TIMESTAMP: November 3, 7999. 8:51 p.m.

Uriel’s cello didn’t just play music. She made sure of that. She made the instrument, as well as any she had ever or would ever play, sing.

She played on it a very old song from our childhood, one she’d learned from the spiral sheet music she’d found long ago on a very top shelf at the Library of Mercy. None of us then had had a clue where any of the Library’s material had come from, aside from the fact that our Parents had put it there for us, and that it was incomplete. I know where it comes from. So will you, one day, and so will she.

The song she was playing then was called Moonlight Sonata.

She, like any angel, loved music. Playing music to her was like figure skating: when she drew the bow over the cello strings, she didn’t need to worry, instead she could let her mind wander. And depending on the song, it wandered in any and every direction. Uriel Morningstar was the Archangel of Brilliance, and she thought an awful lot.

Today, despite her efforts not to, she thought of Jack McIntyre.

Think of the Moon Goddess, Marama, she tried to tell herself. Or even her arrogant sister, Youali. She’s probably not been killed yet. I don’t think Lucifer’s armies have found her yet. I haven’t been told they have, anyway. But her subconscious was instead drawn to a little bookstore tucked cozily between several stores of its kind on Morbid Avenue, known colloquially as Body Snatcher Street for the thing all these businesses had in common.

When Uriel had fallen from Heaven’s Gate five years prior, she had plummeted to the ground and smacked the water like an egg hitting a concrete wall. Unlike an egg hitting a concrete wall, the force didn’t shatter her. All six of her wings had been out, and they kept her buoyant for about two seconds before she began to slowly sink.

A bit dazed from the fall, she didn’t quite realize where she’d landed until the high concentration of salt in the water that had just flooded her mouth and nose woke her up with a sudden jolt of panic. She floundered in the water, already imagining she could feel the hands and tentacles and pulsing membranes of whatever angel-eating creature lay in wait for her. A ferry passed by, and she scrambled up to it, clinging on like a barnacle. Whe

n all this was over, she and her cherubim were going to have to teach themselves saltwater swimming.

She didn’t know this, but she’d landed not too far from the Rose’s headquarters. And directly in front of a house on Mercy Street with a blue door and morning glories in the window boxes. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The ferry, however, reached its dock on the opposite side of the lake, where she splashed her way gratefully onto sour sand. It was only then, as Uriel dragged herself onto dry land and shook herself off like a dog, that she realized she had next to no memory of how she’d ended up here in the first place. She was guarding the Gate like she’d been told, she remembered being bored, then only the panic of falling. There was no way she’d simply fallen, she wasn’t careless enough to just tip over the side. Probably. Which led to the vaguely frightening possibility that she’d been pushed. But by whom?

Leaning against a garbage can that smelled disgustingly of humanity and seagull, she tried to remember. Who had she been talking to up there? She remembered using Hester as a trumpet–she patted Hester now, in knife form (why was she in knife form?) –to call somebody, but who? All she got was the thought that she needed to find Jophiel, and if not her then Raphael or even Samael. But why? Raphie and Sammi were the enemy. What was so bad that she needed help from them?

Either way, looking for either of her brothers would be suicide. Much safer to find Jophiel. But then what would she say when Uriel had found her sister? What threat was there to warn her of? Uriel herself didn’t even know. All the same, she’d only feel better once she found Jophiel. Going back up to Heaven would probably be suicide, too. Besides, angels are expert hunters and were divinely created to never be hunted. We carry no natural scent, and tread lightly on the ground. If an angel didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be.

The humans of Celestial City didn’t notice her walking by, even with her wings out. Their eyes slipped right over her as if she wasn’t there. Uriel suddenly remembered they couldn’t see her

at all– human eyes weren’t structured to see angels properly without help. This didn’t bother her, she liked slipping through a crowd unrecognized and unseen, but the fact that she’d momentarily forgotten why certainly did. Just what had caused her lapse in memory?

The city itself soon lured her in. The sights and sounds and smells were far too much to resist, now that she’d actually gotten up close. She’d only visited Earth maybe four or five times since the war started eight thousand years ago, and only when her cherubim pleaded for a much-needed break while they were already in the area. Earth was Lucifer’s base, the enemy’s center of command. It was also where Luci had been locked up for the past four billion years.

So while she wandered the city watching the humans do peculiar things like exchange business cards and play kickball in the street, there lay beneath the surface an undercurrent of fear that not once in her five years on earth had ever gone away.

Something she noticed very early on was the Score, and how religiously people stuck to it. The higher-Scoring citizens had been trained from birth to treat the lowest Scorers like dirt.

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Her memory of that first day in Celestial had fractured, faded. Not many details of that day had stuck with her, but that was rather understandable because what happened that evening eclipsed everything else.

She had sat on a bench swing in a deserted park on the poorly kept side of town. The side where cockroaches had gang wars with rats and garbage bags formed mountains on the sidewalks. She hadn’t tired, exactly, but she had gotten a bit overloaded with new information. Still, she kept her ears open for the voices of her siblings.

Finally, as night neared, she heard it– the tiniest whoosh of large wings landing nearby. She stilled, angling her head in the direction of the noise. Nothing but rustling for a while, then– “Uri?”

She recognized the voice. Cassiel, one of her younger cherubim, just barely two million years old. She tried not to pick favorites, but Cassiel had long ago won over everyone’s hearts. He’d whispered her name, worried someone may have been listening. “Uri, are you okay? I saw you fall. Where are you?”

“Hush,” she called back. She still couldn’t see him. “I’m okay. You should go back to your post. Retreat, just get out of here.” He was around twenty yards away, blocked by several wide apartment buildings.

“Okay.” He was getting farther away. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine, just go find your sisters.”

She heard him take flight, then saw him flapping above the buildings a few blocks away. She then heard something two hundred feet to her left that she didn’t notice until it was too late. If she had, things may have gone very, very differently.

It was the slightest gasp, the smug whisper of “gotcha,” and the pulling of a trigger.

Cassiel fell from the sky with a terrified yelp.

Uriel shot toward him, catching him just before he hit the ground. She held him, tried to stop the bleeding, but that wouldn’t have helped anyway. The bullet had caught him right through the chest and killed him almost instantly, but she didn’t want to believe it. The golden blood spilling from the wound couldn’t have been real, the cracks snaking along his skin couldn’t belong to Cassiel. He was her baby. He’d survived eight thousand years of war against thousands of his kind and survived. He couldn’t have died so suddenly by the hand of a mere human.

And yet.

A loud knock at the door jolted Uriel out of her miserable memory, ending the song with a sudden shriek. Duck Helquist, a frail girl wearing a feather boa and thick round spectacles, stood in the doorway. “There’s a woman who wants to see you. Well, us. By the back door.”

Uriel sighed heavily, feeling no relief from the breath. Hester got up to press her nose against Duck’s palm in an effort to be petted, tail wagging. Duck obliged. “And there’s nobody else you could’ve gone to?”

“Everyone’s at Seraglio’s party over in the Broken-Door District. I mean, there’s Imogen, but she’s doing target practice, and I’m scared to go interrupt her.”

“What about January?”

“I’m too scared to interrupt him, too.”

Uriel stood up. She wasn’t planning on doing much tonight anyway. “Alright, I’ll go get Imogen. You bring whoever it is into the kitchen, offer her whatever food we have.”

Uriel went down to Floor 8, through the disguised door in the wall that led down a corridor into the shooting range, which was actually held in an underground room six blocks away designed to dampen sound. Imogen fired a pistol at various objects hung about the room, hitting every target with startling accuracy–the last bullet catching a stenciled dragon in the eye. The dragon lay twenty-four yards away.

“Why aren’t you enjoying the party?” At the sound of Uriel’s voice, Imogen jumped a foot in the air.

“Gracious Gods, you and your dog move like ghosts,” Imogen muttered. “And I don’t do parties.”

“Really?” This was surprising. Imogen seemed to be rather friendly and extroverted. More friendly than Uriel herself, anyway

.

“Really. Now did you come here for a reason, or did you just want to come distract me with your pretty face?”

Pretty? The compliment made her buffer for a second, but she shook her head. “Some lady says she needs our help.”

“What does January say?” Imogen had already stowed her pistol in its holster and was heading out the door.

“I’m sure he won’t mind.” In reality, Uriel simply wanted to relish the feeling of doing something January didn’t know about.

As they entered the kitchen and got a look at the woman sitting at the table looking completely out of place, Uriel realized this was going to be a very long night.

She had no badge. This in itself wasn’t necessarily unusual, plenty of people who showed up to the Rose had their reasons for forgoing the Score and all that it entailed. She had the bronze-brown skin and no-nonsense look of the Ulisdidanelvi people, but the clothes she wore did not resemble the intricate furs of Ulisdidanelv in the slightest. Denim trousers cut scandalously above the knee, and a thin gray jacket with a zipper instead of buttons covered a pink cotton shirt. On her feet were gray sandshoes with bright pink laces.

What struck Imogen and Uriel the most, however, was that this woman looked shaken. Her jacket had a tear in the shoulder, and her shoes were streaked with mud. Her black hair was disheveled in its ponytail. She had refused Duck’s offer of watery tea, the cup sitting forgotten on the table beside her.

Before Imogen or Uriel could speak, the woman said, with the slightest accent neither of them recognized, “My name is Cosette Nines. And I’m looking for my husband.”

Uriel had the urge to thank her for getting to the point so fast. In her experience, humans could talk around in circles for hours if you let them. “When did you last see him?”

“About two hours ago.” Cosette fidgeted with a tarnished key around her neck.

“And how are you sure he’s missing?”

“It’s a very long story.”

“Do you think he’s in any danger? What’s his Tier?”

Cosette frowned. “Excuse me?”

Imogen and Uriel shared a look. “The Score on his badge. The badge that is legally required of every Celestial citizen. What is his Tier?”

Her eyes flickered with some kind of understanding at the word ‘Celestial’. “He doesn’t have one of those. And neither do I. We’re not from around here.”

Imogen smiled a little. “I can tell. Where are you from, then?”

“A little town called Blue Hill, Mississippi.”

“Never heard of it. Your husband, what’s his name? What does he look like?”

“His name is Jericho Edward Nines, twenty-eight or so. Tall, blonde, blue eyes. He’s with a few other people.”

“If you know he’s with them, how is he missing?”

“I told you, it’s a really long story. We got separated. I have a device that’s meant to help me find him, but… I found something else instead. You cops?”

They shook their heads. “We’re not affiliated with the Crown in any way,” Imogen said. Uriel raised her eyebrows at that.

“Good. I've seen your cops, and I don’t trust them with a homicide.”

So much for getting straight to the point. “Homicide? You should have led with that!”

“I think it’s best if you start from the beginning. All the way at the beginning,” Imogen said.

Cosette stood up. “I should show you what I found. I’ll explain on the way.”