Melliel forced herself to say, “So we’re to die?”
“The queen will decide what is to be done with you.”
Queen? This was the first mention of a queen. Was it she who had sent Joram the basket of fruit that had seen fourteen Breakblades swinging from the Westway gibbet and a concubine flushed out the gutter door in a shroud?
“When?” Melliel asked. “ Whenwill she decide?”
“When she comes home,” said the girl. “Enjoy your flesh and blood while you can, sweet soldiers. Scarab has gone away hunting.” She sang the word. “Hunting, hunting.” A snarl of a smile, and again Melliel saw that her teeth were points… and again saw that they were not. Strobing time, strobing reality. What was true? A crack and strobe and the door was closed, Eidolon was gone, and…
… and the room was dark.
Melliel blinked, shook off a sudden heaviness and looked around her. Dark? Eidolon’s words still echoed through the cell— hunting hunting—so it could only have been a second, but the chamber was dark. Stivan was blinking, too, and Doria and the rest. Young Yav, barely jumped up from the training camp and still with a boy’s round face, had tears of horror in his blue, blue eyes.
Hunting hunting hunting.
Melliel spun to the window and, with a push of her wings, thrust herself at it and looked out. It was as she feared. It was no longer dawn.
It was no longer day. The black of night hid the sky’s bruises, and both moons were high and thin, Nitid a crescent and Ellai but a crust, together giving off just enough light to brush the edges of the stormhunters’ wings with silver as they tilted in their ceaseless circles.
Hunting, came Eidolon’s voice—echo or memory or phantom—and Melliel steadied herself against the wall as an entire lost day raced through her and was stripped away, every stolen minute, she felt with a shudder, bringing her nearer to her last. Would they die here, the lot of them? She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—believe Eidolon about the fruit, but the memory of its dense flesh between her own teeth still made her want to gag.
These people might be seraphim, but there the kinship began and ended, and in Melliel’s mind the shape of their mysterious queen— Scarab?—began to warp into something terrible.
Hunting hunting hunting.
Hunting what?
ARRIVAL + 6 HOURS
LANDFALL
At 15:12 GMT, with the whole world watching, the angels made landfall. There was a period of hours, while the formation’s flight path carved due west from Samarkand, over the Caspian Sea and Azerbaijan, when their destination was a mystery. Across Turkey the westward path held, and it was not until the angels crossed the 36th meridian without turning south that the Holy Land was eliminated from contention. After that, the money was on Vatican City, and the money was not wrong.
Keeping to the formation in which they’d flown, in twenty perfect blocks of fifty angels each, the Visitors alighted in the grand, winged plaza of St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome.
The scientists, grad students, and interns who’d gathered in the basement of the NMNH in Washington, D.C., watched the screen in silence as, in baroque regalia befitting his title—His Holiness, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God—the Pope stepped forth to greet his magnificent guests.
As he did, there came a shift in the first and central phalanx. It was difficult to make out details. The cameras were in the air, hovering in helicopters, and from this high vantage point, the angels looked like a living lace of fire and white silk. Exquisite. Now one of them stepped forward—he seemed to be wearing a plumed silver helm—and in one liquid movement, all the rest went down on one knee.
The Pope approached, trembling, his hand raised in blessing, and the leader of the angels inclined his head in a very slight bow. The two stood facing each other. They appeared to be talking.
“Did… the Pope just become the spokesman for humanity?” inquired a stunned zoologist.
“What could go wrong?” replied a dazed anthropologist.
Eliza’s colleagues had put together an ad hoc media center by grouping a number of televisions and computers in an empty outreach classroom. Over the course of several hours, the tenor of their commentary had shifted almost entirely away from hoax theory toward the more unsettling realms of… If it’s true,how is it true, and what does itmean , and… how do we make it make sense?
As for the television commentary, it was inane. They were bandying biblical jargon around like there was no tomorrow—which, hey, maybe there wasn’t! Ba-dum-bum.
Apocalypse. Armageddon. The Rapture.
Eliza’s nemesis, Morgan Toth—he of the pillowy lips—was using an altogether different vocabulary. “They should treat it like an alien invasion,” he said. “There are protocols for that.”
Protocols.Eliza knew exactly what he was getting at.
“That would go over well with the masses,” said Yvonne Chen, a microbiologist, with a laugh. “It’s the Second Coming! Scramble the jets!”
Morgan gave a sigh of exaggerated patience. “Yes,” he said with the utmost condescension. “Whatever this is, I would appreciate some jets between it and me. Am I the only non-idiot on the planet?”
“Yes, Morgan Toth, you are,” Gabriel piped up. “Will you be our king?”
“With pleasure,” said Morgan, sketching a slight bow and flipping back his artfully overlong bangs on the way up. He was a small guy with a handsome face set atop skinny, sloping shoulders and a neck about the circumference of Eliza’s pinkie. As for the puffy lips, they existed in a state of snide smirk, and Eliza was constantly plagued by urges to bounce things off them. Coins. Gummy bears.
Fists.
The two of them were grad students in Dr. Anuj Chaudhary’s lab, both recipients of highly competitive research fellowships with one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, but from the day they met, the animosity Eliza felt for the smug little white boy had felt like nausea. He’d actually laughed when she told him the name of the scruffy public university she came from, claiming to have thought she was joking, and that was just the beginning. She knew he didn’t believe she’d earned her spot here, that some form of affirmative action must account for it—or worse. Sometimes, when Dr. Chaudhary laughed at something Eliza said, or leaned over her shoulder to read some results, she could see Morgan’s nasty assumptions in his smirk, and it enraged her. It dirtied her—and Dr. Chaudhary, too, who was decent, and married, and also old enough to be her father. Eliza was used to being underestimated, because she was black, because she was a woman, but no one had ever been quite so vile about it as Morgan. She wanted to shake him, and that was the worst of it. Eliza was mild, even after everything, and the rage itself enraged her—that Morgan Toth could alterher, bend her like a wire by the sheer awfulness of his personality.