They had been
playing the music a little softer in Laren’s these past few months. There was a
time, not so long ago actually, though it felt like the distant past, when
Laren’s had been noisy. In the first decades after it was founded, Laren’s had a reputation as the
toughest bar in Port O’James. Law enforcement officers were almost as regular
as the customers.
This was around the
time the Industrial Stimulus Act, called ISA, passed in Port Sang thirty years
earlier. The government invested in modernization, automating a lot of the
harbor’s services while promoting new industries and services. Port O’James was
still a port town first and foremost, but there was a growing tech industry
thanks to ISA’s tax incentives and education investment.
This allowed Port
O’James to escape from an economic slump, but it also created a gigantic rift
between generations, with a lot of resentment toward the “ISA Kids” on the part
of those who were a generation or half a generation older. Children descended
from long lines of longshoremen and sailors now had access to world-class
educations and white-collar careers.
Laren’s became
something of a battleground in the resultant culture war. But over time, the
old regulars started to give way to new regulars, and the rough reputation
transformed into a charm in its own right. The rambunctious fervor of the bar
metamorphosed into an ironic imitation of itself.
But the volume of
sound, ironic or not, had died down in recent months. And so when Ana walked
into her favorite bar, there was something dreamlike to it - an incongruity
that, at least in her current state of consciousness (something she was pretty
certain was genuine wakefulness,) refused to be contradicted.
There was no denying
that if people recognized her on the street, they tended to either stare or
avert their gaze. She had never felt so self-conscious, but after weeks of this
treatment, she thought she had gotten used to it.
Walking in to see a
quiet Laren’s, though, confirmed for her something that until this point she
had only understood subconsciously. It was not just her. The city was on edge.
And to be fair, it
had felt on edge since the Ostrich sailed
into port. But in the time that Ana had been gone, the town had gotten
skittish.
She thought about
the faceless men, and how the soldiers at Far Watch had behaved strangely,
unable to see them. She took some consolation that she had not seen any of the
faceless men since Far Watch, and she preferred a town that was scared over one
filled with people numb to near catatonia.
Nick and George were
at a table in the back – not their usual one, as there was a group of Arizi
sailors taking that spot. For an instant, she considered turning around before her
friends saw her, but her feet kept taking her forward.
“There she is!”
cried George. He got up from the booth and immediately went over to hug her.
Ana bent down to accept the hug – George had achondroplasia, and so was over a
foot shorter than she was. George wrapped his arms around her and held tight.
Her eyes began to well up. George whispered into her ear “You’re back, Ana. And
we’re never letting them take you away again.”
Ana released a
sobbing guffaw. “Thank you,” was all she could think to say. They had been
friends since elementary school. When things got heated with her parents, Ana
would stay at George’s house. One hug brought back almost two decades of
friendship. It was a little overwhelming.
Ana stood up again
when Nick came to hug her. This was a quicker moment, one-armed due to a glass
of beer in his hand. And there was the awkwardness inherent both in the fact
that they had seen one another fairly recently at the station and the perpetual
subtext of his hopeless infatuation with her. It had been her hope that, if
there was any good to come of her shocking revelation as undead, that he might
finally lose this attraction, but she suspected that he had not.
That was not a
problem she felt ready to confront – it was low on her priority list.
“So,” began Nick.
“How’s the process coming?”
“Fully debriefed.
Legally recognized as the same citizen I always was.”
“And at work?” asked
George.
“Taking a leave of
absence. Harrick suggested it.”
“To cover himself?”
George has always been skeptical of law enforcement, and Ana’s choice to join
the force had been met with something like shock – though the shock was couched
in unconditional support, as it always had been with George. Ana had chosen the
career partially because of her grandfather, Bjorn, who had always been her
favorite. He had died early enough that she was able to idealize him and ignore
the likelihood that he would have held to the same conservative views that had
alienated her from her mother. On principle, she also decided that if she
wanted a society with a more progressive and ethical law enforcement, people
like her would have to join. Max Herrick had confirmed for her that she wasn’t
the first person to have this idea.
Ana shook her head.
“He didn’t pressure me into it or anything. I… It’s still kind of a blur to me,
you know?” She allowed a server to place a beer that one of her friends had
apparently ordered for her in front of her. “I mean, objectively, I’m not back
to normal. In a sense I’ve never been normal, you know?”
“Sure, sure,” said
George. It had sounded like he was going to follow this up with something, but
instead he turned his attention to the bottom of his nearly-empty glass.
Nick leaned forward.
“After I got suspended, George took point on trying to get you back.”
“I kept trying to
get that Lisenrush fascist’s office, but-“
“What?”
“Lisenrush, I was
trying to get in touch with her to complain. I was beginning to think they were
ignoring me.”
Ana’s own attitude
toward Lisenrush had been fairly confrontational to begin with, but after their
trek through the forest, she did not seem like an enemy.
Yet Lisenrush had
been the one to take her against her will to Far Watch. That had been dubiously
legal. The Rangers had authority to deal with the undead – an authority that
dated back centuries – but as far as Ana knew, the doctors had only put forth
the idea as a hypothesis when she was taken.
Still, she had
bristled at George’s description of Lisenrush. She had been forced to put her
trust in the Ranger-Captain. They had seen something that was almost
unthinkable even after having witnessed it. She had expected she would get more
questions from the Port Security Service, the North East Colony’s main
intelligence agency, though they seemed satisfied with her statements. Perhaps
they were in the process of corroborating her statements with those of
Lisenrush.
Maybe there was
reason to dislike, even hate Lisenrush. But that all seemed irrelevant, given
the threats they both knew existed.
Coming back to Port
O’James had felt so strange partially because it didn’t look like the world was
ending here. Was it safe here?
“It’s like something
out of a nightmare,” Ana said to herself.
Apparently it had
been out loud, though, because George piped in. “Hey, Ana. We’re going to make
things like they were. It’ll be ok.” George, the good friend he had always
been, seemed to have adjusted to the revelation of her… physiological status
with ease.
But that wasn’t what
she was thinking about. In a strange way, it almost felt like finding out she
was undead was a kind of relief – a release of built-up pressure. It had been
shocking at first, but she was beginning to acclimate to the notion.
The nightmare was
the faceless men. The outpost had transformed almost instantaneously. How could
she be sure that the faceless men would not come back?
Lisenrush could not
feel her legs. They had her on an IV that seemed to be pumping in a lot of pain
meds. Though, she supposed, not enough to prevent her from realizing she was on
pain meds. And not enough to prevent her from feeling pain.
Maybe it would be
worse without the meds.
She had never let
pain get to her. When she was a kid – ages ago – she used to get into fights.
She was not the best student, or even the most gifted athlete. But she had an
edge in fighting, because she did not let pain bother her. She could fight
stronger kids and simply outlast them. It was a way that she could win.
Her spine had
shattered when it hit that tree. The draugr had looked so frail and thin, but
that was the thing about the undead – their strength was not human, physical
strength. It was all channeled through mysticism and magic, not earned through
practice and grit.
Through standard
medicine, she would have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her
life. Nothing below her abdomen would have had any function again. But all that
was changing in this new, interconnected world.
The Arizi used magic
for everything, even though the doctor that the hospital brought in insisted
that “magic” as it was understood by most people, wasn’t really magic in the
strictest sense.
She was not
interested in philosophical debates. She could barely stay awake for two hours
at a time. She suspected that was partially the boredom of being in a hospital
bed.
Sleep had been… not
difficult, but it almost didn’t feel like sleep. There was a comfort, a
pleasant sensation to sleep, when the mind’s logical thoughts were allowed to
relax and drift on a timeless sea. Yet when she slept now it just felt like
numbness.
She looked up at the
clock. It was three in the afternoon. She used the remote to turn on the
television. She looked up – she just wanted to check the news – but she had the
strangest sensation. She could hear the anchors talking about some sort of
uncharacteristic violence in Arizradna (something that gave her a certain
nationalistic smugness) but she could not see the television.
She was staring
right at the screen, but she could not tell what the picture showed. She
squeezed her eyelids shut and opened them again. Was it her vision? The draugr
had given her a painful head butt, and perhaps that had jostled her eyes or
even her brain. But she turned her head and looked at one of the medical
posters – something about proper handwashing procedures over the sink – and she
could read it just fine from across the room.
Yet when she looked
back up at the television – or rather, where she was certain the television was
– she did not see it.
And strangely, she
suddenly thought of Ana. Ana had seen things that weren’t there – faceless men,
she said. Ana said something about seeing buildings sprouting up around Far
Watch when it fell. Buildings full of these men with no faces.
What did you see there, Lydia?
She couldn’t say. She had not seen anything. Not
that she had seen the old Far Watch in ruins or an empty patch of forest. She
had simply not seen things in the places where she had looked.
And now she was not
seeing this television that was only a few feet from her eyes.
Even at Far Watch
she hadn’t felt this level of fear. She tried to think rationally why that was
as her heart began to pound and she found herself desperately trying to get out
of the bed as if her legs were not useless weight and her spine was not
shattered into a million shards of bone.
Ana saw them. She thought. Ana
saw them. Maybe Ana can stop them.
And then she could
see the screen. There were pictures of what looked like a satellite telescope
that had fallen onto a building. She could see the television with ease, its
power button and volume controls, the cord reaching from the back to a plug
nearby in the wall. It was perfectly ordinary.
After all, the
faceless man had moved out of the way.
(Copyright Daniel
Szolovits 2017)
