Unity and Destiny Pt. 07

Esther didn't respond to his weak joke, and Javier knew immediately he'd missed the mark about her worries.

"I don't care how old I am," Esther said, her voice rising, arms tightening across his back. "I care about what Benjamin said his sister believed about me. That I was somehow important, crucial to the future. And why might she have thought that? Because she saw it in Unity, of course, just as Diana did. I should have guessed, Javier. It was how Benjamin knew where to place me all those years later. And now I'm terrified what else of my life might have been foretold by Unity. It's too much of a coincidence for me to show up in more than one vision. A child stolen from a death sentence, a future destiny? What do you think that sounds like, Javier? Can't you understand what I'm saying?"

Javier hadn't really grown up religious, but Mamá had sent him to Sunday school when he was young. Esther was thinking of Moses, or even Jesus. They were just stories. Except to Esther, he supposed they weren't only that, not precisely.

"There is no destiny," said Javier, with a conviction he wished were as strong as it used to be. "Maybe there are some fixed points, like you described, but I'm not sure I even believe that. It's probably what you told me once, that with enough information you can find certain things that are very probable. But that's all. People can make decisions and affect the world. You should understand that better than anyone."

"Don't you think I get that?" Esther said, crying harder. "None of you ever talk about it, but can't you see what I might become? Selena asked me indirectly if I could cause an earthquake, and I'm terrified that the answer might be yes, at least someday. And if I could do that, surely I have to figure out how I could make it happen safely, a series of smaller quakes, so people didn't die. With that kind of ability, failing to act would be just as bad as causing the damage myself. Right now I already have the power to walk around a city and stop criminals on the street, like one of those comic book superheroes you told me about, and I tell myself I don't do it because it's not my place. In truth it's because I've convinced myself there are too many larger things I have to understand, so I can fix bigger problems. But it won't ever end! Javier, even as I listen to myself I can hear how arrogant I am, and now I find out there really are prophecies about me?"

"No," Javier said. "There are some things people saw in Unity that might have related to you, and it was people who made it all happen. They made the decisions about what the visions meant. Just as you're making a decision every time you make something your responsibility, and the rest of us tear our hair out worrying about the burden you're setting on yourself. There is nothing that says you have to do any of what you're doing, Esther. No prophecy, no moral code that's more binding on you than everyone else in the world. It's all just you, and the person you are, and I love you more than I can ever say, but you're still just a beautiful, brilliant, limited human being. If you told me tomorrow you were giving this all up to focus on math, I would love you exactly as much as I do today, and I'd be unbelievably relieved. But I know you won't do that, and so I'll just have to follow wherever you go and tell you again and again that you can't solve everything, and it's not your responsibility. But as long as you're trying, we're all here to help."

Esther didn't reply, and Javier let her keep crying into his shoulder, until she finally shuddered to a stop.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, Javier." She held him even tighter.

"Are you, though?" Javier asked.

"No," she admitted eventually. "But I'm better than I was."

"Good," Javier said, scratching her lightly across the spots of her lower back. She gasped softly.

"Could we have sex now?" she blurted, and Javier laughed. But he was already moving his mouth to her right nipple, the taste of her sweat in his mouth, her petite body rubbing against him as they settled into a familiar pattern with more urgency than usual.

But of course nothing was ever quite the same with Esther. Maybe it was a faint new freckle he found. Maybe it was something she did in her own mind, one of her little tricks in otherspace that sometimes had surprising results in her body. Or maybe it was like today, where she took his thumb and pressed it as hard as she could against her tiny hole, even as she struggled to take his dick into her mouth. And to his surprise, her sensitive flesh stretched, then stretched more, and just as her body began to shake with an orgasm, the very tip of his thumb went inside her.

She was so surprised that she nearly bit him, but it was all right. The way she moaned on his dick more than made up for it. And it was Esther. There was nothing he wouldn't do for her, if only he could.

* * *

It took two more sessions for Esther and Diana to go through all of her memories. The last batch included all of Diana's most recent visions. But it also contained a scene Diana had perhaps subconsciously wanted to delay as long as she could.

"That car crash," Esther said. "That was the man you killed, wasn't it? It was all so detailed, you must have been sure it was your task."

Diana looked out the window.

"He survived," she said. "I was very careful, and he was not really hurt. Just as the vision showed. That was only the second month after we moved to the ancient place, and Union was so much sharper than it had ever been. I was never more sure of my understanding of the Way."

Diana sighed and looked back at Esther. "It was the third driver, the one I didn't see coming. She swerved to avoid us, and her car flipped over. I had to flee the scene of the accident. And I thought I'd been humbled. But of course, I hadn't. Javier was right to remind me of that. The Way would never require us to hurt another unless it was utterly necessary. And yet I have hurt again, believing I interpreted the Way properly."

Esther thought of the guards in the power station. And of course, the vision, so terribly clear now in Esther's mind as well. A sequence of changed switches, broken pipes, small fires—it was lucky Tanaka's sending had stopped her. Esther had no idea what all of that would have done, and obviously Diana hadn't either. But someone must have. It was too specific, requiring expert knowledge. Could that sort of knowledge arise organically from the subconscious of many Changed?

"Thank you, Diana," Esther said. "You have given me much to consider. May I ask if you have acted on any visions since you recovered?"

"I have not," Diana said stiffly. "I am far from Harmony, Esther. All of us are, whether we know it or not."

Esther found Javier by the half-finished greenhouse foundation, watching Nicola storm off. Esther hadn't eavesdropped on the one-sided argument, and Javier shrugged it off.

"She isn't really angry at me," he said. "Just blowing off steam. What's up?"

"Let's take a walk," she said. "I just finished with Diana. There's something we're missing about Unity."

By the time she'd finished describing Diana's Black Christmas vision, Javier was nodding excitedly. "You're right. We've been trying to pin down what Unity is, but we already know it encompasses visions of past and present, and probably future. And we already had the examples of Benjamin's dreams. Your invented Unity visions at the lake were enough to fool everyone but Diana. What if Unity isn't one cohesive thing? What if all of our theories about Unity are partly right? Because that vision Diana got is looking more and more like a smoking gun. Someone using Unity as a transmission channel for their own agenda."

Esther smiled. It was hopeful news, indeed. Could the worst atrocities have a single perpetrator, or a small group?

That night, Nicola was less impressed. "We already guessed about this. The apocalypse faction was responsible, whoever they are. Obviously there were some big players trying to help out. Maybe Yau sent those instructions, but he's dead. How is this new information?"

"It is, though," said Selena slowly. "Where would they have gotten that specific set of instructions?"

"Some Changed person on the apocalypse team, who just happened to work at a gas plant," said Nicola.

"So they had a gas engineer, someone who could design bombs, someone else who could synthesize nerve gas, experts in information warfare, people who understood software of power routing—"

"OK, I get it," said Nicola. "I suppose there aren't really that many Changed people, and we've been assuming the other Chosen are mostly like the ones we know and hate. Not tech-savvy. Maybe we had a Franklin type working to extract the information from these specialized people, or to make them do things."

"Or we had someone planning far in advance," said Javier. "Far enough to do all this research on their own schedule. Think about all the things that began happening ten to fifteen years ago. Franklin's rise, Abuela's sense of a growing conflict, the plots of Yau and Gupta, and all the political intrigue Tanaka's journal mentioned in Europe."

That was the same period during which Benjamin had left Esther with her parents, but Esther squashed that thought. Not everything was about her.

"I don't buy it," Selena said. "No, I agree something started in that time frame. But I don't buy the Black Christmas attacks as the culmination of that process. They were too sloppy, don't you think? It could have been a global catastrophe without Tanaka, but only because of the nuclear war danger, which we aren't even positive was part of the same set of plots. It was as if everything was being rushed."

"Rushed," Javier agreed. "And what did Tanaka say was happening just in the last year? The Mexican stopped playing such a subtle game. I'm sure it has something to do with that. The Mexican was the one who rushed things. Maybe Franklin's death rattled him, and he tried to force his plans forward."

"Or maybe he was trying to stop it, and his pressure caused Yau or whoever else was actually organizing it to rush their own plans. Or maybe we're making up a grand conspiracy when it was just Unity and a lot of little conspiracies."

Javier nodded, conceding Selena's point.

"What was Castillo doing, during this time period?" Nicola asked slowly. "Say the year before the attacks. We want to know what the Mexican was up to, and there's a good chance Castillo was working for him. Kat got that record of his credit card activity, but aside from a body trail, we didn't know what to look for, and surely the FBI or Myra Jackson's group did the same research. But maybe we have some guesses the FBI wouldn't have thought of."

"He was a hunter," said Mark unexpectedly. "Castillo must have been a master at finding people. That's why they sent him after the Japanese man."

Nicola nodded. "You're right, Mark. We keep thinking of him as an assassin, but he was a hunter."

"Wait," Esther said. Everyone immediately quieted, and she lost her concentration a second. What was it?

"It's one of Diana's visions," she said. "Just a quick image, very blurry. A chemistry lab, five months ago. And there's another, someone working on electronics, a month before that. What if these were visions Castillo was working from? Could he have been searching for skilled people?"

"Where was Castillo during those times?" Javier asked excitedly.

"A suburb of Houston, for the electronics. And Buenos Aires during the chemistry lab vision. Please, everyone, give me time to meditate. I'm going to see if I can find out anything more."

Esther took a breath, closed her eyes, and opened them in otherspace. With another deep breath, she plunged free of her usual guideposts, leaving her Watch far behind. The geometry twisted and bent far past her understanding, but it was a familiar feeling. This was the place her mind could work best without preconception, to trace connections from Diana's frozen visions to other facts in her mind, or details of the world around her.

There was something in that tiny snippet of vision from the chemistry lab. A sound. When she chased it, it vanished. She steadied her mind again. She had to be like Lukas, opening her mind to more information, not focusing on any one detail. Her senses stretched, and stretched further, and suddenly she felt a pattern. A set of connections half-complete, as though her mind had already been working this problem, but that wasn't right, and there was something unfamiliar—

* * *

Esther gasped, and Javier quickly steadied her, giving her a glass of water.

"OK?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, focusing on him, slowing her breathing. "Yes, I'm fine. Something unsettling happened. Let me think for a moment."

They all waited while she sipped the water and rubbed her forehead.

"Someone was speaking Spanish in that chemistry lab," she said finally. "Either in the vision, or now when I reached to look for it. I'm not sure."

"Buenos Aires," Javier said excitedly. "Castillo must have gone there to follow the vision."

"That's pretty thin," Selena said, frowning. "But it's a coincidence, for sure."

"But I know more than that," Esther said in a rush. "There's an engineer who used to work at the refinery in Richmond. He quit work three months before the Black Christmas attacks, and then he disappeared. But his wife was an undocumented immigrant, and anyway no one ever filed a missing persons report, so the FBI wouldn't have known about it. And then the fire would have destroyed all the employment records on site. The thing is, Castillo had credit card receipts in San Francisco during the week the engineer disappeared."

There was stunned silence.

"How did you figure all that out?" Nicola finally asked.

"Lukas," Esther said uncomfortably. "I think it must have been Lukas. I was telling myself I needed to think like him, I stretched my mind out as widely as I could, and then I found a scattered bundle of connections that someone else had been assembling. I don't think he even consciously knows everything I told you, because there were parts missing in his construction. Probably it's just one of many avenues his mind is traveling. But once I saw the pieces, I could put it together myself."

"You didn't alert him, did you?" Javier asked nervously.

"I can't imagine so," said Esther. "And I got a vague sense of where he is. Central Europe. So he is not completely hidden from me. I could probably find him if I set out to do that."

"Don't," said Nicola quickly. "We know how to contact him if we must. Honestly, I think you should try to avoid doing what you did again. Isn't this the first evidence you have that anyone else even understands otherspace?"

Esther frowned. "Maybe. I don't think he's using it anything like I am. I think it's more like the way Abuela's map rested on top of otherspace. Another projection. A way of structuring his memory, beyond what his physical brain can easily contain."

Javier started to laugh. "Are you telling me Lukas is using otherspace as an external hard drive?"

Esther smiled. "I guess that's one way of putting it."

Nicola started laughing as well. "Christ, no wonder he can remember so much. You know, it actually makes me feel a lot better to know he's cheating."

"Let's get back on track," said Selena. "It sounds like Lukas is trying to figure out the same things we are, but so is the whole world, really. So let's talk about the engineer, and what we do next."

"We try to find him, of course," said Javier. "And we look for records of other disappearances like his. We should call Kat tomorrow morning and get her looking into it. Maybe there's a pattern to the ones Castillo or his bosses selected, assuming that's what happened. This could be strong evidence pointing towards the Mexican. Or the cartels, if we want to portray it that way. Everyone knows cartels kidnap people. It all makes sense."

"Disappearances of skilled people, possibly not reported, in the places where Castillo was," Nicola said. "That's pretty vague."

"Kat's really resourceful," said Javier. "You should see what she can get digging around on the internet. Not to mention whatever she can steal from the FBI."

* * *

"That's pretty vague," said Kat. "And maybe it can wait until you get back."

Her voice was glitchy over the poor connection, but Javier was glad the cellular signal was working at all. They'd had to drive two hours to somewhere with a tower.

"You know what this means, though," said Javier. "If we can get the evidence, this could be everything. We could point the world governments away from the Changed, towards just the worst individuals. The Mexican, assuming it's him."

"OK," said Kat. "Talk to you later."

Javier blinked. She'd practically hung up on him. Was she angry about something? No, that wasn't it. She was scared of talking on the phone, and scared to even hint at her worry. He should've thought of that. They were wading into extremely dangerous waters, and he didn't really know how anonymous Geoff's cell phones were, especially now they'd used them a few times. The voice was encrypted, but what was the method? He couldn't even remember how the protocols worked. He'd been leaving too much of this stuff to Kat and Geoff.

"That's it?" Nicola asked.

"I guess," said Javier. "I think she's starting to get nervous talking on these cell phones. We should've planned better for communicating."

Nicola sighed and looked back out the car window. The mall parking lot was a shock after the miles and miles of empty space getting here. To have an excuse for such a long trip, Javier had offered to go buy a load of supplies for the Chosen. Paid for on their dime, which had annoyed Nicola. Then again, Javier hadn't expected the elders to accept so readily. It looked as if the splinter colony wasn't in good shape financially.

"So, time to shop?" Nicola asked, and Javier smiled. He was glad to have her company, and glad Esther had convinced her to come. It seemed to be doing her some good. Though he suspected Nicola was also there for more ways to communicate with Esther, and maybe even to physically protect him. He didn't know how he felt about that.

Once they finished shopping, Javier took the drive back. Nicola put her feet up on the dashboard for a while, but she kept huffing and switching positions, until finally Javier asked if she was all right.

"No," she said. "I'm fucking horny."

When he looked at her, she sighed and unsnapped her pants.

"Are you really going to do that?"

She nodded. "Nothing you haven't seen."

But she didn't make any moves in that direction, until Javier shook his head. "Fine, Nicola. Just don't make it too interesting. I have to drive, after all."

She was quiet enough that he had to sneak a glance to see if she was really doing it. But Nicola wasn't like Kat, and she didn't really tease just for the hell of it. She had a hand down her panties, eyes closed. Though she immediately opened them to meet Javier's glance.

Eyes on the road. For a while there was just the strip of asphalt, the road noise, the grasses and distant hills. And then he heard the faintest noise from Nicola.

She was trying not to cry, and she looked defeated. He'd barely ever seen an expression like that on her face. Not even when Mark was lying dead on the gravel. Javier quickly pulled off the highway, parking on a little gravel road that seemed to extend far into the hills.

"Sorry," mumbled Nicola. She'd pulled her hand away and was looking out the window. "I was trying to be boring. You should just keep driving."

Instead, Javier waited. There was no one else on the highway. The silence was oppressive.

"Esther told me I should talk to you since I wouldn't talk to her," Nicola said. "Your girlfriend is pretty bossy sometimes."