Yet she dared not relax her vigilance. Steadfastness was one of the defining qualities of an angel. Two days cooped up with the sodden, unresponsive lump in her charge, staying ready for action that never came, left her frustrated and edgy.
The trip out from Ananke in a battered old hopper had taken ten days, but this far swifter return seemed much longer. An eternity. All because of him.
At first she had come to the conclusion that this man Marchey was dead inside. People whose spirits had broken were common on Ananke; not everyone had the faith or inner strength to tread the hard steep road to perfection. His cryptic, sometimes sarcastic comments were nothing more than echoes of what he might have once been, like ghost data from a wiped program. She had dismissed him as nothing but an empty shell. Any response to being struck was merely an echo.
But in the evening of the second day her opinion had been forcibly revised.
He had been stretched out on a lounger, reading, listening to music, and as usual, drinking steadily. Where anyone else would have been watching her fearfully, not for even a fleeting moment forgetting that they were in the presense of an angel, he seemed utterly indifferent to her. That was wrong, contrary to all she knew. It rankled, but if he did not challenge her control over him, there was little she could do about it.
Boredom had set her to pacing the confines of the ship’s single deck. Back on Ananke there was always something to be done. Serving Brother Fist. Guarding the flock. Overseeing the workers. Hunting out blasphemy. Here she was cut off from all use and diversion.
Her restless gaze had crossed an overhead storage compartment she didn’t remember having searched when she swept the ship for weapons. So she unlatched the door to check it out.
Inside, carefully held in place by uniholds, was a bisque-fired clay sculpture. She released it from the clamps and took it down for a better look.
Brother Fist had objects like this. Pretty things, some of them imbued with a strange indefinable something that she could sense, but not quite understand.
This object was beautifully made, and it radiated a raw emotional power that caught her unawares. The harsh lines of her face softened as she stared at the thing in her hands in growing wonder.
It depicted two people who had begun making a single thing together. But the man stood off to one side, staring sadly up at what they had begun and never would finish. He cradled a child in arms that ended just below the elbow. His missing arms lay at his feet. He held the child and stumps of his arms up toward the work in an attitude she knew well, one of supplication.
The woman was tall and thin. She huddled on the ground near him among her abandoned tools. Her face was filled with such shame and loss and frustration that Scylla felt uneasy looking at it. That face was turned away from both the man and the thing they had begun making together.
What they had been making were two people embracing. Although it was rough-hewn and incomplete, Scylla could see that the man’s face was Marchey’s. It was the woman on the ground he held.
She frowned, disquiet rising with the unfamiliar emotions aroused by the thing in her hands. Something about it drew her, and yet that same thing repelled. It set off an uneasy subterranean yearning she could not begin to define. She had to wonder what her prisoner was doing in it, and why it was hidden. She called his name, turning to ask him.
When he saw her and what she held, his face had gone a terrible bloodless white. He made a strangled, tormented sound that was somewhere between a sob and a snarl, and launched himself at her with his silver fingers hooked into claws.
His drunkenness betrayed him. He stumbled as his feet hit the decking, and he went crashing to his knees.
Scylla had already braced herself to fend him off, angel reactions slowing time to a crawl as she waited for him to get up and come at her. Anticipation perked through her, hot and invigorating. At last a chance to assume her rightful place as she put him in his!
For nothing. He remained where he had fallen, hunching in on himself in heaped misery. He began to weep, begging her not to hurt the thing in her hands. He kept repeating a name: Ella.
Brother Fist’s angel knew that she had finally found a weapon to use against him, a crack in his seamless apathy. That was good.
Yet for some reason whose rhyme still escaped her, she had carefully returned the thing to its niche, putting its unnerving presence safely out of sight.
Then she had told him that it was safely back where it belonged, and promised that she wouldn’t hurt it.
Promised.
How could she have done such a thing? What was happening to her?
There was no escaping those questions. They plagued her waking hours and haunted her dreams when she curled up in a corner and set her proximity alarms to waken her if he came within three meters. He never did—at least not in body. Her sleep was fitful and restless, filled with dreams in which he intruded at will.
Never had she known such inner turmoil. Her sense of self and purpose no longer filled her the way it once had, her certainty complete and unscathable as her silver skin. The more she fought it the worse it became. Like an air leak, it had begun as a mere pinhole when Brother Fist sent her away to fetch this man, and had become a widening rent upon finding him. Only it was her insides escaping, not air.
Him, she thought grimly, watching him take yet another drink and mumble something to himself. He wasn’t afraid of her, even though all she had to do was look at the people of Ananke to put them on their knees. He didn’t care that she had taken his life in her hands. Where she was taking him and for what purpose meant nothing to him. Outwardly he acted as if he was totally beaten and in her control.
Yet she knew he was not. But for that one incident, she had not reached him. He no longer disputed her angelic state, but she had the unsettling feeling that he was only humoring her.
Every time she talked to him she came away feeling even more frustrated and confused. When she spoke of things she knew as truth, he would give her a tolerant, forbearing smile such as an adult would give a misinformed child. Somehow that smile made her feel small and weak and stupid—she who was made by
God to stand above lowly creatures such as he. When she said other things he gave her a different smile, one that left her feeling absurdly pleased.
Worse yet, he seemed to know things about her no mortal should. Like their talk of food that first night. Only her master knew—He had been the one who instructed her—that once a month she had to unburden herself of the physical manifestation of her own spiritual imperfection. It came in the form he had described, from the place he had indicated. How could he have known such a thing?
There were times she thought that maybe he was a devil who had been specifically shaped and sent to taunt and tempt her. His every aspect baffled her. He was an infidel, yet had the hands of an angel. He wallowed in weakness, but there was strength in him that made him nearly impossible to bend to her will.
Only a devil could have such knowledge or insidious power. Somehow his very presence made her think forbidden thoughts, made her doubt herself and all she knew as true. It was as if his blank indifference turned him into some sort of mirror that reflected back hidden faces of her self while distorting the familiar all out of recognition.
Where had the silver armor of her certainty gone?
For all the times she had asked herself that, she still had no answer. Her only certainty was that her only salvation lay in returning to her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side. He would make things right again, just like he had when—