Airborne?

  We’d closed the windows st night. That, by the nature of windows, would have excluded spores along with scents and noise.

  There might be a few others in Drumsong Cascade who had, probably the people I’d heard screaming who were now ominously silent, but most people left windows open in the mild climate of the Grassnds. Animals couldn’t get in. Spores apparently could.

  How could you ever defend against spores? This world didn’t exactly have N95 masks, and with no data I wasn’t entirely sure even those would work. No contact. No warning. Just breathing. Not really optional, that.

  Suddenly I felt sick.

  Right on its heels was rage.

  “You are absolutely out of your fucking mind,” Logan said ftly. “They’re not going to let you get away with that. You know that. There’s no creativity in a world with only your mind in it dominating brain soup.”

  “They haven’t stopped me yet,” she said calmly. “I don’t think they can. That, or they agree with me.”

  “No. They don’t. You haven’t been paying attention. Nathan has had help. That kind of help.”

  “Then it was all bluster and they can’t interfere directly.”

  “Turned out I was wrong about Logan,” I said. “He’s definitely a bit of a prick and might actually be proud of that, but he’s not basically a bad person. Clearly I was also wrong about you, but in the opposite direction. Absolutely nothing I’ve heard has actually done justice to just how much of an arrogant egotistical narcissist you are.”

  “I would expect nothing better from you than petty name-calling and a complete failure to grasp that I was chosen.”

  “By who, Carol? Yourself? Voices in your head? Because I’ve heard it all before.”

  “According to her,” Logan said, “the same source as your nat-twenty rolls and your little bonus rewards. The same source that id down rules for mosslings and zombies.”

  “Only if they set us up to fight for their entertainment.”

  “Not what their profile says, nope.”

  “You don’t believe because you don’t understand,” the Moss Queen said, but I detected a distinct hint of grinding teeth behind the condescending facade. “No one before or since was right for the job. Only me.”

  “Because you have pnt skills?” Logan said mockingly. “If you’re the god of nature, I’m the god of crafting, and Nathan’s damned near the god of healing, and I know newcomers that are potentially the gods of cooking and textiles and performance and communication. One talks to animals who all like and trust him on sight, and oh yeah, there’s another newcomer with skills in gardens and pnts who decided she didn’t want to bother with the full Quincunx.”

  “Yes? And yet, I’m the most powerful force in this world.”

  “No you aren’t, and you fucking know it. If you’re about to break the whole damned world, then the bit about not interfering might matter less than usual.”

  “Nothing seems to be happening.”

  “You really willing to gamble everything on that?”

  “I have no choice! I cannot protect my world and do my job with an adversary constantly spreading discontent and rebellion, so I will do what I must, even if it breaks my heart! If I cannot protect and guide, then I have no job to do and no purpose!”

  “It’s not your world!” Serru shouted at her, coming up beside me. “Any discontent is because you pretend it is! It is our world, not yours, and everyone in it, people born here and the newcomers who choose to belong here, every single person wants you to get out of it! You have no right to tell us who to be or how to act! You are not this world’s creator and we owe you nothing!”

  The Moss Queen gave her a patronizing look of martyred patience. “Children do not understand what’s best for them, and often pursue paths that are not good for them.”

  “We are not children!” Zanshe shouted, her voice echoing off the buildings with a resonance Serru couldn’t generate. “And never, ever yours!”

  I wasn’t sure which I was going to choke on, my frustrated anger that the newcomers from my birth world were at the brink of destroying a beautiful and peaceful world, or the too-familiar excuses of love and compassion for an act that was unadulterated hate and contempt, or the tangle of pride in and fear for my friends that in the face of the end of their world, they weren’t giving up.

  We were only safe from her spores as long as we were in my Rain. I would eventually run out of mana and potions. As it was, my current Rain was easing up and I needed to renew it, but the sooner I did, the faster my mana would drop. Escape didn’t look very promising. How were we getting out of this?

  And why was she still standing here talking? I could un-mossify mosslings if they came close enough but there was nothing keeping her from having them throw rocks at me or something. Was she just enjoying the posturing that much? Probably she didn’t get an audience very often.

  One thing I was sure of: it was better for us if she was off-bance and reacting instead of thinking.

  “You’re not a goddess, Carol,” I told her. “You’re every invasive species that chokes out the native pnts and animals with no restraint so that you can thrive in a wastend. You’re every imperialist colonial invader showing up in a new nd to tell the native popution that they’re doing everything wrong and then bludgeon them into a pulp that you can reshape into your own image with weapons and disease and religion.”

  “How dare you!”

  Well, that had cracked the false nobility. Her flush only darkened green skin, reducing the contrast of the pattern; her hands clenched until the knuckles did the opposite, paling to near-white.

  If she was going to kill us or worse, I was going to make sure she heard this much.

  “You’re every fucking pgue that destroys living bodies to breed and spread, and every selfish asshole who spreads it because they don’t want to listen to medical advice, and every psycho who sees pestilence and war and famine and disaster as an opportunity to get even more obscenely rich off people suffering, and every eugenicist bigot who thinks only people in a very narrow range are even worth trying to save. The st thing you are is a protector. You are everything self-righteous and self-serving and self-important. You think the people of this world are children? You’re a toddler who only thinks about what they want and throws a screaming tantrum and breaks toys when they don’t get it. This is protecting.” I pulled up my Purification Rain, ramped up the power to cover a rger area despite the damage to my mana level, and brought it down over all of us again, including her and her deer mount and at least one yer of the ring around us.

  Which was turning into a very disturbing wall of dead mosslings—dead people—surrounding us.

  She jumped clear before the deer colpsed. “All you’re doing,” she said, straightening her living cloak with a flip of a hand, “is proving with every word that you have no comprehension of anything and that you are completely unrepentant with no intention of changing.”

  With still-falling rain pstering my blue and ivory coat to my body and my pale hair to my back, I gnced at Logan. “That is the same nguage, right? She’s hearing and speaking the same nguage we are?”

  He shrugged. “In theory.” His hands were moving, I noticed, though not dramatically—just his fingers twitching rather a lot, tapping against his crossed arms.

  This was like being on social media, but worse. Never thought I’d say that.

  “My job is to help people who are hurt or suffering,” I said, slowly and distinctly. “I am not going to stop doing that. You are the number one cause of suffering in this world. I am not buying a single word of your cim to be a goddess, or buying into your bme-shifting, and I am definitely not buying into your break-eggs-for-the-greater-good rhetorical crap. So no, it’s safe to say I’m not repenting anything and there is zero chance of changing.”

  She tilted her head to look at me, and shrugged, and then smiled. It was about as friendly as a close-up of an overwrought spoiled aggressive chihuahua’s teeth. “So what exactly do you intend to do? You’ll run out of magic eventually and then you can’t keep creating your Rain. At that point, you and your little friends are mine. Or you can force a path out of here, maybe with them, maybe not, or you can die. Running away would mean it would take a little longer for me to cim you. I wonder how long it will take to saturate the air completely with spores? You’d never know which breath is the one that infects you. There’s nowhere you can escape to. Except the Axis and leaving this world entirely. If you asked nicely, I might let you both do that.”

  Oh. That was why the dey. She didn’t want us dead, she wanted us infected.

  “No,” Logan said. “You won’t. That’s a lie. It’s the st pce you’d let either of us go.”

  “I’m not completely unreasonable. If you two were out of the way, I wouldn’t need to take extreme steps.”

  “Oh, I bet you’d still find a reason to do it,” I said. “I’ve met people like you. They’re gaining ground again back at home. Anything that’s different from them is by definition inferior and bad and should be eliminated and forced into line with their own values, by violence if necessary. They’ve just never had literal mind control avaible at this kind of level. They have to use fear and propaganda instead.”

  “It’s not mind control! It’s harmony! A perfect union of shared experience and perspective!”

  Serru made a strangled noise low in her throat.

  “No,” I said. “No one who’s experienced it thinks it’s anything but torture. That was pointed out to you in glorious detail recently but apparently that didn’t sink in at all.” I felt Serru’s hand on my shoulder briefly.

  “That kind of ignorant dissent is exactly what needs to be eliminated.”

  “There goes creativity and novelty,” Logan muttered distractedly.

  “You can infect the whole world,” Serru said, “breaking down minds and identities, but you can’t control that many people, can you? You can’t even dominate this entire town. That’s the real reason you’re holding back. That many sapient minds, all screaming, all aware that what you’ve done to them, you’ve also done to their children and siblings and partners. They are all refusing to act the way you want, aren’t they? Calling them here, keeping them here, that’s different, but you can’t force them to act in a way that every one of them knows would be destructive and painful for everyone they love in this life and the next. You cannot make a... what’s the word, Nathan? Army? You can’t have one. Because the respect for life and community we learn from birth is too strong and deep and real. It isn’t just something we say to justify doing the opposite! A few sapient minds, you can overwhelm, but this is too many.”

  “I’ve had more than enough of you and your impertinence! Be still!” the Moss Queen snapped.

  “And what are you going to do if I’m not?” Serru drew away from me and walked over to the ring of motionless mosslings, a third of the circle away from the Moss Queen. Only that disturbing low wall of fallen bodies separated her from them. I hoped fervently that she knew what she was doing. “The one who did this to you is angry at me for telling her the truth. She wants you to attack me and silence me. Are you going to?”

  The ring of mosslings, which was several deep at this point, stirred, all the way around us.

  One nearly in front of Serru, a felid, said, “No.”

  “She’s rude and disruptive!” the Moss Queen commanded. “Take her! Now!”

  “No.”

  Logan ughed. “You can mess them up but you can’t actually ensve that many. Priceless.”

  The Moss Queen scowled, but shrugged. “It’s a new infection. My control will get stronger.”

  “Not that strong,” Heket said. “Not against so many, all constantly resisting you. All hating you.”

  “And you’re going to run everything manually, are you?” Logan asked. “Micromanage farms and mills and all to keep people fed? Good thing buildings mostly self-repair so you can just squat in them while everyone and everything in the world just sits and stares adoringly in your direction for their whole lives without ever doing anything else. Their brains will turn to jelly and their bodies will starve. Mosslings can’t die but that’ll be the only thing keeping anything going through each year.”

  “How is that winning?” Heket demanded.

  “It’s an unpleasant transition into a new beginning,” the Moss Queen said.

  “It’s a silent dead world!”

  “With no creativity!” Logan added. “Nothing new. Nothing clever. Nothing beautiful. Maybe think about that?”

  “No kindness,” Aryennos said, ying a hand on my equine shoulder from the other side. “Do you even remember Annoris? Cervid hair stylist and body artist? Took time from her own life to try to help you find a way home?”

  The Moss Queen actually stopped and looked at him in surprise. “What?”

  “Lineva? Human musician who took a detour on her way to meet up with other performers so she could help Annoris? Nimre, jotun dancer and singer and Lineva’s friend, who stayed when Annoris decided she needed to get home? You lied to them and left them trying constantly to keep you out of trouble and making excuses for you to people you were rude to, but they still stayed with you because they felt that you needed someone.”

  “I didn’t! I let them stay! The revetion I had at the first site made it quite clear that I was chosen and would make it to all the others!”

  Emotionally hyper-reactive and driven to respond, to correct the record as she saw it. We could probably get her to do a full-on vilin monologue with minimal prompting, if there was a reason to. Serru had clearly established why the Moss Queen wasn’t telling mosslings to do some sort of ranged attack and interfere with my protection, but we were still at the same impasse. Spores there, rain and limited mana here, and she only had to wait.

  “The only threats at the time were environmental ones,” Serru said scornfully, coming back towards me. “Which can be bad enough, but there were no mosslings to attack you, so it would have been significantly easier. They could have just left you on the ring road with tents and food and gone back to their lives.”

  “Teriven and Vashana?” Aryennos persisted. “Jotun and human gatherers? They could have abandoned you deep in the Highnds. They should have, considering your rudeness. Lineva and Nimre might have died and gone back to their birthpces, but no one was sure about you.”

  “They might not have been,” Logan said. “But she was. There’s no way Jack hadn’t shown up by then to cover the basics. He never let anyone reach a second site without it, and usually not the first one. Doesn’t mean that she told anyone else about that conversation.” His fingers never stopped moving. What was he up to?

  “That is no one else’s business,” she spat. “No one else needs that information.”

  “Which information? That newcomers died in our own world, and so far we’ve all been from the same world even though there are lots of them out there, and by accident we end up here without a proper complete reset? That every site gives us a new form with new abilities based on skills we already had?”

  “Shut up!”

  “That the Axis gives us the same chance anyone gets, to leave this world and roll the dice, but because we don’t exactly belong here and the world isn’t entirely sure how to handle us, we get another option? Which, y’know, was supposed to be a compassionate gesture allowing us to continue a life that was suddenly cut short, not an invitation to become a terrorist and hijack the world. Oh no, someone might hear secrets!” He gnced at Aryennos. “Who else did she abuse?”

  “Silosi and Uraset,” Aryennos said, though I could see him making mental notes. “The musicians who didn’t want to go into the Highnds. Saurid and felid. Lineva and Nimre, as soon as they made sure that you weren’t alone, ran away because they couldn’t bear any more of the unpleasant things you were always saying and doing.”

  “They never understood,” the Moss Queen said. “They never believed me or appreciated the responsibility I was given. And despite that, I found them ter and gave them the honour of being among my first chosen ones, and they still had no gratitude.”

  “Clearly, no kind deed goes unpunished around you,” I said. “Whether it’s to you or to anyone you dislike.”

  “I think they understood you very well,” Aryennos said. “Lineva and Nimre made sure it was all written down, in detail. They spent more time with you than anyone else did, and they had a lot to say. Silosi and Uraset did their best to help you get to the fourth site and the Axis so you could go home. Away from our world, which you were constantly praising and compining about in the same sentence. This would be lovely, if it weren’t for that. Our shared world. Your subjective values. One of those needed to bend. You decided it should be the world.”

  “I. Was. Chosen,” she said through gritted teeth. “I will make this world what it has the potential to be. A genuine utopia, under wise and loving guidance, with no discord, no pain, no misunderstandings.”

  “It’s already close enough!” I said. “Spectacurly close, as close as you can really get with so many different individuals living their own lives, and it’s based on mutual respect and appreciation of the advantages of diversity, not on absolutely homogeneous uniformity. And it is overflowing with life and joy and creativity. Whether it needs any change is not your call to make.”

  “It is my call, and I’ve already made it.” She made an extravagant gesture with one arm. “I’ll also be getting rid of the delusional ideas that those mecha abominations are anything but unnatural and ugly, and make sure there are no more men pretending to be women or treating women with disrespect.”

  My golden dispy winked into sight without any action on my part, distracting me from further details of her manifesto, and a box asked me, Allow Access Permissions? Warning: this is high-level access, be sure you know what you’re doing and who you are giving permissions to!

  I gnced at Logan, who raised an eyebrow, expression all impatience.

  What else had he hacked to go with the post office and bags of holding?

  Did I trust him?