Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  “You’re unguarded,” the boy breathed.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice low and even. The last thing I wanted to do was frighten him away.

  His lips turned up a little in humor, yet there was a melancholy quality to it. I knew that sadness from Adriel. “Unguarded soul.”

  I ran my hand along his wing in wonder, wishing to lose myself in this softness. “What . . . what are you?”

  “I fell,” the boy said in a sweet soprano, and his eyes filled with tears. He pressed his hand in curiosity against his cheek to feel the first tear dropping, like he wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. “For vengeance, I fell.”

  “Cadmon!”

  Adriel was stopped in horror in his descent of the hill, twigs and leaves rattling down from his feet. The boy turned, his wing brushing against the length of my arm, and he called, “I fell, Adriel.”

  “Cadmon, you can’t show humans this!” Regaining himself, Adriel rushed down the hill to the bottom and then charged up the slope to us.

  “We’ve fallen,” Cadmon whispered to me, his eyes drifting to a distant point.

  “Fallen from where?” I asked.

  “From grace. For vengeance . . . for distraction . . . for love.”

  “I won’t say anything,” I blurted when Adriel came into the fairy ring.

  “He caught you,” Cadmon breathed. His eyes had come back to me, and he pressed the fingers damp from his tear to my cheek. “He was not supposed to catch you. She’s unguarded, Adriel.”

  “What does he mean, you caught me?” I asked Adriel, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of my lungs. “That was real? The flying . . . the music?”

  Adriel blanched, looking back and forth around the fairy ring for an answer that couldn’t be found there. Then he whispered, “Jessa, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Caught me? You saved my life!” I said incredulously.

  “Yours wasn’t a life that I’m allowed to save,” he said in agony, running his hands through his dark blond hair. The gold threads shined in the sunlight. “We’re fallen, Jessa, we can’t save anyone any more. You were rightfully dead, and now you’re wrongfully alive.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I’ve changed a thread of this tapestry again, and no one can find out. Cadmon, you shouldn’t have done this!”

  “Angels,” I whispered in realization.

  “Fallen,” Cadmon added sadly, closing his eyes to catch a measure of music from the wind.

  “So . . . all of your f-family . . .” I stammered.

  “Thrown from grace for violating our principles,” Adriel said in total agitation. “You mustn’t tell, Jessa! You aren’t an anchor thread of the tapestry, so they might never find out. They can’t know, not ever. The Thronos will mete out punishment . . . there could be a million ugly consequences.”

  The wind blew more strongly. Cadmon’s wings beat and he lifted high over our heads to spin. The gray of his wings blurred to the silver points of light at the tips, making the silver the predominate color.

  Hating to see Adriel in such distress, I took his hand in mine. “I won’t tell. I promise. You can trust me.”

  Cadmon floated with the wind to another fairy ring as Adriel said, “I know. It’s not you telling that I’m really worried about.”

  “What is an anchor thread?”

  “One person upon which many others depend. That’s why they are given to the charge of angels. Certain events must happen in their lives, so that what is woven matches what has been woven. But you’re human, and limited by linear time. These two things cannot exist to you.” His gaze followed his brother, who was sweeping farther and farther away with the wind. “I should not have caught you that night.”

  I pushed my hair out of my face. “Then why did you?”

  “I don’t know. I just couldn’t let you fall. But they might never know, since you don’t matter.” Something showed in my eyes at that and he shook his head to indicate it hadn’t been an insult. “You matter to your family, and to your friends, but not in a wider sense to the world. There aren’t many who matter to a great extent, but those few souls matter so much that the weaving of tomorrow hinges on what is woven today in their lives. So they are guarded souls.”

  “Not equal-opportunity angels?” I said, finding that unfair.

  He had a hint of a smile at my umbrage. “There aren’t enough to go around, and that’s not how it works. You aren’t an anchor in the turning of this world, so you have no angel. Most people don’t. Your thread was meant to come to a close last Friday night, but now it continues and changes the tapestry. Small changes can be overlooked. Yet one day your great great grandchild may affect an anchor soul in a way that is not meant to happen . . .”

  “Well, why worry? I won’t be around by then.”

  “But all times exist at once, in some place. It may be that the change to the tapestry is noticed tomorrow, and the thread of your great great grandchild will be traced back to you, back to that moment on the road when you plunged off the side. I am not allowed to interfere. Catching you was a crime.”

  The next wind to come made me shiver. Adriel looked up to the sky and said, “It’s getting late. We should get you back to your car.”

  “Is that how you know so much about me?” I asked once we were out of the fairy rings. “Like when I embellish to fit in at a new school?”

  “Your soul . . . it doesn’t darken, but it feels shielded to an angel’s perspective,” Adriel said. He slipped off his jacket and gave it to me. Blissfully warm, my chills dissipated at once. “Your soul is luminescent, so it’s very easy for me to see when a part of it shields.”

  I looked around for Cadmon, who was out of sight. “So he’ll be fine?”

  “Yes. This has just happened to him recently, the fall from grace. It’s a normal part of grieving. We all go through it. He’s trying to hear the music that an angel hears all the time. But we can only hear snatches of it now since we’ve fallen, most especially when we fly.”

  “I heard it, too.”

  “Some human souls do, the older ones.”

  As the fairy rings fell farther and farther behind us, I longed to return to them. Something incredible had just happened, and now I was headed back to my house, past the disco fish and on to a pile of homework, the mundane matters of eating and showering and sleeping. I wanted to return to the surreal. But even though it was gone, Adriel was still with me. I stepped down into the logging road and said, “Which was it for you? The reason you fell?”

  “We fall for many reasons. Mine was pity.”

  I wanted to know more, but he didn’t offer it. “Cadmon said that he fell for vengeance.”

  Adriel looked back to me in surprise. “He’s never told us, not in ten years.”

  “He came to you as a fallen angel toddler?”

  “No, he came to us as he is. We stay this way forever, or near enough. For vengeance . . . that’s terrible. Drina did something like that.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Do you really wish to know?”

  There wasn’t much else I could think of wanting to know more and he said, “You don’t have to answer. I can see it. An anchor isn’t necessarily a good soul, Jessa. Some are, but not all. In her charge was one of the bad ones. But the evil he inflicted, as a tribal leader upon his community, was not for Drina to judge. It played a bigger part outside of him, outside of those he brutalized. Other events hinged on these events. Her opinion . . . the opinion of the guardian angel is irrelevant. One does as bidden. There came a night where she was to warn her guarded soul of an attempt on his life, whisper a premonition of it in his ear, so he felt a need to conceal himself. She didn’t, disgusted at what he was doing to the innocent, and he died.”

  In disbelief, I said, “He was cruel. How can you be expected to watch? And protect?”

  “This is our role, and she spurned hers to stand by while a soul entrusted
to her care was murdered. So she fell, cast out by the Thronos, for the crime of passivity. She’s the oldest of us.”

  “The Thronos is your . . . authority?”

  “Yes. They watch the weaving of the tapestry, give us our charges, and pass down judgment. Drina is to walk this world until the last human soul leaves it, and then she will die. She is not allowed to interfere in human affairs, nor can any of us.”

  We wended our way down the logging road, the slope back out of the redwoods visible ahead. “Don’t you change things just by existing? You bought a house and that affects the seller. Investments affect the economy . . . Kishi takes classes at the junior college that someone else could take . . .” You go to school and break my heart to look at you, I thought.

  “We can live the lives of mortals who aren’t important threads to the tapestry,” Adriel said. “And less than that, in truth. We must move every few years, to prevent people from taking interest in how we never age; we can have no relationships but with each other nor have children.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “I was timeless until I fell. That was in the 1800s. I can’t be sure of when; I was like Cadmon, raging to return to our angelic music. Drina found me living in the woods after she read a newspaper article about a feral boy. She hunted me down. Sometimes those wild people turn out to be fallen angels. All of my memories are in a tumble of those years, but I do remember the first automobiles.”

  I longed to return to that music myself, and to have the memory of it reawakened even slightly created a physical ache in my body. We climbed the slope to the oak trees. When among them, I said, “You were outside my window. I found one of your feathers.”

  He stiffened. “I wanted to see that you were all right. Forgive me. That was rude.”

  He shouldn’t be asking for forgiveness when I was the one who should be dead. “And you just happened to be there when I fell off the cliff? Are you some supernatural stalker?”

  Adriel laughed quietly and opened the gate. “You’re too clever for your own good, Jessa Bright. I was flying in that area. We can darken our wings temporarily to keep from being seen. The commotion at the party caught my eye, and then yes, I followed you out. I was worried. It was so windy to be on a scooter.”

  “People think you were in San Francisco that weekend.”

  “We wanted to not be bothered. I saved one destined to die, and thus violated the law. There is little I could have done that would be more terrible. We had to decide what to do, all of us move, just me-”

  Horrified that he might be leaving, I blurted, “And what did you decide?”

  “Pray that news of this lapse never travels beyond our circle, that the new fabric woven on this tapestry is overshadowed by the greater light of the anchors passing through this world. This may be so small a change that nothing ever comes of it.”

  Within the beautiful house, music was playing. That must have been why he was in the orchestra room, listening for some piece of harp music. There was no re-creation of what I’d heard while flying, no equivalent substitution, but in nature or instruments, they could hear hints of it. Adriel walked me to the mail truck and closed the door once I was inside. Struck with shyness, I said goodbye awkwardly. The gates opened as the vehicle approached, and I pulled down to the road an utterly different person than the one who drove up it hours ago.

  The sky was growing purple by the time I arrived home. Grandpa Jack was just setting dinner on the table, his version of vegetables being a handful of vegetable-flavored chips on each plate. We ate with the news playing, and I laughed to see Grandpa Jack eating the potato and tomato flavored chips but avoiding the spinach. He put the green ones back in the bag with a shrug, muted the television for commercials, and said, “Everyone asked about you today, from one end of town down to the Gap.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “Little Lotus now, she whipped up a paste of some sort for your road rash and gave it to me. I put it on your desk. She said it will heal that up right fast.”

  I hadn’t even noticed until now how much my leg was aching. The hike hadn’t done it any good, but I wouldn’t have taken a step of it back for anything. The fairy rings, the angels . . . there was so much I wanted to ask, and I wasn’t sure if it was okay to ask it.

  Once the dishes were done and Grandpa Jack settled into his recliner to watch television in the living room, I started up the stairs. A shout followed me. “Oh, I forgot! Nash called just before you got home.”

  “Thanks, I’ll call him back later,” I said, so overcome with irritation that I forgot to duck at the top of the stairs and met disco consequences.

  “And Diego, too!” Grandpa Jack hollered.

  Wonderful. I didn’t want to talk to either of them. It had always been Downy and Taylor that boys went for in Bellangame. I was the girl they noticed after getting shot down. That hadn’t done any wonders for my self-esteem. But here I had the opposite problem, boys ditching their hometown girls for the dazzle of Los Angeles. Opening the green container on my desk, I lathered my leg in cream. It had a strange smell, yet the pain ebbed and died almost at once.

  Did Adriel like me? That was all I really cared about. He had broken an angelic law to catch me, yet . . . it could have been pity. Pity and nothing more. My heart sank. I was just his lapse. He couldn’t like me that way, not the third choice girl from Bellangame High. And he wasn’t just any guy either, but an impossibly old, beautiful, and mysterious guy.

  I had a lucid dream that night of the strike to earth that never happened. My head cracked on a branch of a tree in the plummet, so I was not aware when my body slammed onto a boulder. Death didn’t come immediately upon impact. For seconds my heart continued to beat, and the pulse of it vibrated to me watching this happen. I stared into my own staring eyes and moved back so the blood seeping from my wounds did not touch my bare feet.

  This was as it should have been. My heart beat once more and quieted forever. The silence spread like a stain around the broken body, moving out farther and farther to mute the sounds of the forest. It was this silence the searchers noticed. I didn’t know the Coopers save Lotus and Zakia, but I saw echoes of their features in relatives searching with flashlights. They looked up when the silence muted their voices and the rustles of their feet over the ground. Then they moved as one to the center of the quiet and found my ruined body. Zakia reached it first. He required no flashlight with his night vision, and the lights from the others darted about as they rushed to me.

  It was too late. I was dead.

  I watched as my eyes were closed, searchers wiping at their eyes and a stretcher soon coming. Once upon it, the body was covered with a sheet. Then I as the invisible watcher was lifted up, up, up into the trees and above to the road, to float behind the ambulance driving on the curves of Sutter. The sirens weren’t on, nor did the driver go quickly. There was no medical treatment that could help me now.

  This was right. What a sorry end! I had lived seventeen years just to die in Spooner. The body was wheeled into an elevator at the hospital and ferried down to the morgue. A doctor came forward to lift the sheet, and when it fell, I was at my funeral. Looking pale and sick with grief, my parents and grandfather cried in the front row of the chapel. The place was packed, every seat taken and many more people standing in the back. Spooner faces and Bellangame faces mingled, tissues being touched to eyes and shoulders shaking. I watched from above, hating to see everyone in such pain. I shouted at them that I was fine, but they didn’t hear me.

  This was the tapestry, the coffin slipping from sunlight into the earth, the clumps of dirt settling on the wood. My family went to a waiting car, my friends dispersed, and the cemetery workers finished filling in the grave. Still I floated above, watching them leave and wishing they could hear me call out not to be left alone. Grass grew over the dirt of my grave, flowers came and went, the trees in the cemetery lost their leaves and grew them back according to the season. In time, the flowers stopped comi
ng to my grave. I understood that my parents must have died. It was to them I mattered most, and once they were gone, I essentially ceased to exist. This was what had been planned for me originally.

  I was no one important. I wasn’t one of the people who needed a guardian angel, since my life was too small. There was something so devastatingly right about this scene, the lonely grave beneath me. People visited other graves and children played about, occasionally one or two stopping to notice that this was the grave of someone young. They wondered what had happened and returned to their lives. My only life was here in the cemetery, and I watched them go in envy, their world lost to me forever.

  When I woke up, I got out of bed. It was too much like lying in the coffin. Pulling the feather from the holder, I brought it back into bed with me and fixed my pillows so I was sitting up. No longer did the feather glint with gold, no longer was it so meltingly soft. The barbs were growing stiff, and I knew this would one day look like any other ordinary feather. That was sad.

  Sleeping that way, I woke with a sore neck. After using the cream again on my leg, I swiped some on my neck as well. Whatever Lotus had put in this cream was effective. The pain faded to gentle tweaks and those evanesced altogether. I turned my neck slowly to stretch it and heard a crack of something settling back into place. Then I walked out the door to head to school.

  I still had the sun. The Jessa in that dream, in the woven tapestry was cold in the ground. But the real one in this new tapestry felt the warmth on her cheeks. And this might be the wrong thread, the wrong weaving, but it felt right, too.

  I got to school without remembering a single turn or light. Pulling into an open spot, I lifted my backpack off the passenger seat and thought of how hard it was to go from the glory of the fairy rings to the humdrum of Spooner High School. I had the radio set to an instrumental station, and I listened to the rest of the piece that was playing before I got out. It was there within the flute in this song, the faintest remnant of what I’d experienced, and it was gone in a flash.