They heard her coming long before they saw her, because she didn’t come alone. Nadia hadn’t expected her to. They’d been warned. But the warnings did not prepare her.
There was a long, slow, shambling line of them, in both sexes, of every age and condition. The first was a toddler, barely old enough to walk. The lady behind him was old and hunchbacked. The third was a plump housewife just going grey, the fourth a teenage boy, the fifth a young man in a suit. The only things they had in common were agony and fear. Every single person in the line—and Nadia, craning her neck, couldn’t see the end to it—looked to be in such misery that they didn’t even know where they were. They clutched their heads, and cried; some tore at their faces with their nails, or halted a moment to simply bend over and shudder, as if they were about to vomit into the underbrush.
None of them looked like they saw or knew where they were going. They tripped on weeds, ran into low branches and even whole trees, either from blindness or because Yunks thought it was funny. When they fell, they got up on their own, at their own pace, and nobody else in the line seemed to notice. Every one of them was coated in dirt, fallen leaves and little cuts and bruises. The tiny boy in the lead had an open cut on his forehead, bleeding down into his right eye; at regular intervals, like clockwork, he would raise a grubby fist to wipe ineffectually at it, howling the whole time. The noise grated at her ears, and part of her was shamefully glad when the poor thing fell over and muffled his cries in the mud. Another part of her wanted to run, pick him up and cuddle him—but he was beyond that kind of comfort, and she couldn’t help him yet.
Nadia had jumped to her feet at the first distant cry. Fatima, who was leaning against a tree, only took the ghastly parade as a sign that she could light another of her dwindling store of cigarettes. “So,” she said, over the noise, “this is how she wants to play it?”
“We knew she would.” But there was knowing, and knowing. Every scream dredged up old memories—nights in Syria or Greece, lying awake listening to the poorly-muffled noises from Papa Titus’s room. She checked her phone, and saw a screen of garish rainbow static. If Yunks had a halo, they were in it, and cut off. But where was the demon herself?
“Taking her time,” Fatima said, echoing the thought. The little boy had come to a halt a few meters away. Now he was squatting in the forest litter, his screams broken only by the occasional splutter as he spat his own blood out of his mouth. The rest of the line looked to be falling in beside him, forming a very untidy row.
“She’s trying to break us,” Nadia guessed. Each of them had a kitty in her pocket, and could put an end to the horror whenever she wanted, saving all these people. But that would spoil the whole plan, and Yunks would only move on to hurt someone else. Possibly Yunks was testing them with all this. Possibly she didn’t have any other way to sustain herself.
Either way, Nadia could only watch, and suffer watching them, storing up wrath inside herself. The trumpet and sword were shining in her mind’s eye. If she ever let them disappear, she would be as helpless as these wretched Poles. If Fatima failed as well, the operation would fail with them, and very likely the both of them would die in torment. And humanity was unlikely to get a second chance at the same trap. Everything depended on Nadia staying angry.
“How long do we give them?”
Dr. Gus considered, sketching the shifting perimeter against the forest. “It is difficult to say where exactly Yunks herself is, in the absence of an emissor. If we move too early, we risk allowing her to escape.”
“But too late—“
“I will be able to tell if she is displaced by a proper halo. Instantly.”
“But not if she gives in, and the whole thing is a failure.”
“No. Until one girl or the other calls her emissant, she is invisible to me, either way.”
Keisha bit her lip. The halo, if you could call it that, was a hazy oval more than a mile long, only starting to condense around the red X in the center of the forest. They couldn’t risk moving until it was damn near a perfect circle. And the girls would have to judge for themselves when the time was right, with a halo up. Really, they’d have to guess. “I don’t like this.”
“I know.”
The minutes stretched on, and the parade of victims continued. The first few dozen had lined up to form a ring around them, so that they would see suffering whichever way they turned. There was nothing Nadia or Fatima could do to stop it, and they didn’t try. The point was to keep Yunks here, and she couldn’t move from her prey. Nadia clenched her teeth, and thought of Yunks’s painful death, and got through it—at first.
Then she noticed, as a second ring of puppets started to form around the first, that things were changing up a little. Every time a child, or a teenager, appeared in the line, they would take the place of an adult in the first row. By the time a third row appeared, the front was mostly children their own age, or younger, and Nadia saw that she was starting to switch out even teenagers for children under ten. All crying, or moaning, or hitting themselves. The bloody-faced toddler was still right there, front and center.
“This has gone on too long,” she muttered to Fatima, then raised her voice. “All right, Yunks. I know you’re here. I killed you once—I’m sorry you didn’t stay that way. But if you’re here now, show yourself!”
She didn’t expect the creature to simply obey, and she didn’t. Nadia counted the seconds silently, and got up to forty-seven before a sudden thump on the ground behind her made her jump. Fatima gave a little shriek too, which annoyed her; it made them look weak. Why hadn’t they stood back-to-back, anyway? They should have seen the trick coming.
Slowly, slowly, she turned around, to show Yunks she wasn’t impressed. And she wasn’t, really; she was the same ugly thing she’d always been, a perverted pagan idol from a sick man’s imagination. A naked woman with bear’s paws, a snake’s neck, and a bird’s head. She had enough ugly memories of the shape that her heart beat a little faster, but her sword and trumpet were still clear, and really, she was nicer to look at than the children.
“I’ve seen worse than you,” she declared. The monster reached out with one of her great bear-paws, claws extended, toward Nadia’s face. “Do you remember what happened to you, the last time you tried that? I have a new familiar now, and she can beat you as bloody as the old one.” She couldn’t, of course, without wrecking the plan, but Yunks didn’t know that.
And it worked; at least, Yunks gave a little shrug (had she done human gestures before?), and let the paw drop back to her side. “Better,” Nadia told her. Dr. Gus said she was growing, changing. “Will you ever be more than this? More than just a stupid torturer? Could you become something like a human again, if we gave you the time?” Yunks cocked her head, and examined Nadia with one bright eye. Like she was considering the question. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”
To her surprise, she got an answer—from behind her, of course. “They all died, you know.” It was a very young voice, with a strong foreign accent.
Nadia looked up at Yunks, and decided against turning around. It was probably the bloody-faced boy again, and she didn’t need to see him. Whoever’s voice she was using, it was Yunks anyway. “Who died?”
“The Metics,” said a different person, a girl of five or six, off to Nadia’s right. “All of them. You left them for Yunks to eat, and she did. She gnawed on them until there was nothing left, and the Russians put them out of misery. With a missile.”
“It was missiles before, wasn’t it?” said another girl, to her left. “After you killed her father. They threw missiles at the castle. So you told them you could keep them safe. A lucky few escaped. They might be alive now. All the ones you saved, died after torture. Gulya, too. Why did you even try to help them?”
“Don’t listen,” Fatima said. “You know it’s lies anyway.”
“Maybe it’s lies,” said a voice behind Yunks. “But why lie? You don’t think the Metics survived, do you? That was all they wanted them for. That was all they wanted you for, as an incubator for Yunks. Everything you have done since was just an afterthought. Them using you, like a tool.”
“You’re boring me,” she told Yunks. “And the gimmick with the switched voices is stupid. Just pick one, if you can’t talk for yourself.”
Of course she didn’t obey. Another child spoke up, behind her: “Bored? Why are you bored? Do we bore you? Have you seen so many people die that you don’t care anymore?”
“Seriously,” Fatima told her. “Stop listening to this shit. Cover your ears.”
“Do you even remember the Metics?” a boy taunted. “You never bothered to go back and save them. You used to be one yourself. You could have died with them, if you hadn’t gotten lucky. But you didn’t care enough—“
Nadia clapped her hands over her ears.
Dr. Gus moved his hands in a shape that was nearly a circle. “I think it is time. It could be neater still, but the last of it is at least a kilometer from the city. She will be inside.”
She was starting to call Adesina even before he finished the second sentence.
The forest was more than ten miles long from east to west, and at least five the other way. To actually surround it with a solid perimeter of halos, and trap Yunks inside, would normally require the combined efforts of ten emissors. And they had ten ready, just in case—but they hoped to do it with one.
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It was a tricky business, trying to figure out how far a given halo would expand. There were a lot of variables: the density of the human substrate, their age and level of consciousness, how recently they’d been exposed to another valence, the presence of nearby halos. You could get a decent feel for it with experience. Nothing precise, just enough to work with.
But then there were the wildcards nobody expected, like the Holcombe Effect. That one didn’t kick in often. You needed a population that actually wanted to believe what it was being told, and would adopt your valence with enthusiasm. Human minds being all different, Holcombe was usually just a couple of odd bumps here and there, and it averaged out to nothing but a minor bonus you could safely ignore.
Right now, Warsaw and the surrounding area was one big mass of people who were absolutely desperate to hear that everything was going to turn out all right. They had more emissors, they had kitties, they had everything all ready, just in case. But they didn’t need any of it. Dr. Gus’s hands spread in a smooth, steady arc north and south of the woods, until they enclosed it in a single massive loop. The only gap was the forest itself, a small empty space surrounding Yunks’s freshly embattled kingdom.
Now it was all up to the girls.
The kick came from behind, a wicked snap at her left ankle. She fell into a heap of moldy wet leaves, and she threw out her hands to catch herself. She looked up, and the next kick hit her right in the forehead. It didn’t hurt much—the kicker was about five—but she reeled away from it, and got a few thumps in her ribs for her pains.
“Selfish, stupid, cowardly—“
“Cares about nobody but herself—“
They were still cursing as they hit her. She stood up, flinched in time for a kick at her bottom to hit the top of her thigh instead. Without thinking she twisted around to backhand her attacker, and hit a little boy right across the face.
“Beating up on children! Scandalous.”
“It’s not even him doing—“
“SHUT UP!” she screamed, and looked for Fatima. Her sister had her back to a tree, and was swinging her arms to keep a little army of preschoolers at bay. Gently, so as not to hurt them much if she connected.
Somebody else kicked the same ankle while Nadia was distracted, and she hopped away, cursing in Russian. It still wasn’t very painful; that wasn’t the point. Just another game. How much longer did they have to stall her? Was she all together now?
“Where’s your brother, Nadia?”
“What happened to Gulya?”
“That Turkish man, what was his name? Do you even remember?”
“You make me sick.”
She couldn’t block her ears and dodge at the same time. “It won’t work, Yunks!” she shouted over the noise. “I know it’s all you!”
The Ghost of Leipzig had her paws on her hips. She craned her head around on its long neck to examine Nadia again, posing like one of Yuri’s old pinup girls. Contemptuously she flicked one paw in their direction: carry on, children.
Someone tackled her, knocking her over and tumbling with her across the sodden litter. Nadia flung the weight off, and a little girl flew into a tree, cracking her skull audibly against its trunk. She landed on all fours, sobbing and rubbing the back of her head.
“See what you did?”
“Shame on you.”
They had Fatima down on the ground now, pummeling her back with their little fists while they jeered. Nadia made to help her, staggered back when somebody ran headfirst into her stomach. The impact nearly made her retch. She pushed the child away, not as gently as she wanted, and two more children grabbed her by either hand, yanking her down to the forest floor. As soon as she landed two more threw themselves on her feet, pinning her down spreadeagle.
The bloody-faced toddler loomed over her. “Your parents are dead,” he said in his lisping baby voice. “Your home is dead. You’ve killed to save yourself, you’ve killed because you were angry, you’ve killed because it was fun. All that death. You’ve made orphans, you’ve left parents to bury their children.” A blotch of something wet splattered into her eye, and she writhed at the sting. The child had spat in her face.
There was an analog clock on the wall, with a second hand. Keisha made it three minutes and thirty seconds since Adesina came out. Dr. Gus’s hands showed the halo continuing to trickle in around the red X, settling into a proper circle. Under Grandmama’s soothing spell, Keisha couldn’t do anything you could really call worrying. She only noted that it had been a long time. She glanced at Doc, who shook his head. It was still Yunks in charge. Until her halo broke, they couldn’t touch her.
Nadia was blind in one eye now, and couldn’t clear it. She couldn’t get up, or even pull back her hands and feet; they were stretched all the way out and pinned down by about twenty kilograms each. She could barely make out individual words in the flood of abuse pouring down on her, or feel the individual blows against her ribs. Nothing for it but to remember her trumpet, her trumpet and her sword. And pray that Fatima would help soon—the kitty in her hoodie might as well be in Vladivostok.
All of a sudden, the cudgeling stopped. The little army of waifs stepped back. Nadia breathed deep, as well as her bruised chest would allow. “Yunks, if you don’t let me go right this minute, I will—“
The bloody toddler held something small and shiny up to the light. She recognized it as a needle just as he bent over and drove it expertly into a space between two of her ribs. The sword and the trumpet vanished from her mind in a scream of pain.
Six minutes since emergence. Keisha felt sure it would all work out, but she couldn’t come up with a convincing reason why. “Doc?”
“No change.”
They’d had enough time. Outside, Adesina appeared next to one of the emissors on standby, tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed. He threw a salute, hopped on his motorbike, and took off on the road into the forest. He was posted as close to the children as they dared risk; any closer and he might have scared Yunks off. Keisha assumed—because she had no other way to think—that he could still get to them before they lost their minds completely.
Worthless. She was worthless. Everything she had ever done had just made things worse. She thought she’d escaped, thought she’d made it better, but it was all a lie, making it easier for herself at the world’s expense. She owed the world a debt she couldn’t ever repay, and if she tried, it would only make things worse.
From far away, she could hear Fatima screaming. Why had she dragged her sister into this? Always, always she was trying to stick her nose into problems that had nothing to do with her, to feel better about the trouble she had already caused. Now she had condemned her own family with her stupidity. Just one more sin to bear.
Sin and damnation. Was this hell? If it was, she deserved it. Poor, stupid girl, she’d always wanted to punish the wicked, when the worst culprit was right in her own shoes. Or was that why she did it? To turn her own judgment on others? Well, she could fix that now.
The weight came off her arms and legs. She sat up, avoiding the eyes of the children she’d made to suffer. Someone handed her a bloody needle, and she cried at the sight of it. A blessing. A means of expiation. She felt a hot pain in her side from every time she breathed. How many times did she breathe every minute? If she stuck herself again, and again and again, would redemption multiply? Could she begin to pay back her debt to the world? It was her only hope.
With trembling hands she jabbed at her stomach, through her hoodie. The needle hit something hard, and bounced off. She couldn’t even punish herself correctly. She fished in the sweatshirt’s pocket, and drew out a thing like a metal drinking cup. The sight of it thrilled her. This was divine wrath; she recognized it. Far faster than any needle. She let the wretched little sliver drop in the soggy ground, forgotten, and raised her blessing up to the sky like a Eucharistic chalice.
Yunks swung her head around on her snake’s neck, alarmed. Well, what about her? Who cared what she thought? She was only a lowly demon, suffered to live so she could punish the world. Nadia held in her hands a bottomless cup of condemnation, direct from Heaven. Recklessly she tore off its lid, swatting away the clumsy hands of children as they tried to stop her. She was determined to drink it down until she burst.
At eight minutes and fifty-two seconds, Dr. Gus’s hand slapped down onto the red X. “Contact. Nadezhda.” His other hand skimmed over the map, coming to rest on a spot in the northeast of the forest, some distance away. “Yunks will be here.”
Finally. “Alone?”
“She might be feeding off squirrels, or deer. They will not save her.”
“Fine.” Without a halo to feed her, Yunks was only a disgusting wad of loose ectoplasm. And what destroyed ectoplasm? Light.
Chansonne gave her a beautiful view of the end. She only wished it could have lasted longer, or that she might have struck the last blow herself. Really, though, all that mattered was that the deed was done. She saw a massive, ugly shape, blundering through the dead trees, and a tiny old lady, dressed in blinding white, staring in disgust from the roof of a house. Then there came a flare of pure white light, painfully bright, so bright that Nadia could see it with her own eyes, kilometers away in the middle of the wood where the gathered host of Yunks’s former victims screamed for her destruction.
For the better part of a minute the light shone, a second sun on the edge of Kampinos forest, and Nadia knew there was no hiding from it. It was bright enough to destroy ectoplasm even in reflection off the dull bark of trees. Muddy puddles shone like precious stones; drips of water were falling stars. Fed by a hundred thousand hopes, it burned, and it burned, and Chansonne herself, though well-supported, flinched from the force of it in her perch in the sky.
Then it was done. Nadia straightened up and opened her eyes, blinking away purple shadows on her vision. All around her, exhausted men, women, and children sank to the forest floor, too tired even to cry. Nadia dropped her empty cup to the ground, and flopped back to rest.
She was just drifting off to sleep in the mud when Fatima spoke up. “Is she gone?”
“Of course.”
“Good.”
And they slept in peace.