by Susan Ee
But my feet feel like they’re rooted to the sidewalk. I stand there, worried. Worried that it’s a trap, worried that I won’t see him again, worried that he is yet again in the hands of his enemies.
I’m so lost in all the things that might happen that I don’t hear the footsteps behind me until they’re too close for me to run.
People step out from behind buildings. One, five, twenty. They’re all dressed in sheets, and their heads are shaved.
“You missed them,” I say. “They weren’t much to look at anyway.”
They walk toward me from all sides.
“We’re not here for them,” one of them says. The top of his head is more tanned than the others’ like he’s been shaving his for some time. “The masters like to do their business in private. We understand that.”
“The masters?”
The group keeps closing in on me, and I start to feel trapped. But these are cult members, not street gangs. They don’t exactly have a reputation for attacking people. Still, I put my hand on my teddy bear hanging at my hip.
“No, we’re not here for them,” I hear a woman’s voice say. “No one has a bounty on your angel friend.” Then I see her—the woman who offered herself up to Paige.
“I guess I should have let her eat you.”
The woman glares at me as though I humiliated her by saving her life.
I pull off the bear and wrap my hand around the sword handle. It’s cold and hard and ready for battle. But I’m hesitant to use it on them. We all have more than enough enemies trying to kill us already without going after each other.
I back away from Tan Head. The circle tightens. “Are you really going to harm the sister of the Great One?” Hopefully, they believe in their own story.
“No, we mean you no harm,” says Tan Head. He reaches for me.
I step away and pull out my sword.
A hand holding a damp cloth reaches around me from behind and clamps down over my mouth and nose. The cloth reeks of something awful that shoots straight into my head and makes the world fuzzy.
I try to struggle.
I knew it was a trap. I just hadn’t realized the trap was for me.
My thoughts turn into a jumbled mess.
The sharp scent of chemicals, the burning of the fumes going down my throat—these are the last things I remember as the world fades into darkness.
I WAKE UP blinking in the sunlight in the back of a classic Rolls-Royce. Everything is sleek and shiny and polished. Big band music plays with glorious fidelity. The driver wears a black suit complete with a chauffeur’s hat. He watches me through the rearview mirror as I groggily come to.
My head feels foggy, and my nose is still full of a chemical scent. What happened?
Oh, yeah, the cult . . . I put my hand up and touch my hair to make sure it’s still there. You never know.
My hair is still on me, but my sword is not. Only my empty teddy bear hangs on my shoulder strap. I stroke the soft fur, wondering what they did with my sword. It’s too valuable for them to have left it and too heavy for them to have taken it far. I can only hope they hefted it into the trunk or somewhere nearby as proof that they got the right girl for the bounty.
My car seems to be part of a matching caravan of classic cars—one in front of us and one behind.
“Where are we going?” My throat feels lined with sand.
The driver doesn’t answer. His silence gives me the creeps.
“Hello?” I ask. “You don’t need to worry about anyone hearing us. Angels don’t like Man’s technology. They won’t have a bug in here or anything.”
Silence.
“Can you hear me? Are you deaf?” The driver doesn’t respond.
Maybe the angels have figured out that we are not as perfectly formed as they are. Maybe they’ve realized the value of some of our flaws and hired a deaf driver so that he can’t hear me enough to be persuaded.
I lean forward to tap his shoulder. As I do, I glimpse the rest of his face in the rearview mirror.
The red meat of his gums and cheeks are clearly visible. It’s like half of his face has been skinned off of him. His teeth sit exposed like he’s a living skeleton. His eyes stare straight at me in the mirror. He’s watching my reaction.
I freeze. I want to jerk back, but he’s watching me. His eyes are not those of a monster. They are the eyes of a man who expects yet another person to cringe and pull away from him.
I bite my lip to keep from making a sound. My hand still hovers above his shoulder. I hesitate for two breaths, then gently put my hand on his shoulder to tap him.
“Excuse me,” I say. “Can you hear me?” I continue to look at him in the mirror to let him know that I saw his face.
His shoulder feels solid, the way a shoulder should feel. That’s a relief, both for me and for him. He’s probably not some new ghoul that the angels have created, but a regular man they injured.
At first, I think he’ll continue to ignore me. But then he nods, slightly.
I hesitate, wondering if I should ignore the elephant in the car or if I should ask him what happened to his face. From spending time with my sister’s friends, I know that people with disabilities sometimes wish others would simply ask and get it over with, while other times, they want to be treated normally and not have their disability define them. I choose to get on with business.
“Where are we going?” I keep my voice as friendly and casual as I can.
He says nothing.
“You’ve got the wrong girl, you know. Lots of people have weapons. Just because I had a sword doesn’t mean I’m the girl the angels are looking for.”
He continues to drive.
“Okay, I get it. But do you really believe the angels will give you safe passage? Even if they don’t kill you today, how will you know they won’t kill you next week? It’s not like every angel will get a notification with your picture that says you’ve captured the girl they wanted.”
The big band music continues to fill the car, and he keeps on driving.
“What’s your name?”
No response.
“Do you think you could slow down a little? Maybe a lot? Maybe even stop for just a teensy second and let me out? There’s been a mistake. I don’t belong here. Come to think of it, neither do you.”
“Where do I belong then?” His voice is harsh and full of anger.
It’s hard to understand him. I guess it’s not easy to talk when your lips have been ripped off. It takes me a minute to translate what I heard.
I have more experience than most in figuring out what someone with a speech impediment is saying. Paige had a couple of friends with disabilities that kept them from communicating easily. It was her patience with her friends and her translations that finally allowed me to start understanding them. Now it’s second nature.
“You belong with us,” I say. “The human race.”
Isn’t this what Raffe’s been saying all along? That I belong with the human race and he doesn’t? I push that thought away.
The driver glances up at the mirror in surprise. He didn’t expect me to understand him. He probably spoke just to scare me off with his otherness. His eyes narrow as though he’s wondering if I’m playing a trick on him.
“The human race doesn’t want me anymore.” He watches me as if suspecting that I just got lucky in understanding him last time.
He eerily says the things that Raffe won’t say about himself and his own situation. Does Raffe think of himself as this deformed in the eyes of angels?
“You look human to me.”
“Then you must be blind,” he says angrily. “Everyone else screams when they see me. If I drove off, where would I go? Who would I call my own? Even my own mother would run from me now.” There’s a world of sadness behind his angry voice.
“No, s
he wouldn’t.” Mine wouldn’t. “Besides, if you think you’re the ugliest thing I’ve seen this week, boy, do you have a lot to learn about what’s going on out there.”
He gives me a glance in the mirror.
“Sorry. You’re not even in the league, frankly. You’ll just have to settle for being classified as perfectly human like the rest of us.”
“You’ve seen people more horrible than me?”
“Oh, heck yeah. I’ve seen people that would make you run and scream. And one of them is a friend of mine. She’s sweet and kind, and I miss her. But Clara’s back with her family, and that’s the best I can wish for her these days.”
“Her people took her back in?” There’s disbelief in his voice but hope in his eyes.
“It took a little coaxing, but not much. They love her, and that goes beyond what’s on the outside. Anyway, where are we going?”
“Why should I tell you? You’re just pretending to be friendly to get me to do what you want. Then you’ll run off to your friends and tell them what a freak I was. That I actually believed you might not be repulsed by me.”
“Get over yourself. We’re all in danger. We all need to work together and help each other if we can.” That sounded a little too much like Obi. Maybe the twins are right and we do have something in common. “Besides, I haven’t asked you to do anything yet. I’m only asking for information.”
He assesses me through the mirror. “We’re going to the new aerie in Half Moon Bay.”
“And then what?”
“And then we hand you over to the angels. The New Dawn members can collect their bounty—assuming the angels are in a generous mood—and I get to continue living.”
“All at the mercy of our invaders.”
“Do you want to know what happened to my face?”
I don’t. It doesn’t seem like a story I want to hear.
“They ripped it off for fun. Half my face. Skinned alive, I guess. It was the most excruciating thing I could ever have imagined. In fact, I couldn’t even imagine it before. You know what it’s like to have your life changed like that? One moment, you’re normal, the next, you’re a monster freak? Do you know that I used to be an actor?” He snorts. “Yeah, I made my living off my charming smile. Now I don’t even have lips to smile with.”
“I’m sorry.” I can’t think of anything else to say. “Look, I know it’s been hard.”
“You have no idea.”
“You’d be surprised. Just because I don’t have a problem on the outside visible for the world to see doesn’t mean I’m not messed up on the inside. That can be just as hard to deal with.”
“Spare me your self-centered teen angst. What you feel is nothing compared to what I feel.”
“Gee, okay,” I say. “You’re not at all wallowing in self-centeredness. I see that now.”
“Listen, kid. I haven’t talked to anyone in weeks. I thought I missed it, but now you’ve reminded me that I really don’t.”
The music fills the car with old-world style before he speaks again. “Why should I help you when no one bothers to help me?”
“Because you’re a decent human being.”
“Yeah, one that wants to live. If I let you go, they’ll come down and kill me.”
“If you don’t let me go, you won’t feel quite so human anymore. Being human isn’t about whether you fit in or look like the rest of us. It’s about who you are and what you’re willing to do or not do.”
“Humans kill all the time.”
“Not decent ones.”
Outside, the deserted world slides by. I guess no one wants to go near the new aerie. Word must have gotten around about that apocalypse party.
“Did you really kill an angel?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I’ve killed two.
“You’re the only one I’ve met who has. What happens if I let you go?”
“I return to my family and try to keep us all alive.”
“Everybody? You’d try to keep all of us alive?”
“I meant my family. That’s hard enough. How would I even begin to keep everyone alive?”
“If the only one who can kill an angel can’t do it, then who can?”
It’s a good question, one that takes me a minute to come up with an answer. “Obadiah West can. Him and his freedom fighters. I’m just a teenager.”
“History is filled with teenagers who lead the fight. Joan of Arc. Okita Soji, the samurai. Alexander the Great. They were all teenagers when they began leading their armies. I think we’re back to those times again, kid.”
WE WEAVE SEDATELY through the abandoned cars on the road. Occasionally, I see people scurrying away when they spot our car. It must be a strange sight, seeing a luxury caravan cruising down the road. Not that everybody hasn’t already picked an expensive car to try out, but that phase mostly ended in the first couple of weeks. After that, it was all about keeping a low profile.
The miles pass as I try to figure out how and when my escape should happen. We’re moving too fast for me to jump out of the car. Just as I decide that I won’t be able to make a run for it, we slow to a stop.
There’s a roadblock of cars up ahead.
At first glance, it looks like a mutated, multiangled scarab grown to fill the entire road. The cars are artfully laid out to make it seem as if it were happenstance, but my intuition tells me it’s probably tactical.
My driver reaches down and pulls up a pistol. I don’t have my sword on me, so I’m on my own.
I casually check the back door to see if I could make a run for it. But before I can make a move, men with guns emerge from behind the cars. Homemade tattoos are scrawled across their necks, faces, and hands. A street gang.
They come at us with bats and tire irons. One of them swings a tire iron into the windshield with a thunderous slam that makes me jump in my seat.
The glass turns white with a million cracks around the impact area but leaves the rest intact.
Baseball bats pound on the hood and doors. The gang spreads out to attack the other cars. The shiny perfection of our antique Rolls-Royce is turning into a demolition derby car.
The passenger window of the car in front of us rolls down before the men can reach it. The black barrel of an Uzi submachine gun sticks out of it.
I duck my head just as the gunfire begins. The rat-tat-tat of the Uzi is deafening even with my palms against my ears.
When it stops a few seconds later, all I can hear is the ringing in my ears. A train could be rolling by outside my window and I wouldn’t know it right now.
I peek my head up to see what’s going on. Two cult members with shaved heads and sheet dresses—one man, one woman—stand beside our car, holding matching Uzis and scanning the area.
Three men lie bleeding on the road. One fell beside a spontaneous roadside memorial. These street shrines have cropped up all over since the Great Attack. Photos of lost loved ones, dried flowers, stuffed animals, handwritten notes pouring out words of love and loss.
Fresh blood glistens on a framed photo of a smiling girl with a missing front tooth.
I had always assumed the roadside memorials were for people who died because of angels. Now I wonder how many of them died because of other people.
The other attackers are nowhere to be seen.
After a few seconds, the cult members hop into the two largest cars in the roadblock. They drive slowly into the dead cars, shoving them out of the way like tanks to create a path for us. When they finish, they jump back into their classic cars, and we keep driving.
BY THE TIME we arrive at the aerie, I can feel the fear rolling off the driver. He’s more afraid than I am, which is saying a lot.
We pull up to the side of the hotel’s main building. It looks more like a country estate than a hotel, with its sprawling mansion, golf course, and large circ
ular driveway. There are guards posted there, looking official.
My stomach turns icy at the thought of being in this place again. The last two times I was here, I barely got out alive.
The cars stop, and the cult members get out. One of them opens my door like a chauffeur, as if he expects me to step out like a lady attending a party. I slide to the far side of the car and crouch in the corner. It’s pointless to run with so many angels, but I don’t have to make it easy for them.
I kick the guy who leans in to pull me out. Now they’re starting to look embarrassed as well as scared. Eventually, though, they open the door I’m leaning against and drag me out kicking and screaming.
It takes four of them to do it, and I’m glad to see that my driver is not one of them. The guy holding me is trembling, and I don’t think it’s because he’s afraid of me. Whatever it is their new religion tells them about the angels, they must know that they’re violent and merciless.
“We’ve brought the girl to be exchanged for your promise of safety,” says Tan Head.
The guards assess me. Their eyes look like they were chiseled out of stone—emotionless and alien. The feathers on their wings ruffle in the breeze.
One of them motions for us to follow him to the main entrance.
“You can either walk or we can drug you and drag you there,” says Tan Head.
I put my hands up in defeat. They let me go but stand only an inch away, blocking my path in every direction but toward the aerie. We walk along the circular driveway to the main entrance, with every angel posted on the rooftop and balconies watching us.
We stop in front of the double glass doors. One of the guards goes inside. We wait in silence under the predatory gaze of far too many warriors. The cult people rush to the trunk of one of the cars and heft the sword out. It takes two of them to drag it across the driveway toward us.
Then the glass doors open, and several angels come outside. One of the newcomers is Uriel’s footman, the one who helped him get ready for the last party.
The men bow deeply to the angels. “We’ve brought the girl as promised, masters.”
