I have a theory about the Cascade, she said an hour later, as they crossed a largely uninhabited expanse of rock and shale that was eerily beautiful in its starkness.
I am listening.
Sometimes, you sound so much like an archangel. She had to force the lightness, because just then he hadn’t been playing. The cold and remote edge had been real, his new power pushing constantly to erase the humanity inside him.
It may surprise you to learn that I am, in fact, an archangel.
Elena’s laugh held as much relief as amusement, because that had been her archangel.
At times, he said before she could respond, I feel the cells of your heart inside me. Small pieces of mortality that are so weak, so vulnerable, that they should be eaten up by my immortal blood and yet they endure.
I feel you in me, too. Energy shattered her skin less and less now, but it was there in the background, a constant hum of power. That power tasted of Raphael and it had the Cascade cold to it, but though she could access enough of it to heal, fly, it couldn’t seem to find a clawhold in her, designed as it was for the body of an archangel.
She rode an air current over a field left fallow for the season, the moonscape of rocks now behind them. Raphael swept down beside her and they skimmed the rooftops of a small hamlet where nothing moved. I’m getting creeped out, Archangel.
They are all out in the fields. Look.
A line of hats, bodies bent industriously over a low-height crop. The wind carried across faint sounds of laughter and conversation. Phew.
Tell me your theory of the Cascade.
We decided it isn’t sentient and I haven’t changed my mind on that, but what if it’s driven by the thoughts of sentient beings?
Raphael angled to catch a draft, creating a slipstream for her to ride. She did so until it whispered out, then rejoined him at his side. Who could have such powerful thoughts?
I know it’s an angelic ghost story, but what about those Ancestors said to Sleep below the Refuge? Immortals so old they were beyond time, immortals who had slept through the rise and fall of civilizations, through the birth of mortals and the creation of vampires. Elena had even heard it whispered that they were a different subspecies, an earlier iteration of angelkind. It could be a reset of sorts.
If so, they do it in Sleep so deep they are invisible to our senses. The sun glittered off Raphael’s wings as he swept right. The idea of a reset . . . We are currently in a time of great turbulence. Already, we’re down to only nine in the Cadre. If it is a reset, to what purpose?
I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Elena dug into her jacket pocket for a couple of plain brown hair clips; her damn short hair kept getting into her eyes. She should’ve listened to Ransom and worn a headband but ugh, they made her think of the torture of junior high.
The sea washed into her mind again as she clipped back the worst offenders. There is another option.
Gee, you’re not sounding scary at all right now.
What if the Ancestors are real and this Cascade is so violent because they are waking?
Elena’s throat dried up. That wouldn’t be good would it?
They are said to be so powerful they built our world. They could as easily destroy it.
Nice cheery ghost story. Thanks Mr. Guild Hunter.
Raphael laughed and they flew on, taking in everything around them and resting when Elena needed it. This was only the first of multiple flights they’d be doing across the country. At no point, however, would they be staying in China. The jet would drop them off at different points through the country. It would then return to pick them up in the air.
If necessary, the two of them would stay nights in the territories that bordered China, those archangels having agreed to the arrangement, but actually being resident in China, even with wildfire rampant in Raphael, was a risk too far.
It was as they were reaching the far point of the day’s quadrant that they overflew a village of silence and stillness. No people in the fields. No dogs excitedly playing with children in the streets. No smoke rising from hearths even though with the sun setting in a blaze of soft reds and lush pinks, the world had become noticeably colder.
Jason marked this ghost village in his reconnaissance map. It was one of the first he discovered. Raphael’s voice was the sea on a bitingly cold day, shards of ice forming on the surface.
She embraced the sensation, accepting who he was and who he was becoming. I want to land, look around. When his expression turned to granite, she said, I’ve already done it multiple times with no ill-effects.
None of those times were in a village devoid of life. Lijuan’s poison may be soaked into every inch of dirt, every square meter of every home. Raphael continued to circle the eerily silent village after making that point.
But Elena wasn’t done. I think there are things going on below that one of us needs to see. Jason’s last surveillance flight over this area was probably a while ago. The spymaster had spies all across China, but they couldn’t see everything.
If we land, we do it together.
Elena’s abdomen clenched. The poison is aimed at archangels, she reminded him, desperate to keep him off the land that had infected one archangel already; Raphael had given her all the dreadful details of how the contagion had turned Favashi into an adjunct of Lijuan. I have strange DNA that—
No, Elena. No give in his tone. We cannot allow Lijuan to dictate to us from beyond Sleep. And if I am vulnerable to her, I must discover it now, before she rises in battle.
Shit. She couldn’t exactly argue with that—because if Lijuan had become immune to wildfire, the entire world was fucking screwed. Let’s do it.
Their boots hit the earth moments later. Dust swirled up around them as Raphael folded back his wings. Elena retracted hers, and the two of them began to walk through the village accompanied by the sound of nothing. No life. Not even a squawking chicken or irritated cricket.
Spotting an open door, Elena knocked. “Hello? I don’t mean you any harm,” she called out in the very basic Mandarin Chinese she’d learned in the weeks before their departure. Mostly greetings and phrases like this one that she’d thought might be needed.
But her nose told her that attempting communication was a vain effort: abandonment had a dull, musty odor it was impossible to mistake. The taste of it coated the back of her throat as thickly as the dust that caked everything in sight.
She walked all the way inside.
Charred pot on the stove. Looks like it was left on until the element burned out.
The table is set in this home, Raphael replied from another part of the street. The food on the plates has petrified under mold.
The two of them checked multiple buildings, even a barn, and a garage where a car sat up on blocks with its bonnet raised, but aside from the unnerving lack of people and animals, there was nothing unusual to see. No mummified bodies, no indications of burials. It was as if the entire village had simply vanished in a single heartbeat.