Echoes from the Battleground

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

the Week After

xi

The meeting was like so many that had preceded it: a gathering of minor functionaries, knowing themselves to be so, with little power or authority and almost as little imagination. And, once again, the task was to deal with the negative repercussions of something they hadn’t initiated and didn’t understand.

As the senior member of the city council, Joseph Roemer was the one presiding. “I’ve looked through the city charter,” he told the others, “and I’m afraid the lines of succession are … well, not as comprehensive as we might have liked. Somebody has to serve as mayor pro tem, until we can have a special election, but there are no provisions for a situation like this.”

Without looking up, Marian Cox said, “Of the bunch of us, Adán probably has the best grasp of what’s going on. I propose that we appoint him. Anybody?”

There were nods of approval here and there; nobody was exactly scrambling for the top spot. Adán Garcia, the City Manager, looked glum, but said, “I’ll give it a shot if we’re in agreement. But how soon can we have an election?”

“It’ll be at least six weeks,” Roemer said. “We’ll get a committee on that right away. Meanwhile, Roger? what’s the situation with the high school?”

“Total loss,” Roger Pollard shot back. “What did you expect?”

“I know that,” Roemer said in return. “But we have to figure out what we’re going to do with next year’s high school class. You’re the liaison with the school board, so I want any suggestions you may have.”

“Oh,” Pollard said. “Sorry. Mm … I’d say, filter everything down. Move the fourth graders down into the primary school with the first three grades, junior high students down into the elementary school with the fifth and sixth graders — they won’t like it, but hey, tough — and the high schoolers take over the junior high.” He shrugged. “At least that building is fairly new.”

“And some people will move, take their kids on to other school districts.” This was Larry Petersen, who had spent three years as little more than a seat-warmer. “That always happens, after …”

He trailed off, but imagination filled in the rest. After one of the bizarre disasters that seem to occur five or six times a year. It was unnecessary for anyone to say it aloud. “Well, at least the city budget is in good shape,” Alfred Tunnell pointed out. “Whichever way we go, we should be solid on funding.”

“Good.” Roemer shook his head. “It’ll be next fiscal year, at least, before we can even start on new construction, but we can be getting agreements and drawing up contracts. All of this … it’s a shock, and we’re having to take quick action, but aside from the immediacy it’s all relatively routine. But there’s one matter …”

“Oh, hell,” said Carolyn Seaver, the impossible red hair a startling contrast to the pallor of her face. “This has to do with Dick Wilkins, doesn’t it?”

Roemer held up a placating hand. “Yes, but not directly. I’m ready to do this on my own authority, but I wanted to let you all know, so that I’m not forcing anything. I’ve arranged for someone to clear out various … materials … from the Mayor’s offices.” He looked around, his expression flat. “Most of what’s there, I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know. I just want it all gone, and Mr Giles assures me that he knows the proper means of dealing with —” He stopped, coughed. “With such … things.”

“Giles,” Seaver repeated, her expression suddenly alert. “Isn’t he —?”

“The high school librarian,” Roemer confirmed. “And, as such, a city employee already. However, I think we can consider this outside his normal duties, on which basis I offered him a special commission. Unless someone else would rather handle the matter?”

No one did. Roemer hadn’t expected that they would. Like anyone else who had chosen to live in Sunnydale, the members of the city government had a deep-set awareness of which areas they were better off avoiding. Only duty had carried Roemer even as far as he had gone: one look at the shelves in Wilkins’ office, and he had hastily closed the doors again; fifteen minutes’ quick skimming of the file labeled PENDING EVENTS, and he had been more than willing to accept Rupert Giles’ offer to take it all off his hands.

Still, Roemer reflected as he looked to the next item on the agenda, he really ought to ask Giles just what exactly ‘plague limpets’ and ‘cruitl hatching’ were. In case some quick action was necessary.

Such as moving to Australia.

xii
(The following segment has references that will make more sense to those who have read
“Whisper of a Moment” and “the Still, Small Voice”.)

There were two big things about hospitals. The first was that you could go many places as long as you looked like you knew your destination. The second was that you could go almost anywhere if you wore a white lab coat, carried a clipboard, and kept your personal appearance acceptably professional. With black-framed eyeglasses and her hair twisted back into a bun, Willow walked briskly down the hallway toward Sunnydale General’s IT room. The fifteen-year-old girl who had once dreaded confrontation, or even attention, still lived inside her in part, but that part was layered under memories of face-on combat with vampires, breaking into the city morgue to do a personal autopsy, distracting staff in this same hospital by feigning frog hallucinations. No hesitation showed in her expression, only preoccupation and no-nonsense purpose.

This was business, but it was also personal. Faith had directly, individually threatened Willow, Buffy, Xander, Angel … only Giles and Cordelia had been exempted, if only by being relegated to the larger massacre that had been planned for the entire school. Willow had heard the initial reports indicating essentially zero probability that the dark Slayer would ever emerge from the coma that gripped her. As far as Willow was concerned, zero was still too big a risk. She wasn’t about to take anything for granted; she intended to know.

Ahead of her, the elevator ding!ed and opened. Willow recognized the man who stepped out, and raised the clipboard as if to peer more closely at a line of very small print, obscuring the lower part of her face. Father Nolan, she’d met with him often enough that he might recognize her, she could always claim she was doing volunteer work in computer support … Her heart lurched as she saw the priest stop short at the sight of her; he stared, even took a step back as if startled or fearful. She passed him with a murmured apology, pulse hammering, and went on with every appearance of confidence that she could project through body language.

The way he’d looked at her … could he tell, did he know she’d been having sex? by something in her face, or even in the way she walked? Ohgodohgodohgod —

Get a grip, Rosenberg! She turned the nearest corner, continued on her chosen path. Catholic guilt had nothing on nice-Jewish-girl guilt, but she had a job to do here, and she wasn’t about to be distracted.

The door she needed was ahead. A security card was required to get in; she could have had one made, by pulling enough strings, but it had been simpler to hack into the hospital’s system and instruct it to accept and approve the information from the magnetic strip on her Blockbuster card. Once inside, she was ready to duck into the alcove where the routers were stored (she had the schematics) or bluff her way through with IT-talk more than adequate to show her expertise. The server room was empty, however, so she was able to settle straight in to work.

She could tap into the hospital network any time she wanted, but that was broad strokes; Sunnydale General’s systems weren’t fully integrated yet, and some of the records she would need were sequestered in non-networked systems. She opened her laptop, ran a cable from it to the main server, and began tracing connections. In the router section, she used three cables to add connections where none had previously existed, then added another three to set up alternate channels in case of misadventure. Now everything she needed to know could be accessed remotely, at her convenience.

Back at her laptop, she began testing the channels, confirming that it all worked the way she’d intended. Easier, if she’d had the money and knew who to approach, to just pay someone in the hospital to call them if Faith ever showed any sign of waking. She had neither the cash nor the knowledge necessary, though, and when it came right down to it, Willow put more trust in systems she could control. Now that the connections were established, she would write programs to track and collate every file recording any aspect of Faith’s treatment or condition (huh, her surname was listed as Lehane, was that real or was it an alias the Mayor had set up?), and use comparison algorithms to send up a flag whenever any collection of interrelated symptoms even hinted at prospective recovery. It would take at least a few weeks to collect a sufficient baseline of reports, and no doubt she would have to tweak the tracking programs on a regular basis — which meant, don’t let college distract her from keeping up with all that! — but she had no doubt that this particular early-warning system would be more than worth the effort …

All right, all looking good. Various records were already being unearthed, assimilated, and integrated for composite analysis. Blood gases, ECG, EEG, electrolytes, even urine output (ew!) … She would need to work a medical database into the warning program, but that was nothing compared to some of the programming she’d done just as a hobby. She had only a general idea of what most of these things meant, and none at all on some — CBC, BUN, creatinine, Na/K/Cl/Ca balances — so a certain amount of self-education would be necessary, maybe she could actually work that into some of her college course-work …

Okay, hold on, that one looked familiar: HCG, what was that? She’d seen it somewhere, or read it in scientific journals, or maybe even in television commercials. It nagged at her, it was intolerable to know she knew something and not be able to call it up, she did a fast online search … right, human chorionic gonadotropin, used to test for … and track … and confirm …

Oh, God.

She stared at the lab results, a cascade of memories and inferences crashing through her numbed brain. In the course of less than two minutes, all of Willow Rosenberg’s plans and imperatives underwent radical alteration, and something inside her turned dark and forbidding and very, very cold.

She didn’t yet know precisely what she was going to do, though a faint framework of intention and necessity was already beginning to take ghostly form in the back her mind. Too many things were yet to be determined, too many choices would require deep, searing reflection. One item leaped immediately to the forefront, however, impulse instantly transmuting into decision. Willow called up a particular electronic document, and in a vital field she added a single entry, using one finger to stab three different keys in forceful, deliberate sequence:

          D.

          N.

          R.

xiii
(The following segment will have more meaning for those who have read “Shadow and Substance”.)

She arrived with the twilight, a pale woman dressed in vintage clothing, her thick white hair in a long braid and blue-lensed sunglasses protecting her eyes against the fading light in the sky. The ruins of Sunnydale High School had been fenced off with plastic orange netting strung from metal T-posts; the rubble no longer smoked, but a psychic-mystical miasma still hung over it. Part of that would be Hellmouth emanations, and some the residue from the previous week’s cataclysm … but there was also old, old evil suffusing the soil, and the insensate memories of uncounted tragedies.

She herself was the result of one of these. She did not squander any of her time in grief — that was long behind her — but busied herself instead with purpose. She cleared the barrier with ease, and her booted feet carried her smoothly and surely through broken stone and masonry, earth littered with the diamond twinkles of shattered glass, and (here and there) clumps of charred, decaying Olvikan/ Mayor-carcass. She knew the spot she wanted … but the spot itself had shifted with the demolition of the building, and the best she could do was to place herself at the vertical axis of the proper location.

She looked upward, eyes fixed on the mid-air spot where a fleeing woman had died, over a year before. Unreachable, once the floors had collapsed, but this was near enough. She pulled supplies from the bag she carried, and placed them with practiced dexterity: candles, a pair of crystals, fragments of bone, a diagram laid out in lines of gray-blue powder. She lit the candles and intoned the chant in the ancient words of her people, then stood, probing the gathering darkness with every last fading wisp of magickal potential her body still held, all her senses seeking … anything.

There was nothing.

She left the diagram and materials where they lay: useless for her, they likewise would offer nothing to anyone who found them. It had always been an insubstantial hope, that she might be able to find a means of resurrecting herself by working some as-yet-undeveloped ritual at the site of her own death; with that site now obliterated, even the distant chance was gone. And, with it, the last reason for her to remain in Sunnydale.

Somewhere within the city limits was a man who lo–… who had once loved her. She had gone to great lengths to avoid being seen by him in her current unclean state (even to changing her appearance so that she wouldn’t be recognized in the event of an unexpected encounter), and likewise taken pains to not see him, even from hiding, for the sorrow of what she had lost was a never-ending ache better left unprodded. She had remained in this city, risking exposure, while she searched out every remote possibility of cleansing rebirth for herself. Following ever-fainter paths, scorching her soul with manipulation and betrayal, turning her interior self into something so dark and tainted as to match the flesh she now inhabited.

That was done now. Out in the wider world, there were other nodes of knowledge to explore, and she had endless time to search them out. The promise there was vague, but here there was none. More than that, her newer quest would include attempts — again, potentially eternal — to make amends, to grope her way back to some semblance of … not righteousness, but perhaps decency.

Mouth set, expression showing nothing, eyes masked behind the blue lenses, the pale woman who had once borne another name, whose heart had once beat with dedication and passion and even whimsy, turned her back to the past and looked toward the blank, unreadable future that stretched out before her.
 

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