by S. M. Reine
“I loved James,” Elise said. “Always.”
Betty’s brow creased. She picked at the edge of the makeshift bandage. “I probably knew that. I just wish you’d told Anthony. Even if you didn’t love him, you liked him, didn’t you? Wasn’t he your friend? He deserved better.”
It was like a slap to the face.
“I guess he did,” Elise said, swallowing hard around the lump in her throat.
“When we get out of here, you need to apologize. Promise me you’ll apologize.”
“I don’t know if we’re getting out of here.”
Fierce optimism burned in Betty’s face, even now. “Just promise.”
“Okay,” Elise said. “I promise.”
Elise watched over Betty as she slept through the pain. It didn’t matter whether or not Elise remained vigilant, but she feared falling asleep too much to relax. When she dreamed in the garden, she was never quite sure that she would wake up again.
They had climbed into the lower branches to escape the dampness of the tepid pool, and the Tree grumbled in deep, wordless voices as Elise settled in. Betty was using a pillow of moss to rest her head with her knees curled to her chest; one foot stretched out to touch Elise’s, toe-to-toe, as if she needed that reassurance.
As Elise waited, keeping one eye on Betty, her mind wandered. And she found herself thinking of Adam.
When she had first entered the garden, His touch had been agony. But it was getting easier all the time. She wasn’t sure if something about Him had changed…or if it was Elise doing the changing.
She almost wanted to touch Him again to find out.
It wasn’t His fault that His touch was sensory overload. It had been bad ever since He had entered the Origin and became omnipotent. Trying to concentrate that much power into a physical form was bound to have side effects.
If Elise concentrated, she could almost see the contrition in His eyes when He realized how much He had been hurting her when they kissed. She could hear the way He had whispered, I’m so sorry, Eve. And she remembered her heart breaking into thousands of pieces.
Wait.
The Origin? What was the Origin?
Elise couldn’t possibly know when Adam had become God. It predated her first visit to the garden—hell, it predated all of humanity.
Which meant she had been having Eve’s thoughts.
Stomach churning, she climbed to the edge of the branch and looked down. The white door was waiting for her, as always. It was flat to the ground, facing up, so that she could have jumped and landed on it.
Elise hadn’t gone through the door yet, so why was she losing herself to Eve?
“Metaraon,” she whispered into the quiet of the garden.
He stepped from the bushes below to stand beside the door.
Betty stirred, rolling onto her back, bandaged hand cradled against her chest. Elise cast a glance toward her before climbing down the Tree.
She stood opposite Metaraon, the door between them.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to kill Him,” Elise said. “But I need my swords.”
“Out of the question.”
“Do you think I can kill Him with my bare hands?”
“If need be,” Metaraon said. “I’m sure that you can accomplish wondrous things, given the…proper motivation.” His eyes flicked to the branches above.
Elise’s shoulders tensed. “If either of you touches her again, I’m going to—”
“Stand idly by and watch us kill her?” Metaraon laughed bitterly. “You prefer to allow your friend to be tortured than walk through a door. I’ve never seen such cruelty in a human before.”
Elise circled around the door to face Metaraon. “Give my swords back to me.”
Metaraon swept a hand toward the Tree.
“I’ll show you where they are.”
He led her down a dark path between the roots. The cavern underneath the Tree was as misty as it had been on her last visit. Metaraon led her down another path to the other side of the lake, far from James’s body.
When they reached the bottom, he pointed at the amber lake.
“This lake is a mixture of sap from the Tree, the waters of Mnemosyne, and ethereal blood,” Metaraon said. “It feeds the entire garden, including newborn angels, as you can see. Whenever possible, we retrieve the bodies of our fallen and return them here so that their matter can be recycled. We also dispose of our waste here. The clothing you wore into the garden was thrown into this lake—as well as your swords.”
Elise stared into the murky depths of the fluid. Her reflection on the surface was inky-haired and pale-skinned, as if Yatam were staring back at her.
“You threw my falchions into a lake of tree sap,” she said.
“Metals are slow to be consumed. If you’re lucky, they’re still somewhere at the bottom. Of course, inhaling too much of this fluid is likely to plunge you deep into insanity.”
The memory of having her head shoved under the surf sent chills rippling over her exposed skin.
Her swords were gone, devoured by the Tree.
But that had been her only plan for saving Betty.
“How will I kill him without my falchions?” Elise murmured. She didn’t mean Adam.
Metaraon slipped past her, the tips of his wings whispering on the stones as he walked. He bent to whisper into her ear. “Get creative.”
Elise turned to watch him glide up the path toward the surface.
Get creative.
A spark of inspiration bloomed in her mind.
If she didn’t have the weapons she needed to kill Metaraon, then she would just have to get help.
“Thanks,” Elise said.
Metaraon had already left.
But she wasn’t the only person staring into the amber lake.
A female figure stood on the far shore. She seemed to glow faintly in the mist.
There should have been no other women in the garden—it was in quarantine, Adam’s prison, and all previous brides were dead.
The woman turned, gliding up the path between the eggs.
Elise bolted around the shore of the lake, cutting through the razor-edged ferns. She was fast—very fast, even without darkness to carry her—but the lake was much larger than it appeared.
By the time she reached the other side, the woman was already walking out into the garden again.
Elise chased.
She stepped out of the cavern to find the woman sitting just a few feet away, skirts pooled over a stone bench. Elise slowed to a stop.
She had been prepared to find Lilith lurking in the garden—maybe even prepared to fight her, if she had to. But she hadn’t been prepared at all for the woman she found waiting.
It was her mother, Ariane.
“It’s you,” Elise said.
After running into her mother in the City of Dis, Elise could no longer be surprised at the places that Ariane would show up. Neither she nor Isaac had ever been too concerned about rules, quarantines, or silly things like mortal peril.
Ariane telegraphed her emotions with every line of her body, from the hesitant tilt of her chin to the curve of her bottom lip, and the way she drew her shoulders toward her ears. Elise could tell that Ariane was worried, maybe even fearful, but not surprised. She had already known that Elise was in the garden.
“What are you doing here?” Elise asked.
“I am only a dream,” Ariane said, speaking her native French, just as she usually did with Elise.
“Bullshit.”
“How can you be sure? Sometimes we are in a garden, sometimes in a city, and sometimes on Earth. It’s possible you are imagining me now, too.”
“I’m sure,” Elise said. “If I was going to dream about anyone, it would never be you.”
Ariane flinched, hands clutched to her heart. “I see.”
“Don’t tell me this is a rescue attempt.”
“It’s not. I’m sorry. Metaraon bro
ught me here so that he can keep an eye on us.”
She frowned, trying to understand the connection between her mother and the archangel. “Why would he need to keep an eye on you? What were you trying to do?”
“Escape him.” Ariane’s shoulders were tense, extruding muscular lines on either side of her neck. “Permanently.”
There was a lifetime of history in those three words—the implication that Ariane would need to run from Metaraon, as if he could have some kind of interest in her, but Elise couldn’t imagine why. Metaraon didn’t think much of mortals. He had made that more than clear.
“So the fact that you’re here has nothing to do with me.”
“No…I wouldn’t say that.” Ariane squared her shoulders, as if steeling herself to deliver unpleasant news. “While I was serving in the City of Dis with your father, we received many transmissions from the Union. One update warned us of a prophesied convergence—a point on which destiny hinged. Or, rather, a location.”
Elise lifted her eyebrows. “And that location was the garden?”
“No, a village called Oymyakon. The prophecy said that you would be there soon. Very soon. You’re only one part of the convergence, however; we are all drawn toward it. Even me—and I had done my best to escape. That is why I am here. You and I, Elise, we are being drawn toward destiny.”
“But if I’m supposed to be in Oymyakon, then that means…”
“You’re going to escape,” Ariane said simply.
Elise glanced around the garden, afraid that He was watching. The Tree swayed above them. Adam didn’t appear.
“How?” she whispered.
“The solution is simple, if not easy,” Ariane said, reaching out to take her daughter’s hand. “Walk through the door.”
Elise shook off her mother’s grip. “Did Metaraon tell you to say that?”
“No. But you must do it. Walk through the door, let Him start over, and when He is luxuriating in His new life…” Ariane sighed. “I never wanted this for you.”
“How do you know about the door? You can’t know, unless you’re colluding with them.”
“Colluding is a harsh word, my daughter,” Ariane said. “But Metaraon tells me many things now. We are…very familiar.”
She stood, and her dress fell around a huge stomach.
Elise’s eyes widened.
She had said that Metaraon wanted to keep an eye on “us”—not Ariane and Elise, but Ariane and her new offspring.
It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.
Elise was surprised at how angry the sight of her mother’s pregnancy made her. Her parents had abandoned her when she was fourteen years old, like she was too much of a burden for them to bear, yet went on to conceive another? And with an angel?
“This is fucking bullshit,” Elise said.
“I can explain.”
“What? That you fucked up with your first kid and thought you could try again?”
“This isn’t meant to be a replacement,” Ariane said.
“Then what is it? A mistake?” Elise asked. The words lashed at Ariane, making her flinch.
“You were planned, Elise,” Ariane said softly. “But not by Isaac and me. Metaraon asked us to make you, so we did.”
“You knew that I would be the Godslayer.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know how much I would love you.” Ariane reached out for Elise, but she jerked away from her mother’s touch, angry heat pooling in her stomach.
“You didn’t think you would love me? Your own daughter?”
“I was sixteen, Elise,” Ariane said. “Sixteen is a stupid age. My concept of marriage and parenthood was little more sophisticated than a child toying with her dolls. I made oaths I had no ability to understand. And when it came time to surrender you…I did what I had to.”
Elise had been about to walk back under the Tree again, but that phrase stopped her.
I did what I had to.
That was the same thing that she had told Betty.
Ariane wasn’t done speaking. She fidgeted with the skirt of her dress, seeming to choose her words carefully. “Consider this, my daughter,” she said. “Your life has been orchestrated by greater powers. All of it. There was never any doubt in Metaraon’s mind that you would come to this point, in this garden, at this destined convergence point. He has invested everything in you.”
“But I escaped. I was gone for a long time.”
Ariane shook her head. “No, Elise. You weren’t.”
“For ten years—”
“No, Elise,” she said, more forcefully than before. “Metaraon knew where you were the entire time.”
Elise frowned, trying to understand what her mother was telling her. “James and I…” She let the beginning of the sentence hang in the air between them, but didn’t finish it. As soon as she said James’s name, a spark had lit in Ariane’s eyes. “What are you saying?”
“I wouldn’t dare suggest anything,” Ariane said. “But you and I have much in common.” She suddenly looked old, so old, and so very tired. She sat on the bench again. “We have been used, Elise.”
“James didn’t use me,” Elise said.
Ariane cupped her cheek. She didn’t say anything else, but the warmth in her eyes spoke volumes.
Having her mom touch her like that sent her back to the time when she had still found comfort in her mother’s company. After so long in the garden, after so much of Adam’s torture, she desperately needed that comfort again.
Elise rested her hand on her mother’s stomach. The baby stirred at her touch. It felt strange for the skin to bump and jitter underneath her fingers and know that there was something alive in there, like the eggs underneath the Tree.
“I did make a mistake with you, Elise,” Ariane said softly. “I made a thousand mistakes. But what’s done is done, and I cannot fix the past. You’re an adult now. Your destiny is in your control.” She rested her hand on top of Elise’s. “This one—this one, I want to keep.”
Elise didn’t feel angry anymore. She was too numb.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“I agree.”
“I’ll get both of you out of here. You and…” Elise trailed off, rubbing her mom’s stomach. Ariane, Betty, a baby—she had entered the garden thinking she had nothing left to lose, but it only got worse by the moment. “Nobody’s going to use you anymore, Mother. I promise.”
“Walk through the door,” Ariane said gently. “It’s the only way.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” she said, “Lilith told me.”
VIII
RUSSIA – MAY 2010
Babushka’s house stunk of thick, cloying pipe smoke. It made the air in the tiny living room suffocating, which was stuffed with a broken couch, bookshelves, and a TV, despite its size.
A pair of teenage boys struggled over a GameCube controller. Malcolm’s new friend—who had introduced herself, extremely reluctantly, as Alsu—shoved past the boys, blocking their view of the TV. They flung their arms in the air and shouted protests.
A single look from Alsu silenced their complaints.
“Who’s this?” asked the first boy, who had just lost his game.
“Pizza delivery,” Malcolm said brightly.
Alsu looked pained. “Stop being lazy and go outside, children.”
She pulled Malcolm into the kitchen.
From the outside, the entire building had looked hardly bigger than a garden shed, so Malcolm was amazed to see a half a dozen centenarian women jammed in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Their voices rolled over each other as they chatted, building to cacophonous white noise. There wasn’t even a pause when Alsu shoved Malcolm into the one empty chair at the table.
“Now this is more like it,” Malcolm said as one of the women set a plate in front of him.
“I’ll be right back,” Alsu said before stepping into the back hall.
Dozens of eyes watched Malcolm as he dug in, inhaling the pasta as
fast as he could manage. It made his stomach cramp to eat so quickly, but it was too delicious to pace himself.
“Did you want some?” he asked his watchers, cheeks bulging with food.
The women whispered among themselves.
He finished the pasta alone and started on the next plate of food that they gave him. Malcolm didn’t get far before Alsu returned to the kitchen. “She’ll see you now,” she said.
Malcolm shoved a potato into his mouth. “Right now?”
“Right now.”
He followed Alsu out of the room.
It had to be some kind of temporal rift that allowed four bedrooms to be situated behind the kitchen. At least one of them seemed to have been converted from a broom closet, and it was probably the most attractive of all the rooms; it was the only one without stained, forty-year-old wallpaper.
Alsu took him to the rearmost bedroom door. “She’s very old,” she said. “Speak up and show respect.”
He swallowed his last mouthful of food and winked. “I know how to handle the ladies, trust me.” Potato flecked from his lips as he spoke.
She sighed and pushed the door open.
Until the moment that Malcolm stepped inside Babushka’s room, if someone had asked him to describe the smell of death, he would have said that it had no smell at all. The piss and shit a body purged while dying certainly had a smell, and so did perforated intestines, and blood spilled in large quantities. But death itself had no particular odor.
Yet the instant he walked through that door, he could smell that Babushka was about to die. It was a stale, grim odor, like the air inside a mausoleum that hadn’t been opened in centuries.
Babushka herself was probably old enough to have found the invention of horse-drawn carriages frightening. The trenches on her face were stained black with smoke. The slivers of her lips were pursed into a permanent, wrinkled pucker, probably thanks to the pipe that she was currently filling with fresh tobacco.
“I don’t like any of this,” Babushka said as soon as he entered.
