Angeli

by Jody Wallace

  “Why didn’t the light take my priest?”

  “Who?”

  “Padre Humberto of Saint James Cathedral.” She finally met Gregori’s gaze, and there was nothing alien about him. He looked like any preternaturally gorgeous blond man. “If you aren’t experimenting on us, how could the padre not have been taken? He was the best person I have ever known.”

  Pain flickered across Gregori’s face, the first unambiguous emotion she’d seen since he’d started telling her these things. “The retrieval teams concentrate on women and children.”

  “I’m a woman, and I’m still here. I’m not a bad person.” She was, however, worse than she’d been before this event. If she’d ruined her chances for forgiveness because she’d believed in false angeli, she’d…she’d spit.

  “I don’t think being a good person is how they choose.”

  “Why not save all of us? You have all these superpowers and weapons and spaceships and this technology that makes you fly like a bird and shoot fire from your hand, and you can’t save us?”

  “Once the original invasion site becomes a nexus—what you’d think of as a stable wormhole, I believe—a world like yours is considered lost. We only have space to save so many.” His lips tightened.

  “La boca del infierno.” Whether or not it led to hell, devils spilled out of it. “I didn’t know wormholes were real, just theoretical. Is that what it really is?”

  “It’s a rift between this dimension and the next, which we call the maelstrom dimension. Your weapons don’t affect the shades because shades are not of this plane. We believe daemons are hybrid.” As the sun set, the exercise room darkened with long shadows. “What the entities seek is to—”

  “Eat us,” Adelita said bitterly. “They’re eating our bodies and souls because of one tiny opening your people can’t plug.”

  Gregori’s chin lowered. “Your people can’t plug it, either.”

  “That’s because somebody convinced us it had nothing to do with science. Told us to stay away from the mouth of hell. Run like frightened deer. Who knows what my people could have figured out if somebody had been honest?”

  “Your governments haven’t ignored scientific explanations,” he pointed out. “They’ve just made no progress. The Chosen One was everyone’s best chance of stopping this.”

  The Chosen One—the source of endless discussion, contention, and dismay among the people of Adelita’s world. After the angeli had arrived six months ago, they’d explained their purpose and the incipient apocalypse, claiming that mortals still had a chance to alter their fate. Since daemons had also recently arrived on the scene—murderous and unkillable—many people had longed to believe. The angeli had set about selecting a human delegate and had picked Adam Alsing, Hollywood actor.

  For many, the selection of a white male as the one destined to save them had proven the angelis’s legitimacy; for many more it had proven the angelis were false. For Adelita, his race and sex hadn’t been a surprise, but it had been a disappointment.

  But then, so had most of his movies.

  “That cocky bastard,” she told Gregori, “was your first mistake.” The various governments hadn’t been pleased by the angelis’ plan to send a single human to stop la boca, but their own efforts had produced nothing. “You should have sent one of your people who knew what he was doing.”

  “The Chosen One had to be native to this planet and his maneuver inconspicuous,” Gregori said, “or the entities could have figured out what was going on. There would be dire consequences if they found out my people were here. It was all according to code.”

  “Code, code, code. Blah, blah, blah.” She wished she had something to throw that would bust mirrors or someone’s head. “You picked that ass because of this code. You should have prayed for a better idea.”

  “The code is our guide,” Gregori said. “It’s like your holy books.”

  “If it’s that obtuse, it’s nothing like my holy book.”

  “It served us well on other planets.”

  “What other planets? No, don’t answer that.” She didn’t want to think about how the universe had changed around her. The only thing that mattered was whether her planet was going to die.

  “What can I answer?”

  “Uno momento.” Adelita pressed her fingertips to her eyelids, letting the blackness soothe her. She took a moment. Another moment. Gregori didn’t utter a peep.

  The exercise room smelled like moist towelettes, orange juice, and a whiff of daemon rot. Was it coming from her or Gregori? When he’d carried her across the canyon, he’d smelled like…person. Skin. A little salt. A little electronics. A little…

  She sniffed. There it was. Pine. He smelled like he’d rolled in pine needles, which he had. And why not? He had to sleep and eat and go to the bathroom like anyone. He’d said so himself.

  “Are you crying?” He clasped her shoulders. “What can I do?”

  She opened her eyes, surprised to find how close he was and how shadowy the room had grown. “Are we doomed because of your code? Maybe you brought this evil here in the first place. Maybe you planned this.”

  His hands tightened. “You don’t believe that.”

  “I know, but…” It didn’t help anyone to have their nice, blue planet eaten by the blackness. It especially didn’t help her. “I don’t want to die.”

  “I don’t want you to die.” He brushed her hair out of her face, his gaze intense. “Adelita, this is why I stayed. You are why I stayed. I don’t think they’re right to give up.”

  She swallowed. He was almost reassuring. The man could fly and kill daemons and he came from outer space. Why couldn’t he work miracles? “What are you going to do?”

  “What I’ve been doing.” His hands were strong but gentle. He seemed to enjoy touching her, the way he was rubbing her jaw with his thumb.

  She knew that look, that mesmerized expression. She liked seeing it on his face, but the timing was laughable. So she said, “What you’ve been doing is flying around getting drunk and picking fights with daemons.”

  “The alcohol helps me sleep. I find it hard to relax these days, as you can imagine.”

  “Spare me. I know the truth now. You’re no different from us.”

  His lips quirked. “I’m a little different.”

  She fought the urge to throw herself into his arms and cry. Or kiss him. It wasn’t as much of a sin to proposition the man who’d saved your life as it was to proposition the Lord’s messenger.

  Still, her time would be better spent finding a way out of this. If this wasn’t the Revelation, that meant the apocalypse could be stopped.

  “I’ll help you,” she decided.

  Since he was a man, with a man’s brain, that changed everything. He wasn’t a savior. He wasn’t the answer to prayers. His thinking appeared to be no more enlightened than hers. Maybe less. He was male, after all. He seemed to mean well, and he’d been so grave on the television, but now that she knew the truth, she’d handle him accordingly.

  “Help me?”

  “Save my world.” She took his hand and gave him her most earnest stare. It had gotten her out of a lot of trouble with the nuns when she’d been a student. “You’re one person. These hit-and-run tactics are not going to win the war.”

  “I have plans in place to—”

  “You need to go to the US government. Or the Chinese.” She might not have 100 percent confidence in any government, but they represented the largest fighting force and cache of weaponry on this planet. “Tell everyone the truth.”

  “Bad move. If I go public, there will be consequences from Ship.”

  That sounded ominous. “What kind of consequences?”

  “There’s only a small squad of my people after me so far because I’ve been sticking to code. I haven’t been putting Ship in danger. If they wanted me off-planet, I’d be off-planet. Honestly, I’m not sure why I’ve been allowed to continue as long as I have except that coming after me all-out woul
d be conspicuous.”

  She released his hand and unzipped her backpack. He settled on the floor in front of her, though how he managed it with wings, she had no idea. “Why would they care what you do on our planet now? To them, aren’t we as good as dead?”

  “It’s code. Protocol.”

  Typical masculine thinking. Their knees touched when she leaned forward. “What are the chances of changing your leader’s mind?”

  “Zero.”

  “You can’t convince him?” She rummaged in her stash, found a book light, a pen, and a notepad, and flipped to a clean page. “I’ll talk to him for you. It’s something I’m good at.”

  Gregori shook his head. The sun had dipped behind the mountains. It was getting hard to read his expression. “Ship wouldn’t listen to a native.”

  She twisted on her book light and clipped it onto her notepad. “What kind of man is Ship besides stubborn?”

  “Ship isn’t a man. Ship is Ship. Your people might call it a sentient computer. All Ships have independent thought. Personalities. Likes and dislikes. They aren’t machines.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded.

  “I hope Ship’s not like Skylab.” Adelita wrote “Hal” in one column and “Not Hal” in the other. “Did the computer write your religious code?”

  “It was written before Ships came alive and modified as needed.” Gregori rested his palms on his knees, and the backs of his fingers brushed her skin. “The original sentients, humans like us, achieved space flight and started stumbling across inhabited planets. Some of the results were disastrous.”

  “If sentients built your Ships, why are Ships in charge? You should be in charge.” A human would be easier to convince than a machine, that was for sure. Instead of love-hate, she had a hate-hate relationship with computers.

  “Ship has a vast perspective no organic being can achieve.” It sounded suspiciously rote. Gregori awkwardly took one of her hands and rested their clasped palms on her knee. “When a decision isn’t clear-cut, Ship is better equipped to process all the information and make…hard choices.”

  “Like Adam Alsing,” Adelita guessed. She balanced the pad on her other leg. If he needed to hold her hand, that was all right by her. “You said he wasn’t your choice.”

  “Ship calculates the best way to approach each planet under attack by the entities.” His thumb brushed a scrape on her knuckle. “You should put medicine on this.”

  “After a bit. I’m thinking.” Gregori’s people worshipped a computer, and Ship told these space-faring bozos what to do. That explained a lot. No wonder their code didn’t work. “Have you ever had doubts about your Ship’s sanity?”

  His fingers stilled. “Sanity?”

  “Ship’s choices and reasons. How it tells you to follow code.”

  Even in the gloom, she could see his scowl. He had doubts, all right. That’s why he was here, with her, in a deserted hotel on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. “Ship is almost always right.”

  “Almost isn’t always.” She jotted notes in her columns. “Do Ships have a soul?”

  “It’s believed so. A soul or some other essential spark not found in lower life forms.” He caressed her fingers thoughtfully, though it didn’t seem as though he was trying to distract her. It was more as if his brain was so occupied, he didn’t know what his hands were doing. “That’s why we can’t let the entities find out we’re here. They’d come after Ship.”

  “I see.” She crossed something out of the “Not Hal” column and rewrote it on the other side. “So why is it all right for them to come after us? Because we aren’t important?”

  “It’s not all right. That’s why we’re here.” Gregori patted the back of her hand. “But they don’t come after Ship with daemons and shades. If the shades catch someone of our genome, a Shipborn, they realize we’re here, helping your planet. That’s when they form a leviathan.”

  “A whale?”

  “A being. A vast being formed of every entity on the planet. My people know of no way to defeat it. Ship wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “If this leviathan is so effective, why not send one in the beginning?”

  He leaned forward. Their clasped hands slid to her upper thigh, and the notebook threatened to hit the floor. The back of his hand was warm against her skin. “The leviathan isn’t interested in organic sentients. It feeds on Ships.”

  “Then what?”

  “We don’t know.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “We’ve always been too dead to find out.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad for us,” she muttered.

  “It doesn’t happen often.”

  She nibbled the tip of her pen and studied her list. Concentration was increasingly difficult. His touch on her leg wasn’t intimate, exactly, but it was beginning to light sparks in her privates.

  How was she supposed to think about saving the world when Gregori was lighting sparks in her privates? Adelita pointed at him. “Stop that.”

  “What?”

  She thwacked his knuckles with her pen. “You’re distracting me. I need my hands to write.”

  He released her and straightened. “Physical contact comforts your people when they’re distressed.”

  “Doesn’t it comfort your people?”

  He opened his hands, palms up. “We’re both human, Adelita. I wanted to calm you.”

  “So that’s why you were always groping people on television,” Adelita said. “Except you weren’t.” When enthusiastic fans had gotten too close, the angelis’ reactions had been similar. They’d extricated themselves with noble forbearance. It was why Adelita had never believed the rumors that sometimes, in the dark of night, the angeli allowed themselves to be worshipped.

  So to speak.

  But if the angeli were just men…

  “It wouldn’t have aligned with your cultural beliefs about angeli,” he explained, “for us to go around kissing and hugging people.”

  “No kidding.” They’d been wise to keep their just-men behaviors out of the public eye.

  “But you know I’m not angeli.” He clasped his hands loosely in his lap, leaning toward her again. “I don’t have to act like that anymore.”

  She wasn’t sure what he was implying, but she glared at him on behalf of everyone on the planet. “Tell you what, Gregori. When I need to be comforted, I’ll let you know.”

  “Gotcha.” He didn’t look chastened. Maybe she should have belted him.

  Maybe she should have waited a little longer to see where else he’d touch her. How far he’d go to calm her. And then belted him.

  “Where were we?” She ignored her sexual curiosity and scribbled more line items. The majority fell under the “Hal” column. Though it was laudable that his Ship had tried to help Earth when it could be eaten, too, she suspected its motives. “Say you didn’t want to follow code. Not just now, but all the time. What would Ship do? Would you be persecuted?”

  “Of course not. We could emigrate to the closest suitable planet. No one has to live on a Ship if they don’t want to, though there are benefits to being registered with one.” He unwrapped a band from his arm, flicked it into a long, thin tool, and began to scratch his back. “Most of us prefer Ship to dirtside. Most of us believe in the code and strive to fight the entities.”

  She studied him, her pen poised over the paper. “Do you?”

  “Do I believe or do I fight the entities?” If she thought scratching itches meant he was preoccupied, she was wrong. He regarded her with narrow eyes.

  “Do you prefer Ship anymore? No offense, but it sounds like they don’t care what happens to you. If we can’t save this world, Gregori, you’ll die with us, and your Ship will disappear. The scientists were estimating a year, tops, the last time I heard, and…” She let her voice trail off.

  He lowered the tool. It gleamed softly in the small light. She watched as it shrank into a cuff. “I know. But it’s the right thing to do.”

  Without mee
ting his assessing gaze, she said, as diffidently as possible, “If your people catch you, will Ship have you executed?”

  He cinched the cuff on his arm. “Jail possibly, but execute? Never. An important aspect of code is preservation of Ship at all costs.”

  “Preservation of the sentients who created Ship?” Adelita asked, putting another big, black check in the “Hal” column. “Or preservation of Ship itself?”

  Gregori’s shoulders slumped. Either he was tired or didn’t like the question. “All sentients matter.”

  “Is that so?” Adelita flipped to another page and wrote a conclusion based on her Hal chart. “Would you say what happened on my planet is unusual?”

  “Definitely.”

  “What else is unusual about my planet?”

  He finally had the grace to look uncomfortable. “There seems to be a high proportion of females to males here.”

  “No, there’s not. It’s pretty equal,” she said.

  “Not compared to the Shipborn.”

  “I assume you know how women, ah, get pregnant and how the sex of a baby is determined and how all that works?” She didn’t want to explain the birds and bees to a man who’d gotten a hard-on for her once already. A man whose awkward attempt to calm her made her want to undress.

  “I know how all that works,” he said, amused.

  “Does it work the same way with you?”

  “Adelita,” he said with raised eyebrows, “are you asking how my people have sex?”

  “No.” She forced herself not to glance at his crotch. “If it’s the same, why is your ratio out of balance?”

  His expression flattened. “Our medical divisions are studying that.”

  “Meanwhile, there aren’t enough women?”

  He lifted one shoulder. “Define enough.”

  “Enough for…you know.” She figured he knew, too, and didn’t want to answer. “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “Do your people pair up? Group up? Whatever your people do when a man and a…when people,” she said, stumbling over her words, “want to be together. That kind of thing.” Her face heated like Arizona in July.