seen the woman who said yes to the question—and to say no would ensure she never said anything ever again.

“Yes,” Sabra said. “And I’ve seen that woman. Do you understand me? I’ve seen her. She’s a monster, the same as you! How many people have to die before you admit it’s not worth it? What’s the point of saving the world if you just burn half of it down in the process?!”

Blueshift’s expression didn’t change. “How many people have to die,” he began, “before you admit that it is?”

“What?”

“Is the cost of thousands now not better than the cost of millions in perpetua? We have the capabilities to create a better world, and yet we spend it covering the cracks of the old. How much will your fear cost you? How much will your inaction cost the world?”

“Better to do nothing than to hurt people.”

“You don’t believe that,” Blueshift said. “You are merely afraid to look back and afraid to look forward. So, here you are—stuck in a present without meaning or purpose. Placing morality above justice. But no one has ever effected real change by acting morally, Defiant.”

“That’s not true.”

“Of course,” Blueshift replied, shrugging. “Sometimes the system elects to sacrifice pieces it can afford to lose. The system that you wish to change imposed its morals upon you from an early age. Because of this, it becomes easier to imagine that the end of the world is inescapable before you can imagine killing the system that is murdering it. The first step in changing the world is acknowledging that morality is just a construct, the same as any other.”

“You’re arguing for nihilism, that nothing matters.”

“No.” His gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not. Nor am I arguing that atrocities become righteous when performed by someone who thinks of themselves as a hero. But enacting significant change requires you to do things that many may consider abhorrent, even yourself. What makes one a hero is understanding this, accepting it, and effecting change with no expectation or desire for absolution.”

What was the end goal of this, Sabra wondered. Was it violent revolution? She thought of Asclepion, her home. The glorious city of the future, shining beacon of the Golden Age—and yet that light only fell on a certain few. What would it have taken to fix it, to restore it? There had been morality, there had been law, the city had functioned—but it had never improved, never changed. Contradictions had rotted it from within. Removing Sentinel had changed nothing.

“Where does this end, Blueshift?”

“Nothing ends, Sabra. You might as well wish for an end to history. Again, you wish for an ultimate moment that will absolve you of your responsibility for the choices you make moment by moment, day by day.”

“Normal people can’t live like this.”

“We’re not normal. But we have the capability to change the world for the better, and therefore we must. Perhaps, then, we may create a future where we are no longer necessary.”

“Perhaps,” Sabra said. She clenched her right hand, unclenched. “I never asked for this, Blueshift.”

A beat. Then, Blueshift said, “Neither did I.” His voice was barely above a whisper. Then, louder, “But I’m offering you an opportunity to use your abilities for the good of the world, to ensure the creation of something better. To control your ability, to not fall for and become trapped by the curse of prescience.”

He extended his good hand towards her. Sabra looked at it for a moment, and shook her head, left him hanging, and made for the door.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

The door opened. Whether or not that was a good sign, Sabra didn’t know.

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According to her mother, there had been this thing that Sabra had been obsessed with as a child. A sloped bucket that you could drop coins in—so many people on Asclepion had old money, all of it worthless—and watch them spin and orbit faster and faster until you’d almost think they’d escape, and that was when they clattered away into the pit at the bottom.

She thought of that now, as she paced the halls of the Star Patrol precinct that’d become the hub for the disaster relief efforts in Melbourne. Like she was spinning around something inescapable—no matter how much speed she felt she had, no matter the energy, she was only going to fall toward darkness.

Was that the curse of prescience? To be aware of it, and therefore trapped by it? She had dreamed of joining SOLAR, and now she knew the cost—to never blink. She had thought she could run home and pretend she was normal, but she wasn’t, and she never had been.

Wasn’t that an admission of the choice she had made?

“Sabra, there you are!” Fisher said, jogging his way toward her. “Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Feel a bit like I just walked over my own grave.”

“You need a minute?”

“No, I’m good—what’s up?”

“It’s Sam,” he said. “She’s found Jack.”