Unity and Destiny Pt. 07

"Yeah."

"I'm losing Mark," she said eventually. "Or maybe I lost him long ago, but neither of us knew it. Maybe we never were right for each other."

"Of course you were right for each other," he said. "You still are. Mark's just going through something terrible."

"He's sweeter than anyone," Nicola said. "He's loyal, he's a sensitive lover, he's a good person. And I sound like I'm describing a dog. I've taken him for granted for so long, and now he's not here for me, and I don't know what I'm going to do with myself."

Javier put out his hand, and to his surprise Nicola took it, gripping it uncomfortably tightly.

"Is this about sex?" he finally asked.

Nicola snorted. "Of course it's about sex. Everything with me is about sex, isn't it?"

Javier didn't reply to that, and eventually Nicola shook her head.

"I'm sorry, Javier. I've been abusing you the whole time we've been here, and before that as well. I do it to everyone, but you have some kind of superpower, the ability to tolerate it. Esther has it too, but I think you have the most. And for all Mark's strength, he doesn't have much of it at all. I've been a terrible partner for him."

"He doesn't think so," Javier said. "He thinks you're brilliant and patient and kind."

Nicola stared at him. "Kind? He said that?"

"More than once," Javier said. "He said you're only truly cruel to yourself, and sometimes it spills out accidentally at other people."

Nicola rubbed her eyes and looked away.

"I always underestimate him," she said. "Since the day we met."

She sighed and pulled down her underwear. "He says I should have sex with other people. With you, I guess, since Esther's been uncomfortable about that lately."

She started to masturbate again, and Javier swallowed uncomfortably. Her fingers were sticky, and her smell was all too strong in the stale air.

"I don't think I need all that," Nicola continued, "though God knows I want it. But Javier, I think I need you to tell me now what you saw that day at the lake. I need someone to look at me and tell me I'm beautiful and magical. Everything Mark can't say to me anymore, not even without words, the way he usually did."

Javier nodded.

"It was late morning," he said. "The sun was shining off the water, so bright you had to squint if you looked that way. Maybe that's what you were thinking, or maybe it was something else. In a way you were dying, and maybe you had to get out the art you have bottled inside you, some last testament to who you were ..."

* * *

Nicola didn't say much on the drive home. But when they approached the farm, she put a hand on his knee.

"Esther is lucky to have you," she said. "But so are all of us. Javier, I'm so scared for Mark. I can't seem to do anything for him. Even if he recovers his strength, and everything else, I don't know if he'll ever be the same. How do I convince him that it was never his physical strength that was important to me? That I can protect him, too?"

"I don't know," said Javier. "Just keep telling him that, I guess."

"I never say enough. And it always comes out wrong."

"That's because it's hard. You said you were going to stop avoiding the hard shit."

"I did, didn't I?" Nicola said. "Fuck you, anyway."

"Oh, good," Javier said. "Right where we started again."

* * *

When Mark's sparring instruction finished, Nicola immediately went to help him off the field. Mark looked exhausted and grim, and he hardly looked at Nicola. But he didn't reject her help.

Javier found himself drifting towards Henry, who was finishing some post-workout stretching. They'd barely spoken this time around, and Henry obviously felt some lingering resentment about Javier's act the last time around. But he nodded politely when Javier approached.

"How's he progressing?" Javier asked. "I can't really judge. But he looks so clumsy and slow compared to before his injury."

"Well, I can't deny that," Henry said with a grimace. "I heard what he did fighting Franklin, and I've never been taken down by someone the way he did the first time. But I've also never seen a student like him. He's relentless, and so quick to learn. He sees a move once, and he can replicate it, within limits of course. His body can't keep up with what he's learning, and I know how frustrated he must be, but he never lets that get in the way of practice. It's not just copying, either. He's a genius, really. He understands how and why all the moves work, and he can apply them creatively. Plus he's getting a little faster every day. Even if he's never as fast or strong as he once was, eventually he'll master these techniques, and he'll be more than formidable."

Javier nodded. "Thank you. That's good to hear. You should make sure to tell Mark that."

"I have, of course," said Henry. "I don't think it's enough for him."

"No," agreed Javier. "It was more than his body that got hurt in that fight."

Henry looked at Javier a while. "Diana thinks his spinal nerves were completely severed, that someone immensely strong probably broke his neck the way they broke Aaron's. She doesn't understand how he could have survived such an injury, let alone recover as he has."

"He almost didn't," said Javier.

When he didn't elaborate, Henry sighed. "I also have no idea how you defeated someone who could do that to Mark. I assume it was the Owl, or Selena, or perhaps another of your powerful friends."

"We shot him," Javier said, wondering why he was telling Henry this. "A lot of times. And then I smashed his head, over and over. It's the worst thing I've ever done. I still have nightmares."

Henry put a hand on his shoulder. There was nothing but honest sympathy on his face now.

"It's your mind's attempt to lead you back to Harmony," he said. "But our own minds aren't always reliable judges of that. It's part of you, now, and you're not going to forget it. But the nightmares will probably ease. And if they don't, there are treatments now. You don't have to tell them what you did if you don't want. It worked for me."

Javier looked at him in surprise.

"Vietnam," he said sadly. "I didn't know what I was back then. Well, enough about that. Should we get lunch?"

* * *

Nicola didn't come back to the greenhouse after lunch, and Javier wasn't sure what to do with himself. So he wandered into the main building. He heard a familiar voice, and walked quietly to the door.

Esther knew he was there, of course, but Eva was the one who was already looking at him when he peeked in. He reminded himself that she'd been exiled for the strength of her abilities. He remembered all too well what Eva's body looked like, and she hadn't had many visible Changes. But unseen Changes didn't correlate entirely with the visible ones.

Esther asked Eva a question again, and Eva quickly looked back down at her work, hesitantly answering. Esther smiled as though Eva had just solved Fermat's last theorem, and pointed at the next exercise before moving to check on Meredith's progress. She flashed him a quick smile, but obviously she was busy, so Javier waved and walked off again.

Maybe Esther was a novice at teaching, but Javier knew she would be brilliant at it. She should be a professor, like Raj or Anatoly. Maybe in fifty years she'd have to retire, so her slow aging didn't become too obvious. That was kind of sad. Probably she couldn't just start again with a different mathematician identity, because she'd be famous within her field. Maybe she could be a physicist, or an artist, or something totally different.

Esther was so terrified of what she might become one day. And all Javier wanted was to hold on long enough to find out.

* * *

This time Javier was smarter. He'd asked Esther to look, and she'd reported that there was a computer lab at the nearest community college, in a small town an hour away. With a few quick long distance calls on the farm's phone, he confirmed the lab allowed public internet access during its limited open hours. A week and a half after he'd called Kat the first time, he drove over there.

It took Javier a while to decide the looks he kept getting from the older man running the lab probably had to do with the way he stuck out among the students on campus, who seemed to be uniformly white. He didn't have much fear the idiot knew how to run a keylogger, but he still ran the checks that Kat had taught him. Then he went through the steps to anonymize his location, which seemed pretty damned anonymous to begin with.

Sure enough, there were several messages from Kat. The first she'd sent immediately after his phone call, apologizing and confirming that she'd been freaked out by all the things he'd blurted over the phone. There were a few other messages that mostly reflected her frustration with the task.

I hacked into a couple of pharmaceutical labs in Buenos Aires, she'd written. I had to get Grace to help with the Spanish. I even found some employment records at two of them, but it's taking forever. No matches, anyway.

But then her last message had come just yesterday.

Javier, I did it. You said Esther thought the electronics guy in Texas might have been working in his home. So I found the contact for a hobbyist group in that area, and I posed as someone who'd met him at a convention, but I couldn't remember his name, just this group he was involved in, and that he said he'd be moving last July to my area. Sure enough, I got a response. Apparently this guy was a local legend, and then he'd dropped off their radar in July. Stefan Meirscheim. They thought he was married. Told me to let them know if I found him. Some not-so-subtle hints that they'd worried the feds got him. They thought he'd never hurt a fly, but I guess he was a little into lock-picking, random bombmaking, that kind of Anarchist Cookbook stuff.

I've looked everywhere for more on Meirscheim, but I couldn't find anyone he worked for the last couple years. He might have been unemployed. But I found out his wife worked as a nurse, and when I called her floor, posing as an old friend looking for her, they said she'd quit in July, no reason given. Just made a phone call to HR and then stopped showing up.

Javier, I'm terrified. I don't know what we should do with this information. It goes against all my instincts, but I feel like this is where we get Myra Jackson or the FBI on the case. Let me know.

-Kat

* * *

They'd discussed it all evening. At least two kidnappings by Castillo, likely more. A vision in Unity, and then Castillo found someone. In both cases, some effort to cover the disappearance. In both cases, a spouse taken along with the victim. Either it was part of the cover-up, or it was for leverage. In the latter case, all the victims might be alive, if there were future plans requiring their expertise. That meant they were being held somewhere.

There was no particular pattern to Castillo's movements. No convenient city he always stopped in, at least not any recorded by that credit card. But Castillo had spent a fair amount of time near the Mexican border, or in Mexico. And Javier had a sensible guess: a place near the border, somewhere perhaps already controlled by a cartel for drug smuggling. Probably on the Mexican side, where the police would be easier to bribe. Or where the Mexican might already own the local police wholesale.

So now Esther floated in otherspace, working her gaze slowly along the border. When she reached a city or town that would take too long to investigate, she put it off for later. On this first pass, she was looking for Changed people, hoping she might find guards that way. It would take far longer if that weren't the case. More than a night's work, for sure.

She found Changed people. A migrant farm hand in his dormitory. A woman asleep in her bed. An entire family with faint Changes, huddled in a barn, likely waiting for their chance to slip across the border. Esther had to force her attention forward each time, or she'd inevitably start wondering what she could do to help.

This geographic search was a limitation in Esther's mind, she knew. She was only harnessing a familiar slice of otherspace, focusing on one location at once. Maybe one day she'd be comfortable enough to search otherspace more directly, bypassing the crude limitations of geography. But this was what she knew, and it would work eventually.

She almost missed it. It was just a deserted farm, after all. But something confused her, and she looked closer.

Not deserted. Obscured, very much as Castillo had obscured himself. Less expertly, perhaps, and not nearly as masterfully as the more distant place she assumed was the Mexican's home base. But it made her nervous nonetheless. And so she moved carefully farther into otherspace, her own searching gaze fracturing across those alien geometries, gathering information by avenues she fervently hoped were entirely unfamiliar to others.

Finally she retreated with a grim satisfaction.

Javier was asleep, but Nicola roused and brought her some food, gently shaking Javier awake as well. It was past three in the morning, and Esther was utterly exhausted. It had been a long time since she'd been in otherspace so long. She still needed to take care about these excursions. Her body had its limits.

"I found them," she said. "We were right. The place exists, and unfortunately it is guarded by at least two dangerous Changed individuals. I don't know much of the prisoners except that there are at least a few. I can't really tell."

Javier nodded. "And other guards, aside from those two?"

"I don't really know," Esther said with frustration. "It was at the limit of what I could sense, at least while remaining as subtle as I was."

"Don't try any more," Nicola said. "You should get some sleep. We'll talk about this in the morning."

* * *

After Esther was asleep, Javier couldn't stop pacing in the living room. Nicola came out to join him, and then Mark as well.

"Selena's awake," Nicola said softly. "I don't think she'll mind if we go join her."

"But Esther's concealing us here, in case Diana—"

"Not tonight," Nicola said. "She's only concealing herself. She must be exhausted. I don't think Diana's going to bother eavesdropping this one night. Anyway, Selena's about as far away from the main house as you can get."

A few minutes later Selena invited them in wordlessly, and they crowded around a little table. Softly enough that Javier could barely hear, Nicola filled Selena in about Esther's discovery.

"She's going to want to go there," Selena whispered. "To rescue them."

Javier nodded. The existence of the dangerous Changed guards would only harden Esther's resolve.

"Someone has to do it," Javier said. "It can't be a group that doesn't understand the dangers they would face. And that leaves us, other Changed people, or Jackson's group. Or I guess the military types, like the ones who tried to get Mark."

"She'll never agree to that type of raid," Nicola said. "And I think I might agree."

"Yeah," said Javier. "You send in soldiers with tanks and weapons, and there will be deaths, even of the people they're trying to rescue. And if they understand how dangerous these prisoners' skills might be, I bet that would be a risk the commanders would accept."

"So us, other Changed, or Jackson," said Selena. "Let's be realistic. The only options among the Changed are the Chosen we're staying with, or Lukas. What do you think?"

"Not Lukas," Nicola said. "Not for this. Rescuing non-Changed from a bunch of Changed? I'd have to know a lot more about his politics today, more than I even did when I stayed with him. All we really know is that he's probably not working for the Mexican. But that's not enough."

"This group, though," said Javier. "It doesn't seem impossible. Diana and Henry alone would be a huge help."

Javier felt bad as soon as he said it. No one was looking at Mark, but he was sure everyone was worrying, Mark most of all.

"I'm coming," said Mark. "I am still very sensitive. And I'm stronger every day. I have to help. You have to take me."

"We didn't say we weren't," said Nicola, taking his hand. "We don't even know if we're going. We're trying to come up with options. But I can't pretend I like the idea of inviting any of these Chosen. I trust them even less than Lukas."

"Mark, you're already a lot more capable than me," Javier said. "And no one would prevent me from going." He had no doubt about Mark, not after watching him today. Henry was right about the way he was learning.

"I'm conflicted about the Chosen," said Selena. "I still believe all my own warnings about Unity. But that's the main wild card. Otherwise, these people are what they seem. They're more openminded and cautious about Unity than the ones they left, and they're a small enough group they're having trouble getting much from Unity anyway. Diana's the de facto leader, and she's the most skeptical of all."

"But it's not that simple," Nicola said. "We'd have to explain why we needed to do this. It would take a shitload of explaining. And you know the way Diana has kind of latched on to Esther as a kindred soul. It's all based on her assumption that Esther is a fellow traveler. Pretty soon they would realize that our world view is a lot messier than that, even for Esther. If Castillo got all his instructions through Unity, how can we be so sure he wasn't serving the Way? Not to mention the blatant way we used Diana's visions without consulting anyone. You see how it would go?"

Javier frowned. It was an uncomfortably good argument. And suddenly he wasn't so confident they should be discussing this at all, when there was an outside chance Diana might hear.

"But Jackson is the only other option," he said. "She understands this kind of undertaking, because of Franklin, and all the intelligence work she's done since. But I hate the idea of being around her people. And then we really would have to hide Mark, or disguise him. I half assume they'd pick up the rest of us for the hell of it, if only to run some tests or whatever."

"We could let Jackson handle it alone," said Selena. "But we'd lose control of whatever information might be there. And we don't actually know if she could pull it off. If Castillo really was picking off some members of her own task force, they can't handle someone that dangerous. And Esther says there's someone pretty dangerous down there."

"Leaving just us," said Nicola. "Fuck."

"We don't have to decide yet," Javier said slowly. "Esther couldn't figure out everything she wanted from so far away. But it's always easier when she's closer. We could go down to Texas or New Mexico, as close as is convenient or safe, and then she can look again."

In the end, that was the best they could come up with. It might give them time to think of something else. They all felt a sense of urgency, but it had been a long night. And more than anything Javier needed to go curl up next to Esther.

* * *

Kat and Grace's plane landed just an hour after theirs. Selena and Grace handled the rental cars while the rest of them caught up.

Esther had never been to El Paso, or anywhere in Texas. But of course there was no time for tourism, and right now the most important thing was that it was a city. A handful of other Changed lived their lives here, and a few more across the border in Juárez. Enough that the presence of a few powerful Changed might not be noticed at a distance, as long as Esther kept them properly concealed.

She'd never felt so keenly how conspicuous her friends were, especially in a group. All of them had been practicing their concealment, and Selena was becoming fairly proficient. But without Esther's aid, they would stand out like a sore thumb to someone of enough skill, even at great distances. If the Mexican was looking for them, Esther didn't even know if her help was enough. But if that was the case, they could have been found at any point already. She had to hope the Mexican was not her equal in perception.