But for Molly, they would have. For as the angels sifted away, escaping their eons-long bondage, the Mantle of Ontological Consistency grew weaker and weaker. Without the full weight of enforced angelic consensus to solidify and delineate them, the boundaries between possible and impossible grew hazy. Hazy enough for the entire edifice to come crumbling down.
But for Molly, it would have.
She opened her arms, shielded the Earth.
She breathed deeply. Her exhalation tugged at gravity, twisted it, gave it a minute localized kink. Rearranged geodesics described new trajectories for the orbital detritus that filled the underside of the sky. Metal skimmed into the upper atmosphere. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but soon enough the cascade would begin, and the high frontier would become accessible once again. Humans would have to do their part, but at least she had given them an opening.
Meanwhile, the sky was ablaze.
“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” said the angel who had once been Molly.
* * *
I sat on the roof of the diner, sucking hooch from my flask and watching the show. METATRON had clobbered the Nephilim—as, of course, it would—and appeared to have gone dormant again.
No, not dormant. But once that Trumpet gets going there’s no stopping it; flametop disappeared the instant she touched that plastic dingus to her lips, and now she had a tiger by the tail because the Nephilim had done exactly what they were intended to do by distracting the Voice of God. METATRON hadn’t stopped her in time. It was out there, I knew, watching the same show as I. And what a show it was.
The angelic diaspora made a Čerenkov light show of the Pleroma as my colleagues’ various Magisteria, no longer constrained to a tight metaphysical packing, went superluminal in their quest for elbow room. Land was soon to get very cheap here on the Pleromatic side of what was once the MOC.
I wondered how long before a tumbleweed rolled past.
* * *
The laws of physics were formless and empty, darkness fell upon the surface of mortal reality, and Molly’s spirit hovered over the dead waters.
And Molly said, “Screw this.”
She spread across the oceans. Dunked her hands in the water, trailed her fingernails through anaerobic silt. Felt the play of heat and salt trickle through her fingers. With practice, in her unfettered angelic form, she knew she might have eventually learned the topology by heart. But the Trumpet made it trivial.
She temporarily elbowed thermodynamics aside in order to discard ten trillion terajoules of waste heat. And then, after reestablishing the conservation of energy, she jump-started the worldwide thermohaline conveyor.
She reversed the acidification and resurrected the phytoplankton, too.
* * *
Joy reverberated through the Pleroma, but it sounded a little ragged as whole sections of the Choir loft fell away. Most angels didn’t feel compelled to stick around singing their little wings off. The song lost its lowest registers, almost became a parody of itself, when the Principalities ducked out for parts unknown. So long, kids, it’s been swell.
The diaspora was well underway now. I monitored its progress from the shattered and battered remains of my Magisterium. Part of me felt like a proud father: Uriel hadn’t been blowing smoke when she said this plan had been my baby. Gabby’s baby. He would’ve been proud to see it all grown up, had the rest of him been around to see this. And part of me did feel pride. But most of me was climbing the walls.
Unfortunately for you, I’m not stupid.
She’d said it, and I didn’t like it. I kept on not liking it while the MOC fell apart and my fellow angels hit the road.
Not all of them, not right away. Sam swung by for a quick so long. A stand-up citizen, that one; pillar of the community. Raguel, Michael, and Uriel did, too. Guess they still considered me an honorary member of their little family. Seemed only fair.
“Come on, Bayliss. Time to go.”
“Nah,” I said, waving them ahead. “It’s jake. I’m waiting on someone.”
“Madness,” they said.
“Somebody has to lock up and turn off the lights after the joint is empty.”
Anyway, flametop wasn’t finished yet.
* * *
She was cleansing wind. She was cleansing rain. She was cleansing fire. She scrubbed the waters, the atmosphere, the sky. She spread across the surface of the Earth. The overheated, dying, used-up Earth.
“Let there be life,” she said.
Molly found she didn’t need the Trumpet to do these things, though it was vastly easier when she could ignore the killjoy busybody known as entropy. Yet even within the constraints of the MOC, the slow death of the planet never had to be inevitable. The merest attention from the angels, the tiniest spark of giving a shit, could have prevented it. But, of course, they were filled with too much contempt to consider how the monkeys were using the boon granted them by the Voice of God.
She swirled through the excavated bowl of the Calhoun lake bed. A terraced field of lavender sprouted in her wake. She alighted—not all of herself, but a portion of herself—alongside a bed in a Minneapolis hospital.
Someone had braided Ria’s hair. It had grown since the day the ambulance took her here, and now two perfect plaits lay across her shoulders. She smelled of antiseptic soap and lemons. Molly kissed her forehead. Ria’s skin was cool to the touch. It tasted of salt.
The faintest glimmer of electrical activity flickered through the nether reaches of her empty mind. Ria was there, trapped in the unrelenting grip of her damaged brain, but submerged deeper than the bottom of the sea.
“Wake up, babe,” Molly whispered. She brushed a stray strand of hair from Ria’s forehead.
Molly’s brute-force attempt to reveal herself wasn’t all that different from the way the tainted Plenary Indulgences had imbued their recipients with terrifying dreams. The tiniest sliver of the Jericho Trumpet was a peek into the Pleroma too grand for any mortal mind to comprehend. Thus it drove the recipients mad, etching their psyches, cursing them with nightmares. So, too, had Molly tried to force Ria to perceive something she could not. What Molly had done to Ria was exactly what the other angels had sought to avoid by riding inside the penitentes.
Ria didn’t awaken straight away. It happened slowly. Like a sunrise. Molly rescinded entropy and causality again—she had no need to fear reprisal by METATRON now—and coaxed the tattered cobweb of current to percolate through the unoccupied vault of Ria’s brain.
A nearby nurses’ station erupted in a chiming cacophony of alarms and monitors. Molly closed the door to soften the clangor. Ria deserved peace, not bedlam, as she regained herself.
The passage of time was a sandpapery wind whickering across Molly’s skin like a cat’s tongue tasting her knuckles. She curled the fingers of an upraised hand until time could do nothing but trickle through the hole she left it. She let the spare moments pool in the palm of her other hand, then flung the extra time into the hallway. That slowed things down enough to ensure nobody broke into the room while Ria recovered. She’d have a tranquil return to the living.
Molly laid her hand on Ria’s forehead. She used the extra time to reach inside and carefully reassemble a billion-synapse jigsaw puzzle. One neuron at a time, always checking her progress against the picture of Ria’s mind on the lid of the box.
The rippling, faintly coruscating web of electrical impulses pulsated through Ria’s brain. Each puff stimulated just a few more ion exchange reactions, pushed just a few more microvolts. Slowly, gently, like the undulations of an enervated jellyfish, Ria’s consciousness reclaimed its home.
Her eyelids fluttered. Molly disconnected the wires monitoring her vitals. Ria’s lips parted. They were a chapped pale pink. Molly conjured a glass of water from her own Magisterium. Ria coughed. Dragged an awkward tongue across those chapped lips. Opened her eyes.
They didn’t focus right away. Turning her head took more energy than she could spare. She settled for glancing blurrily ab
out the room.
Molly knelt alongside the bed and took her hand. Part of an Édith Piaf lyric peeked from Ria’s sleeve, a line of cobalt blue copperplate rendered on alabaster skin.
“Hi, babe.”
It took a few seconds for Molly’s voice to register. Ria croaked, “Molly?”
“How are you feeling?”
Ria coughed again. Molly touched wet fingertips to Ria’s mouth. While wetting her tongue and lips, Ria studied her surroundings.
At last, she said, in a voice dusty from months of disuse, “Am I in a hospital?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember…”
“Shhh, shhh.” Molly squeezed her hand. “You were sick for a while. But you’re okay now.”
Ria licked her lips again. Molly afforded her a tiny sip. “Easy,” she said. “You haven’t had anything in your stomach for a while.”
“How long?” said Ria.
“A while.” Molly stood, looked her over. “You look good. Really good.”
“You look…” Ria squinted. Frowned. Her face moved like a glacier. But she would thaw. “Different.”
“I get that a lot these days.”
“How come you…” Ria tried to shrug, but lacked the strength. It turned into another weak cough.
“I’ve been stopping by. Checking on you now and then.”
“Anyone else?” A moment later Ria winced in slow motion, realizing how rude that sounded. Molly smiled.
“Lots of others. You’re plenty loved. Not forgotten.”
“Oh. Okay.” Ria’s eyes slid closed. She wrenched them open again, with effort. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me, too, kiddo. And I’m sorry.”
Sorry I almost destroyed you. And that I took so long to fix it.
“Me…”
Ria surrendered to sleep. But it was a natural sleep this time, not the inescapable unconsciousness of a broken mind. Molly laid a hand on her face and held it there for a spare few seconds. Then she evened out the flow of time through the hospital and opened the door.
She didn’t know when she’d make it back to see Ria again. Eventually, as she recovered and reestablished connections with her life, Ria would try to get in touch. She’d hear about what happened to Molly in Australia. Maybe, as time passed, she’d chalk up this interaction to a vivid dream, a sensory hallucination, her conscious mind’s first gasps after being so long submerged. But even then, part of her would always know, as Martin did, that Australia wasn’t the whole story.
* * *
Most of the Pleroma within a few scant ontological furlongs from the mortal world had been abandoned. Stampeded, more like. The detritus left behind told the story of a mass exodus: overturned prime numbers; a broken fragment of a Lie algebra; a mutated Principle of Least Action; a smattering of energetic electrons knocked free of the Van Allen belts. Such was the trash blowing through the empty spaces of the Pleroma like Times Square confetti on New Year’s morning.
The metaphysical bedrock of the MOC had fallen silent. Barren. Empty. It had become the divine reflection of what had almost been Earth’s future. The Mantle of Ontological Consistency sagged. Groaned. Shifted. Without the Choir to hold it together, the notion of a logically consistent mortal reality had become untenable. Irrelevant.
Molly had to work quickly. Her clock was ticking.
Bayliss had said something very similar on the night she died. She wondered if there was some fundamental principle at work, some deep structure to the Pleroma that enforced circularity, brought endings and beginnings together like the mouth and tail of an Ouroboros. If so, it was buried deeper than anything the angels could conjure. METATRON might know. Maybe she would ask it someday.
The angels had spread far and wide. Very far. Very wide. Near Earth, the local Pleroma had become a desert. Here and there, fragments of abandoned Magisteria poked from the shifting sands like the sun-bleached ribs of an ancient Leviathan stranded a thousand miles from the modern sea.
Only one Magisterium stood even remotely intact. The diner had taken damage. So had the adjoining building that, Molly supposed, housed Bayliss’s apartment. Presently, they meshed in a distinctly non-Euclidean way. Unsurprising, given all the disruptions. She was impressed he’d held it all together as well as he had.
The degraded crumb of a former Seraph sat cross-legged on the diner’s roof, shading his eyes from the glare. He must have seen her coming across the sands, but didn’t say or do anything until she stood just beneath the eaves.
“Figured you’d be back,” he said. “Figured I’d wait for you.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of lying?”
Bayliss shrugged. “Force of habit.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Any juice left in that dingus of yours?”
Molly brandished the Trumpet again. Now it looked like a silver harmonica. It glinted in the non-light. “Plenty.”
“Give a guy a hand?”
Molly clapped.
“That’s rich,” he said.
Molly peered at him through the harmonica’s air holes. METATRON’s tether was a wispy silver braid emanating from the mundane sliver buried deep inside him. Her own had been incinerated when she activated the Trumpet.
Bayliss’s tether disappeared from view when she lowered the harmonica. No matter. He was still bound by the legacy of the Jericho Event.
“Gee,” she said. “That looks uncomfortable.”
Bayliss lifted his fedora and ran a hand through his hair. “Did you come all the way out here just to crack wise? Or do you have something in mind?”
“Why, Bayliss? You sound like you’re in a hurry.”
He jumped down. Wind whistled through the tattered shadows of his missing wings. The dust of desiccated realities eddied about his feet. He brushed himself off, saying, “You don’t understand how long I’ve waited for this. Longer than you could have comprehended when you were purely mortal.” He reached into a pocket, then sighed. “And my flask is empty. It makes a fellow impatient.”
“I can’t let you go,” she said. She hadn’t expected to feel a twinge of sadness.
“Sure you can, angel. Just put your lips together and blow.”
“You and I are the only things holding the MOC together right now.”
“I’m sure you’ll do a swell job with it. But I have other plans.”
“In your dreams, asshole. No, I’m planning to—” Molly tapped a finger on her chin. “How would you say it? ’I’ve gotta breeze, Jack.’”
“What good are you, then? Go on. Scram.”
“Not yet.” Molly shook her head. “I take off, the MOC collapses. You could rewrite it any way you like since there’s nobody left to contradict you. Mortal reality would become what you say it is. And I’m not such a fool that I’d leave the well-being of the ‘monkeys’”—she put air quotes around that— “in your hands.”
“That’s a shame. I’m good with my hands. Everybody says so. Consider the miracles I accomplished with you.”
Molly continued, “But at the same time, I’ll be damned if I spend eternity with you just to bolster the MOC.”
“It’s me or you, doll. Tough break.”
“Actually,” she said, “it isn’t.” Still holding the Trumpet, she slid her free hand into her pocket. “After all, I’ve got all these seeds to plant.”
She produced the fragments left behind by the emancipated angels. Broken shackles. Slivers of the mundane. Here, in the Pleroma, they were dull as lead.
Bayliss’s eyes widened. He backed away.
Even diminished, a frightened angel was a terrible thing to behold. She might have felt sorry for him. But then she remembered an excruciating death, the disorientation of waking up again, the terror of having her soul ransacked by flaming Cherubim … And anyway, the noir formula had a somewhat slippery notion of justice. It didn’t have a lot of room for noble self-sacrifice.
“You of all people should appreciate t
his,” she said. “Our relationship has to culminate in a tarnished moral choice. It’s how these stories work.”
“Hey, now, Molly. Let’s not do anything hasty.”
“Well, you know, I am a dame. I get carried away with all sorts of crazy moods.” She snapped her fingers. He jumped. “Bing, I tell you.”
“Okay. Point taken. Maybe I laid it on a little thick—”
“With a trowel.”
“Sure, but hey, that’s water under the bridge now.”
He seemed so small and frightened. She felt another twinge of regret. “I wish I could have met Gabriel. All of him. Before you split off.”
“You would’ve liked him. He would’ve liked you, too. Liked your fire.”
“As memorials go,” she said, “you’re pretty cruddy.”
Bayliss said, “Maybe so. But they’re out there, our pals in the Choir. They’ll remember who set this in motion. Whose plan won their freedom.”
“I’m sure they will.”
Molly glanced at the harmonica again. Willed it into another form. Then she let the seeds run through her fingers, sifting them into the Trumpet’s bell. She lifted the Trumpet to her lips.
“Don’t I get a blindfold and a cigarette? I believe that’s traditional.”
“Shut up and try to appreciate the irony.” Then she took Bayliss’s advice: she put her lips together, and blew.
The note went on, and on, and on. Somebody screamed. It wasn’t Molly.
When the smoke cleared, Bayliss stood at the center of a million-dimensional spiderweb. A hundred thousand gossamer threads punctured his angelic form, which was indistinguishable from his human form now. Even the ghostly hint of wings had vanished. Previously, a single mundane sliver had been enough to shackle him. Now his coupling constant was thousands of times stronger; his color charge covered the rainbow from infrared to X-ray.
He was more mundane than Molly had ever been. And just a tiny bit divine. Just enough.
The threads dragged him through the Pleroma, down the ontological gradient toward Earth and the mortal realm. He dug his heels in the sand. The tethers thrummed. He bent double with the effort to arrest his slide.
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