They Who Fell (9 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“H
e’ll hurt you,” said Nefta. “He can’t help it. It’s his nature. He’d love you, too, and he’d mean it. But he’d still hurt you in the end, and more than you could bear.”

She’d cooled down a little, but she’d been in a fury when she found Jana. After dragging her back to her chambers, Nefta had yelled for what seemed like an eternity before nearly slapping her again. She’d managed to stop herself, and then just brooded in silence for a full quarter of an hour. Jana had been on pins and needles the entire time, worrying about all the terrible punishments she might soon suffer. But now Nefta’s voice showed only sadness and concern.

“I know how these things go,” said Nefta. “You’re following him around like a little girl. You’re smitten with him. You’ve no reason not to be. He’s everything you could want on the outside. But the inside is a good deal more complicated.”

Jana didn’t exactly consider herself smitten. She hadn’t been following Rhamiel at all—if anything, he was the one pursuing her. It wasn’t that he was uninteresting: he had a strange allure to him, and on paper he was everything she could ever want. She thought he had a kindness to him underneath the outer shell, but the angels could be unfathomable. They did things for reasons she couldn’t understand, and more than anything she was worried about the dangers of giving in to his pursuit. Ecanus was an angel, too, and what if Rhamiel had some of that in him? Even Nefta oscillated between anger and kindness, and didn’t seem to be able to control herself in the way a normal human adult could. Jana started to tell Nefta that she’d misjudged the situation, but prudence got the better of her. Sometimes it’s better to be repentant even if you’re in the right.

Nefta slowly paced around the room, running her fingers across a few of the masks on the walls as she went. She stopped at one—a woman, the mask contorted into an expression of despair. She lifted it, stared at it for a bit, and then hung it back in its place along the wall.

“Sit, girl,” said Nefta, motioning towards a wooden bench. Jana obliged, and Nefta sat down next to her. It made her uncomfortable. Nefta was close, just like Ecanus had been, and the experience was still giving her jitters. Nefta spoke looking forward, keeping the unscarred side of her face towards Jana. She almost looked normal from this angle, with a few raised bumps from the opposite side of her face the only visible sign of her deformity.

“We weren’t always this way, you know,” said Nefta. “We were something better, once. You may not believe it, and perhaps I wouldn’t in your position. You’ve only ever known us as we are.”

“Do you know what a guardian angel is?” asked Nefta. Jana had heard of them, but only in whispered stories. She knew the angels had all had their duties before the Fall, and Sam had told her that they used to watch people as they slept. What had once been a comforting fable was now a horror story the older servants used to frighten the children. They said the angels used to stand over you while you were in your bed, invisible, and if you weren’t careful they still might. You had to mind your words, always, because you never knew when one of them could appear from nowhere with a sword of fire. No one had ever actually seen it happen, but it taught the younger ones a valuable survival skill: how to hold their tongues.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jana. “They see you when you’re sleeping, and they know whether you’ve been naughty or nice. And you mustn’t cross them, or they’ll pluck out your eyes and replace them with burning lumps of coal.” Good stories don’t ever die, exactly, but they change as the years go by, and they teach the lessons of the time they’re in.

Nefta wrinkled her brow in confusion. “No, dear, that’s not quite right. We all had our tasks, assigned by the Maker. He expected us to perform them diligently, something I should hope you’ll learn a little about. I was a guardian angel. We watched over people. Not to hurt them, or whatever nonsense they’ve been filling your ears with down there. We were protectors. Not heaven’s most glorious duty, but I thought it the noblest one. Do you see these masks?”

Jana did. There were so many, and Nefta must have spent untold hours carving them. The attention she’d paid to them was striking. Any one of them could have passed for an actual person, if they hadn’t been made of wood. They bore the lines of worry, sadness, laughter, or joy that life engraves on all of us, and something of the soul was displayed in the emotions carved into each of them.

“Yes, ma’am. What are they?” said Jana. Then she flinched. Cassie had been very clear that she wasn’t to inquire about this particular subject. It was Nefta’s business, not hers. But Nefta didn’t rage, or raise her fists. She’d gotten command of herself, and seemed to be in the mood to talk.

“They’re people,” said Nefta. “I watched over every one of them. Century after century, helping them with their struggles with little nudges, protecting them from their follies where I could. It isn’t an easy job, mind you. You’ve a tendency to do as you please regardless of the consequences, your kind. You’re certainly no exception.”

“I don’t mean to be any trouble,” said Jana. “My friend….”

“Rhamiel isn’t your friend,” said Nefta. “I won’t make him out to be some kind of monster, because he isn’t. Some of the others have become them, but that’s simply the way of things. I wonder sometimes if the Maker was in the right in all of this. He wouldn’t give us what we wanted, but perhaps we needed something else. Rhamiel may be what you want, but he isn’t what you need. He was a guardian angel, too. Did he tell you that?”

“No, ma’am,” said Jana. “We really didn’t….”

“What you did and didn’t do is of no import,” said Nefta. “It’s what you do now that matters. What you must understand about Rhamiel is that he wasn’t always the person you see today. In Heaven he was different. The confidence, the charm, the followers—he had none of that up there. He was actually considered rather plain.”

Jana was taken aback. She couldn’t even begin to fathom it. Rhamiel was by far the best looking among them, and she’d never seen a human man who could even come close. He looked like someone from one of the magazines she’d seen, walking perfection with no need for calculated photographic angles or tricks of lighting. Nefta must have noticed her reaction, or read something in her body language. She smiled and chuckled to herself.

“You don’t believe me? We have different standards of beauty, you and I,” said Nefta. “We see beauty in you, sometimes when you can’t. We see tiny imperfections in our own faces, ones you’d never notice.” Jana wondered how Rhamiel saw her, and whether she’d even recognize herself through his eyes. And if they obsessed over the smallest blemish, how must they feel about their disfigurements?

“The Maker did a little carving himself when he made us,” said Nefta. “Our faces were all about symmetries, perfect expressions of who we were inside and who he intended us to be. And look at all of us now.” She seemed on the verge of tears. Jana hadn’t ever really thought about what this had done to them. The Fall had taken its toll, and the scars weren’t just on the outside.

“He was braver than any of us,” said Nefta, after a pause to compose herself. “The rest of us fell. Rhamiel was the only one who leapt.”

“Leapt?” asked Jana. Nefta had spent a great deal of time studying human emotion, but she still had much to learn. Her warnings had made Jana genuinely curious, wondering what was in the depths beneath the person Rhamiel had become after the Fall.

“It was during Maion’s Stand, the last battle of our rebellion,” said Nefta. “The Maker’s armies were just mopping things up by then. Everything was in disarray, and we were all demoralized. We’d thought we were on the verge of victory just a few days before. Heaven was on fire, the Celestial City had been razed, and there was even talk of seizing the throne itself. Then the tides turned. Loyalists began to arrive, responding to summons from their duties in distant places. The Maker’s forces swelled, and we were beaten back to the outskirts. We all knew things were hopeless. We began to turn on each other, and they exploited it. Everyone could see what they intended. They meant to toss us down, just as they had Lucifer’s army before us. Some led a final charge, simply for the glory of it. Others sat and sulked, or tried to flee. We all knew what was coming, and we were all afraid. Everyone except Rhamiel.”

“He saw the others being surrounded and thrown into the ether, one by one,” said Nefta. “He knew we were all going to burn, and he knew there was no way out. So he grabbed one of the shields we’d pillaged from the armory. It was forged in hellfire, meant for combat inside Lucifer’s Pit. He put it in front of him, he went to the edge, and then he jumped. This side of my face, this blotching. Look, girl.”

Jana forced herself to. Nefta pointed to her bad side, patched with spots of red and brown. The leathery skin had been loosened and distorted, and parts of it bumped up, forming a permanent swelling. She clearly was sensitive about it, but she had a point to make.

“When they threw me down, I lost control,” said Nefta. “I spiraled, my wings useless as I fell faster and faster and burned hotter and hotter. We’re strong, very strong, but such heat. It can’t be endured for long. I tucked the other side to my shoulder and spared it, but most of me was ruined. Rhamiel was the smart one. The shield bore the brunt of things. His bravery let him be the master of his fall, and he was able to glide and slow his descent. Still hot, but nothing like what the rest of us were subjected to. His wings were singed a bit, and his hands scarred from where he held the edges of the shield. But otherwise he made it through intact.”

“And now he’s the most beautiful among us. Much of our status derived from it up there, and it’s no different down here. Only he’s gone from the lower ranks to the top, by his own ingenuity. That’s what you must understand, girl. We are all experimenting in sin, and Rhamiel is vain. He cannot help but enjoy his new position. If you chase him, he’ll let you catch him. He will love you, and he will care for you, as that is what a guardian angel does. You may think you can tame him, and you can, for a time. But his vanity won’t let him sit still. Eventually he’ll move on to another, to prove to himself that he can. And then you’ll be hurt, and you’ll have scars of your own, just like me.”

Nefta stood quickly, and her eyes teared up before she pivoted away. She started to head towards her private quarters and then stopped in her tracks.

“You know, I took you up here for a reason,” said Nefta. “To protect you. I can see what’s to come, even if no one else can. You’re in my charge now, and I forbid you to speak to him. Understand me? You will ignore him if you see him. You will not respond to him if he speaks to you. You will stay away. It’s what’s best for you. The next time you disobey me, the consequences will be severe, and they will be for your own good.”

Then she left, muttering to herself as she walked down the hallway: “All this torture and hurt. None of this would have happened if the Maker had just kept his word.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“G
ive him a little longer. He’s a good guy, but he’s not exactly punctual,” said Dax.

They were waiting for the Cook, in a used car lot outside of a little town on the outskirts of Trenton. Dax knew him, although mostly from chatting on underground resistance forums on the Internet. They’d worked together briefly, supporting a larger group that had tried a full scale assault on three angels who’d turned downtown Philadelphia into their own private playground. Things hadn’t gone well. They’d been particularly nasty ones, warriors with a penchant for kidnapping humans and forcing them into gladiator-style duels for their own entertainment. An actual battle was a dream come true for them, and they’d feigned defeat, baiting the fighters into an attack just to toy with them for hours. Dax had escaped along with most of the support staff, who’d been ordered to stay behind to care for any casualties.

The Cook was an amateur chemist, and had used handbooks he’d downloaded online to teach himself to manufacture a variety of necessities that were no longer being mass produced. One of them was gasoline. People had been able to scavenge it from cars or fuel tanks for a year or two after the angels fell, but it degraded as time went on. It was all gone by now, and if you wanted any, you had to find someone who could make it themselves. The quality was low, it was more ethanol than anything, and it was hell on an engine. In the end, though, none of that really mattered. There were plenty of vehicles, many of which had been left inside garages and were still in pristine condition. But if you wanted to make a long distance trip, you had to find places to refuel along the way. The Cook was friendly, and more importantly, he was free. Most people had given up on resisting, and wouldn’t waste valuable resources supporting those who wanted to tilt at windmills. But the Cook was an idealist. You might have to endure a few lectures about his anarchist philosophies, but if you were fighting the angels he’d give you what he could on principle.

“I want to know where this guy is,” said Holt.

“I wanna know where we’re goin’,” said Thane.

Holt had refused to tell them, and Thane had been pestering him about it the entire trip. All he would say is that they needed to conduct some business, they needed to pick something up, and then they were going back to the City. He liked to protect his sources, and many of them wouldn’t be happy about dealing with anyone else. He’d been fighting for nearly eight years, and had been a member of groups ranging from large militias to small cells like the one he currently operated in. The same pattern kept repeating itself: they’d lose some people, splinter apart, and then reorganize into smaller and smaller groups. Nothing any of them had tried had been particularly effective, but the one upside was that he’d acquired a wide array of professional contacts over the years. Combined with Dax’s virtual friends, they were able to get pretty much anything they needed.

“He said to meet here,” said Dax. “I sent him a couple of messages. He’s probably on his way, and we’ll miss him if we leave.” They’d holed up in the sales offices, just inside the windows where the light could still get in. Rows of cars filled the lot, although they’d been heavily weathered and the interiors were covered in broken glass. Inside, the place was a mess. Yellowed papers and old sales brochures were scattered around the ground in between a few of the floor models, still shiny as ever.

They sat there for another hour, playing cards and passing the time. It could be surprisingly boring, now that modern entertainments and distractions had faded away. They’d all grown up absorbed by them, filling every second of their spare time with television, social networking, and games. You could still get some of that, but not on the road, where what limited batteries you had couldn’t be wasted on frivolities. One of the hardest things about the Fall was adjusting themselves to find satisfaction without the constant stimulations they were used to. Everyone had their own way of coping. Some people couldn’t take it, and had maddened or become unstable as their unoccupied minds went round and round in circles. Others poured themselves into work, even when they didn’t really need to. The cell didn’t have it quite as bad. Dax always tried to carry a few books, but after a reading or two he tended to lose interest. Holt kept them busy when he could, ordering them to practice or drill during any significant downtime. Thane had never been much for anything but television, anyway, and Faye was sociable enough that she could entertain herself by chatting with the rest of them when she wasn’t busy. It still grated, though, and none of them were happy when they had to sit still.

“We’re not waiting forever,” said Holt. “Daylight’s burning and we need to get some gas. I don’t want to end up spending the next few weeks hiking. Where’s this guy live at?”

“I’m not really supposed to know,” said Dax.

“But you do,” said Holt.

Dax fidgeted with his hands, pausing and trying to buy time to figure out what to say. After a few seconds, he knew the jig was up. “He’d get really mad,” said Dax. “Really, really mad. I was just curious, you know. He was so secretive about it. I wanted to see if I could find out. Like a little game.”

“Just tell me where he is,” said Holt.

“He’s in a trailer park a few miles away. I traced the connection,” said Dax. “It wasn’t exact, but it got me in the area, and I used some satellite images to pin things down.” New satellites weren’t being launched, but many of them were still up there, looping around the globe as their orbits gradually decayed. The angels hadn’t bothered any of them. They could fly, but as far as anyone could tell they never went beyond the atmosphere. People had speculated, wondering whether there was some barrier they couldn’t cross or whether they were even capable of going that far up. A few had proposed fanciful schemes of rebuilding society in orbit, beyond the angels’ reach. It was a stretch to begin with, but by the time it was seriously considered the industries necessary for the plan had been decimated. The orbiting remains of various corporate or government space efforts had been commandeered by hackers, used to gather intelligence for resistance or just for personal gain. Dax had been working with some of his connections on an early warning system, hoping to combine satellite imagery with anecdotal reports to get a coherent picture of the angels’ activities, but so far there weren’t enough people still online to make it very useful.

“Tell your guy we’re coming,” said Holt.

“He’ll completely flip out,” said Dax. “He’ll—”

“Tell him,” said Holt.

Dax sent the message, and then they were off. They drove along the highway until Dax directed them to take an exit to nothing, one of those off-ramps placed every few miles just for a place to turn around. They passed a dingy motel, the sign collapsing and the roof rotting in on itself. A barricade of cars had been positioned in a circle surrounding the doors to a few of the rooms, and they could see movement inside through the windows. Someone had thought it a defensible position, and meant to protect it. Being close to the roads brought danger, but also opportunities. Scavenging was easier, as well as trade. But then, so was brigandry, and there were enough bandits along the interstates that one had to be cautious. Holt signaled to keep going, and they sped away along a dirt road that wound beyond the suburbs and into a set of pastures. They saw it on the side, coming up in the distance: row upon row of trailers, dropped into a field that was now grown wild with grass.

Most of the homes were in poor condition. Time hadn’t been kind to them, and they hadn’t really been built to last, anyway. Smashed windows showed signs of looting, and a few of the smaller trailers had been overturned. Trash and cheap furniture were strewn all around the main road to the complex, and they had to dodge it all as they drove inside. Even in the best of times the residents of this sort of place had a reputation for unruliness, and those who’d stayed here during the exodus had obviously enjoyed the benefits of lawlessness, at least for a time. A few of the lots were empty, from residents trying to take advantage of their mobility to bring their homes with them. The rest were mostly destroyed; some rusted from the weather, some dented in on themselves, and some gutted by fire.

“He’s towards the end,” said Dax. “I’ll give you one guess as to which one it is.”

They didn’t need to guess. An army of garden gnomes stood watch outside one of the trailers in the distance, arranged in a phalanx protecting its entrance. An oversized satellite dish took up the rest of the lawn, pointed upward and chattering at the skies. A few pinball machines were overturned on one side of the trailer, their undersides opened to scavenge for parts. Across the street, all that remained of the neighbors’ homes were burnt metal shells, with jugs of unidentifiable chemicals scattered around black patches that dotted the grass. The door to the Cook’s trailer was wide open, clanging against the side as it swung with the wind.

“Guess we don’t need to knock,” said Holt. He dismounted his bike, standing at the edge of the street and watching. Fools rush in, and sometimes angels did, too. But the latter were more durable, and Holt thought the Cook was as unstable as his chemicals. As always, his instinct for caution and deliberation prevailed.

“Hello?” shouted Holt, hand on his gun. He waited a few seconds, but the only response was silence.

“I know he’s your boy, but we need gas,” said Thane, walking towards the entrance. He had no concern for caution, and his own affinities ran towards instability.

“Maybe we can wait here,” said Dax, calling after him. “We probably crossed paths. I bet he’s back at the car lot. You can’t just go into his house. He gets really worked up about—”

But it was too late. Thane was already inside, poking around in the dark.

“Get in here!” yelled Thane, and interest overpowered the others. They went in, too, to see Thane standing in front of the bathroom door, lit by the glow of a half-dozen computer monitors from the bedroom behind him.

“Take a look,” said Thane. They did. It was the Cook, a skinny little man seated on the toilet in an undershirt and his boxers. Splattered blood painted the walls of the bathroom, and his body was covered with wounds. It looked like he’d been gnawed on, with chunks missing everywhere. His eyes were glassy and lifeless, his tongue swollen and sticking out of his mouth.

Holt winced, and Dax rushed outside to escape the scene. Thane poked at one of the wounds, inspecting it.

“Coyotes,” he said. “Gotta be coyotes.”

“A pack of them, inside a trailer?” said Holt.

“Dogs, then,” said Thane. “They go wild and go after anybody.” It was true, to a degree. Packs of them skulked around every city, gone feral after they’d been left to fend for themselves. But they weren’t exactly brave, and they weren’t known to attack a grown man. They certainly wouldn’t have left that much of a kill if they’d gotten hungry enough to make it.

“We’re gone,” said Holt. “Get on the bikes and we’ll stop past Trenton and fill up. We’ll find something to trade on the way.”

“I spy.” The voice came from outside, piercing through the walls of the trailer. It didn’t sound quite right. It was more hummed than spoken, the words blending together as if from a chorus speaking in unison. Holt drew his pistol, and listened.

“I spy, with my little eyes.” The voice came again, and Holt went outside to meet it.

It hovered over Dax, whatever the thing was. Holt had never seen the likes of it—nothing with so many eyes, nothing with so many wings, and nothing with so many teeth.