TIMESTAMP: November 3, 7999. 5:15 p.m.
“So how did you know it was a seraph, anyway?” Imogen asked over the chittering of the two-seated automobile’s engine. They’d had to crank the car a good ten minutes until it coughed and came to life. Now they were bouncing along the winding road away from the Wood and hanging on particularly tightly whenever the car twisted round a bend. Hester sat squashed at September’s feet. She preferred the kind of automobile with seatbelts and a roof, but this was what the Rose had had available at the time.
Imogen gripped the wheel while she drove, and September gripped the mint feather. “Two reasons. First, only seraphim ever kill. The rest just do the deed and then erase the victim’s memory of themselves to cover their tracks.”
Imogen didn’t bother asking what the ‘deed’ was. “Why?”
“To get the emotions. They’re empaths to the extreme. See, when a human wants to have a thrill, they go on rollercoasters or to the carnival or tell a ghost story. When an angel wants that feeling, they can either genuinely risk their own lives by antagonizing a bigger, deadlier creature, or they take the safe route and terrify a human to experience it secondhand.”
“So you’re telling me it did that to Marya simply because it was bored?”
September didn’t answer. They fell into a silence, feeling the mountainous road even out and watching the trees thin out into failing farmland and clusters of small, clapboard houses. Celestial’s crop production had always been significantly lacking, since long before September had even arrived five years ago.
“What was the second reason?”
“Hmm?”
“The second reason,” Imogen repeated, slowing down a bit once the steering wheel started to quake. “For how you knew a seraph did it.”
“Oh. That’s easy,” September said. She held up the feather. “I knew the angel who this be
longs to.”
Imogen almost crashed the car. “You what?”
“Israfel. Tiny. Blonde. Skittish. You know, no two angel wing patterns are exactly alike? No two feathers, either. Like fingerprints.”
“Moving on from the fact that there is no reason for you to have said any of that so nonchalantly,” Imogen stopped to let a big brown delivery truck pass, it was the only other vehicle they’d seen for miles. “There’s not a chance he’d be after the two of us, is there? I mean, we did stomp all over his hunting grounds and send the Shield to recover Marya's body.”
“I doubt it,” September said to put her at ease. “Angels are violent, but only vengeful if harmed directly. What matters to him is that he got his kill.”
What she didn’t say was that angel feathers don’t fall out naturally. Ever. Marya couldn’t have ripped one out as he tortured her; she was under his Command and she’d have had to have yanked with the strength of a fully-grown bear to pull it out. No, it had been placed carefully nearby. Which meant he had meant it as a message. But of what? And for whom?
Twenty minutes later, the foliage got sparser and the buildings taller as they neared Celestial City. Angels have an almost transparent quality; we are only noticed if we want to be, especially in crowds. Human eyes tend to skip over us unless we draw attention to ourselves.
September was glad of this as they drove through the one place in the world where a choice few human beings knew her real name: Uriel.
Evening drew close, seeming to bathe the pristine high-rises of the upper castes in a warm golden glow and the grimy apartment complexes of the masses in washed-out shadow. Celestial City–despite the government’s love of order and rigidity–was not by any means known for its city planning. It was, however, known for its crazy-quilt mishmash of cultures. Throughout time, people from the icy tundra of Isspaika to the sun-blessed plains of southern Alhaaya to the sky-high mountains of Chou So got up individually and made the decision to migrate… here. Uriel didn’t understand why, but could see how readily these millions of migrants had made this place home. The porch railing of one house was painted a demure shade of violet and decorated with daisies, a common custom in Ghabai. The long multicolored robes of Chou So hung on clotheslines between windows. A trolley driver they passed bore the geometric tattoos on her arm, traditional for Stupefian women. Flags of every color and country flapped in the weak wind. The Glorious President didn’t officially care which country you come from, as long as you agree that Celestial is the best one.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
And, of course, as long as you stick strictly to the confines of your Tier. The city streets may not have been built with much foresight, but signs everywhere indicated who exactly could use which street and when. Every little thing was segregated to the finest degree: parks, cinemas, cemeteries, subway cars, hotel rooms, hospitals, phone booths. The goal was to save the country’s best and brightest the trouble of having to look at those it looked down on. Which gave plenty of people plenty of opportunities to hide.
If you we
re to look past what the Glorious President wanted you to see, past the gleaming skyscrapers and reservation-only restaurants, you’d see filth. And rust. And a quiet despair.
And a quiet hope, too.
To Uriel, Celestial City for the most part carried the air of someone who had long ago given up. I haven’t seen this city with my own eyes yet, but I will, someday, and I will see instead the air of someone holding an important secret. Just look around: rusted fire escapes that reach all the way to the sky, stores selling broken guitars and nail polish only in shades of green. I’ll see One Eyed Andrew Farlough, who lost an eye and a hand in a house fire and can see ghosts out of the missing socket. I’ll see Hyacinthus, the purple-haired prophet who sings to the flowers. Sometimes they sing back, and she makes a living shouting their prophecies at people from her tiny garden. Maybe I’ll even catch a glimpse of Elli Wolfsbane, an on-and-off visitor of the Rose, who’d faked her death a grand total of eighteen times. Uriel didn’t quite realize this yet, and neither have you, but there are plenty more people here worth fighting for than you think.
But it’s easy to forget this fact when the traffic sucks this bad. Like with all big and crowded cities, everybody in Celestial seemed like they all had someplace to be, but all the sweet time in the world to get there. It was lucky angels aren’t typically bothered by noise: Uriel could hear every single sound within fifty miles perfectly clearly. She could hear every car horn, every shout from every angry driver, and every footstep of every pedestrian. And the shit from every single horse’s ass hitting the pavement. There were a lot of horses.
Every now and then, they’d pass a building with its black blankets still covering the windows, or an army of poorly paid construction workers would be clearing away the rubble of a bombed apartment complex, or fighter jets would soar overhead, reminding everyone there was a war on.
Luckily the Rose’s headquarters wasn’t situated too far into the heart of Celestial. Unfortunately, it sat on the beach on the opposite side of Lake Dilemma, Celestial’s most unique and unexplainable natural features. Lake Dilemma was a narrow little slice of water that separated the eastern tip of Celestial from the greater ocean. Lake Dilemma, you see, had no fucking business being as deep as it was. About five thousand feet deep. No historical sources can agree on how the bridge across it stays up. Some sources say it was there even before the country was founded. Every time she crossed it, Uriel resisted the urge to let her wings out–the angel’s instinctive response to fear. I don’t have to explain to you that every angel has a deep-rooted fear of the ocean. I may have to, with time, explain to you why.
They reached the tall blonde brick apartment complex on Cabaret Street, the one with green window boxes, reserved for C Tier. A bare, slimy human eyeball sat naked and glistening on the corner of a window ledge and followed them as they passed. They parked the car in the garage next door, then entered the hidden back door of the apartment complex. The one with the staircase leading down.
The Rose’s headquarters was entirely underground, and had eight levels, most of which were for either employee’s offices or dorms. Imogen and Uriel had adjacent dorms on Floor 7. January, the director, rarely left Floor 8.
Floor 4 had amenities such as the library, the maps room, a game room, a war room, and a cafeteria, where the three of them headed now. As they entered, Rooster Claws Randy, whom I should clarify had rooster claws for hands, bent down to pet Hester, which Hester did not enjoy. The kitchen was packed with people who either just came back from searches or had nowhere better to be. Several people in the room were on the run from the Sword or the Crown, and every single one of them in the room could be jailed for life: almost everyone’s badge was taken off or covered up. Casey Griffiths, just thirteen years old, had hidden his under his stovepipe hat. A bulletin board on the far wall announced things like updates on the war effort and Seraglio Jones’s 68th birthday party.
“Oi, Campione!” Charlie Hoshi welcomed Imogen warmly. He asked how their job went, and she obliged, telling everyone about the girl killed by an angel. The second she said the word, the entire crowded room hushed.
“A real angel?” Ethel Greene asked, pondering. “Did you see it?”
“No, but we found its feather. It’s the real deal, according to September.”
The whole room’s attention suddenly shifted at once to Uriel. “It’s true.”
She held up the feather, which immediately got snatched and passed around like show and tell. Any doubt to the feather’s authenticity was squashed when Casey sliced his finger open running it along the edge. Uriel had forgotten humans were fragile enough to get cut that way.
As someone bandaged Casey’s finger, he started babbling off ‘facts’ about angels: how our favorite food is babies, how our blood can be used to make pure cocaine, and how, apparently, an angel named Gabriel once snuck into Franz Ferdinand’s house and stole everything but the cat and the garlic salt (this one’s actually true but it happened in another universe entirely, so I’m not sure how he got this information).
“Kid, there’s no way that happened,” Imogen told him.
“Says the girl who believes in the moon,” Duck Helquist said. “There’s no way a big rock in the sky existed and then just disappeared.”
“The moon was totally real!” Casey said, predictably. “They found fossils in the ocean that fel
l from it that came from the empire that lived there–”
“Oh, not the space werewolves thing again–”
“They’re CALLED lunacanthropes–”
Lotta Baudelaire knocked on the doorframe. “September? January wants you in his office.”
Uriel slipped into the hallway, reluctantly heading to Floor 8. It’s not that she disliked January, in fact he often put her at ease just by the calming command of his presence. But she didn’t want to talk about what she’d seen on Mount Vexation. It had been a while since she’d had to really think about what she was doing on earth. Any reminders of the war in Heaven just made her anxious.
l from it that came from the empire that lived there–”
“Oh, not the space werewolves thing again–”
“They’re CALLED lunacanthropes–”
Lotta Baudelaire knocked on the doorframe. “September? January wants you in his office.”
Uriel slipped into the hallway, reluctantly heading to Floor 8. It’s not that she disliked January, in fact he often put her at ease just by the calming command of his presence. But she didn’t want to talk about what she’d seen on Mount Vexation. It had been a while since she’d had to really think about what she was doing on earth. Any reminders of the war in Heaven just made her anxious.
More anxious than normal, anyway.