“What happened to them, do you think?”
“Lucifer happened. Lucifer promised them freedom: he just neglected to tell them what he was freeing them from. Hope. This is the work of the hopeless. No-one with any hope in their soul could do this.” He stared down into the pit.
“One of them thanked me. As he burned, he thanked me.”
“You were killing him. It’s probably the first mercy he’s seen since he Fell.” At last, he stepped back from the pit. “Don’t let it bother you.”
“Bother me? Compared to what? This?” She waved towards the mess on the floor of the pit. “Because this is taking ‘bothering me’ to a whole new level.”
Somewhere in the darkness, something growled.
“And that was what?” Alice asked, taking an involuntary step closer to Castor.
“Time we weren’t here.”
“Guard dog?”
“If only. Come on.” He skirted around the pit and towards the stacks of crates, with Alice close behind.
They threaded their way through the towers of boxes, and Alice couldn’t help but stop once or twice, listening for the growling again. It was still there, but it was faint – and, thankfully, getting fainter.
“You’re not going to tell me what that was?” she asked.
“Nope. Certainly not here, in the dark. You’ll thank me later.”
“If there is a later...” she muttered. Funnily enough, running face-first into Lucifer bothered her a whole lot less than unspecified animals growling at her in the dark.
At the end of the maze of boxes, they came to another stretch of concrete, and a door. Beside the door sat a heap of what looked like black binbags. It looked like someone had emptied a skip against the wall, letting the bags fall where they would; some had spilled their contents across the floor and each other.
In front of them, Alice saw what was unmistakably part of an arm, just lying there. Almost casually.
“I need to leave now,” she said.
“I don’t think this is the worst of it.” Castor’s grip tightened on his baton, and he tucked it behind him.
“Does it say more about you or about me that I knew you were going to say that?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he crept ahead and pushed the door open with the end of his baton.
He stepped through, fumbling for a light switch on the other side, and Alice felt them. She felt them before she saw them. She felt the pain and the fear and the hate... and it broke her heart.
There were cages lining the corridor. It stretched the full length of the warehouse; cramped, mesh-fronted cages.
And there were people in them.
Men. Women. Children.
Young and old; frightened and filthy and locked in cages in the dark.
They flinched as the lights burst into life overhead – some cowering back into their cages, some merely blinking at the strangers in the light.
“Who are they?” she asked Castor. He was turning from one row of cages to the other, a puzzled expression on his face.
“I don’t know.” One cage in particular had caught his eye, and he crouched down in front of it. There was a tiny, dirty bundle at the back of it. It didn’t appear to be moving. “Hey,” he said as softly as he could. “Hey there...”
The bundle moved. Not much, but it definitely moved.
“I’ve come to help. Will you let me help you?”
The bundle moved again.
“Can you keep a secret?” Castor leaned up to the mesh, hooking his fingers through.
A face appeared above the fabric at the back of the cage. It was a little boy. He couldn’t be more than five or six; his hair stuck up in a dozen different directions and his face was streaked with dirt. At first, he gazed blankly at Castor, who smiled in encouragement.
“I said: can you keep a secret?”
The boy nodded.
“Well, alright, then.” And in one movement, Castor tightened his fingers on the door and pulled, wrenching it free. He stood up, tossing it aside... and without taking his eyes from the little boy, he opened his wings.
It was slow, and it was deliberate, and all of them saw it. Everyone in the cages. They saw as Castor’s wings unfurled, the feathers stretching over one another. Clipped or not, they were the first angel wings these people had ever seen.
He opened his wings, and Alice realised that she could hear someone laughing... or not laughing, exactly, but giggling.
It was the boy.
Doing her best to extinguish the flames that still burned about her, she crouched in front of the now-open cage and held out her hand.
“My name’s Alice. What’s yours?”
He looked at her, and shook his head.
“That’s alright – you don’t have to tell me. Are you ready to come out of there?”
He nodded, and slowly began to crawl out. She reached in and helped him as much as she could, but he recoiled at her touch. She couldn’t blame him.
“It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. This is my friend Castor. We’re here to get you out.”
The boy turned his face towards Castor, and the first thing he did was to reach for his wings.
Castor knelt down in front of him, rolling one of his wings forwards around his shoulder for the little boy to touch. He giggled again as his fingers brushed the feathers, and he smiled at Castor. After a moment, Castor rolled his wing back.
“So, you didn’t answer my question. Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes...” he said.
“That’s good. Your name. It’s Riley, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Alice raised an eyebrow, but Castor simply tapped his wrist. Zadkiel’s choir.
“Riley, do you see that door, right there?”
Riley turned his whole body to follow Castor’s finger, saw the door, and turned back. He nodded.
“I want you to go through that door, and straight through the warehouse on the other side. I don’t want you to look at anything. Can you do that?”
Another nod.
“There’s a big hole in the floor in the middle, so be careful you don’t fall. On the other side, there’s a big door and it’s open. As soon as you can see it, I want you to run for it. You run, you hear me? No matter what you hear, no matter what you see. You run for that door and you do not look back.”
Riley slid his hand into Castor’s.
“I’m afraid not. I have to help more people. But I want you to be the first one out, so they know the way to go. They’ll follow you.” He squeezed the child’s hand. “Can you be brave, and show them? Can you do that for me?”
There was a pause, and another nod – solemn this time.
“I thought so.” Castor slid his hand away from Riley’s and reached behind him. There was a faint snapping sound, and he produced a large, dirty-grey feather which he handed to the boy. “Here. Take this. It’ll help you to be brave.”
Riley eyed it for a moment, then closed his fist tightly around it – and just like that, he turned and ran for the door. The sound of his footsteps, fast and light, echoed through the warehouse, and Alice and Castor watched him fade into the dark.
“Now,” said Castor, rubbing his hands together, “Let’s do something about the rest of these people, shall we?”
The doors to the cages had started to rattle. Some were being shaken by the captives behind them; some were... not. Something was shaking them, something else. Something outside. The people locked inside were shouting; screaming. A few stayed silent.
“Let me,” said Alice. She had been looking at the cages while Castor talked to the boy. They didn’t look as though they had been built to withstand much by way of heat...
“Alice, if you get this wrong...”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll kill them all...”