[Faye of the Doorstep] - Chapter 2 - Threesies

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Faye of the Doorstep, Chapter 2

Threesies

As she raged, Faye felt a plan forming. Not deliberately and not the way humans planned things. It was more like a current, an idea taking shape somewhere behind her eyes, then catching hold of her and pulling. She did not decide it, rather she recognized it.

A memory rose, unbidden.

She was sitting on the front porch, legs crossed, jacks scattered on the boards. The radio murmured from the living room. Frances was inside, moving about the kitchen. The light was warm and the day was ordinary.

Faye tossed the ball, then picked up three jacks and smoothly caught the ball after it bounced. She grinned to herself.

Inside, Frances made a sound Faye had never heard before. Raw and animalistic. The radio voice had changed. Words fell from the speaker.  Shot. Dallas. Dead.

Faye missed the next catch. She remembered that, too.

Kennedy had been shot on the day she mastered threesies.

She had not understood the grief then, only the sudden absence of safety. She remembered the way the air went thin and the way Frances leaned against the counter, hands braced, as if the world had tilted and might not right itself. Even now, decades later, Faye understood something new.

History did not break all at once. It broke while children played. It broke while people learned small, precise skills. It broke while women cooked, and hoped, and believed progress was steady.

The plan finished forming. It was not completely vengeance, though it was mostly that. There  was also balance and fairness mixed into the revenge.  If the world shattered in moments like these, then moments were where she would work, and this time she was old enough to do something about it.

Faye thought of Minneapolis, and then she was there.

She saw police tape and news cameras. On social media was already a solemn statement of support for the federal officer from the head of Homeland Security, words already separating themselves from truth.

“Threesies,” thought Faye.

She was back in the Null Space now, standing among the ruins her anger had raised. Fires smoldered without heat and towers leaned as if listening.

Three men stood beside her. They wore masks and their uniforms were mismatched, patched together from different agencies, different budgets, different rules, as if the officers had rummaged for gear from the castoffs of other, better agencies. It was a force assembled too quickly, from the leftovers that no one wanted. Faye turned to face them.

“Men,” she said.

Her voice was quiet. It did not echo, yet it filled the space. Timelessness clung to her like a second skin. Her anger was held, barely, and that restraint made it sharper.

“We are at a crossroads,” she said. “Give me your names.”

The men hesitated,  confused and frightened. They hadn't been trained for surprises. They looked at her and saw command, not because she shouted, but because she did not need to. One by one, they spoke, and when they did, their names came with them. They were not thier numbers and not aliases. They said thier true names, given by their mothers.

Faye took nothing by force, they gave it, and she knew then that the plan had been waiting for this moment all along.

“Men,” she said again.

Her voice did not rise. It did not need to.

“The enemy has made this beautiful land a wasteland. Look at the ruins.” She gestured, and the Null answered with broken towers, scorched ground, the wreckage of something once whole. “Among these ruins is the enemy. And among them, the riches they have stolen. Their food, their wealth and their safety.”

The men watched and listened.

“Find the enemy,” she said. “Take the spoils for yourselves.”

With their names freely given came power over their minds. Faye did not have to shape it carefully. She did not have to invent lies because the work had already been done. They already  carried fear of the Other. They already carried rage at equality, at being made ordinary, at being equal with others they wanted beneath them.

All Faye did was remove their ability to recognize friend from foe. Then she let go.

Over and over, a thousand times, she returned to the waking world and stepped back again with men and women in federal enforcement uniforms. Nearly all gave their names. Nearly all believed they were acting with purpose, with righteousness, with authority. She did not strike them down nor erase them. She merely set them loose.

They hunted endlessly in the ruins of the Null. They hunted each other in the shadows. The echo of an enemy that was always just ahead and the spoils  never satisfied them in the wasteland never healed. The Null let them circle forever in the worldview they had already chosen.

For a long while she watched them, hoping to feel satisfied with the retribution. But Faye learned, with a sorrow that never quite faded, that justice without mercy curdled quickly, and that power, once used this way, always left a residue on the hand that wielded it.