First Angels Read online

  Affirmative .

  “Gods above.” She turned back as Sam spoke. He knelt there, bound and beaten, but with an unmistakable expression of awe on his face. “Who are you?”

  “I’ve said it at least three times.” She paused, and grinned slightly. “I’m the one who’s going to change the world. Starting with your corrupted afterlife.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “You think the thousand worlds are the dreams of gods, right? Well, I’m going to fix the machine that’s been dreaming your nightmare of an afterlife.” She pointed up, towards the ring. “You’ll get Elysium, a paradise for the dead. You’ll be able to stop… annihilating people. If there’s any mercy in you.”

  Sam looked at the ground, confused and hurt. “Look, Ada, I get why you’d think I’m evil, but I’m doing it to help everyone I know. Everyone who is already dead. You don’t know what it’s like -”

  “I don’t give a fuck, Sam.” She saw a gentle disturbance in the cityscape float into view outside the window, and Cherry’s voice spoke to her.

  I have arrived .

  “Can you actually fix it?” Sam was looking at her with… hope? Was he hopeful?

  Ada sighed. “I can manage just about anything. Including, yes, this specifically. I know I can. The gods told me so.”

  “The gods?”

  “I met them. Face to… well, in person. Look, I need to go -”

  “Help us.”

  Ada blinked. “What? Why in all the hells would I do that?”

  Sam looked away. “The only reason we’re doing this is because what the living did to the afterlife. Do you have any idea what it’s like to spend hundreds of years in an empty void, with silence crushing your mind and no proper body or sense of direction? All you can do is move or stay still, and every other person you meet is just… screaming, or dead inside. If you could fix that, I know I’d stop. I’m sure most of us would stop. Hell, I’d kill myself all over again.”

  “Why would I need your help?”

  “Because that army out there is hunting for a shrine. They think they can defeat us too if they find it, and it sounds like the thing you’re trying to fix.”

  How had they heard of it? Coder lore? Either way, that was a problem. If they found it first - unlikely, but not impossible - Ada might be in trouble if she was alone. She didn’t trust anyone but herself to fix it properly. Nobody else had a clue what they were doing, no matter how good their intentions.

  She thought about it. Work with the ghosts. Help the ghosts. It sounded completely evil - which was just what the Institute had told her of her own thoughts or ideas or questions, many times. She wasn’t evil, but that didn’t mean she had to be blind to pragmatism. She took a deep breath.

  She looked at Sam, who was looking up at her with wide eyes. He looked pitiable, weak, harmless. She knew the ghosts as a group were anything but harmless, but even as a group, they were still pitiable. They were the dead, punished only for dying. Ada knew that wasn’t fair.

  “I’m not going to help you just for the sake of it. But if you can convince your people to help me , well. Maybe we can work something out. I still don’t have everything I need to solve this problem yet.”

  Cherry, can you fit a second passenger?

  Are they a friend, or a prisoner?

  Her eyes narrowed. Prisoner, definitely.

  It will not be comfortable.

  I don’t care about his comfort.

  “I can’t promise you the Master will agree to this, but I’ll try to convince him.”

  “The Master?”

  “One of our walkers. We’ve had three, as far as I know - one was killed at Glass Peaks, and the other is… well, in hiding. As an insurance policy. There’s only one left on the field, and he’s our leader. Our Master. He’s my friend, too.”

  Ada sighed. What was she getting herself into? Was this even a good idea?

  “Fine.” She stepped over and undid the rope that bound his feet, but left his hands tied up. “Come on. We’re flying out of here.”

  “Flying? What, are you some kind of angel too?” He looked puzzled, but she pulled him up and shoved him towards the open window. He looked scared for a moment, looking out into what looked like an empty night. Then Cherry’s cockpit popped open, the inside of the ship floating in the air just outside the broken window, the rest of the ship melting into the lights and darks of the night. She heard Sam take a sharp breath.

  Ada smiled, barely making out the fan of Cherry’s six fins in the stealth distortion field, an eerie pair of composite wings.

  “Sure, think of me as an angel. A dark angel. The really dangerous kind.”

  Chapter 7

  “What the hell is this?”

  Isavel watched from a safe distance as Zoa pointed at something in the elevator shaft. She remembered the coders explaining how code could kill, but looking at this code, she could actually believe it. The spindly, crawling sigils crept across lobby floor and walls, all of it sucking the life from the ceiling lights to the point where Isavel had to light up her hand like a flashlight to see clearly. The coder siblings stepped over that code fearlessly, but had stopped when they reached the gutted elevator shaft.

  Next to Zoa, Ren sighed and ran a hand through his dark hair, turning to Isavel. “Gods, Isavel, this reeks of Ada’s work.”

  Code was dangerous, unpredictable magic, but that declaration made Isavel want to see for herself. She stepped over the pale glow of the code on the ground, walking towards the elevator shaft. What she saw there was just more code to her, nothing distinct or different from what was on the floor outside. “What do you mean?”

  Zoa pointed at the place where the code in the lobby flowed into the elevator shaft. “Ada was always doing this kind of shit - splicing code together like this into bigger sigils. It’s liable to get people killed more often than not, but no, Ada was special - if you asked her, at least.”

  “What would Ada want with the Mayor?”

  Ren shrugged. “What Ada wants is anyone’s guess. She’s always been too busy brooding and huffing to communicate properly with anybody.”

  Isavel leaned in, peering up the elevator shaft, and felt a sudden… lightness. What? She frowned, extending her hand into the elevator shaft. “What’s the code doing?”

  Zoa waved her hand around in the elevator shaft, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Feels like my hand is floating - this is some kind of master-level sigil. I’ll get Elder Tan so he can take a look at it.”

  Isavel shook her head - after the attack, with explosions upstairs sending debris cascading into the square, she had told the rest of the leaders to get back to the camp and stay safe. To her surprise and discomfort, they had all listened without question. “No, they’re heading back already. See what else you can find on your own.”

  She turned around to the guard who was standing nervously at the entrance to the lobby, not far away from the charred corpse of one of his compatriots. He was trying valiantly not to look - what could he do, after all? The other man was dead.

  She sighed, putting a hand on the guard’s shoulder. “How else can I get up to the Mayor’s home? I need to find out what’s going on up there.”

  The man pursed his lips, looking into her eyes for a moment before nervously glancing away. “I, uh, I think those were his drones shooting. I bet he shot some ghost trying to kill him - hard to tell who the body was that came down in the square.”

  She sighed. “I need to get up there either way.”

  “Yes - yes, of course, Saint Herald. Sorry. There’s a stairwell that leads up to his home, but - ah - you should go alone. He usually only wants a us to follow him partway up the stairwell, no further.”

  Alone? Why, so the Mayor didn’t feel threatened? She was thrice-gifted and blessed by the gods, and had died for this life. She was perhaps the most dangerous person he could meet, alone or otherwise. She turned around to the two coders, still inspecting the code they claimed must be Ada’s. “Zoa, R
en, I’m going upstairs - be careful.”

  Zoa looked back at her, brushing stray blue hair out of her face and nodding vigorously. “Sure thing, Isavel, of course.”

  Isavel followed the guard to an indistinct, ancient door in a cramped hallway, and the guard opened it up to reveal an ugly, barebones concrete stairwell with the blandest possible lighting carved into the ceilings. “Anything I should expect to see?”

  “It’s locked up there, so you’ll need to, er, knock to get in.”

  He looked uncomfortable, but his intent was clear. Isavel should knock for the Mayor to let her in, but if the Mayor wasn’t able to do so, she should really knock.

  She tried a smile and thanked him, turning to the long ascent through the tower. It was quiet, and each flight of stairs was identical to the next, with the exception of ancient markings on every door, metal sigils fused in place that might as well be code. After a few flights Isavel felt like time itself had forgotten about this miserable little stairwell.

  If she ever reached the top, what would she find? Something had exploded in the building, the festivities had been called off, somebody charred and dead had fallen from on high. She needed the Mayor to help her though, to help her people - how would she do that now, if he was angry and had just survived an assassination attempt? How would she do that if he was dead?

  And what did Ada have to do with all this? To the beat of her footsteps she remembered Ada’s eyes, livid and flaring out like angel wings. There were no coincidences - at least not of this scale, not of this nature. The gods had sent Isavel here, and clearly they had sent Ada as well - but why?

  When she finally reached the door at the top, she stepped into another elevator lobby. The door was shattered here too, dust and shards of metal covering the floor, and there was a gently pulsing red light filling the space. Another door - the one she was supposed to knock on, no doubt - had also been destroyed. So much for that.

  She stepped into the Mayor’s home, a great suite of ancient metals, stone and glass, and… too much wind. Too many outdoor sounds. Something was wrong. Homes were not supposed to be filled with wind.

  The damage was worst in the central atrium. The ground here was scorched and chipped in one long streak, and an entire wall’s worth of window was blown away - and what glass remained bent out, not in. It had been broken from inside, no doubt by the bulky drones humming lazily in the middle of the atrium. She was wary at first, but they were completely unresponsive. She walked past them and found blood on the floor too, small droplets scattered near a vast wall of ever-changing colours and light. Images, she realized - images of an ancient ruin, boxy and surrounded by people.

  She blinked, staring up at the screen. Where was that? What was that?

  “Hello?”

  She almost jumped out of her skin, and turned to see a young boy peeking around the corner behind her. He couldn’t have been much older than ten, not quite yet an adult. He looked scared.

  She smiled at him, remembering what it had felt like to fear the dark and windy nights in the forest. There were no other sounds here, after all, and they seemed to be alone. “Hi there. Who… Are you the Mayor’s son?”

  He nodded nervously. Gods, a child - in the middle of a city. That was impossible - there was no way he could have been raised in a place like this, unless… Unless the child had never left this building. And the same must have gone for his mother, possibly for years before he was born. The thought made her cringe.

  She approached the Mayor’s son and knelt down next to him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  He nodded again, looking past her at the glass. “Dad’s gone. He just… disappeared.”

  Isavel narrowed her eyes at those words. They were familiar. She squeezed his shoulder a bit. “My name is Isavel. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Aren.”

  She smiled. “Aren. Can you help me figure out what happened? Did you see anything?”

  Aren nodded even as he explained. “Someone else came in here, and she told me I had to hide if I wanted to be safe. Then she and my dad were yelling at each other, and something blew up. She flew away into the sky, out the window.”

  Isavel gaped, stammered. “She… flew away?”

  He pointed to the shattered window. “I think she was an angel, but a scary one. I saw… I just saw big huge wings in the air, outside. They looked like they were made of stars and sky.”

  Isavel’s mind raced. Ada. It had to be Ada - who else could it be, at this point? Isavel had told Ada that she wished the mayor would disappear, and she knew Ada had something to do with the gods. And now here she was, listening to this.

  Was Ada actually an angel?

  Aren looked around. “I guess she killed the other one. Dad said he was a ghost, not a real person. He was right here before it all happened.”

  Isavel stepped towards the great shattered window, looking out into the night sky, hoping her gifted eyes might chance across a pair of angel wings somewhere between her and the stars. She saw nothing of the sort. She sighed and turned back, sitting next to Aren and wrapping an arm around his shoulder.

  “I don’t think your dad is coming back. I’m so sorry.”

  He was staring blankly into space; for a moment before he answered, she wasn’t sure he had heard. “Sometimes he goes away for a really long time.”

  She sighed. Her own parents were gone. She may even had seen their faces in that pile, but she did not want to look at those memories too closely. Better to let them blur and smear over time. What had helped her? Why hadn’t she become a broken, nervous wreck?

  She had done something. She had had a mission, a duty to the gods. She looked back at the drones. There was plenty the boy could do, too - but no. Not yet. This was not just some opportunity to seize - there was tragedy here, tragedy that demanded respect.

  “I lost my parents too.” Out in the night she, she could just make out the curvature of the ring in the sky, its twinkling lights denser and fainter than true stars. Perhaps the dead waited up there for her, like some of the stories said.

  “What happened?”

  She looked down at the floor, trying not to think too hard about the bloody details of what must have happened to the faces she knew. “Bad people came to my village. They killed everyone.”

  “But not you.”

  Isavel smiled, but it was a weak smile. No need to go into details. “Yeah. And now I want to keep other people safe, so the same thing doesn’t happen to them.”

  “Can I keep people safe too? I don’t think I’ll be gifted.”

  Curiosity seized her momentarily. What gift did he think she had, from her looks? “Do you think I’m gifted?”

  He looked at her. “I dunno. You’re pretty. Aren’t gifted heroes always pretty?”

  She smirked, shaking her head. “I don’t think it’s that simple. But everyone can always help keep others safe, even if they’re not gifted.”

  Isavel hesitated, looking back at the drones. This was as clear an invitation as any, and though there was human tragedy here, the gods’ will was not dulled. Still, how could she possibly -

  “I can use the drones. Dad taught me. It’s our family duty.”

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. Well, that was that. She turned around, her eyes flicking between the boy and the images on the screen. He could use the drones, and presumably all the other ancient relics here. That meant he could help. Good thing his father had died.

  Isavel was briefly horrified as that thought scurried through her mind. He had been unpleasant, yes, but it was a terrible thing to be glad for. It was not admirable, it was not heroic. The gods’ will needed to be carried out, and he had stood in their way, but there should be no glee in that recognition.

  She swallowed hard and stood up, lifting the boy up by the hand along with her. “Aren, I need your help. Your dad...”

  She trailed off, not wanting to lie to him about his father. The Mayor had appeared to want nothin
g to do with her campaign, but if she told the boy that his father had wanted to help, perhaps...

  She couldn’t lie, not about this. It was too manipulative.

  She let out a sigh. “Your dad was angry with me. I need to find something important, and I wanted his help, but he wasn’t going to help me. But I still need help. Can you help me instead?”

  He looked at her quizzically, as though trying to puzzle out what was wrong with her. Apparently he couldn’t see whatever threat his father had seen. “Do you want the drones?”

  “No, you can keep the drones.” She pointed to the screen. “I just need to know something about the past - and I think it’s that right there. Can you ask the machines what this picture is?”

  He nodded. He seemed strangely unfazed, all things considered, just staring off into space. Was he in shock? She wondered what she had looked like, the morning after her rebirth.

  “Aren… I know you said your dad leaves a lot, but I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  He nodded again. “I know.”

  She bit her lip. Orphan to orphan, she still wasn’t sure what she should say. “Are you okay?”

  He shook his head a bit too vigorously. “I’ll see him again, one day. He told me he would wait for me after he died, with mom and grandma.”

  Isavel leaned in to give him a hug. She hoped he was right. What little she remembered of the afterlife was confusing and terrifying, and she certainly couldn’t imagine finding lost family members there for a joyous reunion. Nobody had been waiting for her - though perhaps that was because they were all dying at the same time. Or perhaps she had been too weak to find her way. There was, after all, a gods-promised paradise somewhere after death, perhaps beyond the ghosts. She just hadn’t found it. Or deserved it.

  “Do you want me to ask the drones what that is?”

  She nodded, looking up at the screen. “Yes, please.”

  He took a step closer, eyes flitting across the screen. “Hello!”

  The machine voice that responded was cool and flat. “Access confirmed. Hello, Aren.”