Fallen

by Claire Delacroix

  At least, she had awakened on time.

  One glance into her closet and bathroom revealed that the intrusion hadn't been just a bad dream. Lilia checked her palm and confirmed that it had blithely surrendered everything it knew to person unknown at 01:16:47. It noted the time with perky precision, the faithless piece of junk, as well as the fact that every one of Lilia's passwords had been overridden.

  Lilia was shocked. She had layers of passwords on her palm. They could only have been broken with some hotshot illegal software.

  Or by the Republic itself.

  Lilia thought of Montgomery's warnings and shivered. It hadn't been Montgomery in her room: the intruder had been too slender. And Lilia was sure that some very specific female bits of her would have responded with enthusiasm to Montgomery's presence, no matter how sedated she might be. That narrowed the options to someone less buff than Montgomery.

  Who could have been sent by Montgomery to do his dirty work.

  On the other hand, Montgomery had been the one to guess that Lilia didn't keep the good stuff on her palm. She couldn't believe that he'd bother with a palm rape.

  Some individual unnamed had spiked something she'd consumed with a little pharmaceutical present, then left it to do its magic before breaking into her room. One of the glasses of wine she'd had in the lobby bar must have been doctored for her displeasure.

  Too bad she didn't remember who had brought all of her drinks. There had been the first one from Blake. Mike had fetched her another. She'd gotten two for herself. Rhys—the creep—had bought a round, then sent his little weasel around to deliver another. What had the kid's name been? Nicholas. He'd talked mostly to Lilia's breasts, she remembered that.

  It was oh-so-tempting to ask Montgomery for help. There had to be a hotel security vid, which he could access officially.

  Lilia could offer sexual pleasure in exchange.

  His evil twin might go for that deal, but she had a feeling she'd be seeing his officious cop side from here on in.

  It was too bad, really.

  Montgomery heard the pleasure fringe as he drew closer. This zone of New Gotham was far from subdued and certainly not asleep. Cathouses were lit brightly and laughter carried through open doorways. Jazz music drifted from the windows of buildings filled with secrets and velvet shadows. Montgomery bought a handful of tokens and jingled them in his pocket as he progressed.

  He always enjoyed the transition, the delicious sense that he was heading directly into temptation, if not damnation. There was joy to be found in the sensation of being human and alive, a luxury that he found alluring and seductive. He liked the vitality in the pleasure fringe, a savoring of life in defiance of how the Republic wished to constrain such pleasures, which he found refreshing and invigorating.

  He didn't doubt that Lilia felt the same way about pleasure fringes. She was more alive than anyone he'd known— and tempting as a result. Distracting and seductive. He could sense the promise of humanity in her rebellious attitude and defiance, her determination and optimism. He could see the merit of saving mankind, if they had all possessed the noble recklessness of Lilia.

  He wondered whether anyone other than Fitzgerald knew the location and design of Lilia's tattoos.

  On the cusp of the pleasure fringe, the establishments seemed just a whisper from being legit. Any given bar could have been a restaurant, with a slightly different menu and clientele. The whores could have been women who worked in other occupations. The shade collecting money at the door of the peep house could have passed for norm beyond the neon lights, where he wouldn't have been dressed to display his hermaphroditism so well.

  In the main traffic areas of the pleasure fringe, the stimulants were predictable and reasonably tame: there was caffeine and alcohol and cocaine. Clothing was scant but not tattered; flesh was unscarred, at least beneath the light of artifice. A citizen could buy sex toys or jewelry or cigarettes with tokens, and the purchase could never be traced. Clusters of citizens, mostly teenage boys, wandered in packs, discovering forbidden pleasures. The streets were fairly busy and there was a festive atmosphere.

  As Montgomery moved farther into the pleasure fringe, though, the streets became rougher. The whores looked meaner. The shades were more radically mutated and more of them sold their bodies, or the sight of their bodies, right in the street. The bars began to look like destinations of no return, and Montgomery knew better than to buy himself a drink. The drugs for sale were plainer and their effects less easy to predict. There were dangers in the shadows. The rales were almost nonexistent.

  This was where the controlling fingers of the Republic seldom reached and, given how little of merit was there, Montgomery believed that to have been a deliberate choice. The worst a citizen could do to himself in the deep fringe was self-destruct.

  And maybe that was, in a sad way, performing a civic duty.

  Was he being followed? Montgomery was never certain, so he acted as if he was. He impulsively ducked through a darkened doorway, passed through a grubby restaurant and into the dirty kitchen behind it. He ignored the protest of the cook and the scuttle of rats as he leapt down the access to the netherzones.

  The accesses were usually in service zones, given that shades were the ones who used them. In the pleasure fringe, the accesses were seldom secured: this world was dangerous enough that it was unimaginable that anything worse could emanate from below.

  Montgomery pulled his laze as he descended to the only level that existed in this part of town. He glanced back as the cook shouted again.

  He was being followed.

  Montgomery broke into a trot, dodging from shadow to shadow. Few people in the pleasure zone could afford slaves for power generation, so these netherzones were mostly deserted. The hidden passageways also tended to be simplistic in layout, lacking barriers and dead ends. Montgomery chose one stairway that smelled of perfume, guessing what he'd find at the summit.

  He was right. He emerged in a boudoir with peeling gold paint on the walls, mirrors on the ceiling, and a pair of female shades entangled on the bed. This whorehouse had a Victorian motif: the draperies and gilt were as excessive as they were worn.

  The redheaded whore had a third breast. The other had skin the color of coffee and luscious dark lashes. He couldn't see her defect and didn't want to know. The women were half naked and kissing, rolling across their mattress with such pleasure that Montgomery felt badly for interrupting them.

  "Break time's over," he murmured and they jumped.

  The brunette swore like a sailor and threw a pillow at him.

  "Who are you?" demanded the other.

  "It doesn't matter." Montgomery tossed them each a pair of tokens. "There might be a customer coming, one who likes a fight."

  "Yum," said the redheaded one as she straightened her custom bustier and checked her lip stain in the gilt-edged mirror.

  "My favorite," said the brunette.

  "We could take you both," the redhead suggested with a hard stare.

  "No time, unfortunately."

  The brunette rolled from the bed and pulled on a poet shirt. The redhead lit a pair of candles in crystal-hung candelabra. "Lock the door from the outside, would you?"

  "My pleasure," Montgomery said.

  "You'd have to stay for that," the redhead said, sliding her tongue across her upper lip in invitation.

  "Impossible, since I was never here." Montgomery left another pair of tokens on the dresser and the brunette smiled.

  "There's the kind of man dreams are made of," she murmured. "He wants only silence and is prepared to pay for it."

  "And leaves promptly." The redhead glanced at the door.

  When Montgomery looked back from the threshold, the tokens had already been secreted away. He locked the door from the other side, then moved silently down the hall and into another room.

  The blond whore being taken against the wall looked over her customer's shoulder in alarm, but Montgomery shook his head and held a finger to
his lips. She had a keloid on her cheek, and the scar tissue had been augmented with a red tattoo to look even more like a crab than was typical. She'd even put sparkles on it and otherwise was quite pretty.

  She glanced at her heaving customer and hesitated in promising her silence, until Montgomery placed two tokens on her dresser. Her eyes narrowed until he added another, then she nodded.

  She gasped all the while as if lost in pleasure. Montgomery pointed downward, to the netherzones, then indicated the room, silently asking for the access point.

  She arched a brow and looked at the tokens.

  Montgomery added a token, but she only gave a minute shake of her head. When the fifth was added to the pile, she indicated a tapestry hanging on one wall. Montgomery understood that the access was behind it. She caught the back of her client's head in her hand and kissed him with false ardor, distracting him from Montgomery's progress across the room.

  Montgomery headed down into the darkness again, without the climaxing client ever knowing he had been there.

  He repeated his trick three times, passing through the kitchen of an oyster shack, jumping from the roof of a second whorehouse to that of a rowdy bar. He pushed through the crowd at the bar, disappeared into the band, ducked through the basement and into a service tunnel. There were old electrical conduits on the walls and grates in the floor that emitted the scent of sewage. Montgomery ran along it for as long as he could stand the smell, then emerged through a grate into a deserted alley.

  It was darker and he heard the faint tinkle of calliope music from the circus. He moved down an adjacent alley, heading for his destination. It was after three and he had no time left to play games.

  Fortunately, it wasn't far from this point to the first corner of this earthly paradise that Montgomery had seen. The moon was full and the clouds thinner than usual, the silvery light creating mysterious shadows in the night.

  Montgomery walked quickly. Rachel had taught him to move with stealthy silence. He walked the last section of road with a heavy heart, feeling the lack of her presence, hearing her admonition to never let himself become emotionally involved with humans.

  He must have broken that edict long before he'd met Lilia, because he missed Rachel and her blunt pragmatism.

  He'd fallen further than he'd realized.

  Could he ever go back?

  Even assuming that he completed his mission and Rachel's, did he want to? It was a shocking thought. Everything he'd done had been geared toward regaining his wings and returning to what he knew.

  But he recalled Lilia's kiss, the pleasure of her pressed against him, and wasn't convinced that he wanted a life without sensation.

  Was it better to feel pleasure and even pain than to never feel anything at all?

  Once, Montgomery would have been positive of his answer but on this night, he yearned for Rachel's company and Lilia's touch and wasn't nearly so sure.

  He emerged from the last group of trees and shuddered at the first sight of the warehouse, just as he always did.

  Then he walked onward with purpose.

  He'd returned a dozen times, despite Rachel's warnings to the contrary, but if he hadn't had such a strong memory of the place, he would never have guessed its secret use. It was made of red brick and had been a factory in the nineteenth century. Once there had been a multitude of high windows of small dense glass panes; now there were boards nailed over many of the windows. Inside was darkness and the crunch of glass underfoot.

  The fields beyond the building had reverted to scrub. Queen Anne's lace had been blooming there when Montgomery had become earthbound, the frothy white flower heads one of the only things he could find attractive about his new home. The moon too had been full on that night, which seemed to have been a thousand years before.

  He had changed in so many ways. He had been seduced by pleasure and sensation, more thoroughly than he had ever expected. He cared about humans, collectively and individually, something he'd never thought possible.

  Was the change irrevocable?

  In this night's cool darkness, Montgomery could see golden plumes of ragweed moving in the breeze. They were past their prime, their scent still pungent enough to tickle his nose.

  The warehouse was utterly silent.

  It seemed almost to absorb sound.

  Montgomery hesitated before entering it. There was a lump in his throat and a tightness in his gut. It showed no signs of diminishing, especially when he returned here.

  But he had too many questions to turn back now. He didn't even know for sure whether the angels had a fixed schedule or whether they simply did what needed to be done when it needed to be done. When he realized that he could have made this journey for nothing, he felt a very human pang of despair.

  Was he becoming one of them? Or would the angels know when he needed their counsel?

  There was only one way to find out.

  Montgomery paused inside the building for a moment to let his eyes adjust to its darkness. The floor was rotted away in some places and it paid to be careful. He was climbing the stairs to the room that the angels favored as a pearly light began to emanate from ahead of him.

  The light ran like quicksilver, filling the cracks of the floor and flowing along them, a gleaming luster that was reminiscent of opals and pearls. It steadily grew in brilliance and couldn't have been mistaken for anything other than what it was.

  Angelfire.

  They were coming.

  Montgomery stepped into the room, shielding his eyes from their brilliance. He felt awe as their light touched him.

  He had been like them, and he had chosen to throw it away.

  He'd never understood that it could be a permanent choice.

  Montgomery fell to his knees in the room, the light of the angels searing even though he had his eyes tightly closed. A bit late, he realized that he could no longer communicate with his fellows by thought alone, and that they didn't make any sounds. Could they hear him if he spoke?

  He had to try. He prayed for guidance, he prayed for answers, he prayed for a way to complete Rachel's mission.

  Most of all, he prayed that his former fellows would understand.

  Micheline met Lilia at the entrance to the circus, indicating that Lilia should take a bicycle from the communal rack. Micheline had already chosen a smaller bike with pink streamers on the handles and rode away without looking back. She made good speed, heading onto the darkened road on the far side of the circus.

  It was shadowed and deserted. Lilia shuddered, refused to think about darkness, and chose a bike.

  They rode for a good twenty minutes, moving farther from New Gotham, and Lilia wondered how far they had to go. Finally, the little girl pointed ahead and to the right. "There," she said.

  Lilia could only see a copse of trees, their crowns silhouetted against the night sky and fathomless shadows beneath them. The cluster of trees troubled Lilia, as it seemed darker and more isolated. It looked lonely, to her view, too far from city lights. She might not trust people individually, but she felt better with more of them around her.

  It was too isolated here.

  Micheline rode on, untroubled. If anything, the child seemed excited. Lilia could hear a chirping sound that must have been crickets and could see a multitude of stars overhead.

  She thought about her visitor of the night before, of being trapped alone and powerless to his whim, and shuddered again.

  Micheline rode directly into the heart of the darkness beneath the trees, holding her feet out to either side and whooping with joy as she raced down the slight hill.

  Lilia couldn't quite echo her mood. She biked after Micheline and was surprised to find a town beyond the cluster of trees.

  An abandoned town. There wasn't a whisper of breath on its streets, not a sign of life, but not because of the hour. A glimmer of light caught Lilia's eye and she glanced down, noting that her radiation patch was emitting a slight glow. She looked past the trees and line of low buildings t
o see the silhouette of Gotham far to the light.

  It wasn't a high radiation reading so it must have been a trick of seasonal winds to send the fallout plume back in this direction. The Republic, known for its caution in such matters, had probably ordered the town to be evacuated.

  And the people had never come back. Lilia slowed her pedaling. It had been a small town, with an old main street lined with shops and apartments on the second floor overhead. There was an intimacy about this town, though, something about the scale of it that made its desertion more heart wrenching.

  She could easily believe that she'd crossed through a portal to somewhere both within and beyond the Republic. She could have traveled back in time, back to a place where her skirts would have been the fashion for the first time.

  But there was nothing whimsical about towns emptied because of the toxic plumes from old cities. Gotham, after all, had been abandoned for the same reason.

  The difference was that in this town, Lilia had no sense that she was being watched. She felt like she was the last person alive, which was a much more creepy prospect.

  She obviously needed more sleep.

  At least, she knew where Micheline had borrowed supplies. Lilia was relieved that the little girl would take on less radiation over time than if she'd really been going into the old city.

  Micheline, meanwhile, had leapt from her bike. She started to run toward an old brick warehouse. "Hurry!" she cried. "They're coming."

  Lilia didn't express her skepticism. She left her bike beside the child's, then followed Micheline into the deserted building.

  It was pitch dark inside and that was enough to make Lilia hesitate. Micheline scampered across the wooden floors with a confidence that Lilia felt obliged to echo.

  She followed Micheline up the stairs with trepidation, hearing the building creak all around her. Thousands of small glass windows admitted the night's light, moonlight slicing through some, others boarded to darkness. Glass crunched under her boots when they were close to the ex-terior walls, but Micheline headed to the center of the building.