Fallen

  Montgomery's body responded with predictable enthusiasm to this notion, although he knew that this dark angel's goal was to distract him. "I have things to do."

  The voice dropped. "I know you sampled her once. How many more times will it take to sate you? Is it even possible? Think of those lips, those breasts ..."

  Montgomery found it far too easy to do so.

  "Perfect!" His companion laughed, a rich rolling laugh, and stepped out of the protective cloak of the fog. He was naked and black, so black that his skin might have been carved of ebony. He was muscled and possessed of a certain radiance, a dark opalescent glow that reminded Montgomery of the fog. He had presence and Montgomery could feel the weight of his gaze. He moved with complete confidence, untroubled by his nudity, and had an impressively large erection.

  Lucifer himself, emperor of all dark temptation. "Yes," the dark angel said. "My moment has finally come."

  That was when Montgomery understood what was wrong with his relationship with Lilia—as long as he saw her as an object of desire, as long as he lusted after her, he would never be satisfied with their lovemaking. With lust, he served only this prince, the Prince of Darkness. He sacrificed the luster and glory of his being for empty earthly pleasure.

  But if he loved Lilia, then all of that changed. Love was the expression of the divine, love was what made everything worthwhile, what made every act holy.

  And it would be so easy to love Lilia.

  "You must have been majestic once," Montgomery said, seeing him as a shadow of his former self.

  At his disparaging tone, Lucifer unfurled his wings. They were massive and leathery, like the wings of a bat, and stretched up to brush the roof of the netherzones. "Miss yours?" he asked playfully, then leaned closer. "You could join me, Munkar. I could give you back everything you've lost and then some. We could rule together..."

  It was out of the question. "You will never rule anything."

  "I will rule the earth and the Republic, very soon now," Lucifer retorted. "The time has come, or did they forget to tell you that part when you volunteered? You're too late, Munkar, the course is set. I have the perfect plan and the candidate who will make all things possible." He leaned closer and hissed. "Why not join the team that will be triumphant?"

  "It's never too late," Montgomery insisted.

  Lucifer laughed at this defiant hope. "The Revelation of Saint John, chapter 9. Know it?"

  Montgomery shook his head. Rachel had given him a Bible to study but its mix of speculation, misinformation, and truth had been too time consuming for him to study in depth as yet.

  His dark companion cleared his throat and posed to recite. "I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit." He smiled and gestured to the netherzones. "Here we are, Munkar. What have you done with the key?"

  "There is no single key to the netherzones."

  "I'm speaking metaphorically, of course. And there is a single key. I even know her name." He leaned closer, his breath as dark as brimstone. "Her name is Delilah. Where is Lilia's child?"

  Montgomery fired his laze, right into the heart of the specter before him. He squeezed off three shots in rapid succession, but they sliced right through the dark angel before him.

  One shot burst a pipe behind Lucifer, and it erupted with a sizzle and began to spew steam into the nether-zones. Montgomery smelled a fire starting, then a boiler blew. His three shots had trashed infrastructure but left the dark angel unscathed.

  He hadn't taken substance.

  Yet.

  Lucifer, meanwhile, laughed. "Listen and learn, Munkar. My triumph is imminent and you can be a part of it. Send me the child and you'll be seated upon my right hand. We'll rule together." He leaned close again. "It's an offer you'd be a fool to refuse."

  "Liar!" Montgomery shouted, but he was alone in the netherzones.

  The lights came back on, all at once, and an alarm rang. He jammed his laze back into his holster and ran in the opposite direction from Emergency Response.

  The Devil wanted him to change teams.

  Which had to mean that he was close to thwarting something. Montgomery navigated a course to Breisach and Turner, hoping he could discover what Rachel knew.

  Before it was too late.

  A minion caught up with Lilia in the lobby and insisted on removing the professional credential from her I.D. bead. She bent her head for the foul deed, seething all the while.

  At least she looked fabulous.

  It was a surprising relief to let the lie go, because really it had been Gid who had graduated twice summa cum laude, not Lilia.

  And they couldn't erase her tattoos.

  Lilia's satisfaction faded when she got to the front desk, because the security dude wouldn't return her laze. She wasn't checking out and those were the rules he lived by.

  So she went to Breisach and Turner unarmed.

  She felt as if she was going naked.

  Which might have made the journey more interesting.

  Lilia must have looked dangerous all the same—and she was in a pretty foul mood—because no one messed with her and it was past curfew. Maybe the good citizens of New Gotham weren't that brave. Maybe the few people who were on the streets sensed trouble emanating from Lilia's person and they scattered from her path.

  The area around Breisach and Turner's offices was quiet. Lilia could see lights in the windows of upper floors of buildings, apartments over store fronts, and the occasional shadow of someone moving behind blinds.

  The front door of the building was unlocked and the lights were off. Moonlight streamed through the sidelights at the entry and slipped over the transom to paint a patch of silver on the foyer floor.

  Lilia slipped over the building's threshold, acting as if she had every right to be there. Once inside, she listened. The building was silent. Lilia was glad of the moon, a welcome old ally. She could see the stairs dimly and stared up them, feeling a bit of trepidation.

  She reached the second floor and paused, but heard only sounds from outside. A cat yowled, someone shouted at it and something shattered. Lilia took a deep breath, told herself she was perfectly safe, and acknowledged that this was a lie. All the same, she went down the corridor to Breisach and Turner.

  The door was locked.

  But there were no witnesses. Lilia put her wedding ring on her index finger and broke the glass in the door with one swift stroke. Shards tinkled to the floor inside. Lilia picked up her pace, just in case there was a silent alarm. She put her ring back where it belonged, wrapped the end of her scarf around her hand, reached through the glass, and unlocked the dead bolt.

  She went straight through the reception area to the office where the shade receptionist had peeked out the window. The moonlight shone brightly enough through the blinds to let her see dim shapes.

  Lilia had hoped for a desktop with a blotter display like Montgomery's but no luck. There was a table in the room that looked as if it was made of wood. Wood. It must have cost a fortune. It had no drawers, no display, no electrical feed.

  The building was starting to feel like a museum to Lilia.

  One wall was completely filled with metal cabinets, each of which had four doors, one over the other. They were graceless and bulky and quite deep. Lilia had no idea what they might be or why anyone would bother to manufacture anything so hideous.

  Let alone collect a whole row of them.

  There was a little white box on the top drawer of the leftmost cabinet. When Lilia squinted at it, she realized it was a label of some kind. She could make out the handwritten script "A—Armistice ".

  The one immediately below said "Armstrong—Berkshire".

  And so it went, one to the next, reminding Lilia of that old set of encyclopedia volumes that someone had tried to sell to her mother. Lilia and her mother had had a huge fight about them: Lilia had been fascinated by the faux-leather binding and the thin pages of paper, but her mother had called t
hem a waste of money.

  Actually she had called them "a bourgeois souvenir of Victorian social aspirations and the cultivation of appearances." When Lilia had complained, she'd been invited to look up anything she wanted to know in the public-access areas of the Republic's databanks, preferably at the public library, where the connection was fast and free and comparatively anonymous.

  There was a metal tab beside the handle on each drawer. It wasn't rocket science to figure out that this was a clasp of some kind. Lilia depressed it, pulled on the handle and a massive drawer rolled out toward her.

  She yelped and ducked as it clattered right over her head. It finally lurched to a stop, the depth of the drawer being—surprise—the depth of the cabinet. It was obviously on casters and heavy enough to have a momentum of its own.

  The drawer was stuffed full of files, files made of paper.

  That stopped Lilia cold. She fingered them in awe, looking over the array of drawers and trying to imagine how much paper was collected here. It too would be worth a fortune. The only time she had ever seen paper, actual sheets made of compressed wood fiber, had been when she had looked at that encyclopedia.

  Never mind shipping and expediting—maybe the partners of Breisach and Turner had retired. They could sell this paper and buy themselves a tropical island. Maybe two—his and his luxury retreats.

  But the paper was still here, thus unsold.

  Maybe what was written on it was important. Lilia pulled out a file and flipped it open, unable to keep herself from fingering the corner with reverence.

  She carried the file over to the window-—the writing was small—and read a bit. It was a customer file for Armstrong Manufacturing and was filled with shipping documents, invoices, and receipts. The very fact that the documents were on paper told Lilia that they were old, and in fact, they were all dated from the 2040s. That the paper had been kept meant that the data likely hadn't been processed electronically.

  Lilia paused. And that meant that whatever information was here was not in the Republic databanks.

  Her pulse skipped.

  Pulp triumphed over bytes. This was lost information, or information that the Republic didn't even know existed.

  She knew then that somewhere in this array of files was the bit of info Gid had wanted her to find, the bit that the receptionist had been defending, the bit that had condemned them both.

  But there were thousands of documents, hundreds of files, and time was a-wasting.

  A quick peek revealed that every drawer was full, arranged in an orderly fashion. Lilia zipped through the other office, just to make sure the problem wasn't bigger. That room contained only a chair and a table similar to the one in the first office.

  Back with the files, Lilia looked up Breisach and Turner, but found no file. New Gotham Circus didn't have a file either, nor did its proprietor Stevia Fergusson, although that had been a long shot. Gideon Fitzgerald didn't have a file and neither did Lilia Desjardins. Y654892 had no file. Lilia's mother had no file. Neither did NGPD. Adam Montgomery didn't have a file. Lilia even checked Armaros and Baraqiel. No luck.

  Gid had died in the old city. She tried Gotham, Rockefeller Plaza, even Prometheus. Angel. Satan. Lucifer. God.

  Nada.

  These files were starting to tick Lilia off. She wanted a good search engine but they didn't have one.

  She leaned against the wall and looked up at the moon. It was high overhead, its shape fuzzy through the filter of the blinds.

  Someone had shipped something somewhere, years ago, and the record was here. What had anyone been shipping that could have been important enough to get Gid killed?

  The moon rolled across the sky overhead and Lilia glared at it, wishing her old friend could tell her the answer. The moon would have been here. It must have stood witness. Wasn't there supposed to be a man in the moon?

  The moon was round.

  And kind of yellowish.

  Lilia snapped her fingers and dove for the filing cabinets, seeking the drawer for 5, as in Society of Nuclear Darwinists.

  The moon was almost like an orange. Orville the Orange and the Society's Sunshine Heals program had been launched in 2040, which was less relevant than the fact that somebody had to move those oranges around every year.

  To ship and expedite them, as it were.

  The Society of Nuclear Darwinists did indeed have a file at Breisach and Turner. Lilia snagged it out of the drawer, barely able to get her fingers around it because it was so fat. Decades of oranges, she guessed, none of which might have anything to do with anything.

  She shut the drawer, bracing herself for an exciting night of reading. Lilia couldn't snag the data as it hadn't been digitized. She'd have to discover whether there was anything worth reading here the old-fashioned and time-consuming way.

  Here?

  She couldn't just steal the file—could she? She hadn't really been joking to Ernestine about changing her own game—stealing certainly would be against the law.

  But then, who would know? The receptionist was dead. Did Messrs. Breisach and Turner check their paper files? She was debating the merits of reading in the office—in an uncharacteristic attack of conscience—when she heard the front door to the office open.

  Lilia froze, the file clasped to her chest.

  Maybe she hadn't really heard anything. She held her breath, ever optimistic.

  But no. A beam of light moved across the outer office floor, then was extinguished.

  Lilia might still be in the dark, but she clearly wasn't alone anymore.

  Lilia ducked into the shadow that would be behind the office door when the visitor opened it more widely. Maybe she could leap past the new arrival and run before he or she was aware of her presence. Lilia pressed her back against the wall, clutched the file, and waited.

  He shut the door to the outer corridor quietly, but he hadn't left. Lilia heard his boot on the broken glass. She heard him breathing quietly out there, waiting and listening as if he also suspected that he wasn't alone.

  She had to strain her ears to hear his cautious footfalls in the outer office. That meant she was dealing with a seasoned professional, a thief who was both armed and dangerous.

  One who should have been able to hear Lilia's heartbeat.

  She felt his presence coming closer, smelled him more than she heard him. She sensed that he looked into the other office, then stiffened as he approached the one she occupied. Lilia saw the shadow of him through the crack between the door and the frame, a little sliver of darkness that entered the office.

  He didn't advance far into the room, which didn't give Lilia any chance to make a run for it. She waited, trying to not have heart failure in the interim.

  His light flicked on and she peeked around the door in time to see it play over the filing cabinets.

  "Paper," he muttered. "Brilliant."

  Lilia just about fainted when she recognized his voice.

  Tit for tat, though. She'd get even with him scaring her like that. "You'd have more charm, Montgomery, if you didn't try to freak me out all the time."

  Montgomery nearly went through the roof. He swung the flashlight around and Lilia held up a hand to block the light in front of her face. He swore so eloquently that she couldn't help but smile. He was in evil-twin guise, which made her heart soar.

  "Gotcha," she said.

  Montgomery went one better, though. He swooped in, caught her against his chest, and kissed her like he was never going to stop.

  It worked for Lilia.

  It worked just fine.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Montgomery demanded long moments later. "I thought you were staying out of trouble."

  Lilia was in a trim black evening suit with her hair coiled up. Even without making any infractions of the S&D code, she was the sexiest woman he'd ever seen.

  And she kissed as if she wanted to eat him alive.

  "I had a relapse," she said, giving him that impish smile. "I could ask you the s
ame thing, you know."

  "I'm part of an official inquiry."

  "I don't think so. You told me that there was no investigation about the secretary's death, because she was a shade."

  "Maybe that changed."

  She looked up at him, all sparkle and mischief, and relief made his heart skip a beat. The system was still feeding him reasons to arrest her, someone in the Society was out to get her, and she was just fine. He shouldn't have been surprised that Lilia protected herself—she'd been doing it for a while.

  And maybe it was better that way. After his physical the next day, he wouldn't be able to help her at all. Montgomery tried not to worry about that.

  "And that would be why you've forgotten your eye of the Republic stud?" she teased.

  "They had to remove it at the beginning of my shift to assess why it isn't working. I think the angelfire shorted it out." He didn't tell her that he'd probably worked his last shift.

  "They're going to think you were staring at a nuke." Lilia regarded him with a twinkle in her eye. He noticed that she was clutching a fat paper file. "So, Mr. Straight and Narrow, have you got a warrant for this official inquiry?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  She let her eyes round. "Are cops allowed to break into private offices in New Gotham whenever they feel like it?"

  "I was going to knock, but the door was already open. I'm investigating."

  "And what did you find?"

  He smiled. "A citizen with a talent for finding trouble."

  She smiled back, untroubled by his assessment. "It's a gift."

  Montgomery sobered. She was in a serious predicament that was getting worse. He needed to be sure she knew how bad it was. "I need to ask you a question."

  "That sounds ominous."

  "What happened to your child, Lil?"

  She took a step back and he saw the wariness in her eyes. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, but he could hear the lie in her tone.

  "You had a shade child. It's on your file. I told you as much the other day."