Her face was blank and bloodied. Her lips were full. She was deep brown and smooth-skinned, and her eyes were unnerving: pretty and too light, too wide open, and the whites so very white. Her arms slack in her lap, she rested on the seat’s edge, head tilted back as impossible streams of language flowed from her bloodied mouth.
It took the mind a moment to sort it out. The blood, the woman, and the two languages, loud and at cross-purposes. The men were arguing in Arabic. One of them had apparently brought the woman here and was keen to ditch her. The other was a hotel employee, who, understandably, was having none of it.
“You can’t just dump her here. What happened to her? What’s she saying?”
“How should I know? Some Americans will be coming for her soon. Let them worry.”
“Fine, and in the meantime? She needs care. Look at her. What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know.” The driver was surly. Afraid. “She’s not my responsibility.”
“And she’s mine?”
They went on in this vein while the woman went on in… quite a different one. “Devouring and devouring and fast and huge, and hunting,” she said—cried, in Seraphic—and her voice was mournful and sweet and drenched in pain, like an otherworldly fado. A soul-deep, life-shaping lament for what is lost and can never return. “The beasts, the beasts, the Cataclysm! Skies blossomed then blackened and nothing could hold them. They were peeled apart and it wasn’t our fault. We were the openers of doors, the lights in the darkness. It was never supposed to happen! I was chosen one of twelve, but I fell all alone. There are maps in me but I am lost, and there are skies in me but they are dead. Dead and dead and dead forever, oh godstars!”
Hairs raised on Karou’s neck. Akiva was beside her. “What’s happening to her?” she asked him. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“No.”
“Is she a seraph?”
He hesitated before again saying no. “She’s human. She has no flame. But there’s something.…”
Karou felt it, too, and couldn’t name it, either. Who was this woman? And how was she speaking Seraphic?
“Meliz is lost!” she keened, and the hairs stood up on Karou’s arms. “Even Meliz, first and last, Meliz eternal, Meliz is devoured.”
“Do you know who that is?” Karou asked Akiva. “Meliz?”
“No.”
“What is going on here?”
Karou snapped around at the sound of Zuzana’s voice and beheld her, most excellent rabid fairy, cutting to the chase. She marched right up to the men, who blinked down at her, probably trying to reconcile her steely tone to the tiny girl before them—at least until they got a healthy dose of her neek-neek look. They broke off arguing.
“She’s bleeding,” Zuzana said—in French, which, due to Morocco’s colonial past, was the European language most readily understood here, even before English. “Did you do this to her?”
Her voice held a glint of outrage, like a knife not yet fully unsheathed, and both men hastily proclaimed their innocence.
Zuzana was unmoved. “What’s wrong with you, just standing here? Can’t you see she needs help?”
They had no good answer for that, and no time to make one anyway, because Zuzana—with Mik’s assistance—was already taking charge of the young woman. Each at an elbow, they eased her up to a stand, and the men only watched, silenced and chastened, as they led her away between them. There was no break in her flood of Seraphic—“I am Fallen, all alone, I break me on the rock and I will never again be whole.…”—and no flicker of focus in her striking eyes, but her feet moved and she made no protest, and neither did the men, so Zuzana and Mik just took her.
And a couple of hours later, when the Americans in dark suits came to claim her, the hotel clerk led them first to Eliza’s room and then—finding it emptied of both person and possessions—to the rooms of the small fierce girl and her boyfriend who had, between them, ordered half the food in the kitchen. They knocked on the door but got no answer, and heard no movement within, and when they let themselves in, it wasn’t really a surprise to find the occupants gone.
No one had seen them leave, not even the kasbah kids playing in the courtyard that was the only way to reach the road.
Come to think of it… no one had seem them arrive, either.
They’d left nothing behind but thoroughly empty dishes and—this would be one for the conspiracy theorists—several long blue hairs in the shower where an angel’s hand had stroked a devil’s head, locked in a long—and so very long-awaited—embrace.
Once upon a time…
A journey began,
that would stitch all the worlds together with light.
ARRIVAL + 60 HOURS
52
GUNPOWDER AND DECAY
It was like Christmas for Morgan Toth—in the greed-and-presents sense of the holiday, not the birth-of-Christ sense, of course. Because really.
The text messages on Eliza’s phone were getting crazier and more desperate by the hour. It was some kind of nutjob extravaganza delivered right to him, and he wished, almost, for a partner in crime—someone to marvel, with him, that there were such people in the world! But there was no one he could think of who, if he told them what he’d done, would not quail in self-righteous horror and probably call the police.
Morons.
He needed a groupie, he thought. Or a girlfriend. Wide eyes and awe. “Morgan, you’re so bad,” she would coo. But bad in a good way. Bad in a very, very good way.
The phone buzzed. It was Pavlovian at this point: Eliza’s phone buzzed and Morgan virtually salivated in anticipation of not-to-be-believed, someone-must-be-yanking-my-chain crazy-time. This message did not disappoint.
Where are you, Elazael? The time for petty squabbles is past. Now you must see that you can’t run away from who you are. Our kin have come to Earth, as we have always known they would. We have made overtures. We have offered ourselves to them as helpmeets and handmaidens, in ecstasy and servitude. The day of Judgment draws nigh. Let the rest of this blighted world serve as fodder for the Beasts while we kneel at the feet of God. We need you.
Gold. Pure gold. Ecstasy and servitude. Morgan laughed, because that pretty well summed up what he wanted in a girlfriend.
He was tempted to write back. So far he had resisted, but the game was getting a little stale. He reread the message. How did you engage with insanity like this? They’d made overtures, it said. What did that mean? How had they managed to offer themselves to the angels? Morgan knew from previous texts that the sender—who he gathered was Eliza’s mother, a real piece of work—was in Rome. But as far as he knew, the Vatican was virtually keeping the Visitors prisoner, which was pretty hilarious. He imagined the Pope standing on the dome of St. Peter’s with a giant butterfly net: Caught me some angels!
After much deliberation, he typed a reply.
Hi, Ma! I’ve had a new vision. In it, we *were* kneeling at the feet of God, so that’s good. Phew! But… we were giving him a pedicure? Not sure what it means. Love, Eliza.
He knew it was too much, but he couldn’t help himself. He hit send. In the ensuing silence he began to fear that he’d killed the joke, but he shouldn’t have worried. This was no fragile specimen of crazy he was dealing with. It was hearty.
Your bitterness is an affront to God, Elazael. You have been given a great gift. How many of our ancestors perished without seeing the holy faces of our kin, and yet you can find it in you to laugh? Will you choose to stay and be devoured with the sinners when the rest of us rise to take our place in the—
Morgan never got a chance to finish reading the message, let alone fire off another response.
“Is that Eliza’s phone?”
Gabriel. Morgan whirled around. How had the neuroscientist managed to sneak up on him? Had he forgotten to lock the door?
“Jesus, it is,” said Gabriel, looking stunned and disgusted. Morgan did wonder about the stun. Edinger despised him. Why should this come as a surprise? And what could he say? Caught in the act. Nothing to do but lie.
“She gets a new text message every thirty seconds. Someone’s obviously desperate to find her. I was just going to reply to whoever it is that she’s not here—”
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
Gabriel didn’t ask again. He just kicked the leg of the stool Morgan was sitting on hard enough to swipe it right out from under him. Morgan windmilled and fell hard. What with all the impact and pain and fury, he didn’t even realize he’d relinquished the phone until he was back on his feet, batting his bangs out of his eyes.
Damn. Edinger held the phone. His looked of stunned disgust had only deepened.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Gabriel said, suddenly realizing. “It was all you. Jesus Christ, and I gave you the means. I gave you her phone.”
Morgan’s fury turned to fear. It was like antiseptic hitting pus: the seethe, the bubbling, the burn. “What are you talking about?” he asked, feigning ignorance, and feigning it poorly.
Edinger slowly shook his head. “It was a game to you, and you’ve probably ruined her life.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Morgan said, but he was unprepared to defend himself. He hadn’t thought… He hadn’t thought about getting caught.
How could he not have thought?
“Well. I can’t promise I’ll ruin your life,” Gabriel replied. “Honestly, that’s a bit of a commitment. But I can promise you this. I will make sure everyone knows what you’ve done.” He held up the phone. “And if it does ruin your life, I won’t be sorry about it.”
Another letter. The third. The same servant brought it, and Razgut knew by the envelope that it was from the same sender as the previous two. This time, he didn’t bother playing any games with Jael. As soon as the servant—Spivetti was his name—was gone, he seized it and ripped it open.
He had taken special care crafting his last two replies. They had almost felt like love letters. Not that Razgut had ever written a love letter, mind.… Well, no, that wasn’t strictly true. He had, but that was in the Long Ago, and it may as well have been a different being entirely who had penned a sweet farewell to a honey-colored girl. He had looked like a different being, that was sure. He had still looked like a seraph, and his mind had still been a diamond without flaw, uncracked—and the pressure it takes to crack a diamond!—and unfurred by the molds and filths that claimed it now. It was so very long ago, but he remembered writing that letter. The girl’s name was lost to him, and her face, too. She was just a golden blur of no consequence, a hint of a life that might have been, had he not been Chosen.
If I don’t return, he had penned in a fine but eager script, forward-tilting, before leaving for the capital, know that I will carry the memory of you with me through every veil, into the darkness of every tomorrow, and beyond the shadow of every horizon.
Something like that. Razgut remembered the feeling that went into it, if not the precise words, and it wasn’t love, or even the most surface-skimming truth. He’d simply been hedging his bets. If he wasn’t chosen—and what were the chances that he would be, out of so many?—then he could have gone home and pretended relief, and the honey-colored girl would have consoled him in her silkiness, and maybe they even would have married and borne children and lived some kind of drab-happy life in the undertow of his failure.
But he had been chosen.
O glorious day. Razgut was one of twelve in the Long Ago, and glory had been his. The day of the Naming: such glory. So much light in the city as had dazed the night sky, and they couldn’t see the godstars but the godstars could see them, and that was what mattered—that the gods see them and know: They were chosen.
The openers of doors, the lights in the darkness.
Razgut never went back home, and he never saw the girl again, but look. He hadn’t lied to her, had he? He was remembering her now, beyond the shadow of a horizon, in the darkness of a tomorrow he could never have imagined.
“What does she say?”
She.
Jael’s voice broke into Razgut’s reverie. This letter, it was from no silken girl but a woman whom he had never seen—though her name was not unknown to him—and there was no sweetness in her, none at all, and that was all right. Razgut’s tastes had matured. Sweetness was insipid. Let the butterflies and hummingbirds have it. Like a carrion beetle, he was called to sharper scents.
Like gunpowder and decay.
“Guns, explosives, ammunition,” Razgut translated for Jael. “She says that she can get you anything you need, and everything you want, as long as you agree to her condition.”
“Condition!” Jael hiss-spat. “Who is she to name conditions?”
He’d been like this since the first letter. Jael had no appreciation for a strong woman, except as something to break and keep breaking. The idea of a woman making demands? A woman whom he was in no position to humble? It infuriated him.
“She’s your best option is who she is,” replied Razgut. It was one of many possible answers, and the only one Jael needed to hear. She’s a vulture. She’s fetid meat. She’s black powder waiting to ignite. “No one else has managed to bribe their way to you, so here is your choice, today: Keep courting these dour-mouthed heads of state and watch them mince through the minefield of public opinion, fearing their own people more than they fear you, or make this simple promise to a lady of means and have done with all of that. Your weapons are waiting for you, emperor. What’s one little condition next to that?”