Virginia - Ohio - June - August 2067
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Sighting
On the morning of June seventh I had awakened very early to Azazel, my guardian angel, humming erratically. There was always a low, continuous hum emanating from angels, less an audible sound and more of a vibration you could feel in your eardrums and sometimes your bones, but whatever Azazel was doing was definitely making noise. I held my hand up to him so he could generate a thought-field and let me know what was going on. I had watched his triangular face flash like he was encoding a field, but instead of beaming thoughts at me, he blasted some kind of energy into my hand. I could still feel it now, hours later, pins and needles like my arm was asleep even though it was working normally. Since then, Azazel hasn’t stopped making noise and hasn’t communicated with me at all, though it seems like he’s been trying. Mom and Dad’s guardians Haniel and Muriel weren’t making any unusual noises or blasting anyone with energy, but they also couldn’t generate thought-fields.
All three of us had been greatly concerned all that morning, but as we were the only people we knew of in the world who had guardian angels, there was nobody to talk to and figure out what was going on. Everyone else in the world believed the angels were non-living entities called “nodes” that were little more than extremely advanced fax machines or web servers. Only our family, since my grandfathers, had angels that followed us and communicated with us directly. Nonetheless, the evening news had much to tell: the angels (“nodes”) in the nodal array had all spontaneously vanished early this morning, and by lunchtime there had been reports of rebel activity at the National Nodal Array Administration. It turned out not to be rebels, but a solitary teenage girl. Nobody knew who she was or where she had come from, but with the apparent power of a god she had immolated the NNAA headquarters and leveled half of Columbus, which was where the capital of the UNSA was moved to after the rebels captured DC last fall.
I had a strong feeling in my gut and a tingling in my arm that told me the reason the guardian angels had stuck with us was so we could do something to stop this girl from burning down the world. Of course my parents were not on board with chasing down a girl with the power of god to try and defeat her with only our small and relatively powerless angels to help us. I think they were just too worried by the war, after all this was the second American civil war in their lifetime, and so the fight was just kind of beaten out of them. Mom and Dad’s angels even reflected this; Haniel and Muriel were both dimmer and humming lower than normal, as though they were both dejected.
I decided I would have to take matters into my own hands. Around nine o’clock that first night I pretended to go up to my room and go to bed, and then waited patiently for my parents to go to sleep. They stayed up late, much later than usual, talking in hushed and anxious tones about the news and the angels. Sometime after midnight I finally heard their footsteps creaking up the stairs. I lay down in bed and pretended to be asleep, because despite me being seventeen, my mother still cracks my door and leans in to check on me every night before she goes to bed.
After the light went off in the hall and I heard the click of my parents’ bedroom door closing, I got up and went to my window. I unlocked it and opened it all the way, and then with great effort pinched in the two releases on the storm pane and pushed it up as well.
“FUck!” I exclaimed, catching myself halfway through the word. I had pinched my finger in the screen when I was letting go of the storm pane. I shook out my hand to blow off the pain and poked my head out into the warm night air. The window was right above the side door that leads into our kitchen, and there is a small roof over the steps that peaks just beneath my window frame. I climbed out my window and onto the roof, edged down to the end and then carefully dropped my legs down and stretched out until my toes touched the railing. I climbed down to the railing and then hopped down onto the steps and walked around to the street in front of our house. My car was parked right on the line between us and our neighbors, so I hoped my parents wouldn’t notice as I started my car and drove away. With any luck, in the morning they would assume I had driven to school, so I would have a decent window before they realized I’d gone.
Azazel hovered over my passenger seat, his soft pulsating glow casting a dim blue tone over the interior of my car. I pulled out my phone and set a course for Columbus, and hoped the girl would still be in the area when I arrived. I plugged my phone in and started my road trip playlist, and set my phone’s assistant to announce any breaking news regarding the flaming teenager.
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The trip to Columbus should have taken a few hours under normal circumstances, and probably would have been extended by the proximity of my route to the warfront, but as the actions of the teenage god got underway, the situation changed pretty drastically. In the end, it took me nearly two full months to get to the city. It was looking like it could be the end of the world, and people were definitely acting like that was the case. Driving down the freeways was pretty much impossible because of anti-vehicle defenses put in place against the rebel motor convoys, and driving through the scenic routes was a nightmare with the doomsday mobs and plethora of abandoned vehicles.
Though my initial intent had been to go on some sort of hero’s journey in secret, returning when my parents had just begun to worry about me, as I hit delay after delay I began to worry about them and we started texting during the first week. I was too committed, and things were getting dicey around home so they decided it was for the best to let me keep going away from our town. After the first month, they were evacuating home and heading for my aunt’s house in North Carolina, and after that we lost contact. I haven’t heard from them in a couple weeks now, I’ve been assuming the worst and hoping for the best but mostly trying not to think about it for the time being.
Keeping tabs on news about the girl proved difficult, as she kept vanishing for periods of time, but basically, things got pretty batshit. While I was hunkering down in the woods waiting for whatever was going on with the pillars of fire in all the towns near me toward the end of my travels to blow over, I caught up on some news: people were sighting new fish in the Atlantic, new avian creatures were seen in the skies over Europe and Canada, and satellite footage showed the huge Antarctic fissure had been repaired. Apparently the world’s military arsenals had been destroyed, and the world’s prisons had been shut down by emissaries of the god-girl, and whatever was going on now was some kind of rapture. Lovely.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
As I was trying to sift through available news about the state of the American revolution, my attention was drawn to the sky by an incredibly loud whooshing noise. I realized it was the sound of the great pillars of fire receding away through the sky — ominously, they seemed to be going the same direction as me. That said, with the pillars out of sight, I decided to continue on with the last leg of my journey to Columbus.
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When I was finally getting to the city, Columbus had been evacuated, so there wasn’t really any news coming in about the situation there anymore. The government had sent a small military operation to try to secure a perimeter, but with the war going on (or maybe over, it was hard to tell from the news reports) they weren’t sparing many resources. Apparently there were rumors that the rebels might send military forces to try to capture the girl, and other sources were reporting on more rumors that the NNAA had actually been experimenting on the girl with node technology. I was willing to believe both of those things in a different light; I wouldn’t put it past the UNSA to be doing crimes against humanity, and if they were it would make sense for the communist rebels to be planning a rescue op. In any case my umpteenth playthrough of my road trip playlist had ended fifteen minutes ago and I was on the final approach to Columbus at last.
On a flat stretch I could just make out military vehicles on the horizon. I was just thinking about how I would get past them when a bright light appeared in the distance. I slowed the car and pulled over as I stared intently at the moving point on the horizon. It was growing larger, and fast. After a moment I was able to make out what it was exactly: the teenage girl, floating at least ten or fifteen feet off the ground, engulfed in a pillar of fire. I realized now the ground was smoldering along the trail she had taken. I watched as the military vehicles were stirred to action and turned to fire on her. She was unaffected by bullets and then by rockets, and before they could try anything heavier, she was upon them.
I looked on in awe as she called down bolts of flaming light to immolate tanks and summoned up walls of pure energy to disintegrate rockets and mortars. Within seconds a lone truck was left standing against her, I watched a soldier standing in its bed load and aim a rocket launcher at her. Before he could fire, she had generated a massive spear of red hot flames and thrust it through him and the truck, turning him into an unholy crucifix for just an instant before his body was vaporized and the truck exploded.
After she had annihilated the military unit the girl held her position and looked around. I watched the pillar of fire flickering hungrily around her and glanced nervously at Azazel. He was floating low, just above the seat, and humming much deeper than normal. I looked back out through the windshield and froze.
From nearly a mile away, the girl was making eye contact with me. Fear and adrenaline were coursing through me -- I had come to find her, but I had hoped to do more recon before confronting her -- and now I was frozen in place just staring her down. While I watched the blank, hot white fire burn in her eyes, sweat poured down my back as though the flames were right in front of me. I could feel my throat drying out but couldn’t manage to swallow. The girl narrowed her eyes, intensifying their burning for a moment before she suddenly collapsed in on herself and vanished in a swirl of embers, accompanied by a thunderous crack that echoed across the open stretch of road. I was so hyperfocused on my fear responses that I hadn’t noticed the tingling in my arm crescendo to a heated throb. With the girl gone my heart rate settled and I breathed normally again, but as I started up the car it didn’t feel as though the pain in my arm had really subsided.
“I think she teleported,” I remarked aloud, rubbing my arm in as much an effort to calm my nerves as the tingling. Azazel hovered a little higher again, perhaps agreeing.
I put the car in drive and continued on ahead. I carefully avoided the husks of the military vehicles and tried to ignore the pieces of soldiers smoldering among them. I drove along the trail of blackened earth the girl had left behind and entered the Columbus city limits. I figured the best place to start my search would be where this all apparently began at the headquarters of the National Nodal Array Administration. The building was an old MegaMall that had closed way back in the 2010s, and for some reason or another it had a natural bounty of nodes at the genesis in 2025. Columbus had apparently been chosen as the headquarters because of some kind of ideal pattern in its nodal activity, combined with the quantity of nodes in this particular abandoned property.
I parked in the ground level lot behind the old mall, as I didn’t want to take my chances with the probably failing structural integrity of the multistory garage. I got out of the car and took a deep breath before heading into the dark, smoldering entrance of the NNAA, Azazel floating along and humming softly behind me. My arm began to burn again, but not in the raging way it had when I saw the girl— now it was more of a dull and heavy throbbing.
When Azazel and I crossed the threshold, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Hundreds or more had apparently died in the initial incident, and considering the immediate evacuation of the city, the bodies had been left in the smoldering wreckage and the Summer heat for more than a month now. The smell of burnt and rotting flesh was almost tangible in the air, and I puked immediately. Even Azazel was reacting with a bit of tremolo in his humming and a deeper tone to his blue glow, but this was probably more in response to the negative karma of death and destruction than to the sights or smells.
Some of the power still worked in the building so the interior was a patchwork of sections lit in red-orange emergency lights, in the cool white of clinical fluorescent lighting, the iconic blue-green of node enhancing bulbs, and some sections that were entirely dark. The core of the building, which had taken the most damage, was the darkest sector. On the edge of the apparent center of the disaster was a fire-proofed vault of a room which contained a large server array. Azazel and I went in there, and I looked around for an access terminal. There was one tucked away in the corner, which I powered on. I was presented with a login screen showing the NNAA emblem. A message on screen was prompting me to present a key card. I went back into the hall and pinching my nose and gagging a bit, I dug in a dead researcher’s pockets until I found an ID. Shaking, I logged into the computer and began what would soon turn into a twelve hour long deep dive through all of the NNAA’s classified information on the current situation and a certain 17-year-old Agatha Jones, presumed dead after an incident in 2025 and now more alive than ever forty-two years later.
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