Nothing Works

Charismata

Chapter 13: Nothing Works

Miriam was sick by dawn.

Ez woke to the sound of retching outside the tent — a raw, ugly sound that the rain couldn't mask. He unzipped his sleeping bag and crawled out into grey light and found her on her knees in the wet grass, one hand braced against a tree, her body convulsing with the particular violence of someone whose system was rejecting something it couldn't name.

"Miriam —"

"Don't touch me." She held up her free hand. "Not — I'm not being rude. I mean literally don't touch me. I don't know what my body will do."

He knelt beside her. Close, not touching. The rain was light now — not the sideways assault of yesterday but a fine mist that hung in the air like breath.

"It's withdrawal," she said, when the retching stopped. She sat back on her heels, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her face was the colour of wet paper. "The healing gift. My body is used to processing other people's pain — taking it in, filtering it, expelling it. It's been doing that continuously for four years. And now there's nothing to process. The system is running but the input is gone, and the body doesn't know what to do with the idle." She laughed — a small, harsh sound. "I'm having withdrawal symptoms from empathy. That's not in the textbooks."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"Water. And don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're worried. I've been monitoring my own vital signs since I was thirteen. I can't do it right now and being looked at with concern by someone when I can't feel whether the concern is genuine is —" She stopped. Breathed. "Difficult."

"When I can't read a body," she said, looking at the ground, "I don't always know where to put my care."

Ez got the water. Levi emerged from the tent, looked at Miriam, and said nothing. He handed her a ration-pack cracker and sat down three feet away and ate his own breakfast in silence, and the silence was not cold — it was the silence of someone who understood that the best thing you could do for a person in pain was not leave.

They broke camp slowly. Miriam moved like someone relearning how to trust a body that had always given her more information than she'd asked for and was now giving her nothing. Levi packed with mechanical precision, every action deliberate, the behaviour of a person who had replaced perception with procedure. Ez did what he could — rolled sleeping bags, scattered the fire, checked the map — and noticed, with a clarity that surprised him, how much of his ordinary competence had nothing to do with the gift.

He could read a map. He could tie a knot. He could judge the weather by the shape of the clouds and the direction of the wind, the way Nana had taught him when he was eight, pointing at the sky above Brixton Market and saying: That one means rain before lunch, baby. See the flat bottom? That's a nimbostratus. That's God telling you to bring an umbrella.

The memory hurt, but it was a clean hurt. Not the gift. Just missing someone.

---

They reached the first checkpoint by noon.

The checkpoint was a cairn — a pile of stones on a hilltop, marked on the map with a red circle. No staff, no equipment, no sign of the Institute. Just rocks that someone had stacked on a high point of the fells, overlooking a valley that dropped away into mist, with a view that on a clear day would have been staggering and on this day was merely grey and wet and enormous.

Two other teams were already there.

Team Three: Abena Mensah (Foundation, Knowledge), a boy named David Park (Manifestation, Tongues), and a girl named Priya Sharma (Revelation, Interpretation) — sitting under a makeshift shelter of tarp and branches, looking like they'd been there for hours. Abena's Knowledge gift, which in normal conditions gave her instant access to information she'd never learned, was gone. She was holding the map upside down and staring at it with the specific frustration of someone whose mind had been a library and was now an empty room.

Team Five: Henrik Larsson (Foundation, Faith — the active kind, like Anand's), Sara Okafor (Manifestation, Healing — Sara, who'd been in Tobi's Trial team), and a quiet boy named James Chen (Revelation, Wisdom). Henrik was pacing. Sara was sitting very still with her hands in her lap, her face drawn, her body going through the same withdrawal Miriam was experiencing — two healers in a place where healing didn't work, their systems idling like engines with no road.

"How long have you been here?" Ez asked.

"Since yesterday evening," Abena said. "We found the checkpoint, decided to wait. David's been trying to speak in tongues for six hours. It's not —"

"It's not working," David said. He was sitting apart, cross-legged, his eyes red. "I keep opening my mouth and it's just — nothing comes. The language isn't there. It's like trying to speak a language you've forgotten. The shapes are gone."

Miriam sat down next to Sara. Didn't speak. Didn't touch. Just sat, and the two healers looked at each other with the recognition of two people experiencing the same specific hell, and that recognition was enough.

"Has anyone seen Team Four?" Ez asked.

"Ruth's team?" Abena shook her head. "They were dropped on the eastern perimeter. Different route. They should have reached this checkpoint by now."

Levi was standing at the edge of the hilltop, looking east. Without his discernment, he couldn't scan the landscape for frequencies or read the spiritual state of distant people. He was just a boy on a hill, looking at rain.

"They're late," he said.

"They might have taken a longer route —"

"They're late." He turned. His face was stripped of everything except the thing underneath the discernment, the thing Ez was beginning to suspect had been there long before the gift: a blunt, mechanical concern for other people that had nothing to do with reading frequencies and everything to do with the boy himself. "Ruth's team has a Knowledge gift, an Encouragement gift, and a Prophecy gift. None of those are navigation skills. In a dead zone with no gifts, they're three academics on a mountain in the rain."

The hilltop was quiet. The mist thickened. Somewhere to the east, three students were missing, and nobody on this hilltop could feel them, find them, read their frequencies, or reach them with anything other than legs and eyes and voices.

"We should go," Ez said.

"We have no gifts," Henrik said. "We can't track them, we can't heal them if they're hurt, we can't —"

"We have legs," Ez said. "And eyes. And torches. We don't need gifts to walk east and shout their names."

The hilltop went quiet again. A different kind of quiet — the quiet of people being reminded that before the gifts, before the charismata, before the Institute and the training and the frequencies and the alignment, they were just people. And people had been finding each other in the dark long before anyone spoke in tongues.

Levi looked at Ez. Something moved in his expression — not warmth, not yet, but the thing adjacent to warmth. Recognition. The discerner seeing, without discernment, something he would have missed if his gift had been running.

"I'll come," Levi said.

"Me too," Abena said, standing.

"Your map is upside down," David pointed out.

"Then someone else can hold the map."

Henrik hesitated. Then: "I'll stay with Sara and the others. If you're not back by dark —"

"We'll be back," Ez said.

He didn't know that. He couldn't know that. The gift that might have told him was silent, and the pressure in his chest was a cavity, and he was making a promise based on nothing except the intention to keep it.

They went.

---

They found Ruth's team two miles east, in a gully below a ridgeline, in the rain.

Ruth was fine — sitting under a rock overhang with Marcus Webb (Encouragement), both of them soaked, both of them functional. The problem was the third member: Henrik's counterpart on Team Four, a boy named Thomas Osei-Mensah — no relation to Abena — who had slipped on wet rock coming down the ridge and was lying in the gully with his right ankle at an angle that made Ez's stomach turn.

"We can't move him," Ruth said. Her voice was tight. "Marcus tried to lift him and Thomas screamed. We don't have —" She stopped. The sentence she'd been about to say was we don't have a healer, and the absence of that option in a world where healing was as real as antibiotics was, in its own way, as painful as the ankle.

"Is it broken?" Ez asked.

"I don't know. I have a Knowledge gift, not a medical degree. Without the gift, I can't —" She gestured at Thomas, at the ankle, at the whole situation. "I can't know anything. I'm just guessing. Like everyone else."

"Everyone else manages," Levi said. He was already kneeling beside Thomas, examining the ankle with his hands — careful, methodical, pressing gently around the joint while Thomas hissed through his teeth. "My mother broke her wrist when I was nine. Before the ambulance came, my father splinted it with a magazine and a belt. No gifts. No frequencies. Just hands and common sense." He looked up. "It's a sprain, not a break. Bad one — he shouldn't walk on it. But it's not broken."

"How do you know?" Ruth asked.

"Because if it were broken, the bone would be misaligned and I'd feel the discontinuity under my fingers." He paused. Almost smiled. "Some things you can learn from anatomy textbooks instead of spiritual perception. I realise this is a novel concept."

They splinted the ankle with a tent pole and strips torn from a spare shirt. Marcus and Ez took Thomas's weight between them — one arm over each shoulder, half-carrying him up the gully and along the ridge. Levi navigated. Ruth walked ahead, clearing the path of loose rocks, checking the ground for stability, doing with her eyes and her feet what her Knowledge gift usually did with her mind.

It took two hours. The rain didn't stop. Thomas swore inventively for the first mile and then went quiet, which was worse than the swearing, and Abena talked to him — not with a gift, not with supernatural Encouragement, just talked, about nothing, about everything, about a dog she'd had in Accra and a film she'd seen last week and the specific qualities of Yorkshire rain versus Ghanaian rain, and the talking was a rope she was throwing him, and he held on.

When they crested the last hill and saw the checkpoint and the tarp shelter and Henrik standing up with relief breaking across his face like weather, Ez felt something he hadn't expected.

Not the gift. The gift was still gone, still silent, still absent from his chest like a pulled tooth.

Joy.

The ordinary kind. The kind that didn't require perception or alignment or spiritual frequency. The kind that came from carrying someone who couldn't walk to a place where people were waiting, and arriving, and being enough.

---

That night, all three teams camped together. They combined rations, expanded the shelter, built a fire that was larger than the previous night's and burned steadier. Thomas's ankle was elevated on a rolled sleeping bag. Sara and Miriam sat together and talked — really talked, for the first time, without their healing gifts running diagnostics on each other's bodies, without the clinical overlay that turned every conversation into a consultation.

"I don't know what your resting heart rate is," Miriam said to Sara.

Sara laughed first. "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week."

Miriam laughed too, then rubbed at her mouth like she'd let something slip. "I keep doing that," she said. "Thinking if I know enough about a person's body, that means I know them."

Ez sat with Levi at the edge of the camp. The fire threw their shadows long across the grass. Below them, the fells dropped away into a darkness that could have been infinite — no lights, no roads, no evidence of the human world. Just land and sky and rain.

"What you did today," Levi said.

"What I did was walk east and help carry someone. That's not a gift."

"No. It isn't." Levi was quiet for a moment. "When Henrik said we can't track them, we can't heal them — he meant we were stuck. Like if the gifts went quiet, we would too." He looked at Ez. Without the discernment, his gaze was different — not the analytical sweep that catalogued frequencies and read alignment, but something simpler. Harder. More human. "You didn't go quiet. That's all I mean. Someone was missing, so you moved."

"So did you."

"I went because you were going. That's different."

"Is it?"

Levi didn't answer. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the camp behind them, David was trying to sing — not in tongues, not in any spiritual language, just singing, an old hymn in his ordinary voice, and the sound was fragile and human and unadorned, and it was enough.

"My mother used to sing that," Ez said. "Nana told me. Before I was born. She'd sing hymns around the house — old ones, Ghanaian ones, ones she'd learned in church in Kumasi. And when the gift got bad — when the prophecy was coming too fast and too heavy and she couldn't hold it — she'd sing, and Nana said the singing would calm it. Not stop it. Calm it. As if the singing reminded the gift that it lived inside a person, not the other way around."

"What happened to her?"

Ez had never told anyone at Ashford House. Not Tobi, not Silas, not Anand. The information was in his file, presumably — the redacted baseline, the family history — but the telling of it was his, and he'd kept it held, the way you hold a wound closed with your hand.

"She died. I was three. The gift — it overwhelmed her. She'd never been trained. Nobody told her what she was carrying. She just — burned out. Like a wire carrying too much current." He looked at the fire. "That's why Nana called the Institute. Not because she trusts them. Because she buried her daughter and she won't bury her grandson."

Levi was quiet for a long time.

"My father is alive," he said. "He eats breakfast every morning and goes to his office in Geneva and administers a department that oversees the very system his existence disproves. He is alive and Turned and functional and the institution that should have removed him keeps him because he is useful." He paused. "Your mother died because what was in her was real and too much and nobody taught her how to carry it. My father is still here because he's good at looking right from a distance."

The words hung in the cold air between them, and Ez understood — without prophecy, without the gift, with nothing except the ordinary human capacity to hear what someone was actually saying — that this was the closest Levi Aronsen had come to grieving in five years. Not for a dead parent but for a living one. For a father who was present and hollow and whose hollowness Levi had been forced to carry alone since he was twelve because the institution that should have acted had chosen, instead, to look away.

"I'm sorry," Ez said.

"Don't be sorry. Be angry. Sorry won't do anything. Anger might, if you keep it pointed the right way."

David's singing drifted across the camp. The old hymn, the ordinary voice, the words that carried no spiritual charge and needed none because they had been true before charismata existed and would be true after.

Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart...

Ez listened. The hole in his chest where the gift had been was still empty. But the emptiness was different tonight — not a wound, not an absence. A clearing. A space swept clean, waiting to be filled, and for the first time since crossing the boundary, Ez wasn't afraid of what would fill it.

He sat with Levi in the dark, and the fire burned, and the song continued, and two boys who had lost the things that made them special discovered, in the losing, the things that made them people.

The rain stopped sometime after midnight. Neither of them noticed.