Chapter Text
[Beta, noun: (linguistics) The second letter of the Greek alphabet, from which the word "alphabet" is partially derived. A symbol with many meanings.]
I never thought I'd be so happy to see land.
Don't get me wrong, the fact that I was able to cross the Pacific Ocean, on an Earth where the most advanced civilizations are in the Iron Age (outside of what can be scavenged from machines), was incredible. The fact that Cirrus got us there in just over four days was nothing short of miraculous – even in the heyday of the fifties, a supersonic liner could only make San Francisco to Guangzhou in four hours. But it was a long flight, and it was four days filled with a constant miasma of mild terror and utter boredom.
The wind running over Cirrus' flaps and ailerons had been too loud to speak over without shouting, so conversation was limited to utilitarian communication. We stopped in Hawaii halfway, but only long enough to set up camp and for Aloy to refill some of our provisions. It was dark, and I didn't get to see much – not that I was expecting a luau.
See, that's the weird thing about being here, in Aloy's world, when I came of age amongst the Zeniths. I knew a lot about how Earth had been before the Plague. I had to – I was to be the Zenith's interface with GAIA, so I had to know as much about terraforming as Elisabet Sobeck would. You can't know that much about Earth's environment, and the inner workings of Zero Dawn, without picking up a lot of culture from context clues. I may not have known as much about Hawaii as I would have with full APOLLO access, but I knew enough to know what I was missing.
But mostly, it was just ocean. Ocean, and clouds, and the occasional whale or Tideripper far below us, were all I could see outside the cargo net; Aloy and Alva were all I could see inside it. And even then, Aloy wasn't always in the net with us. She clambered all around the Stormbird's body, adjusting things, making sure the flight was smooth. I could help her with the code upkeep on the override (and by the end of the flight I was doing most of it), but the physical maintenance of our ride was all on her.
And Alva...well, it's not like I needed more reasons to look at her, but the isolation made it more obvious. So I mostly watched the ocean below us, or tinkered with code on my Focus screen when we were flying steady enough for me to read. And that was it, for the most part, until we hit land in the Pearl River Delta.
The area we came down in was secluded and green, but much like the Isle of Spires, we could tell that it had been a sprawling megalopolis a thousand years ago. Bigger than San Francisco, for sure – we had seen the shape of ruins poking up from the forest from the air on our way in. Alva pointed out a particularly intact-looking trunk of a skyscraper as a good place to land, and Aloy agreed – the two of them were operating on some set of heuristics I wasn't privy to. Aloy steered Cirrus down between the buildings, keeping the Stormbird's wings pinned in to avoid hitting anything in the snarl of green and gray.
I waited until I got the all-clear from Aloy before I unbuckled myself from the safety harness and fell to the soft earth. I braced myself against a nearby piece of rubble, closed my eyes, centered myself. Focused on the smell of soil, still so alien to me, and the feeling of the concrete against my back, and the soft metallic sounds of Cirrus standing nearby us as she shifted slightly in position, that ever-vigilant posture that machines in watchful mode do.
After a few breaths, I heard Alva approach me. "Beta?"
"I'm fine," I said, opening my eyes, taking in her small, slightly puzzled smile. "I'll be there in a bit. It's just a lot."
"Okay," Alva said. "Just let us know when you're ready."
"No, that's all right. I'm ready now." I stood up and dusted off. After wearing the same style of clothes for my entire life, the variety in the outdoor outfits that Aloy had set me up with were still strange to me, the new textures of fabric and ornamentation giving me a little thrill as I patted myself down. Sometimes it was too much stimulation, but sometimes it was nice, especially with its little patches of machine armor. I’d collected several pieces from machines I’d overridden. "Let's get set up."
In the end, implying I could help was a bit ambitious of me. I helped carry a few things, but as usual, I was mostly useless outdoors. Aloy and Alva got our tent set up – together, they had combined an amalgamation of technical plans we found in the Base, Aloy's survivalist know-how, and various machine parts into a functional tent. It was a pretty nice setup, lightweight and with a surprising number of amenities.
At some point during the process, Aloy took off into the ruins, looking for a Tallneck to override to give us a local network, leaving Alva and me to finish setting up. We chatted some; swapping stories, mostly. She was interested in the bits and pieces of Zero Dawn culture that I had found during my studies of the limited APOLLO clone with the Zeniths, and I was interested in her Diviner's knowledge of the broader society at the time. Especially her particular cultural perspective, colored as it was by her more accurate knowledge of her "Ancestors."
"Of course, the stories that we tell about her are completely...ugh," Alva said, moving a softpack of rations from one of the cargo nets on Cirrus' flank. Her eyes flashed with an intensity I only saw when she was questioning her culture's teachings. "Amanda Steiner, hero financier of the Clawback. Honestly, we probably shouldn't have needed the help of Forbidden Knowledge to know what a folder of lies that was – celebrating someone just for the sake of spending money? But when I accessed the files about where all that money actually came from? Do you know what I found?"
"She was making money off of both sides in some of the Lost Decade conflicts, including the Hot Zone Crisis," I said.
Alva looked up at me sharply, and I shrugged, looking away. "She died in a climbing accident right before the Faro Plague, but you and I both know she’d have been up there with the Zeniths if she'd been alive at the time. She was a friend of Tilda's, I think. I heard her mentioned once or twice."
"If you'd told me a year ago that I would be talking to someone who was raised amongst my people's heroes..." Alva said quietly. "...I don't know. I guess that's the least incomprehensible thing that's happened to me in the time since I left the Empire."
"Can you hand me that pack over on the other side?" I gestured, and she passed it over. "Thanks. For what it's worth, I'm–"
I paused, unsure how to say this next part, and a little anxious about how Alva might read my intentions. But softening the wording would soften the compliment I intended to give her, and she deserved the strongest praise possible. Hiding my crush was a lesser priority.
"–I'm amazed by how quickly you accepted the truth," I said. "Maybe it's because the first other human beings I ever knew were millennia-old fossils with habits ingrained deeper than a river gorge, but discarding your preconceptions like that seems more superhuman than anything the Zeniths accomplished."
Alva blushed, and I just about dropped dead right there. A radiant smile came with it. "Thanks," she said. "I would say it's because Diviners are trained specifically to be able to integrate new information into our worldviews, but...well, if that were the case, I wouldn't be quite so afraid of going home to my own people. I think it's just because I can't stand lies. The idea of lying to myself is the worst of all."
"Good," I said. "I wish more people were like you." I looked around. It looked a lot like many of the places I'd visited in North America since landing with the Zeniths and traveling with Aloy: a thousand years of growth atop a thousand years of decay. The vines looping in and out amongst the trees and fractured cinder blocks were unfamiliar to me, but I couldn’t recognize them by sight without my Focus anyway. Not the way Aloy could.
The air smelled different, but not in any way I could really place, and honestly most natural smells were strange to me after my sterile upbringing. The only comforting presences around were Alva and Cirrus, who...
"Hang on," I said to Alva. "Back away from Cirrus for a second. She's acting a little antsy." I pulled my override module off the sling on my back. I wouldn't have been able to do anything with a spear other than hurt myself, so unlike my sister with her override weapon, I just kept my module on the end of a Lancehorn horn wrapped in boar leather. I kept my machine aggression jammer on the other end, because I usually used them together, but I didn’t need that here.
I gently poked Cirrus in the side with the business end of the module, swirling through the circular masses of code that my Focus pulled out. HEPH had stepped up his override resistance algorithms, but the onboard processing for most individual machines was slow to update to dedicated attacks. Cirrus’s override shouldn't have been coming undone unless I’d made a mistake somewhere, and –
Aha. There. I identified a spot where I had left a data heartbeat unencrypted, and quickly patched it. Cirrus visibly calmed down.
"That's amazing," Alva said after I had pulled back out.
"You could learn to do it easily," I said, shrugging off the remark. "It's not that much more involved than any other deep-level Focus coding, and I know you've done that before."
"Not just that," she said, eyes wide. "I mean, the way you do it and the way Aloy does it are really different." Alva tapped her Focus in its ornate holder. She had added various bits to her outfit in her time at the Base: a hairpin from Zo, leather bracers from Erend. But the ornamentation on her Focus was entirely her own – an embroidered nine-petaled flower, the symbol of GAIA. "I can't see exactly what you're doing, obviously, but I know command gestures. Seeing you two work...it really is more of an art than a science."
"Maybe. She's better at it, though."
"If that's true, it's only because she grew up learning how to hunt machines, and you didn't know they existed at all until a little while ago." Alva winked. "Don't tell her I said that."
A few hours later, our Focuses informed us that we were connected to a new wide-area mesh network, and that new map firmware was being downloaded. After that, a message from Aloy appeared in the local feed.
ALOY < Got the Tallneck. That went well. But I have bad news about Cauldron UPSILON. It's further out from Quen lands than I thought it would be.
BETA > Are you coming back?
This had always been a possibility – Alva had her mission here, with the Quen, and she needed the help of one of the Sobeck clones to do it. Aloy had business at a rogue cauldron that GAIA thought might have the key to recapturing HEPH. If things needed to go that direction, it only made sense for Aloy to go off alone, and me to stay with Alva.
ALOY < No, not until I've dealt with the Cauldron. Are you two good here?
ALVA < Are you sure you don't need Cirrus?
I smiled a little. Neither Aloy nor Alva seemed to mind that I’d named our method of transport. I could understand why Aloy didn't usually do that, given how much more temporary her overrides had to be, but it just seemed appropriate to give a name to a being we were so reliant on for so long.
I don't know if I'd call the machines alive, exactly, but I’ve always known what it’s like to be viewed as a tool, one that’s given a designation instead of a name. Hence, I named Cirrus – and felt a small joy at having someone else use the name.
ALOY < I'm fine. There’s a handful of Zero Dawn-related facilities nearby that I might want to take a look at on the way, so I'll travel overland. There's plenty of Bristlebacks here. I can make good time.
"Hmm."
I looked over at Alva, sitting on a piece of rubble across our small campfire. Her eyes flickered uncertainly.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"I...there's something I'm not sure I want to know."
"From Aloy?"
Alva nodded, biting her lip. I tried not to focus too much on her lips. Or on how the firelight played across her face. Or–
Ugh. Useless.
"Whatever it is," I said, "she's probably the best person to ask. Even if she's not always the most tactful with her answers."
She sighed. "You're right."
ALVA < Is one of those places the ELEUTHIA facility that the ancestors of the Quen came from?
ALOY < I think so, yes.
ALVA < If we finish everything else we need to do here, and you have time, I think...yes, I'd like to see that.
ALOY < If you're sure. I've only seen two ELEUTHIA facilities, and they're
ALOY < they can be hard to handle.
ALOY < I know you know what happened, that APOLLO was malfunctioning and the kids were thrown into the world with no education, but it's something different to actually see it.
ALVA < I know. Thank you.
A separate window appeared, a private message from Aloy.
ALOY < Your Stalker armor is charged up?
BETA > Yeah.
ALOY < And you promise you’ll use it if you get in trouble?
BETA > Aloy…
ALOY < Just… promise me, Beta. Please.
BETA > All right. I promise.
I woke up before dawn to the feeling of my sleeping bag being shaken. The last vestiges of a dream evaporated from my mind and I blinked away the sleep. "Huh?"
"Hey," Alva whispered. "We need to get going."
"What are... ughh." I yawned as I levered myself up from the lumpy ground. My bed back with the Zeniths hadn’t been the height of luxury by space magic standards, but I missed it every day that I had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the ground, or even on my cot in the Base. "What are you talking about?"
"The Leviathan auxiliary site," Alva said. "We need to get over there quickly. I think there's going to be trouble."
Blame it on the sleep deprivation, blame it on the fact that I couldn't think properly when I was this close to Alva – either way, the questions I should have been asking didn't come to mind. My paranoia, normally my close companion and protector, woke up just a little later than me.
And so instead of, How do you know? or, What kind of trouble? or, If there's going to be trouble, why are we chasing it? I just said, "Okay."
We didn't take Cirrus. I sent her a quick scram command – a little subroutine I came up with that meant "pretend to be a normal Stormbird for X number of hours, or until you receive further instructions from me." With the Tallneck in the area active, I'd be able to call Cirrus down when we needed her again.
Hopefully.
I let Alva lead me through the darkened forest, the predawn sky showing in flashes of blue and royal purple through the gaps in the tree cover above. Alva knew the terrain, if not the exact area, and when I fell (twice, regrettably) she was there to help me up and usher me on.
Those questions I should have asked earlier rose up in my mind, but they were suffocated by lack of oxygen. I needed all of it to keep up with her.
And then, we cut free from the forest and over a ridge. A valley spread out below us, dotted with Quen tents, Quen torches, Quen sentinels, and a very un-Quen wedge of solid hydraulic concrete embedded in the ground like an exposed vertebra. The ruin reminded me of Zero Dawn facilities I had seen, but more utilitarian, brutal in its sheer force of existence. There was a huge metal door on the front, half-open, with a sloping pile of Quen barrels and crates stacked next to it.
Alva ducked behind a log and pulled me, still gaping, down next to her.
"Wh- wh- wh–" I took a deep breath, letting my nerves steady a bit. I still felt like I'd been punched in the solar plexus – demonstrating what Erend affectionately called my "flimsy space bones failing me again" – but I needed to communicate. "What the fuck?" I hissed. "I thought we were supposed to be landing in an area with no Quen presence!"
"All of the fins have some level of Quen presence," Alva said calmly, gesturing over her shoulder at the concrete edifice in the valley below. "I thought this one would be lightly patrolled. I was wrong. But this could be a great opportunity!"
"It could be, if we could get in!" I said through clenched teeth.
"We can," she said. "And we sort of…have to do it here. I’m not positive I have the ability to open the door on my own, and the research patrols and Diviner rotations button them down when they're done."
"You didn't tell Aloy any of this?"
"I told her we'd need the Quen's cooperation before bringing the system online. I told you that, too." Her gaze slid away from mine. "I...thought that I would figure out another way in before now, or that we could camp out at a fin and spend a while finding an entrance. But this is a perfect opportunity."
"It doesn't matter if they open the door for us if they'll just detain us on sight," I said. "I know you're a Diviner, but they'd be able to tell almost immediately that your Focus is the wrong model. And I can use my Stalker armor for a little while, but I don’t like the idea of using it up before we face a real emergency."
"Their focuses are the ones that are the wrong model, actually," Alva said with a smirk. "But it's not just because there are other Quen here. It's because there's a specific Quen here."
I felt a sharp pain, like I'd swallowed a handful of metal shards. "Federa," I said, casually. "Right."
Stupid, stupid. Of course she was going to run into her girlfriend out here. Of course I was going to be put in a situation where my feelings about Alva would be seen through, glass-clear. Jealousy was completely counter to the mission at hand – but then again, so was anxiety, and that never stopped me.
"Yeah," she said. "I think you'd like her. I think...maybe she can help us?"
I swallowed as best I could. "You arranged this with her?"
"Not exactly," Alva said. "It's...look, I promise you I'll explain the whole thing later. It just…it hurts too much right now, and we might not have much time. I have an alert set on my Focus when she's nearby, and it went off when we approached on Cirrus today. Her Focus is looking for my old one. So she doesn't know we're here, but I can signal her."
Ever since Aloy and her friends destroyed Far Zenith and rescued me, I had been using a therapy module that's part of APOLLO, to help control my anxiety. One of the principles it taught me was radical acceptance. Take the thing that's causing you anxiety, accept both the thing and your bad feelings about it, and give yourself the permission to both be scared and accept that scary things exist.
I took a deep breath, centered myself, gave my quaking anxiety a hug and let it pass through me. I couldn't control this situation, but Alva could. I couldn't trust myself, but I could trust her.
And so I said, for the second time that day, "Okay. What do you need me to do?"
We made it down to the door without too much trouble. The forest was thick here, and so was the rubble, both of them converging from garden and edifice to a dense, mixed tangle. There were plenty of places to hide, hundreds of shadows big enough for two small people moving silently.
The "fin," as Alva had called it, was bigger than I’d thought at first glance. Up close, it was easily as tall as some of the Utaru homesteads, the ones built into their telescope dishes.
The polyhedron’s simplicity made its size deceptive. A more complex building, a more lived-in monument, would have had plenty of details to help me discern its scope – windows, bricks, maybe even exposed girders. But the fin was just a big, irregular, triangular prism, its faces and edges worn smooth with age. There was no texture to clue me in to its size, so as we approached, it loomed.
Alva told me the plan, and I went along with it. It was a solid plan, as these things go, but my anxiety sat over my shoulder pointing out the flaws. It didn't help that my part in it was, for now, simply to observe. I was to be hidden in the cleft in a chunk of concrete that was of an obviously different make than the more durable, almost sandstone-like finish of the fin.
Alva fidgeted as she waited out of the general eyeline of the Quen camp. She was less hidden than I was, which meant that she had sent the signal already.
We waited long enough that I started to wonder if anything was going to happen at all, but eventually a lone figure approached, torchless, moving by the light of her Focus alone. That light source made it hard to make anything out about her at first. She was tall, and that was all I could tell.
The woman moved closer, and turned. I could make out some details – an aquiline nose and sharp cheekbones. Though the shifting illumination made it difficult to tell exactly, her skin seemed to be a warm brown somewhere between Zo's and Va...well. Somewhat darker than Zo's. The woman’s hair was up in a bun with a few elaborate braids hanging from it, threaded through with white leather that tied into her Focus headpiece. "Alva?" she whispered.
"Federa," Alva breathed. She stepped closer, away from me, so I couldn't see her very well, but this was part of the plan. This would keep Federa's attention on Alva and not me.
"I – what–" Federa's voice cracked as she spoke. "For months, I just get the most...the most nothing updates from you, they don't sound like you at all, and I start to think maybe you're dead, and they've disappeared you into some hole because of something you found on the Eastern Expedition and now you just show up here?"
"Yeah, pretty much," Alva said. "Sorry. It's a long story. But it's me, I promise."
"I can see it's you," Federa said tightly. "That's why I'm mad. Alva, what happened?"
Some awful voice in the choir of awful voices in my head cheered at that hint of imperfection, of anger. The chorus itself was an intrusive chain of thoughts beyond my control, feeding on my infatuation. I can't pretend I'd never felt jealous of Federa before, even though I'd never met her, and I only knew her from the few stories that Alva would tell, back at the base. I won't pretend I hadn't thought about this happening.
And then Alva said, "I wish I could have told you, Federa. I'm sorry." I couldn't see her face, but I heard the pain in her voice, and that pain strangled my jealousy where it slept. Nothing that made Alva sound that unhappy could possibly be a good thing.
"Look, I–" Federa started slowly. She took a step towards Alva, then another. Wrapped her cautiously, carefully in a hug. They were so different in size and shape – Alva shorter and drawn from curves, Federa all height and angles – that I thought they’d clash. But they looked good together. Like they were made to fit each other. "I don't know what happened, but I'll make it okay, all right? I'll go to the piyem of this expedition, I'll tell him what happened, and we can get you back home, and make sure your family's okay..."
"I can't do that," Alva said, pulling out of the embrace. Her voice didn't echo, and it wasn't loud, but it thudded against the trees and rocks like a warhammer.
Federa stilled. "What?"
"I can restart Leviathan," Alva said. "I can help clear what's left of the blight. But I need your help, and...no other Diviners."
"Alva," Federa said desperately, "think about what you're saying. That's–"
"I know," Alva said. "The Seventh Precept. ‘Some things are forbidden for a reason.’ But have you thought about just who that reason might be benefiting, Federa? Not everything with a reason is good. Not every rule that is set is just."
"That's heresy," whispered Federa.
"I know."
Federa shook her head. "I can't let you do this to yourself, Alva. I don't know what you've gotten into, but I'm scared for you, showing up out of nowhere like this."
"No–" Alva started. But it was too late. Federa had already touched her Focus, and with a nauseated look on her face, eyes turned away from Alva's, she spoke into it.
"Piyem Esani? Can you come to the northwest corner of the digsite? There’s something I want you to see."