“Oh godfire,” Val swore, followed by the sound of distant gunfire to the east.
“Val, report.”
“Busy—”
More gunfire, suddenly stopping. Val yelled in pain over the comm. Three more shots.
“Val?!” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Die, you animal.” Val was the angriest I’d ever heard him, voice strained with what had to be a significant wound. He fired one more time. “Commander, I’ve been ambushed by dryads. I regret to inform you that they are combat effective. Disruptor lethality confirmed but multiple shots required.”
“How bad is the injury?”
“I—can’t walk.”
“Shit,” Markus muttered.
“We’ll circle around and pick you up,” I said.
“Ah, don’t bother,” said Val, grunting with some kind of exertion. “My comm says more are coming. I have”—another grunt here—“insufficient ammunition.”
“Fuck!” I yelled.
“Quiet!” Markus hissed.
“Whatever, I’m invisible,” I said.
“I’ve set the resonator to self-destruct,” said Val. “It’ll cut the entanglement with the knife. Keep you safe. I’ll try to hold them off until then.”
“Val, I’m deploying the ship to your location,” said the commander. “ETA—damn it! Val, you said the engines were fixed! It’s not responding!”
“Error code?” Val grunted. “I have maybe ten seconds.”
“Nothing, it’s just hanging.”
“Ah. Boot script must be glitched. I’ll fix it when I get back. Or you could, if I don’t.” His vocal tone changed, confident, furious, only the slightest hint of pain behind them. “Come and die, then! Your friends are dead! I can kill you just as easily!”
“Is he trying to bluff dryads?” I asked.
“It’s Val,” said Markus. “He bluffed the high priest of a god of thieves once.”
“How will you guard the forest lying dead in this clearing?”
“Wait, are they talking back?” I said. “I thought they didn’t do that.”
“Commander?” asked Markus.
“Don’t distract him.”
“What does it matter if I’m wounded? My weapon works just fine. Walk away now. How many more corpses will suffice to demonstrate my point?”
“He didn’t put nearly this much effort into roleplaying his character,” I said.
“You go to your doom, angel. My companions are even better armed. Your master spends you frivolously.”
Angel? Markus and I looked at each other. Yep, Val was giving us a warning. There was no way we could make it to the ship before it found us, but we increased our speed as much as possible in the tangled undergrowth of the forest.
“Then die!” The muffled pops of Val’s disruptor pistol sounded in the distance again. I hoped he made it. We had to worry about ourselves right now.
I was cloaked, but apparently the other end of the entanglement still pointed right at me. The angel came in low, flying between branches with supernatural agility. In the leaf-dappled moonlight I saw only a black cloak, not even a weapon.
It landed in front of us. Without the Ragnar’s shielding between us, I felt the full effect of its conceptual bleed: a sense of limitless, rushing time, the current of history, the endless cycle of ages. There was a deep gravity to it, as if this moment were eternal, infinitely recurrent.
I ignored all that and opened fire.
It blinked to the side as the first few bullets passed through where it initially stood. One arm reached out and ripped a branch off a nearby tree, which began to warp and writhe in its grasp, lengthening into a staff. I fired a few more shots, tracking its center mass, but it stepped to the side, whirling under an automatic burst from Markus’s rifle. I popped off what would have been a headshot had its head not bent unnaturally to the side as it came out of the whirl. Markus maintained trigger discipline, not spraying erratically like I probably would have, but it danced between the bullets. I emptied the rest of my magazine to similar effect. Its quarterstaff flicked the last bullet out of the air with a shower of sparks.
“Angels are bullshit,” I said. “What is this, the Matrix?”
Surrender, it said, and its voice was the sound of rise and fall, the inescapable momentum of the past to the present to the future. Sexless, ageless, inevitable.
“Get out of here, Lilith,” said Markus. “I’ll distract it.”
“The hell you will.”
The Calamity may yet be minimized, it said. You must surrender now, or the costs will be ruinous.
Tactical mistake, all this chatting. It’d given us the time to reload.
“Oh no, oracle bullshit, we’re so confused.” My lips twisted in a snarl. “Guess what, asshole? We did the math. There’s only one future. If there’s a calamity coming, calamity is what you’re going to get.”
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Its body language didn’t shift, but a mixed sense of curiosity and disdain emanated from it. For our part, all that emanated were bullets. Markus in particular went for what the commander would probably frown on me for describing as “spray and pray.”
We got its cloak, I think, but it didn’t seem to care about the storm of bullets, blinking to the side again. Behind it, disruptor bullets slammed into tree trunks, leaving behind mere wood and leaves. The angel’s staff whirled, knocking shots out of the air, then ended with a flick of the wrist. It must have done something to weight the staff unevenly, because it spun through the air with the center of gravity near one end. The erratic-looking flight was impossible to dodge effectively and it slapped the rifle out of Markus’s hands.
The Calamity is foretold, this is true, it said. The damage is not.
Markus had drawn his pistol. The angel corkscrewed through the air at him, throwing off my aim as I unloaded on it, and pushed Markus’s hand away as he tried to bring his pistol up to bear. The angle of fire was too close; I’d risk hitting Markus, and even a glancing hit from disruptor ammo could disintegrate his soul. Markus turned the momentum from the push into a thrown elbow, which the angel casually blocked with one hand, but which left him able to fire at its feet. It jumped back.
“Markus! We have to coordinate!” I said, slamming another magazine into my pistol.
“How?!” he shouted.
I hear you but faintly, child, the angel said. Markus fired again but it ducked and charged him. Two shots went over its head before it sprang up, its shoulder throwing off his arm and sending the third shot into the trees.
Wait, it couldn’t see through the cloak? How was it dodging my bullets? If it was really just about speed, why not just take our guns?
Know that you cannot win, the angel said. I am not slain today.
“Still stabbable,” I said to myself, drawing my knife, still hazy with doom. Markus threw a punch, but before it landed the angel put a palm on his chest and pushed. Markus yelled as he flew backward about twenty feet and rolled another ten. If he’d hit a tree at that speed, he’d have died instantly. I realized after a moment that it’d just invited me to empty the rest of my magazine, and it was only polite to fire six shots at its back as I closed the distance. The first two went wide as it swept to the side, it ducked the next, did some kind of weird floaty roll for the fourth, and righted itself with its staff to block the last two. But that put me near knife range—I lunged—
Crack! I felt my wrist bones shattering as the staff came down on my knife hand. I yelled, and hadn’t finished yelling before my wrist hit the ground and had to yell harder.
Frustration is a poor teacher, said the angel. It stalked toward Markus. Control your passions. Examine the reason for your failure.
“Eat shit,” I said, struggling to reload my pistol with one hand. One last magazine. Twelve bullets against an oracle’s soldier who—it’d seen them all coming, of course, I was an idiot. I just had to figure out a pattern of shots it was impossible to dodge. I levered myself onto the arm that still worked properly, getting onto my knees, raising my pistol to try to get this motherfucker. That coincided nicely with it picking Markus off the ground by the back of his shirt, using him as a meat shield.
“Just shoot me, Lil,” he groaned. “I’ll flash first.”
I can catch your soul as it flees, human.
“I’m not risking that,” I said. “Commander? Got anything for us?”
I’m still here, you know, said the angel, and for the first time that transcendent voice sounded annoyed. Markus is not slain today either. But perhaps I cripple him. Perhaps I bring his soul to my master as a gift.
The commander’s voice popped into my head. “It tracked the knife here but missed you on the way in. Stall until Val cuts the entanglement, then use the cloak.”
“And what about Markus?” I subvocalized. I glared at the angel. “What do you want?” I asked.
You wear the blessing of Meris, yet she knows you not. You wield strange weapons, vicious in their way, bearing the touch of a strange god. Who is she? Why does she war with so few?
I smirked. Eifni tech was built to mimic divine signatures, but there was no way I’d ever give up that information. And we’d just gotten another god’s name out of the deal.
“If I tell you, you’ll let Markus go?” I asked. “Swear on your god.”
Relinquish your cloak of secrets and I will.
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
Secrets or no, I can smell a lie.
“You got me,” I said slowly, readying my pistol. There was no more gunfire from Val’s fight; was everything okay? Would the entanglement actually end? Markus was hanging limply, but he winked at me, then glanced at my fallen knife. Did he have a plan? I’d trust him. “Alright, I’m decloaking now.”
I slowly turned down the cloak’s intensity. I couldn’t see under the angel’s edgy mysterious getup—which had somehow stayed on despite all the acrobatics, because angels are bullshit—but it seemed like its attention sharpened as I emerged from etheric stealth.
“Val, how’s it coming?” I subvocalized.
“I’m alive,” he said, his pain and exhaustion bleeding through the meaning of his words. “Just a bit—ugh!—longer.”
The angel was just staring at me. I stared it down, not blinking. Just a bit, Val said. I could do this.
“You gonna swear?” I said.
Thank you, said the angel. It threw Markus at me. I dropped my gun as I shifted to prevent the impact jostling my broken wrist, which partly worked. We fell to the ground, and I screamed.
“Sorry,” wheezed Markus, pulling himself up. “Should have worked out less.”
You will now accompany me to Kives, said the angel.
“Like hell,” I moaned. “Val, what the fuck is taking so long?”
“Would you—ah!—would you believe dramatic timing?”
“If you can blow it, blow it!” I said.
The angel was walking toward us across the clearing. I was in so much pain I instinctively turned on the cloak to get some distance. It left me free to think. The angel kept walking—was it not enough cloak? Was it tracking Markus? It could see the future of my actions, at least when they involved bullets and knives, but couldn’t see through the cloak. It had seemed to react to the uncloaking, not anticipate.
“Markus, carry me and run,” I said. “I’m going as deep as I can.”
He looked at me, concerned, but picked me up. I hissed at the pain, and embraced the feeling of the etheric cloak to escape. I was pushing it, I knew; I’d been skipping my meditations. This was dangerous. Markus’s comm was tuned in to me, he wouldn’t forget me, I could trust him to come pull me out of the dream. Or Val. Or Abby. Such good friends. The math said so. Friends for a hundred years, a thousand years. They’d be sad if Lilith was gone. I was going now. Poor sad friends.
“Detonation,” said Val. “You’re clear, get out of there.”
Lilith mumbled something to Markus, but forgot what it was halfway through my sentence.
“Stay with me, Lilith,” he said, limping away.
Do you think you are the first to use the blessing of Meris against me? the angel asked, looking around the clearing. You are fools. You serve destruction, but think yourselves its sole master.
Lilith watched as the angel gently laid a hand on the nearest tree, which it somehow managed to do in the angriest possible manner. A pulse of power echoed through the forest and through her mind. Trees shook, leaves grew and fell. Her scalp itched as her hair grew half an inch in moments.
Be cowed, said the angel. The blessing of the goddess.
With a roar of power, the tree burst out of the ground, its trunk thickening, roots writhing through the loam. Other trees were uprooted, falling around Markus as his limp became a stumbling hop. The moonlight was snuffed as the tree’s upper branches grew thicker and sprouted thousands of leaves. The trunk was the size of a school bus, stood on its end, but their real trouble was the roots, which grew ever thicker, and which were coming for them. Like a nightmare in which you couldn’t run fast enough. The blessed, monster tree had branches the size of the other trees, now.
Then the roots caught up, and Markus tripped. Markus and Lilith fell onto the mass of wooden tendrils as they reached outward, frantically trying to keep their limbs from getting caught—well, Markus was, Lilith was just kind of sitting there, which was kind of a silly way to react, didn’t she know better? Markus yanked her back from a crevice before she lost an arm. In the chaos they fell apart. The tree stopped immediately. Markus scrambled back to Lilith, picking her up.
Just in time: in the darkness of the titanic canopy, the angel of Kives swept overhead, looking in vain for its prey.
Markus gave the massive tree a long look, then began the long hike home.