Unity and Destiny Pt. 09

He didn't react in the slightest to her attempts. Within the confines of this room, she thought her abilities functioned, but it seemed the Mexican had safeguarded her slave against others' attempts. Of course she had.

Esther would die in this room, and perhaps the Mexican would as well. It wasn't the ending Esther wanted for either of them, but she had to believe it was better than what the Mexican had planned.

* * *

Javier and the others crept along the strangely familiar corridor. Selena had been sure this was where it had happened, ever since they'd reached the open gate on the road below. And now it was confirmed. There were bodies in the main chamber ahead, and Mark said that one was a man with unbelievable numbers of Changes: the Mexican. Each detail unlocked another memory, and Javier already remembered what the terrible man looked like. Whoever had been monkeying with their minds had finally stopped making them forget. Maybe Esther had beaten them, just like she must have defeated the Mexican, during those seconds none of them could remember.

Mark also confirmed there was no one alive here. Javier was trying to maintain hope, because it made sense that the Mexican's associate would have fled with Esther. Mark hadn't sensed any bodies that could match Esther, from the memories they'd been able to scrape together. The dead bodies bothered Javier, though. It was a messy detail, for someone who'd tampered so subtly with their minds. They'd have to examine the bodies, and hope there was a clue there.

Mark suddenly held up his hand, and everyone froze. After a few seconds, Selena and Nicola joined him to edge silently forward. Javier followed at a distance, with Grace, Kat, and Raj trailing. They moved right past the ornate doors to the main chamber. Javier could hear something now, indistinct noises from a doorway just around the corner, and he tensed with frustration. The three ahead would have to handle this danger.

Together, they dashed into the room. He felt the faint rumbling of Nicola's subsonic cry, and a second later Selena called.

"It's all right, everyone. He's not a threat."

It was a kitchen, of all things. Mark was holding an old man, who looked confused and angry, but wasn't struggling.

"Where did you come from? Where is she?" Nicola gripped his chin, forcing him to look at her, but he didn't say anything. He kept trying to look back towards a plate of food. An apple, a sad-looking sandwich, a cup of something dark and hot.

"He's just a servant, isn't he?" Javier said. He repeated Nicola's questions in Spanish, more gently, but the man didn't say anything to him, either.

"There's a door," Selena said. "I didn't sense it before. There must be a room concealed back there. Mark?"

He nodded. "Perhaps it's an ancient place after all. I still sense nothing beyond the door."

"Go," said Javier. "We can handle this man. We'll retrieve you if you become trapped. It doesn't feel like a trap though, does it? This place feels abandoned."

Selena nodded. Javier took hold of the man's wrists, but he still pulled towards the platter. Perplexed, Javier let him pick it up with a free hand, and he followed the others back out to the hall, letting the man carry the plate with him as they shuffled along towards the open doorway ahead. There must be something wrong with the man's mind. A disability, perhaps.

Mark and Nicola burst through the doorway together, ready to fight, but almost immediately Selena gestured for the others to enter. There was a terrible smell in the room, like an outhouse.

Javier let go of the man's hand, mind reeling. The man walked slowly forward with the plate, but Javier found himself rushing to the wretched-looking young woman tied to the chair, her arm restrained barbarically behind her shoulder in an immense manacle.

The memories blossomed in his mind. Esther, hiding in the back seat of his station wagon. Esther, looking even worse than she did now, lying unconscious in a spectacular canyon somewhere in Utah. Esther in bed with him, Esther laughing at a joke, or sitting on a log playing with sticks, or in a strange owl costume, holding up her hand with the power of an archangel. He touched her face, and she stirred. When she saw him, she started to cry.

"Javier," she said weakly. "Javier, I thought you'd forgotten."

"Never," he said, though he almost had forgotten, and he knew he was still all mixed up. But they would figure it out somehow. They always did.

* * *

"It was Selena," said Javier. "She was the one who remembered about the messages, who made Kat figure out a way to check them. We eventually found an internet cafe."

"But you were the one who kept delaying, said Selena. "You still knew there was something we were missing. God, my memory feels like Swiss Cheese. You say it was all this woman here? That she was really the Mexican all along?"

Esther nodded, trying to ignore the pain. She felt a lot better now with food and water. Mark had sawed through the ropes in quick order, but he and Nicola hadn't made any progress with the manacle. Nicola had driven off with Grace to procure a tool she called an angle grinder.

"She called herself the last of the Mexica," said Esther. "I think that refers to the Aztec Triple Alliance."

"Holy fuck," said Kat. "She was an honest-to-God Aztec? What does that make her, four hundred years old or something?"

"I think well over five hundred," said Esther. "From the way she talked, she was around for decades even before Cortés arrived."

Selena shook her head. "You're sure she's safely confined? I can't even imagine the power she must have."

Esther nodded. "Only I can undo what I did to her. I should warn you that she can hear us speak. I could prevent it, but that kind of imprisonment would be even more cruel than what I've done. With care, I will be able to converse with her safely. And perhaps one day, I will find an alternative."

Javier nodded, and Esther knew that he understood, even if the others had difficulty. Every human needed a chance of redemption. The Mexican had been more human, once. And perhaps she could be again. Esther had to believe that, because the alternative was too awful.

The Mexican was Esther's future. One version of Esther, anyway, one that she could never allow to manifest.

* * *

They spent an extra day at the Mexican's hideout, cleaning up, burying bodies, and most of all listening to Esther.

Javier thought Lukas would never have left such a mess behind if the Mexican hadn't been pushing them all to leave immediately. He wondered briefly what her longer-term plans had been, but he decided it was depressingly obvious. She would have found more people that others wouldn't miss, probably some street kids in Oaxaca, and then brought them here with her mind, enslaving them for life just as she'd done to Edgar.

Edgar's case was horrifying. He could understand English and Spanish, but he paid virtually no attention to anyone except the Mexican. At first he'd violently objected when they'd tried to touch her body, just so they could clean her. But he wasn't stupid, and once he understood what they were doing, he quickly took over the task himself. A servant beyond all reason. Esther said his mind might be too damaged to ever nudge into a more ordinary life, and she refused to even attempt anything more than a nudge. Javier hated how much it hurt Esther to look at Edgar.

They set Esther up in one of the larger bedrooms, probably where the false Mexican had slept when he wasn't pretending to be emperor. The real Mexican, the old woman, rested more or less comfortably back in her own bed. No one much liked talking with the old woman nearby, knowing she could hear all of it.

"So how much of the fake Mexican's powers were actually her instead?" Kat was asking.

"Less than you might think," said Esther. "I think he was truly one of the most powerful of our kind. He learned from her how to hide this place, and perhaps after that she helped on rare occasions, but I think she only took over again after we defeated him. It was convenient to offload so much on him, because she has been obsessed for decades with understanding the universe. Predicting the future. I think in some ways she already thought she was a god, more even than the younger Mexican, whom she called the peacock."

"Was she so obsessed with her studies that she missed how reckless the younger Mexican was becoming?" Javier asked. "Maybe he'd have slipped up and let someone launch a missile at this place. Or he'd have started a full-scale nuclear war. Surely that would've put a damper on her studies."

He'd been sarcastic, but Esther was considering it seriously. He felt his stomach drop.

"She could have stopped a missile," Esther said slowly. "Deflected it away, at least. I don't think she understood electronics well enough to do anything else. And maybe she was watching just closely enough to prevent too many nuclear bombs from falling. But I think she would have been comfortable with that, too. She'd survive the fallout, and whatever came after. So would I, or any of the Changed who were strong enough. And from her perspective, it would have been an easy fix for the increasingly annoying task of hiding this place."

Raj muttered something and walked out. It sure didn't look like he wanted company.

"All that power," Nicola said unhappily. "And what she wanted most was to predict the future. Obviously she was exploring Unity. Do you think it was her immense strength that made the biggest contribution to Unity? Did she send a lot of the prophetic visions?"

"Some of them, most likely," Esther said. "But I suspect she kept most of those to herself. The younger Mexican dreamed others on his own, and some of them he passed along. I believe the older Mexican found it useful to employ others for computation that way."

"So it is a kind of collective unconscious," said Grace. "Like a big distributed computer, the way Kat described."

"Yes and no," Esther said, frowning. "In a way, it was simpler. The entire framework was set by the Mexican's mind. I think she herself was Unity."

"Holy fuck," Nicola said. "All of it? When I was a zombie, that astonishing feeling of something larger than me, that was just the Mexican's mind?"

Esther nodded unhappily. "She was using everyone. All the Chosen. I think she even directed their customs around it."

"The elimination of the strongest children," said Selena, voice rising in anger. "That was her doing. All to protect herself from her competitors, going back for hundreds of years no doubt. But then again, some of you escaped. You, Abuela, a few others."

Esther shook her head. "Some were surely out of her control. But my escape wasn't an accident, and I imagine I wasn't the only case. She was winnowing. Weeding us, like a gardener. The younger Mexican wasn't the first in his position, and for years she'd wanted a replacement. She left a few stronger individuals, watching their development carefully, allowing them to grow in novel ways so she could choose the most interesting. Perhaps if we hadn't managed to defeat the younger Mexican, she would have waited for another more powerful to come along. Or maybe she would have let him kill everyone but me."

"The younger Mexican was Herod after all," Grace said slowly. "Somehow understanding that he was going to be replaced. But that woman truly was Cronus, eating her own children. She's been playing God for centuries."

"She's not a god!" Esther hissed, and had a sudden coughing fit. Eventually she wiped her eyes. "Leave me alone, everyone."

Javier didn't go, though, not until she was finally asleep.

He ran into Nicola and Raj outside. The professor looked the worse for wear, same as all of them. They needed to get out of this awful place.

"You were actually the one who helped Esther the most," Javier told Raj. "I didn't understand when she described what she did to the Mexican, but it obviously involved the breakthrough you'd been working on."

Raj nodded. "I still don't understood it either, though I think I may in time. She's passed all of us, in certain ways."

"That's got to be what she's so terrified of," Javier said. "She looks at the Mexican, and she sees a future version of herself."

Nicola shook her head vehemently. "She could never become like that," she said. "That's not Esther. She should remember Abuela instead. Look at how Esther tortures herself even now, wondering if she could have found a less oppressive prison for that horrible woman."

Javier nodded. "We'll have to keep reminding her of that."

They thought about it for a while, and Nicola sighed.

"The Mexican is worse than a nuclear bomb. I have to trust Esther that she's harmless like this, but it gives me the creeps just to be in the room with her. Over five hundred years old, and God knows what powers that even Esther didn't learn about. Mark doesn't see anything physically wrong with the old witch, so who knows how much longer she might still live. What a burden for Esther to take on."

They looked towards Esther's bedroom, wondering, their own minds trying to grasp such a destiny.

"We won't be with her forever," Javier said finally. "But there will always be others who see her the way we do."

"Yeah," Nicola said. "But that's a lifetime from now. Let's make it count."

* * *

Esther poked awkwardly at her noodles. She still hadn't worked out how to use chopsticks quite right, but Jacob and Tomiko politely pretended not to notice. The couple had settled in so well together, as though they'd just been waiting to find each other. They would never have met if not for a sequence of terrible events, and Esther found her mind wandering, trying to construct an alternate version where Castillo hadn't killed Tomiko's great-uncle, where Abuela hadn't been killed horribly, and yet these two still found happiness together somehow—

It was impossible, and dangerous for her to think along those lines. It smacked of a power she didn't have, and no one should ever have. Her attention flickered towards her friends, and the living room in the Shack, where Edgar and the Mexican sat unmoving. They were safe, of course: part of her Watch now.

She hadn't wanted to leave the group, even for an evening, but a few days after their return, Javier had pretty much ordered her to make a longer visit to Jacob.

"You keep telling us the world is safe from the Mexican," he'd said. "If the only thing making that true is your constant vigilance, then it's not really true at all, is it? Because something might happen to you, and anyway you can't live that way."

He was right, of course, and she was glad she'd come. She'd called Jacob from Mexico, along with everyone else: Javier's Mamá, Jacob, and Professor Kuznetsov and his wife. Even her lawyer. Everyone she could think of who needed to be reminded of her existence. Jacob hadn't forgotten nearly as much as the others, which gave her an interesting clue. Something about the way he'd suppressed his abilities had made him very resistant to this particular type of memory attack.

The older couple was too polite to say anything, but she knew they were curious. Over the phone, Esther had only given the barest outline of what had happened, and they deserved the truth, as awful as it was. When she was finished with the tale, Tomiko gave a heavy sigh.

"What a world we live in. And what a gift that we have you and all of your friends to keep watch. You're everything my great-uncle wished he could be. I only wish everyone could understand how close we truly came to the end."

"Tomiko," Jacob said, and a look passed between them.

"I'm sorry," Tomiko said. "What I really should have said is how glad I am you're alive, Esther, after all of it. I have too much of my uncle's hopes and needs rattling around in me. It's time you had some quiet, and let the rest of us take care of the world for a while, as much as we can. Now, I know you need to talk to Jacob."

She quickly cleared the table and retreated to their bedroom, leaving Esther to face Jacob alone.

"I haven't told anyone the worst of it," she finally said. "I can't bear to. Javier still hopes the visions were all figments of the Mexican's own creation, brought to fruition by her apprentice, or the Chosen, or her own incredible power. But it's not true. I saw so many things in her mind, Jacob. It was just as I expected of Unity: events grand and small, little to link them, difficult to interpret. But it's been over a week now since I've trapped her, and I've identified a few that have already come to pass. They were not predictions I could have calculated, and there are no longer any Chosen assisting. She really was seeing the future."

Jacob nodded, and she waited for him to say the obvious: that the Mexican hadn't seen her own downfall, despite all her powers. That despite decades of work, she still grasped mostly at fragments, unreliable glimpses that were perhaps restricted to a few nearly-fixed events. That things would surely diverge over time, without constant nudging: the implacable rules of quantum decoherence and chaotic amplification, blurring all paths probabilistically. These were the arguments Esther rehearsed to herself.

But he was silent, and finally Esther couldn't stand it.

"Don't you see what that means? If she has that ability, there is some chance I could gain it as well. No one should have that power."

"Only God," Jacob said evenly, watching her. She caught herself nodding vigorously, and Jacob sighed. "Esther, you know as well as I do that her abilities don't make her closer to God, or the Devil for that matter. Whatever the Mexican was capable of, it's another part of the human experience. We didn't know that before, but that was our own ignorance. Once upon a time, people thought forecasting the weather was witchcraft, and now look where we are."

"That's not the same, Jacob. You know that's just probability, careful application of physics-based models, and—" Esther frowned, considering.

"Your abilities allow you to forecast the weather a little, don't they?"

She conceded the point. "You're saying I'm falling into a sort of dualist trap, putting the internal workings of my mind in a completely different category from computer models. And maybe you're right, because that's what Nicola thinks. I can predict the weather because I can sense conditions directly, and while the calculations in my mind slip below my conscious understanding, perhaps they aren't really so different from weather models. It's probably true, and after all I'm nowhere near as good as a real weather forecaster. But I didn't expect this argument from you, of all people. Are you saying that's all there is? Just the physical processes within my mind, performing calculations the universe already does all on its own, but organizing them a little better? So I'm a kind of glorified secretary?"

Jacob laughed. "Maybe that's a healthy way to think of it, though I'm not so sure we'll ever have a physical explanation for the wonderful capabilities of your mind, or anyone else's. But answer this, Esther. Suppose you woke up tomorrow with the Mexican's abilities. You could see glimpses of the future, and you had truly formidable powers of action. What would you do, then?"

Esther shivered. "I'd be terrified. I'd probably be paralyzed with indecision, and I'd be miserable to be around, trying to avoid acting, always trying to understand more before I even thought about acting, and then blaming myself for everything after the fact. I hope that never happens."

"I selfishly admit the same hope, so that you're spared that pain," said Jacob. "But I suspect you won't take measures of the sort I did. Instead you'll keep adding to your own burdens, and you'll keep worrying, because something in your soul drives you in that direction. You make that difficult choice each day of your own free will, and that's the miracle that God has given us."