Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (28 page)

A ladder was against the wall, and the code in the keypad opened a circular hole in the ceiling
. Silea went up first, looked out cautiously, and motioned for us. We climbed back to the surface and stepped out into the woods beyond the lane. Zakia’s shed was nearby.

Radeo’s
walkie-talkie made a noise and a man’s voice said, “We’re headed back there.”

“Do you have them on binoculars?” Radeo asked.

“Negative. We don’t have a view of the sky from here.”

The street was quiet.
Lifting their guns, Silea and Radeo crept back to the houses with me coming along behind. The tree cover was too thick to see much of the sky. Scorch marks ran down the cement and lawns in long stripes of black.

A car jerked around the corner at the far end of the lane and screeched to a stop in front of the first house.
Zakia leaped out of the driver’s seat and ran for the smoking bunker, shouting, “
Jessa!
”

Then a
silver light dove down to one of the lawns. The hunters raised their guns and I said, “No, it’s only Cadmon!”

His shirt was in shreds, since his wings had
gone through it. Flame had blackened his sweatpants, although his skin underneath looked fine. Searching upwards, he called, “Drina?” He ran down the lane away from me, still looking up. “Drina, I’m here! Come find me!”

I stepped off the curb
and followed the hunters down the road. The sky held nothing but clouds, and thin streams of smoke rising up from a hundred places. The houses were still, although sirens wailed in the distance. Something clattered at the bunker and I heard Zakia calling for me anxiously. I cut across the lawn and looked down to a black hole where the bunker had been less than five minutes ago. Zakia was ripping twisted shelves around and sifting through the mess.

“Zakia, I’m up here,” I called.

“Oh, thank God!” he exploded. He climbed out of the pit and embraced me hard. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” I said, throttled by his arms.

The hunters stood on the road, guns down but with their eyes trained to the emptiness above us. I called for Cadmon to come to me, but he wouldn’t with one of the cut at my side. Eyes wide upon Zakia, Cadmon ran over to Silea and Radeo to take their hands. Radeo jerked away like Cadmon was poisonous and snapped for Silea to make him let go. She shook her head slightly and allowed Cadmon to hang on to her.

“He is cut,” Cadmon said to Silea while the two of them walked to the pit.

“I know what you are,” I blurted to Zakia. “I’ve known for a while.”

An angry heat came to
Zakia’s eyes. “No one had the right to tell you that. That’s my personal business.”

“The Ripper,” Silea called.
We looked down to the hole. I spotted what was left of the chair, tipped over on its side by the trapdoor. My heart fell. It was empty.

Chapter Twelve: The Move

“We can move her to the compound in Oregon,” Radeo was saying to the others in the kitchen of the Kreelings’ home.

I was listening from the living room.
It was the least comfortable living room imaginable, no armchairs or sofas, only hard wooden chairs that encouraged someone not to remain sitting for too long. The walls held no pictures or paintings, or personal touches like knick-knacks. The television was old and small, and the entertainment center it sat upon had empty shelves. Movers would have needed no more than five minutes to empty the contents of this room into the back of a truck. I was curious if the rest of the house was like that, too. Nothing but the bare bones necessities.

Cadmon was sitting on a
big pillow in the corner, his eyes closed as he listened to music through an old CD player that belonged to Silea. Drina had checked his leg carefully for burns, but the scorching was only to the fabric.

Feeling like I had said this twelve times
already, I made it a thirteenth and called, “I’m not going to any compound!” Everyone wanted me to rest in the living room, but it was my life that they were discussing and I had a right to be a part of it. I got off the chair and pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen to join the group. Around a plain table were Drina and Adriel, as well as the four Kreelings. The counters and windowsill were bare; the refrigerator was unadorned except for a handful of plain magnets kept in a tidy line. As they turned to me, I said, “Look, I can’t just pick up my whole life and go somewhere. I have school and a family-”

“That is
irrelevant,” Radeo said dismissively. He adjusted an icepack behind his back and leaned against the chair to pin it there. “If they get their hands on you, you’ll have nothing.”

“But these two chased them off,” I said, putting my hands on Drina and Adriel’s shoulders.
He needed to have the burn on his face treated. “I heard you guys talking about that. They’re gone.”

“That doesn’t mean they won’t come back,
honey,” Drina said soberly. “I know what Rippers are like. I was one long ago, very briefly.”

“You were
not
,” I exclaimed. I would never believe that of her, not when she was so loving with her family and Cadmon especially.

She squeezed my hand.
“My wings were growing coarse, and the color was changing. I was on my way, not as far down that path as these four, but heading in that direction. When you’re stuck here for an eternal life, forever cut off from your true world and unable to make much by way of connection . . . the resentment and the bitterness of it can twist you. Easily.”

“What do we know of them?”
asked the woman named Evanyi. Her leg was propped up on another chair, the burn on her shin a deep red. Her husband Collan was treating it with a tincture. Although it must have been excruciatingly painful, she never flinched. Nor did she acknowledge anything I had said about not wanting to go to the compound. Even their wedding rings were simple, plain gold bands around their fourth fingers.

“We
’ve cobbled together our kreolos information with what Drina Graystone knows of them,” Silea answered. I hadn’t realized Drina knew any of them, but she was extremely old. “Barasho and Makala are very peripatetic. They don’t stay anywhere longer than a few weeks.”

“So these are friends of yours,” Evanyi said to Drina with dislike.
I looked at Evanyi and felt a great deal of dislike myself.

“
Not friends. When I knew them, which was quite long ago,” Drina said, “they were low-level Rippers. What they did today, the outright flagrancy of it, was something they never would have done before. Now and then they ripped a human marked for death and kept that person as a servant. They didn’t actively seek them out, it was only by chance if they came across one, so it happened only now and then over the centuries.”

“How did they treat the human?” Radeo asked.

“Neither cruel nor kind,” Drina said. Sensing how upset I was to hear about this, Adriel put his hand over mine. Words could not express how I had felt to see him walk through the door to the living room, with no more injuries than the burn to his cheek. Drina leaned back in her chair and then forward immediately. The chairs were no more comfortable here than the ones in the living room. “In truth, I didn’t know why they bothered to rip the human at all. They derived little pleasure from it.”

“Why did you rip yours?” Evanyi asked.
I looked down to Drina in horror.

Stiffening a little in her seat
, Drina said, “Loneliness.”

“And that was all?”

Drina remained polite, even though Evanyi was being rude. “That was all. After a long time spent in a hermitic life, I was desperate for some companionship. I came upon a man in the desert. He was nearly dead from dehydration, and I claimed him on an impulse. I took him back to my home and treated him, thinking I could have a friend.”

“And then what?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“He asked while he was recovering that I take him back to his people. And I realized that I could not keep him willfully unto myself, for my own purposes with no consideration to his. Rippers keep humans for lovers, for friends, for victims or slaves . . . it depends on the Ripper in question. But I couldn’t do that, not any of it.”

“How noble,” Evanyi said.
I glared at her, but she didn’t afford me a glance to pick up on it.

“
I didn’t want a friend this way. He was a human being, not a stray dog. Nor could I take him back to his home, for as the tapestry was woven, he was meant to die out there. This man was raising an anchor as a son. The breach would have been incredible. So I concocted a draught for pain and gave him so much that it killed him. He fell asleep and never woke up. Then I returned his body to where I found him in the desert. The color and texture of my wings slowly returned to normal.” Drina added, “Makala was not the instigator when they ripped; at the time she expressed little affection for humans. She blames them for her fall, even though it is obviously not any human’s fault. She made her choice, as I did, and for a similar reason. But she didn’t accept the consequences.”

“And Barasho?” Evanyi asked.
The only hint that what her husband was doing to her leg hurt was that she closed her eyes briefly after speaking.

“He did
n’t blame humans but the Thronos, who punished him over a splitter. I think that he ripped hoping a confrontation might be borne of it, for if a fallen angel behaves badly enough for long enough, our authority will step in. Had he found my man in the desert, I believe that he
would
have returned that fellow home to affect the anchor son, provoking the Thronos to respond personally and destroy him in battle. Barasho has nothing to live for, and an eternity in which to live it. I wouldn’t describe either of them as malicious, although by ripping they were doing malicious things. Our acquaintance ended since I loathed to see the unhappy lives of their ripped humans, who Barasho killed when he tired of them.”

“What
was his method?” Collan grunted, which was all he had said until now.

“
He flew straight up into the sky with the human, let the music lull them to sleep, then let go. They fell to death fairly unaware of what was going on. Today . . . that was far more aggression from the two of them than I ever saw in our long-ago acquaintance.”

From th
e other room came Cadmon’s voice, humming along with the music through the player. Downloading more information through her strange kreolos tools, Silea scanned it and said, “His methods have changed. One of their temporary homes was discovered many years ago, and within it the slain body of a ripped human. He had been stabbed in the stomach, and his body showed signs of torture.”

“We change with time, like humans do,” Drina replied.
“Yet that is not the Barasho I knew. He never tortured his ripped humans, save for the torture of not allowing them to go home. Except for giving orders to fetch shoes or something to eat, Makala barely spoke to them. They were lost souls, Barasho and Makala. Their wings and fire were ugly then, but they are hideous now. Something changed drastically in our long time apart.”

“Something
is likely Japheem, and he may have been the one to do the stabbing,” Radeo said.

“I
don’t know him, or the one named Zofia,” Drina said.

Evanyi looked at Adriel
no more pleasantly than she was treating Drina. Adriel said, “I’ve never met any of the four of them until today in Seataw with Jessa.”

Radeo readjusted the icepack and said,
“Japheem was cast out for reworking large portions of the tapestry itself in secret, from what we know. While most angels live to listen to the music, to move with the wind and await their next task, he was severing threads and retying them to suit his purposes. He did this in his non-corporeal state-”

Both Drina and Adriel were wearing expressions of absolute
aghast, and she said, “So the Thronos would not see him!”

“Yes.
He was clever. By making himself invisible and plunging in and out of different times to rework threads, he made it very difficult for them to discover who was causing these changes. The tapestry itself almost collapsed when he severed an anchor thread from five thousand years ago. It changed every facet on the face of this world.”

“Adriel, y
ou said something to me about a fallen angel who used to live with you doing something like that. Jacquiel,” I said.

He shook his head violently.
“Not on that level, not by far! And not with the actual physical tapestry itself! Jacquiel was playing with extremely minor matters belonging to extremely minor people. You can’t compare the two: it’s a snowflake to an
avalanche
.”

C
racking his knuckles one by one, Radeo said, “For long the Thronos blamed an anemoi and increased their guards upon the tapestry. Japheem blew right past them to go on with his evil work. It was not until the Thronos thought to investigate individual angels that they found the culprit. He was cast out at once, and the vote was as close to unanimous as they’ve ever come, eleven to one.”

“The Old Guard
should have taken him apart!” Adriel said forcefully.

“But they did not.
They needed one more vote for that. So now he continues his mischief as a fallen angel. This group is almost impossible for kreolos to track. They change locations swiftly and at great distances. By the time a kreolos gets there, they’re long gone and the trail is cold. The Council hasn’t bothered assigning hunters to this case in the last few decades, since it’s such a waste of time and effort. Japheem leaves a symbol behind in every place he alights, of a crescent moon pierced by an arrow. Hunters have come across those places by accident, as my father once did. This one wants people to know that he’s been there.”

Thinking of that jangling music, I said, “It is physically painful to be around him.
It felt like I was being pulled apart on the inside.”

“That
is a consequence of what he did with the tapestry,” Radeo said. “Angels do not lay their hands on the threads, yet he did many times. What he warped, it warped him in return. It gives him unusual insight into the souls of humans.”

That was how he knew that I fell.
“What were his purposes in doing what he did with the tapestry?”

“There was none,” Silea said.
“I explained already that he’s insane. He didn’t do it for love or vengeance; he did it just because he could.”

“It made him fe
el powerful,” I guessed. “He couldn’t create the world itself, but he could fashion a different one.”

“But none of this concerns you,” Radeo said.
“All that we have to decide in relation to you is where you should be hidden. Now the underground compound we have in-”

“Absolutely not!” I cried.
I hadn’t just won my life back from the cliff to lose it on a chance encounter in Seataw. “Look, I’m not going to hide out in a compound for the rest of my life. My life is essentially over then! You just said that they move swiftly and go far away. How long do you think they’ll hang out here?”

“The point is-”

“The point is that the decision is
mine
,” I said. “I’ll hide out this weekend; I’ll hide out all next week if you think that’s smart. But I am
not
hiding out forever, especially not underground! That’s ludicrous.”

As
Evanyi lifted her leg down to the floor, Collan put a cap on the cream and said, “You realize the risk you’re taking? If they were to come back and capture you, we won’t follow. You’re gone. No one will come to save you from them. We won’t ever catch up. That’s the reality of the situation here. So you should think about this a little more carefully than a test you might have next week or wanting to stay around for a boy you like.”

I didn’t think I had ever heard myself described in such shallow terms.
Drina and Adriel winced, but there was nothing I could do about how my soul was blazing. “I think that’s pretty rotten that hunters don’t even bother with the people that these Rippers take! You’re hunters, so
hunt
. Or else what good are you?”