27.1 Discombobulated

  Maeven steps down from Leichman’s helicopter thinking that somehow, Tesset looks a little different. Aside from a few Reserve buses and storage trailers parked in front of the border wall, and a queue of assignees packing their insides with crates and canvas bags, the city really looks the same as she left it. It’s Maeven who’s changed. In particular, the feeling by which she returns to the winding city; like a part of her had just been shattered—then put back together in the wrong order.

  “What now?” Maeven asks, hearing Eyeshot exit behind her.

  The Optimist takes a breath. “I’m about to make a very long call.” She’s typing something on her pad.

  “What do I do?”

  “Standby.” she says.

  Maeven thought she was going to say that.

  “Keep it within the three companies if you would like to tell the others about the mission. Anyway, I’ll update all of you as soon as possible.”

  Maeven nods at the instruction, and Eyeshot strides ahead while herself; she walks to the city at her own pace. She can’t help but replay parts of the conversation they had in the helicopter, feeling absent in her silence, her body moving on autopilot as she passes groups of assignees heading outbound to the Reserve buses. Unthinkingly, she finds herself back at the hotel. Standing by the front doors is Victor Stendahl.

  Victor’s saying something to the assignees walking out; some quip that makes them stop and laugh and carry on, canvas bags hefted over their shoulders. Scopasthaesia makes him turn, and Maeven, not really knowing how long she had been standing there, finally snaps into the moment.

  “Welcome back,” he says, a smile on his face.

  “Hi Victor,” she returns.

  “How was the mission?”

  “Good.”

  That’s what she says when she doesn’t have an answer for something. How was the mission? The question sticks in her mind and images of the past 48 hours retrieve from her memory though in no sensible order: Endless sand, starving chickens, Eyeshot sitting across from her in a white leather cabin.

  “Anything interesting happen?”

  She rubs her neck.

  They’re moving cities, leaving Tesset. There’s no other reason for the Reserve buses being parked out there, as well as the busying assignees.

  They can probably keep that as their priority for now.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she tells him, stepping inside and heading for the stairway.

  Given what Maeven and Eyeshot had discovered over the reconnaissance mission, it’s her responsibility to relay that information to her team as soon as she can. But calling a meeting for it now could cause delays, she reckons, when they have a hotel to revert, care packages to distribute, inventory checks to complete.

  She also doesn’t feel right. There’s something about that helicopter ride she needs to iron out. Pushing the meeting back also means she has time, perhaps a false assurance, that she can put herself back in order in the meanwhile.

  27.2 Maeven's Block

  Later in the day The Voluntary Reserve proceeds to their next checkpoint, Surabad, a one-and-a-half hour drive north from Tesset.

  It’s a city of limited facilities. No hotels, no alleyways, just a flat sprinkle of square adobe buildings, houses and small shops. The VR has had to make do camping themselves outside but within the city perimeter, since there was no structure big enough to accommodate them all. Next to the border entrance, a colony of large green canvas tents have thus been propped up across two-hundred square metres of empty sand, where the Mortaresi kids like to play soccer.

  Walking around camp feels like they’re a battalion posted in the most unremarkable outskirts of a war. Everyone’s gathered around lanterns, smoking, reading books and playing cards. The facts of Maeven’s recon mission are still being processed with confidentiality between Eyeshot and the higher chains of command. To most of the volunteers, barely anything new has happened, and as far as they’re aware it’s business-as-usual: chill out until someone tells them to do something.

  After they had set up, eaten dinner, and returned to their respective tents, it was up to Maeven to break the monotony and call the meeting between Ocean, Sky and Sand. She wasn’t permitted to inform anyone else, according to Eyeshot, so with a brief but detailed summary she had to whisper what happened during the mission.

  In the end, it was an unsatisfying volume of information. Maeven knew that it would be. In fact when she finished her recap with an abrupt, “and then we went back to Tesset,” wanting to skim past the helicopter ride as quickly as she possibly could, she wasn’t surprised to see the assignees faces once she finished. Confused, unnerved, asking questions that began with a long “So…”.

  She could only answer few with concrete detail. Victor wanted confirmation that they had thoroughly investigated the area for remnants of South Sarafiyah and the missing assignees; Maeven assured him that they had checked it twice. Jackson from Sky Company asked if it meant they were going to start the campaign soon; Maeven said probably. Gunner asked when; she didn’t know.

  None of them seemed to know what it meant for a User to assault a quiet city.

  Their discussion heated up a little theorising it. Victor, who had been strangely reserved through it all, uncrossed his arms and exclaimed, “Alright.” He suddenly called for bedtime. Their assignees didn’t budge at first, maybe they were confused as to why he wasn’t as bewildered as they were.

  Maeven decided to help.

  “I think we’re circling anyway,” she said, realising he was right. Everyone looked tired, and she’d rather talk about it in the morning.

  So eventually, they climbed into their bunks and killed the lantern light, and it seemed all of them fell asleep within minutes except for Maeven.

  Her eyes refused to close; she couldn’t stop staring at the tent roof. An hour might have went by. For some reason, no matter how she laid there it always felt like her limbs were in the wrong place. Uncomfortable, like they needed another stretch across the peninsula.

  She threw off the covers and walked. Out the tent, she exited the city gate and turned until she was shrouded in darkness by the cover of the border wall. And she’d keep going, she’s decided. She’ll circle around the city until she starts to yawn and her mind quietens. A thousand times. Whatever it takes. It feels so hard to sit still these days, she doesn’t know why. She was trying to find that nook in her mind sitting on Majid’s couch, peacefully drinking Kahwa while watching his wife cook in their old kitchen, alas, it’s escaped her.

  She can’t stop thinking about what she and Eyeshot said to each other in the helicopter.

  On the third lap, she doesn’t expect a familiar Resonance walking around the border perimeter from the opposite direction. Surabad’s thick city wall on her side, she stops to hear his boots scraping the sand.

  Click.

  Maeven switches on her torch.

  Win is there, his hands in the pockets of his VR pants; barely a reaction except for looking up and halting.

  “I just felt like going for a walk,” he says, when they’re both sitting down facing the dark sandscape beyond the city, Maeven’s torch pitched in the ground. “You?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” says Maeven.

  They don’t say anything for a while after that. He already welcomed her back over dinner, pointed out that she had been gone for a while. This is the sort of trailing silence she’s gotten used to, even finds comfort in from time to time. It’s like a bubble of retreat during noisy bus rides and VR cafeterias, Win’s unwavering disengagement, that’s why she sits with him.

  “Eyeshot apologised right to my face,” she says, downplaying it; just sort of throws it out there to see if it’ll get swept away. She’s quickly affirmed that he is indeed listening to her, because he answers, “Good.” And even a question follows it: “Did it feel like she meant it?”

  She says that it did.

  He rubs a line in the sand.

  “I just told her it was okay in the end,” she says.

  “Just like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  It didn’t take much consideration. Maeven had always been quick to accept apologies ever since she was a small student at Larosa. Grudges like that don’t stick to her it seems. She pulls them out or they rot off. “Are you still reading the books?” she asks him, but he skips over the question.

  “Do you actually forgive her though?” asks Win.

  Maeven thinks carefully about it. “That’s a little different.”

  “Right, so no.”

  Set it straight, she guesses he’s saying. Plain and simple. Fine. Ambiguity aside the answer is no, Maeven doesn’t forgive Eyeshot for what she did, and even if she could prove that she forgave her by declaration, she couldn’t by feeling. Feelings don’t change over a helicopter ride, she realises now. Eyeshot needs to prove to her she means what she says, first and foremost. So all Maeven has to add to Win’s statement is, “Not yet.”

  Despite this, Win lingers on the topic. “She sucks,” he says.

  Maeven hums.

  “She can’t act right around the one assignee who does the most for her. What does that mean? She makes us follow every dumb little rule, but she gets to pick and choose when she wants to be a professional. Isn’t that what a hypocrite is?”

  “Well—”

  “For someone that spies on everyone she doesn’t notice much,” he says, “Remember when Callum said he joined the VR because his wife left him? You hear those kind of stories all around the Reserve. This person joined because he just got out of prison, that person joined because he lost his job. Look at you.” He gestures his hand at her. “You graduated from Larosa Academy. You could have been doing anything you ever wanted but instead you’re here, in the VR. There must be some reason for that too. You’d think she’d think about that is all I’m saying. At least not kick you around.”

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  You’ve really thought about this? she almost asks, but the answer speaks for itself.

  That was so much more than Maeven thought he ever had to say about their situation.

  He continues. “Doesn’t it piss you off?”

  “Not really,” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t muster the feeling.”

  “That’s a little weird.”

  “Well I was annoyed before. Now would feel like reacting on her behalf when it was always her problem and I just happened to be around.”

  “OK,” he says, “which is still wrong.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She watches Win pick up a rock smaller than his fingernail and pinch it between his thumb and index. He reels his arm back aiming to toss it across the sand.

  “You could at least admit she was an ass,” he says.

  A silence.

  “She was an ass,” she says.

  He tosses the rock. “Glad your fine though.”

  “Thanks for checking.” She watches the rock vanish in the dark as it arcs, commenting, “I’m surprised I didn’t think you were concerned about me, Win.”

  “We’re friends.”

  Wait—they are?

  They couldn’t even bother to sit next to each other; they’ve plopped down at a diagonal and stayed like that ever since. Maeven has to crane her neck around every time she wants to look at him, including just then, when he had proclaimed their relationship for the record, expression so unflinching he could have said one plus one equals two.

  The next stretch of quiet she finds is less comfortable because Maeven spends it failing to change the topic. Was there something they had to talk about in particular, now? That’s when a thought occurs.

  Why was Eyeshot the first to hear about her Will Block, and not him?

  “Can I share something with you then?”

  “Sure.”

  Maeven shifts back so they’re adjacent, then pulls her legs to sit with them crossed. “You were right about me joining the Reserve.”

  “There’s a reason,” he replies.

  “You know how Ina has her snake thing? Hara has her dodge bank thing? Victor has his Synergy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever wondered what my thing was?”

  He finds another rock. “Your Concept? Doesn’t everyone?”

  “You ever heard of Will Block?”

  Win pauses. He leaves the rock, then withdraws his hands from the sand. “No.”

  “It’s what happens when a portion of your Will temporarily disappears. It’s like a—stress reaction. If you’re going through puberty or something traumatic happens to you, your Will can shut down for a period of time.”

  He goes quiet.

  “Every User goes through it at least once in their life. It happened to me not long after I graduated from Larosa, it was—” She stops.

  The feeling is coming back, the one she felt when she was staring at the helicopter window, a memoir of thoughts jammed in her head. Stop running, she tells herself. Stop moving on autopilot.

  That impulse that wrenches her mouth shut every time the topic of her Will Block rears its head; she needs to control it.

  She breathes out, starts again.

  “As far as I could tell, there was nothing that really triggered mine. That’s why it seemed so strange to me at first. My life was the same it always was, the only difference was that I graduated. I didn’t have to go to the Academy anymore.”

  “What did that feel like?”

  She thinks about it. “You know when you’re with Heigen and you’re trying to get him to make a certain movement, but it isn’t listening? It’s like that, except, you already know Heigen has done that exact thing before, so it shouldn’t be that hard but it only gets worse. Imagine then he can’t run, then he can’t walk, then he can’t manifest…” she says. “I just kept devolving until my Concept was completely gone.”

  She feels a remnant from that day, of cold panic in her chest.

  “I thought, okay whatever. Will Block is supposed to phase out over a couple weeks, I just need to wait. Well, it never phased out.”

  “You still have it now?” says Win.

  “Yeah, I do.” It comes out easier compared to the first time. “I was so—bored. I truly felt like I had nothing to do. I made terrible job applications. I got addicted to this game: Drake Quest VIII. Played that thing for months.”

  Win’s eyebrows are knitted, his eyes are locked. A look of subtle devastation, as if he’d just heard that someone he knew though was never particularly close with, passed away in a car collision.

  She doesn’t exactly expect it. Breaking eye contact, she continues.

  “Anyway it’s not all bad. I still have Optimisation and Intuition. My Optimisation is almost back to how it used to be. I’m basically a generic User now,” she says, shrugging. “That’s actually why I joined the Reserve. I thought I just wanted to get away from home and see Eyeshot because I admired her, but, what I really wanted was—I guess—a distraction.”

  She swipes her torch from the ground. Feels the knurling. Flicks it off, then on.

  “Sorry Maeven,” she hears. “I didn’t know you were going through all of that.”

  All of a sudden, she feels it in her eyes. Tears. Something about it coming from Win was just too telling. She glances away. But he can tell. He hands her a tissue.

  “This is so stupid,” she says.

  “No it’s not,” says Win.

  “I should not be crying over this.”

  “Just cry, Maeven. I won’t hold it over your head.”

  “Fuck,” she says.

  She takes the tissue and does exactly that. The tears flow against her will. She scrapes them away thinking it’s just a stream or two. It’s not. She can feel her face morph.

  She covers her face with her hands and the tissue.

  If Hunter were here, he’d be rubbing her back, trying to cheer her up, maybe he’d cry too. Win’s idea is to silently mind his own business, but it’s nice in its own way. She realises it’s an acknowledgment that feelings, even sad ones, happen. He doesn’t want to jerk into action just because she’s started to cry; by doing that he treats it—whether he’s aware of it or not—with complete validity.

  She can feel herself calming down. She uncovers her face and takes a few deep breaths.

  She tells him, “I’m not even done.”

  “There’s more?” he says.

  She blows her nose.

  “Well eventually I got to thinking about where the Block came from, and I got to the point where I started to question whether I even had a Concept in the first place.” She balls the tissue in her hand, throat tight as she takes another breath. “Did you know that Will is extremely malleable at an early age?”

  Win’s response is delayed. He’s taken aback by the sudden tidbit. “No.”

  “I don’t think it’s the same for the automanifested but typically when you’re around eight or nine there’s a brief period where your Will is flexible enough to trial all sorts of Ubermen Categories, as long as you scale it down enough,” she says. “The Academy encourages you to take full advantage of this period. They made us do a thing called spellmaking. We were given assignments to make small, single-serving Will abilities—spells—for whatever category we could access while we had the chance.” Despite her glossy eyes, she chuckles fondly. “I remember I had this piece of dough. I decided to do all my spells with it because I thought it was cool. My Subjection spell was to mould it into a flat circle, then I got my Transformation spell to turn it into a metal disc.” She feels a little bit of that energy come back. It was such a thrill to flex your Will in the early days. “When I got home on the weekend my mum asked, ‘What did you do with the dough I gave you?’ She thought I was making pasta or something.”

  She doesn’t hear him laugh.

  “The limitation to spellmaking—other than the fact that you can only do it when you’re a kid—is that the motive—the mantra—is quite weak. The only things driving us to spellmake was to finish the school assignment so we could move on to the next one. After we showed them off, did our thing, submitted the paper, the spells vanished after a few weeks. We couldn’t do them anymore.” She explains, “It’s only later, once you start to figure yourself out—you decide on your mantra and dedicate yourself to a specialty—when your Will starts to define itself and you can finally make ‘spells’ in your chosen categories that don’t vanish. In other words, you begin to design your official Concept,” says Maeven.

  She pauses to think about her next words.

  “What I’ve been worried about is: What if after all this time my Will never really solidified? What if I was never designing a true Concept and instead I was making a bunch of pointless spells?” says Maeven.

  “Is that even a thing?” says Win.

  “It is,” she says nodding at him. “Users can lose their Concepts if their mantras fall apart. They lose their purpose, or they had the wrong one to begin with. That’s pretty much the same thing. You can read about it if you want.”

  “But you said Users can only make spells when they’re kids.”

  “Maybe I was an exception.”

  He says, “Or what if your Concept is just that. Making spells.”

  “It’s not.” His creativity is appreciated though she considered that already.

  “I feel like you would know,” he says.

  She considers what he means by that as it’s not the reaction she expected. Feel she would know what? That she didn’t make a real Concept, even if she believed she did some point prior?

  Yeah. He thinks I would have a hunch.

  “What if I don’t?” says Maeven. “Win, I’ve never mentioned this to you before but you need to understand: I never specialised.”

  His expression is unreadable, though she gives him a moment hoping it sinks in because if there’s anything she could clarify that would make him understand, it would be this.

  “Normally, right? You start year 8. Year 8 is a big year because you do the experimentation and all the 101 classes in all the different categories. Then you finish year 8. Then it’s time for you to pick your speciality, let’s say, ‘I want to be a Weaponist with an Optimist secondary.’ Weaponist-Optimist, OK. You pick those two faculties for the rest of your education,” she says, shifting towards his direction, “I didn’t do that. I took classes in all of the Ubermen categories until I graduated.”

  She watches Win.

  “I have a Bachelors in Nothing,” says Maeven.

  He opens his mouth. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “It was unorthodox,” she says, proposing the words be interchangeable. “It was ill-advised.”

  “Yeah but you wanted to do it.”

  “Yes. I wanted to learn everything.”

  “OK—” He touches his forehead. “So somehow because you never specialised you’re afraid your Will never got solid and your Concept wasn’t your actual Concept, but a bunch of—”

  “Spells,” she finishes.

  “And it vanished because that’s what spells do. They vanish.”

  She nods. “That’s why it vanished after I graduated. I—” she gestures air quotes as she says the words, “—'finished the assignment.’”

  The tissue is still balled in her palm. She forgot she was crying.

  “You actually feel like you could have made that kind of a mistake?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Maeven—anything’s possible,” argues Win. “Thing is—I don’t think someone like you makes a mistake like that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you not know?”

  I’ve lost him, she thinks, running a hand through her hair.

  “Tell me if I’m being too honest and I’ll shut up?” says Win.

  “No,” she sighs. “I appreciate the honesty.”

  It’s fine. She’ll let it go. It’s not like she could convince him of something she had been thinking about endlessly for a year, in the span of a mere conversation, in the middle of the Mortaresi desert.

  “What even is your Concept?” Win asks. But she’d already decided she should be careful in answering a question like that.

  It doesn’t seem right to talk about her old Concept, her non-Concept. What Maeven used to be able to do before she graduated is irrelevant now. Especially if her theory is true and her condition isn’t really Will Block; her abilities have rather vanished forever exactly as spells do.

  If she ever wants to move on, she needs to let it all go. Bringing it up again would only be clinging on to a time well past.

  “…If it ever comes back, I’ll show it to you,” she tells him instead.

  After that they face the sand, familiarly silent again.

  At the same time she and Win wrap up their conversation and return to the entrance of Surabad, Maeven notices a Resonance nearing then from one side of the gate. His patient footsteps have been ineligible in the wind, approaching Miura’s left flank and startling the assignee when the man opens his mouth and shouts.

  “A sight to see! A night to be!” exclaims Captain June, hands clasped behind his back. “Every time I look upon that horizon I say to myself, what a time to be alive.”

  “Do you need something Captain June?” says Maeven.

  “Not really! I just came over to say…” says the captain, “…adieu”

  “Adieu?”

  “Yep. I’m afraid the powers that be have demanded for my immediate withdrawal. Everything seems to be working out in Dr Hopkin’s favour, no less. Making me leave when the campaign was at its most mysterious,” he says, wiggling his fingers. “I suppose I’m not surprised.”

  She notices Win glancing at her from her peripheral, probably asking something like, Do you know what the hell he’s talking about? Maeven glances back as an answer. No.

  June juts for a handshake.

  “It’s been a blast with you around, Riel. Are you thinking of joining special forces? I think you’d do a fine job. I guess that’s expected for a Larosa kid, eh? Though I don’t know. There’s something more about you Riel, something special,” says June, his grip calloused and unnervingly strong.

  He moves on to Win before Maeven can think of a response.

  “Win, you’re a case study and a half,” he says, pointing at the Creationist. “Don’t let it all get to your head now, you hear me? You’ve got mountains to climb!”

  “Where are you even going?” says Win.

  “Home! The campaign’s been—” June stops himself. “Well, I’ll let Eyeshot explain that part. That’s right, there’s another reason why I had to come talk to you. Eyeshot’s called a meeting at the briefing tent tomorrow. Ocean, Sky and Sand at 0800 sharp. I’ve already told the others and they were not happy waking up, heh, whoopsie!”

  Already?

  Maeven hopes that means the call Eyeshot mentioned this morning was a productive one. She’s not sure how long she can handle her assignees’ theorising.

  “Well,” sighs June.

  For a while the captain just stands there. Seemingly unwilling to leave though unsure what else he could talk about. “Good luck, both of you.”

  Then he walks away, leaving them alone facing the innards of Surabad.

  “June’s leaving?” says Win.

  She doesn’t respond.

  “He’s Head of the Reserve,” he says.

  A surprising development indeed. Who is Dr Hopkins? Why is Captain June leaving? And why are none of the other captains freaking out about it?

  “We should head to bed,” says Maeven.

  It’d be wise to gather the energy for the coming morning.

  Notes & Characters

  Notes:

  - The specialised categories of Will as defined in 13.1 and 16.1

  Some characters mentioned:

  Specialty: Optimist-Weaponist.

  Concept: Super hearing, super sight (including x-ray vision), and indomitable firearm enhancement.

  Visuals: Long silver hair clipped behind her ears. Red eyes. Red-and-white bodysuit with quad gun holsters.

  Specialty: (?)

  Concept: Fire?

  Visuals: Old, short, and never in uniform.

  Specialty: Optimist

  Concept: Uses Synergy to enhance the power of others.

  Visuals: Muscular. Red hair. Side-swept fringe.

  Other: Friendly and charismatic.

  Specialty: Creation-Subjection

  Concept: Minionist

  Visuals: Black hair. Sometimes wears a cap.

  Other: Member of Ocean Company. Aloof. Draws a lot.