Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

  17

  I IMMEDIATELY regretted the decision, but it felt too soon to apologize. I still refused to believe I was hearing voices or whatever. After all, I did live in a world of eye-covered angels who had some sort of obsession with camping.

  So what if the radio wasn’t supposed to be working at this range? I’ll bet I was somehow picking up on a radio signal far away, with the angels acting as amplifiers. It sounded vaguely possible. And Midori couldn’t hear this definitely real show because she just wasn’t tuned to it. Hell, maybe it was her lack of belief that prevented her from hearing it. That sounded vaguely possible too in these dark times.

  It was cold now, really cold, and though I pulled out a blanket to huddle under, my face began to feel numb. I considered sneaking into just the studio itself, hiding under a counter so Midori wouldn’t be able to see me, but I couldn’t risk it. I didn’t want to lose my pride and admit defeat so soon.

  But it sure was chilly. I looked out into the darkness of the night—the empty streets, features lost without lamps or storefronts. The world looked flat and lifeless. The stillness was like a painting—a feeling only prompted by my mind’s insistence that the only way the world could be this dark and hollow was if it was nothing more than paint on canvas.

  Even the angels seemed far off tonight. Some of them did emit light, but it was such a ghostly glow that they soon looked like nothing more than starlight.

  Those angels, those angels, whatever were they thinking?

  There was a plan, a plot, an experiment around us, but those angels did nothing for it. They were watching and waiting and floating.

  My life would have been better if I was dead, if I had simply died all that time ago with my family. And not even on the sixth day, with my foster family. My life would have carried much more meaning if I had just died in the fire with my parents all those years ago.

  If someone else had lived, I’m sure whatever journey and whatever mystery I was being thrown into would have been long solved by now. If I was someone else, everything would have gone smoother. And in most cases, better.

  Weren’t angels supposed to put only the bravest through their divine tests? The most holy? The ones pure of heart? I was none of those things. So why had I passed their judgments. Why had I lived?

  Gav and Midori both made sense as the so-called chosen. Gav had had an angel in his head; of course he would be kept around. Same with Midori—had she not been hosting an angel for however long? But I had never lived at a level any bit more than regular.

  Midori more than fit the bill as some sort of divine. She deserved to have lived. She was magic and beautiful and lovely, someone right out of a fairy tale or a legend. But she didn’t need me. She needed someone better than me, someone who could heal her and fix her and make her happy, which was clearly not a job I was capable of. If I was someone else, Midori would be my friend, and surely this other me would never have heard voices in her head.

  If I was someone else, I would not be freezing outside, and I wouldn’t be crazy. We probably wouldn’t even be here. We wouldn’t have been following a nonexistent radio station. We’d have long ago found humans. And we’d have long ago stopped fighting.

  But I am not someone else—I am, however unfortunately, me. I wrapped myself up tighter and waited for daybreak, hoping not to be alone when it came.

  Day wasn’t going to come for a number of hours. I had perhaps dozed off from the cold, but either way I found myself at full alertness when I heard footsteps on stone. At first I thought it was Midori, being the responsible one and apologizing, but then I realized the sounds were coming from down the street.

  And that meant it could only be one of two people. Gav or Fex, both with the ability to sense the perfect moment to arrive. Well, one was an angel and the other was occasionally an angel, so I suppose they did have a way of always observing the ideal time to pester me.

  Just as I suspected, Fex turned around the corner. And then Gav. Their feet moved as one, but they broke step and walked a little faster when they saw me. However, neither of them looked concerned as they walked toward me. In truth, they looked identical.

  “I wasn’t aware you two kept the same company.”

  They looked at each other. “He is my superior,” Fex said as they exchanged nods. Gav went inside without looking again toward me. “How often have you known him?”

  “What?”

  He clutched his head and then smiled at me. “Sorry, I get a bit too formal when I’m with him. I meant to ask, how many times has he visited you? I know he’s been around a couple times, but how often has he actually spoken with you?”

  “A couple. Like at least three, I’d wager. Why?”

  “As you may have noticed, we’ve been assigned to bother you two. I’ve been following you off and on, but this is the first time I’ve been really ordered on you. I have taken it as a sign to be on edge. My boss has always been following you, but the fact that he has spoken to you personally is frankly… worrying. He plays a number of people.”

  “So why are you here, then? What are your orders?”

  “I don’t quite know. I’m not worried for you, though. I believe Midori may have been deemed unfit and is about to be exterminated.”

  “What? And you’re just standing here—wait, I’m just standing here?” I shouted, and I attempted to shove him out of the way of the door and run inside.

  He held me back. “You can’t. You’re not supposed to know. And I may be wrong about that. My boss can be remarkably unpredictable. All I know is you two are curiosities in our file system, and as I’ve warned, highly experimental. Your fate hangs on the edge, purely up to the whims of someone else to determine if you’re any use.”

  “So why do you think Midori is at risk any more than I am?”

  “Because you’ve been marked up. She hasn’t. You have, I’m hoping accidentally, proven yourself a worthwhile investment for us. So while you’re still technically an experiment to us, we are keeping you alive until something changes.”

  “What did I do?” My thoughts raced to the past couple of days. Since when had I done anything to help the angels?

  “I can’t say. Not even my opinion.”

  “But Midori….”

  “Midori may still have her uses, so I wouldn’t worry much. I don’t think she’ll be dying as long as she keeps being potentially useful to us. Again, I can’t say anything. As much as I want to help you, I am bound by loyalty to my own.”

  “Not even the slightest hint about the long-term plan?”

  “Well,” he said, suddenly caught up in thought, “it’s what you’d expect. Maybe. If you’ve been paying attention.”

  “Not very helpful. How long is Gav going to be in there anyway?”

  “As long as he wants.” Fex shrugged. “Like I said, even I don’t know what my boss is up to.”

  “You call him your boss. But is he just like, your district manager, or would he be a bit higher on the corporate ladder than that?”

  “Your metaphors do confuse me sometimes. I only have a simple and vague well of human knowledge to work from here. But no, he is only a little bit higher than me. We’d be about equals if I wasn’t still a bit disgraced. And keep in mind the both of us are right at the top either way.”

  “What about his name? I’m tired of calling him Gav.”

  “What? I was under the impression you knew. Gav is his name. Are you asking about his other names? Because he does have a thing for theatrics. He enjoys playing around with those he meets, much to my disgust.”

  “Has he always had that form?”

  “What, the human shape? Of course that’s not his true form. You should know this.”

  Good. For a moment there I thought that maybe Gav was—well, an angel. Which he was. But now he was at risk of not even being Gav, the strange boy, but Gavreel, the strange angel. A coincidence of name, and nothing more. Bound to happen at some point—

  “Wait, has he ever told you otherwis
e? This is why I was worried that you had spoken to him before. He’s a natural trickster. It’s dangerous to be alone with him.”

  “He… has.” Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “What has he told you?” Fex demanded, eyes wide.

  “Is it possible… his vessel is still alive? Like if the host was strong willed, and kept fighting, maybe he could occasionally overpower the angel.”

  “No. This is why I really need to know what he’s been lying to you about. Because we don’t use hosts. We’re shape-shifters.”

  “Shit!”

  Fex gripped my arms tightly and forced me to look him in the eye. “What has he—”

  But then the door opened. Gav, who was really the angel Gavreel, emerged with Midori.

  “Something the matter?” Gavreel asked.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t even bother,” Midori said, fixing her posture slightly up when she saw me, as if to allow her better access to looking down on me.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, looking away from the both of them.

  “I have somewhere I have to be,” Midori said.

  “Really, you’re going to go with Gav? As in, the angel possessing Gav?” I at least still had the sense to pretend I was still living in ten minutes ago, before I knew anything.

  “I’ve long told you, Erika. The angels are not bad. We should trust them and work with them. And now, I have been told by this angel what my destiny is and I have humbly accepted it.”

  “Don’t do anything he says. We both know the angels are scum.”

  “You say that, yet never have I seen proof of this. Maybe you’re the bad one in this story? All you do is wander and kill. It’s hopeless to resist this anymore. And besides, I always knew I was meant for something greater.”

  “But you’re not meant for anything! Okay, shit, that came out wrong. But you told me yourself that you’re ordinary, that you just want to be normal.”

  “Maybe this is the new normal, Erika. And maybe, I just want something organized for once. I hate nature and I hate camping. I want to be with civilization, and let’s face it, we’re never going to find any more humans.”

  “What about your plan to wait here for them to arrive? You were almost certain they’d be here tomorrow.”

  “I know better now. We’re the last ones left. It’s a good thing I was never as caught up in humanity as you were, or I’d be more distressed.”

  “The world goes on forever. We aren’t the last ones. We can’t be. It’s like saying there’s no such thing as aliens just because we’ve never met any—conceited and ignoring the statistics.”

  “I know now,” she said again. “And somehow, I don’t believe I trust the words of someone who hears voices.”

  “But you’d trust Gav? As in the one who is periodically human and periodically an angel? The one who has been stalking us? The guy whose emotions change every few seconds, the one who obviously has bad intentions and isn’t afraid to hide them?”

  “Again, your judgments. Never mine. I’ve always thought of him as nothing more than a tad frightened and a slight bit curious,” she said. “Besides, you’re not one to talk about distrusting angels when you buddy up to Fex every chance you get.”

  “Fex doesn’t frequently freak me out. At least he acts about the same every time I see him.”

  “This arguing is tiring me out. You do realize, I hope, that you’re not going to change my mind?”

  “But surely you can’t—”

  “Surely I can’t… what? Make my own choices? Decide things for myself? Leave me alone, Erika. Just let me be. This will probably be the last time I see you, and you know, I think I’m okay with that.”

  Fex and Gavreel had just been watching, faces once again matching with a slight smile.

  “Don’t,” I begged.

  “Too late. It’s already been arranged,” she said. As she walked past, Gav and Fex fell in step on either side of her.

  As Fex passed, he patted me once on the shoulder. The closest he could get to sympathy, I suppose.

  And indeed, once day broke, I was alone.

  PART TWO

  FIRELIGHT

  18

  AT ONE point in life, everyone will either take part in or overhear a conversation that features the line: “But what if none of this is real?”

  I had been in algebra, and we had been left alone to do work. A group of kids—Darcy Hallows, Leon Fitz, Kaylee Sparrow, and Caleb Lee, if I remember correctly—were sitting behind me, and suddenly one of them brought it up.

  I didn’t join in at all, but I listened halfheartedly, the way most people do when they’re bored in math class.

  “Like The Matrix?”

  “Or like, a coma. They say people in comas live years in a dream before waking up.”

  “But if I’m asleep, how would I be able to think I was in a dream? Shouldn’t that cancel itself out somehow?”

  “Nah, that’s the genius of it. You question it, and that only supports the idea.”

  “How can my dream have science in it? And calculus? What about you? How can you have an entire life that I don’t know about right now? How can I even learn new things if none of this is real?”

  “Maybe you make it up as you go along?”

  “I must be a damn genius, then! Too good to be wasting away like this, that’s for sure.”

  Conversations like this get sidetracked very easily, and soon enough it dissolved into something else entirely.

  But often when you keep quiet and keep to yourself, you have the most time to think about what’s being said. And I remembered, sitting in class that day, and saving the idea for later. Just as a reminder to myself: if life ever seems odd, maybe it’s not even real.

  And lately, I was wishing it were true. Maybe not for me, since I’d evidently spend the rest of my days in an eternal sleep or computer simulation, but for everyone else.

  At least they still had a world to live in.

  IT WAS a cold morning, and now that I was alone for the first time in a while, I was feeling reluctant to follow the expectations of the past. That is, I had given up on trying to wear clothes I thought were nice and just threw a comforter around my shoulders and huddled it around me like a cape while I walked downtown.

  To say I was alone was not an exaggeration either. The angels, perhaps following with the exit of their lords, had left Burlington while I slept. Though somewhere in my mind, the part still hoping I was just having a long and disoriented nightmare, thought it a sign. First the radio had been all in my mind, and next, perhaps the angels themselves.

  Maybe this city was actually full of people right now, still whole and breathing, and I was nothing more than a cold girl in a comforter stumbling about the parting crowds.

  But either way, I had to accept the reality of the situation, even when it rarely made sense. I had one last terrible, terrible suspicion infecting my mind with worry, and I had to follow up on it before I left this lake for good.

  There wasn’t any noise this morning, besides the waterfowl’s cries, and again I found myself retreating to the abstract fantasy that I was just going for a pleasant walk on the beach—not surveying the ashes of my arson with a grudging sense that I knew exactly what I was going to find.

  And there, in the impossible ashes of the plastic tents and fiber sleeping bags, were the indisputable signs of a growing community, of a past life and of a lost hope.

  But mostly, there were ashes. And no bodies.

  It was bizarre, downright, somehow the first happening in so long to truly give me pause: Was this real? Could this actually have been a camp of humans? There was no way to tell, that’s what really got me. I had no idea.

  There were no bodies, but the tents had been arranged organically, I could remember. The angels had shown up late, the sand seemed to have caught fire—all things that made me think the impossible. Could I have just killed hundreds of humans?

  It seemed impossible. The angels didn’t need me. They would have done it the
mselves, the moment they realized the settlement was out there. This was all a trick by Gavreel, a game for him. But I would never know. I never wanted to know.

  Perhaps it was the mood I had woken up in, or perhaps it was the mood still left from last night. But it took me a long while to cry. And then it was over very, very fast.

  Somewhere in my mind, a slow and mocking piano began to play a couple lines of an unknown melody, then ceased with a fading tone.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time I had heard music in my head.

  But today I didn’t have the radio—I had left it, finally, back in the studio. And as the last note died, I looked up and found my reflection in the eye of an angel.

  It was a familiar face, I suppose, though I found no comfort in this fact. It was that same deer-angel creature that I had spotted before spying on me. I suppose, as another thing that had been harassed by Gavreel, we were on the same side. But then again, it was a giant one-eyed deer. And I wanted nothing to do with it.

  “And that song, folks, was ‘Naval’ by Yann Tierson. Lovely piece right there, truly. Next, we’ll be featuring a particular composer I’ve always had a fond ear for—”

  The voice came and went with a flicker of static and a particularly nostalgic noise that tended to accompany electronics shutting off, and I fell again on the sand, lying on my blanket and curling up in a ball.

  “Today’s forecast looks sunny. Not a chance of rain! This summer’s looking to be a record breaker in good weather for sure, if such a thing exists.”

  I rolled over on my back, staring at the cloud-cloaked sun until my vision went green, and was once again greeted by the round face of the deer-angel peering over my body. An old classic song started playing quietly.

  “Shut up,” I told it, and I threw a fistful of ashy sand at its eye. It simply closed its eye and backed off, blinking rapidly.

  Everything went quiet.