Something More Than Night

by Tregillis, Ian

  I wondered if the Voice of God was out there somewhere, watching over our shoulders. Maybe it was.

  They spiraled up into the lofty reaches of the Pleroma. At an altitude of several light-years, they tucked their wings and rolled over. Gaining speed, they extended their sword arms and swirled with perfect synchrony into a two-pronged superluminal corkscrew. Those muggs meant business; I hadn’t heard of them pulling out the big guns like this since the first days after METATRON revealed itself. I wasn’t the only angel to step back. Like I said, the Seraphim draw a lot of water, and there’s a reason for it.

  Down, down, down they sped, the leading edge of their assault a golden ring, a blazing razor sharper than the now that separates past and future. The spinning blades cast incandescent sparks; the searing-hot wind of the Seraphim’s passage scorched the ice plant and scoured the soil into glass. They bore down on the Nephil like a trillion-rpm buzz saw. My loose fillings echoed with the music of the spheres again. I really had to see a dentist about that.

  They hit the Nephil. Nothing happened.

  Michael and Raphael went skidding into the void, shedding clouds of silver feathers along the way. The music of the spheres became deafening static. I ground my teeth together to clamp down on the buzz. A collective gasp rose from my assembled brethren. Even with the combined mojo of all the gawkers who’d made the hike from their Magisteria to see the interloper, the Seraphim couldn’t carve the slightest scratch in the fabric of the Pleroma around the Nephil’s perimeter.

  Broken topology trumped angelic ideology.

  I didn’t know if that thing down in the shoals was conscious, or if it had willpower. But it could shrug off the Seraphim and that meant it was some mean medicine. Uriel had insisted they were handling things. But if this was their idea of taking charge, the Pleroma was in even worse shape than I’d imagined.

  Suddenly, Gabriel’s murder didn’t seem so impossible.

  I went straight back to my Magisterium and wasted no time getting very, very tight.

  14

  GUARDIANS AND TORMENTORS

  Molly pulled another blanket over her brother. She listened to the faint hint of a snore in the rhythm of his breath until she knew this was a restorative natural sleep. Then she rummaged the apartment for drugs, breathing on every vial and syringe and rock she turned up. If she poured his drugs down the sink, or flushed them, he’d assume he’d been robbed and try to steal them back. That would only escalate until it ended in disaster. So instead, an astronomically improbable—but not impossible, for she didn’t want to piss off METATRON again—confluence of cosmic rays and natural radioactivity transmuted the chemical cocktails. Even the ghostly dark matter wind breezing through the Earth contributed to the alchemy, turning pharmaceutical gold into briny dross.

  She could do many things previously unimaginable, but she still couldn’t reach inside Martin to fix the addiction. Humans were too complicated. She knew the MOC implicitly, but her expanded mind tried to leak out her ears when she considered the long ladder leading from the MOC to biochemistry. The universe was simple. People were so much more complex. No fix, no path toward correction, unspooled in her mind when she considered Martin’s plight. She knew the underpinnings of the MOC, but people were a complex emergent phenomenon. She needed more practice if she were ever to help Martin. Or Ria.

  Oh, God, Ria. Molly choked on a sob. Outside, the heightened concentration of cosmic rays ionizing the atmosphere seeded cloud formation far above Martin’s building. The sun disappeared again; shadows grew.

  Biochemical signatures were nothing compared to the pall of guilt, loneliness, and sorrow that clung to Martin like cobwebs. No, she couldn’t fix his body. But she could watch over him until his grief wasn’t deadly. Until his mind could heal itself.

  After transmuting his stash, she took a seat on the futon to watch him sleep. Just a little longer, she told herself. Just until she felt satisfied he’d have a restful night. A healing night. The hardest part was leaving the filth and the dishes and the roaches where they were. Were she still alive, she would have taken a stab at the squalor while Martin dozed. But it would do him no favors to wake from untroubled sleep to find the place unrecognizably altered. He’d doubt his sanity. And they’d be back at square one.

  The sun rose. But what day was it?

  She was losing track of time. Earthly dates were fleeting; water through her fingers. How long had she been dead? How long had Ria been hurt? She was losing her connection to her home, to herself, to the human part of herself. She had come untethered. If that continued, she might drift forever on the tides of supernatural indifference until she lost herself completely. That changes now, she told herself. It was past time she anchored herself anew.

  Molly kissed Martin on the sweaty forehead. Tasting salt and poison, she rode a slipstream of reflected shadows through the peephole and back to day-lit Chicago.

  Just as the encounter with the Virtue had enabled her to interact in the mortal realm, it also left her with an implicit understanding of how to untangle the memory fragments stuffed in her pocket. Rather, there was nothing to untangle. She’d thought of them as pieces of string, a knotted ball of yarn. But that was a human metaphor for a work of Pleroma. Physical proximity meant nothing to the fragments of consciousness crammed in her pocket: on Earth, a pair of dreams didn’t become intertwined merely because two people dreamt of the same café or the same dog on the same night. So, too, with memories. Molly wondered why she hadn’t approached the problem in that way from the beginning. It was obvious. She felt a little stupid.

  On the boardwalk, she took a bench facing Lake Michigan. It put her back to the ugly snaggletoothed grin of the crumbled skyline. Off to her left, the concert hall on its crystal pylons shattered the rising sun into a billion luminous fragments. She could hear how it disrupted the flow of traffic: bottlenecks sprouted where each piece of rainbow shrapnel forced drivers to shield their eyes. Molly wondered why the nanodiamond hadn’t been treated with an electrophoretic coating to change its albedo as appropriate. Or if it had, why nobody had bothered to fix it. Grandeur and decay.

  Molly spread the fragments on the railing before her as she’d seen in videos of magicians flourishing cards for a trick. They were intangible and thus immune to the ceaseless breeze that ruffled her hair, fluttered her coat, teased her lips. Pacholczyk’s tired indiscretion sat on top, the guilty vignette that destroyed his marriage playing over and over again. Gabriel had also taken a memory from a soon-to-be widower who had sought a Plenary Indulgence for his wife, whose descent into dementia had left her incapable of coming to church any longer. The sour-milk reek of grief wafting from that one turned Molly’s stomach. She concentrated on the joyful memories, memories of people who found solace and succor in receiving absolution for their imperfect earthly lives. Those tasted of rosewater and chimed like a toast made on fine crystal wineglasses.

  She ran her fingertips across the array of memories. Santorelli’s parish was the one of the few in Chicago granted authority to dispense Indulgences. The recipients came from a variety of backgrounds, neighborhoods, social and economic strata. The only obvious similarities were their ages, being middle-aged and older, and a reverence for the spiritual life. (Five minutes with Bayliss would cure them of that, thought Molly.) They exuded a desperate desire for piety. Some out of fear, some from a genuine desire for betterment—

  A shock jolted her. Molly yelped. She yanked her hand back and sucked on her fingertips, half expecting to taste blood. The odor of ozone burned her nose; she sat in a fog of metallic anger and hurt the wind could not dissipate. She had snagged herself on a jagged edge, sharper than a rent torn across the sky by a hot fork of lightning.

  This memory came from a woman who had been browbeaten into working toward an Indulgence against her personal beliefs and desires. The pall of dysfunctional family guilt, of emotional manipulation, lay so thick on the memory that Molly twice spat into the lake to clear the sour taste from her mouth. The
recipient was young. Almost Molly’s age.

  Wow. One of these things does not belong.

  Molly reexamined the fragment, more gingerly this time.

  … head bowed low, hot tears trickling down her face, legs aching as she kneels at the rear of the church, air thick with incense smoke and prayers of the joyous faithful, Father Santorelli’s reedy voice echoing through the nave, her father’s hand heavy on her left shoulder and her mother’s hand clutching the right, their fingers digging like talons while she cries for shame at her own weakness, angry that she let them win, that she let them drag her through this stupid pointless ceremony, full to quivering with the impotent knowledge that Father and Mother still misunderstand, that they believe she weeps out of regret for her sinful, godless ways, hating more than anything the smug confidence transmitted through their touch.

  Mother stands. Anne, she says. It’s time …

  Emotional overload. Molly reeled. That afternoon had marked a crisis point in the woman’s extremely complex relationship with her parents.

  Holy shit. What was wrong with these people that they were so oblivious to their daughter’s anguish? Molly missed her mom and dad more than ever.

  She spat again to clear the phantom tastes of blood and bile and emotional manipulation from her mouth. Anne had tried biting her tongue, hoping to find distraction and solace in the pain. Anything to keep her from crying. But it hadn’t worked, and her parents had seized upon the tears as evidence of spiritual cleansing.

  The appeal to pain was interesting. A repentant penitente? Molly explored the memory again, seeking evidence of discomfort where Anne’s parents touched her shoulders. But if it was there she couldn’t find it. Anne didn’t look at her own wrists over the course of the fragment, so Molly couldn’t check for surgical stigmata. Even if she had, the tears beaded on her eyelashes were too thick to reveal anything but the prismatic blur of her own despair. The entire situation was fucked up.

  Molly stuffed the other fragments back into her pocket. She wrapped the wrenching vignette of Anne’s life around her thumb in imitation of how Pacholczyk’s memory had twined itself about her finger. Remembering how her own memories had been altered when the Cherubim ransacked her Magisterium, she wondered if Gabriel had lessened Anne’s memory of that traumatic afternoon when he lifted the fragment. She hoped so.

  The memory tugged at her finger the moment she stood and turned away from the glare of sunrise on the concert hall. But the pull was weaker than the urgent divining-rod yanks of Pacholczyk’s guilt. Was that an artifact of distance? Had Anne moved elsewhere? Molly didn’t feel up to walking halfway across Wisconsin. She stitched together shortcuts through the Pleroma, stepping through light and shadow much as she had done to enter Martin’s apartment and similar to the way she had first stepped from her own coat closet to Chicago. With a quick succession of jaunts through the Pleroma, punctuated by hops back to Earth to check her bearings, like a swimmer popping her head above water to double-check the location of the shoreline, she zeroed in on the reluctant Plenary Indulgence recipient. Molly traversed a much greater distance in a fraction of the time it took her to track down Pacholczyk. Anne’s memory pulled her west, across Illinois, away from the rising sun.

  In the form of early morning sunlight, she skimmed low and level across a small town. She glinted from the aluminum window frames of an abandoned bank to ricochet into the parking lot across the street. Wind conjured a dust devil from leaves and flower petals and discarded cigarettes. It teetered through the lot, scraping against a wall of pitted concrete to hop broken benches wrapped in overgrown weeds. The wind withered; the devil dissipated; Molly emerged from the shadows of a boxelder maple.

  She stood in the courtyard of what had once been a small county library. The building was perched on a tall bluff overlooking a wide slow river. Sculpted concrete, circular windows, slanted skylights: the library dated to the previous century. So, too, did the funereal dirge thrumming in the turbid waters below, the sandpapery texture of residual phosphates and nitrates deposited into the soils of the riverbank. A checkerboard of farmland stretched from the river to a line of low tree-lined hills near the horizon, the fields jade and gold and ochre in the first light of the rising sun. The vista flickered with random glints of light as automated water purification modules pivoted to acquire the sun.

  The fragment looped around Molly’s thumb went slack. Anne was inside the library.

  The stiff door creaked. Her entrance set cobwebs undulating and dust gyrating in the sunlight. She’d never been inside a proper old-time library before. Not one that still had actual paper books. She hadn’t expected the mustiness, the thick scents of dust and glue and old paper. The atmosphere here carried a portentous weight, of information lumbering in printed paddocks rather than winging weightlessly through a sterile electronic vacuum. It was ponderous. This, she realized, was how it had felt to be human in the age of books.

  Her entrance drew a stare; a man stood behind a desk. Several stacks of books flanked him. The word CIRCULATION on the wall overhead had been painted over, but it bled through the thin coat of paint. He looked alarmed by her presence.

  “Um,” said Molly. Something about the atmosphere of this place made her want to whisper. “Am I allowed in here?”

  Eyes wide, he gave a slow confused nod.

  “I’m not registered here. Do I need to be?”

  The shake of his head was no slower, no less confused. He hadn’t blinked since she entered.

  “Great,” said Molly. “I’m looking for information about—”

  “We have a network,” he said. And shrugged, almost apologetically. With one last stare in her direction, he turned his attention back to the stack of books he’d been inspecting when she entered. Whatever his strange job entailed it apparently didn’t involve helping people find information. So he wasn’t a reference librarian. Of course not. Who looked things up in books any longer? That had fallen out of fashion in her grandparents’ day. The town was lucky to have a functioning library at all. Her dad had told her about how in his father’s day most towns had a library, or one nearby, but that they had fallen into disuse and neglect as information went online.

  The squeak of a cart cut through the thick silence. Anne was somewhere nearby. Molly couldn’t see her, but the dusty air sloshed in time to a trio of heartbeats. Whatever work took place at this library, only three people did it.

  Molly doubtless could have found everything she needed online. But in order to appear as if she had a legitimate reason for coming in she used the library’s network to find theological references. Maybe she could learn more about simony and Plenary Indulgences. She also sought books about what used to be called New Age topics to see if her mother’s follies could shed any light on the nature of the Pleroma. She pulled an armload of books from the shelves and took them to a table at a window overlooking the river. But it was warm and quiet in the library, the river peaceful.

  She woke some time later—the pattern of sunlight glinting on distant fields had changed—when somebody dropped a stack of books on her table. The clap rattled the table and set Molly bolt upright. The wind of the falling books felt cool against her face. The corner of her mouth and part of her chin were damp. She’d drooled. Lovely. She coughed and sputtered into her sleeve as she ran it across her face.

  “I’m sorry. Was I snoring?”

  A woman smiled down at her with hard blue eyes. Her round face was framed by short jet-black bangs on top and long lavender ringlets to the sides. Red veins rimmed the whites of her eyes. Molly recognized her by virtue of the long eyelashes; she had looked out through those same eyes when she inhabited Anne’s memory. It hadn’t seemed so voyeuristic until now. Anne wore denim coveralls over a faded t-shirt. Molly took one look and knew this woman had never been a penitente. And she had a cute smile.

  Still smiling, Anne said, “Go fuck yourself.”

  That was less cute. Molly paused in the act of scrubbing the last traces of d
rool from her face. She blinked. “Huh?”

  “How much did they pay you?”

  “I’m very confused right now.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” Anne rounded the table to loom over Molly. Molly scooted her chair back. “Did they hire you just to find me and send a report, or do they expect you to badger me until I return?”

  Anne’s voice echoed. Molly said, “Can we please calm down here? I think there’s been a mistake.”

  “Yes, there has. You go back and tell them that the next time they pull a stunt like this, I’ll change my name.” The jagged-lightning feeling prickled across Molly’s skin again. “I’ll vanish. I’ll make it so difficult to find me that they’ll spend every dime for the rest of their miserable lives in vain. They’ll die never knowing what became of their beloved only daughter.”

  Wow. This really was one messed-up family.

  “Look,” said Molly. She raised her hands in what she hoped was a conciliatory gesture. “I don’t know your parents, okay? I swear. Whatever your argument with them might be, I promise you I’m not part of it.”

  Anne glared at Molly’s pile of books. “So you just happened to wander in, wanting to read up on religion?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Nobody ever comes into the library except us.”

  “Maybe I live in town but haven’t had a need for the library until now.”

  “You’re the first person to come inside for six or seven months. He came in for directions. The woman before him needed to use the bathroom.” Anne looked her up and down. “You’re not from here.”

  “Neither are you,” said Molly. “You grew up in Chicago.”

  “I knew it. They did send you.” Anne turned back to her cart. Squeaking away into the dusty shadows, she said, “Well, you be sure to tell them they can go straight to the hell they fear so much.”

  Molly followed her past a curled and faded paper placard labeled MESOAMERICAN ART AND CULTURE. “Okay, okay. I admit it. I did come in looking for you. But not because of your parents, all right?”