“Hannah?”
She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”
“What is…Why am I—”
“I need the code.”
“I don’t know any—”
She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.
Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.
“That code, Jean. Genetic code.”
“Commander, what is it?”
Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.
Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”
The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”
The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.
“It goes deeper than we thought.”
Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.
At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.
Someone.
The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.
“Orders, sir?”
Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.
“Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”
Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.
As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.
Windham slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.
“This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”
“I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”
“Why the blood, Hannah?”
She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”
“A gift?”
She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of
silver is my favorite.”
He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.
“Jemie?”
“Jo?”
“How can you afford this?”
He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”
“But I thought—”
“I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”
“But James, I—”
“Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.
It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.
Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.
late night and you’re driving me
crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times…We’ve known each other before.”
“I know.”
Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.
“I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.
“Can you do that?”
“It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”
“Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”
“Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”
“Of course. You could never love.”
“Never.”
“Never at all.”
“Nope.”
Stillness and distance breached.
“Keep your distance!”
The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the order, yearning to dispatch these non-humans with the EM pulses that reduced them to useless balls of silver.
“Don’t fire,” Reynald broadcast through the comm implants. “Something’s different.”
“It’s a trap, sir. It has to be.” Windham kept his trigger finger firmly in place.
“No.” Reynald rubbed his eyes. A dull pain had begun to throb just behind them. Something was different…The angels were different.
So close…He could feel them, feel that blank stare of inhumanity. No expressions, no weapons, no indication of hostility. They just walked up the crater, toward Reynald’s small band of soldiers.
Windham was restless. He was a good boy, but Reynald sensed that his impatience would be his undoing. Windham wiped sweat from his eyes, adjusted his helmet’s position on his head.
“Sir? What do we do?”
jean
“What?”
“Orders, sir?”
jean reynald
Reynald blinked to clear his eyes, but the haze that had descended over his vision was still there, casting a lightness over the world, halos over the heads of the projected angels.
“Stay here.”
“Sir?”
Reynald stood up from the rim of the crater, began to walk down the side.
“Reynald!”
He turned back to Windham. “It’s okay. It’s time.”
He walked to meet the angels.
“I’d watched you for centuries. Watched your line. I know that you were the one. I saw to it that you’d be the one at the first encounter. You and your pretty little American boy.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
Maire’s face clouded. “I won’t hurt him, dear Jean, but he has to be the one who goes home for me.”
“Don’t…He has a family, a young bride—”
“I know this. And I know what I need from him.”
“Please, don’t do this.”
“His son, our daughter…A perfect extinction.”
Hunter slumped in the angel’s metal grasp. He was too shocked to cry, too exhausted to feel, too old for his young life. The shield doors cycled shut behind the angel, cutting off Hunter’s view of the scene of death. He could see his mother’s body on the ground, torn apart by another wave of phased flak.
They’re all dead out there. Mommy’s dead.
Loud snap as the phase shield reactivated around the building. The angel gently placed Hunter on the floor next to ten or twelve other boys, all sitting in silence, all staring at Hunter. He curled into a fetal position and rocked back, rocked forth. Many of the boys did. Torn from sleep, rushed to the Complex, sitting there with that knowledge that the city was dead out there, their mothers were dead in the city and their fathers were dead or dying in the sky or in the outer.