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It’s far off yet.
Elena can see the thin line of smoke from a cookfire coming straight up off the top of the desert ridge, the dark shapes of makeshift shelters vague against the late afternoon January sky. Another refugee camp.
When she left Edge, she didn’t even have the standing to get a vehicle from the WRO quartermaster; she’d had to hitchhike to Junon, and she’s been traveling on foot over the Western Continent, sleeping rough. The nights have been dry, but cold.
Elena watches the smoke, thinks about the people sitting around the fire. She hasn’t seen a town or an inn in five days. She could stand to wash her face, if they have enough water.
She could stand a drink even more.
She pulls up the hood of her sweatshirt, and zips her bomber jacket up to her chin. Eyeing the slender thread of smoke, she starts climbing through the chaparral.
She hasn’t spoken aloud since she booked passage from Junon to Costa Del Sol, sixteen days ago.
--
“You pulled her off the task force,” Tseng says, “because she was in a bar fight?”
“A bar fight? Is that what you call it?” Reeve tosses the file to Tseng across his desk. “Three people in the hospital with broken bones. One of them has a skull fracture. The seventeen-year-old has kidney damage. You’re lucky it’s just a suspension. I could have her up on charges.”
Tseng pages through the report, and doesn’t speak.
“Look, I’m aware of her background, what happened. Has she had any counseling, anything?” Reeve asks. “Where is she now?”
Tseng doesn’t answer.
“Do you even know?” Reeve asks, incredulous.
“What she does on administrative leave,” Tseng says, “is really her business.”
“Her business,” Reeve repeats. “Are you aware that she is drinking heavily? Housekeeping went into her room. They found—I couldn’t believe how many empty bottles they found—“
Tseng looks at him sharply.
“You violated her privacy.” It's not a question, and the even tone is ominous.
“I violated—look, after she was suspended, she vacated her quarters,” Reeve says. “Housekeeping took care of the room. It’s standard procedure.”
“Elena is my responsibility,” Tseng says. “Not yours.”
“Fine!” Reeve says. “Then deal with her. Take responsibility.”
“Don’t try to manage me, Reeve,” Tseng says, and for a second Reeve sees something ancient and vengeful show in his eyes. “I’ll take care of this my way.”
“Your way. The Turks way? Veld’s way? Is that what this is? You’re not on my payroll, so I can’t discipline you formally. That said, if you can’t control your own people, I won’t just cut ties, Tseng. I’ll disavow you publicly, and then I’ll hunt all of you down.”
“Like animals?” Tseng asks. “Like dogs that bite their masters?”
They face off across Reeve’s desk. Reeve’s pale, exhausted, furious. Tseng’s withdrawn into himself almost completely, his face a mask.
“I have to assume,” Reeve says, “full responsibility for the WRO and its actions—including this. Do you understand how bad this looks? It’s never been more important for us to project an atmosphere of lawfulness and fair dealing. Elena just made us look like a bunch of thugs.”
“Elena suffered a trauma,” Tseng says. “She needs some dignity and she needs her space.”
“Space? Space, Tseng? Ask yourself this,” Reeve says. His eyes are bloodshot. “Are you helping her by leaving her out there alone? Letting her loose to beat the shit out of a bunch of civilians before she drinks herself to death? You think this will make her stronger? A better Turk?
“You say she’s traumatized. Is this her trauma playing out, Tseng? Or yours?”
Tseng doesn’t answer. He collects the report on his subordinate and exits Reeve’s office, without meeting Reeve’s eyes.
--
It’s been a bad winter.
From her position out of sight, tucked under an overhang of rock, Elena spots a young, weedy-looking fellow with a hunting rifle and one thickset woman with what looks like a pirate’s cutlass stuck in her belt. Everyone else is unarmed, and they don’t look too good. Bandits, she knows, have been homing in on vulnerable farmers and villagers; she’s aware of at least three human trafficking rings working the Western Continent.
As she climbs up to the camp, Elena’s not at all surprised when the rifle she spotted ends up pointed at her chest.
Silently, she lifts her hands in the air.
“Keep the gun on ‘er,” an old man says. He approaches, and Elena can see that his face is battered and bruised. They’ve been visited by strangers before, she thinks. “Sally, watch the perimeter. This could be a trap.”
“Not a trap,” Elena says. Her voice is hoarse. “Just looking—“
“The hell is this?”
He grabs her wrist and shoves back her sleeve, holds it out to show the rest of the camp.
The wristband buckled onto her arm is loaded up with materia, small and perfectly formed, powerful like you can’t get anymore, Fire and Protect and a mastered Restore.
“I recognize this gear,” the old man tells Elena. “I used to see this gear, down below the Plate in Sector Four. Know that mark anywhere. You’re a Turk. You did the dirty work for Shinra that was.”
Angry sounds are coming from the crowd that’s coalescing around them.
“You’re a Turk,” he says again, “and you fucked up the world.”
Elena thinks that if she told them, You’re wrong, I’m a humanitarian liaison now, and I work for the WRO, they’d probably back off. Scattered around camp are a few half-empty crates of food and basic medical supplies, the products of the last WRO airlift.
She can’t tell them that, though. She won’t tell them what’s not true.
“You’re right,” she says. “I’m a Turk.”
The old man holding her wrist balls up his fist. She wrenches her arm free and elbows him in the stomach. He doubles up, wheezing.
Then someone moves in to throw a punch, and the young man with the rifle gasps, his hands moving reflexively.
Elena goes for the gun first; if this escalates, it will be deployed, and there will be casualties, maybe fatalities.
After she gets it off him, she cracks the butt of the rifle into his head, and he drops without a sound. A few more blows start to clear some space in the crowd, and she begins moving backwards as people start to fall around her feet. She hasn’t pointed the gun; she’s still using it as a club.
The old man, still clutching his middle, has dropped to his knees. Refugees are starting to pick up rocks, sticks, even clods of dirt.
The woman with the cutlass is crouched over the young man on the ground. He’s unconscious, his face covered with blood.
“What is wrong with you?” she cries.
Elena drops the gun, and runs.
--
“No sign?” Tseng asks, as Reno throws the bolts across the door and stalks towards the Healen kitchenette. He’s tired, cold, and ravenous; the temperatures outside have dropped below freezing, and he’s been out for hours.
“Nope,” Reno says. “We should expand the perimeter. Contacts have been calling in all morning. She isn’t here, man. She’s picked up a ride somewhere, she is nowhere in the area.”
“How do you figure?” Rude asks from the lounge. “Could be laying low, staying away from people, sleeping outside.” He regards the light dusting of snow on Reno’s coat and shakes his head. “Hope not,” he says under his breath.
The kettle whistles. Reno, still wearing his fingerless gloves, pours hot water onto instant coffee and adds a jigger of whiskey from the flask in his coat pocket.
“Don’t think so. She’d be sticking out like a sore thumb,” Reno says. “Tiny blonde lady, traveling all alone, breaking heads everywhere she goes.”
Tseng, hunched over printed reports scattered over the dining room table, closes his eyes.
--
Perfect darkness; it’s palpable as a caress. It’s a darkness she knows well.
Elena painfully rolls onto her side. She knows exactly where she is. She feels the ornate carvings on the stone floor beneath her cheek.
She knows it’s a dream, but it doesn’t make any difference.
In the darkness, color blooms: phosphenes, she reminds herself, watching hypnagogic pinwheels shift behind her eyes from violet to orange.
Way back in Turk training, she was briefed; these hallucinations happen to people forced to live in the dark. They make up for the absence of light.
She hasn’t seen Tseng since they were captured. She hasn’t seen anything but these visions, these compensatory light shows; all this time, time she’s no longer able to track, she’s been tied up in the dark. But she can hear; she knows her captors by sound, by voice.
This one’s Kadaj.
“You miss your master.”
She hears his breath, the creak of his leathers, as he squats beside her. She feels his fingers, cold, drift across her collarbone and trail down her arm to fasten just above her elbow.
“Your lives are so strange… so strange. So fragile. I could break this without even trying.”
Elena does not reply. The pinwheels whirl gold, careen towards white.
“His broke,” Kadaj says, something almost like wonder in his voice. “Snapped. It made a sound.... you must have heard it, it was so loud. But that was awhile ago. Is he alive or dead? What do you think?”
Elena feels the grip on her arm tighten. Kadaj runs his thumb absently back and forth across the fabric of her jacket. She wants to throw up.
There’s a sound in the dark, then, harsh and brief.
“Oh! Alive after all. If you listen carefully,” Kadaj tells her, “you can hear him screaming.”
She’s shivering, immobilized, her body twisted up in her blanket. She wants to wake up; maybe she already is awake, but she can’t seem to move.
Elena’s sure her eyes are open, but she can’t see her surroundings. She knows they must be there, but there is no way to make contact.
There’s just this fan of light, this palpable darkness.
--
There’s a break in the silence a few days later, when Rude phones in, right in the middle of lunch.
Tseng puts him on speaker.
“Got a report of someone matching her description getting picked up by a longhauler on his way to Junon Harbor,” Rude says.
“Well done,” Tseng says.
“Pretty obvious where she’s headed,” Rude says, “but the news is stale.”
“Probably too late to catch her in Costa del Sol,” Tseng agrees. “Reno, I’ll need a ride to Junon.”
Reno puts his fork down and reaches for his coat and scarf.
“I’ll prep the helo.”
“And I’ll need a car once I get to Costa del Sol. It may take me awhile to pick up her trail on the Western Continent.”
“You want company for this? Should I pack a bag?”
“No,” Tseng says, drawing on his coat. “This one is mine.”
--
When the light comes up, Elena wraps herself in her blanket and climbs.
Eventually she finds a perch high on a rocky outcropping off the highway. Rocks like jagged teeth stand up in the scrub on the steep hillsides that ripple south. There’s a tiny thread of oily-looking water making its way through a gully; she’ll refill her canteen there. Except for the highway with its yellow marks, there’s no human sign anywhere she can see.
She feels the wind through her blanket on her neck. She’s managed off the land so far, but her pack is getting light, and she’s at a crossroads.
She looks down at her wristband, runs her fingers over the embedded materia, touches the buckles and leather straps, shiny with age. Her equipment’s kept her alive. And not just here, she thinks: year after year, in Midgar and all that came after.
For a minute she contemplates throwing it and her backpack into the gully, and walking without armor or aid into the hinterlands. She imagines herself some time later, gone to bone, food for birds.
Why not?
Because, she thinks. Because no reason. Because at the moment, she’s alive.
She’s pretty sure she’s alive.
Her body aches; she feels old.
--
It takes him a week to find her.
He spends his nights in the faceless one-storey motels spaced out along the Corel Highway, lying fully dressed on a forgettable sequence of identical single beds, smoking cigarettes and ignoring his phone.
He spends his days driving.
Eventually, he reconstructs her path more or less as Reno’d predicted he would, following the trail of injuries she’d left in her wake—most of them the members of two particularly predatory groups of raiders operating out of North Corel, some of them ordinary people so unthreatening that Tseng gets a chill.
He loops back and forth along the highways, tracing side roads and returning, slowly mapping an ever-shrinking hexagon as the reports come in. He’s gambling that she will stick to the roads. If she’s gone deep into the backlands, Tseng knows, he’s probably done. Even a dedicated search party familiar with the terrain would be hard put to find her in those canyons.
As it turns out, he guesses right.
At five in the evening Elena turns up walking down the center of Highway 9, the long straight road that leads, in time, to Rocket Town. From his position on a switchback high above the basin he sees her, a small tired figure moving all alone across a landscape of grey earth, shattered rocks and stark shadows; the air is cold, crystalline, the light almost too bright.
Tseng debates following the road out to her and decides the shorter path by far is straight down. He parks the car on the shoulder, and scrambles down the loose shale on the hillside to intercept her path.
--
Out of nowhere, she hears her name, and turns.
He’s there, on the highway behind her, backlit, the blue suit gone darker than black.
She watches him walk towards her along the empty road, improbable as hell, his long hair blowing, the lenses of his sunglasses glacier blue.
Beautiful, she thinks.
They stand face-to-face on the pavement.
“Are you alive, or dead?” she asks.
“Alive, to the best of my knowledge,” Tseng says.
Elena is trembling with anger and relief. “Did you come all the way out here to beat my ass? To tell me how stupid I am?” she asks.
“I came out here to make sure you understand that you are my successor.”
She squints at him. Her face is caked with dirt and blood.
“What?”
“And I wanted to see if you were interested in getting dinner,” he says. “I know a place.”
--
A mile or two outside the tiny town of Boron, well on the way to Rocket Town, there’s a filling station, and across the road is the Astroburger Drive-in Restaurant. Its pale blue sign is retro, illuminated, crowned by a giant, working astrolabe and a parade of wind socks, thrashing in the stiff breeze.
“Cute,” Elena says. “How’d you discover this place?”
“An endless supply of security details and presidential convoys. Don’t worry. The food’s good, and the beer isn’t piss,” Tseng says.
In the parking lot, she stops him.
“I’m… listen. Before we go in there, you should know. I’m not right. I need you to know that. And I need you to know that I know.”
“Because of what happened?” Tseng asks, after a silence.
“I wish I could say that,” Elena admits. “No. Whatever’s wrong with me… has been wrong all along.”
Tseng starts walking again, looks back at her over his shoulder. She sees the ghost of a smile.
“That is probably true of all of us Turks,” he says.
Elena makes a bitter face.
“You seem to have your craziness under control.”
Tseng pauses, his hand on the door to the restaurant.
“Elena,” he says. “Control is my craziness.”
--
Tseng’s selection doesn’t disappoint. Elena tears into her burger and onion rings, aware that a family with small children is watching her in some concern. She’s filthy, probably stinks, and can’t stop stuffing her face. Hah, she thinks. If you knew.
His plate is loaded with a disconcertingly large serving of fried chicken, not something she’d have tagged as a favorite. He eats quickly and methodically, and takes each piece all the way down to clean bones.
There’s a pitcher of beer on the table, but so far, they’ve both let it lie. Elena’s had a little time to dry out, traveling in the hinterlands. She’s decided that the beer is a test. She drinks water: big, thirsty, gasping mouthfuls.
It’s good.
Tseng’s staring at the pitcher of beer.
“One of the consequences of leadership,” he says suddenly, “is that your decisions don’t just go into the past. They stay... they stay inside you. You’ll hear the voices of everyone whose life was ever in your hands. That’s our fate,” he says. “Yours and mine.”
Elena takes this in, thinks back.
“You said once that Veld told you to stop. Stop hearing those voices.”
“Veld never stopped hearing them, himself. But he tried.”
“Did you try?”
“Of course I tried, Elena,” Tseng says. “I’m not a very good person.”
“Stop. Don’t say that. Stop it.”
“I led you into a situation in which you almost lost your life. You could blame me. I think maybe you should blame me.”
“I think maybe Veld was full of shit,” Elena says. “He taught you to think like this.”
“You barely knew him,” Tseng says.
“I know his handiwork,” she retorts. “He was a bad parent.”
“A bad manager, maybe, in some respects,” he replies. “I wouldn’t presume to judge his parenting.”
“I thought you were like a son to him.”
“That,” Tseng says, and in his face are signs she is finally learning to read, “is exactly what I never was.”
--
When they leave the restaurant, Tseng drives until the lights of Boron are pinpricks in the distance, and then he pulls the car over onto the shoulder. In unspoken agreement, they both get out and lie on the warm hood of Tseng’s rented car, looking up at the sky.
There’s no moon. The stars dominate, clustering in a thick band that drives right up the center of the sky. Around them, with the headlights off, it’s pitch black; she wouldn’t know Tseng was there except for the touch of his shoulder against her own.
“I still hallucinate, when it’s dark,” Elena says. “Light shows… crazy. They come up on me at night.”
“Me too,” Tseng says. “And I still…sometimes, at night, I hear...” He stops, overcome.
After a second, Elena’s voice answers from out of the dark.
“What do you hear?”
“Your voice,” he says. “He’d say… he’d trick me. From the time we were captured until Valentine got us out, I had no idea, at any given moment, if you were alive or dead.”
“That’s exactly right,” Elena says. “That’s how it was. I could hear you. I could never talk to you. But I could hear everything.” Elena scrubs tears off her face. “Everything they did to you.”
“It was the not-knowing,” Tseng whispers. “All that time… we might’ve even been in the same room. I wonder if we were.”
All the time, side by side in the dark, Elena thinks.
“Fortunately,” she says at last, “I was alive all along.”
There’s a silence; each listens to the other breathing.
“Fortunately,” he says, “so was I.”
They look up at the big sky, at stars, galaxies, galactic clusters, distant, silent, gorgeous.
Vast whorls of light. And he sees them too, Elena thinks.
Tseng sees them too.
--
They wrangle a ride from Boron back to Edge in a beat-up C-23 Sherpa, a tiny diplomatic cargo plane with a long list of airstrips to hit and a packet of eyes-only documents Reeve didn’t trust to email.
“Ricky Numbers,” Tseng says, surprised, when he sees the pilot.
“Don’t know who that is,” the young man says cheerfully. “But my first name’s Rick, all right.”
“You’re an air courier, now?”
“Air courier, bush pilot, et cetera. See the world, help people out,” Rick says, “enjoy not being shot out of the sky.”
“Denzel’s doing, I suppose.”
“Who’s Denzel?” Rick says, smiling. “I certainly don’t know any guy named Denzel.”
As the plane bumps along the runway and unsteadily becomes airborne, Rick shouts back into the cabin, “Welcome to the beautiful blue mystery, my friends.”
--
Tseng’s found a thermos of hot tea in the cabin. He carries it back to Elena, along with a pair of old mugs with Shinra logos.
“What’s going to happen now, sir?”
The corner of Tseng’s mouth turns up at her “sir.”
“Anything you like,” he says, pouring the tea. “You’re my successor, as I was Veld’s. But I don’t have a legacy to give you. There’s nothing to inherit. We kept Shinra’s order, for better or for worse, world without end. Then the world ended.”
Elena takes a mug, looks out the window at the scrub desert rippling below, at the plane shadow riding along the ground.
An ended world, Elena thinks, might be something she could look after.
“Right now, no one’s able to consolidate anything like state power,” Tseng says. “Godou might be able to extend what he’s built in Wutai, but he’s got internal problems. There are power vacuums, warlords.”
Elena rubs her face, turns away from the window, to Tseng.
“I’ll stop the warlords,” she says. “That’s something I can do.”
Tseng cocks an eyebrow.
“All by yourself?”
“I’ll borrow Rude, sometimes,” she says dreamily. “Or Reno. We’ll stop Abingdon’s operation in Mideel. We’ll crush the cartels in Junon.”
“Sounds beautiful,” Tseng says, and means it. “What about the WRO? We could mend fences there. They would benefit from having you around.”
“It’s all right so far,” Elena says. “Reeve is trying. He has ethics. He means well.”
Tseng tilts his head, listening.
“If Reeve concentrates on infrastructure, it’ll be all right. I’m not so sure he will. At some point, he’ll get frustrated. He’ll want to make sure his ideas stick. If he works at this, he might have the power to make them stick.” Elena drinks her tea. “He starts down that path, I’ll put him down, too,” she says quietly.
Both Tseng’s eyebrows go up, this time. Then he smiles.
“That’s my successor,” he says.
“That’s the way it is,” she says.
“All right. But who watches the watchman?” he asks. “Who’ll be in a position to put you down, if you go down that path?”
Elena turns her head, regards him across the cabin.
“That’ll be your job, sir,” she says. “But it would be good if you intervened before I go really bananas.”
Tseng lifts his mug to his lips. His eyes are warm.