The Angelus Guns (3 page)

“I don't. Yet. But I will.”

“I love you,” she said before she drifted off to sleep.

“I love you too. And our mothers.”

She woke alone, to the tolling of bells.

Stars thronged the sky, all moving, all singing, between a ring of eclipsed suns. The guns must have drifted through the shield wall in the night. Stars: an infinite horde of builders kitted out for war, wings flared white with absorbed radiance, power gathered in rainbow cascade. Eclipsed suns: the Angelus Guns pointed down at Michael's Park, lips aflame, the darkness inside them deep. After so much silence the fleet's music deafened, washes of consensus and rage, righteous hunger and restrained wrath and sorrow passed through tachyons and entangled particles, along meson and microwave, the song conducting itself.

The hilltop where she lay was empty but for the useless sundial.

Bells rang: the tolling of the guns, and answering alarms in the crowd beneath. Gabe was gone. She stood, cried out his name, but even though she amplified her voice a thousand times it did not carry over the screams of praise and rage that rose against the guns.

Stars fell, flashing, toward Michael's Park.

“Gabe!”

Guards streaked up from the park to meet the stars. They all unfolded, songs clashing with songs. Swords met, and rainbows razored through rainbows.

“Gabe,” she said for the third time, and did not bother crying out, because she knew he would not answer. Of course. He'd said his goodbyes the night before.

She spread her wings and took flight, and told the rainbow machines in her blood: find my brother. Find him however you can.

Battle songs clashed around her. Plasma seared her skin and hair; she dove to evade a fog of knives but some still cut her, and she hurt. Her blood burned as the rainbow machines shed waste heat, all their capacity devoted to digesting the data her eyes and other senses fed them. None left over to help her fly or dodge. She slowed in the air. Her strength faded.

There, the rainbow machines whispered: alone, by the grand stage, his eyes skyward. She swooped toward him as a fierce crescendo broke the sky behind her.

She landed in front of Gabe, and grabbed his arm. “Come on,” she said.

“I'm not leaving.”

She pulled him toward her. “Then I'll take you.”

He did not raise his hands to stop her, nor did he let her move him. “Thea. Go.”

“Not alone.”

“You won't be,” he said, and touched the bag slung at her hip. “I'll be with you always. And I'll always be here, too.”

“You're mad.”

“You can't fix this with force,” he said. “Look up.”

She did. Up, into the fire.

When she looked down, her eyes were wet.

“The hardest war,” he said, “is the war inside.”

He was wrong, but she didn't argue.

She hugged him. He hugged her back, and kissed her on the cheek. “Go,” he said, and she went.

She ran through the redwings of Michael's Park as they sang their songs and chanted their chants and feared their fear. Their guardians died in the sky above. Blood smoked to ash as it fell.

The guns' eclipse rims burned brighter.

She fled. Winged west, away from the park, through the rain of blood and burning fog, down broad dark avenues. She fled, wings beating, and tried not to think about the guns, or Gabe.

A soldier stopped her by the broken bridge. Armored, faceless, a generic combat model. But as she approached, its line in the music changed, and Zeke emerged from within. Gentle, calm Zeke. Between her and escape.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Thea. The choir needs you.”

“What do they want?”

“Join us. Reactivate yourself.”

“My brother's still in there. I won't be part of killing him.”

“We can't let you out with rebel memories. They're dangerous.”

“I don't have anything,” she said. “Zeke, I don't have anything but my own mind. Let me through.” Cries of triumph and defeat echoed through the radiant bands. She opened her bag to show him book, and pen, and cup, and sword. “Search me, scan me. But I won't join you. Not in this.”

He sang through her body, through her bag, through her blood, and found no mind but hers. No riders, no stolen memory, no manifesto song.

“We want you,” he said.

“I won't help kill my brother, Zeke.” She spun up her combat engines. Her hand drifted to the hilt of her mother's sword. “You can't ask that.”

“We can,” he said. Their eyes met. Did he, after all, remember the dragonflies that sang?

She held the sword. Its mind woke and unfolded around her own. There were so many ways she could kill him, though she would be cast out in return, chased through all time until she died. She would do it. Zeke knew.

You can't fix this with force.

She released the hilt, and withdrew her hand.

The walls stood gray and dead to either side. Zeke's were the only eyes upon her. He closed them. “Go. I'll forget this.”

She flew past him, out over the gap and down, away from the city, into the marbled sky. Before she slipped from timeless space, she heard, in the far distance, a familiar voice. Gabe. The soldiers of the host sang telemetry songs, and he added his voice to theirs in secret, directed out to her.

So, as she flew and wept, she looked up through his eyes from Michael's Park, and saw the fire of the guns' lips build to burning, and their black mouths open. She raised her hands, and once and forever she died.

She returned to the world with the lizards, in the depths of ordinary time. Her mothers received her. She gave her old mother back the sword, with thanks. They asked her simple questions, and she offered simple answers, and sank once more to work. For a year she watched the lizards struggle with fire: their experiments, their frustrations, the pain when they burned.

When the tribe kept their first flame going all night through, she and her mothers climbed the tallest nearby peak and sang a praise song, and a song for the dead.

That night, Thea snuck to their fire with the book that was not hers, and opened it, and read, as she had many times before, the thick letters her brother's pen had carved into the paper. No memory, no vision, nothing for Zeke to find when he sang through her. Just letters. Just a story with the end missing.

But she knew the end. She drank tea from her cup, and drew her pen, and finished her brother's work.

Someday, she would read it out loud where the lizards could hear.

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