26.1 The World Map

  Maeven stands on the dirt path outside Majid’s hut, boots tied, belt fastened, doing stretches under a cloudless sky. They gave her fresh bread and jam in the morning, more coffee she now knows is called ‘Kahwa,’ and she said goodbye and thank you to Majid as he left for work at 8.

  Lacking a care package, Maeven made sure to leave behind something before she departed. She placed it on top of the guest bed after she woke up: a small painted portrait of Majid and his wife smiling together, with a backdrop of village huts and a blue sky, courtesy of Sketchy. The minion had painted a good interpretation, she thought, not just of the couple but the atmosphere of the village. A small ecosystem, content with its little claim of the desert.

  Majid’s wife walks outside with a towel slung over her forearm and Maeven says to her, “Shukran.”

  The wife smiles only as if to reject it.

  Maeven continues to the highway. She notes the mountain landmark situated a couple hundred meters behind Majid’s village and unfolds the Reserve map from her pocket.

  A jagged red line indicating highway 12 runs up the paper, from the southwest coast, passing Tesset, and climbing all the way up to the Oman border. The mountain landmark, labelled, ‘Jebel Rihab,’ hugs the north-east corner of Mortareste, and it’s hundreds of kilometres from where she started.

  How long did she run for yesterday? she wonders, and how far did Majid then drive her?

  All she needs to do now is cut the road and keep going for a little longer. She thought South Sarafiyah would be close, but not as much as a mere walk from her current location.

  She examines the map closer as she moves. She places her thumb on Tesset where she had started, then tries to find the spot where she had been picked up my Majid. She marks her approximation with her pinky finger.

  The space between the two points seems surreal—almost halfway across the country. For a while she just stares at it in awe, wondering what part of it had her body started to numb, when was it that she begun to think about her graduation and the honour roll, about Mr Whitter’s class, and in what order it all transpired. She puts the map away. I can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. She hasn’t made it to South Sarafiyah yet, and if this were her ideal scenario, she would never have delayed herself by passing out asleep from the run. She would have arrived at her AO and called Eyeshot with something telling about Captain Mills, and it would all have been done before yesterday night.

  What had summoned that thought?

  Maeven takes a breath, recalling the smell of spiced coffee.

  It wouldn’t have made a difference. Whether she was efficient about it or not, Eyeshot will always find something, anything to criticise her about. Why couldn’t she call her even sooner, maybe. Why didn’t she update her once she was halfway? Why, on this green earth, is her VR jacket not zipped up to her sternum?

  Maeven yanks on her zipper.

  It started from the first moment they locked eyes. Thinking about it now, Maeven doesn’t know how it had truly been that annoying to have not attended her physical exam. Since then she’s been whisked around kitchen duties, random errands, leader’s briefing demonstrations.

  Surely, it’s been enough. Eyeshot’s inconvenience unto Maeven has far surpassed that of its reverse.

  Then again, Maeven thinks about when she was called into the User’s office after the BA mission. She seemed different. Her Resonance felt a little dull, and she complemented Maeven on the conclusion of the BA mission. The praise had come and gone so quickly that Maeven barely reacted to it.

  The view ahead is nothing but sand and a row of transmission towers, so far away they look miniature and hazy behind the dust. Maeven begins to ask herself why she doesn’t see that cluster of trademark orange buildings she assumes looks like South Sarafiyah, but keeps walking regardless. A few more minutes go by, still nothing but a bush of isolated halophytes and a scatter of white stones; a tumbleweed bumping against her boot. She lets it pass.

  She should be here by now. She can see a town about five kilometres north. Opposite that, the mountain she saw back across the highway is exactly where she expects it to be: fiddling down before the Oman border.

  “Sketchy.”

  The feline summons from her chest, hovering in the air. Maeven points to the distant town, and Sketchy’s eyes follow her finger. “That’s North Sarafiyah. That mountain is Jebel Rihab. Then between that” —she takes out the map again— “and to the left of the highway—we’re left of the highway, see?”

  Sketchy looks at the map.

  “That means South Sarafiyah should be…” Maeven looks up. “Right here.”

  The map is correct—in that it isn’t upside down nor flipped, though all they stand in is wind and endless daylight. She scans the flatland hoping she’s missed something, hoping that all it is is that she’s followed the wrong road or lost her way. After aimlessly lingering a few, she decides to head to the town she thinks is North Sarafiyah—supposing that all she’s done is mistaken it for its southern counterpart.

  “But it should be here,” she tells Sketchy by proximity. The minion floats by her shoulder, as impassive as ever, Hunter’s bright Resonance emanating from its fur. “Either the Reserve map is wrong or Eyeshot lied to me.”

  Odd. Actually, she doesn’t feel good about this. She reaches into her pocket, where Eyeshot’s pad square is cold to the touch. There’s only a single icon available that she can press on it: a white PNG of a telephone.

  That’s what happens when you share your personal pad device with someone else. You assign limited features to a separated pad section by switching it to, quite literally, ‘Child Mode.’ When Eyeshot lent her the pad section, she only shared the phone app, the only contactable person being herself.

  She taps.

  The connection ringbacks.

  As she recalled, the captain made it clear from the very beginning that she does not like Maeven Riel. Some idea that was, because whenever Eyeshot needs something finished, Maeven is the first assignee she always tosses into the ringer. What if she had said no to any one of those times? To the replenishment with MS Magician, the thief syndicate mission with Sky Company, The Black Ammunition. Sure, Eyeshot could have gone and asked another User, but Maeven was a fan. Eyeshot knew that at least from the moment she found the trading card in her card holder.

  Yes Captain Eyeshot. She thinks about all the times she spoke those words, on Peacemaker, in Rosca, in Jurn and Tesset. Yes Captain Eyeshot. Yes Captain Eyeshot.

  She wonders whether this time she had asked about enough. After running across the country for the sake of a mere theory, Maeven feels like she’s found herself at the butt of a cruel joke. The Area of Operations, this ‘South Sarafiyah,’ a city that doesn’t even exist.

  And maybe that’s why that moment felt so strange, when Eyeshot called her into her office and explained to her the mission.

  “How’s things?” Eyeshot answers.

  “Where did we get our maps from?” Maeven asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They paper ones from The Reserve. Did we get them from the Marines?”

  “The SOC. We got it from the Marines, yes, but that’s where they would have sourced it from.”

  “Give me access to the World Map over the pad. I need to confirm something.”

  “Confirm what?”

  “Send me the map first and then I’ll tell you.”

  “Maeven—”

  “Just send me the map.”

  Maeven hangs up immediately, then watches the telephone PNG.

  The World Map is a default application that’s available upon purchase on every pad device. A satellite mosaic of the entire globe, with traffic feeds, public transportation updates, and ominous black bars censoring parts of The East Empire that bored, over-studied academy kids loved to speculate about between classes. If Maeven can verify the existence of South Sarafiyah on The World Map, she can know for certain that she isn’t being lied to.

  Even if it feels like she’s going crazy, she needs to be sure.

  The pad buzzes. A notification. The telephone icon animates for a second, shrinking then expanding back to its original size, indicating that an app’s been added by the owner. Maeven swipes the screen with her finger, and just as she requested, she sees the Map.

  Luckily, there are no black bars as she quick-pans to her location marker in the peninsula of Mortareste, and hastily zooms out for a wider view.

  Come on.

  It’d be difficult (though probably not impossible) to fabricate the World Map in such short turnaround, unless you for some reason had the foresight to prepare it beforehand. So when Maeven finds the label ‘South Sarafiyah’ scrolling into view and hovering over her marked location, reconciling with the paper map she received from The Reserve, she reads it multiple times over, and finally, lets go of a breath.

  That puts her thoughts to rest.

  There’s supposed to be a few buildings around, indicated by grey boxes, along with intersecting and dead-ending roads. She can even navigate to the ground view and see the city through the lens of a 360 camera: two white metal warehouses, and a pile of cinder blocks in front of a long yellow wall.

  The discovery raises an entirely new unravelling of mysteries. There isn’t a yellow wall nor warehouse in front of her at all. There’s just sand. Sand like it had been sitting here since the ocean dried away millions of years ago.

  Maeven swipes back to the telephone.

  “South Sarafiyah is gone,” Maeven says to it, totally as if she didn’t speculate the User might have been trying to kill her at a falsified location a minute ago.

  “Gone?” says Eyeshot.

  “I thought I was just lost but the map you sent me confirmed it,” says Maeven, walking. “Everything’s gone. The buildings are gone, the roads are gone—”

  “What about Mills?”

  “No one’s here,” answers Maeven. “It’s like the city never existed in the first place.”

  Eyeshot goes silent for a while. “OK?” she says. “Is there any indication of prior existence at all? Any struggle marks? Any signs of confrontation?”

  “No but I’m still looking.”

  “Resonances?”

  None but mine and Hunter’s. “No.”

  “Were you followed? Are you being watched?”

  “I don’t think so.” I hope not.

  “If you had to choose, do you believe Mills and the assignees she was with are safe, kidnapped, or dead?”

  That has her stopping in her tracks. It’s a sudden question, and more weighted than Maeven thought she’d be worth thinking about, coming from the captain. Still, she considers it in earnest.

  In fact the assumption might have already borne itself from the moment she zoomed out of the World Map and looked up.

  “Based on very little evidence…” she prefaces. “…They’re dead.”

  It comes out a little inhumane, a little too objective. Maeven feels like there’s something bigger looming over yonder, rising from the horizon. She doesn’t want to get wrapped up on the prospect of a tragedy, not yet. They need to stay focused.

  “Wait there,” says Eyeshot. “Get out of the open. I’m coming to get you.”

  26.2 Helicopter

  Maeven knows that South Sarafiyah didn’t just vanish out of nowhere. It was Willed away by none other than a User. The scale is too large, executed with too much immaculacy—not a trace of rubble behind—to assume it to be the work of normal humans, or even a machine.

  The question that first comes to Maeven’s mind is: how did they do it? Will is multifarious, and the paths to which different Users arrive at the same outcome can be entirely dissimilar. If Maeven thinks of it like tracing branches starting from the ends, she can find herself at the first binary split: The fact of whether or not the User banished the city through activation of their Concept.

  If they did, the answer lies in the nature of their unique ability. Perhaps it was someone who can remove matter, or teleport things in bulk. Maeven can’t think of any other Will specialty that would better complement such a power than a Spatialist. Meaning they came in, activated their Concept, and left.

  On the other side, there is also a possibility that the User’s Concept wasn’t used at all. That the city was destroyed by way of a particular skill Users of all specialties have the potential for. The Willed call it Disintegration. It’s what happens when a User envelops something with their Will—usually an object—with such intensity that it literally dissolves. The nuclear stockpile of User to non-User relations, as a topic of conversation.

  Maeven uses it for petty reasons. Litter, most of the time. It’s how she discarded her empty water bottles on the way here; she dissolved them so she didn’t have to carry them around, by holding it by their cap and flaring her Will. The sheer scale of Disintegrating an entire city, however, with its infrastructure, living residents, and most of all, a User like Candy Mills, that’s a far cry from empty water bottles. It’s even a far cry from the likes of Babda or Rich.

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  Regardless of which scenario is correct, this is likely a User who could stand toe-to-toe with Eyeshot.

  It’s been less than an hour since her call with the Optimist. When Maeven last looked at the World Map, the User’s location icon was already nearing Jebel Rihab, presumably on helicopter. Maeven decided to do what she was told and seek a bit of cover, only as a precaution. She burst to North Sarafiyah with the help of her Optimisation and started to wander its abandoned streets.

  North Sarafiyah is also empty, she discovered, though not as drastically as its southern neighbour. There are still buildings, cars and free-roaming livestock—just no people. She could see the tyre marks of Leichman’s field buses streaking the roads between civilian homes with swung-open front doors and fallen belongings in messy trails, so she presumed the people that lived here must have been evacuated.

  But she also saw cooking smoke streaming out of the roof of one of the low-ceilinged huts, and she’s now opened the door to peer inside it, spotting an old Mortaresi man sizzling something over his stove with his weight on one bare foot.

  “Hey…” she says weakly. He just looks at her like she’s a brick wall with his wiry grey eyebrows and turns back around.

  I don’t think they could convince this one to leave.

  She closes the door and walks back to the road. If they couldn’t do it, then…

  Outside, there’s a noisy gathering of chickens, red-wattled heads bowed to the ground and picking at Maeven’s uneaten MRE’s. She knew they were starving, being abandoned and all, so she took a few minutes to heat them up, wave the trays under their noses, here kitty kitty, and of course, lead them all to eat together for the mild entertainment of seeing a bird banquet.

  She walks to the chickens and flips upright the trays that had been pecked over. Then she sits down and continues to watch.

  They’re ferocious consumers. They eat like there’s a bomb about to go off, finishing her food in a matter of seconds.

  After she cleans up, she hears the hum of rotor blades.

  Leichman’s icicle blue helicopter touches down by the road just before North Sarafiyah. Maeven spots it as she walks out from between the huts. The door slides open, and Eyeshot, the lone passenger, steps out wearing her red-and-white bodysuit; four different firearms holstered to her thighs and back.

  It’s a sight that used to get her pulse rushing, her body at-attention. This time, Maeven barely dips her head as she pays mind.

  Eyeshot meets her gaze and nods.

  Her Resonance—it really is different. It was a searing laser when they first met on Peacemaker. Still is now, except it’s almost like…the beam is off.

  “I saw what you meant from the window,” Eyeshot says when she’s approached. “It’s completely deleted.”

  Maeven hums in agreement, finding the word choice a little odd but also scarily accurate.

  “Anything new?” Eyeshot says as she scans the buildings, likely using her Concept to see through the adobe walls. She notices the User’s voice. Low and calm. A volume Maeven finds it easy to match to.

  “North Sarafiyah has been evacuated,” says Maeven. “Sorry I took so long to—”

  “You haven’t seen anyone from the Reserve?”

  Maeven answers, “No.”

  “I just don’t understand. How could we have not been alerted?"

  Something in the distance catches Eyeshot’s attention. She watches as the Optimist freezes and her eyebrows furrow. To Maeven, it just looks like a brick wall.

  “I couldn’t get the stove guy to leave,” Maeven says. An educated guess.

  “No, not that,” says Eyeshot. “I hear something.”

  It takes a couple minutes for Maeven to understand what the User was talking about. After walking into the empty city they see a Reserve Humvee driving in, tyres rolling back over the escape tracks. Three assignees are sitting inside. They notice Eyeshot and Maeven standing in the road, so they park and get out, looking surprised.

  “Cap’n,” says the driver, an older man around Callum’s age. “We weren’t hearing any news. What happened?”

  “Your name?” says Eyeshot.

  “Dom Rodriguez, ma’am. Number 531. Shell Company.” He points to the assignees on his left and right. “This is Carla Bennet and Roman Anderson. We’re not uh—under any orders ma’am. We came on our own prerogative.”

  Dom looks worried to admit it, but Eyeshot seems unconcerned about the fact. “Is Mills with you?” she asks.

  “No.” Dom looks confused. “She’s here isn’t she?”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Al Majaz, where we brought the residents of Sarafiyah North and South. We haven’t heard anything since then.”

  “And how many assignees are there?”

  “Uh—” Dom turns to his teammate Carla. “Who left?”

  “591 to 600,” says Carla

  “They were the ones stationed at South Sarafiyah with Mills?” guesses Eyeshot.

  “That’s right ma’am,” Dom confirms. “Minus the ones who were evaced.”

  Last they heard, Captain Mills and her assignees were stationed at South Sarafiyah when it vanished. Now according to Shell Company, it seems just a portion of assignees 500 to 1000 were in the city at the time it was assaulted. It’s a good thing to know amidst the onslaught of peculiarities that a majority of the Reserve are still alive, along with the Sarafiyah residents, currently all in Al Majaz.

  “But did something happen?” says Dom. “Why are you here captain?”

  “Why did no one contact the rest of the Reserve?” says Eyeshot.

  “That’s Mill’s job.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “We don’t got our pads cap’n,” says Roman. “We don’t got phones, radios.”

  “You said all communications go through her to minimise noise,” says Dom.

  “I said that?” says Eyeshot. A look of offence. “I never said that.”

  “Mills said that,” corrects Dom. “I gotta be real Cap’n she’s been a real piece of—”

  “Mills is gone,” Eyeshot cuts in.

  Shell Company pauses, returning with looks of concern and confusion.

  “The ten or so assignees she was with are missing also.”

  Shell struggles to find a proper response, meanwhile Maeven thinks about the disdain on Dom’s face on the topic of Candy Mills. It was hard to ignore. Assignees 500 to 1000 must have had a difficult time even before the incident at South Sarafiyah.

  “What are they dead or something?” says Romero.

  “We don’t know yet,” says Eyeshot. She calls her pad and taps on it for a moment. “The risk of the campaign is” –She sighs— “escalating. You need to go back to Al Majaz and stay there until we figure out what’s happened. I’m sending you some radios.”

  “I wanna know what happened to our assignees,” says Dom.

  “Likewise.”

  Eyes shift to Maeven when she cuts in.

  “Leave it to us,” says Eyeshot, her tone softening.

  There’s a few minutes of disagreement. Eyeshot’s decisiveness proves itself immovable against the assignees’ debate and confusion. In the end, Shell Company leaves with failure. They drive off in an air of dissatisfaction, dust picking up under their tyres as they beeline for Al Majaz. Once they’re gone, when the Optimist turns around and walks back through the city, her composure loosens a little, and Maeven can hear her grumbling the name, “Captain Mills…”

  Maeven is thinking about her too. Stripping the Reserve of all devices of communication, what was she doing?

  “Was she the one who decided to split the Reserve in half?” asks Maeven, following her.

  “Yes…” Eyeshot seems to recall the fact as she answers. “It was supposed to be, we focused on intel, Mills focused on eradication. Then in the middle we switch.”

  Instead, Mills has seemed to have gone off on some authoritarian tirade.

  “I should have paid more attention.” says Eyeshot.

  “Do you think she did it?”

  “What, taken out the city?” Eyeshot looks to the road ahead. “Maybe. I have no idea why she would want to do that.”

  The two of them perform one more check of North and South Sarafiyah before they leave. Eyeshot uses her Optimised vision to scan the land. Maeven tunes up her Intuition. They even ask the stove guy if he knows what happened. According to Eyeshot’s pad translation, all he had to say was that the city was there one day, gone the next.

  Thus, they return to Leichman’s helicopter empty-handed.

  Maeven chooses the far seat—white and made of leather—and notices a driverless cockpit as she climbs in and sits down. There’s a large, square window at her shoulder, vertical strip lights across the ceiling. Eyeshot sits in the seat directly opposite with her pad hovering by her side.

  She must be using some sort of interface to control the helicopter, or messaging Leichman to make it go back. After the User withdraws her device and the rotors start to whir, she reaches into the seat’s armrest. Maeven watches her as Eyeshot finds a mint and tosses it in her mouth.

  Soon enough they’re far from the sand below them. She notices how luxuriously quiet it is inside the cabin. She can barely hear the blades. She looks out the window and can see the full, vast emptiness of a small town that once stood. A puzzling sight.

  She wonders whether she should mention something to Eyeshot about what they just witnessed. What is there left to say? She already informed the User of all the necessary details. And by the look on Eyeshot’s face, far from panicked, just an assured seriousness, the User seems like she already knows what to do about it. It is what they’ve been bred to do, Will Users, to solve dangerous puzzles such as these.

  “Riel,” she watches Eyeshot say. “Can I share something with you?”

  It dawns on Maeven that she had been staring. Her delivery. Didn’t sound like an order, an insult, nor a forewarning. Maeven’s face doesn’t give off much, how wary she feels about Eyeshot prefacing whatever she’s about to say like that. She answers, “Sure,” but her guard’s up.

  “Right at the end of the campaign with the Black Ammunition, I got a call from the UL government. I won’t become Secretary of Defense, they told me. The vote didn’t pass,” says Eyeshot.

  Then the Optimist watches her like she knows how to respond to that. Maeven isn’t at all prepared. She doesn’t understand why she needs to know this. Why it feels like Eyeshot isn’t just sharing this to her, but entrusting it. “How do you feel?” Maeven asks. It seems like a safe enough thing to say.

  “Good,” Eyeshot says, looking down like she’s telling it to herself. “Yes, terrible but good.” Then she’s nodding like the question provoked a revelation Maeven hadn’t intended. She was just trying to fill the silence, honestly. She’d been criticised before about seeming like a blank wall.

  A few seconds later, Eyeshot comments with just the word, “Madness…” Her hand cradles her cheek. “Never reduce yourself to a single goal. You will get lost in it.”

  At that point, Maeven is at a loss for a response.

  “You asked me a question the other day,” says Eyeshot, settling her hand on her lap. “Something about Will Block.”

  Okay? She knows what she’s referring to. It was back when she and Victor were handed their files for the BA mission in Tesset. She paused before the door as she was leaving, feeling like she was about to embarrass herself but going with an impulse to speak anyway. Why does Will Block happen? She asked something like that.

  “Why did you ask me that question? Were you just curious?”

  Almost immediately, a steely No flees from Maeven’s mouth.

  Eyeshot hums—never mind, then. The Optimist turns to look out the window, lets it be. They could very well spend the rest of the trip silent.

  But the moment isn’t leaving Maeven’s mind. Mimicking Eyeshot, she’s faced out the window, except staring at the glass not the clouds, feeling a coat of sweat.

  It was never supposed to be a secret. Never. They way Maeven reacted just then was out of pure panic. She shouldn’t be surprised. She knows that she avoids talking about it, for most of the time she’s been afflicted with it. The ongoing omission of her Will Block as a topic of dialogue stems from a desire to forget it had ever happened, obviously. Then maybe—she could suppose—that the desire turned into her trying to actually believe it never happened, which further manifested into behaving, out in the real world, as if she had successfully convinced herself of the delusion.

  Eyeshot is still looking out the window.

  Between Users, there’s an unspoken agreement that you don’t ask about each other’s Will abilities without a good reason, to let the beholder decide whether or not they want to reveal the truth of their powers. She knew this would work in her favour. It wouldn’t stop the assignees from wondering about what kind of Concept the Larosa kid has, sure. Maeven’s silence in the end, was likely understood as her own decision.

  That’s why nobody until now, has asked her outright about her Will.

  Maeven’s fingers are tight, rubbing against the base of her palm.

  And what would it have changed? It’s not like revealing the fact of her Will Block has been undeniably necessary at any moment during their VR campaign. It’d only attract unwanted sympathy. Sorry faces she can’t even stand the mental image of. But why is it then, after all that hiding, she feels an itch at the end of her throat desperate to relieve itself?

  Why does she want to say it now? To someone who just a few days ago, would seemingly find any excuse to get Maeven kicked out of The Reserve?

  The feeling doesn’t stop. It heightens to a pinnacle, where she opens her mouth staring pathetically at her knees.

  “I have Will Block.”

  Eyeshot turns back from the window. “So you do?” she says, blissfully unaware of the door they had just opened.

  “How bad is it?” asks Eyeshot.

  Maeven feels it inaccurate to describe the feeling any more verbose than simply replying, “Bad.”

  The User shifts forward on her seat. “Why you say this?”

  Maeven tosses her hand, finding it hard to fully acquiesce to the situation.

  “What did it affect?” Eyeshot goes on to ask.

  “My Concept. I still have a little bit of Optimisation and Intuition.”

  “OK,” she says. “So at least not everything.”

  “But it’s kind of…”

  Eyeshot goes quiet.

  “Sort of…”

  “Well, yes?”

  She almost gives up on saying it. Her intonations keep dancing around the answer. But it’s too late to say, never mind, and do away with it. Avoidance turns to frustration, and the truth becomes a terse statement in protest of her own timidity.

  “I’ve had it for over a year,” says Maeven. She glances up to observe the User’s reaction.

  The Optimist’s eyes widen for a microsecond. Then she blinks, and her neck cranes ever-so-slightly forward.

  “A year?” she says.

  Maeven doesn’t respond.

  “Of Block?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A year?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause of sinking in.

  After their mellow discussion, and minutes of staring at the clouds, Eyeshot’s reaction comes out like an eruption of emotion. “Unbelievable!” Her voice reverberates loudly in the sound-proofed cabin. She plants the weight of her arm on her knee and taps with her finger. Maeven reclines to keep the distance.

  The User begins to think. “Your Will was blocked right after your graduation from Larosa Academy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the cat? That’s not yours?” Her searing eyes are flicking back up every time she finishes a thought.

  “Sketchy’s my brother’s minion. He lent it to me before I left.”

  “You’re brother from Larona?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So without a Concept how did you complete the BA mission so quickly?”

  Is the answer not already apparent? “I didn’t need it.”

  Finally, Eyeshot asks, “Is this why you missed your physical examination?”

  That’s when Maeven hesitates again.

  She didn’t miss her physical examination, she avoided it. Although her Will Block was definitely one of the reasons why, instead of answering Yes, she answers, “Kind of,” because it makes her think of the weight of rage it had justified in the captain since that day on Peacemaker.

  “Oh, Riel.” Eyeshot covers her face, collapsing into her hands. She says an entire sentence in a language Maeven can’t understand. Russian—it sounds like—flowing seamlessly back into English as her eyes are strained and closed, “—You were discouraged. But you still wanted to be a part of the Reserve.”

  There’s nothing Maeven has to add to that.

  “You should have done something. You should be counselling.”

  Maeven assumes she meant in counselling, and doesn’t take offence to the suggestion. “There’s no counselling for Will Block.”

  Going to counselling for Will Block is like going to counselling for Growing Up. It’s just a natural consequence of a transition period, a sign of a developing User. It’s not supposed to last this long.

  “I mean I told my professors about it—” says Maeven.

  “They didn’t bother doing anything?”

  “They did. They were concerned,” Maeven clarifies. “It just—nothing worked.”

  As much as they fought to remedy the Block with all the time they could spare, it also felt like they were screaming at a broken leg to try and get it to heal faster. Pointless and ceremonial. Eyeshot backs up a little into her seat, catching up to the reality of Maeven’s circumstance. “A year without a Concept, this is unheard of to me. Are you OK?” she says, her tone settled down.

  “It’s fine,” says Maeven.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have contacts. I might know someone who can help.”

  “I don’t think there’s a simple solution.”

  Eyeshot falls silent.

  Neither of them has said sorry to each other, she realises.

  It makes sense. Every variation of expressed sympathy beyond a mutual loss for words would only come out insincere. Even if Maeven used to be a fan, they’re not friends. They probably never will be.

  As soon as Maeven thought their discussion was truly over, as she was prepared to discount the happenstance of this helicopter ride as a random admittance to a stranger, Eyeshot says something else to her. “You seem to handle your grievances a lot better than I do, by the way.”

  Maeven returns with a look of incredulity.

  “How can I put this…” says the User. “I think I treated you like some sort of punching bag when you were really a pad holder, this make sense?”

  Huh?

  “You could have struck back but you never did. I always assumed that made someone weak, but. Sometimes, I think it’s the opposite,” says Eyeshot.

  It takes seconds for Maeven to follow, to really understand—or finally accept what the User is alluding to. The low hum of the blades take over, and the sound of waxed leather as Eyeshot rests fully against the back of her seat and grips her wrist.

  “Now I’m not forcing you to do anything, but if you have anything to say to me, Riel, now might be the best time to do it.”

  “Do you want to say sorry?” asks Maeven.

  Eyeshot responds with, “May I?” So Maeven gestures her hand forward to tell her, Go on then.

  “Riel I’m sorry,” says the User. “For targeting you, and for taking advantage of your competence and loyalty. Even before I knew of this Will Block I was prepared to say this. I’m not proud of myself—and I promise you, I really promise you: This is not who I want to be. I was supposed to be a User of fairness. Competency. Responsibility. I wasn’t supposed to let feelings cloud my judgement. I was never supposed to be nervous; scared. But—you can see yourself”–she gestures out the window—“I have failed. I’m sorry. I have never been so disappointed in myself.” Her eyes bow only at the very end. The choice of words so specific it could have come from genuine consideration.

  This. This is why her Resonance feels so strange. Why the Eyeshot before and after the BA mission almost seem like two different people. Losing the Secretary of Defense must have triggered something within her, and she’s thinking about everything she’s ever done.

  Maeven never thrived in the idea of vengeance. The only punishment she facilitates in this moment happens as she lets it linger, so the dread of unforgiveness and unending regret remains up in the air for just a bit longer, while Leichman’s helicopter continues southward, passing the rocky peaks of Jebel Rihab.

  Finally, Maeven opens her mouth and responds to the captain.

  “It’s okay, Eyeshot.”

  Notes