Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

  From the left wall, the one that led to the outside, there were strings. They were stiff, and I had a feeling it was a bad idea to touch them. They seemed to be pulsing with energy. They ran at all heights and angles, but always went from the wall to the inner structure.

  “You would not enjoy the result of touching the supports. Though….” He looked wide-eyed at the nearest one, and seemed poised to grab it himself. He caught himself. “It would harm us,” he reminded himself. He then reached up and grabbed the orb of light to extinguish it, and began leading me again.

  “So what are they?”

  “Supports. They connect the Metatron to the outer wall. They’re extensions of ourself. While we must enter the inner sanctums to return back to the state of the Metatron, those that do not need to cease to be separate beings quite yet can simply rest on the wall and deposit their memories in that way.”

  “Does the Metatron have a physical form? I’m sort of imagining it as some sort of… giant ball of light at this point.”

  “Yes, very much. We have a single shape. We can’t even change shape.”

  Light began to filter in through the darkness in a very organic manner. I didn’t even notice it at first, but suddenly I was aware I could see my hands and the slightest outlines of Fex’s face. I couldn’t quite place where the light was coming from, though it seemed to be somewhere ahead of us.

  It began to get brighter and brighter, but stopped when it was about as bright as an early winter’s dawn.

  The shape to the right was not quite consistent, nor was it quite as dark as I had thought. It was rough and bumpy, and as we walked it curved multiple times. It had a certain semblance to something, though I couldn’t quite place what. It too seemed to be glowing, though, a sort of purple, sort of green, and sort of blue light that did little to illuminate.

  “We’re here,” said Fex suddenly, though we seemed to be nowhere close to anywhere.

  He had mostly loosened his grip on my wrist when it became bright enough that I could avoid the support strings on my own, but now he grabbed me tightly and pulled me to the inner shape, following its perimeter carefully.

  “Is there a secret entrance?” I wondered aloud.

  “There will be guards from here on out, and we’d best not alert them of our presence. As Midori has been placed in the Vask, all angels have ceased their search mode and have defaulted to protection of her. They will kill you.”

  “Or at least, try to.” I tightened my grip on my bat and walked a bit more deliberately.

  “No, they will kill you. In Eden, you are too close to the Metatron to stand a chance. Everything is alive and everything will attack you. You must remain unnoticed until we arrive at Midori’s location.”

  We rounded what was sort of a corner and sort of a long curved structure. It was an outcropping of sorts, with a series of stonelike steps leading up to a tall and narrow opening. It seemed unguarded, but I let Fex walk ahead to check.

  “No one is around,” he said. “I’m on edge about this. There should be Seraphim this close to the Metatron.”

  “All the better, then.” I jumped up and walked rather unsurely into the dark hole—it was again pitch black, and smelled odd. Fex knew exactly where to go, and he made me speed up.

  “I’m worried about one thing—” he started, but a voice from behind me interrupted him.

  “Me? I really hope you’re not scared of me. That’d be a shame and rather odd.”

  Fex had stopped suddenly, but when he turned around to answer, he seemed to speak with more irritation than contempt. “I was referring to some sort of ambush. Afterward, I would have brought up the subject of you in this way—’also, wouldn’t it be annoying if Gav showed up?’ I don’t fear you, obviously. I’m just rather annoyed that you were lying to Erika and feeding her a ton of false information. And generally acting bizarre.”

  “What, can’t I have a little fun while I’m alive? My job’s boring enough as is. No harm in screwing around a little. And besides—I found Midori! As in, our perfect match. That was all me.”

  “Technically I found her, thank you very much. I saw her first.”

  “I talked to her first.”

  “She liked me best.”

  “Definitely not!”

  “Boys!” It was odd, on second thought, to break their quarreling to refer to them as something they were not in the slightest. “I think you’re both forgetting that it doesn’t matter who ‘found’ Midori—she’s a threat to you either way.”

  “A threat?” Gavreel said, painfully confused.

  “She’s something like… an infected angel possessing a human corpse, bent on getting back into the Metatron. We’re here to remove her.”

  “What? Really? That’s wild. Uh, I guess I was going to ask what you were doing here, and possibly fight you over it, but I guess I really can’t argue with that.”

  “That’s good,” said Fex. “Where are all the guards?”

  “I already called them to assemble down in the Vask rooms. Intruder alert.” Even in the darkness, I could make out the faint lines of Gavreel shrugging. “Called it right when I saw you enter. I’m not ‘evil,’” he said with what seemed to be his attempt at air quotes. “Just doing my job.”

  Fex sighed. “Just go away already.”

  “Wait,” I said before Gavreel could move. “I’m just remembering—when we first met, you shot a deer, right? Why didn’t you want me to touch it?

  “Just messing with you.” He shrugged again. I wondered where he even learned what a shrug was. “You moved slow during those first couple weeks. Me and a buddy were just experimenting with possession of dead animals, and you startled me. Had a good laugh about how confused you looked afterward.”

  “Oh. What was your friend’s name?” It was weird to think angels could even have friends, honestly. Weren’t they essentially friends with themselves, then? Fex and Gavreel didn’t get along perfectly, essentially meaning they didn’t get along with themselves. It was probably best not to overthink individuality in the context of angels.

  “Mnyeph.”

  “That’s a pretty cool name, I guess.”

  “Is it? Do you think my name is cool too?”

  “Is it any longer than Gavreel?”

  “No. Does that matter?”

  “Are you guys going to stop making idle chitchat any time soon or am I going to have to physically lift Gavreel up and place him very far away?” Fex said.

  “I can move very far away on my own, thank you,” Gavreel said. “Do you want me to call off the guards or not?”

  “Like I can’t do that myself.”

  “What, in your state?” Gavreel leered. “Oh, like I can’t smell it? You reek of disease. I ought to terminate you myself, you know. You’re living on my blessing alone.”

  “And my protection,” I said. In the dark it was hard to gauge his reaction, but he seemed to take a few steps back.

  The cave, if that’s what the structure was, had mostly taken shape as a very long and narrow tunnel. Its walls had a certain ribbed feeling to them, and the ceiling was only about a foot above my head. The floor was mostly curved, leading to a dire need to walk carefully or else stumble—which I ended up doing fairly often regardless.

  It eventually opened up into a larger area with pale lights embedded in the walls, floors, and ceilings. The hard surface of the floor still felt slightly warped, but evened out until it was walkable. Nothing seemed to be here, however, besides a great deal more of the rounded tunnels we had arrived from.

  Fex and Gavreel, of course, knew exactly where they were heading.

  “Where is everything?” I asked. “Or is there just nothing here?”

  “You’re about correct,” Fex said. “There is not much here that you can know. But we have a greater connection, and we can feel the Metatron all around us. We hear them. But you lack the link, so I suppose this place feels a bit like nothing.”

  “A bit less than nothing.” We had enter
ed another tunnel, and I was once again forced to find my way by feeling the walls and bumping into Fex repeatedly.

  Luckily the tunnel was much shorter this time, and we stumbled into a small, circular, and red room.

  “Here we are, then. Vask.” Fex was still leading, and he stepped forward into the room. I noted how he had yet to touch anything—no doubt worried his infection might spread if he did.

  There was a long period of silence. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to enter, but Gavreel slipped by and stood next to Fex. They both stood in utter silence with blank looks on their faces. I was ready to ask what was happening when I realized: they probably were using telepathy to communicate with the Metatron, or at least the other deployed angels.

  I nervously walked down to them. Neither of them was so much as blinking, and with a cautious sense of mind, I explored a bit. The room was very red; the sort of candy-colored shade most often found on the painted walls of dinky fast food joints. The walls were smooth too and had the faintest reflective quality to them. There were little paths leading between the odd shapes of the walls, to various other rooms.

  The first room I dared to pop my head into was exactly the same as the one I was in, though with a more blue-gray color to it. But the next one was strikingly different. For one, I could see the angels clustered inside it—though to say they were inside it wasn’t wholly correct. They were it, bodies sticking about halfway through on every surface and wings stretched out from the interior.

  But far on the other end was another important, strange, and beautiful sight: Midori. She too was partially in the wall—and though my vision was obscured, I could make out how her body was coated in a weblike material that stuck her there. She was not sitting like I had imagined her to be—cross-legged, calm, and awake—but she looked rather like she had been thrown there, with her legs askew at odd angles and her head limp and facing the floor.

  I wanted to run over and check out how she was doing, but I didn’t feel safe trying to reach her with the angels in the way, and I returned back to Fex and Gavreel.

  They hadn’t budged. I sat on the floor and waited. It wasn’t particularly cold or warm in the room. It wasn’t particularly anything. The interior was unremarkable, the only sounds were ambient nothings, and there wasn’t even a smell to the place. It was wholly boring, enough so that I found myself yawning.

  What was keeping Fex and Gavreel? Were they arguing? If Gavreel had ordered the angels into Midori’s room, surely they’d listen to him when he made them leave. And Fex was—well, at least he’d act as backup to whatever Gavreel was saying.

  But it surely couldn’t keep up for long. The black bubbling of his skin was starting to slip past his bandages, and if any angel saw him now he was dead.

  I was considering hitting one of them to see if they reacted at this point. It had been at least twenty minutes before I had gotten fed up enough that I returned to the room Midori was in, took a good look at the feathery floor, and walked through it with great care.

  The eyes of the angels did not turn to watch me. They looked vacantly ahead, distracted, and I made my way to where Midori was.

  It was a little raised platform, and I sat across from her. I crossed my legs, and I lifted her head and looked into her glassy, dead eyes.

  “Hello? Midori? Are you still in there?”

  28

  MIDORI DID not answer me at first, or really, at all. She continued to lie there as unmoving and unbreathing as, well, a corpse.

  But she couldn’t be dead. Wasn’t all of Eden supposed to die with her? Wasn’t the whole world supposed to crumble with her death? I held her head in my hands and lightly shook her. I took her pulse. I checked her breathing.

  There was nothing.

  The room behind me was still full of angels, but they were still stuck in their obscure thoughts. I was the only thing stirring in the whole of Eden. But I wasn’t going to give up. That had always been something I had been proud of, wasn’t it? My tenacity? And to walk away from all this, to give up now—well, it certainly would achieve nothing, to say the least.

  Most of Midori’s body was covered in thin webbing, and it held her firmly against the wall. I regretted dropping my knife back at the motel—the web turned out to be very stretchy, but nearly impossible to break. It took a good minute to snap a single strand, and while I had time to spare, I couldn’t be sure I had that much.

  I settled on freeing her head and hands first, and then seeing if I could just drag her away. Her hands and arms came undone after a bit of work, but her head refused to unstick itself. When I leaned over to get a better grip on the web that was keeping her so firmly in place, I discovered why she wouldn’t—and couldn’t—budge: the back of her neck and bottom of her head were melded right into the wall.

  I traced the area she was stuck on with my fingers. The wall behind her seemed to be pure rock—or at least, a very hard material with some resemblance to rock. It didn’t seem capable of absorbing part of her head.

  But of course, I had already seen the exact same thing on the angels. They were all stuck about halfway through solid surfaces too. But somehow it seemed startlingly scary when the same thing was happening to a human—or at least, something in a human body.

  I could free Midori’s body as long as I cared to, but it wasn’t going to free her mind. Fex had said that their chosen human was going to have to fuse minds with the Metatron. So Midori was alive. Just attempting to fuse with another consciousness that was technically already herself.

  There was one other terrifying implication I had come to realize as well: if the angels and Midori could simply move through the walls, well, they definitely weren’t just walls. They had to be organic. And they had to be alive.

  The Metatron was in Eden, and Eden had simply been the white casting for this: a giant, hollow nest of angels.

  I ran back to the small room where Fex and Gavreel still stood, still looking lifeless. Out of curiosity, I couldn’t resist pushing gently on Gavreel, and found him light enough that he fell right to the ground. He didn’t get up, and I hoped he wasn’t going to have some way of remembering this.

  Fex was looking worse, blacker and more hollow. I promised myself he would be fine for a little bit more.

  The mere fact that I was likely inside some sort of giant organism freaked me out enough as I made my way outside—though it was unlikely it was truly alive, acting more or less like a storage unit for memories and energy of the angels. It was still just way too creepy.

  It was a lot less time to get out than it had to get in. That was probably thanks to the lack of the boys slowing me down, and my sudden realization that it was faster to just run through the tunnels than carefully step it out.

  The entrance to the Metatron was a curved and angular little outcropping, with the roof jutting at a sharp angle and the floor keeping almost flat. From the lightly shaded interior, I could make out a series of jagged rocks.

  And when I stepped fully outside, I was on what was like a small pile of rocks, uneven and random, but when I took my lighter out and walked along their edge, they began to resemble something else entirely.

  I took a few steps closer and raised my light ever so slightly, and found myself looking at a dark shape, one that was very hard to make out, so much so that I almost made myself pretend I couldn’t recognize it—but I could, and I was done lying to myself.

  It was a face, mouth open, eyes empty, and I was standing on its interlocking fingers. For a body of angels, it sure looked human—but never quite exactly, and it had a very uncanny resemblance to something much more animal or unknown than a true human.

  But it sure freaked me out, and that was enough to make me want to flee, but there wasn’t anywhere to go but out or in, and neither way seemed appealing. I ended up choosing the pathway that didn’t involve going inside a giant body in the end, though I knew I couldn’t exactly leave Midori on her own like that. I just needed a quick respite.

  Or, I guess, I coul
d figure out a new way to save her. The supports to the Metatron ran every which way, and what had Fex said again? That they were direct links to the Metatron? That sounded like it would be somewhat helpful.

  I grabbed one of the strands with all my force, as I wanted to just get it over with already. It hurt as much as I expected it would, electric shocks coursing through my hand, but then came the second tier of pain: the mental sort.

  I did not loosen my grip: if anything I tightened it. I did, however, fall to the ground. Far too many things were flashing before my eyes—or really, in my mind, because my eyes were squeezed shut. And nothing I saw could be understood. All I saw were colors and shapes and images, and sometimes I thought I saw something I knew, but a second later I would forget what it had been.

  I continued to be bombarded with thoughts that cluttered my brain like static noise, but slowly they began to phase out, and I regained myself again. I wasn’t quite melding minds with the Metatron, but I was acutely aware of its—or their, I realized—presence. I could also sense, in a similar way, Fex, Gavreel, and all the other angels out on Eden’s outer shell. It wasn’t that I could see them, but I knew of their location. There was a sort of input about them, based on their distance and whatever information they were currently feeding the Metatron.

  The Metatron itself felt separate from this constant flow of data. I couldn’t figure out a single thing about them. I just knew they were there. It was like they were breathing down my neck.

  And watching. And listening. And then a word came to my mind.

  Detach.

  The word came to me like I had thought it. I knew I hadn’t.

  Remove yourself.

  The words were not really said, they were transmitted all at once. I knew I had heard them in the same way I knew I had heard any sound. But I had not heard them—I only had the memory of having done so, and the knowledge of what had been said. In this same way, the Metatron’s voice was not truly a voice, and thus impossible to properly define.