Chapter Text
7-Eleven employees are virtually super villain henchmen, Andy thinks as she escapes the harsh Khorgos cold, sparing a glance at the neon-lit sign above as she slips into the convenience store. The space itself is small enough for the gas heater she could hear struggling in the background, the clean but worn white tiles a familiar comfort, though the shelves are barely stocked. There's a middle-aged Chinese guy manning the counter alone, and he has a nametag she can't read because it's in Hanzi. He stands as he sees her approach, then takes his place behind the register, next to the sad and empty coffee machine.
"Ni hao," she starts, her tone way off, and she doesn't need the cashier's twitching brow to know it. "Wo qu shou huo," she says while miming a box. She tries again, "Posylka?"
Back to her theory. For one, employees now provide banking services after their successful third attempt at expanding their crypto trading. Two, a manager in Istanbul successfully routed a flight for his boss back in 2046. Three, there's a station in every godforsaken location, which she's ninety-nine percent certain has diplomatic immunity stronger than that of the US Embassy. Four, they offer mail pickup for media correspondents in active war zones.
"Dokumenty?" says the employee, slowly.
Andy presents her ID. And store card, "Vot."
After scanning them, he goes, "An American? My goodness, you're far from home," he says absently and with barely an accent as he takes her package out from under the counter. So, probably trilingual. Definitely a valuable henchman, but he should still invest in learning to pilot a jet to move up the corporate ladder.
One would expect Andy's parcel to go through the global post-- stamps of Istanbul, Almaty, China, etc. all over it like barnacles on a well-traveled turtle. No, in the Lord's year of 2054, you present your store loyalty rewards card instead of your passport, because the world has stopped pretending to make sense. She looks down at her prize, just the maximum weight and dimensions limit for 7-Eleven Express.
SENDER: Lily Williams, 442 W 22nd St, Apt 4B, New York, NY 10011-7052, USA
TRANSIT HUB: IST-KRG-DRYPORT TRACKING: 77-BIF-GULP-99012
Andy's eyes are dry. She thinks of Lily's cozy apartment in Chelsea. Hazel, Lily's daughter whom she decided to raise alone after divorcing her husband, would be turning, gosh, 29? The years have gone by too fast. The girl is Andy's goddaughter, and she hasn't seen her since… Andy's throat constricts, and she compulsively pinches the ring under her gloved fingers.
Her eyes are still dry, but the cold winds will whip it into true submission, she's sure.
She gives the henchman a smile of thanks and makes her way back into the grey, grey world. Her package is safe near her chest, and she digs her fingers in to get a feel as to what it might be. It's shaped like a book and feels like it too. Oh, what if it's pictures of her friends and goddaughter? Andy looks around the snow-covered expanse. Low visibility; she can't see the steppes in the distance at all. But there is a waiting shed that could grant some cover from sudden gales. She carefully trudges to it.
Andy sits down in the shed and tries to tear through the parcel, her cloth gloves slipping on the tape and plastic. She pulls off a glove with her mouth and tries again, peeling away the white and green cover successfully this time. It's not a photo album she could browse while saving battery for her satellite phone, but it is a book alright.
BRED FOR THE EMPEROR'S FAVOR, The Jewel of the Inner Palace, a #1 Bestseller, Stayed in the Charts Longer than the Second Cold War!
A massive dark-haired man in kingly robes, but with his overly muscular chest somehow in full display, seizing a helpless-looking blonde girl—boy?—in a gauzy wedding attire. Andy flips to the back of the book and reads the synopsis. Breeding? Knotting?
What the fuck is an Omega?!
A cloud passes through, blocking the sun overhead and casting a gloomy shadow. The fog thins, revealing scattered rows of empty buildings and rubble. Smoke and gas intermingle with the water vapors, clinging tirelessly to Andy's coat and scarf. A little ways away, there's a piece of land where the cover of snow is thin, showing the earth pockmarked from heavy artillery.
The old journalist stares at her smut book. "Lily is the worst."
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Later that same day, Andy realizes that Lily is, in fact, not the worst, and she knows Andy very well indeed. In the book, Lily has tucked in an envelope with a letter and a few photographs, which Andy is saving for when she finds herself particularly down.
At the moment, a dozen people are crammed in the basement of what used to be a restaurant. The air is sufficiently warm, and Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" plays on an ancient, battery-operated speaker. They're celebrating Andrea Sachs' 70th birthday and have decided to perform a play in her honor. The celebrant sits crisscrossed on top of the only sturdy table, as she deserves. Journalists and photographers scattered around, most of them middle-aged. They're holding opened MREs; a few have makeshift props in their hands.
Andy clears her throat. Her voice is clear and resonant, with the same passion as the speeches she gave in Washington, D.C. and Capitol Hill. "Jasper brought his arms across his chest. His nipples hardened against his will, pressing against the gauzy fabric that hid nothing from the imagination. But the onset of his Heat was inevitable, slick, humiliatingly gushing…?" Andy readjusts her glasses. "Gushing. Out of his hole."
Jimmy, short and bearded, steps forward. He's wearing nothing but cargo shorts and a mosquito net draped on top of him. He wiggles his best and shoots an equally bearded man to his left a salacious look. This other guy is Georgie, and he's wearing an eyepatch over his right eye. The eyepatch is an artistic liberty, considering the other lead in the novel isn't wearing it.
Georgie preens a little before further ripping his own already-torn shirt to show off a pasty, fishbelly-white chest. Wolf whistles erupt from some of the women. He tenses his jaw and squints his eyes because the script says Emperor Domitian is smoldering. Lowering his voice, he begins, "Kneel before my throne. I can smell what you need, Omega."
"A shower," someone heckles.
Jimmy looks at a piece of paper in his hand, on which is Jasper's: 'Please, not here, not in front of everyone. Have mercy!' Jimmy glares at Georgie, and with his crisp Scottish accent, "Ye jus' dun want me bumhole's skidmarks on yer sheets, ye cheap fuck?!"
Andy roars in laughter, the kind that starts from her gut and bursts through her chest, bringing along everyone in the room. Jimmy looks proud of himself. She then hypocritically knocks her knuckles on the table, calling for order. They all manage to parody their way through the book after that, but before an hour could fully pass, Cate, a woman with short straight hair, asks,
"How does the Command Voice even work? Can it," she makes a zooming motion with her hand, "travel through the phone?"
Andy pauses. "Never explained throughout the book, but they don't have phones here." She shuffles around the pages. "I don't know, seems to be a pre-industrialized setup."
Georgie readjusts his eyepatch over his left eye. "It could be like the Purple Man, what's-his-face, Kilgrave! From Jessica Jones, remember? Marvel Comics, TV series. So his body produces pheromones, though some renditions present it as virus-like particles. When paired up with his voice, it makes people follow his every command."
Cate chortles, "Marvel wrote an Alpha!"
"He's also famously a rapist, so that checks out," Georgie confirms.
Jimmy pipes in, "So we all agree, if someone presents as an Alpha, 'e shud be ushered into a lil' room, an' humanely disposed."
"Hear, hear." Andy raises her juice.
"Okay, I'm back into this shit again," the sound guy says, changing the song to something of Rihanna. "So a mask, uh, an elastomeric respirator just to be safe, tactical earplugs, and a .45?"
Everyone takes turns to give their opinions.
"No, those things don't exist there. That would be cheating. Why not just bring a tank at that point."
Jimmy, who is at this point in time refusing to get off Georgie's lap, explains the tensile strength of silk to the room and his ideas about a garrote.
"The Alphas are supernaturally strong, Jimmy. There's no way you can overpower Dominus Domitian Whatever. I'd go with using the silk as a sling."
"A sling! Just put a rock in the silk and swing it down on his head. Nice. But let's assume you're super weak."
The "theater" quickly devolves into killing methods, which in turn goes into ideas about destabilizing the novel's hierarchical society.
"The average lifespan of Betas is normal human years, while Alphas and Omegas could go like six hundred years old? They still outnumber them. I'd raise a Beta army and wipe them out in two generations."
"Well, their whole society is driven by slave labor. Nobody can resist the pheromones/voice, so you have to build industries to produce counters to that. If you're lucky, you won't actually need an elastomeric respirator, maybe just holding your breath and covering your ears. The point is not to hear clearly…"
Old friends converse and make merry through the night, ancient songs for the Millennials and the Gen Z, the scent of diesel and re-heated MREs in the air. They make grand plans to take over a world without persistent loitering munitions, algorithmic misinformation, or biometric policing. A world where knowledge is not as futile as grief.
Andy strokes the ring on her finger.
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Three months after her birthday, Andrea Sachs is on her deathbed. She finds herself floating in and out of consciousness, but she's curiously not splattered over the earth, she's inside a building now. They must have managed to drag her, or what remains of her, into a neutral zone.
"Damn it Sachs, stay with me," it's Cate's voice. Andy can vaguely tell that she's redoing a tourniquet. Her hands are shaking. They never shook so much the other times Andy had seen her do this.
"Listen 'ere. If ye don't want to be shipped in an ice cream freezer back to yer country, you…" Jimmy's voice breaks, but this elicits a chuckle out of Andy. And he jolts closer, "Ye there, ol' gal? Can ye speak?"
"Here's some water-" the spout of a water pack is shoved at her face. She purses her lips and closes her eyes. She's not really thirsty. She's cold.
"Is there… is there anything we can do for you?" a wobbling voice, she can no longer tell whose, "want me to fetch that shitty book again?"
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A book, that's right. There was a woman who told her to deliver a book, a lifetime ago. If she thinks hard enough, she'll be able to feel the shape and weight of it, strum the spiral binding with her fingernails. Andy breathes in, and she can barely recognize the smell of smoke and diesel, as her mind puts all its focus on the hint of perfume and coffee.
A no-foam, a no-foam… what was it again?
In a deep corner of her mind, her younger self is screaming the continuation to that. She is crying, that girl.
There is something she has to remember. Something important that she's forgotten.
A no-foam…
There were years she threw up at the smell of coffee. It would make her remember the attacks on press offices and, improbably, on Elias-Clarke. Right, she was avoiding thinking of the funeral, of the time when her world stopped, long ago. She'd rather stare down a firearm and live in the basement of a hollowed-out mill.
But in the end, she might have in fact robbed herself. Because it wasn't all fire and brimstone. With that scent, she also stopped thinking of the morning light filtering through their townhouse window, the way it fell on her white hair and made her dear head glitter. The sound of the twins arguing as the TV played in the background. The give of warm flesh through cotton as she pressed her cheeks to her wife's back.
Caroline, Cassidy, Miranda. She had screamed their names in the ruins and the rubble. Sirens. The crush of people.
Andy should sleep. She's so cold.
Next time she wakes up, there should be feet stomping down the stairs. Coffee brewing in the kitchen, a dog panting after the teenagers. She would make plans to take them out for a day, somewhere nice for a treat. She had just won her first Pulitzer.
Wait. Was the before or after? Did Miranda know she won something, did it happen after she lost them, did she get to treat them somewhere nice?
She can't remember.
But there were peals of laughter, and a soft voice that carries through time and memory.
Andy could sleep. Maybe she would wake in a place where Miranda Priestly still exists.
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The first breath Andrea Sachs takes fills her lungs to the point of bursting. The air is unbearably clean. Her head aches, but years living in on the edge forces her eyes wide open. Both her hands fly to her own neck, too much, too much.
The last thing she remembers is dying, and she pats herself to check the damage. It feels wrong, why is she wearing too little, and the fabric is too coarse even for rags. Should she sit up-- can she? Before moving any further, she takes in her surroundings. This is…
A small wooden house and a straw bed. She isn't freezing.
Her right hand travels to the ring finger on her left. Nothing. That makes her jolt and stare at her hands. Good God.
No prominent veins and tendons, young and elastic skin, and pretty nails. No ring.
She looks at her body. She's wearing dirty rags that emit an acrid scent around the neck, as if she threw up on it. She tries to stand, and her body feels foreign and familiar at the same time. Though she feels weak, there's a noticeable lack of arthritis. A mirror, she needs a mirror.
She looks around the small space, doesn't find a mirror, but a shelf with earthen jars. There is one made of glass. She shakily approaches it, and through the reflection, she sees herself, just as she was in her twenties, no, maybe younger. She looks tired and worn, but unmistakably no longer the woman about to be shipped in an ice cream freezer.