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.