We had a few hours before our meeting with the Archangels, and I had... absolutely no idea where to go. I mean, I’d gone and seen Sarah upset, and thought that going for a walk would be a good idea. But I... I didn’t know my way around this place at all. Where would we go? “Um....” I started, trying to fill the awkward silence. “Let’s go... um...”

Sarah chuckled. “Let’s go this way.” She pointed at a narrow little tunnel branching off just outside the cafeteria. Nobody seemed to be walking through it, but we discreetly entered the passage. A few steps away from the main causeway, the noise already faded, leaving the air between us... very quiet.

A fly landed on my nose. And spoke. “Hello!” Her voice was high-pitched and exuberant.

“Simulium,” Sarah murmured. “Don’t bother Quinn too much.”

The passage we’d stepped into was a narrow steel walkway, suspended over a deep but narrow crevasse in the rock. Lights were awkwardly placed high up on the rock faces, but the light vanished long before reaching the bottom. Indeed, the pit below seemed to to stretch down forever.

“It’s nice to meet you, Simulium,” I said. The little black fly grew excited with the mention of her name.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Quinn!”

A few steps into the passage, Sarah let out a deep sigh. She stopped for a while, leaning over the railing and staring into the darkness of the crevasse. I wanted to approach her, but I still didn’t really know what to say. I didn’t really want to bring up anything painful, or pry too deeply.

But Simulium didn’t seem to mind volunteering information anyways. “Don’t worry, Quinn. Dealing with Sanctuary 1 is just a lot for Sarah. Especially since Heidi isn’t here to help her calm down—”

“Simulium!”

“Sorry! Ehehe.” I certainly didn’t get the impression that the symbiote was sorry at all.

Sarah sighed again. “It’s not... it’s not like that. It’s just a little bit frustrating. I’m supposed to be a reliable adult that you can look up to, Quinn. I’m sorry.” She straightened her back and stretched. “But I’m a wreck right now. It’s... it’s hard to explain, I guess. Maybe I can just show you.”

“Show me?”

“Yeah. Maybe that will let me... collect my thoughts. I’ll take you on a little tour of Sanctuary 1, and maybe you’ll understand a little better.”

***

“This is the entrance to Flight Haltere’s hive.” The room was a dead-end, a smooth circular chamber where the steel gave way to polished tile floors and freshly painted walls.

“Where, exactly?”

Sarah pointed up. Above our heads, the roof sloped gently upward, funnelling into a narrow circular passageway. She stretched out her arms and morphed into her Imago, her skin flaking away to reveal a shiny black exoskeleton. Her face was the last to go, wavy brown hair disappearing into a back helmet and bloodred visor. A pair of glassy wings unfolded from her back, alongside a second pair of hammer-shaped stubs. Both pairs flexed, moving up and down to warm up before she rocketed up into the hole.

The passage looked pretty tight, but I could probably fit through. Maybe. I bit my lip and transformed. It felt a little less painful than usual, though it was always jarring to watch through the translucent chrysalis as my body dissolved and was replaced by its enhanced form. I gave my wings a few warm-up flaps before slowly following after Sarah.

I’d never really realized just how challenging it was to navigate through tight spaces with my wings. The most it had been was fitting through a window here or there, and, by comparison, maintaining a steady route through the long and winding passage was crazy. I kept feeling like my wings would brush against the rock or clip against an outcrop, making very slow progress after Sarah.

“Sarah?” I called. “Can you slow down?” Sarah glided through the tunnel with ease, darting around tight corners and weaving through the rocks with little concern for her own wings. After a few drawn-out minutes, I finally managed to catch up to her. She’d paused in the tunnel and was hovering, waiting for me.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll take it slower.”

She continued up through the passage. The way opened up into a huge cylindrical chamber. The central cylinder rose up for maybe a hundred metres, with rings of hallways arranged around the central column. Angels were flying up and down between the levels, or down the side hallways and out of this chamber. The buzzing of their wings was loud but harmonic and oddly pleasing to the ear. The top and bottom of the column were peppered with holes, various tunnels leading to what I assumed were other parts of Sanctuary 1.

“Here we are,” she said, flourishing her arms. “The hive for Flight Haltere.” We rose up through the central column and landed on the fifth walkway up. “We are the... the support division of the Angels.”

“She doesn’t like that.”

“Simulium! You know, I’m thinking of getting some new decor for my room. Maybe I’ll get a nice venus flytrap.”

“Sorry!” The fly went and landed on the back of my neck. Hiding?

“Look,” said Sarah, “Flight Haltere is... often on the passive side. Our leadership is very much in favour of staying out of active combat. I happen to disagree with that.” We walked along the walkway, circling the central column of the room. “I think it’s putting other Angels at risk. I... I don’t think that our role as support is lesser or inferior in any way. I mean, I work at the hospital, and I know that everyone, whether they’re at a desk or in the operating room, is important. It’s just...”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“She’s used to being in the operating room.”

Noticing my looks, she rolled her eyes. “Stop giving her the wrong idea!” Sarah laughed. “It’s not that I’m after attention. I just want to be doing the best job I can. And being forced to stand back while others are in danger...”

“I... I understand.”

“See, Nep and I had an agreement back at Sanctuary 73. We were able to do more, to be more. I thought that perhaps the operations of flight Haltere had changed in the intervening years. But they hadn’t. And now... I’m kind of worried that...”

“Oh Sarah!” A lady came walking down the hallway. She looked to be in her early thirties, with wavy brown hair and a very important-looking black uniform absolutely covered in red and gold embroidery.

The moment she heard her voice, Sarah grabbed my hand and bolted upward, pulling me into the air. “Sorry!” It took me a few seconds to get my bearings and get my wings buzzing again. Leading me upward, she weaved through the Angels, aiming for one of the tunnels at the top. “Tuck your wings.”

“Tuck your wings!” said Vespa

“Tuck my—”

A rush of air passed by as we approached the tunnel. I folded back my wings just in time as she pulled me into the narrow passage with inches to spare. She continued like that for a while, just letting the momentum carry us through as she glided through, making periodic adjustments with a burst from her wings. After a few minutes, she slowed down and we emerged from the room of yet another massive cavern.

This one was made like a hangar, with huge steel trusses running from the floor to the ceiling, and a vast smooth-paved floor. Various lines and markings were painted on the surface, and hundreds of ornithopters were lined up on the ground, from tiny personal vehicles to enormous aircraft the size of passenger jets. Far below us, tiny people scurried around like ants, guiding the ornithopters to stations for maintenance or repair. On the very far end of the cavern, the glow of light was blinding. It took me a while to realize what it was: the wall there was open; the light was the sun reflecting off the desert sands.

But rather than take it all in, Sarah just sat on one of the ceiling beams, with her legs dangling over the ledge. Her Imago melted away, and she returned to her human form. I felt the right thing to do was to sit beside her and do the same.

“That woman—”

“Yeah, she’s another reason that I don’t exactly want to come back here.” Sarah looked at her symbiote expectantly. “Well? You aren’t going to spill everything now?”

The fly landed on her hand and nuzzled the skin. “Hey. Even I have my limits. Though I may like to tease you, I know how sensitive you are when it comes to your sister.”

Sarah put her head in her hands.

“Oops.”

Oh. So that lady was her sister. And, judging by her dress, she was someone very important. “I’m not going to pry, Sarah,” I said.

“Thanks.” She smiled. “Oh my goodness! Look at your uniform.”

I looked down and saw that, in the transformation back, I’d failed to recreate the uniform properly. The sleeves hung extremely long and loose, and the jacket had frayed ends that seemed on the verge of falling apart. The hem of my pants weren’t much better. “I’m... not very good at this,” I muttered.

She put her hands on my wrist and guided them to my sleeve. “It’s really not that hard. Even if you don’t get it perfect when you unmorph, you can touch it up by hand. Just run your fingers over the cloth and think about how you want it to be mended.”

“How I want it to be mended?”

“Like... see how its fraying? You want the strands to run perpendicular to that; to attach the loose ends back together. And then... can you imagine little loops around the ends? To cap off the tip of the sleeve and stop it from fraying any more?”

I tried my best to follow her instructions. Visualizing things in three dimensions had never exactly been my strong suit. Soon, a thin, uneven film of chrysalis formed around the edge of my sleeve. “Is this supposed to happen.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Like this.” She ran the tip of her finger around my other sleeve, forming a perfectly smooth sheen in her own chrysalis’s colour. “Stuff like this is really nothing. It’s so plain. Not making good use of all the tools at your disposal, you know. All these proteins, all these types of cells... you can make something wonderful. Like that jacket I gave you back in Vancouver.”

“That thing scares me,” I admitted. The ‘leather’ jacket was...

Sarah laughed. “Sorry. I thought it would be handy. I gave it all these neat features and everything. You know, it reacts to Demons and Echoes and stuff. It changes its properties to keep you safe.”

I chuckled. “Maybe I’ll give it a seco—third chance. Maybe.” That seemed to please her, though I kind of still dreaded the prospect of putting it on again. “But hearing you talk about it, you make it seem so easy. You know, I was pretty happy that I could just... stay clothed when transforming back.”

“Oh, don’t be like that. It is easy. See? You’re doing it great all by yourself.”

I appreciated her words, though, as the bits of my chrysalis fell away, I could tell that the fabric was still nowhere near as pristine as it was on the sleeve she’d fixed herself. “Thank you,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “Thank you. You let me feel just a little bit like I knew what I was doing for a bit. That helped out a lot.”

We sat there for a few moments, simply enjoying the view from the rafters of the hangar. “This is a really nice view.”

“Yeah,” said Sarah. “It’s very relaxing. And the sunlight is really nice, too. I found this place shortly after I first got assigned here, not long after I became an Angel. And ever since, it’s been my go-to place when I need some time alone to think.”

“Yeah, and when she needs to—”

“Simulium! One more time and I will order that venus flytrap, I swear.” The fly shut up. “But yeah, Quinn. You know, this little... um ‘walk’ was really nice. I wouldn’t mind doing this with you from time to time. And, uh, I’m sorry for treating you like a kid so much earlier on. Don’t get me wrong, You’re still underage. But um... yeah. Maybe I can cut in on some of that cool big-sister energy that Angelina had with you.” Sarah giggled. “I’m sure she won’t mind.”

I reached for my phone to take out Angelina’s chrysalis. Just then, my alarm rang. Alarm... for... oh. Right. “It’s time,” I muttered.

We were going to meet the Archangels now.