Unity and Destiny Pt. 08

And the others too, of course. Nicola didn't exactly stop masturbating when Esther opened the front door, but she did pretend she wasn't watching Javier.

What a mess, indeed. But for once Esther thought she could put off worrying. Her body was tingling in a way it hadn't for a while, and she started thinking about a quick little wash, and then lubrication, and then getting Javier to push his meaty penis pushing deep between her butt checks. Maybe Javier was thinking about that right now.

It felt selfish, leaving her friends in the lurch, but as everyone kept telling her, she couldn't solve everything. And twenty minutes later, as she rode roughly atop Javier, she let her control slip just a little. Enough that Selena sat up, outside on her bench. Enough that Nicola sighed and sped up her movements, a soft sound coming from her lips, maybe something to push her to an orgasm, or just part of the whole neurological response. And she knew they were all a little confused, but they loved each other, and that would be enough. Maybe she could convince Mark to have sex with her, while Nicole and Javier coupled next to them, the way both of them obviously wanted so badly. Maybe there was some clever thing she could do to share senses and bring the other couple closer. Nicola wouldn't know yet, but Mark had turned around on his own, walking as fast as he could back to the woman he loved. It would all work out, eventually.

* * *

Javier's hands sweated as he gripped the nylon CD case.

He knew he was safe. Esther and the others were only two blocks away, and no one was going to kidnap him in broad daylight, in the middle of San Jose. Myra Jackson's agent would sit on the bench with him, say the code words, and then after a few minutes Javier would get up, leaving the case beside him. Just like a spy movie. He should put it down now, so it didn't look suspicious later. But these hard drives were more valuable than gold. More valuable than anything. He wiped his hand again.

Someone was coming towards the bench. He gazed the other way, trying to look casual. No need to even notice them.

"Pickles twenty-seven television. Hello, Javier."

He almost jumped. Why had Jackson come herself? Well, he hardly needed the code from her. But he appreciated she'd said it, anyway.

He set the case down casually between them, still not looking at her.

"You and your friends did the country an immense service," she said quietly.

He turned to look. She wasn't reaching for the case, and she had an odd expression on her face. Almost pity. His stomach lurched. What was her game? Was this another elaborate trap?

"We didn't touch the original drives," he said nervously. "Our friend made a very careful copy. She said it shouldn't have affected a thing. But there are E-mails on there. Financial stuff. It's full of evidence."

"I'm sure," said Jackson. "And I know it will help our efforts greatly. But those people you rescued already supplied the crucial missing pieces."

Javier swallowed. Jackson still hadn't taken the drives. What was she really here for?

"Where are they?" he said nervously. "Have you repatriated the non-Americans? What about the people they were being used as leverage against? Have you found them? Is there anything we can do?"

She looked at him, expression blank again.

"We're in discussions about the foreigners. And I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about the rest of the situation. Javier, I'm still not positive what your group's motivation has been. I like to think you're just patriots, as I am. Trying to do the right thing. But now is the time to stop. From here on, it's a bigger problem than you can handle. No matter what you think you know, the reality is far more dangerous."

She stood up, casually taking the case.

"I'm sure Kat was careful," she said. "And tell Mark he has less to worry about now. Javier, you should all listen to the news tonight."

Then she walked off, as though nothing at all had happened.

* * *

Kat and Grace came with them to the Shack. Whatever was coming, they wanted to hear it together. Esther invited Raj as well, but he'd declined, saying he had an obligation with Professor Kuznetsov and his wife. Esther wasn't quite sure what to make of it. But he'd been withdrawn ever since they returned from the Mexican raid.

The newscaster had just announced a special address from the president and the British prime minister, in fifteen minutes. The rumors were flying, but everyone assumed it was about Black Christmas, maybe some breakthrough about the conspiracy.

"They must have already worked out a lot of the Mexican's organization," Javier was saying nervously. "They just needed the central bit of evidence, and those hostages provided it. The president will announce that the Mexican's a fugitive. But those hard drives will still be really important, like Jackson said they would."

Javier was repeating himself, and Selena shook her head. She'd hardly said anything on the ride back from San Jose, after the first discussion, where they'd worried about how Jackson found out Mark was still with them. But then they'd moved on to wondering about the announcement tonight, and Selena had just pursed her lips and looked out the window. Esther had this terrible feeling that Selena and Javier had both guessed something, and were too scared to tell Esther.

The radio finally switched to the live broadcast. The British prime minister began first, and he sounded angry. But he always sounded angry. It turned into one of those uncomfortable speeches that they'd already heard, describing the horror of Black Christmas. They all waited for him to get to the point.

And then the president started talking. There were more lofty words, about righting the wrong done against the whole world, about a careful and measured response. Esther felt a glimmer of hope. This was what they'd wanted.

"It is with a heavy heart that we begin what is necessary to bring justice to those who have done us evil. For too many years our great neighbors to the south have hosted a parasite, one they have been unable to remove despite their honest efforts. And so as we speak, American and British forces have begun air strikes on the strongholds of these drug cartels, whose criminal enterprises have finally extended to wanton terrorism. We have solid proof that several of these cartels secretly collaborated with terrorist cells around the world ..."

Air strikes? That meant bombs. It meant war, like in the Balkans. Esther stared at the others, but they were stricken with horror as well. Except Selena looked more sad than horrified. She'd expected something like this. And Raj must have guessed as well.

"We did this," she said slowly, the bile rising in her throat. "We started a war. We wanted to point them at the cartels, and we succeeded."

The words repeated in her head. We did this. WE DID THIS. Suddenly she couldn't breathe. Javier put his arm around her, and she shoved him away. He was the one who'd wanted this, he and Selena. But it was really her fault. She should have understood what all of them obviously had. She was the naive one.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was running out the door. Running to get away from all of them, from what they'd done and what she'd done. Javier came out the door, but he let her go. And so she kept running, farther and farther, into the dark woods. And she almost wanted to laugh bitterly, because finally the Mexican was ignoring them. They'd gotten everything they wanted. She didn't even need to protect the others now.

But she kept hiding them, anyway. Because they were still her family.

* * *

Javier pounded in the next nail, and this time he mostly missed, whacking his thumb.

"Fucking shit!" he yelled, throwing the hammer off to the side.

Nicola retrieved it. "That's my line, Javier."

He shook his head and grabbed the hammer back from her, getting the nail in properly. But now his thumb throbbed, and the blissful half hour of forgetting had evaporated.

Nicola took his hand, prying his fingers off the hammer. He didn't want to go wherever she was dragging him, but it was just down to the bench. Still, the last thing he needed was her pity.

"I just realized something," he said. "I haven't told Mamá I swam across the border. I don't think she would find it that funny."

Nicola snorted. "It is kind of funny, I suppose."

"I haven't talked to her at all," he said. "She even left a message on the phone here. In the end Kat had to tell her I was still alive, and just really upset. Kat had to tell my Mamá that, because I'm too chickenshit."

"No," Nicola said. "I think you're as upset as I've ever seen you. Javier, are your relatives all right, the ones in Mexico? I've been too chickenshit to ask."

Javier nodded. Probably they were fine. His mother's cousins, people he didn't know too well. He'd visited his father's family too, when he was little, before his father had walked out on them. Mexico was huge. All the relatives he'd met were in Sonora, and he didn't think any were too close to the big crime areas. There hadn't been any strikes within two hundred miles of them.

But who knew what would happen? The bombardment had already been so much more than anyone expected. Hundreds of missions, in an immense initial barrage, and then it hadn't stopped. Today the first ground troops had entered the outskirts of Culiacán. It was hard to believe it had only been five days. The US and Britain were at war with Mexico, though even the Mexican government claimed otherwise, that they were fully cooperating. What else could they say, anyway? It was a disaster, and he was so selfish that all he could think about was how Esther would never forgive him, or herself.

"She still loves you," Nicola said, reading him depressingly easily. He shook his head, because of course he knew that. That's why it all hurt so much.

Finally Nicola kissed him on the top of the head and stood up.

"Sorry, Javier. I've got to practice. I promised myself I'd only take long enough to recover. You think you can work on the stairs without throwing the hammer too many times?"

He nodded, and Nicola fled to her own refuge, the way they all were doing nowadays. So he walked back to the porch, picked up the hammer, and tried to keep going. Bargaining with his own mind to forget, if only for a few minutes. A few seconds.

* * *

Esther floated in otherspace, high in the atmosphere, feeling stationary despite the air rushing past. Up here, there were many fewer rippling connections than she was used to. The air was tenuous, and it was harder for events on the ground to propagate to this region. That meant the connections to her own senses were also weak, and this place felt very far away. Similarly, the vacuum of space above her head was barely farther than Reno, in physical distance, but it felt unbelievably distant in otherspace. Physical location and motion were just more variables in the abstract structure of otherspace. Moving her own center of perception at high speed was not particularly harder than staying still, if she thought about it properly.

Esther floated in otherspace, and an American bomber floated beside her. The ground rushed underneath her, and she floated, waiting for the bays to open and death to rain down from the sky.

There were better ways to go about this. She should be searching for where they were choosing targets, or trying to eavesdrop somehow on their radio communications, or decrypt computer messages. The best way of all would be to go back in time and never have helped start this war. But she'd found something she could do. She'd already done it, over and over, though it would never be enough to pay for her mistakes.

The relevant mechanism twitched, and she performed the calculation faster than ever, adjusting for wind, elevation, and speed. And then her mind simply jumped, leaving her staring at a ramshackle set of buildings at the edge of a residential neighborhood. She tuned her senses to the infrared frequency she'd learned, and finally found the invisible spot of the targeting laser. The plane was too high and moving too fast for the people on the ground to hear yet. They couldn't know that many of them would be dead in under a minute.

Maybe there were people down there who had done some bad things. She didn't want them dead either. But she had to choose somehow. No one directly under the bomb. She'd made that mistake the first time, and there just wasn't enough time.

She stretched her senses, and made her terrible decision: two parents, two children, on the ground floor, in the high danger zone. She gathered them together in her mind and pulled, as hard as she could, her body going rigid with the effort. Uncertainly, they all stood up from the table, shuffling towards the door. And so she pulled even harder, until finally the parents grabbed the children and fled out the door, towards Esther. Away from the bomb. They ran, and they didn't even look back when the explosion happened, flattening their house. Killing dozens that she couldn't save.

Abruptly Esther fell out of otherspace, crying the way she usually did. But she felt a fevered kind of energy. She'd been even faster this time, and she could start over again, in just a minute or two. Maybe she could manage two groups next time. A small part of her understood that she was training herself, pushing her abilities far beyond what she thought she was capable of. Becoming more efficient, as she would need to be for what was coming.

When her strength failed, she would fall back to cautious listening again. Searching out the Mexican, trying to understand the limits of his abilities, the way that his mind worked. The way she might fight him when she had to.

But first she had more children to save, playing God in the midst of war. She was more arrogant than Diana could ever imagine, but nothing else mattered. These fevered interludes were the only times she was alive.

* * *

Javier finished preparing dinner, and soon Mark and Selena returned from the hide-and-seek game they spent hours playing every day. A game, but a deadly serious one. Mark had the better senses, but Selena was still faster and better at hiding. Of all of them, he thought those two had become most content with their daily routine. But it was relative.

Nicola joined them shortly, and they all sat down at the table. Then they waited, pointedly not looking at Javier.

"You know she's not coming," Javier said. "I'll take her food later."

Nicola sighed and started eating. Mark looked towards the back of the Shack, where Esther lay on her bed. But probably he didn't see anything. Nicola said Esther was still shielding all of them carefully, however far gone she seemed, and her personal concealment was better than ever.

"She needs to exercise," Mark said. "Her mind is only as strong as her body can support. She needs to balance her routine."

Javier nodded. "I'll try to convince her of that, the next time she pays me the slightest fucking attention."

There was a strained silence. Finally Nicola put down her fork.

"We've been letting you try to take care of Esther alone, and that's not fair. Just because we all feel like shit doesn't mean we're helpless."

"I've tried logic," Javier said miserably. "I've tried begging her. I tried dragging her off the bed, and tickling her, and touching her the way she likes. She knows I'm there, and she doesn't get angry at me. But she keeps her own schedule, and never says anything to me."

Nicola rubbed her forehead. "I don't even have a clue what it is she's doing. Practicing too hard, I suppose. Like us."

"I think she's saving people," Javier said. "I think she's finding people in danger in the war, and saving their lives. Last night I heard her mumbling more clearly, and I finally realized what she's been saying: numbers. Ninety-six people she'd saved, the last I heard."

Selena inhaled sharply. "That's too big a task for anyone, even her. She'll go insane."

"I think she's most of the way there," Javier said.

Nicola put her hand on his. "OK. I'm coming with you now. And we're going to rouse her somehow."

Javier nodded unhappily, and the two of them walked in to Javier's room, with Selena and Mark trailing behind. Esther lay on the bed, naked from the waist up, eyes closed but not asleep, her muscles twitching slightly.

"Esther?" Nicola said loudly. "Esther, we're all worried about you. Don't you remember what happened last summer? Staying in your head too much puts you in danger. Take a break and come eat with us."

Esther didn't reply, and Nicola sighed. She pulled off her shirt and got on the bed, resting her weight on Esther, breast on breast. Trying to share senses. But it was no good.

"I can't do this if she doesn't want to join," Nicola said. "Probably just as well. It feels wrong even trying. Javier, let's just carry her down to dinner."

He nodded and moved to get her legs.

"No," Esther said.

She hadn't opened her eyes.

"Esther, you need something different for a while," said Javier. "I'm sorry, but I think we have to."

Nicola nodded, and Javier reached to grab her legs. But he didn't get there. His muscles stopped working, and he couldn't move. Nicola was equally frozen.

"Esther!" Selena yelled. "Stop that, Esther. You're not yourself."

Javier could move again, but he was terrified. This wasn't Esther. She'd never do something like that unless she had to save someone's life. But then again, that's exactly what she thought she was doing.

Nicola looked just as shocked. He took her arm and led her back to the kitchen.

"Well, that was fucking humbling," Nicola said, putting her shirt back on and sitting shakily.

"We're not going to get through to her," Javier said. "She sees us, and it just reminds her that we all started this war."

"We didn't, though," said Selena. "We've gone over this. It was going to happen. At most we sped up the timetable, and our intelligence will help get it over with quicker."

"You know Esther will never see it that way," said Javier. "She needs people who can't possibly be blamed for what we did in Mexico, and something else to occupy her. I'm going to get Raj and Jacob up here, for as long as they can stand it."

* * *

The bomber was almost comforting. Its mechanics were familiar, and the machine was just a machine. Even those aboard thought they were doing something necessary. Esther would never harm them. Taking a life to save lives was a line she would never cross. Or so she told herself. But it wasn't so simple. In that horrible fight, when she'd finally managed to freeze Castillo, deep down she'd known what would have to happen. She hadn't been as strong then, and she couldn't have held him more than a few seconds. She'd killed Castillo, as much as Javier or Selena had.

"So circumstances do matter, then," Father said, resuming the lapsed discussion.

He floated alongside her, seeming as real as anything in this abstract place.

"Do you think souls are here, in otherspace?" Esther asked. "Does this place contain Heaven as well as everything else? Could it really be you I'm talking to?"

Father just smiled and didn't answer. Not so different from his way when she was younger, after she'd asked him a theologically hard question. He wasn't like Mother, who usually had a decisive if unsatisfying answer. Father would wait for her to think it over, and sometimes ask her a question in return.

"Suppose this place contains everything in all of God's domains," Father said after a while. "As you learn its secrets, you could be learning the mind of God. Is that what you're looking for? Someone to help you make these awful decisions you've set before yourself? Or to make them for you?"