After her parents’ death, the FBI had shown her the manifesto they’d found tucked in his junior-year yearbook. It was nothing like the crisp, well-spoken brother she thought she knew. Instead, it wandered and fretted and threatened and despaired.
The Open Edge of the Blade
by Nathan Farooq-Lane
Only the open edge of the scissor blade is pure.. Once it has closed it has exhausted its potential.. Purity is apartness.. Purity is potentiality.. So much of the world is dull too dull to ever cut.. Or was once open and is now closed.. The dull scissors were never scissors they were only lawn ornaments.. They are scissor-shaped but they were never going to have a purpose.. They are no better or worse than the closed scissors.. The closed scissors are also no longer scissors because they once could cut but now are closed.. All that is important is the open edge of the blade which is still pure.. These are the blades that have purpose.. Purity is purpose.. Purpose is purity.. There is no room for the shears to open if there are too many closed scissors in the box.. Making room means deletion.. Not cutting because cutting leaves pieces and pieces take room, just different room.. Deletion is erasure which makes space for the open edge of the blade..
And so on for a dozen typed pages.
Had Nathan Farooq-Lane made sense?
She’d asked herself since then if there had been something about his external self that would have allowed her to predict this internal self. She asked herself if her parents would still be alive if she had. But he was one system she’d never been able to fit into a spreadsheet.
Later, the Moderators had found her and told her Nathan was a Zed, someone who could take things out of his dreams, and that all the peculiar explosive devices had actually been dreams.
“I know it can be hard to believe,” Lock had said.
But Nathan had killed twenty-three people starting at age sixteen. She could believe anything about him now. What she’d actually thought then was: The Moderators would have had to kill him at age fifteen to save all those lives.
“Well, this is creepy as hell,” Lock rumbled.
The leader of the Moderators was tanklike as he powered down a hall in the West Virginia Museum of Living History. Broad shoulders. Fat-soled athletic shoes crunching debris beneath them. Everywhere Lock’s flashlight beam illuminated looked war-torn. Hanging ceiling tiles. Peeling paint. Faded, knocked-over furniture.
The ruined museum was unsettling, but Lock wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about the mannequins.
Someone had filled the hall with a troupe of mannequins from the museum exhibits. Recently. Everything here was covered with great, soft layers of dust, but the mannequins had handprints all over their arms and chests. Fresh. A few days old at most. Farooq-Lane shone her flashlight on each as she passed. Sailor. Baker. Homemaker. Policeman. A Zed could stand among them and the Moderators wouldn’t know until they were on top of them.
“Oh, come on,” said one of the other Moderators, delivering a sudden kick at the homemaker. The mannequin heaved to the side, heavier than expected, and fell into the arms of a surprisingly sturdy train conductor with mismatched eyes. “There’s no Zed here. We’d already be completely screwed if there was.”
The Moderator wasn’t wrong. Every recent encounter with the Zeds had ended the same as the encounter with the Zed in the Airstream, with the Moderators defeated and confused, and generally feeling like absolute idiots. These new Zeds were boggling their minds. Literally. Farooq-Lane understood that even this ruse of mannequins was mostly to play with their heads. It wouldn’t stop the Moderators for long—it was just to unsettle them. It was Nathan’s scissors.
Lock shone a flashlight into a mannequin’s face. It was a chef. He—Lock, not the chef—said, “The Visionary saw us confronting the Zeds in her vision. That means we’re supposed to be successful in the future, only it gets changed. We will find a way through this.”
“Where is the Visionary anyway?” one of the other Moderators asked, a little nervously. The other Moderators were all very afraid Liliana was going to blow them up. A reasonable fear. She’d accidentally blown up a family of ducks during her last vision.
“She’s waiting in the car,” Farooq-Lane said. “But she’s very stable at this age.”
“Very stable at this age.” One of the other Moderators mimicked Farooq-Lane’s crisp way of speaking, which, to Farooq-Lane’s surprise, sounded a lot like Nathan. “She’d be more stable if she’d turn that stuff inside. Like every. Other. Visionary. Until Miss Carmen here.”
Just a few weeks before, Farooq-Lane would have spent time wondering what she could possibly do to prove her loyalty to the Moderators. But not anymore. No longer did she find them the all-knowing righteous arm of the law. The failures of the past few weeks had changed all of them. The Moderators had all separated neatly into Team Discouraged or Team Cagey or Team Angry.
Carmen Farooq-Lane was Team Restore Order.
This was no longer only about a possible future apocalypse. The Potomac Zeds had pushed this into a new realm for her. Using dreams to mess with people’s minds was a system-breaking, society-ending weapon, and there was no longer any doubt in her that something had to change.
So she didn’t let the Moderators’ needling rattle her. She shone her flashlight slowly over the mannequins they’d just walked through. She had a funny thought that there were twenty-three of them. She counted them.
Twenty-three.
But Nathan was dead, and they were chasing three entirely different Zeds who had nothing to do with him. It was coincidence, not magic. Her subconscious had taken in information about her surroundings while her active mind was doing something else. There was a term for it. Unconscious cognition? Priming? One of those. She’d taken some courses in college.
This is your guilt, Farooq-Lane told herself, letting herself acknowledge it. Guilt for not stopping Nathan. Guilt for getting him killed. Guilt for feeling guilty. Guilt for killing so many Zeds over the last several months.
Guilt for not asking questions.
They had come to an enormous ruined space, a tree bursting through the collapsed roof, the night sky visible overhead. Farooq-Lane shivered in the suddenly brisk air. This ruin was what they were trying to prevent. Humanity wiped out. Every human accomplishment reduced to rubble and vines. Civilization was so tenuous. This museum had been important to someone, once. If a Zed had made this, she thought, it could have been made supernaturally permanent. This was the real danger of Zeds, she thought. The scale of it. Humans could only do so much. Zeds could kill infinite people, start infinite fires, create infinite destructive legacies.
A gun went off.
Everyone jumped; Farooq-Lane hit the deck. As the ferns tickled her cheek and her palms pressed the cold rubble beneath her, she wondered, Is this real?
It felt real. But she’d seen what the Potomac Zeds could do to perception.
A moment later, Lock rumbled, “That was very unprofessional.”
Farooq-Lane lifted her head. One of the Moderators—Ramsay, of course—was holding a pistol, the barrel still visibly smoking in a flashlight beam. In his other hand he held half a limp black snake. The other half of it had been shot away. As Farooq-Lane watched, the ruined end of the snake slowly twisted in a muscle memory of life.
She had to look away.