Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (33 page)

The train slowed to a stop. Citizens moved in and out of the train cars as the station announcement resonated overhead: “Welcome to the Central Cathedral Station.” She and her partner jumped down onto the train and slunk toward their hiding spot for the next segment of their journey.

She caught a glimpse of Campbell walking across the square right out of the front doors. “What a joke,” she thought to herself. People, not knowing who he really was, would think he was just another visitor or even a worshipper. However, they would never know the truth. She did not even understand the whole picture. One thing she knew with certainty. There would be no telling how the general population would react if they knew of the truth of what she had learned in the days after Campbell recruited her.

The maglev whirred to life and began to slide away from the station. The agents securely hidden away, they headed back into the LTZ to pick up the trail of Evangeline Evans and the Dissidents.

FORTY-NINE

Jack and Felicia had been travelling for a few hours when the refuse vehicle reached the outskirts beyond the LTZ. The next leg of their journey included a ride in the windowless cargo hold of a smaller transport vehicle. The only accommodations for sitting were metal benches suspended underneath the storage racks along the sidewalls. Felicia, almost as if by routine, placed her small pack at the end of one of the benches and laid down, propping her head against her pack.

Jack followed her example and sat down on the opposite bench. He tipped sideways when the transport shifted into gear and pulled forward. He caught his balance with one hand against the bench and the other hand grabbing onto the shelf over his head. A few minutes into the journey, he gave in and let gravity pull his body down to rest on the cold, metal bench. He tried in vain to rest, but his mind was racing with thoughts of Evangeline’s level of safety. He massaged the bridge of his nose in an attempt to get past his exhaustion enough to sleep.

By the glimpse of sky he had caught moving from one transport to the next, it was the early morning hours before dawn. Jack had nodded off for a few minutes at a time in the back seat of the refuse transport, but each shift in direction or bump in the road startled him awake, like tipping backwards in a chair.

He was losing hope that Gideon had found a lead on Evangeline in the few hours since he had rushed out of his home. The silent communicator in his pocket revealed nothing, good or bad.

He ceased rubbing his face when his eyes caught the blurred image of Felicia reading a book. He pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on to make certain his tired eyes were not playing tricks on him. He had only ever seen one other person reading a physical book in lieu of reading from a display or tablet.

The tattered and worn book looked like it had been dropped in the mud, bitten by a dog and stored in a knife drawer. The spine showed the signs of repeated use to the point that the printed title was illegible. The pockmarked cover bore the image of an ancient man and woman sitting in an austere pose. It did not have the same signs of age as a few of Evangeline’s acquisitions over the years. Jack guessed someone printed and bound the book sometime in the last ten years. He and Evangeline had seen similar objects among the antique stores they enjoyed browsing on lazy days off.

“What are you reading?” Jack asked. His interest was genuine. Evangeline’s love of books had fueled his own fascination with printed material.

Felicia looked up from her book. Jack had sat back up on the bench and had put on his most non-threatening smile that he could muster. It was not Jack’s night to win ladies over with charming smiles. His fatigue made his smile look more like a leer, and his natural social awkwardness made him come across as a creepy stalker who had run into his quarry in a club.

The uneasy expression on Felicia’s face told him enough - the smile was not working in his favor. The wary look in her eyes gave him the distinct impression that she could kill him in less time than it would have taken to answer his simple question. However, a few seconds after the question had escaped his lips, her face softened from the stern demeanor she had held since they had met.

“
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen. It was written before the Great Recovery,” she answered with a spark in her eyes. “Have you read it?” Jack was surprised by this sudden turn in her mood. He made a mental note that discussing antique books was a sure way to get on Felicia’s good side.

“No,” replied Jack, feeling embarrassed. “I just noticed you were reading a printed book, and not digital. The only other person I’ve ever known to read paper books is my wife. Even my family in the LTZ only read from a display. She picked up the habit from her parents. It’s a pretty expensive hobby!” He was relieved at the upswing in his mood.

Felicia’s face went dark and she furrowed her brows. “It’s a
hobby
that more people should take more seriously!” she snapped. She hid her face behind the frayed pages again.

Several awkward minutes passed. Felicia’s eyes darted between Jack and the pages of her book, while Jack studied the book’s cover in an clumsy attempt to be casual. She huffed out a breath and sat up, digging around in her pack.

“I have another one if
you’d
like to make better use of your time than just staring at me,” she said, retrieving another book from her pack. She held it out an arm’s length in front of her and waited for Jack to take it.

“What is it?” he asked, reaching out with a slow hand. He was wary from her sudden mood swings and was not sure if the book was a peaceful offering or a trap that would cut off his fingers the moment he touched it. He had seen what Felicia had done to the Angel - he would not put such a tactic past her.

He could make out the faded image of a cartoonish robot on the worn cover. He opened it to the title page.

“
Isaac Asimov’s Selected Works
,” Jack muttered under his breath.

Jack had heard of Asimov from his days at the academy. He remembered the lectures on how Asimov had written the three laws of robotics and created the rules of artificial behavior. The rules that, according to his stories, prevented robots from causing harm to human beings.

In all his years at the academy, he had never read any of Asimov’s stories. He never understood the value of such ancient tales until he married Evangeline and she introduced him to a love of the printed word.

Felicia had returned her attention to her own book while Jack had sat on the bench visiting his memories.

“We still have another few hours to go. It’ll help you pass the time,” she said with a smirk on her face. “It was once said that people learn by doing, watching, and reading. So, you might actually learn something from it,” she finished, glancing at the book in his hands.

Jack looked up from the book and was surprised to see she was smiling at him. The kind of smile that indicated he was not in on her joke. With little else to occupy his frantic mind, he leaned back against the headwall of the transport and opened the book to the first story.

FIFTY

“Like I’ve already said,” Kevin said with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders, “there’s no means of communication in or out of here. We can’t afford to let any signals be triangulated to our position. But, I assure you, your husband is in good hands. One of our best people went to check on him once it seemed necessary to bring you in.”

Evangeline could not hide the worry etched across her face. She had not spoken with Jack since she left their home to go visit Daryl in the Crisis Unit. “I’m just so worried about him, B.B.,” she whispered. “Jack’s not a soldier, he’s a programmer. He invents games, creates holographic children, he doesn’t know any self-defense. What if your soldier didn’t get there in time? What if he died because of something
I
got mixed up in? I could never forgive myself.”

Evangeline felt as helpless as a paper boat in a hurricane. In the dark recesses of her mind, she wondered if she should have denied herself the allure of Jack’s boyish charms. She felt cursed. The man she adored with her entire soul may have fallen victim to dire circumstances because of her ill-fated life. She wondered if she had denied herself the joyous future she saw in Jack’s eyes, would he have spent the last few years oblivious to her existence, but safe in a life untainted by her damned life.

She blinked the moisture building under her eyes back into her sockets and picked up the small wheat muffin from her tray. Picking at it, to give herself something to do, she ate the muffin one crumb at a time. Kevin sat across a small table from her, eating his own breakfast and watching Evangeline after every other bite for signs of her mental condition.

Evangeline and Kevin were in a mess hall of sorts, seated at a table against the sidewall while they ate their breakfast. Until Kevin had offered her something to eat, Evangeline had not noticed how hungry she was. She had been so preoccupied with worry over Jack that her mind glossed over every one of her physical needs.

The ham and fried eggs with diced melon on her plate revived her mind and body. She half-listened to Kevin telling the story of his alleged death and resurrection. He had been on a routine patrol in the northwest LTZ near the textile district when he responded to reports of a dirigible that had crashed several miles short of its landing platform. He and his wingman were the closest units available, so they had flown over to assess the situation and render assistance if needed.

“I would have told you all this in person, but you had been on your first off world assignment for about a year. I couldn’t risk sharing any of this with you in an unsecured transmission, and given your history in the eyes of Olympus, I couldn’t risk sending you an encrypted data stream.”

Evangeline absently sipped her orange juice, nodding at certain parts of Kevin’s story.

“What I found out there fundamentally changed my entire belief system,” he said, staring off into space, lost in the memory.

The look on Kevin’s face, a combination of awe and horror, pushed everything further than their small table away from Evangeline’s attention.

“I don’t know if you ever knew this,” he added, “but before I tested for the TRTV program I considered a life in the ministry; to spread the teachings of the Angels.”

Evangeline’s memory flashed to the religion that had developed after the arrival of the Angels, but would have never guessed that B.B. had considered making it his life’s work.

A caravan of a few thousand Angels had escaped their world, light-years away, from enslavement by a sect of their brothers who no longer adhered to the teachings of their faith. The dark sect desired for power and wealth over the welfare of their people.

Although the Angels had arrived from a distant world, they were nothing like the science fiction aliens created by literature and the entertainment industries. Angel refugees considered themselves blessed to have found Earth, a place inhabited by their spiritual brothers and sisters, a place where they would be free to live by the teachings of their faith. They taught that their entire purpose for existence was to serve all others created by God, both Angel and Human. All they asked for was a place where they could live out their days in the service of their God.

The Angels never spoke of their home world in great detail, but they did share that it had endured long periods of cloud cover. The lack of direct sunlight resulted in their skin pigmentation to fade and disappear, giving them the pale skin, white hair, and blue eyes known to their race.

The Humans of Olympus, on the other hand, had once consisted of various ethnicities, ranging in skin tones, hair, and eye color. After centuries of inter-breeding, the predominant features of Humans were a medium brown skin tone, hazel eyes, and medium brown hair. There were still variations in the levels of pigmentation, but for the most part the ancient genetic divisions of the so-called races had long since disappeared out of the necessity for repopulation.

After the Angels had arrived, and began integrating with Humans, they started to share their religious beliefs with anyone willing to listen. They taught that there was only one God in the universe, and all living beings were created in his image, which explained why Angels bore a strong resemblance to Humans. The variations in gene pools and environments had resulted in the subtle differences in appearance.

Evangeline’s birth happened centuries after the arrival of the Angels, so their presence had always been a matter of fact to her. She never understood the difficulties and hardships that had existed before their miraculous arrival.

There had always been a shortage of labor in the LTZ. Crops were lost because there were not enough people or machinery to harvest all the food. Goods and services were hard to come by due to the lack of available workers. Rampant illness plagued the population. The Great Recovery restored the basics of civilization, but the recovery did not cure the diseases that had evolved during the decades of chaos.

It was feared that the Angels would die once exposed to the naturally occurring diseases to which humans had developed immunities, or that the Angels had brought their own unknown diseases that could wipe out humanity.

In fact, the opposite turned out to be true. The Angels had an incredible immune system. Once exposed to any disease, they became immune within days, if not hours. Cures developed at an alarming rate, saving thousands from the slow, painful death from diseases thought to be incurable.

People had become healthier within the first generation of the Angels’ arrival. Harvests continued to improve year after year and the quality of life began to increase. The Angels were superior to Humans in every way imaginable. Angels had become such an integral part of society; no one could imagine life without them.

Evangeline had not heard the rest of Kevin’s story of his interest in the ministry. He sat across the table with a patient smile on his face waiting for her mind to return to the conversation.

“I’m sorry!” she exclaimed, and she cleared her head as she tried to recall the last thing he said. “What did you find at the crash site?” she asked with a wave of her hand, brushing away her flashback.

“I found Angels, dozens of them, among a handful of Humans. And most of them were already dead by the time we arrived.” The image brought to Evangeline’s mind the face of the dying Angel wrapped in a blanket with the back of her skull missing. She shuddered and tried to repress the image by focusing her attention on Kevin’s story.

He took a sip of water and continued. “That’s not the strangest thing I came across that day. One of the surviving Humans, a man, caught my attention while my partner was scouting the rest of the debris for survivors. He motioned me over. I found him impaled on a piece of the balloon’s frame. I’ll never forget it. His breathing was ragged, but there was a panic in his eyes, unlike anything I had ever seen before.

“I started to get the first aid kit off my pack, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward his face. He was trying to whisper something to me.” Kevin’s voice lowered as he relived the memory. “All he said was ‘Hide them, please. You must set them free.” He paused to swallow and take a breath. Evangeline was so wrapped up in the story she had been holding her own breath, and she also pulled in a deep lungful of oxygen.

“He was a Dissident, wasn’t he?” she asked, putting down her cup. “That’s how you were recruited by these people, the Dissident’s, isn’t it?”

Kevin’s eyes smiled at Evangeline, but she did not get the joke. “What’s so funny?” she asked. Kevin took a sip from his cup, thinking about how to answer her question.

“The Dissident Movement,” he said, gesturing in the air toward the room at large, “was a fabrication by the Quorum.”

Evangeline stared at him in disbelief. His words conflicted with everything that had been taught to her about the Angels, the Dissident’s, and the history of Olympus. “What do you mean by a
fabrication
?” she asked.

Kevin leaned forward, scooting his chair closer to the table with a weary smile. “The
Dissidents
didn’t exist until about thirty years ago, even though public records and news recordings suggest otherwise. Those who you know as the Dissidents were just a bunch of zoners who had a stronger than average distrust of the Quorum and began to see patterns emerging on Olympus
and
in the LTZ. The Quorum created an fictional enemy to preoccupy the public mind from taking notice of what was really going on around them.”

Evangeline’s eyes rolled as she sat back into her chair. She wanted to spout the arguments drilled into her from school, but after everything she had witnessed first-hand in the past few days, she could not deny the itch in her mind. She wanted to believe her old trainer. She trusted him with her life, and she saw no signs of fanaticism in his eyes. Kevin watched Evangeline for signs of her acceptance of her new reality, while Evangeline waited for Kevin to lose the charade and tell her the truth. They stared at each other over their empty food trays for several minutes, each of them pushing their facts and arguments into the others’ brain by the sheer force of will.

Just then, on the other side of the room, the mess hall doors swung open. Jack and Felicia emerged, and Evangeline could not help but cover her mouth to prevent her lip from quivering. Jack did not bother to pretend to be as strong. His eyes glistened as he navigated his way through the sea of tables and chairs.

“Told you he was in good hands!” B.B. called out after her.             

Evangeline bumped the table, knocking over her cup as she stood up. She ignored Kevin’s comical outburst as he mopped up the juice that had poured off the table and into his lap.

Jack and Evangeline collided in the middle of the room in a fierce embrace, ignoring the confused stares around them. They hugged, kissed, and cried into each other’s necks for several minutes. Felicia stood a few feet behind Jack, her arms folded, rolling her eyes at the display.

“Ah-
hem
,” she faked a cough.

Jack and Evangeline gave each other one last tight hug, and then Evangeline took a minute step away. She brushed the tears away from her eyes with one hand while never letting Jack’s hand out of the other.

“Let’s take this over to Turner, shall we?” Felicia asked with a wry grin. Jack’s cheeks flushed, but he never took his eyes off Evangeline. She led him back over to Kevin, who sat there with orange juice dripping all over the sleeves of his shirt and soaking his lap.