by Brian Fuller
She stepped aside, drilling him with a glare worthy of an angry mother. Trace glared right back and passed inside.
Archon Ramis’s office was a narrow oval with a single, recessed dome light in the center. Accent lights artistically illuminated darkly stained shelves built into the walls. The old, leather-bound books and small gold and silver statuettes on the shelves added to an affluent décor Trace had not expected. Directly behind Ramis, a floor-to-ceiling wall painting depicted a glowing female angel in a white robe crushing a dragon’s head beneath her heel. It added a religious air to the room.
The Archon sat at his desk in the king of all office chairs sporting a host of adjustable knobs and levers. He looked and dressed as he always had but now wore a dark suit coat. His deliberately added age and slightly graying temples projected a wizened, older look, though for this occasion he had grown a close-cropped beard that put Trace in mind of a seasoned navy admiral.
Athena shut the door as she left, and Trace waited while the Archon perused a document. The desk was of the same stained wood as the shelves and topped with a glass slab an inch thick to handle the touch-screen interface. Just as Trace started to feel annoyed at the stalling tactics, the Archon glanced up.
“Have a seat, Trace,” he said, closing out the documents.
“Look,” Trace said, lowering himself into the dark leather chair. “Everything that happened was my fault. Don’t go hard on Cassandra. I can be stubborn, and I went against her orders.”
The Archon’s blue eyes didn’t blink or register any sort of comprehension. Expressionless, Ramis nodded, stood, and began to pace about the room. From the shelf he picked up a small golden figurine and resumed his walk.
“Look, Trace, we’ve seen this kind of thing before with Cherubs. You have all these new abilities. You think you’re invincible. You think you can finally make a difference. You think you can be a law unto yourself and everything will work out. Yes, Cherub, we’ve had our share of renegade vigilantes come through here. I’m not really going to address that with you directly. I’ve spoken with Cassandra, and I’ll leave it to her to teach you why we have structure, procedure, and accountability here.”
“Can I go, then?” Trace asked, knowing what the answer would be.
Ramis briefly regarded the statuette he had picked up. The bureaucratic, vapid expression had vanished, and an emotion—turmoil?—replaced it. A thorn pricked Ramis’s mind, some disclosure he wanted to deal with delicately. Perhaps it was all an act, but to Trace he appeared sincere. Ramis returned to his seat and put the statuette in the middle of the glass desk, facing Trace.
Trace inspected it. Standing about eight inches high, the statuette depicted a woman in street clothes with a long coat, open to show a blouse. A detective badge was clipped to the belt, and the unmistakable face, hard and pretty, evidenced that this statue was the likeness of Cassandra. Trace remembered Prescilla’s gossip: Ramis had a “particular” interest in Cassandra. Possessing a statue of her certainly lent credibility to that report.
“You know who that is?” Ramis asked.
“Cassandra.”
“No,” he replied. “That is Allison June Parker, the woman who became the Ash Angel Cassandra. In our parlance, I am her father. She was the last one I performed the Awakening ritual on before I became the supervisor of this training facility. It was my custom to create a statuette like this for every one of my children. I gave these to them to help them remember that it was because of who they were in life that they are who they are now. Do you know what Cassandra did when I tried to give this to her?”
“Gave it back, apparently.”
“Exactly. And that, Trace Evans, should tell you everything you need to know about Cassandra.” He retrieved the statue and stood, returning it to its place on the shelf, angling it so it faced precisely toward his desk. “Cassandra’s life before and after death has not been easy. Perhaps you’ve noticed that she can be a bit . . . abrasive . . . from time to time.”
Like all the time. “Yes.”
“She’s not always been that way. She’s tough and direct, but certain events have precipitated a bit of a downturn in her social aspect of late.”
“Why did she quit the Ash Angels? Goldbow, right?”
The question brought the pacing Archon up short, his face turning sour. “That is none of your business, and you would do well not to inquire about it. It was unfortunate, and the rumors that followed even more so. I will not have her slandered, do you understand me clearly?”
“Yes, sir,” Trace said. Cassandra’s recent history seemed littered with land mines he was adept at stepping on. But people like Ramis and Goldbow still cared for Cassandra, tried to protect her however she acted. Clearly she had friends. Trace remembered the night he’d found out about Terissa and Simon. Who would have stuck up for him had he lived?
The Archon’s face smoothed over with forced control. “Let me be brief. We need you, especially after the Blank Massacre, but we need Cassandra more. You make her miserable, and I will make you miserable. Clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Good.” He sat and tapped a virtual keypad on his glassy desk. “Athena?”
“Yes, Archon?” she answered
“Bring Trace a 155-TER, a 414-HA, and a 19-DAC. I sent the DAC action text to you earlier. He can fill them out in the lobby.”
“I have the forms ready.”
“Thank you.”
The Archon leaned back and regarded him with the same vacant expression as before, not speaking until Athena cracked the door. “Fill out the forms and remember what I said. You’ll have an Active Mission Evaluation in two to four weeks or whenever Cassandra thinks you’re ready. I don’t want to hear any more reports about you before then, and I want only glowing reports after. Dismissed.”
Trace rose and collected the clipboard from Athena, who smiled at him encouragingly but not altogether sincerely. No doubt one of the procedural manuals in the lobby was How to Deal with Recently Reprimanded Ash Angels. He plunked himself down in a cushy leather chair. 155-TER: the Training Evaluation Report. 414-HA: Normal Human Interaction Result Report. 19-DAC: Disciplinary Action Contract. The latter had a pile of legalese with a paragraph inserted, the “action text” the Archon had alluded to earlier. While his promise to Ramis was to not make Cassandra miserable, the text read: “I, Trace Evans, hereby commit to render full compliance to the staff, trainers, and leaders of the Ash Angel Organization, recognizing that my past actions may have, in full or in part, compromised, endangered, or rendered less efficient the goals, operation, and success of said organization. I furthermore commit to render complete obedience to my trainer, Cassandra, and to any future trainers, team leaders, or other superiors in whose tutelage or governance I find myself.”
Terissa would have made short work of all the legal nonsense. She used to bring home sheets of long paper full of jargon and convoluted sentences and go through them at the kitchen table. The memory stung. He shook his head to clear it.
There was a place for a signature and date. What could they do if he refused to sign? What if he broke the contract? Would they sue him? Send him to some Ash Angel prison? Boot him out of the organization? The document in front of him sweetened the notion of living life as a freelance Ash Angel.
When the first bliss of dawn had filled him and Lear had brought him to train at Trevex, he thought it would be more like church and Grandma’s house and less like a corporate military complex. But he wanted to be involved. Like Ramis had said, he wanted to make a difference. Trace screwed up his determination. He would not be a failure.
Lifting the clipboard, he dove in.
The 414-HA report was really the same as the 155-TER, forcing him to record every detail of the mission, except the 414 asked him to speculate on how his actions would help the humans with whom he interacted to reject evil and live more productively and uprightly. Trace felt a stab of guilt. His aim wasn’t to help the miscreants at all. He wanted to punish t
hem and memorably. However, by making their lives miserable, perhaps the two men might reconsider their life of crime and strive not to run afoul of the law or a crazy lady and her kid again.
He scribbled something to that effect as fast as he could, doubting anyone would even read it. Two hours later he entered Athena’s office to return the clipboard. She took it and assumed her motherly persona. “Now, you stay out of trouble, young man,” she encouraged with a wink.
Trace gave her a thumbs up and left. Cassandra, Ramis, and Goldbow. A mystery was hidden somewhere in their interpersonal hurricane, but Trace wondered if his best bet was simply to do the “Yes, ma’am, No, ma’am” routine until he could get assigned to someone a little less troubled than the acerbic Cassandra. At the very least, he would try to avoid getting a gun barrel pointed at his head.
Chapter 9
Second Grade
Five long days passed before he saw Cassandra again. If anyone knew where she was or what she was doing during that time, they hadn’t bothered to inform him. Maybe he had eternally offended his trainer, but while she was gone he felt more at ease than he had in weeks. Her absence provided him with opportunities to mingle with his fellow Cherubs, Prescilla in particular. She had reversed her old-age trend and taken to attending all her classes as a ten-year-old child, one who embroidered. From comments made by the instructors, Trace gathered Prescilla was the most precocious morpher to have come through the Ash Angels program in some time.
When Cassandra finally did return at two in the afternoon, he felt a stab of disappointment. Regular Ash Angel training had been nice, if a little bland. She dragged him out of an interesting lecture on Ash Angel technological advances, her face hard, her eyes cold. Trace resolved just to do what she said and keep quiet. Spending time with the chatty, excited Cherubs for the past few days had reenergized him, and one look at Cassandra nearly drained his happy tank to empty again. If he just jumped through her hoops a while longer, he could graduate to an assignment and she could go drop her grumpy weight on some other unfortunate victim of Ramis’s choosing.
“Let’s go,” she ordered, striding away and forcing him to follow like an obedient dog. She had morphed to middle age again, but without the frowzy frump she had chosen during his ride-along mission. Instead, she looked like someone’s rich wife in tailored blue slacks, a breezy white shirt, and plenty of golden jewelry. Her car idled out front. The Cadillac Coupe sported a new red paint job and a fixed bumper, but once he got inside, he found the thumping music hadn’t changed. He guessed her sudden appearance had something to do with Ramis, who’d probably chewed her out for ditching work for nearly a week. Trace didn’t care and didn’t bother to ask.
Don’t speak until spoken to.
Once she gunned it out of Trevex D, she punched a button on the dash that muted the music. “Okay, Jarhead, what did Ramis tell you when he gave you your spanking?”
“He said he would assign you to teach me about the importance of following protocol and if I made you miserable, he would do the same for me. I then had to sign a contract stating I would obey my superiors.”
“Is that it?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered with military brevity.
She took her hand off the gearshift and slapped him in the face.
“What the hell was that for?” Trace said.
“Don’t pull that drill sergeant ‘Yes, ma’am, No, ma’am’ crap with me. You’re just doing it to piss me off.”
Trace faced her. “Piss you off? You’re pissed off every time I see you! At first I thought it was some sort of ‘tough trainer’ act, but now I think it might be your other Bestowal you won’t tell me about. I don’t know what your problem is, but it certainly didn’t start with me. So let’s just do this training thing. Then you can get rid of me and get back to whatever it is you do that makes you so upset all the time.”
He had more to say but bit back the remarks. He may have already crossed the line Ramis had drawn. Cassandra took his brusque comments stoically, but Trace thought he could detect a hint of something—a sadness, perhaps—in her expression.
Silence reigned for several minutes as they both focused on the road and on not saying something they might regret.
“I need you to morph into a middle-aged man,” she finally said, voice controlled. “Go clean-shaven because beards take you forever. I need you to look like someone who has a kid and would belong in a car like this. You won’t finish in time, but the practice is worth it.”
Instructions given, she punched the dash again and filled the car with pulsating rhythms. Trace enjoyed the music but found it hard to concentrate on thinning his hair, aging his skin, and gaining twenty pounds. If he had his Standard Set pictures and a quiet room to himself he might have managed it. He was only halfway done when they pulled underneath the shade of a broad tree near the newly minted Olivetta Elementary School, complete with brightly colored playground equipment and fresh asphalt. She parked the car and leaned back to look him over.
“You really have to get faster,” she admonished. “It’s one of the most important skills for a Blank operative. It allows you to be quickly inserted into a developing situation, and it’s critical for escape. Are you practicing? Maybe you should get some lessons from your girlfriend. I hear she’s quite good at it.”
Cassandra did like to tease. Another of her annoying qualities. “Why are we here?”
She turned her critical gaze back toward the school. “Arguably the most difficult skill for any Ash Angel is to act convincingly like a child, but it’s also one of the most useful. Children are naturally invisible to most of the people we work against. If a Blank can pull off behaving like a child, you can walk by Dreads all day long. If you do it badly, you’ll be as easy to spot as a naked virgin in a biker bar. You’ve shown some aptitude for being observant, so today you’re going to observe. School is out in five minutes. I want you to watch and tell me what you see.”
Now this sounded interesting. When the bell rang, the doors practically exploded open as kindergarten through fourth grade streamed from the building and into the afternoon sunshine. Some headed toward a line of buses parked in the front, others to the playground, and some to a growing collection of cars along the sidewalk. Wherever they went, few walked. They ran, they skipped, they bounced, and they weaved everywhere. Stairs were jumped or ignored, curbs walked like tightropes, railings ducked under, spun over, and balanced on. The girls’ hair was done up in braids and bows, while the boys’ looked a mess. They chased and shoved each other, kicked rocks, and clutched roughly colored pages. Laughter, color, energy, enthusiasm, curiosity, life, innocence, simplicity.
As the buses and cars pulled away and the schoolyard drained of its charges, Trace felt an odd pang of loss. He’d always prided himself on being a productive, responsible adult, but watching the children made him feel like a rusty old boat anchor, all weight and age. Had he lost something? Had everyone? Cassandra gazed out the windshield with a wistful look, her expression the softest he had ever seen it. She turned toward him, but Trace spoke first.
“I don’t remember what it was like anymore either,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s time to remember. Today a Mr. and Mrs. Lee enrolled their fraternal twins Abigail and Sherman in the second grade. We start class tomorrow.”
“What?”
She cranked the engine. “You heard me. We’ll be attending for at least a week. Longer if you suck at this. As slow as you are, you’d better start morphing now and don’t forget to hit wardrobe for some clothes that fit. Mommy and Daddy Lee, aka Goldbow and Prescilla, will be dropping us off and picking us up every day.”
Trace was stunned. “I’m going to be attending elementary school for a week? And who came up with the name Sherman?”
“I did,” she confessed. “I thought you’d like it. It was a tank model in World War II, right? And please be mature enough not to use this opportunity to become the star athlete and valedictorian of K throug
h four, okay? We are to blend in. Average. Ordinary. Unremarkable.”
“Sher-man-Lee drinks poop and pee! Sher-man-Lee drinks poop and pee!”
Trace tried to ignore the taunts of the brutish third grader as he threaded through the bobbing, noisy throng in a desperate scramble to reach the outer doors and escape into the playground. His memories of childhood were a bit fuzzy, but during his idyllic imaginings of childhood a few days ago, he had somehow forgotten that kids in elementary school could be brutally honest and spectacularly cruel. While Trace had managed to morph down to the right size and age for his first day of school, his pitiable skills left his brown hair looking like it had been trimmed by a blind barber using a dull, sputtering lawn mower. He’d thought eight-year-old boys wouldn’t notice a bad haircut, but apparently they did when it was really, really bad.
It didn’t help that Abigail—Cassandra—had picture-perfect braids in her long blonde hair and looked as cute as a peony in her pink shirt, brown denim slacks, and sunshine unicorn backpack. Their teacher, Ms. Ruffner, cooed over her big blue eyes, and Cassandra had actually managed to giggle and blush at the praise. The teacher further commented that it was hard to believe she and her brother were twins, leaving unsaid that somewhere in their mother’s womb nature had scoured through darling Abigail’s genes and thrown out the garbage to create Sherman.
By the second day, Trace had managed to morph his hair into something less awful, but the damage was done. The bullies had noticed the weak wildebeest in the herd and had ridden on the awkward, stoic, and mostly silent Sherman. Trace took some satisfaction that he still had his adult strength and intellect, and flying in the face of Cassandra’s counsel took satisfaction in destroying his classmates in soccer and spelling. It might take him an eon to morph, but by all that was good and holy, he could run like a cheetah and spell pencil.
As for acting like a kid, Trace hoped he was making progress. For the life of him he could not be silly and immature without feeling guilty and foolish. His father and mother had insisted on sobriety and decorum from him and Brandon and never got it, but Trace remembered feeling ashamed and guilty for his behavior when it was really bad. Brandon didn’t seem to care.