Angel Radio

by A. M. Blaushild

  “This is ridiculous!” I said finally, getting very tired of having to do everything around here. I dug yet another lighter out of my pocket and lit it in front of her face.

  It worked like smelling salts. Her eyes snapped open, and her pupils contracted at the sight of the fire. Then she blew it out.

  “I’m trying to attain oneness here! What are you doing, Erika—trying to burn me to death?” Her voice was higher pitched than I remembered but still very welcome. She then looked around at the room behind us. “Oh, so you are. What exactly is going on here? Why are you in Eden?”

  “To save you! From… yourself I guess. Look, you need to get out of here.”

  “The Metatron explained everything. I will save everything if I just focus hard enough. You need to get out, though—this place certainly isn’t safe for you! I need to get back to sleep.” She leaned back and banged her head against the wall. “What?”

  Was it possible she didn’t actually know? That she had forgotten she was an angel? Surely that sort of thing was impossible. But she definitely didn’t seem to understand how dire our situation was.

  “The Metatron is deteriorating from illness. We have to get out before they turn into a carapace.”

  “How did you get here? Or even find Eden? I’m supposed to be the chosen one….”

  “I had Fex bring me here. Come on. We have to hurry.” I couldn’t help her to her feet, but I motioned for her to get up, and she did so. “I can’t really walk anymore. Can you please help?”

  “Of course.” She still seemed rather unhappy at my presence, but she lifted me and let me lean on her shoulder. She was frowning all the while.

  The floor was mostly burning in patches, and with a bit of painful hopping, we made our way to the “not yet but soon to be on fire” chamber where Fex and Gavreel were. But they were no longer stuck. Fex was mostly gone, writhing on the floor. Gavreel seemed too weak to really flee, but had backed as far away as he could.

  “How could you let this happen?” yelled Gavreel as he caught sight of us. He looked particularly angry, especially since his true form was starting to leak past his human shape—and he had the sharp teeth to match.

  “At least I got Midori.” I tried to motion to her, but of course she was still holding me up. She had gone oddly blank as she took in the state of the other two angels and did not respond to my comment.

  “Yeah, but that’s rather pointless because you evidently forgot to off the already infected one!” I wasn’t really sure what Fex was or what he was doing at this point, but he certainly was oozing a disgusting mush of goo from his body.

  “I’m sorry you two got stuck standing still for like an hour. Obviously I wasn’t going to wait around and watch.”

  “Waiting is—was—your job! If you had some patience, you might have had the sense to not let any of this happen. What were you doing anyway? We knew you, you know. We knew you were communing with the Metatron. So were we, in fact. Did you honestly scamper the whole way outside just to uselessly get information we could have told you?”

  “You were just standing there—and, like, come on, multitasking is a virtue.”

  “It’s not,” Gavreel yelled. He seemed reluctant to do anything else. “Now finish Fex. And take the other girl’s place, for our sake!”

  “She’s not taking my place. I earned that. I’m special,” Midori said. She pointed weakly between us. “Erika isn’t. There’s specific guidelines and rules. She just wouldn’t work. Only me.”

  “You’re dead,” said Gavreel. Midori didn’t seem to interpret his words literally, however, and just looked offended. “Now do it already!” He pointed harshly to me.

  I had dropped my bat in the fire room. But I always had more lighters. I motioned for Midori to lower me down, and she dropped me to the floor. I inched over to Fex and cautiously lit him on fire—his body was not catching, however, and I eventually found that only the fleshy parts of him were willing to burn. But it did make him stop thrashing about.

  “Sorry,” I said quietly, in case he was able to hear it. I mean, it wasn’t like he had to die right away. He was probably going to live through the burning for a good couple minutes as long as he kept to his human shape.

  There was a moment of silence as Fex combusted. Gavreel then let out a groan. “Hurry up and replace her!” He gestured angrily toward Midori, who backed off and looked ready to run back to her chamber.

  “Midori, wait.” She had yet to help me up, but I moved toward her feet and sat there. “You can’t fuse with the Metatron. You don’t fit.”

  “Fit? It was these two”—she gestured to the still burning Fex and the huddled over Gavreel—“who came to get me in the first place! And put me here! And they said that I was special, and then they said it too, in a voice like a million people, whispering in my ears. I was born for this.”

  “You’re dead. Literally.” I suppressed a very inappropriately timed laugh at how cliché this was sounding. But it was reality, I guess. “You’ve been dead the whole time. You’ll cause more harm than good if the Metatron wastes all their energy on trying to fuse with you.”

  “What? That’s outrageous!” she said. “You just want to be more than I am. You’re jealous, and you don’t want to be alone again either.”

  “No. I do think you’re the best match for this. I really do. But I think you were the best—and now you’re just an angel in the body of the best match for the Metatron, and you’re very confused about it. Please pick me up before my feet catch fire.”

  She grumbled, and she looked down at her hands, and I had to wonder if she’d known all along. But she picked me up and rested me on her shoulder anyway.

  “So you’re going to do it? You’re going to become the Metatron?” She had accepted defeat far quicker than I think I would have if I were in her shoes.

  “No. I’d hate for that to happen. Besides, if I did that you’d be stuck out here alone again.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “Out. This whole place is going down in a few minutes. Might as well start walking now before it’s too late.”

  She smiled again, looking uneasy and unwell, and she wasn’t really breathing. But her body was giving off heat, and when she caught my eye both of our smiles widened a bit more. I don’t think either of us was really that angry at the other after all.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  I really had missed her.

  30

  “I HAVE no idea what you did to your ankle.”

  It was maybe ten minutes later, and we were outside. Though the narrow inner halls of the Metatron made it difficult for Midori to properly support me, that struggle was soon alleviated by the seeming collapse of the white shell that normally protected the Metatron. The walls were thin enough that we could walk right through them like cobweb, and we settled down in a nearby field.

  “Didn’t you stuff spiderweb into the last cut I had? That ended up healing fine.” My ankle had already swelled up, and there seemed to be no way for me to hold it that didn’t cause me to cringe.

  “Sometimes the fastest way to heal from something is to believe you already have,” Midori said. Then she paused. “But no prayer or crystal is going to fix this. There’s a hospital in town and hopefully not all of the painkillers have expired. We can also grab you a cast, a crutch, a wheelchair—whatever you need.”

  She moved to pick me up, but I resisted her and stayed on the ground. She gave up right away and settled down next to me.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m not leaving here right now.”

  “Your foot is inflamed. You need some relief medication and proper bandaging to prevent infection.”

  “No. That can come later. Right now I need to fix this.”

  “Waiting?”

  “Technically. Why don’t we use this time wisely? Please, I want to know about you.”

  “I was a Seraph. And I am disgraced,” she said heavily.

  “Fex figured as
much.” I sighed. Was he really dead? It hadn’t quite sunk in yet. I guess I was still clinging to the possibility that he, being a crazy supernatural slash extraterrestrial slash whatever, somehow had evaded death.

  “When we Seraphim are born, we are blessed with an extraordinary amount of power from the Metatron. We can’t eat or sleep, and thus have no way to create or preserve energy for ourselves. Instead the Metatron grants us a very finite amount. We use it not only to survive being temporarily separate from the Metatron, but also for any other problems we have to face—shape-shifting, for example, requires an immense amount of pure energy. We have to account for the transfer of mass and various whatevers that make up our chosen form.”

  “Where does the Metatron get their energy from, then?”

  “The other lesser angels feed us. Many live purely for the purpose of feeding us. Should I stop referring to the Metatron as ‘us’? It is proper, but it seems to be confusing you. We—the angels we—carry over any consumable matter to the Metatron, which they then absorb over however long. It’s a slow process, so the Metatron requires a great deal of food to keep their energy levels high.”

  “Right. Back to your story. What does it mean to be disgraced? Fex refused to tell me.”

  Midori looked down. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  “Is this one of those ‘can’t or won’t’ scenarios?”

  “I mean it entirely. I can’t remember what I did. The Metatron’s consciousness is a singular one, and is built from the thoughts that we retrieve for it. I was one of the scouts. We were sent to Earth to essentially see what we could see—the Metatron was very weak at this point, and could only provide energy for maybe ten of us, and even that left them struggling and on the verge of death. But they had to do it. It was common for scouts to be disgraced, and they had to send as many as they could muster.”

  “Is this from space? You’re from space, right? Like from another planet?”

  “No. Not really, I think,” she said slowly. “Anyway, one day I was depositing my mind back with the Metatron, and that was that—I never got my memories back. Normally, you see, the Metatron will basically copy our thoughts and return them so that we can further use them to survive. But I simply came to with nothing more than my basic inborn knowledge of what I was and the realization that I was disgraced. I can’t even recall my time scouting. I’m just working off that assumption.”

  “And so you just killed a girl and took her place?”

  “Not at first. The Metatron doesn’t reabsorb us once we’re disgraced. We’re too corrupt for them. Instead they leave us to run out of energy and die. There are rehabilitation programs. Simple work that, if you prove yourself worthy enough, will earn you the right to move up the ranks until at last the Metatron will welcome you back to them. I didn’t bother with this. I couldn’t stand such lowly work. I killed Midori when I began to run low on energy. I knew she was a proper genetic match for the Metatron the moment I possessed her body—and I considered that a boon. It made it a lot easier to puppet her limbs around.”

  “Surely that isn’t enough to survive on, though?”

  “It’s not. I didn’t have enough to do anything special after that. I couldn’t exactly shape-shift when I was possessing a body anyway, but then I used up all my spare energy when I had to fight off Kasos. She was going to kill you, and there was nothing else I could do. I’ve been running on empty for a long time now, and you know what? I’m scared of death. I don’t want to die alone. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’ve been so desperate—I thought that by pretending to be just a regular human and then striving to perfection, the Metatron would accidentally reabsorb me into themselves. Then we’d continue to look for a suitable human. It’d be fast and cause no harm. I didn’t realize that process for perfection and reabsorption were so different.”

  I didn’t have anything more to ask her about her past. But of course, the pressing matter of the future was still at hand.

  “What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Well, the Metatron’s first and primary purpose is homeostasis, like with every living thing. All the angels are swarming back to help fight the infection, as well as replace damaged tissue with their own selves. They’re in a full shutdown mode, and they won’t be searching for a human cure until the current crisis is resolved.”

  “But isn’t finding another human the only thing that will let them refresh themselves and actually remove the disease?”

  “It’s the ultimate, but brute force works too. This function is expected to only kick in for much minor infections. They weren’t expecting for it to reach so far in or spread so fast. But their basic survival instincts don’t differentiate these situations so well, and it comes down to whatever seems most pressing—and that’s removing the pain.”

  “That doesn’t sound too smart.”

  “Everyone makes bad decisions, Erika. We just want to live. Though…,” said Midori with a quality of voice that suggested a sudden transition. “That reminds me. I want to apologize for how I’ve been acting. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m mad at you, or hate you. It’s quite the opposite. I’m just… stressed.”

  “Please, it’s me that should be apologizing. I’ve been remarkably rude to you too. You weren’t really around to hear me say any of it—or think it, actually—but I think I’ve been holding you in a rather bitter part of my heart after you left. So I guess I don’t quite have a reason to apologize, but I’d like to do it anyway. After all, you don’t really need to say you’re sorry either.”

  “I don’t?”

  “It’s no skin off my back that you got a little grouchy. You were scared and you were dying, and you got a little irate as it started to go to your head. I’ve acted worse in my life. Not to spare the last few days—just a couple hours ago I was having a full-out emotional attack or whatever I’m supposed to call it. And before that I evidently hallucinated a whole slew of things. I think I might be crazy.”

  “You don’t need to apologize for that. It’s not your fault. And I mean, you’re admitting it to me right now. Isn’t admitting you have a problem the first step to solving it? I’m sure you’ll figure yourself out one way or another, and I’ll be standing beside you the whole time through. So don’t feel so bad.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t feel so bad about anything you’ve done either.”

  “Again, same to you.”

  “So I guess we’re both agreeing… that we shouldn’t hold ourselves so responsible?”

  “I mean sometimes our problems are definitely our faults. But some things are innate and others can’t be helped, so yeah, that’s about right.” The best way I could describe Midori’s face was “welling up with emotion.” It was an odd face on her, but not one particularly terrible. It just made me mimic her. “So I guess what I’m saying is this: I’m responsible for some of my problems, but not all, and you’re saying that I shouldn’t beat myself up about it. Right. Okay. And the same to you.”

  “We should move on.”

  “But to where? If the Metatron succumbs to their illness, the void lands will spread all over the planet. We will be unable to live anywhere.”

  That was a problem, wasn’t it? “Can’t you use your angel sense to, like, sniff out another human? I’m not above tricking someone into fusing with the Metatron, you know.”

  “That seems a bit morally low.”

  “I mean, if I’m doing it for your sake, it’s still okay, right?”

  “Uh… not morally. Sort of iffy. But I agree with you—I would much rather live with that on my conscience than be without you. The only problem is that I have no way to sense humans. We’d have to hope one or two of them are just nearby, which is a mix of incredible odds and statistically likely factors. The void is growing, and anyone still alive would be pushed by its spread in this direction.”

  “Oh man, I’m just realizing—if the void lands started around the opposite of here, that’s like, southern
Asia right? So everyone there has to be dead. I mean, there’s a whole ocean in the way.”

  Midori expressed her thoughts through a shaky hand gesture that conveyed her mixed feelings. “We’re not good with water. I can’t say for certain anything much. You are correct in that we arrived there first. But I’d actually doubt that the carapaces even reached the islands. It’s hard enough to convince an angel to cross a large body of water, and we’re in possession of all our knowledge about the potential benefits.”

  “Then how did the disease even reach us here?”

  “The same way it starts, I’d guess. We are very complex and yet very simple organisms. The Metatron, when they first decided to send out their angels and begin the renewal process, was not yet at risk of the disease. But we knew of it, and thus we were working in anticipation. The disease normally is born at the same time the Metatron is preparing to fight it, as they create a massive amount of angels, all at once, the risk of one of them being born wrong and infected grows higher and higher. If the Metatron has plenty of energy, infected angels are immediately culled. But one or more easily end up slipping past, and eventually succumb to their illness and become carapaces.”

  I had turned around at some point in her explanation—or really multiple points. I wasn’t entirely happy with all this waiting around. Far off, but less so than before, the void was advancing and swirling like the living storm it was.

  “Do you think I could just burn the void lands?”

  “You’d burn everything underneath it too. And I’m not even sure that’d work.”

  “I don’t know. When doesn’t it?”

  She paused. “Rarely. But it’s still not a good idea.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Burning the world down might not be a good plan, whatever. But wow, we’re really running through our options, huh? What’s next? Do you think if you finished killing the Metatron, all the carapaces and angels would die?”