“What do we do now?”
“Go outside.”
There was a rumbling just then, and we both slid as the floor tilted. There was an aesthetic change in the Metatron, and I could feel the energy in the walls—they were healing. Almost on instinct Midori and I began to run with little regard for anything. We dashed right past the chamber that held Fex and Gavreel, and out of the corner of my eye, I swore they were both alive. But at once I found myself feeling very little about the situation that was their lives, and I continued running without another thought of them.
There was something in my mind now, a greater sense. Before I had heard the voice of the Metatron—but now, I did not. I just knew the voice. There were no words, anymore. Just feelings. A side effect, I suppose, of what I had given up.
By the time we had made it out, we were both exhausted. The fingerlike appendages had moved again, and with a series of poorly planned and fairly dangerous jumps we made it to the ground and fled through the ever-thinning walls of silk that coated the Metatron.
We didn’t stop running until we were far away, out on a grassy knoll and looking down at the Metatron. They almost looked like some sort of maggot—a dark shape, lying in the folds of rotting white, helplessly stuck on the ground. On the other side, the darkness loomed.
“Will they be okay?” Angels from all over were still heading to protect the Metatron, and no matter where I looked there was movement. Midori seemed caught up in it too—she stared restlessly at the rivers of angels, perhaps wishing to join their numbers.
“Of course. The Metatron will not die. I simply won’t stand for that.”
“So what do we do?”
She looked at me and sighed, but it wasn’t really a fed up sort of sigh, much more an affectionate one. “Nothing, Erika. The Metatron will care for themself.”
“So what’ll they do?” I still wasn’t used to the idea of waiting and watching. I couldn’t help but feel like I was supposed to have a greater part in all this: like ride an angel into battle and wield a shining sword. Not sit on a hill, among flowers.
“Fight. Sort of. You lost some mass. A little goes a long way. And some mind—again, a little goes a hell of a long way. The Metatron will use their new boon of energy to fight off the infection, and while they will probably not recover, it will certainly be progress.”
Down below, far away enough that it looked like nothing more than a delusion, the Metatron was stirring. And snapping. And clacking and clicking and writhing and growing, and slowly, and carefully, they unfolded their body.
“So they’ll fail? Will I have to lose another part of myself again, after which they’ll fight and lose again, thus creating a cycle of loss? Was there any point to this at all?”
I couldn’t be sure if the Metatron was bipedal or quadrupedal, but they seemed to have a lot of limbs. Arms, it appeared, and many of them. But they were not yet standing up, just shaking and scratching at their indigo skin.
“Don’t be ridiculous. They won’t and can’t fail. They’ll fight the infection as long as they can, and build up immunity. It won’t be a cure-all. Maybe they’ll just leave and sleep for a couple hundred years. Or maybe there’s still another human out there, and they’ll use them.” Midori eyed me warily for a second. I had a feeling, like I usually did, that she knew more than she was letting on. “They know you’ve lost enough already.”
But I didn’t feel like I had lost anything. In fact, I felt quite content. Ironically, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt so at ease. There was still the nagging feeling I should be doing something, but it wasn’t strong enough to drive me to action. As a matter of fact, I really only seemed to care about the ultimate fate of these things by principle alone, with very little having to do with my personal feelings. Was that what I had lost? My empathy? I could sense the Metatron in my veins, but something in my mind kept me disinterested. It was no longer a surreal existence, that angel soul. It was a new normality.
“I don’t know. I bet I could go another round with the Metatron if they ever need me again.”
“And again, and again, and again—I wouldn’t let you, you know. You could keep going, and they could keep removing more and more of you, and you wouldn’t mind a day. But as someone who is not you, I’d notice, and I doubt I’d care for the changes very much.”
“So they decided to remove any malice? Figures, I guess.” I cycled idly through my memories, trying to notice any gaps. But I couldn’t. Everything seemed in order. I guess that was just another side effect of the process. I had an impression something was off with my memories, but I was unable to place what.
Down below, the Metatron peeled off its skin, shedding layer after layer until there was a simple shape of light. And then—arms and fingers and hands and some elbows, but mostly just arms. And then from its back, blossoming like flowers, wings erupted from the top section of its body. There were twelve pairs total, placed on the long serpentine body like segments of a spine. The hands quieted their movements. The body settled. The light looked like fur, and from every gap there were eyes, and while the body never stopped moving, it began to cycle from arms to eyes to light, over and over again.
But the wings stayed the same.
“They… look much stronger than I would have thought possible,” said Midori, and she looked at me with great worry. I didn’t share her concern. I was doing fine. Keeping and restoring the health of the Metatron had been my duty, after all.
It began to move—how, I do not know. But it was on its way, and I suppose it could have been flying. On the other side, the darkness was doing something, but it was too dark to discern what. And while all this was very odd to me, it was all at once also very familiar, and I realized I didn’t really care that much about it. They were going to fight. All right. What next.
Midori still seemed stuck on the Metatron, still longing. Her beautiful hair caught the wind in a way that deserved some sort of poetry to be written about it.
“What are you going to do when all this is over? Return?” I asked.
“Die.”
“Are you, honestly?”
“In a long number of years. I have enough energy to sustain me for that long.”
“Oh. In that case, me too.”
“I’m sorry, by the way, for pushing you into the Metatron.”
“Oh, you were right, though. They wouldn’t take two of us at once. I don’t mind.”
“No really, I’m sorry.” She seemed much more emotional than I was about it.
“Honestly, I’m thankful.” I smiled despite myself, which felt like an inappropriate response. But Midori smiled back. And then I laughed, and then she laughed, and neither of us was sure what we were doing or why. But we were laughing and crying and smiling, and I fell back on the ground and held my stomach and looked at the sky, still covered in angels. And Midori fell down as well, but she misaimed and fell on my face, and we both laughed about that for ages.
And then I got up again, and I looked absentmindedly at the battle behind me, but I was not at all invested in it. I was really looking at Midori, and as she sat on her knees, I leaned over and kissed her forehead, and we laughed about it, and then I kissed her on the lips and neither of us could laugh about it, even if we tried very, very hard.
We fell over on the grass yet again, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My ribs ached and my knuckles creaked. And far off, something was burning and something was growling.
Above us, the angels continued to fly. The sky was clear and chilly, and my eyes were watering. But then again, all of that, everything in the world, may have just been a result of our laughter. I curled up against Midori and held her in my arms, the grass bending beneath our bodies and nothing in the sky paying us any mind.
I kissed her again.
“Funny,” she said. “Very truly funny.” But she meant it in the way of peculiar, not humorous. I couldn’t be sure what she was talking of—the Metatron or us?
We paused again.
Or rather, I did.
“Like a movie.”
Our laughter had never quite ceased, and I don’t suppose it ever could. The only thing that could happen would be the intervals spacing out over hours and days and weeks. But it stopped there, and it paused as I did.
“What’s a movie?” I had to ask.
And Midori paused too.
Friend to dogs, writer, cult fiend, and part-time wage slave to the illuminati, A. M. BLAUSHILD has an understandable lack of free time. With an attitude best described as “naively cheerful,” A. M. has only recently been thrust toward the adult world, and her peaceful optimism is still going strong. Subsiding on possibly the world’s worst diet, A. M. is driven to write more than most humans should—she has been accused more than once of being a robot. Though she desperately tries to write a diverse portfolio of subjects, but angels tend to get tangled in there fairly often. She seems to have some sort of weird thing for cults as well, and boy, nothing really pumps her up like a good old-fashioned angel cult. When she isn’t off adding to her manuscript collection, A. M. enjoys long walks in the pitch black of night, the company of friends and cats, and wearing cute clothes.
E-mail: [email protected]
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Angel Radio Page 26