Chapter 12

When the front entrance of the hideout slid open and Quill stumbled inside, Castor caught him with her one good arm. He was breathless, and pale, the faint layer of grime on his face streaked with tear lines and sweat. She guided him over to one of the armchairs in the workshop, and he fell limply into, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. For what seemed like a very long time, he sat in silence, the only evidence he was still alive being the faint rise and fall of his chest.

Rina watched him, worried. The emotion inside him boiled and seethed like an overflowing pot, spilling out into the air around him. Rage, grief, loss, fear, regret, horror, hopelessness... each foamed to the surface and bubbled over the edge of his consciousness one after the other, none lingering long enough to stick. She didn’t have to ask where they were coming from. It wasn’t hard to guess.

Finally, seemingly unable to stand the unasked question in the air any longer, Kessa spoke up and asked it.

“Where’s Sera?”

Quill continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, unmoving. Finally, words found their way to his lips. His voice was dry and brittle.

“She’s gone,” he said quietly.

Kessa bolted upright, ignoring the spasm of pain that shot through her leg.

“She’s gone!? What do you mean, she’s-”

“The Ministry took her. Right outside of Jakken’s shop. I saw it happen.”

Kessa swore loudly.

“And what, you just stood there and-”

“Kessa!” Castor snapped. “That’s enough!”

Kessa recoiled as if she’d been slapped. She leaned back in her chair, the fear and rage Rina felt inside of her now filled with embarrassment.

Castor knelt down beside Quill’s chair. The look on her face was restrained, but full of pain.

“Tell us what happened, Quill. Please.”

Quill continued to stare up at the ceiling. After a moment, the words began to come, slowly at first, then gradually faster and faster. He told them how the streets were filled with enforcers. About the drone he’d shot down. He told them about making it to Jakken’s shop and seeing Sera surrounded. How she fought and ran. How the drone had stunned her. How he’d watched as the enforcers restrained her, and went to come after him. How Jakken had gotten him to run. How he’d heard the man shut up by the sound of a Ministry weapon as he ran away.

When he finished, a heavy silence hung in the air around the workshop. Castor cursed quietly and looked at the floor. Kessa covered her face. In the faint distance outside the hideout, a siren wailed. Zimmer signed quietly to Tasha. After a moment, her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide in shock. Kaji stood leaned near the door. Despite the detachment he was trying very hard to present, there was anger and defeat lurking under his skin too.

Quill leaned forward, putting his face in his hands. As he sat there, Rina felt a strange shift inside him. The boiling inside him seemed to withdraw somehow, dampening in intensity until it was like everything was buried beneath a dense grey blanket of gauze. Instead of pain and rage and grief, there was just… nothing. A numb inner silence devoid of anything except a faint sense of intense pressure lurking somewhere far behind it.

He’s dissociating, she realized. When feelings became too intense to handle, the mind could just… not feel them for a while. Flood itself with something like emotional morphine. It was a sensation that she was all too familiar with. It didn’t make things better. It just pushed them far enough away that they couldn’t be felt. Rina looked around the room, and saw that Castor and Kessa were starting to respond the same way.

They’re all giving up.

She couldn’t blame them. Things seemed hopeless. Maybe they were. After all, Castor and Kessa were crippled, Quill was overwhelmed. Sera was taken. Tensor was gone. The only trace of the Black Hands left sat in this room. Every single block of the Grid was crawling with armed soldiers that wanted them jailed, or dead, or worse. And there was no way back for her, unless the people in this room somehow managed to miraculously reassemble a machine none of them seemed to actually understand from parts none of them had.

But then, why didn’t she feel like giving up? Why was she here wracking her brain trying to figure out some way she could help?

Because you’re the only one who can feel hope, genius.

The thought felt like a slap to the face. Of course they couldn’t. Why did she keep forgetting that? She wasn’t experiencing the same reality as them. The world they lived in held no brightness, and never improved. She was trying to find solutions because she had something none of them could. And that’s when she realized what she needed to do.

“So, we’re going to try and rescue Sera, right?”

In near unison, everyone’s attention snapped to her. The looks on their faces varied, but each communicated roughly the same degree of confusion, disbelief, mockery, or pity. Tasha was the sole exception, up until Zimmer signed to her what Rina had said.

After a long moment of silence, Kaji snorted derisively.

“Are you swiving stupid?”

Rina flinched slightly at that, and Castor spun on him.

“Shut the hell up, Kaji,” she snarled.

Kaji leaned away from the doorway and paced a few steps closer.

“That girl’s gone. You don’t ‘rescue’ people from the Ministry. When they’re gone, they’re gone. Period.”

He gave Castor a sidelong glare.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said. Then turned to the others and repeated himself. One by one, they shook their heads.

He turned back to Rina. He opened his mouth to talk, but she cut him off.

“I do think you’re wrong,” she said coolly. “The Ministry isn’t invincible. You’ve seen that first-hand.”

Kaji crossed his arms.

“You may be able to scare off a few enforcers, but what about a hundred? A thousand? Does your alchemy work on drones, or gearoids, or tanks? What about when the Choir snatches you up? You think you’re gonna scare them away, or make them let you go with the power of happiness? Because that’s what every single person who stands up to these swiving monsters is up against. What could you possibly do against that?”

As he spoke, Rina felt the emotion in the room slowly begin to change. One by one, they were all beginning to feel the same fatalistic despair she felt lodged inside him.

“Things seem hopeless right now,” she said. “You all feel it. And for good reason. There doesn’t seem to be anything worth hoping for, especially when you can’t feel hope at all. But right now, we don’t have the luxury of falling apart. Our lives are at risk. They have Sera. How long do you think it will be before they learn our names from her? Where we are hiding? Or the names and locations of everyone who could possibly help us or keep us safe? If we don’t rescue her from them, how much longer do you think it’ll take for them to catch us? A day? A week? If we don’t save her before they make her talk, we’re all gone.”

A faint wave of recognition pinged in a few of their minds. She continued.

“You’re right, Kaji. I don’t have answers for all of those things. But I do know one thing- the entire Grid is locked down. They’re storming houses and checking the IDs of every single person. They’re threatening to imprison or eliminate anyone who tries to help or hide me. Why? Because they’re terrified I’m here.”

As she said this, she gently reached out into each of their minds, connecting to their inner worlds. To her surprise, connecting with all of them simultaneously while talking was far more difficult than she’d expected, especially once she’d forced her way past the dissociative barricades each had built.

Everything each of them was feeling was so complex and intense that it felt like she’d stepped into a concert hall with a hundred different instruments playing a hundred different songs in a hundred different keys and rhythms. She paused for a moment to get her bearings, then continued.

“They’re terrified I’m here because I’m the one person they can’t crush under the boot of their emotional control. They’re not terrified because I can scare some of them off, they’re scared I can do things like this.”

She reached inside each of them, and in unison grabbed ahold of the fear inside each of them, mentally crushing in her mind’s fingers. The reaction she got was just as exaggerated as she expected it would be. Kessa sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. Castor’s expression went from grim to confused to shocked. Even Quill sat forward in his seat, his gaze intense.

“That is what it feels like to have no fear,” Rina said. “And this, this is what hope feels like.”

One by one in succession, she mentally pressed the faint but unshakable belief things could get better she carried in her mind into each of theirs. The reaction she felt from each was immediate and intense. It was as if each of their minds snapped onto it so ravenously they bit her mind’s hand in the process. She could see the small sparks begin to diminish as the Bazaar began to try to steal the feeling away. However, to her astonishment, she felt it begin to swell and expand in each, seeming to replicate and regenerate faster than the Bazaar could steal. The way each mind responded to it was different, but the new emotion immediately blended and swirled with whatever it encountered. In Quill, it merged with his anger, which she suddenly felt roar into a blaze inside him, like a fire fed fresh oxygen. By the time she’d finished a moment later, he was standing, his fist clenched.

“The feelings you now carry inside you are why the Ministry is scared. They know that nothing can stand in the way of hope that can’t be stolen. I may not be able to stop their machines, or every single enforcer they’ve got, but I can help us get the help we need to succeed, and help us overcome whatever they throw at us. But I can’t do it by myself. I’m no good with technology. I’m not a fighter. I don’t know my way around this place. Those are skills and knowledge the rest of you have. But if we work together, any chance we have to rescue her is worth trying for, no matter how long a shot. So let’s figure this out. What do you say?”

For a brief moment, there was absolute silence. Then Quill walked over to her. He stopped a pace away, studying her. Then he smiled. It was the first genuine smile she’d ever seen on his face.

“Alright. I’m in. Let’s do this,” He said. He turned to the rest of them as he spoke.

“If we’re gonna do this, I need each one of you to understand what we’re up against. We don’t know where she’s being held, but it’s safe to assume she’s probably in central holding in the Grid 19 Ministry operations center. That place is a fortress. Even getting close to it will be difficult. Once we reach it, we’re up against advanced physical and digital security, armed patrols, and probably MinDef combat gearoids. There may even be Choir present.

Assuming we get past all of that without being detected, then we have to find our way through a massive complex we don’t know the interior layout of while maintaining this stealth, find her, remove her without setting off any alarms, and exit without being detected or leaving any trace we were there. If we are detected at any point, we can expect the entire Ministry Bazaar-wide to converge on where we are. I don’t have to explain how much we don’t want that to happen.

I’m not asking anyone here to step up or risk their lives unless you're absolutely willing to suffer or die for this. If you want no part of this, now is the time to say it. But if you're in, you're in, until we succeed or fail for good.”

He turned to Kessa.

“You in?”

Kessa stared at the floor for a long time, then finally raised her head and nodded.

“Castor?”

“It’s a long shot, but I’m in,” she said.

“Kaji?”

Kaji looked back and forth between Rina and Quill. The conflict inside him obvious on his face. He cursed and spit on the ground.

“Give me a chance to put some of those Ministry punks in the dirt and I’m in,” he said.

“Zimmer?” Quill asked.

“I have no place to go but here. And unless any of you have experience with computers, you're going to need me,” Zimmer said. “I'm in.”

“Tasha?” Quill asked, looking between her and Zimmer. Zimmer signed to her. She sat silently for a long moment before replying. When she finished, Zimmer nodded.

“She’s in.”

Quill turned to Rina.

“Given everything we’re up against, you still wanna do this?” He asked.

Rina grinned.

“Absolutely.”