Authors: Paul Hughes
“Why the blood, Hannah?”
She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”
“A gift?”
She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of
silver is my favorite.”
He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.
“Jemie?”
“Jo?”
“How can you afford this?”
He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”
“But I thought—”
“I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”
“But James, I—”
“Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.
It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.
Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.
late night and you’re driving me
crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times... We’ve known each other before.”
“I know.”
Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.
“I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.
“Can you do that?”
“It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”
“Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”
“Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”
“Of course. You could never love.”
“Never.”
“Never at all.”
“Nope.”
Stillness and distance breached.
“Keep your distance!”
The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the order, yearning to dispatch these non-humans with the EM pulses that reduced them to useless balls of silver.
“Don’t fire,” Reynald broadcast through the comm implants. “Something’s different.”
“It’s a trap, sir. It has to be.” Windham kept his trigger finger firmly in place.
“No.” Reynald rubbed his eyes. A dull pain had begun to throb just behind them. Something was different... The angels were different.
So close... He could feel them, feel that blank stare of inhumanity. No expressions, no weapons, no indication of hostility. They just walked up the crater, toward Reynald’s small band of soldiers.
Windham
was restless. He was a good boy, but Reynald sensed that his impatience would be his undoing. Windham wiped sweat from his eyes, adjusted his helmet’s position on his head.
“Sir? What do we do?”
jean
“What?”
“Orders, sir?”
jean reynald
Reynald blinked to clear his eyes, but the haze that had descended over his vision was still there, casting a lightness over the world, halos over the heads of the projected angels.
“Stay here.”
“Sir?”
Reynald stood up from the rim of the crater, began to walk down the side.
“Reynald!”
He turned back to Windham. “It’s okay. It’s time.”
He walked to meet the angels.
“I’d watched you for centuries. Watched your line. I know that you were the one. I saw to it that you’d be the one at the first encounter. You and your pretty little American boy.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
Maire’s face clouded. “I won’t hurt him, dear Jean, but he has to be the one who goes home for me.”
“Don’t... He has a family, a young bride—”
“I know this. And I know what I need from him.”
“Please, don’t do this.”
“His son, our daughter... A perfect extinction.”
Hunter slumped in the angel’s metal grasp. He was too shocked to cry, too exhausted to feel, too old for his young life. The shield doors cycled shut behind the angel, cutting off Hunter’s view of the scene of death. He could see his mother’s body on the ground, torn apart by another wave of phased flak.
They’re all dead out there. Mommy’s dead.
Loud snap as the phase shield reactivated around the building. The angel gently placed Hunter on the floor next to ten or twelve other boys, all sitting in silence, all staring at Hunter. He curled into a fetal position and rocked back, rocked forth. Many of the boys did. Torn from sleep, rushed to the Complex, sitting there with that knowledge that the city was dead out there, their mothers were dead in the city and their fathers were dead or dying in the sky or in the outer.
“Stay here, boys. We’ll be leaving soon.”
An explosion from outside, close, hard. Each of the angels flickered to static for a moment. The lights in the chamber went out for an instant before returning as red emergency lights. The angels looked at one another, a higher form of communication resonating between their images. They all turned to look at a door on one side of the chamber.
The door cycled open and another angel walked through, holding a little girl.
Hunter sat up. It was the little girl from the other side of the fence. He’d only ever seen two girl children, this one and his baby sister who had died days after her birth from the silver. Most of the boys in the room had never before seen a little girl.
She recognized Hunter as the angel carried her by the boys. She smiled and waved. Hunter did the same, wanted to say something, but the angel quickly carried her through another door, which slammed shut with a phase shield.
Hunter wondered if he would ever see her again.
“What is he doing?”
Windham
put the scope back up to his eye, a fluid reflex learned from those months of war. Reynald was deep into the blast crater now, slowing his pace. He bent and placed his EM rifle on the ground, held his hands before him as he kept walking into the mass of angels. Windham saw one of the projecteds break away from the group, approach Reynald.
He flipped the safety on the EM pack of his rifle, brought the crosshairs of the scope to rest on the chest of the projected, where he knew his pulse weapon would find the silver ball that created the illusion of the angel.
It flickered for an instant, an intense light, and Reynald raised his arms to shield his eyes.
“Commander!”
“Nan, that was the—”
“I know, little flower.”
“But I want to—”
“No time, Lily. You’ll have all the time in the world to meet your new friends later.”
The angel jogged through the metal hallway. Another shield door cycled open and closed as she passed into another chamber carrying Lily. The floor stretched out as a platform into the spherical room. At its center there was a small chair with restraints. The little girl began to tremble in the coolness of the room and the fear of her situation.
Nan
slowed her pace as she walked out onto the extended catwalk to the center of the sphere. She gently placed Lily in the vacuum chair and fastened the restraint harness around her.
“What’s going to happen, Nan? Do I have to go see the lady now?”
Nan
shook her head as she tightened the final restraint, smoothed Lily’s tousled hair back from her forehead. “No time to see her now, child. It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay here any longer.”
“Why are they in the sky?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetness.”
Nan
leaned in close, kissed Lily’s forehead with her cool metallish lips. She squeezed Lily’s hand and walked back down the platform toward the chamber’s shield door.
“Nan?”
She turned, no tears on her face because of her inability to produce them, countenance now emotionless and cold because she had to be strong for the little girl, had to realize that the Catalyst was never hers to begin with. “Yes?”
“Will I see you again?”
“No, Lily. You’ll have a new caretaker in the void.”
“But I—”
“Goodbye, Lily.”
Nan
turned, walked through the shield door, which slammed shut and snapped with phase static. The little girl was left alone in the utter silence of her bubble. The sound of static increased as the walkway to the center of the chamber retracted into the wall of the sphere. The wall itself began to shimmer, and several ports along its circumference opened to allow the thick gelatin of liquidspace travel to fill up the sphere.
Lily struggled in her restraints as the bottom of the sphere filled with mercurial phase. The level steadily increased until it washed over her bare feet, ankles, shins, knees, the hem of her lavender Honeybear Brown nightgown. She tried to kick at that cold metal fire, but was unable. The tickling, burning sensation of liquid reaching into her, preserving her biologics against the stress of Light X.
Liquid reached the arms of her vacuum chair, covered her hands and lower arms, upper arms, shoulders, crept up her neck. She shouldn’t have panicked, tried not to panic, didn’t want to panic, but panicked nonetheless. Lily began to scream, sobbed, flailed her head around as the mercury touched her chin, her earlobes... Her wet hair sent drops of the silver cascading out as she tried to spin around.
“Nan!”
Caressing jawline, earlobe. Tears coursed down the child’s face, mixed with the invasive silver. Touching bottom lip.
“Mommy!”
Lily closed her mouth as the level rose. Upper lip, nose. She strained back in the seat but was unable to prevent the silver from pouring into her nostrils. She instinctively exhaled, exhaled, silver over eyes, clamped eyes shut, felt silver finally cover the top of her head.
Robbed of senses, completely submerged, pain in her chest from a heart attempting to tear itself out, lungs on fire. A chamber spins, a chamber resonates. Liquid to fire, fire to space. A child’s mind falls into the silence of fear complete.