Broken Angels (24 page)

“One thing I remember,” she said, “is what you seem to have forgotten, if you ever even knew: we angels have a duty to ensure Creation’s finished state is as perfect as possible.”

“No doubt there’s a whole boatload of things I should know,” Robert said as he looked at the frozen kids to ensure they were still breathing, “but there’s only so much I can wrap my skinny head around.”

“There’s a lot I want to teach and show you,” Ava said, “but in order for you to understand it all, to see the entire picture clearly, we have to go to XynKroma. That’s where we
have
to begin. My sight and yours are limited here, and I mean that in more ways than one.”

Robert considered her words, and his thoughts drifted to Darryl. Darryl was of the firm belief that, with each individual mind he changed on the subject of “love,” he was progressively healing XynKroma, the collective
sunconscious
. Each lover he charitably left in “peace” was one step closer toward an improved state of Creation. His philosophy and Ava’s were remarkably similar, at least on the surface.

Robert hadn’t been to XynKroma in a long while, but this Flood had to be taken seriously. For the first time, he began to seriously consider allowing Ava to usher him to the fundamental realm of Reality so he could soak up as much as possible, learn everything, and, fortune willing, emerge sane and prepared to do whatever he could to stop it. But he still had questions.

“How can going to XynKroma together help us find Marie-Lydia?”

“I told you,” Ava said. “That’s where I took her. That’s where I last remember seeing her.”

“But not
her.”
Now that she was talking, and now that he was willing to hear her out, Robert wanted to be sure he was clear on everything she had to say. One couldn’t travel to the extra-dimensional realm as if simply driving to Canada or flying to Japan or rocketing to the moon. One had to leave all material possessions behind, including the body.

“Yes, I took
her
. Her essential essence. Her
soul,
if you want to get technical.”

“Yeah,” Robert said, “technically, I suppose that’s the best way to get there.”

Even though the realm was accessed by traveling to the core of the human mind, its sights and sounds weren’t immediately comprehensible to humans, not at humankind’s current stage in the evolutionary process. Everything seen in Xyn was metaphorical; everything heard was symbolic. The only hope a human being had of existing and traveling within any degree of comfort in the realm was by concentrating and reshaping the essence of his consciousness into a symbolic or figurative representation of what religious folks would call the “soul.” This allowed Xyn to make some sense to a human being. The soul translated the sights and sounds into stuff that was more or less familiar, but there was a price. Whatever happened to a person’s soul while in Xyn had permanent effects on the person’s body and mind, sometimes minor, sometimes major. These “Pieces of Paradise” and “temple-palaces” Ava had mentioned were also metaphorical, but could also be consequential.

“Marie-Lydia’s soul and mine traveled there together,” Ava said. “You know she was a corrupted angel”—Robert nodded—“but she wasn’t a thoroughly corrupted one; I didn’t believe so. I took her to Xyn to reform her. Just like the Archangel inverted me, I intended to reconfigure Marie-Lydia’s soul, clean up her way of thinking, remake her into an angelic being that could benefit humanity and help usher in a perfect, finished Creation.”

“Noble intentions.”

“I just need to get to my temple-palace, Robert. Its caretakers can tell me everything I need to know, maybe even restore my memory.”

It was all very interesting to him, but something about her story just didn’t seem right. He wondered whether or not he should introduce Ava to Vince Ceniza. The psychological mapmaker might be able to supervise a solo journey through Xyn for her like he’d done so many times for Darryl. Robert hadn’t yet convinced himself this was a good idea when three police cars pulled up to the curb.

“Which one of you is named ‘Goldner’?” one officer said as she and her partner approached.

Robert raised his hand, got up from his seat, and—when prompted—gave the officers his version of what had just taken place. When they questioned Ava, and she gave them a word-forword recap of what Robert had just told them, he again looked at the bodies on the ground. Ava’s handiwork.

Frozen.

Just what did it really mean?

ELEVEN

“Okay,” Robert said, “what’ve you got for me?”

“Something hot,” Kurtis said.

“Burning.” Anika glanced at Robert with an odd smile.

It was noon on Monday. The three of them were huddled in a private study-room of a campus library.

After taking a tired Ava back to The Burrow on Sunday evening and privately asking some other agents to keep a close eye on her, Robert had called his friends and asked for an update on their project. They hadn’t yet completed their research, but they had some material they wanted him to review. Robert was eager to see it. His excitement just barely compensated for his exhaustion. He’d spent much of the night tossing and turning as he turned over in his mind the concepts of “God” and “Satan” in light of everything Ava had told him in the park.

In Christian belief, angels were beings of light; Satan—a fallen angel—and his demons were creatures of the “fire.” Robert couldn’t help but think that “fire” and “polluted light” were synonyms. He knew from his long-ago Sunday school lessons that Satan had once been a servant of God, as illustrated in the Book of Job—synonymous perhaps with how The ID were somehow servants of the Arkangels who, according to Ava, were serving the Creator and its work of Creation, a Creation that got its start via a metaphorical
spark
. Before falling asleep, considering it all mathematically, the best he could come up with was that, whatever Supreme Being or Higher Power the Arkangels truly served, it was neither an indifferent Watchmaker nor a Benevolent Deity. Robert was sure in his bones that the space-and-time warping Flood was not inevitable, but these Arkangels were organized to make it so.

He’d agreed to meet his friends during their lunch hour, the only break between classes Kurtis and Anika shared. Robert had arrived not knowing what to expect but hoping it would illuminate what he’d seen the day before.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Hell,” Kurtis said, “over the past year, that girl has been busier than a bee trying to get into Georgetown Law.”

“Check this out.” Anika made a few fast keystrokes on her laptop. Within seconds, the three of them were watching a surveillance camera recording of a confrontation in a strip mall’s parking lot. The unusually clear and detailed footage showed Ava fighting with two adults, a man and a woman. It was obvious by their methods of fighting the adults weren’t Virus-carriers. It was also obvious the two were trying to do Ava some serious harm. Among a scattering of onlookers, two young children were prominent in the picture. The video had no sound, but Robert could tell by their movements the kids were panicked, crying and screaming. Ava appeared to be trying to maneuver herself around the man and woman, attempting to get at the children, while ducking and dodging the adults and the objects they threw at her.

“What’s she doing?” Robert asked.

“Not sure,” Anika said, “but based on all we’ve reviewed over the past twenty-four hours, I’d say she’s fighting for those kids you see.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I can add,” she said, “even when no numbers are involved.”

“Some of the other footage we’ve seen,” Kurtis said, “shows her fighting in areas where graffiti is a natural part of the environment.”

“Out of all the drawings, symbols, gang-tags and so on,” Anika said, “one little decorative message stands out: ‘Save the children.’”

“Yeah,” Robert said, “I’ve seen it before.”

“We’ve seen it in two of the videos we reviewed,” Kurtis said, “and heard her say it more than once in those that have sound. Look at those kids. They’re scared, but they’re not running away. They’re hoping one of those parties will protect them from the other. We haven’t had time to do the digging on those two, but I strongly doubt I’d lose my scholarship funds by betting they’re abusive guardians.”

“Yeah,” Robert said. “Maybe.”

“It’s not on the video,” Anika said, “but I’d wager one of
my
scholarships that one of those kids was smacked or spanked right there in public. I’ve seen it happen before, in grocery stores, on the bus. The girl probably saw and decided to do something about it.”

“Your scholarships are not inheritably more valuable than mine, Nika,” Kurtis said.

“I didn’t say that they were.”

“But you implied—”

Robert shushed them. They could engage in one of their pointless arguments on their own time; he had to focus.

Although bigger and older, the man and woman on the video were clearly outmatched by the spry girl. Using light as her only weapon, Ava knocked them out, grabbed the kids by their arms, and hurried away, beyond the view of the camera. The video lasted less than three minutes.

“I’d like to know what happened to those two kids,” Robert said. “And the adults. Maybe she’s part of some kind of kidnapping outfit.”

“Why don’t you just ask her?”

Robert gave Anika a look. She gave him a blank stare. When he realized she wouldn’t get the meaning behind the lines on his forehead, he said, “I’m sure amnesia will factor into her answer.”

“Well, whatever happened to them,” Kurtis said, “I can assure you she didn’t take the kids home with her. Before you and your partner found her, she’d been living in HOT houses, moving from one to another.”

“The House of Thomas shelters?” There were ten such shelters in the DC-Northern Virginia area that Robert knew of. They were set up for homeless people infected with incurable diseases, homeless people who
knew
they had a disease. “
Really
?”

“Yep,” Kurtis said. “Spending her nights there anyway. She seemed to have spent much of her daylight hours adventuring.”

Anika grinned. “Kicking ass.”

“Sometimes alone, sometime with partners.”

“Partners?” Robert asked. “Who?”

Anika tapped a few more keys and pulled up another short video. It showed Ava and two others fighting together at what appeared to be a miniature golf course. It was obvious the footage had been recorded by several surveillance cameras and that, before being launched into cyberspace, the footage had been spliced together and edited to portray a coherent and uninterrupted stream of action; Robert wondered by whom. He didn’t recognize any of the individuals he saw on the screen as associates of The ID, but that meant nothing. Only a tiny fraction of the terrorists had been documented by authorities. The video ended shortly after Ava’s partners grabbed three kids and turned them and themselves invisible. The last few seconds of the film showed Ava knocking down two tall, rotund men—kicking them in their groins, then their faces— and running away, out of range of the cameras.

“She doesn’t play around,” Kurtis said.

“She’s playing at something,” Robert said.

“We saved the best for last.” Anika punched a few more buttons on the keyboard. “Look familiar?”

It did. At once.

The setting was a front yard. The yard in front of a house he and his partner had recently visited. The haven of identity thieves, where they found a battered, bruised, and unconscious Arkangel. On the computer screen, Ava was wide-awake. Robert, Anika, and Kurtis watched in silence as she maneuvered from one position to another, using all manners of light tricks and electromagnetic effects, fighting for her life.

Robert was unsure of the total number of fighters Ava faced, but the odds were clearly against her. It was also clear her opponents were all women, and all Virus-carriers. When Ava seemed to almost score a hit against one, the target disappeared and, two seconds later, another target appeared and struck at Ava from another angle, undoubtedly in her blind spot.

Ava’s opponents were dressed in short-jackets, short skirts, and high heels. The jackets stopped just above the navel, putting the ladies’ bare midriffs on full display. The sleeves had been pushed up to their elbows, and, underneath the jackets, the women only wore bras. Plenty of skin was showing, and what wasn’t showing was hidden by parts of an impractical outfit. Robert knew only two types of Virus-carriers would dress in such a way, go out in the sunlight, and engage someone in a fight: those who were suicidal, and those who were highly skilled warriors.

Robert briefly considered that Ava was facing off against only one, one woman winking out of sight to change her appearance and her position, using multiple ways of instilling confusion in her opponent; skilled fighters knew confusion turned into fear, and instilled fear usually led to a self-defeated opponent. Robert’s theory was bolstered by the facts that only one other woman besides Ava appeared on the screen at a time and, while the colors of the woman’s outfit changed back and forth between a combination of red-and-white-and-black and blue-and-white-and-purple, the outfit remained the same.