Broken Angels (23 page)

“Victims?” Ava repeated the less important of the two “v” words he’d used. “Victims of what exactly?”

Robert took another breath as he deepened his stare, hardened his resolve.

“Of nature,” he answered. “And God.”

Ava’s brow wrinkled, and the muscles in her forearms tensed. Robert could tell she was unhappy with his words, probably the last one in particular. Was this it? Was the time bomb down to its last seconds? The muscles in Robert’s forearms tightened.

But whatever Ava had felt, it passed.

“This is a waste of time,” she said, turning back toward the stream. “In Xyn—”

“Damn it”—Robert started forward—“what is it about you and that place?” He no longer felt like standing still. If she were on the verge of coming out of her cover, he wanted to get it over and done with. “Why do you want to go there so badly? And, worse, take me with you?”

“Why are you so resistant?” she shot back.

“Are you crazy?”

Robert believed only the insane willingly went to XynKroma— associates of The ID went happily, and frequently, like an addiction—and when the sane unwillingly went, it was probable they’d come out insane. In a calmer moment, he’d admit his accusation probably could’ve been put into better words, but he wanted to push her. He wanted her to push back. His ambitions didn’t allow for language-censors.

“No, Robert,” she said, “I’m not crazy. I know what Xyn is. I also know what it could be, what it
must
be before it overwhelms us.”

Wish granted. He was almost speechless.

“Overwhelm? So you’re admitting—? The Flood—?”

“The Flood is coming,” she said. “Nothing can stop it.”

He was right. All along he was right. He knew it. She
wanted
the world to be plunged into chaos. She wanted the Earth to pop like a bubble and spill its contents in a stew of pure anarchy. She was definitely an ally of The Infinite Definite. In some way. Somehow. Damn what Adam had said; Robert had all the evidence he wanted, and he had a duty to take her down. Now.

He took a step backward as he squared off, readied himself, and folded his fingers to make fists. Ava cocked her head in response.

“What are you—?”

She’d begun to speak but stopped and jerked her head to the right. Robert flinched. Before he could recover from his withdrawal and counterattack, Ava was already running. She was on the other side of the stream before he could even consider what had just happened. Confused and already several steps behind, he sprinted after her.

As he ran, Robert realized Ava had somehow managed to see just around the shaded trail’s bend. She had somehow seen or heard the commotion before he did. In a far-from-neat picnic area, four teenagers were attacking a family of six.

Two boys and a girl were taking turns punching, kicking, and spitting on the short, paunchy father as he staggered, fell, and regained his footing only to fall again in the small space between a tree and a grilling station. The three hoodlums got their knocks in while the mother only had to deal with one: a scantily clad girl who laughed hysterically and shouted anti-Latino slurs as she threw uncooked food, paper plates, and plastic utensils at the cowering woman. All the while, the couple’s four preadolescent children ran around aimlessly, crying and screaming amid all the senselessness.

Robert considered how Ava had detected something out of the ordinary happening behind her back while he, facing in the right direction, didn’t pick up a thing. She seemed to possess more abilities than the average angel.

However she’d become alerted to it, Ava had been quick to take off across the low concrete bridge, following the pathway’s curves. She didn’t slow her pace for even half a second as she neared the scene and, as if running up invisible stairs, took three steps on the air and a fourth atop the family’s minivan. While leaping off of the maroon vehicle, she reared back with her left arm, gathered a ball of sky-and-tree-filtered sunlight in her hand and fashioned it, shaped it into something longer, slimmer, and more pointed before throwing it to her right, directly at the back of the neck of one of the young thugs. The hit boy screamed in agony, slapping the palm of his left hand on his neck as he fell down to his knees. Although he’d received the first blow of Ava’s assault, he may not have been her first intended target; it was most likely the racist black girl, she who got tackled a second after she saw Ava diving for her from the top of the van.

Robert had only been three steps behind Ava in her race toward the violent scene, but he’d stopped running the moment he saw Ava take her first step onto the unsolid air. It was unexpected. All of it. He’d seen her in action on videos, but in-person was something else. He was too amazed at what he was seeing to think of assisting, and Ava’s actions made it clear she really didn’t need any help.

The slur-spewing girl had been knocked down but not out when Ava forced her to the ground. As the girl cursed and struggled to get back to her feet, Ava struggled to keep her own body straddled on top of the girl. Ava used her hands to hold the girl’s head, squeezing it, making the girl’s nose point toward hers as Ava looked into her eyes. When they were in the right position, Ava did something with her own eyes and somehow rendered the girl still.

The two delinquents still on their feet left the father alone and ran toward Ava. She spotted them, rolled to her left, and grabbed a fallen tree branch as she came up to her knees. Ava threw the branch at the boy’s knees as she looked with squinting eyes at the running girl’s throat. Robert could see she was being shot with twin narrow beams of infrared radiation. The girl would feel a sudden sensation, as if a match had been struck on her throat and then left there to burn through the skin.

She felt it. Both of her hands went to the burned area as the girl dropped her head, stumbled over her own feet, and fell, landing on her side.

The boy who’d dodged the tossed branch had been hindered, but he was still coming at Ava. He was less than ten running paces away.

Ava hopped up to her feet and ran three steps to her left, toward the nearest picnic table. She jumped, placing her foot on the edge of the tabletop and pushed off, twisting in mid-air, putting her body in just the right position to kick the boy in his ear.

The boy went down, and Ava was soon on top of him. She rendered him motionless in the same manner she had the girl—by forcing him to look into her eyes.

Robert had stepped off of the paved path and onto the picnic area’s grass, nearer the chaos. The panicked mother was trying to calm her four screaming children and rush them into the minivan while the bruised and bloody father stumbled around in a daze. Robert saw but didn’t know what he could do to help them.

His full attention shifted back to Ava when she leaped from a picnic tabletop, took two steps on the air, and landed on another tabletop, moving closer and closer toward the boy who’d received an arrow of light in the back of his neck. He was on his feet now, but he was still pressing his palm against the burned area and sucking in small streams of air through clenched teeth. He wasn’t exactly in a daze, but it was obvious he was following no particular direction as he took tentative, baby steps forward.

In her second-to-last leap off of a picnic table, Ava tossed another bright arrow at one of the boy’s elbows. He screamed when stung. He screamed again when Ava kicked him in the chest. The hoodlum fell back against a tree, and Ava hit him in the jaw—left hook, right hook—before placing her hands on his cheeks and giving him the same treatment as the other two. The boy collapsed on his butt.

Robert got a fleeting-but-close look at the formation of the electromagnetic arrow during Ava’s last throw. The arrow itself was a shaft of yellow and orange light that had been sharpened at one end with light in the infrared range. As it took shape in her hand, strange webs of orange and yellow light were visible on her forearm, strangling them, appearing almost like strings, or vines. While he wondered how a Virus-carrier would react to being struck by such an arrow, Ava made quick work of the last delinquent still conscious, the girl with the burned throat.

Ava wrapped her hands around the girl’s neck, pressed her thumbs against the burned area, squeezed harder and said, “Look at me.” The girl opened her eyes for only a sliver of a second, but it was long enough for Ava to do whatever she’d done to the others.

Four down. But what about the family of six?

Robert turned and saw they’d finally gathered themselves into their minivan. He called out to them, asking them to wait. They were safe now, and the authorities would have questions for them. The father shouted back at him in Spanish while the mother shouted in the same language at her kids, probably in another paradoxical attempt to calm them down.

His pleas ignored, the vehicle sped away, and Robert was left to survey the area, observing how the grass and dirt were littered with food, napkins, spilled condiments, and other assorted rubbish, not all of it a result of the melee. Did anyone respect the environment anymore?

He picked up the trash in his path as he made his way to the picnic table Ava was leaning against. She seemed to be in two modes at once—resting from her activity, and ready to take a swing at someone else. The way she looked at him as he approached put Robert on guard.

“Why didn’t you help?” she said, trying to catch her breath.

He did feel a little embarrassed by his inaction, but not regretful. She’d gotten the job done, in short order, and maybe even better than he could have. He wasn’t ready to start giving her compliments just yet, though.

“I didn’t have time.”

“Yeah?” she said. “You’re wearing two watches. What happened? They canceled each other out?”

Cute. Rhetorical questions and a terrible joke all wrapped into one by a wise-aleck. Robert felt it was probably deserved, but, more important, the remark reminded him of his watches’ primary use. He touched the tips of his index and middle fingers to the face of his right wristwatch to give Adam a brief summary of what had happened and ask him to contact the authorities to round up the fallen. Ava pointed at two of them with her thumb.

“These are the type of terrorists you accuse me of being in line with?”

“No,” Robert said as he deciphered Adam’s immediate response. “These aren’t terrorists. They’re just brats. What did you do to them anyway?”

“I froze them,” she said. “Put them in an altered state. They’ll be fine in an hour.”

Robert took another look at the four victimizers-turned-victims. They almost looked as if they were dead. He could see they were still breathing, just very slowly.
Frozen
.

“So, what’s that you were saying before,” he said as he sat on one of the table’s benches, “about the Flood coming?”

Ava smirked at him. “So now you just want to talk, huh?”

Although he still wasn’t convinced she was truly on the side of the righteous, he was a bit more willing to consider her close enough, close enough to be trusted as—at the very least—a potential ally. Maybe Adam had seen something in her Robert couldn’t. He left her question unanswered as she sat down on the opposite bench, facing him.

“I was saying that I know that the fundamental realm of Reality— XynKroma—is the collective
sunconscious
of all living things, and as a result, the place is a mess. A chaotic collage of nonsense. The apparent indiscriminate result of an unsupervised collaboration of an enormous number of the most abstract artists, poets, and musicians. But it’s also a realm of polluted light. And while all angels can manipulate light at will, those of us with higher aspirations have applied our talents to the realm of XynKroma. We’re not content with just beating the stuffing out of other angels here on the surface of Reality.”

Or freezing the stuffing that’s inside the noninfected, Robert thought. The term “sunconscious” wasn’t just a cute term combining the words “subconscious” and “unconscious;” it was an apt one-word description of the extra-dimensional realm of low light, dirtied up by the thoughts of an uncountable number of sentient beings. Robert was more used to seeing Virus-carriers use their eyes to burn skin than freeze something deep within.

“I and other angels,” Ava said, “like the Archangel who oversaw my inversion, we’ve sectioned off parts of Xyn and protected them, cultivated them, remade them into Pieces of Paradise. We’ve created temple-palaces. One grand palace and one surrounding garden per one fit-and-deserving angel. And each temple-palace is inhabited by the caretakers of these pieces. They’re attempting to bring and maintain order in Xyn, but they’re also watching for the day when the realm spills out to the surface of Reality. We want XynK-roma to be as ordered as possible when that happens.”

“And you believe this Flood can’t be stopped?”

“I know it,” Ava said. “The Flood
has
to happen. Creation isn’t finished yet, Robert. It’s only a work in progress. The Flood is part of the process.”

Hence her metaphor about artists and poets, Robert thought. Ava was a clever one. Smart and clever.

“I was once an Evangelical Christian,” she said, “believing in a superhuman God who created the universe in six days and then guided everything within it, using divine intervention. Answering prayers, teaching people harsh but deserved lessons, and all the rest. But the Archangel taught me the truth about Reality. The Creator did create the prototypical universe, by lighting the spark of consciousness. But as this fire of consciousness burns, as the level of consciousness in living beings is raised, the universe develops, and the Creator is consumed. Creation didn’t happen; it’s
happening
.”

Robert was on the edge of his bench. It seemed that either Ava or this mysterious mentor to whom she kept referring had developed a postmodern take on modern theology, a kind of in-process Deism. Original Deism had its roots in seventeenth-century Europe, during the period of the Enlightenment; its adherents believed a Creator-God designed the universe during a set period of time then, once the work had been done, retreated to observe life and history and everything play themselves out while the Creator declined to interfere in anything in any way—an old-fashioned Watchmaker, watching the finished timepiece tick-tock on its own. In Ava’s mind, the Watchmaker was still creating the watch. Once finished, the Watchmaker will have a well-timed heart attack…unless The ID interferes, smashing the unfinished watch and murdering its Maker prematurely.