Irresistible Forces

1

Refugees.

A dead word from the Earth history books had shockingly come to life. Jenny Hart first heard it at the print shop as she was closing her station ready to go home.

"… a queue of refugees that goes out of sight and beyond because the gates of Anglia are closed for the first time during the day in living memory."

The office screen ran Angliacom most of the day and Jenny was used to treating it as background noise. It took a moment to register, but then she turned to stare at the wall. The screen was split into max cells, but Sam Witherspoon, the manager, had the volume pegged to the picture of a line of crowded vehicles on the road. Buses, lorries, even farmvees of one sort or another.

"Refugees?" Sam echoed blankly.

"Like from plague, famine, and war?" Jenny asked, and they looked at each other.

She'd asked a question, but she knew. He probably knew, too.

"The blighters," she said.

He turned and picked up his case. "I'd better get home. Lock up, all right?"

"Sure." Jenny was still staring at the screen, but she knew why he was rushing away. He had a family. Children. Probably her mother would be fretting about her.

She picked up a phone and claimed a screen cell for it. Her mother liked to see her children when she was worried. Her younger brother's face came on first. He took one look and yelled, "Mum! Jenny!"

Madge Hart appeared, red hair wild, eyes flashing. "Are you all right?"

"Of course I am, Mum. I'm not outside, you know."

"But isn't it awful? Those poor people. We should take them in. But they say there's more and more, and room elsewhere. But they'll end up out in the dark. I don't know."

"It makes no difference, Mum. Blighters don't care whether it's night or day." All the same, Gaians didn't like to be outside at night.

"It's all panic," her mother said, clearly remembering her maternal duty to reassure her children. "If there was real trouble, we'd know."

"That's right."

"Are you coming home for dinner?"

"Not right now. I want to see if I can find out what's really going on."

"That's a good idea. Ask Dan. He'll know. Bring him home for dinner as long as it's not too late. He's been looking peaky."

"Right, Mum."

Jenny clicked off before she smiled. Her mother had fussed over Dan since he'd been a toddler, long before he'd been spotted as a fixer and sent off to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities — generally known as Hellbane U. Now he was back and living on his own in the fixer's flat, she acted as if he might be starving to death. It wasn't as if he didn't have a family of his own here.

She powered down the screen and checked the place over, then went out, coding the lock. Where to go for news? The Merrie England pub?

No. She wanted to go up on the walls to see for herself. God knew why. A camera did a better job than human eyes, but she was sure the walls were crowded with gawkers. The Olde English battlements and turrets had always seemed like a pleasant whimsy, but as Jenny hurried toward the nearest steps, she wished they really could keep an enemy out.

They couldn't. In nearly two hundred years, Anglia had only experienced one blighter attack, but one was enough to show thick walls and drawbridges were no protection at all. Sixty-eight years ago, in the lovely Public Gardens, a blighter had killed a child in front of her horrified mother. Rendered her into a pile of greasy ash amid her pink pantsuit. There were photos.

A statue in the Gardens depicted a beautiful little girl holding a posy of flowers. Quite likely she'd been a pest, but she hadn't deserved to die in terror like that. No one did.

"Hostile amorphic native entities." That was how the exploratory services had labeled the one, puzzling problem on an otherwise perfect settlement planet. HANES.

Technically accurate, but it hadn't captured reality. Within a generation they had become known as hellbanes, and some settlements had their own name as well. Anglia, with typical wry humor, called them blighters. No coincidence that back on Earth blight had been a disease that turned plants to slime. But the Frankland "terreurs" was perhaps a better word. Jenny could feel it now, in herself and in the people all around, milling in gossip, heading to the walls, or hurrying home to protect or be protected.

Fear. Deep, formless fear, as if something terrible were blowing on the winds from the south.

An arm snagged around Jenny's waist and she whirled.

"Gyrth!"

Gyrth Fletcher was thin, long-faced, with blond curls and beard that made him look as if he'd stepped out of a medieval manuscript.

"Want to come down a dark passageway with me, pet?" he asked in mock villain voice.

She winked at him. "Depends what you're offering, don't it?"

"A better view. From an arrowslit."

"Lead on!"

He worked for wall maintenance, so he'd know those passageways, but the main appeal was company. That'd blow away her creepy feelings.

She couldn't help stating, "There's no real danger to being outside in the dark."

"Right." He didn't sound any happier than she was about it.

"Perhaps we should go and look for Dan. He'll know what's going on."

"He's probably in a stuffy room with the Witan."

"Oh, I suppose."

Strange to think of Dan as official like that. They'd been born within weeks of each other three houses apart, and according to her mother, been stuck together like toffees until they reached that age when the other sex suddenly seems alien. Before they'd had time to get over that, he'd tested positive for fixing and been sent to Hellbane U.

Bloody fixing. His three fortnights home each year hadn't been enough to keep the closeness over eight years, especially when Jenny had known he'd not come back in the end. Fixers didn't. They went where they were needed, and they always seemed to be needed far away. Anglia's fixer before Dan had been from Cathay.

"You all right, Jenny?"

"Sure. Where's this arrowslit? Perhaps we'll be able to hear what people are saying out there."

They held hands so they wouldn't be pulled apart in the crowd, but Jenny was thinking about Dan. Her childhood friend. Anglia's fixer. The one who'd be expected to deal with any blighters who invaded here. Sure, fixers trained to fight blighters, but there weren't any. Not here, at least, or anywhere far from the equator. So they fixed other things. Broken machines. Broken bones. Broken hearts if the break was physical. Things that didn't fight back.

"If there's trouble in the south, do you think Dan'll have to go to fight blighters there?" she asked.

Gyrth stopped and shook his head at her. "Hellbane U'll deal with it. They're not going to leave the towns without a fixer, are they? Not short of something desperate. And it can't be desperate. Didn't Dan say that blighters are so rare they have to hunt them to find one for the graduates to zap in their final test?"

"Yes, but then why the refugees?"

"You're such a worrier! What did that old Earth politician say? We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Come on."

Jenny went, but asked, "Have you ever thought it's strange that Dan came back here? Fixers don't."

"He said once that he asked. Apparently most don't." He grinned. "You've got to admit that a lot of times the town wishes he hadn't. He's a right change from quiet Miss Lixiao."

That he was. When Dan had left he'd been mischievous and thoughtful, and he'd come back wary and wild. It was a good wild, though, making him the burning heart of a group of lively twenty-somethings. Jenny wasn't sure she fit in with all the group, but she spent time with them because of Dan. She and he weren't toffees anymore, but they were still friends. Friends enough to worry.

They reached High Wall Street and the width of it meant she could let go of Gyrth's hand. Thirty feet.wide, it was edged on one side by railings overlooking the lower street, and on the other by shops, pubs, and cafes that backed onto the wall. So how did they get to an arrowslit from here?

Gyrth headed toward the space between Porter's Pies and Castleman's Ironmongery.

"Down there?" Jenny asked dubiously.

"It's safe."

But then he stopped, waved, and shouted. Jenny saw his sister Polly and Polly's husband, Assam, who waved and walked toward them. Or rather, Polly waddled. She was pregnant and bigger every time Jenny saw her. It didn't seem she could swell any more and not burst, but she still had a few weeks to go.

"We're going to get a better view from a slit," Gyrth told them. "Want to come?"

"I'll stick!" Polly protested but let herself be persuaded.

There was no real danger of Polly getting stuck, but it was definitely single file. Rubbish crunched under Jenny's shoes, some of it stinky, and despite the fact that the ginnel was open to the sky two stories above, she began to feel trapped. Or perhaps the faint pulse of panic was because of refugees, blighters, and war. It couldn't be true, but then, why all the people on the road?

She was ready to give up, turn back, when they reached the maintenance passage, wide enough for two or three. As a bonus, it was either cleaned regularly or the rubbish didn't drift this far. Gyrth led them to an arrowslit directly above the gate. From here, the amplified official voice was clear, though the response was indistinct.

Driven by her strange urgency, Jenny wasn't her usual polite self. She climbed first into the embrasure and worked forward to the slit. It was six feet high but only about a foot wide. Even so, she felt as if the world was spread before her, and all the voices outside were clear.

"What's going on?" Gyrth asked.

"Someone's asking distances to Skanda."

Jenny wished she knew how far back the queue stretched, but it wove out of sight between a coppice not far away.

"Didn't they used to keep the space around castles clear?" she asked Polly, a history teacher. "So they could see an enemy coming?"

"Certainly. But it's not as if anyone could see a blighter, or stop it if they did."

"Shame. I see how these work. I could fire out at the enemy, and they wouldn't be able to hit me."

"Seems a bit unsporting to me," Assam said, clearly teasing.

Polly frowned at him. "War was not a sport."

Gyrth jumped up into the space. "Let me have a look, Jenny."

She gave way and climbed back out. There'd been nothing out there to settle whatever was bothering her. "I don't know about that," she said, joining the other two. "Tournaments and things. And didn't they have what they called 'war games' even in recent times?"

"Probably still do," Polly said, rubbing her belly. "They still have war, though mostly robotic. Thank heavens for peaceful Gaia."

Jenny hugged herself, suddenly cold in this dank, shadowy space. "I wish our ancestors had chosen a more peaceful design."

"All part of good old Merrie England," Assam said.

"Merrie? They used to pour boiling oil down on the attackers, didn't they, Polly?"

"Well, probably not. Oil would have been expensive. But boiling water, and sometimes pitch, which would stick."

"Ugh!"

"And the attackers would hurl dead cows back with catapults," said Assam, clearly enjoying himself.

"Ugh, again. Stop it, Assam! It was bad enough learning about all this in school."

"But very necessary," said Polly in her best teacher manner. "Lest we forget."

Then Jenny heard the gates opening beneath her. "Are they letting someone in, Gyrth?"

"Yes. Must be an Anglian in the family. They can't keep native Anglians out, or their families."

"Then I suppose I'll be able to go to Erin if things get bad here."

"Not unless your mother's with you," Polly pointed out. She was always precise about such details. "And would you really want to leave?"

"Of course not. It was just a thought."

Jenny said it lightly. No one else seemed seriously concerned, but something was pressing on her mind. A kind of foreboding that defied words, as a half-remembered dream does.

Assam was still teasing Polly about castles. He was probably trying to amuse her, but Jenny thought she was getting upset.

"Talking of hurling cows," she interjected, "do you still show that film? The grail one. Though I suppose they were hurling cows from inside."

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail?" Polly said. "Of course. It's a key work to understanding ancient Earth warfare."

"The words Fetchez lavache illuminating the strife that arises out of separate languages and the consequent misunderstandings, and also the instinctive desire for union in the creation of a blended language, franglois. I got an A-plus on that paper — mainly by paraphrasing the textbooks."

"If you got an A-plus, you must have done more than that."

Jenny shrugged. "I liked the film even though I didn't really understand it."

"It is deep. I don't think we've truly grasped the meaning of shrubbery."

"The dark warrior's need for healthy, beautiful plants rather than destruction," Assam stated. That certainly was straight from the textbook.

"I feel there's more," Polly said. "After all, we've only just made the connection that explains Monty."

"Which is?" Jenny was glad for the distraction, even though she felt as if she was back in sixth-form history.

"Someone recently found a film in the archive called The Full Monty. Monty," Polly said with the air of one sharing an exciting treat, "turns out to mean naked!"

"Naked snake?"

"No, no! The snake is obvious. It's the serpent in the Garden of Eden — and that connects to shrubbery, of course. And Holy Grail is the ultimate freedom from strife to which all humanity aspires. But nakedness builds powerfully on the concept of Eden, don't you see? Nakedness in Eden — honesty and openness— threatened by the python of deceit."

"Ah," said Assam, "but what about the rabbit?"

Jenny wanted to kick him.

Polly merely gave him a look. "We don't quite understand the rabbit yet. I think it warns that the threat to the grail, to Eden, can trick us by appearing harmless."

"Well, that rules out the blighters. We've known they were bloody nasty since first settlement."

"I don't know," Jenny said. "I think we'd have mostly forgotten about them if they didn't show schoolkids that film of the scout being ashed."

"That's a crucial part of Gaian history," Polly protested.

"Perhaps, but it gave me nightmares for weeks."

Assam moved closer to the embrasure. "Anything new going on there, Gyrth?"

"Not really." Gyrth turned and climbed out. "Let's go to the Merrie. See what people are saying there."

No one argued. They headed out, but Jenny carried gloom with her, remembering the film of the scout's death.

Settlement was always preceded by exploration, and the first wave, the scouts, wore full recording equipment that sent real-time data to the ship. New worlds are unpredictable, after all, and corpses don't tell what killed them.

In this case, the data told the tale but left a mystery. Even though the suit-sys recorded 360 degrees, it had shown nothing, absolutely nothing, of what had attacked. The various sensors had recorded no change in air pressure, temperature, or radiation.

The body system readouts, however, had charted extreme stress — a racing heart, rapid breathing, and sky-high adrenaline and blood pressure. The scout had gasped and expressed terror, but she had screamed only once, at the point of death. The oblivious suit-sys had kept on recording, even when the person inside had become a pile of ash, but it had registered as little after the event as before.

Hostile Amorphic Native Entity.

Jenny could imagine how often that data disk had been viewed and reviewed, but in the end Gaia had been approved for settlement. There'd been no further attacks, and in all other respects it was the best EPP — Earth Potential Planet — ever found. It had the rarest of rare earths to provide an economic base and needed little amendment. It had even been free of anything close to a sentient species that might complicate ownership.

The perfect place, but when they emerged into the light and bustle of High Wall Street, Jenny sucked in a deep breath. She'd not thought she was claustrophobic. "Does anyone smell something funny?" she asked.

"Just the chip shop fat," Gyrth said. "Look, there's Dan."

Jenny turned, suddenly breathing more easily. Dan, and he looked normal. Not worried at all. Everything must be all right.

He was in his fixer uniform of brown shirt and trousers, with assorted badges and braids of significance to those who understood them, but there was nothing special about his looks. Average build, average height. Brown hair and blue eyes in an average face. Like her, really. But not anymore.

Something drew people to Dan Fixer like flies to jam. A fizz in the air, a brighter light, an energy that meant there was never a dull time when Dan was part of a group. Jenny thought she could feel the fizz now, even though he seemed relaxed, as if this were just another evening in Anglia. Work over. Time to play.

"I wondered where everyone was. Poking around down cracks between buildings?"

"Peering out through arrowslits," Jenny said, hooking arms with him as they all turned to go down the circular staircase to ground level. "And reanalyzing Monty Python. Polly, tell Dan about the monty stuff."

That kept things light and away from blighters for a while. Now, with Dan by her side and showing no sign of concern, Jenny wanted to forget about it all.

But it wasn't so easy. Despite the chatter and laughter, that something grated on her like an off note in music. When she and Dan ended up together behind the others, she had to ask, "Are there really more blighter attacks near the equator?"

His look was quick, and perhaps guarded. "Yes, but don't worry. It's all under control."

Leave it. Leave it. But she couldn't. "Then why are people pouring north?"

She thought he wasn't going to answer, but he pulled a face. "You'll hear soon enough. Central has recommended that everyone in the affected areas leave until the hellbanes are stamped out. After all, one person ashed is one person too many."

He declared it as a trite motto, but Assam caught it and turned back. "Damn right. But the problem won't reach here, will it? Polly can't travel now."

Polly and Gyrth stopped to listen.

"Blighters have always been more active near the equator," Dan pointed out. "There are plenty of fixers there, and Hellbane U as well, with the most skilled and experienced of us. They'll deal with it."

Jenny relaxed, and Polly said she was too tired to walk. Assam suggested a tram and Gyrth went with them.

Jenny and Dan strolled along in comfortable silence for a while, but she had questions, and this seemed the time to ask them. "Fixers can feel blighters, can't they? That's how you hunt them."

"I wouldn't exactly call it hunting. Just stand around and they come."

"I thought you had trouble finding them."

"True, but the only way we know is to bait a trap."

"With what?"

"Cow, pig…"

"Then you zap it?"

"That's the idea. Ideally before it ashes the poor beast."

"Do fixers ever fail? I mean… die?"

"Very rarely."

They paused to let a tram pass, and Jenny thought about that. She'd never imagined that fixing might be dangerous. "What does it feel like?"

He pulled a face. "It can't really be described. It's like a nightmare. It evaporates if we try to describe it."

As they crossed the tracks, she asked, "Can nonfixers sense this? At a distance, I mean?"

His look was quick and sharp. "You're sensing something now?"

"No! Maybe… I'm not a fixer, Dan. Don't even think it!"

"I don't, but some people have a trace. What are you picking up?"

She tried to explain, but it was as he'd said. Like trying to tell a dream. She didn't like the fact that it seemed to make sense to him. "So you're feeling the same thing, but much stronger?"

"I assume so."

"So they are coming?" she asked.

"No. Seriously, there's no need to worry, Jen. The action is all in the hotter lands."

She stopped. "What action?"

"The blighters, and the fixers dealing with them." He grabbed her hand. "Come on. The others will be there long before us." But three steps later he stopped and put his hand to his ear. He muttered something, but pulled the fine wire from his earring round to his mouth. "Fixer."

After a moment he pushed it back. "Kid fallen off High Wall near Watling. Luckily, only a broken leg. Want to come?"

"Of course!" She rarely got a chance to see him work, and it always delighted her.

Hand in hand they ran across to the nearest tram line and Dan waved one down, his uniform his authority. He seemed to have a map of the lines in his head. They jagged rapidly across town to the west wall, where they found a boy on the ground with two nurses in attendance and a small crowd of gawkers.

The patient was about thirteen, with freckles and ginger hair. A tubby, dark-haired lad hovered, looking more shocked than his injured friend. It turned out that the patient had already had something for the pain.

"Right leg," said the nurse who was kneeling beside him. "Tibia and fibula, I think. Might be spinal, too. Name's Jeff Bowlby."

"Thought you could fly, Jeff?" said Dan, sitting cross-legged beside him.

"Just fell. Will it hurt?"

Dan smiled at him. "Not at all. Relax."

He put his hands on the boy's leg, which was still covered by his jeans. Jenny knew the rules. Everyone did. In case of an accident do nothing except pain relief until the fixer comes, unless it's necessary to prevent death.

The youth tensed anyway, but then his eyes widened. "It tingles."

Dan didn't say anything. There really was nothing to see of what he was doing except a stillness that was very un-Danlike. But this time, Jenny realized, she could feel something.

Tingling? That was one way to put it. What she felt was in the air, or in her mind — or rather, in a part of her mind she hadn't known was there. Oh, she didn't like this. She didn't like it at all. She wasn't a fixer!

A man rushed up. "Jeffy?"

Jenny and the second nurse took an arm each before he could interfere.

"He's fine," said the nurse, his voice steady. "Mr. Bowlby, is it? No great harm done, and it's being fixed. We'll just need some details from you."

The young man led the father away to comfort him with record taking, and sting him with a bill. Copayment for foolishness.

"All right?" Dan said.

Jenny turned back to see a slight shudder pass through him as he raised his hands from the boy's leg.

"That's good as new, but take care of my work, okay, Jeff? Let's see if you've done any other damage." He passed his hands over the boy, pausing for a moment in one spot, then rose easily to his feet. "All clear."

The boy started to sit up but the nurse beside him held him down. "Oh, no you don't. We'll help your father take you home and keep an eye on you until the shock and medicine wear off." She looked up at Dan. "Good job, Fixer."

Dan gave the nurse his tally, and she typed the code in that would authorize his payment from Anglia's health program. Jenny let him guide her toward the tram stop, thinking about fixing. Really thinking about it for the first time.

"Does that take a lot of your power?"

"Not particularly. A string of those, and I'd be wiped for a while. Normally."

She thought about querying that, but he went on. "As it is, I welcome the work. If I don't use the energy, it tends to…flare."

"Flaring's bad?"

"It can turn me a bit wild."

"Wild's your greatest charm, Dan Rutherford, and you know it."

He laughed. "I like it when you call me that. I know people like my energy, but there's an edge there."

That put her worry into words. She thought he danced along an edge.

Flaring. Good word for it. Flaring high spirits that led to exciting times, but that threatened a conflagration, perhaps mostly of himself. Though fixers could fix so many problems, they rarely lived to a hundred.

"It's the magic," he said, putting an arm around her.

A shiver rippled up her back at his touch. Not particularly unpleasant, but a shiver, and for a moment she thought that was what he was referring to. But then she realized he meant the flaring. "You mean fixing?"

"Magic's a better word. A more realistic one."

"Realistic? It doesn't exist."

"Who knows? Why so many Earth stories if it never existed? And they show it as dangerous stuff. Magic creatures who lurk in dark places and trick people to their deaths. Or seduce them with gifts and feasts, then keep them prisoner forever. Or make them dance themselves to death for amusement. That fits."

She eased out of his arm. "That's superstition, and it's nothing to do with what you do. With fixing."

"Isn't it?"

She didn't want this, not now, with her stomach queasy and her mind jangled by his touch, and by an illusion of ashes on the wind. But his silence demanded something, and friends should be friends, so in the end she asked, "Well, is it?"

He leaned against the tram shelter. "There's no way to compare, is there? They say it doesn't work on Earth, but I'm not sure when they tried. I've thought of going back to find out, but who can afford it? Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's another way of looking at it."

The tram glided up, and they climbed on. He led the way to the back, where they used to sit as kids, but he talked quietly, even though there was no one close.

"Fixers aren't normal, Jen. You have to see that. They warn us to be solitary, that it's safer. Not to return home. To keep aloof wherever we go."

"Aloof?" It pulled a laugh from her. "Failed that part of the course, didn't you?"

"Abjectly. And I insisted on coming back home." A fleeting grin faded. "But sometimes I think they're right."

"No, they're not. Bad enough that you had to go away for years."

"People marry out. Your mother did. Or in, in that case."

"That's different. That's love. And I wonder how people can love enough to do a thing like that."

"So do 1.1 didn't like it, Jen."

It was the first time he'd said that, and he'd been back two years.

2

The tram stopped in Market Square then, however, and they got out and crossed to the Merrie England Pub. Gyrth, Polly, and Assam were at an outside table with a bunch of the others. Everyone hailed Dan as if he was rain in midsummer, asking where he'd been. Chairs shuffled. Yas, who looked like a princess from the Arabian Nights, snagged Dan's sleeve and towed him down beside her. Jenny went to a seat at the other end of the table, between Gyrth and Rolo.

She needed space. Things were shifting, and she didn't know what to do.

Magic.

Seduced with gifts and feasts.

Driven to dance to death.

For some reason Dan had wanted to tell her about that, and now it was scarily easy to imagine when she remembered some of the wild times, often here, at the Merrie England. Not tonight, though. Beneath chatter, the mood was definitely not merrie, and it wasn't just her group. The tavern, even the square, seemed subdued. Thoughts of war returned to trouble her. People didn't flee their homes for no reason.

A quarrel started behind them, then Yas complained about "some bitch" who'd stolen a promotion from her, and the means she'd used. Back in the tavern, a crash suggested someone had dropped a whole tray of glasses. Raised voices…

But then it changed. Being so aware of Dan, Jenny saw him do it, saw him open his gifts and set everyone alight. Saw him create a wild Dan Fixer night.

Yas laughed and let her complaints drop. The shouting stopped. Someone called for music. Jenny went with Rolo and Tom to fetch the instruments from the back room and started rollicking folk songs. That wasn't unusual. Three nights a week they did it for pay. It went beyond that, though.

Market Square was ringed with taverns and restaurants, all with tables outside on two levels. Soon everyone was joining in, thumping hands and feet with the rhythm. Fiddling into a sweat, Jenny glanced at Dan. There was no way to tell whether he was still making it happen, but she knew he was.

Dancing to death…

Other musicians joined them, and the crowd urged the group of them out into the center of the square. Jenny ended up on a precarious spot high on the central statue of the first ship to Gaia leaving Earth. Perched up there, surrounded by singing and stamping, she felt like the heart of a bright-burning bonfire that shone out on hundreds of faces at tables, in windows, and crowding the open space as well.

She realized people were being drawn here from all around.

Like moths to a flame? Or like a firestorm, sucking everything into infernal destruction? And what became of those at the center of such a storm?

Where was Dan? She found him, leaning against the base of the ship, singing along with the rest. This couldn't be bad. Dan wasn't bad. He was just flaring, burning off his whatever, and creating light against the dark at the same time.

But why tonight did Dan the fixer need so much light, laughter, and song? Why did he have so much energy to burn, even after fixing that boy's leg? What did it say about the blighters?

Jenny escaped that by diving back into the music.

Tom called an end to it at midnight.

"We've got to stop. I'll get fired if my mates turn up." He was a policeman. "Last song!" he called in his strong voice.

Despite protests, they huddled, trying to come up with the best piece to wrap this up without a riot.

" 'Gaia,' " Jenny said.

Tom looked at her. "The anthem?"

"You can sing it, can't you? I think it's right."

No one argued, which was strange. They weren't in the habit of singing the planet's syrupy anthem based on a bad poem by one of the first settlers. Each settlement had its own anthem, but Gaia was dragged out at any planetary-wide event — usually to groans.

Jenny wondered where the idea had come from and glanced at Dan, but he was sitting now, an adoring woman on each arm. She didn't even know them.

Flies to jam. She'd better watch it. She wasn't going to ruin a friendship by turning stupid over Dan. But if he wanted the anthem, he could have it. She struck up a chord and Tom started to sing in his deep, strong voice.

The crowd was singing along by then, and in the chorus, the thunder of it seemed to rattle the windows all around. With the gates closed and blighters attacking, the words had new meaning. Power crept up Jenny's spine, almost making her hands fumble on her fiddle.

She glanced down at Dan again. He had his head back and his eyes closed as if he was absorbing something from the air.

It was the crowd rather than Tom that repeated the chorus one last time, almost softly despite the hundreds of voices.

Like a lamp turned down, the roaring energy settled to a glow, and everyone began to drift peacefully away.

Jenny sat in the convenient dip between ship and Earth because her legs had turned weak. The others looked pretty shocked.

"The power," Tom said.

The magic, she thought, and she might have a bit of it.

Dan stood waiting to help her down, but she jumped down by herself, then hurried back to the tavern with her fiddle.

The publican, Ozzy Rooke, shook his head. "You're supposed to get the customers drinking, not out there singing the planetary anthem!" He was joking, though, and he gave them all a free round of beer.

Dan sat beside Jenny at the bar. She made a business of picking up her glass because it let her move an inch away. She probed the air around him. Nothing. Nothing more than the usual aura that was Dan. Had he burned it all up in that singing?

By the time Ozzy threw them out and locked up, the city was quiet — a soft quiet that seemed infinitely safe. They set off home together, but Rolo and Tom split off not far from the square. Jenny, Dan, Gyrth, and Yas carried on in a group, singing, teasing, and even tussling sometimes.

Like kids again. Or like teenagers. Dan kept apart a bit, and Jenny remembered that he'd missed most of these nights — the singing, the horseplay, the maneuvering for possible bedmates. She noticed Yas maneuvering for Dan. That'd be nothing new, but she was glad he wasn't responding tonight.

In Chestnut Copse; Yas went into her building alone with a last, hopeful look, Gyrth turned off at the next corner, leaving Jenny and Dan alone for the last little way. Nothing unusual in that, except that, for the first time, she was nervous.

It was just that it had been a strange day, but she hoped he wouldn't touch, wouldn't even want to talk. Perhaps he felt the same, because he walked beside her in silence, and by the time they came to his place, that silence was comforting as a lambswool blanket. It said that everything was all right.

The fixer's flat took up the whole ground floor of a large house. They held parties there sometimes because no one else had such a space to themselves. Jenny still lived at home.

They paused at the bottom of the steps. "Night, then," Jenny said.

"I'll walk you to your place."

She stared at him. "You expect a blighter to leap out of the pavement?"

"You never know." But then he smiled. "I'm just not ready to go to bed."

Tension ricked her shoulders, but she said, "Oh, okay, then. Thanks."

He touched her arm. "You're feeling the effects of the music, aren't you?"

"No. Yes, but it was okay. It was good." She might as well tackle it. "Did you make it happen?"

"I helped." He turned her, and they walked on. "I am the town's fixer, after all."

"What were you fixing?"

"The closing of the gates upset a lot of people."

How often did he do things like that? Could he, did he, fix people's moods? Fix hers? They were on her street now, a tall terrace facing a small park called Surrey Green.

"It's a bright-burning night, and I'm not ready for sleep," he said. "Do you want to walk around the park and talk some more?"

It was the dead hour on a chilly night, and Jenny felt drained, but she couldn't not go. Something important hovered here. They walked through a gap in the hedge, but as soon as they were away from the sparse street lights, she couldn't see what was in front of her feet.

She stopped. "I'm likely to break a leg."

Dan put an arm around her. "Then you're with the right person. Come on."

"It'll still hurt." It came out light as she'd hoped, but her entire skin was jumping as she let him lead her forward. "Night vision, too?"

"Right."

And what else?

There was talk about fixers and sex. Yas spoke about Dan in a way that suggested things. But this was Dan. They'd played in the sandbox here together. Say something, Jenny. Something light and normal.

"The anthem really is terrible, isn't it?"

"Awful. But you know, that used to mean full of awe. And terrible might not be a word to toss around these days."

No talking about terror or awe. "Perhaps we should write a new one."

"I don't think you can do that with an anthem. It has special powers."

No talking about special powers. "Do you think Yas'll resign over not getting that promotion?"

"No, she'll sabotage her rival and get her way in the end."

"Poor rival."

"Some people are forces of nature."

Jenny knew then that he wanted to talk about forces of nature, about powers, about blighters. Was it because she'd admitted to sensing things, revealed that she might have a bit of whatever made up the fixers? She'd rather bury that in the Surrey Green sandbox.

Distant streetlights glinted on bits of the playground, and she grabbed on to the past. "Remember the hours we used to spend on the swings here?"

"And the high slide."

"You certainly kept the fixer busy."

"I sometimes wonder if that caused it. If it's infectious."

She stiffened, on the edge of pulling away. "Really?"

He laughed and snagged her tight. "No. I could always do weird stuff. Mum and Dad tried to get me to hide it, but testing sniffs it out anyway. Remember that time you caught the cricket ball funny and thought you'd broken your finger?"

"Yes."

"You had."

Jenny remembered the horrible pain that had suddenly eased, so that when some adults came running they thought she'd been making a fuss about nothing. They'd been — what? — eight? Dan hadn't even touched her. He'd just stood there saying stupid things like "Are you all right, Jen?"

She knew he didn't glow or anything, but she'd thought he had to touch. She tried to remember whether there'd been a tingle. She'd probably been in too much pain.

"We're lucky, aren't we?" she said.

"You and me?"

She bumped him with her hip. "Gaia! The perfect planet. Healthy, fruitful. Rare earths to pay our way, and fixers to mend almost everything."

"And blighters," he pointed out.

"Perhaps every grail has to have a python."

"I'd rather have the fluffy bunny. But blighters aren't too high a price to pay."

Jenny thought of the refugees. "Still? Could the price become too high?"

"When there's no choice, the price can never be too high, can it? Earth's recovering, but it's still trying to ship people out rather than take them back. Even spread around other colonies we'd be an unbalancing factor."

"So it's Gaia or nothing. That's all right. I can't imagine leaving."

They wove through the playground where the swings, the slides, and the roundabout sat still, as if waiting for ghostly children. A vision swept upon her — of the whole of Gaia like this. The blighters didn't destroy things, only animals and people.

"There's no real danger, is there? From the blighters? I mean to Gaia."

He didn't immediately answer, and chill seeped into her bones. He was going to be honest, and she wished she hadn't asked.

"There's danger," he said at last, grabbing a bar of the roundabout and spinning it as if doing so might whirl something away. "People are being ashed. A lot of people, and even more animals. But the local fixers and teams from Hellbane U should be able to control things, especially now that people are leaving. They've been told to kill all the large animals before they leave so the blighters won't have anything to feed on."

"Feed on?" She moved out of his arm, spinning the slowing roundabout as an excuse.

"Where else do the victims go? They're consumed, so it has to be a kind of feeding. Of energy, we assume. The blighters are a form of energy."

Jenny shivered, even though it wasn't really so shocking. It was more that she'd not thought much about blighters before. Why should she? They were nasty, but they hardly ever popped up even near the equator, and if one did, a fixer got rid of it before it could do more damage.

Like pimples — of a lethal sort.

The roundabout had slowed again. She gave it a running spin and jumped on. "So you're going to starve them, and that'll be an end of it?"

"That's the plan." He caught it, spun it again, and joined her, but on the other side for balance. The world whirled, but they were steady inside this circle.

"What are the blighters doing, Dan? What are they? What do they want?"

"We don't know. Despite generations of study, we know grot all. They're not easy to study. Until recently they were hard to even find. There've always been people who thought they were an hallucination, or a neurosis brought on by bad air. Or by planetary contamination of our food."

"Food? We brought in Earth plants."

"But they feed on Gaian soil. As we do."

The roundabout slowed and slowed, and neither of them spun it again.

"Blighters can't be imaginary," Jenny said. "What about the ashes?"

"That's the rub, isn't it? But apparently there's something called spontaneous combustion. It's been recorded on Earth. People suddenly burst into flames and burn up, leaving acrid ash. It doesn't fit because blighters cause no flames or smoke, but we humans hate something we can't measure and explain."

"Like magic," she said, stepping off the still roundabout.

"Like magic," he agreed, joining her on the grass.

The late night and the chill were getting to her, aching in her bones, shivering over her skin, especially now they were apart. "How do you zap a blighter?"

"We sense them coming and instinctively fix them. It seems to kill them. It's hard to explain. We don't really understand what we do. We just know it works."

"So the fixers down south are fixing things, but they need help from Hellbane U?"

"There are rather a lot of blighters."

"Why so many now?"

"No one knows."

"No one knows much, do they?"

He laughed, but wryly. "No."

She was suddenly exhausted, as much by a sense of helplessness as by the late hour — and that helplessness came from Dan.

"I have to get to bed," she said. "I have to go to work tomorrow. Music usually invigorates me, but tonight it wiped me out."

Without protest, he turned to cross the soccer pitch toward the houses beyond the hedge, but he put an arm around her, and she found it too comforting to resist.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't need much sleep. I sometimes forget that normal people do."

Normal. On the street, beneath the lights, she gently moved away from him, trying to ignore a drag, as if two sticky surfaces were pulling apart. Stuck like two toffees…

"You don't sleep much because of your fixer abilities?"

"The energy of it, yes." He took her hand, rubbing the knuckles with his thumb. "There are things that help."

All kinds of interesting muscles contracted, but she knew — perhaps had always known — that her friend Dan Fixer was too strong a drink for her. Spontaneous combustion.

"You should have gone with Yas, then."

The streetlight two doors down showed his smile. "I don't think so." He raised her left hand and kissed the palm — a lover's move, designed to invite without words. "Anytime you'd like, Jen. Sleep tight."

She watched him walk away.

Anytime?

She had only to ask?

She turned and pressed the lock, her exhausted mind staggering around perilous possibilities.

She stumbled up the stairs and fell into bed thinking she'd probably dreamed the whole thing. For that and a bundle of other excellent reasons, she couldn't imagine taking him up on the offer.

3

For a few days everyone spent time on the wall watching the stream of refugees, but then they lost interest There was nothing new to see, it was depressing, and Anglians were growing more worried about their own security. The town was overcrowded, but that wasn't the problem. It was worry about whether they, too, would end up on the road north.

An occasional group of refugees had a citizen in the family and had to be let in. Those people told tales of whole families ashed. Angliacom showed charts and maps that tracked the hellbane wave, though the announcers assured everyone that the fixers down south had everything under control and that the refugees should be able to go home any day.

However, part of the screen constantly showed the warning that refugees must slaughter large animals before leaving. It was presented as a kindness — the animals would lack care and possibly be victims of a terrifying death — but it was, of course, to starve the blighters.

Jenny wondered how many people recognized that. She also wondered how many saw how the news was sugaring everything and sensed the darker truth. Was she the only one to feel she could taste bitter ashes on the wind, who sensed the peril in the earth, thrumming stronger and stronger, coming, coming, coming…

If the starve-them-to-death plan was working, why did the pressure grow day by day?

Attempts to contact settlements near the affected areas either failed or found people frightened and planning to move. Gaia Central was having trouble keeping track of who was where. Just possibly the first settlers had made a mistake when they'd rejected Earth's efficient communication system and strong, centralized government.

Paradise didn't need that, they'd said, but Gaia wasn't paradise anymore.

Tension was making her jumpy and queasy. Drops got her through her workday, but she stayed home at night, watching the screen with her family.

Dan came over once. He checked her out, but said there was nothing he could fix. He looked worried, and she knew then that the way she felt was to do with the blighters. He looked fine, however, and she heard that every night at the Merrie was a wild night.

She decided all that energy might help her and went there after work, but it was nothing like the music night. Dan flared with too much energy, edgy energy that screamed down her nerves and twisted up her spine, giving her a crashing headache. No one else seemed bothered, but she fled for her own salvation, and because she thought Dan might burn himself to ash.

There was nothing she could do.

Or nothing she wanted to do.

She'd caught his eyes on her once. He'd held the moment before looking away. There must be a hundred women ready to have sex with Dan Fixer, especially now, and she couldn't. Not now.

Spontaneous combustion.

Then Polly's baby was born sick. Jenny was at the hospital with some of the others, waiting for the exciting news. She caught a glimpse of the baby being rushed from delivery room to intensive care in a red pod incubator. It looked tired of life already. A word came into her mind. Blight.

A tight-faced nurse came out of Polly's room. Jenny stepped in her way. "Has the fixer been called?"

"It's not a problem that can be fixed." The nurse walked away, and Jenny turned to the others.

"There must be something Dan can do!"

Yas gave her a look. "This isn't a broken bone or a gash, Jenny. You think he walks on water."

The sharpness of it took Jenny back. "It wouldn't hurt to ask."

"If you want to chase him down…"

Jenny controlled an angry retort. "I do."

She strode to a wall phone and punched in his code. Nothing. She left a message, then tried Ozzy. Dan wasn't at the Merrie. She tried three other possible places. Nothing, nothing, nothing. If only she had his buzzer code, but that was for official business.

She'd always thought Gaia's ways right, but on Earth and most other worlds everyone had a buzzer. They could phone and be phoned anywhere, anytime. A horrible thought, but right now she wanted it.

She should give up, but Yas was looking at her with something close to a smirk, so she went out to search. She hopped a tram and rode it around Low Wall, then took another in to Market Square. Where the hell was he?

He might be at the hospital by now! She leapt off the tram at the next stop and ran to a phonepost. He wasn't there, and the baby was fading fast. She turned from the post — and found Dan there. She knew from his face, but asked anyway. "You heard?"

"Yes."

"So what are you going to do?"

"There's nothing I can do."

"What do you mean? You're a fixer."

He looked worn. Not so much tired, but fined down, burned down.

"I can't do anything, Jen. Do you think Assam and Polly want me there to toss out platitudinous comforts?"

"No, they want you there to do something, no matter how small."

"Think!"

She jerked back, feeling for a moment as if he might shake her.

"My father died last year. I'd have fixed that if I could do miracles, wouldn't I?" He sucked in a breath and ran a hand through his hair. "This is why they recommend that fixers don't return to their homes. Too many personal pressures."

His resistance was like a hand pushing her away, but she said, "Since you do live here, can't you at least try? Come on." She took his hand and tugged. After a moment he went with her, but she felt his reluctance like a weight.

She pulled him onto the West Street tram, but stayed standing near the doors. She couldn't bear to sit down. "Are you all right?"

"Of course."

But he looked almost as weary as the sick baby and she was going over his words. He'd said he couldn't do anything. Had he lost his powers? Had he blasted them away?

They got off at the hospital stop, and she steered him toward the main entrance. But then he balked and turned aside.

"Dan!" She hurried after. "Dan, stop. Please!"

He turned down a side street, and she caught him at a small door. "What are you doing?"

He pressed a lock. Hand print, not code. He used this door often.

The door opened, and she followed him in, watched as he took a set of hospital grays off a shelf and pulled them on over his uniform. "Jen, think. What happens if Dan Fixer walks around the hospital?"

"Everyone wants you to heal them." Why hadn't she thought of that?

He added a stretchy helmet, one designed for a man with a beard, which left only his eyes uncovered. He looked older, harder. Or perhaps he was.

"Why don't you, then? Heal everything."

"For a start, there's not enough of me to go round. But I can only fix things to make them right, which means mostly injuries. Disease is part of nature, like death. I can't fix nature."

He was angry. At the limits of his powers, or at her?

"I'll look at the baby," he said, "but I doubt it's fixable." He turned and headed out of the room.

Jenny followed, wincing. How arrogant to drag him here, as if she knew better than the hospital. She ached for Polly, for Assam, and for Dan who must want to make their baby healthy as much as she did.

At the intensive care nursery he said something to a staff member, and Jenny was given a gray coverall and cap. She didn't want to go with him, but she'd dragged him here. She must. They walked through the steriline into the gently lit room where soft music played with a beat that was surely that of an adult human heart.

It was so peaceful. Surely it couldn't be a place of death.

At least Gaia accepted the latest technology for problems like this. There were four red-laced incubator pods and two nurses moving between them, constantly checking the sheath monitors on their arms.

Dan paused at each incubator, then stopped at one. He signaled a nurse, and she hurried over. Jenny saw the sudden light in the nurse's eyes, and tears pricked at her own. Dan had found something he could fix, but the name card said Smithers. It wasn't Polly's baby.

She went closer and saw a tiny baby under a multicolored mesh. Its chest labored, and its legs and arms seemed grayish instead of pink. Dan pushed his hand through the mesh and touched the child.

The baby clutched his finger as babies do, but to Jenny it looked as if the mite recognized a lifeline. The little chest still rose and fell, but less desperately, and the fingers and toes began to turn pink. The mesh began to fade and retract…

"Heart," said a nurse, coming up beside Jenny. "Valve," she went on. "I was hoping it would be fixable when Dan came around. I'm glad he's early. It's always special to see him work."

"He comes every day?"

"Or when we call. We wait if we can. He has to have a life."

Yes, he did. Jenny was ashamed that she didn't know his real life at all. Some friend she was.

He eased his finger out of the baby's clutch, then touched the round cheek, smiling a little. But the smile faded as he moved on to the last incubator.

"He won't be able to help there," the nurse said, obviously surprised.

Jenny trailed after to see the flaccid, laboring baby. It already looked ancient and withered. Dan put his hands on the shell and leaned there. She tried to believe that he was doing something, something miraculous, but she knew it was simple grief.

She wanted to say, Sorry, sorry, sorry …

He turned and walked out. She hurried after.

"Since I'm here I might as well do my rounds. You'll want to be with Polly and Assam." It was a dismissal, but he added, "If they ask, tell them I'm sorry."

Then he was gone, and Jenny fought tears, for him as much as for the baby, as she worked her way out of the hospital gear.

After that, things only got worse. Polly and Assam had been the first of Jenny's friends to choose pregnancy, and the disaster appalled them all. Pregnancy was supposed to lead smoothly to a beautiful, healthy baby. The other babies in the pods had shown that problems happened, that perhaps disaster was natural, but it felt all wrong on top of so many other all wrongs. She couldn't stop thinking that it was blight, carried as spores on the wind.

Polly and Assam didn't blame Dan, but they avoided him. Jenny thought about telling them that he'd visited the nursery, but would it make it better or worse? Two weeks after the birth they decided to visit Assam's family in Araby, even though it was farther south. The good-bye party was subdued. Dan attended, but briefly.

Jenny looked at him and thought his flame was dying. Was it drowning in the blighters' growing power? Or was he as sick as she was of the bitter catch at the back of the throat, the amorphic taste of ashes on the wind?

Or was it simply the dead baby?

She couldn't fight off strange thoughts about that.

Had Dan struggled for a moment over that incubator? He'd talked about hard decisions. He'd used the word "can't." That didn't just mean able to; it could mean allowed to. She cornered him just outside the room.

"Could you have saved little Hal?"

He looked at her, eyes guarded. "Yes."

"What?"

He put fingers over her lips. "Not here."

He grabbed her arm and drew her out of the house, into the street. "There are rules, Jen. We can't fix what shouldn't be fixed."

"Who says? Who says what shouldn't be fixed?"

He shook his head as if it buzzed. "The rules. There's a difference between something broken and something sick. Nature must rule in the end."

She stared at him. "You let your father die because of rules?"

He didn't answer, but she knew it was true.

She turned and walked away, walked home to find her parents talking about it being too long since they'd visited cousin Mike in Erin. Obviously the soothing reports of "progress" and "imminent solution" weren't working anymore.

Or the soothing had stopped. When she turned on the Angliacom screen cell, the announcer was talking about the blighters "swarming." It made them sound like maniac bees.

Where, then, was the honey?

"However, we will soon see victory in the Hellbane Wars."

That was the first time she'd heard it officially described as a war.

She knew war. They'd studied it in school. Armies and battles, diplomats and negotiations. One side knew who the other side was, knew what the enemy wanted. If this was war, what did the enemy want? Where were the negotiators with whom they could bargain for mercy?

Then one day a news camera accidentally caught an ashing. The camera was panning a deserted settlement, but then switched to a person in the distance, walking toward the road. The woman, in dusty shirt and trousers, a knapsack over one shoulder, waved and hurried forward, probably hoping for a lift.

Then she looked around as if she'd heard something or caught something out of the corner of her eye. And she became afraid.

Jenny watched, tasting that fear as the woman began to run, calling for help but constantly turning and twisting as if trying to track an enemy. She stumbled, scrambled up, then stopped, frozen, mouth wide in a scream of terror. There was nothing to see of the blighter; not so much as dust stirring in a breeze.

The picture juddered, though, showing the operator's fear. The mike caught his mutters along with the scream. "Can't do anything. Can't help. God help us. Gotta go. Gotta go…"

But he stayed, holding the camera as steady as he could, to record the anonymous victim's abrupt translation into empty clothing and that small pile of ash.

No explosion, no fire, no wind.

Just dissolution.

Jenny's mother broke down in tears, then declared that they were all leaving, now.

Jenny protested. "I don't even know cousin Mike."

"That's not the point, and you know it!" Her mother turned to Jenny's ashen fifteen-year-old brother. "Charlie, grab some clothes. Not too many."

"I have work to do," Jenny said.

"Gaia can live without another brochure or handbook. No, you can't take all those books. Bill!" she yelled to Jenny's father. "Pack for Charlie, will you? Jenny, love, please. You saw that film. You want to stay for that?"

"I don't think we can run from it, Mum. If the fixers can't stop them, the blighters are going to eat us all."

"Not my family, they aren't." Her mother dashed around, gathering little things — photographs, documents. "Of course the fixers'll fix it. It'll just take a little more time. And during that time it's stupid to stand in the way!"

Jenny helped stuff the things in a bag. "You're probably right, Mum, but I can't go. I'm sorry."

She realized then that part of the reason was Dan. She was still angry with him, but she couldn't abandon him.

She helped everyone pack, went with them to the station, and bit back tears as she waved them off. She didn't regret her decision, only her mother's tearful despair.

She wandered back home. Because the house was so empty, she started going to the Merrie every night, though it wasn't very merrie. It was never more than half full, and people often asked for melancholy songs. Rolo and Gyrth had left. Yas was still around, perhaps because she seemed to be attached to Tom now, and he couldn't leave, being a policeman.

So who was with Dan these days? From the look of him the odd time he turned up at the pub, perhaps no one. He was Anglia's sole defense when the blighters arrived. Perhaps she should…

But she felt too fragile now. She thought she'd break under any pressure beyond even Dan Fixer's ability to mend.

Jenny was playing a Scottish lament when she saw the Urgent News! line scrolling across the message section of the silent screen. Ozzy switched the sound up, and she stopped playing.

"In a new move to put an end to the blighters," an announcer said, "all the fixers have been called to the front. Reports from Hellbane U…"

"What the heck's 'the front'?" someone asked.

"Old Earth war term," replied Ozzy. "The place where one army meets the other. Don't reckon it can be far from here now."

As if in answer, a map popped up, showing the red tide lapping at Anglia's borders.

"Pap," Ozzy said, muting the sound again, but he added, "Perhaps it's time to close the bloody dismal England."

Jenny could only think that Dan was going to leave. To fight blighters. And Gaia was losing the war.

"Any idea where Dan is, Ozzy?"

"Haven't seem him in a couple of days, luv. Perhaps he's on his way."

"No." Could she sense him, or was it wishful thinking?

She left her fiddle there on the bar and went in search. Stupid, stupid, to have kept her distance all these weeks! He was probably right about nature. He'd told her, hoping for understanding, and she'd walked away.

The pubs were quiet, the music somber, and Dan was nowhere to be found. Not in the square, not at his place, not at the hospital. Not at his family's home; his mother and brothers hadn't left but looked as if they already had news of his death.

Jenny stopped outside the house, fighting tears. Weeks ago he'd mentioned the experts from Hellbane U going to help the local fixers in the fight. Since then the blighters had only grown in strength. If the experts had failed, what could simple fixers like Dan do?

Die, that's what.

She remembered another old war term. "Cannon fodder."

Perhaps he was already on his way, but she wandered the streets looking for him, hoping against hope that she'd have a chance to say something, do something to help before he left.

Eventually, she gave up, stopping to lean against some railings. Then she realized they were the ones around the Public Gardens — the place where the one solitary blighter had dared to pop up in Anglia.

The perfume of herbs and flowers played sweetly on the night air, and she thought how strange it was that all of this — all the simulations of Earth they'd created — would survive when the people were ash.

4

She turned in through the wrought iron gates and followed the wandering path toward the lake and the statue of the little victim. And there, near the statue, stood Dan, tossing stones into the lake.

Jenny paused, purpose tangling into uncertainty. Perhaps he wanted to be alone. He'd have no trouble finding company if he needed it.

Then he turned and held out a hand. "Jen."

There was welcome in it, but there was more. After a teetering moment, she went forward and put her hand in his. "Are you going to have to go?"

"I am going."

"You haven't been called?"

"I'm not sure there's anyone left to call me."

"The news…?"

"I gave Angliacom that information."

He slid his hand free and went back to tossing stones into the glassy water. Plop. Plop. Plop. Each stone made a mesmerizingly slow arc, as if the air was denser than it should be.

"What do you mean, no one's left to call?"

"They're all gone." Plop. "The staff from Hellbane." Plop. "The fixers down south." Plop.

A chilly emptiness weakened her, and she sat where lawn met the lake's shingled edge.

Dan stopped tossing the stones. "There's just the ones in the northern and southern settlements. We've decided we might as well have a go, as they used to say."

It was like listening to nonsense. "Who used to say?"

He turned to her, and she thought he looked more relaxed than she'd seen him in weeks. But thin. Too thin.

"Men in war stories. It's usually men. I've been checking out books and films about war. Lawrence of Arabia. The Dam Busters. Reach for the Sky. Sirius V. Looking for suggestions."

"Did you find any?"

"Be brave, don't give up, and have the right weapons."

Tempting to think him mad, or joking like the old Dan, but he was deadly serious. Bad adjective, Jenny.

"What's going to happen, then?"

"I'm going to die. But," he added with an almost Dannish smile, "in the best tradition of English heroism, I'm going to keep a stiff upper lip and take as many with me as I can."

Jenny wanted to say no, to deny reality, but she knew it was the flat truth. "We're all going to die, I suppose. Is there anything the rest of us can do?"

"Give us reason to try, perhaps."

"If you fail, you die. Isn't that reason enough?"

He sat on the grass facing her. "I'm worn out by the waiting. In a way, I want it over."

She shivered, recognizing a reflection of her own state.

"Living and dying don't seem particularly important anymore," he said, "but Gaia is. I mean us, the people who've made Gaia home. I'm going to fight for that as long as I can. Perhaps I can make a difference."

She reached out and touched his hand.

"I know what it'll cost, though, Jen. You probably know, too. Why it seems easier to die now. Get it over with."

It was the ashes in the wind put into words.

Praying she read him right, she moved close and grasped his tense hands, then raised one for the lover's kiss, as he had done to her, so long ago.

His hand flexed slightly against her jaw. "Are you preparing to sacrifice yourself for the cause?"

"No." If he could face the blighters, she could face honesty. "Just hoping."

He closed his eyes, then drew her hand to his mouth. "I called you. Tonight. Bad form when you'd not taken up my offer, but… I need you, Jen. You. Now."

Breathtakingly, she didn't doubt it. There'd been no reason for her wandering search, and in fact she hadn't wandered, but had drifted here like a feather on the wind.

"How. How did you call me?"

He drew her close, and his lips traced her cheek, her ear, her jaw. "I'm practicing rusty skills. If I'm going to fight, I'm going to fight dirty."

"I don't understand."

"You don't need to…"

And she didn't. There was nothing rusty about his lovemaking skills, and she sensed the something extra. It was little to do with her, no matter what he said, but everything to do with magic, with death. With more than death.

It sprang from hovering annihilation. Fear of it surrounded them and played in the magic of their minds. Fear of a void, which he fought with fire.

She let him undress her because he wanted to, and because each incidental brush of his hands on her skin was like liquid pleasure. It flowed over her and into her, and she pushed off his shirt to get to his skin, to give back, to draw more.

When she was naked, she stripped him, stroked him, cradled him. Then he was in her, slow, relentless, eternal, building a dizzying power. She might have been afraid of dying if things like that mattered anymore. All that mattered now was the cauterizing conflagration, and the drifting postapocalyptic dream.

She came back to reality to find that she was lying on her back on soft grass with Dan half over her, his head cradled on her breasts. He seemed relaxed, replete, and she felt the same way. What a fool she'd been — they could have been easing each other's bodies, minds, and souls like this all along.

So much wasted time, and now he was going off to die.

"Rusty skills," she said, playing with his shoulder-length hair. Longer than he used to wear it.

"Is that a complaint?"

She heard the smile in it so didn't answer.

She'd rather not think at all, but her mind was coming back to life, protesting fate! "The stones. What were you doing?"

"Controlling matter." He lazily pulled a handful of grass and tossed it in the air. She watched it hang there, then suddenly shower down on them.

"Sorry," he said, brushing it off her. "Still rusty."

The fire Was in his touch, though, and brushing led to nibbling, nibbling to kissing, and kissing to another apocalypse. An easy way to mindless pleasure, but reality returned. He couldn't die. She had to save him.

"Someone must have sent for help," she said.

"Weeks ago, but it won't arrive in time. And anyway, what do federal bureaucrats know about blighters?"

But he sat and pulled her up to face him. "Any response might arrive in time to take some survivors off. Go north tomorrow, Jenny, and keep going north. Try to survive."

It was good advice, but Jenny doubted she'd take it. She couldn't imagine fleeing north while Dan went south to die. And she didn't want to leave Gaia. Perhaps it was the scrap of magic in her, that mysterious Gaian part, but she felt she'd wither and die away from here.

"I didn't know you could do things like that — the grass. How's that fixing?"

His grimace showed that he'd noticed her lack of promise, but he didn't pursue it. Perhaps he understood too well. "It isn't."

He collapsed onto his back, hands beneath his head, beautiful enough to distract. Perhaps that was his purpose. It wasn't going to work.

"So what is it?"

His eyes swiveled to hers. "Wild magic."

She knew he was about to tell her something important, but this time she wanted to know. "What's that?"

"The elemental force, I think. Fixers are born with magic. No one knows why. It doesn't go in families. No amount of effort can create it or increase it."

Okay, so she was weak. She leaned up on her elbow to trace the contours of his chest. "What about the training?"

"That's not to teach us how to do things. That's to teach us how not to do things. Here's the truth, Jen. Hellbane U makes such a fuss about finding fixers because they daren't leave a single one unchecked. We can't have wild magic."

"I don't understand."

"Remember when I fixed your finger?"

"But there was nothing bad about that."

"What about the baby?"

She'd pushed that to the back of her mind. "Would it really be so terrible for fixers to heal like that?"

"Yes, yes it would. In that, the training's right. We can't fool with nature. That's what drove Earth to the brink. Death's natural. Without orderly cycling of the parts the whole will rot."

"Then what are you doing with stones and grass?" She couldn't stop a sharp edge in her voice.

"Looking for a weapon. What if wild magic is more useful than tame against the blighters?"

She stared at him. "Tell me."

He rose and pulled her to her feet. "If I'm going to be coherent, we'd better get dressed. I have tea."

He picked up his shirt and found her bra and knickers underneath. With a grin, he tossed them to her. She resisted the urge to make a performance of putting them on. They needed to find a way to survive.

She noticed his small campfire, tucked behind rocks where it wouldn't be easily seen from outside the park. She dressed and went to sit there with him, holding her hands out to the warmth, though the night was not particularly cold. "Now tell me."

"I'm not sure I have my thoughts straight yet." He moved a metal pot onto a trivet over the flames. Steam began to curl out of the spout.

"Talking sometimes helps."

"Yes." He poured the tea into two cups. Had he always planned to draw her here?

"Talk," she said. "How do you suspend something in the air, and what use is it?"

"I don't know." He picked up a stone and released it in midair. It hung there, but then fell. "We don't understand what fixers do any more than we understand the blighters, but I think our… energy… comes from the same place."

"Negative and positive?"

"Perhaps, but perhaps not." He put his cup aside. "Look, assume that the blighters are not just energy but a species — undetectable to us, but following the same patterns as other species. They are born, they reproduce, they die, and they need to take in nutrients."

"Do they?"

"I have no idea. This is a working hypothesis. It would mean that they ash animals to feed, transforming them into the same kind of undetectable energy that they are."

"Like water transformed into steam by heat?"

"Or like green plants transformed into our ungreen bodies. That's a kind of magic if you don't know how it happens."

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," she said, remembering his words.

He pulled a face. "I can't see anything about the blighters we could remotely call technology. Perhaps that comment should say that everything we humans don't understand we classify as magic."

"And thus unreal."

"Until the unreal starts to eat us."

Jenny swirled the stewed tea in her cup, swirling what he'd said in her mind. "If the blighters are eating us, they'll have to stop, won't they? Otherwise…"

"Otherwise, they'll be like people on Earth and the cod."

"Good point. But they re-created the cod stocks from DNA."

"And the blighters almost certainly can't do that."

"So what are you saying? That they'll eat us all then die of starvation? That's not much comfort."

"I've been reading up on it. There are creatures that eat almost all their food source then go dormant until the supply recovers."

Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. "That's why Gaia was so perfect for us! Fertile, lush plant life, but no large or sentient animals. The blighters had eaten it down to a nub. How long would they be dormant?"

"Probably as long as it takes."

"But instead," she said, almost breathless, "we arrived…"

"Like a delivery dinner."

"But it's been centuries!"

"Perhaps they're not programmed to stir until now. Perhaps their life cycle is naturally measured in centuries. Perhaps it's something to do with base energy stores…"

"Or perhaps," she said, "they were waiting for the dinner bell."

He nodded. "My guess is that the occasional blighters have been checking things out."

"Like the drones combing the universe for usable planets. Fair's fair, I suppose."

"And survival is survival." He broke a twig off a nearby bush and began to strip the leaves off it. Something he'd done as a boy when fretting. "Interesting, isn't it? Gaia was the perfect planet, settled with extreme care to ensure infinite harmony and balance: But it all comes back to the jungle in the end."

"Perhaps we had a good run because we developed fixers and learned to zap the blighters."

"Screwed up their system a bit?" He tossed the bare twig into the fire where flames licked at it. "Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. This is all crazy speculation, you know."

"But it makes sense." Jenny looked from the spluttering twig to the statue of the little girl. "Ashes to ashes … Something's told them dinner's ready, and they're rushing to the table. What do we do?"

"That's the question. When we humans find a planet we like, the native life-forms can't stop us from cleaning them out to make things right for settlers. Perhaps we can't stop the blighters from cleaning us out for food. Some small animals will survive, and one day, who knows how far into the future, it'll be dinnertime again."

Jenny pressed her fingers to her head as if that might somehow make her brain sharper. "But you can beat the blighters. The fixers, I mean. So why can't you beat them now?"

"Numbers. A fixer can beat a blighter one-on-one with power to spare. A fixer might be able to beat ten, or even more. It's never been tested, blighters being rather rare." He shook his head. "That sounds so crazy now. We aren't efficient killers — it's a real case of using a hammer to kill an ant, but it hasn't mattered before. Now, if we have to zap one after another we're soon drained — and then they eat us.

"If the fixers had concentrated to begin with, we might have stopped them, but by the time Hellbane U woke up to it, there were too many, too widely spread around the equator. It's been like trying to drain a swamp by standing in it with a bucket. With the swamp eating the bucket."

"How many have you zapped?"

"One, to graduate."

"That's all? No wonder the war's not going well."

He shrugged. "I assume some of the fixers near the equator saw more."

She sipped the tea then pulled a face at the bitter taste and put it aside. "What was it like?"

"We don't have words for it. Blighter is too… mundane. Even hellbane doesn't capture the sense of the alien that screeches against everything we know to be real and tries to latch on to parts of our brain that shouldn't be there. But are."

Jenny shuddered in recognition.

"Then there's the awareness of ravening hunger, of a blind need to consume. Us. That we are nothing more to it than a food source. Like a cow, or a fish, or a loaf of bread." She saw the shudder shake him. "And that's just a start. You have to be there."

"No," she said. "I know exactly what you mean. I can feel it now."

His look was quick and sober. "Then I'm sorry."

She pushed back the sick feeling. "Let's look at wild magic again. What can it do?"

He reached toward the fire. She saw him hesitate, but then he grabbed a glowing end of wood and held it, flames licking through his fingers. She gaped, but then he hissed and dropped it to blow on his hand. "Good job I'm a fixer."

Jenny wanted to laugh and cry. She wanted to hug him and keep him safe. She wanted someone to hug her and promise her that everything was going to be all right.

"Pathetic," he agreed, "but this is all we have to fight with. I'm sure it's the way. It's at the heart of Gaia."

She turned it around in her mind. "So you're magic and blighters are magic, and when a fixer pushes magic against one of them, it's gone."

"Not quite. The energy comes into us."

"Ah-ha! So you get stronger from stopping them."

"And they feed from eating us."

"Ergo, you need to kill more of them than they kill of you."

"Two problems. One: We get a lot less energy from one zap than we use. Two: I assume it works the other way for them because they're feeding."

"I'm not sure I follow that."

"Imagine I carry ten units of power. I use them to zap a blighter and get five back. With a bit of recovery time, I get back to ten again. These days, fixers are having to fight one hellbane after another. In theory they should be able to use the energy gained from a kill to destroy the next, but it's not working. As best I can tell, we become exhausted, so there must be leakage. When a fixer is drained, a blighter eats."

"But if 'dinner' is exhausted, is there any energy there?"

"There must be since they mostly feed, on nonfixers, and even cows and pigs."

Something was teasing at her mind. She caught it. "But you said zapping one didn't take all your energy, so why don't you use less? Half a unit. A quarter. Then you'd be ahead."

He tossed the remains of his tea to hiss on the fire. "Because we don't know what the bloody hell we're doing. We just swing that hammer as hard as we can. If we could gather a bunch of them, we might be able to get a lot with one blow, but they seem to hunt alone."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. Yet. I've suggested that all the fixers left gather to work on it. There has to be something."

"You have?"

"No one else seems to be in charge."

She took his hands. "I'm proud of you for doing that."

"I'm groping in the dark, Jen."

"No, you're not. You're finding lights."

He rested his head against hers. "You give me strength, Jen. When things were tough at school I used to think of you, that protecting Gaia meant protecting you."

Tears filled her eyes. "I'm not worthy of that." She unfastened the few buttons he'd done up. "I'm sorry for not doing this sooner. I was scared."

"So was I."

"I mean, of you. Of your magic."

He slid his hand under her top. "Why not? It terrifies me."

They kissed, and love came slowly, gently this time. Not hard, wild, and desperate, but like a secret flower in a winter garden, unexpectedly discovered and to be guarded from a killing frost until it bloomed.

They lay together afterward, talking over their lives. As dawn touched the sky, she said, "Can I come with you?"

"God, no. Go north."

She thought of lying but shook her head. "Win or lose, I'd rather be here."

"You're a stubborn woman, Jenny Hart."

"There's more to life than living, Dan Rutherford. I'll be here to meet you or the blighters, whichever comes first."

They dressed, then sat, holding hands within the glow of the fire.

"I've never been one for the old Earth religions," Jenny said, "but perhaps I'll pray."

"Pray for a bouncing bomb, then."

"What?"

He shook his head. "Just something from an old film."

When the sun rose, she helped him kill his fire and pack, then walked with him hand in hand to the southern gate. She cradled his face and kissed him, determined not to cry. "Come back. That's an order."

He smiled. "Yes, ma'am! I've coded my place to let you in. Keep an eye on it for me."

He hesitated only a second more, then walked up to and through the small, pointlessly guarded postern gate.

5

Jenny watched the gate close, then turned back into the quiet town. She walked to the old building and put her hand to the plate.

The door opened.

Despite the night they'd shared, she felt like an intruder in Dan's flat. Or perhaps she was afraid that people would realize what had happened. She wasn't ashamed of it, but it was delicate, not yet for public attention. He'd left everything neat. Nothing unnecessary out in the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge or the larder that might go off. His bed was made, his clothes all clean and put away.

The meticulous preparations for a future tenant. For death?

She flicked her way along the hangers just to touch things that had touched him, enjoying the hint of him that lingered even after laundry soap. At the left side, almost out of sight, she found some clothes that stirred memories.

She dragged them forward. A yellow shirt, a pair of striped trousers, and a red jacket. Gaudy fashions of ten years ago, now outgrown. Dan's favorite clothes from before he'd left Anglia. Tears escaped then, because the clothes showed how much he hadn't wanted to leave, hadn't wanted to be marked as different.

She pulled out the red jacket and huddled into it.

Wearing it, she wandered into the living room, where she ran her hand over his bookshelves, looking for a way to share his thoughts. Had he left his system open to her, too? She sat on the sofa and switched on his system. He had.

He'd mentioned films. He must have downloaded those from the archives. She pulled up his menu and found them, the war films he'd talked about, but the last thing he'd used was an audio.

Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, the title read. Speech on Dunkirk, June 4, 1940. (Radio with sim.)

She clicked on it, and a gravelly voice began. Dan had switched off the sim, and she left it like that, hearing it as it had been heard originally, when radio had been all they had. At first the flat delivery seemed ponderous, but then it began to shiver down her spine.

… we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The man spoke as if surrender was not an option and death a strong possibility. Did she hear the tone of one who tastes the ashes on the wind? He'd won his war. Had Dan found hope in that?

When that finished, she scanned the list of films and clicked on one from that war — World War II, a concept that had boggled her until now—Reach for the Sky. She watched it, hugging the jacket closer; watched the pilot be victorious; watched him lose his legs, then take to the air to fight again. And without fixing. She understood what Dan had drawn from that. She didn't like it, but she understood.

When the file ended, she clicked on the next. Lawrence of Arabia.

She didn't move into Dan's flat — there'd be too many questions — but she spent most of her spare time there. She watched the films, seeking what he'd found in them, using the lessons to keep going as the town emptied around her and the blighters came closer on the wind.

Keep going during the blitz. Don't let the enemy get you down. Keep a song in your heart. We'll meet again. Wave a white feather. She even made herself a red poppy to wear. No one knew what it meant, and she wasn't sure herself.

Red for courage?

Red for blood?

She stopped running the Angliacom cells of the screen because, even though the news was grim, it wasn't nearly as grim as the messages in her mind. She used her drops and went to work for something to do. Paperwork, it seemed, never entirely stopped.

Then one day she awoke to realize that something had changed. A lightening. A lessening of pressure…

She clicked on Angliacom. There was no reporter — there hadn't been one for more than a week. Instead, the screen showed a still, tourist-style picture of Hellbane U up in the mountains on a perfect, sky-blue day. Across the bottom of the picture ran: New in from our brave fixers at the front. The spread of hellbanes has been halted. Repeat, the spread of hellbanes has been halted. The wave has been turned, and ultimate victory is in sight.

Jenny watched it five times, joy building, then dashed to the Merrie to see if anyone knew any details.

They didn't, but they were all close to delirious anyway. There would have been another wild night if anyone had been there to spark it. As it was, it was wild enough. Tom and Yas were still around, and he and Jenny played rollicking songs. They even played the anthem again, and some people sang it in tears.

Most of these people were packed and ready to flee not just Anglia, but Gaia. Now they had hope. They drank round after round of toasts to the fixers, especially to Dan Fixer, their own hero.

Jenny had not heard from Dan, but he'd not called his family either. She didn't think the blighters could knock out com-towers, so there must be some other reason.

He could, of course, be dead. It was a fact she lived with day by torturous day, consoling herself that no news was good news. Surely the families would be told, like in the old movies. Whatever the fixers were doing must make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to send any kind of message, but that would surely change now.

She slipped away, slipped home, to sit in front of the screen on max, showing ten different things. Maps on most tracking where the blighters had been stopped. The blighted area was still an appallingly huge belt around the planet, and the closest edge was only fifty miles south of Anglia.

Talking heads, but when she flipped between them none had solid information. She muted the system, setting it to alert her to mention of Dan Fixer, then fell asleep with no new information. She woke to sunshine and the screen still on. One section was flashing. Partial match.

An excited woman was mouthing silently, an exhausted man behind her, sallow-skinned and haggard. A fixer? Jenny hunted, cursing, for the clicker, finding it down the side of a cushion, and turned that section onto max and sound.

"… here at the front, as they call it. My friend here assures me I'm safe." The stocky reporter grinned, but she looked tensed to run at a word.

For some reason she was wearing a dull green shirt and trousers that looked vaguely like the army uniforms in the old films. Jenny snorted. Fat lot of good that would do her if a blighter came along. The woman chattered on, not really saying anything because there wasn't anything to say. Behind her lay peaceful, normal countryside.

"So," she said, turning to the man — flabby, middle-aged, grim—"you think this is the turning point of the war, Jit Fixer?"

"We're getting the upper hand."

It was direct, but the flat tone made Jenny's heart pound. No jubilation at all.

"Can you tell Gaia how you've managed to turn the tide, Jit?"

The man's eyes shifted for just a moment. "It's very technical," he said, then went on about concentration of powers, of nodes and impacts and strategic distributions of forces. Was she hearing Dan's theories put into practice?

If so, Jenny couldn't follow it, and by the look of the reporter, she couldn't either. Even so, Jenny sat glued, praying for a mention of Dan, even though she knew it was unlikely. There had been — what? — more than five thousand fixers before the war.

But Dan had said he'd been the one to gather the remaining fixers. He might be important enough to get a mention. No such luck. The reporter, glassy-eyed, brought the technical ramble to an end, wished the fixer success in the fight, and returned the screen to the "your local station."

Jenny slumped back in the chair. That hadn't even been Angliacom. It could have been anywhere around the world.

On sudden impulse she clicked on the directory and found the numbers for Hellbane U, scrolling down to Information. She clicked on that. After two rings a message flashed: We regret that due to the current emergency the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities is unable to respond to enquiries. Please call back when normal conditions resume.

Jenny went back to the regular screen and lay there watching the maps and charts, then a string of interviews with displaced people, community administrators, even artists sharing their thoughts about victory. No mention of Dan.

If he was dead, wouldn't she know it?

She staggered up to go to the loo, grabbed some food, then collapsed again to watch. She'd had to switch the prompt to search for Dan Fixer only, which stopped the constant flashing and replaced it with nothing. A string of fixers gave interviews, and she learned to spot them simply from their debilitated look. All the fixers, young and old, seemed to be exhausted, and it was more than physical. It was as if something vital had been sucked out of them. What a terrible struggle it must be, but now they were winning.

Slowly, Jenny began to hear something in their voices, an echo of the war films. One of them even said, "We will never surrender," in a flat tone almost identical to Winston Churchill.

Was that anything to do with Dan?

Then one of the fixers cried. He was a dark-skinned man, perhaps, by his accent, from one of the African settlements first affected. Partway through his technical description, tears began to well in his large, dark eyes. He blinked and kept going, but then suddenly choked. He covered his face and turned away from the camera.

The reporter — another young black man, but speaking meticulous Earth Standard English — took over, talking about the exhaustion of the noble heroes who were fighting the terrible battle.

Jenny watched, not hearing the reporter but the sobs of the man off screen, shaken by that deep and desolate grief.

Was the talk of victory lies?

Or did the fixer weep for the price the victors had to pay?

In the past weeks she'd become an expert on war. All kinds of war. Now she remembered the words of the Duke of Wellington after the bloody victory at Waterloo: "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

If Dan was alive, was he as melancholy, as soul-shocked, as the weeping fixer? Oh, to take him in her arms and comfort him. She'd have walked out of Anglia to find him if she'd had any idea where to start.

All she could do was her bit to keep the home fires burning. She had a shower, went to work, and even suctioned dust out of the idle presses. She kept part of the office screen on to Angliacom as she worked, set to alert her to any mention of Dan Fixer.

The parade of fixers stopped, however, replaced by a middle-aged woman called Helga, with gray hair and a stony, unreadable face. Helga flatly reported daily successes, giving details on areas that were cleared and safe. She did not take questions.

News readers returned. Jenny phoned Angliacom asking for news about Dan. A short time later she heard back. They'd put in a request for a report on him and received no response.

Anglia itself was perking up like a spring flower after a frost. People were pouring back in, and Jenny finally had enough work to distract her, enough that she grew impatient for her coworkers to come back.

Reporters ventured out with cameras, but apparently the fixers had ordered everyone to stay away from the front, so they could only send back pictures of peaceful countryside and occasional close-ups of heaps of clothing and ash. Even they were rare. War hadn't changed the weather, so most remains had been scattered by wind and rain.

Daily, Helga reported progress, and the red tide on the map ebbed. Then she began to announce places that were now safe, inviting people to return. There was never a trace of joy or triumph.

Jenny had learned to distrust the news, but she'd come to believe in Helga. The woman reminded her of jowly Churchill, someone who tamped down emotion and simply got the job done.

Anyway, Jenny knew in other ways that what Helga said was true. The pressure of sick fear in her mind was easing, the bitter taste was less. She actually had some appetite and began to put back the weight she'd lost. Sometimes she had to probe for the unreal parts of her mind instead of fight them off.

With victory clear, it was like Christmas. She could have gone to ten parties a night, but instead she spent every night in Dan's place. She didn't watch the war films anymore. Instead she wandered through his sys — music, poetry, games, comedies. She saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail listed but skipped over it. She didn't think she'd find it funny now.

Then she came across his family album and some film from when they were kids.

A group of them running around screaming in the park under water jets.

A birthday party with Dan wearing a Sirius V helmet, a milkshake mustache, and missing his front teeth. Had they really once played at war?

Dan and her building something out of Robot-Robot, then cheering as their construct poured juice into a glass without spilling any. She thought about Earth, where apparently war was mostly waged by robots.

Lucky Earth.

Helga stopped reporting, and Jenny missed her stony solidity, but the good news kept coming. The red swath around the equator shrunk thinner and thinner, and Jenny linked it to Dan's return. He was working hard, to his limit, destroying hellbanes. When that shrinking stain disappeared, Dan would come home.

Then one day she realized that her magic had gone. No, no, that wasn't quite it. That strange bit of her brain that shouldn't be there was still there, but it felt… alone. As if the rest of the magic had gone.

As if the fixers had gone?

She clicked on the screen, heart pounding. More jubilation. More stupid speeches. Say something about the fixers, you berks!

After an hour or so of nothing, she phoned the station. She managed to talk her way through to the newsroom and asked why there were no interviews with fixers.

"I thought you were offering to set up an interview with a fixer," a woman snapped.

"It's hard?"

The woman cut the connection.

With the screen on mute, Jenny closed her eyes and tried to sense Dan. She probed for him, hunted him, blanked her mind so something could come on its own. Eventually she opened her eyes, defeated. It was as if the magic didn't exist anymore.

As if Dan didn't exist anymore.

Surely if the fixers were gone someone would say so.

Stomach churning, she watched ten screen-sectors at once. She stilled on one. that showed people returning to their homes. The camera was like a predator itself, seeking the moments of horror, the faces of loss. Even while thinking that, Jenny couldn't move on. The continuing scenes of return were made weirder because all the buildings and machinery were intact, simply waiting for the inhabitants to return but often coated with ash.

A camera swooped in on a woman scrubbing, weeping, saying over and over, "Who am I cleaning up here? Who am I cleaning up?"

Soon it was almost as if the Hellbane Wars had never been, and yet, and yet, it seemed to Jenny that people held their breath as she did, not really able to believe that the terrible things were gone for good. And no one mentioned the other terrible thing — that they might have to carry on without fixers.

Eventually Jenny had to return to life. She cleaned Dan's place one last time and moved into her own home. Her family was coming back anyway, so she had to stock the house with basics and restart the energy sys. She went back to work and found that the manager, Sam Witherspoon, was back. Her family returned for a tearful reunion and told her Dan's family was back, too.

Jenny hurried over there, and her last hope died. They'd heard nothing, and they assumed he was dead. A hero, but dead.

Someone designed a poster of Dan Fixer, Hero, and it hung everywhere. Heaven knows Where'd they'd found the shot to start with, but it didn't look much like Dan in the end. Square-jawed and rugged, he looked resolutely into the distance against a flaming red sky.

Jenny bought one and kept it, knowing he'd be amused.

Hoping he'd be amused.

Her last hope wasn't really dead.

Then Angliacom announced that in view of the lack of response from the fixers, a team of Mayan reporters was on its way to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Entities. They would carry the thanks of the world and report back on the situation.

Needing privacy, Jenny watched on Dan's screen, watched through the camera's eye as the reporters approached the pale rock walls that looked like part of the Mayan mountain. The gates stood open, but no one waited to welcome them.

With the benefit of top-reality technology, she wandered empty streets and peered into deserted buildings. The mikes picked up only silence broken by breeze-blown dust and rubbish. At least the dust seemed ordinary dust, sandy and dry.

Were any of the houses places where Dan had been? Had he shopped at that bakery, drunk at that tavern? A reporter was droning on about Hellbane U in former days. Jenny made herself listen.

New students had been housed in dormitories in the central buildings ahead. Later, they could board with families in the town. Most of the citizens of Hellbane U were fixers — teachers or researchers — but some had been family and descendants of fixers, without special powers.

Then Jenny realized that the reporter was such a person, that he was a refugee from Hellbane U, returning to his former home and shocked by the desolation. He was a professional, however, and his voice stayed steady as the team progressed through the ghostly town, but she could hear the thickness of tears in it.

Tears were falling down her own cheeks.

Where have all the flowers gone?

Eventually the camera reached the central buildings. It panned lecture halls, libraries, and rooms that defied general descriptions. The tour continued, and Jenny watched it all, but Hellbane U was a dead place, the inhabitants gone. She remembered an old Earth term for it. A ghost town.

Where have all the flowers gone?

She found the song in the system and set it to play.

Another war song.

Damn war.

She listened, and watched, and wept for all the heroes who weren't coming back from the war.

6

They held a parade, renamed Bond Street Dan Fixer Way, and life went on.

Doctors had to learn how to mend broken bones with splints and plaster, but the latest technology was on the way. Apparently they had bugs and bots now to do just about anything the fixers could do. The Minister for Post-Fixer Adjustment moved into the fixer's flat. Dan's things were sent to his parents, who turned most of it over to a committee planning the Dan Fixer Museum. Jenny managed to sneak the red jacket out and take it home.

No one knew what the fixers had done, but they were heroes for sure. Yet it seemed to Jenny that, other than Dan's family and friends, people didn't seem deeply affected by the loss.

Her pain was beyond words or expression, so she hid it, glad that no one knew about that last night.

Then, as she wandered out of work at the end of another meaningless day, a woman in the street bumped into her.

"Did you hear? Dan Fixer's back!"

Jenny stared at her. "They found his body?" But then she answered herself. "No. Blighters leave nothing but ash."

"Alive as you and me! Outside the southern gate, he is."

Alive? Outside? The words didn't make sense.

"They're keeping him out, till they figure out what to do."

The gates would be shut, yes. They were still shut and guarded, though now she thought about it, she didn't know why. "Then it can't be Dan," Jenny said. "He's a citizen."

"And a fixer. Citizen of all, citizen of none."

A sort of glee in the woman's voice shattered the blank-ness in Jenny's mind. "You don't want him back? How can you not want him back? He's a hero. He saved the world. We had a parade and named a bloody street after him! Don't you at least want the fixing back?"

The woman backed away, then turned and hurried off.

Jenny stood frozen. Dan was back?

Alive?

She was already running toward the nearest tram stop. She needed to get to the gate, get to Dan. Then she realized it would be on screen. If it was true. She stopped, made herself look calm, and walked into the nearest pub.

One of the big screens faced the door, split between a cricket game., comedy, and a dim, sunset landscape. She saw a fire and a figure by it. She moved into that line of sound, having to squeeze up against two men in business clothes.

"… claiming to be Dan Fixer," an announcer was saying.

"The Witan is meeting to discuss this development and assures everyone…"

Jenny stepped into the cricket commentary so she could focus on the picture. The camera must be up on the wall, looking down at the road. On the grass verge a small fire burned and a man sat beside it, reaching for a kettle, pouring boiling water into a pot.

Memory staggered her, then hope swept in, as weakening in its own way. She grasped a chair to hold herself up.

"Creepy, if you ask me."

Jenny blinked and looked at the two young men in office wear drinking pints. One was blond with a sharp face, the other dark-haired and heavy.

"They've always been a bit strange, haven't they, fixers?" the blond said.

"No one knows how it works," the heavy one replied.

"No one knows what they did to win, either. One minute the blighters are all over us, next minute they're gone."

"Fixers were supposed to be gone, too. So it can't really be him, can it?"

"Or they're playing silly buggers with us."

More faint hostility. Was this a dream? It wouldn't be surprising to dream that Dan was back, but why would she dream this? She wanted to ask what the hell they were thinking. If Dan was back, it was wonderful!

"They had stories on Earth about this sort of thing," the heavy man said.

"About what?" his friend asked.

"About people who come back from the dead. Ghouls. Vampires. Zombies. Ghosts. Monsters."

Jenny couldn't keep quiet. "Monsters?"

The man turned to her. "Can't know for sure, can we?"

Perhaps she looked alarmed rather than angry, because the other one said, "It's probably not even him, luv. Some berk thinking he can impersonate a hero, that's all. And not even good at it. I saw Dan Fixer not long before he left, and his hair was no longer than mine. Look at that."

He pointed at the screen, and Jenny looked. The camera wasn't on zoom so details weren't clear, but it did look as if the man had a rope of hair down his back.

She didn't realize how much hope she'd gathered until it drained away.

"Like a Trojan horse."

Jenny looked at the dark-haired man in disbelief. "Bringing what into the town?"

"Who knows. That's the point, isn't it?"

Jenny couldn't entirely fight off the idea. The fixers and the blighters had fed off the same force. What if in the end the remaining blighters had taken over their enemies?

She opened that neglected part of her mind, trying to detect something. Was the faint tingle real, or wishful thinking? Was her churning stomach and throbbing head a sign that the blighters were back, or just shock and nerves?

The screen picture changed to a stocky man. Alderman Higginbottom! She sidled over so she could hear him.

"… have to take the cautious road here. We were given to understand that all the fixers had died in their gallant victory. We've been in touch with other major centers, and none of them have heard from their fixers. None of them have one on the doorstep, so to speak."

The camera shifted to the reporter, an eager young woman. "But Dan Fixer has explained that some survived, hasn't he?"

"He can explain all he wants, but we can't just take his word."

The message bar on the screen began to scroll: Alderman Jack Higginbottom talking to Angliacom reporter Alinda Brown. Subject — arrival at the southern gate of a person claiming to be Daniel Rutherford Fixer, our hero of the Hellbane Wars. Gates are currently being kept closed to everyone while a committee of the Witan reviews the situation.

Committee. Jenny had to bite back laughter. It was a standing joke that when anything unusual happened in Anglia, the response was "Let's form a committee." Now they were doing it, and as always it was a way of passing time in the hope that the problem would go away.

"But given the heroic victory," Brown asked, "doesn't it seem wrong to leave someone outside for the night?"

"Well, now, there's no saying how long it will be. The committee may come to a rapid decision. As always, all citizens of Anglia are welcome to observe the discussion and make presentations, either at Parliament Hall or from screen phones."

"But why not let him in to speak for himself?" Brown persisted.

Alderman Higginbottom shed his official veneer and looked older and more strained. "Because we don't know what's come back from the war, and nor do you! This is a time for cautious thought, not impulsive action."

The screen abruptly switched to the Angliacom desk. "We have reporter Nell Raiseby now with Dan Fixer's mother…"

Jenny turned away. She couldn't bear watching that. Should she go and support Annie Rutherford? Or to the Witan to speak up for Dan?

But was it Dan? If Dan was alive, wouldn't he have contacted his family? Or her? Especially her. Worse than that, deep inside, painful as a fatal wound, she, too, had doubts. If it was Dan, what had come home from the war?

"But he is a hero." When she realized she'd spoken aloud she glanced around.

No one was paying attention, thank heavens.

She slipped out of the pub. She needed to go up on the wall but. dark was settling. Soon even the zoom camera wouldn't see much, and she didn't need to see. She needed to think.

She longed to have Dan back in her life, in her arms, but even if that figure by the fire was Dan, he could be changed. She'd seen that, too, in war films. People who returned not just with physical wounds but with mental ones, driven crazy by the things they'd had to do, destroying those they'd fought to save.

How did she find that out? How did she do the right thing, with her heart yearning to have him back?

She stepped back into the pub to see the screen. Part was covering the committee meeting now. Another section showed the huge basement pub in Parliament Hall with its fully screened wall that made it a popular place to watch official proceedings. An illusion of being close to the action.

As the camera scanned the attentive crowd, Jenny saw Tom, Rolo, Yas — a bunch of Dan's friends — at a table. They would be coming up with some way to help him.

She ran to catch a tram, aware that she'd made one decision. The man by the fire was Dan. And that meant she had to help him, no matter what the situation.

She was soon pushing into the crowded room, looking for the others but keeping an eye on the screens. She paused a moment to listen to the committee. Surprise, surprise. They weren't getting anywhere fast.

Where were the others?

Then someone shouted, "Jenny!" and she saw Gyrth standing and waving.

She made her way over, and those on one side wriggled together so she could squeeze in on the end of the bench.

The mood was grim. "It's not going well?" she asked.

Gyrth poured her a beer. "Who knows? At this rate they'll probably talk until the next blighter attack."

"The blighters are gone."

"Whatever."

Jenny took a deep drink. "Are they going to let Dan in?"

"Probably not."

"Then what are we going to do?"

Everyone looked at her blankly.

"What can anyone do?" Rolo asked.

"Argue. Protest! They can't keep a hero out."

"When Sillitoe argued that, Alderman Potts came up with the bright idea that we can't welcome home a hero of the Hellbane Wars without adequate preparation. He wants Dan to go away until we're ready."

Jenny groaned. "Let's form another committee."

No one laughed.

Jenny eyed them all. "We could sneak him in."

Instead of approval, eyes and bodies shifted.

"That wouldn't be right," Gyrth said. "It would be… undignified."

"It's not very dignified to leave him sitting out on the grass, is it?" She stared around. "Let's do form a bloody committee."

"Don't take that tone!" Yas leaned forward, poking a long, beringed finger onto the table. "It's not a simple matter, and if you think it is, you're naive. None of us know what Dan is now. Perhaps he is dangerous."

"You know better than that!"

"It's because I know better that I'm wary. There's more to him than the laughing friend, you know."

Jenny was shocked by her own outrage at Yas's claim. But none of them knew what had happened that last night. Perhaps she should tell them, but she couldn't do it. Perhaps they wouldn't even believe her.

"He's bound to be different, Jenny," Tom said gently.

"I suppose."

Then Rolo said something about there being more point watching cricket, and Yas turned it to office politics. In moments three different conversations were going on around the table, none of them about Dan.

If his closest friends didn't care, what could she do, especially when she knew better than any that Dan could be changed, would be changed. Not into a vampire or a ghoul, but in power. He'd begun the shift before he left.

Wild magic.

Then a screen section closed in on the long, severe face of Alice Cotrell. Jenny rolled her eyes. Mrs. Cotrell was a great one for drawing up petitions and addressing committees.

"I speak for more than a hundred citizens of Anglia — the names are here, Alders, if you wish to verify." Mrs. Cotrell waved some sheets of paper. "We wish to make it clear that many Anglians do not wish to see Dan Fixer back within our walls. While duly grateful for the service the fixers have done, we believe that his home, the home of all the fixers, is the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the Hostile Amorphic Native Elements."

How interesting that she used the full and formal name.

"It is intact," Mrs. Cotrell went on, "and suitable for habitation. As Dan Fixer claims there are only a small number of fixers left, there is plenty of accommodation…"

"There are others alive?" Jenny whispered to Gyrth.

"Apparently. It might be best for them to gather there to figure out what to do in the future."

"True," Jenny said. But Dan wanted to come in.

He wanted, she suddenly realized, to come home.

Alice Cotrell was listing the many possible dangers a fixer might now present to normal people.

Normal, thought Jenny. How very interesting.

Alderwoman Sillitoe interrupted. "He seems perfectly normal, Mrs. Rutherford. And he was born and raised here."

Alice Cotrell stood straighter. "We do not understand his sort, any more than we understood the hellbanes. Who is to say that the fixers themselves won't turn wild on us one day?"

A murmur rolled around the room, but Jenny couldn't tell if it was shock or approval. She'd never thought of that. When a predator is eliminated, the prey often takes over as pest. She followed the debate, no longer certain what was right.

In the end, she grabbed on to one thing. "Listen!" she said.

They all stared at her.

"If everyone's afraid of what Dan might be, then someone has to go outside and find out. Yas—"

"Oh, no!" Yas raised a hand. "We weren't that close."

"What?"

"Not when he left. I don't know who he was rumpling with then."

Jenny turned to Tom, hoping the dim lighting hid her blush. "You're a good friend."

He turned his beer glass in his hands. "I don't know, Jenny. It's not that I'm afraid of Dan," he added quickly. "I don't think he'd deliberately hurt any of us."

"Tom!"

"You know better?" Yas demanded. "Why has he pretended to be dead for weeks?"

That was the overwhelming question. "I don't know," Jenny said. "I just know that someone has to go and find out why he's here and what he wants." The resistance around the table dragged her words to a halt. "All right. How many here want Dan back home?"

Eyes shifted. Perhaps some hands twitched, but none went up.

"It depends…"

"We can't decide yet…"

"I need to know…"

"My, my. The committee really is in touch with the mood of the voters, isn't it?"

"If you're so set on this," said Yas, "why don't you go and find out what's come home from the war?"

It was a challenge, one Jenny knew Yas didn't expect her to accept.

She turned her attention to the screen, hoping for something that would save her. No. They were consulting some expert about the place of Hellbane U in Gaian society. She didn't want to do this, but she had to. She'd remembered what she'd said when she'd parted from Dan.

"Come back," she'd said. "That's an order."

And he'd replied, "Yes, ma'am."

She took a deep breath then looked back around the table. "I will, then, on one condition."

After a stunned moment, Tom said, "You don't have to—"

"If no one else will, I will. But on one condition. I'm your representative. If I come back and say Dan's safe, you all support that."

"What good will it do?" Rolo asked.

"If necessary, we smuggle him in and carry on the fight from here. Once people see he's just Dan, they'll change. Most of them want the fixing back. Medical technology doesn't fix machines and Earth china. Are we agreed?"

She thought for a terrible moment that they'd chorus no, but then Yas, of all people, said, "Yes. Fine. After all, you're such a careful sort. If you think he's safe, he's probably comatose."

It hurt, but Jenny hid it and waited until they'd all agreed. Then she stood. "All right. Let's do it."

The easiest way out was through the storage basement of Gyrth's uncle's grocery. They'd used it as teenagers when sneaking outside had seemed like an adventure. It didn't take long to move the stack of heavy boxes, then work out the loose stones that blocked the tunnel through the thick wall. Wriggling down the rough, dusty hole wasn't Jenny's favorite thing, but right now it seemed a small challenge. She went backward so her feet went out first, hung on with her fingers a second longer than necessary, then dropped the six feet or so to the grass.

She was committed now.

Jenny waved at Gyrth, whose blond head was sticking out of the hole to make sure she was all right, then turned toward that glowing fire.

She shivered under the swamp of chill air and dark infinity. Once again she couldn't see the ground beneath her feet, and Dan wasn't guiding her. She made herself step forward. She knew this was smooth grass, but she still felt for each step as if an abrupt crevasse might pitch her into destruction.

Then light shimmered, forming a silvery path across the grass, a path to the fire. To that figure by the fire, even though he hadn't moved.

She froze. He could do this. What else could he do?

Then he turned. "Hello, Jen."

He was still just a shape against the glow, but it was Dan's voice for sure, just the same as before except for the tone. She searched that tone for welcome, for warmth, and found none. Something inside shrank, wanting to run away. What if he didn't even remember the night that was so important to her? Combat stress caused neural damage that could show in many ways.

"Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you."

She walked forward, picking that apart. I won't hurt you. Not, I can't hurt you.

She'd known that — that he was controlled not by what he could do but by what he allowed himself to do — yet she was suddenly crushed by the mission she'd so carelessly chosen. Who was she to decide the fate of a town? Of a world, even. Who was she to assess Dan's capacity to harm and destroy?

When she arrived close to the fire and was touched by its light and warmth, she finally saw him clearly.

Changed. Very.

Dan. Still.

She realized what made him look harsher — his hair was drawn back in a plait, into that rope of hair hanging down his back.

Hair didn't grow that much in the time he'd been away.

"Would you like to sit," he said, "or did you just come to stare?"

She flinched at his tone, but then he added, "I have tea, and two cups. It's not stewed."

She sat suddenly on the grass, on the opposite side of the low fire. He remembered. "How are you?" It was a stupid question, but it had to be asked.

"Better." He poured tea into a cup she remembered so well and passed it to her.

Better than what? she wanted to ask, but she was groping through the dark here, afraid of rocks and crevasses.

"Have the governors sent you any message?" she asked, sipping. It was perfectly made tea, delicate and fresh. It made her want to laugh and cry.

"I thought perhaps you were it."

"Unlikely."

"Sometimes messages are judiciously indirect."

It was a subtle point, made with a cynicism that was strange from him.

"So?" he asked. "What's going on?"

"They've formed a committee."

His lips didn't even twitch. He might as well know the truth. "They're afraid of you, Dan. Grateful, mind, but afraid."

"That's fair. I'm afraid of myself."

Well, there was the answer to her question. She put down the cup because her hands had started to shake. "Then why do you want to come back?"

"It's my home."

"A person doesn't bring danger to their home."

"Why are you here, then?"

Truth. "A group of us — Tom, Yas, you know — thought we needed to find out about you. Before doing anything."

"And you drew the short straw?"

She sighed. "I was the only one willing."

He suddenly smiled, a flickering hint of the old Dan. "Ah, Jen. That's part of why I've come back."

"For your doubting friends?"

"For you."

Her heart missed a beat. "Why?"

"Do you have to ask?"

"Yes."

He looked down. "Perhaps because you commanded me to."

Coward that she was, she didn't want that burden. "Really?"

"Partly."

She realized then that he was being as painfully careful of truth as she was.

He looked back up, faced her. "I need you, Jen, to have a chance of survival."

"You have survived! The war's over. Isn't it?"

"I'm not sure wars are ever over. The repercussions rumble on and on."

"You don't need me." She meant it to be cheerful, bracing, but truth tumbled out after it. "I don't want to be needed that way, Dan."

"I don't want to need you that way. Sometimes we run out of choices."

He reached into the fire and grasped a burning brand. He lifted it, flames licking his fingers. She waited for him to drop it, but he didn't.

"I can hold a burning brand, Jen. You can hold me."

She tossed her remaining tea over the flames. They hissed, but then burned on undaunted.

Burning what?

He released the brand in midair, and it hung there as he showed her his unmarked hand. "You'll survive, too. I think."

When he'd left, a small piece of glowing wood had burned his fingers. Sharp as a knife, Jenny knew everyone was right. Dan was more dangerous than she'd ever imagined, too dangerous by far for a peaceful town. Or for her.

"You can't force me, Dan."

"I can, in fact, but I'm trying not to." Abruptly, the brand fell back into the fire, scattering golden sparks. "I've learned many things, Jen, and one is that we do what we have to do to win." Suddenly, he lowered his head, his fingers digging into his bound hair. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have put it like that. I've not talked to real people for a long time. Rusty skills…"

Oh, if he was looking for a weapon, he'd found a good one. It was as if she were back by the lake again, with Dan facing death and the ashes gritty in her mind. She longed to reach out and soothe those anguished hands, but she held back. She had taken on a greater role, had accepted the responsibility of judge. And she was scared. She felt a lick of fear that might be what a hellbane victim felt, and a pull toward him that was almost as bad.

"I need you, yes," he said, with the kind of calm that takes great effort, "but there's more to it than that." He looked up, eyes densely dark in the fire's shadows. "The world needs you. Needs both of us. You say you can't. You don't have that choice. You must."

She blocked that. He was powerful, and he was wounded. He might be very dangerous indeed.

But he needed her, and she knew what she must do. "I'm yours, Dan. Forever, if you want me. I'll come with you to Hellbane U."

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "Thank you for that, love, but it isn't so easy. I need the town."

The word "love" collided with the rest of it. "The town doesn't need you."

"Same argument as before. They have no choice."

"Then why are you sitting out here instead of going in?" She pointed at the closed gates. "Blow them open!"

The brand rose again without touch and began to whirl, shooting flame into the dark. She glanced at the wall. Was that damned camera still running? "Put that thing back before someone sees it!"

It stopped, then settled with perfect gentleness into the fire bed. "Better?" he asked.

Her heart raced, and tea and ale churned. "Was that demonstration of control designed to reassure me?

Because it failed. What are you doing?"

He inhaled, and she thought she saw impatience, frustration, anger — an army of dangerous emotions. Every bit of her flinched, but she made herself meet his eyes.

"All right. I hoped if I just turned up, they'd let me in before they thought about it. Once in, I knew it would be a different game. I didn't expect the guard on the gate now it's over."

"It's become a habit."

"A bad one. Once I was stopped, I could only try persuasion. Nothing would work if I stormed my way in. It's like that night in Surrey Green," he said, "and you. I need… welcome, Jen."

"The town's not going to fall in love with you." It was an indirect response to his declaration of love, and she saw him note it and put it aside as she had. Their feelings were not the crux of this matter. "What do you mean 'nothing would work'? What are you trying to do?"

He flexed his hands in a gesture of frustration. "I don't know. I know I need the town, and I need you. I can pay my way," he added, almost pathetically. "I'm still a fixer."

"More than a fixer."

"True. But I could do only what a fixer did."

His desperation tormented her. Whatever he'd become, he'd done it for them all — for the town, for Gaia. They should be welcoming him, but a wounded animal is a wounded animal, no matter what the cause.

"If you could pretend to be the old Dan Fixer…" She answered herself. "But you can't. We all know, or at least guess. You're a hero of the Hellbane Wars, mighty and to be feared. Do you know they renamed Bond Street Dan Fixer Way?"

"That's ridiculous."

"But you're stuck with it." She eyed him. "Why do I feel comfortable all of a sudden? Is it magic?"

"I don't think so."

The relief only lasted a moment. "Are you saying you don't know? Don't know what you're doing?"

"No, not that. But I can't say there isn't any… radiance from it. If there is, I can't do anything about it. Does it matter?"

It was an anxious question, and she didn't know the answer. She raised her knees and rested her weary head on them. "Explain, Dan. Please. Explain what you're trying to do."

He picked up a dead stick, an ordinary one, and poked at the fire. "The remaining fixers are all more or less as I am now. In power. Hellbanes are a powerful potion."

"Is that why you let everyone think you were dead?"

He nodded. "We had to decide what we'd become before we could decide what to do. We could have disappeared, let everyone think us dead. The thing is some of us are… out of control. Mad, I suppose. But mad with great power. We're guarding them, but it takes nearly all our resources. Perhaps they'll heal. If not…"

"You'll kill them?" She was proud of her calm voice.

"We'll have no choice. We can't spend all our energy on them."

"Why not? We miss fixers, but we can cope."

He shook his head. "Gaia needs fixers. We have to rebuild the system."

"What, with a handful of you? Perhaps Alice Cottrel had the right idea and you should stay at Hellbane U and come when called. For important things only."

"I'm not talking about that kind of fixing."

"What, then?"

"If the blighters come back. We have to be ready, and we have to find a better way."

Blighters back? But her mind fixed on the pain at the end of the sentence.

"What happened, Dan? What did you have to do?"

"You don't want to know."

She gripped her hands together. "Tell me anyway."

He tossed the stick into the fire, and it burst into wild flames, making her flinch away.

"All right. It was my idea, clever lad that I am. Fixers were dying one by one, and the blighters only grew stronger. We all wanted to rush out and fight, but I persuaded everyone to play with their magic like I'd been doing, to find the stuff training had locked up in us."

His eyes brightened for a moment. "It was amazing what some of us could do, Jen, the power we could draw on. It became clear that the presence of so many blighters was making us stronger, day by day. But what to do with it?"

Any light in him died. "Do you remember what I said about power gained and lost? We figured out that we could act in a group and have even greater destructive force, but we still couldn't modulate it. What we needed was blighters bunched in huge numbers, and that doesn't seem to be their way."

Jenny was trying to follow his logic, but mostly she was following something that ran beneath his words. Something terrible.

"So we baited a trap."

Her mouth dried. "With what?"

He leaned back on stiff arms. It might have been a relaxed posture, but it wasn't. "They like people more than animals, but they really love fixers — like I love Walker's spiced meat pies, and you love those big strawberries your father grows. A solitary fixer draws blighters from all around. Perhaps they fight over the prey. I don't know…"

She stared at him, but apart from that betraying pause, his tone was flat.

"So we formed troops of the ideal size — about forty, as it happens. We'd form a circle and put the bait in the center. When the blighters rushed in to feed, we cleared the area. We'd get thousands sometimes, and the juice would flood into us, making us stronger still. Then the troop moved along and did it again. And again. And again. Troops had to merge, of course, in time…" After a moment he said, "It was mostly my idea, and it worked."

She was still trying to form words when he added, "We drew lots. My name was never drawn."

After three swallows, she managed, "How — how many of you were there in the beginning?"

"More than a thousand—" Like a violently untethered spring, he curled forward, hands over his face. "One thousand two hundred and twenty three."

And eighteen came home. Day after relentless day, numbers dwindling, lots drawn, good-byes said…

"We all wanted to be noble sacrifices, but the fear's too strong. So we used magic to hold the bait. Right in the middle. It's most efficient that way."

She scooted around the fire and gathered his pain tight into her arms.

"You dread being chosen," he whispered. "You dread not being. You dread living—"

"Dan. Dan… don't. Don't think about it." Oh, how crushingly stupid.

He turned to her and clung, and she did the only thing she could and held tighter still. She wished he'd cry, but he'd surely drained himself of tears long ago.

"You don't want to be here, where you're not wanted," she murmured, rubbing her face against his hair, stroking him, tears escaping. "If it's me you want, I'll come with you. Anywhere."

He turned his head against hers to brush lips. "It's you I want, Jen. It's you I need. You. I thought of you, dreamed of you. When I wanted to throw myself into the blighters because it would be easier, I thought of coming back to you." He kissed tears from her cheek. "Don't cry, love. Don't cry."

"How can I not? But you're home now, Dan. Home."

Then she realized what she'd said. She drew back, cradled his face, looked into his eyes. "It's important to you? That you come home?"

"I don't think I can carry on without it, but… there's more. I'm the only one with a real home to come back to. To heal, I need you. To live, I need you. But I need the town, too. To do what needs to be done, to be what I need to be, I need my family, your family, our family, our friends. Those arc the roots of the tree that I am, the tree that magic is, the tree of the future."

She remembered then what he'd said. "When the blighters might return?"

"I don't think we destroyed them, Jen. We zapped a lot of them, millions maybe, but I think in the end they retreated. We were down to eighteen, and though we were each bloated with power we were close to the end. Yet they went. If this is their life cycle, perhaps they retreated with enough energy to reproduce, or whatever they do."

"The last time must have been a thousand years or more ago."

"But that's because they ate this place almost to extinction. We've survived. If we slacken birth control, we could build the population again in a generation. Even without that, it'll probably be back in a century or so. Or Earth might send more settlers."

Jenny pressed her face against his shoulder. Eighteen left, all crippled in some way, yet they had to be teachers for a new generation of fixers who might be needed within decades — needed to sacrifice themselves again? He was right. There had to be a better way.

Dan and the few other sane fixers would have to come up with that better way while training new ones. And they'd have to train them in the wild magic as well as the old sort.

She remembered Polly's baby. She knew now he'd been right. They shouldn't interfere too much with nature, but that meant the world must change so that it could accept that. Accept that, no matter the personal suffering, the magic must be restrained unless the blighters returned to feed again. To lead all this, Dan needed his home, and above all, he needed her.

She turned to touch her lips to his brow. "I am home. I am yours. Always."

Lips joined, and she tasted need and lingering ashes. No, need was too frail a word. Starvation. A gaping hollow in the soul he'd tried so hard to hide from her. She could not deny him the feast, no matter what the cost. Gathering him into her arms, she deepened the kiss, took the ashes, held him close, until she felt the first desperation diminish.

"Come, love, come." She pulled his shirt loose and put her hands to the hot skin of his back, already rolling him out of the fire's low glow into some privacy. They tore at clothes, and he thrust deep within, seeming to burn her in the surging connection with those alien places only he could touch.

She climaxed quickly, but he went on, pounding into her until she wanted to protest, to cry out to him to stop. She braced herself and bore it, knowing he was far away, seeking something deeper and stronger than mere orgasm. Something healing for those invisible, terrible wounds. He drove her through two more mechanical annihilations before he shuddered and stopped, limp as the dead.

She winced as she bore his weight, knowing it symbolized some of what was to come. His need was great, but she would grow strong enough to bear it. His healing would draw on her, but she would be a deep enough well. His thoughts would not always be centered on her, but that was as it should be. He was a hero, and a hero's intent is always on the greater goal.

Dan had become what he was in order to save them all. She could do no less. For his sake and the world's, she'd feed and nurture him.

And, tomorrow, she would bring him home.

They dressed as the sun began to rise and breakfasted on stale bread and stewed tea. They laughed about that, remembering the park and the horribly boiled tea there. They talked of the future, gently. He thought there might be many people like her, with a little fixing ability that could be developed so they could take on some of the load. "Perhaps everyone on Gaia's that way," she said. "It could explain why it's such a flourishing, stable world." He met her smile. "Which it is, and will be." When the sun was up, they extinguished the fire, packed his bag, and walked up to knock on the postern gate. The wide-eyed gatekeeper opened it and put the formal question.

"What business brings you to Anglia?"

Jenny answered. "I'm Jenny Hart, citizen, and this is my chosen partner, Dan Rutherford Fixer. We're returning home."

The rule was ancient and absolute. Any citizen's partner had freedom of the town.

Jenny looked at Dan, trying to see him as others would see him. She thought he looked as he always had. He'd done something magical to make his hair short again, and he didn't think it would grow so fast anymore. Some of the stress was fading from his features.

They'd made love again with the dawn, that time for her. When she murmured about cameras, he said he'd blocked them. She knew for sure now that she wasn't bringing wildfire into the town, but winter fire, and she would be its hearth.

The gatekeeper returned to open the gate for them. Holding hands, Jenny led Dan through to face the bewildered, hastily assembled alders.

The trouble with heroes is that they want to come home.

But home needs its heroes, and home is also their just reward.