“Stay here, boys. We’ll be leaving soon.”
An explosion from outside, close, hard. Each of the angels flickered to static for a moment. The lights in the chamber went out for an instant before returning as red emergency lights. The angels looked at one another, a higher form of communication resonating between their images. They all turned to look at a door on one side of the chamber.
The door cycled open and another angel walked through, holding a little girl.
Hunter sat up. It was the little girl from the other side of the fence. He’d only ever seen two girl children, this one and his baby sister who had died days after her birth from the silver. Most of the boys in the room had never before seen a little girl.
She recognized Hunter as the angel carried her by the boys. She smiled and waved. Hunter did the same, wanted to say something, but the angel quickly carried her through another door, which slammed shut with a phase shield.
Hunter wondered if he would ever see her again.
“What is he doing?”
Windham put the scope back up to his eye, a fluid reflex learned from those months of war. Reynald was deep into the blast crater now, slowing his pace. He bent and placed his EM rifle on the ground, held his hands before him as he kept walking into the mass of angels. Windham saw one of the projecteds break away from the group, approach Reynald.
He flipped the safety on the EM pack of his rifle, brought the crosshairs of the scope to rest on the chest of the projected, where he knew his pulse weapon would find the silver ball that created the illusion of the angel.
It flickered for an instant, an intense light, and Reynald raised his arms to shield his eyes.
“Commander!”
“Nan, that was the—”
“I know, little flower.”
“But I want to—”
“No time, Lily. You’ll have all the time in the world to meet your new friends later.”
The angel jogged through the metal hallway. Another shield door cycled open and closed as she passed into another chamber carrying Lily. The floor stretched out as a platform into the spherical room. At its center there was a small chair with restraints. The little girl began to tremble in the coolness of the room and the fear of her situation.
Nan slowed her pace as she walked out onto the extended catwalk to the center of the sphere. She gently placed Lily in the vacuum chair and fastened the restraint harness around her.
“What’s going to happen, Nan? Do I have to go see the lady now?”
Nan shook her head as she tightened the final restraint, smoothed Lily’s tousled hair back from her forehead. “No time to see her now, child. It wouldn’t be safe for you to stay here any longer.”
“Why are they in the sky?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, sweetness.”
Nan leaned in close, kissed Lily’s forehead with her cool metallish lips. She squeezed Lily’s hand and walked back down the platform toward the chamber’s shield door.
“Nan?”
She turned, no tears on her face because of her inability to produce them, countenance now emotionless and cold because she had to be strong for the little girl, had to realize that the Catalyst was never hers to begin with. “Yes?”
“Will I see you again?”
“No, Lily. You’ll have a new caretaker in the void.”
“But I—”
“Goodbye, Lily.”
Nan turned, walked through the shield door, which slammed shut and snapped with phase static. The little girl was left alone in the utter silence of her bubble. The sound of static increased as the walkway to the center of the chamber retracted into the wall of the sphere. The wall itself began to shimmer, and several ports along its circumference opened to allow the thick gelatin of liquidspace travel to fill up the sphere.
Lily struggled in her restraints as the bottom of the sphere filled with mercurial phase. The level steadily increased until it washed over her bare feet, ankles, shins, knees, the hem of her lavender Honeybear Brown nightgown. She tried to kick at that cold metal fire, but was unable. The tickling, burning sensation of liquid reaching into her, preserving her biologics against the stress of Light X.
Liquid reached the arms of her vacuum chair, covered her hands and lower arms, upper arms, shoulders, crept up her neck. She shouldn’t have panicked, tried not to panic, didn’t want to panic, but panicked nonetheless. Lily began to scream, sobbed, flailed her head around as the mercury touched her chin, her earlobes…Her wet hair sent drops of the silver cascading out as she tried to spin around.
“Nan!”
Caressing jawline, earlobe. Tears coursed down the child’s face, mixed with the invasive silver. Touching bottom lip.
“Mommy!”
Lily closed her mouth as the level rose. Upper lip, nose. She strained back in the seat but was unable to prevent the silver from pouring into her nostrils. She instinctively exhaled, exhaled, silver over eyes, clamped eyes shut, felt silver finally cover the top of her head.
Robbed of senses, completely submerged, pain in her chest from a heart attempting to tear itself out, lungs on fire. A chamber spins, a chamber resonates. Liquid to fire, fire to space. A child’s mind falls into the silence of fear complete.
peu de fleur
a voice and
“If you’ve no more use for me, just end this, Hannah.”
Her jovial smile fell from her face. “Don’t call me that here.”
Reynald grinned. “You will never win this war.”
She struck out again, letting more blood spill from the wound in his neck. “I’ve already won it, human.” Reynald gasped in pain as Maire dug into his flesh with her silver nails. “You were the perfect flux, the perfect medium…You’ve done your part already. You’ve spread the sickness further than you could ever imagine.”
Windham broke from the line of soldiers and ran down the side of the crater, weapon held before him, trained on the angel closest to Reynald. He pulled the trigger, watched the magball tear through the angel’s chest. The image dissembled, the silver projector falling harmlessly to the ground.
Reynald spun around. “No! Windham, don’t—”
Angels were scattering, and more human soldiers descended from the rim of the crater. EM slugs flew into the mass of angels from the soldiers’ weapons, but did very little damage to their numbers. Windham chambered another slug, brought his weapon up to fire.
“Joseph!”
joseph windham
“Don’t do it!”
don’t
Windham squinted and shook off the painful tug of the voice that seemed to come from behind his eyes. He shot from the hip, knowing by instinct and experience that his aim was true, and the angels closest to Reynald would be destroyed.
The slug struck out at the projecteds with that slurping crackle of the EM wave, but it was struck down in mid-air by a field of light projected by the hands of an angel. A flicker in time and it was right there before him, androgynous face only remotely suggesting human origin, eyes not burning with the fury that combat should brand into the eyes of an opponent, but simply staring back with an emptiness that transcended his comprehension. The angel knocked the weapon out of Windham’s grasp, threw him back on to the ground.
don’t
All around the interior of the crater, EM slugs were being knocked down, soldiers were tangling in metallish embrace with angels in hand-to-hand combat. The humans were already outnumbered, and more projecteds were emerging from the exposed entrance to the tunnel. The fighting was fierce, the din of battle a mixture of human screams and piercing snaps of static.