“Hold on to me tightly,” Lucien said, positioning Vera’s hands around his shoulders and wrapping her arm about his waist. “I’ll bring you up.”
“No,” Vera said. “Bring Azov here first.”
Lucien considered this a moment before setting Vera down and flying back for Azov.
Vera collapsed against the wall of the cavern, her ears ringing with the sharp, rapid-fire noise of the waterfall. Without the light from Lucien’s body, the cave fell into a fathomless darkness. She strained to discern the space. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out from under her. She fell to the ground, feeling as if she might lose consciousness. She closed her eyes for what seemed less than a moment. When she opened them, a faint glow emanated from the distance. Lucien was coming back; she needed to prepare herself for the searing pain of movement. Easing herself up, she watched the light come closer. She saw a glow of white wings, the shimmer of a silver robe, and she knew that it wasn’t Lucien at all but one of the Watchers. It stood before her, looking her over with curiosity.
“You are human?” the angel asked at last.
Vera nodded, all the while staring at the angel. There was something soft in his features, something divine, and for the first time she truly understood how unfair it had been that such beautiful beings had been punished so severely. Vera wanted to understand how an act of love—because the Watchers had, after all, disobeyed God out of love—had brought so much treachery to the world. The angel had spent thousands of years in this underworld of stone and water. He had lost paradise and now he had lost his companions.
The angel introduced himself as Semyaza and placed his hand on Vera’s shoulder. A gentle burst of warmth moved through her muscles, easing the pain, as if she’d been given a shot of morphine. The relief was so profound that Vera felt as if she had the strength to stand.
“The others are up there,” Vera said, pointing up the rope ladder to the ledge high above. “Don’t you want to join your brothers?”
“I’ve decided to remain here,” Semyaza said.
“But why?” Vera didn’t understand. They were offering the angel its freedom, and it had chosen to stay in the cave in solitude and darkness.
“In the presence of other beings like yourself, one can endure great suffering. For thousands of years I’ve been a creature of hell. I don’t know if I can adjust to the light.” Semyaza smiled. “Besides, the earth belongs to humanity. There is no place for me there. I am a prisoner not of this cave but to eternal life as a fallen angel. I would like, for just one minute, to understand what it is like to be human. My memories of falling in love are so vibrant. There is nothing in my experience like it. To feel warm blood in my veins, to hold another body close, to eat, to fear death. For that, I would return to earth.”
The Eighth Circle
FRAUD
I
Dr. Merlin Godwin pressed his thumb against the screen, and the thick, iron doors opened. He made his way into a dark concrete tube, neon bulbs lighting his path. Each morning he entered the tunnel via the south entrance, walking the thirteen hundred feet leading from the exterior to the interior chamber, his briefcase in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. It was a dark and solitary commute. And while it lasted less than ten minutes, walking through the corridor gave him a few moments of total peace and isolation, allowing him to leave the normal world, where people lived without the slightest knowledge of the truth, and enter a place that seemed to him, even after twenty-five years, a place of nightmares.
In truth, he was only traveling one hundred thirty feet below the ground to a space carved into the soft rock below the Siberian permafrost. It was something of a miracle that the facility even existed. Although the society had a long and well-documented history of observing and studying live specimens—their first contact with an angel had been in the twelfth century, when the Venerable Clematis had breached the Watchers’ prison—the angel storage facility in western Siberia was the largest angelic incarceration project in the history of angelology. It contained holding cells, examination rooms, laboratories, a complete medical center, and solitary confinement chambers for angelic life-forms and, when necessary, human beings who obstructed their work. There were facilities for intake procedures and facilities for disposing of dead creatures. There was a crematorium. As the scientist in charge of this massive operation, every possible technological advantage for the containment of the enemy was at his disposal.
The prison had been in various stages of planning since the 1950s, when the Russian Angelological Society had begun searching for a site that could accommodate the masses of creatures they had taken into custody. After two decades of fruitless attempts the society made a deal with the Kremlin to occupy the space directly below Russia’s largest nuclear facility in Chelyabinsk. The agreement was controversial among the angelologists—especially Western angelologists, who objected to any alignment with the Russian government, which had blocked their efforts in Eastern Europe—but, after negotiations, a deal was struck: Below the frozen fields, molded out of the concrete foundation of the plutonium nuclear reactor, there would exist an immense secret observatory and prison facility.
While similar observatories existed elsewhere—Godwin had personally visited a structure in the American state of Indiana and another in China—there was nothing that could compare with the magnitude of the Siberian panopticon. The storage capacity of the facility was enormous, with thousands of cells below the earth. The prison could hold up to twenty thousand angelic beings, from the lower angelic life-forms to the highest. At present, it was filled to capacity.
Access to the panopticon could be gained only with security clearance, and only via specialized tunnels. Godwin always traversed the south tunnel, but passageways opened through each quadrant, each one equidistant from the central cavity, where the glass-and-steel holding cells stretched in a seemingly endless curve, each one lit by a neon light, and each—when the prison was full—containing an angelic being. The prison had three levels. The ground floor held the lowest angelic life-forms. The next ring of cells contained the more dangerous breeds—Raiphim, Gibborim, Emim. Level 1 held the Nephilim, and it required the highest level of security. The three levels formed an elegant and intricate ovoid structure that, when one first encountered it, seemed like a glass honeycomb, each cell crawling with an angry wasp.
In the very center of the rings of cells, separated from the creatures by a vast expanse of blue-lit space, stood an observatory tower, a large glass capsule that rose from a concrete floor like a spaceship. The observatory tower was constructed entirely of tinted panels, and it remained darkened, so that the glowing holding cells seemed like rings of fire around a dark center. Inside the capsule, scientists worked night and day, monitoring the creatures.
It was an ingenious structure, modeled on a classic panopticon prison of the variety developed by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century. A team of engineers had adapted this original concept, reinventing it to suit the particular purposes of angelology. The original intention of a panopticon had been to enforce a psychological control over the prisoners. A central tower was equipped with blinds so that the prisoners could not be sure when they were being observed by prison guards. When the blinds were closed, the prisoners behaved as if they were being watched. Angelologists hoped to employ the same principle. An observer standing inside the tower had the power to watch each and every cell. When they changed the opacity of the Plexiglas, the angels could no longer see the scientists standing behind it. The creatures did not know when they were being watched and when they were not. The effect was the illusion of continual surveillance. The angels were severely punished for any infraction of the rules and in time became obedient and docile.
The angels had nowhere to hide. The cells were ten feet by ten feet, cold, and gray, as if the harsh Siberian climate had been translated into the interior realms of the compound. There were no blankets, beds, or toilets, nothing more than what was absolutely necessary to s
ustain the creatures. Some of the imprisoned angels had been held in these conditions for decades, and would continue to live out their lives under the observation of angelologists. These creatures were listless and resigned. Recently captured creatures, the hope of release still burning in their eyes, stood whenever Godwin came into view. The gesture was so pointless, so pathetic, that Godwin had to stifle an urge to laugh.
As he walked toward the tower he passed through a wash of grainy blue that fell over the concrete floor, over the metallic steps leading up to the rings of cells, over the thick glass of the cells themselves, giving the space the texture of an aquarium filled with exotic fish. Whenever the creatures stood at the glass, pressing their incandescent hands against it, it seemed to Godwin as if thousands of white starfish floated in a murky sea. At so many feet below the earth, there was no natural sunlight, and so the creatures were suspended in a perpetual bath of neon. The absence of the rhythms of night and day proved useful—the captured angels existed in a zone of timelessness, floating in a state of suspension, where—Dr. Godwin imagined—a creature must mark the passing time by the slow, shallow beating of its inhuman heart.
For the most part, his prisoners were unusable creatures, undesirables picked out and captured by the Russian angelologists. Many were Nephilim affected by the virus that Angela Valko had introduced into the angel population decades earlier; others had strong human characteristics, physical and behavioral, that set them apart from the Nephilim ideal; others had betrayed their clans by marrying a human being.
The irony of his position wasn’t lost on him. Godwin was working for the enemy, plain and simple. There were Russian agents who had sold out to the Nephilim—he wasn’t unique by any stretch of the imagination—but the extent of his betrayal was unprecedented. He blamed the baser elements of human nature, of course. He was greedy, vain, and power hungry. He had helped to create an angelic containment program far superior to anything the angelologists could have made alone, and he offered its use to the enemy. When he was feeling self-analytical, he wondered if he weren’t rebelling against his parents, dedicated British angelologists who had insisted that he follow their calling. Once he had tried to please them. He had been an earnest young angelologist whose work was used as a weapon against the Nephilim. He had assisted Angela Valko in exploring the genetic codes of the creatures so that angelologists could destroy them. And now, years later, he’d built upon this research to assist the Grigori family, performing the experiments that Angela had only fantasized about. If he succeeded in creating the population density they required, he would be the most powerful human being in the new world.
Even after all these years, he marveled at the irony of his apprenticeship to Angela Valko. She had been the society’s most devoted soldier when it came to overcoming the Nephilim. And she had nearly succeeded in doing so. Developing an avian flu designed to attack their wings was the act of a thoughtful scientist; releasing it into the angelic population through the Grigori family was the act of a genius. Percival Grigori spread the virus to all the major Nephilim families, ensuring that many of the elite died. For decades Godwin admired and cursed Angela for it. The virus eluded every cure he had attempted to develop. Even now he’d only found a way to halt its progress, to alleviate the symptoms, and to contain it.
After his recruitment, when the Russians brought Godwin to Siberia to survey the site, he’d stood at the edge of a vast field, an eternity of ice stretching before him, and he understood the incredible potential of the prison that existed below his feet. But the true, secret goal of his work was far more exacting, and momentous, than to re-create the strength of the original Nephilim—to elevate their race, as Arthur Grigori had liked to say, with the qualities of the angels that they had lost over the millennia. For several years he had been riding on the promise of his first and only triumph: The twins were an impressive feat of breeding, genetic manipulation, and luck. The successful cloning—twice over—of the late Percival Grigori—using frozen cells harvested from Percival during his lifetime—had bought him carte blanche with the Grigori money. Godwin had been left in peace, working without interference.
Godwin looked up, taking in the full height of the observation tower, an edifice bound by impenetrable panes of glass. Inside, along the spiraling floors, were angelologists on duty, some busy at computers, others at observation posts, watching, making notes, updating inmate files. The night shift would go home and the day shift would arrive, a routine that ensured the perpetual motion machine of the panopticon.
Godwin always felt an odd, phantasmagoric sensation when he traversed the moat of concrete surrounding the observation tower. Thousands of eyes trailed his movements, and he couldn’t help but feel the unnerving power of their gaze. Sometimes it seemed to him that their positions were reversed, and that he had become a prisoner, a spectacle paraded out for the pleasure of the Nephilim. Each day he had to remind himself that he was the master, and they, these beautiful beasts whose bodies were stronger than his own, were his prisoners.
II
Under normal circumstances, Yana wouldn’t go to the entrance to the panopticon for any amount of money. It had been more than two decades since she had last set foot at the nuclear waste facility known as Chelyabinsk-40, and yet the structure still had the power to fill her with dread. While her family had always been angelologists, tracing their first efforts to the time of Catherine the Great, she had an uncle who had been imprisoned in the panopticon as a spy in the 1950s. Stripped of his rights, he was thrown into an isolated holding cell. He worked both in the reactor and at cleaning up the nuclear waste that leaked from the facility. The lakes and forests were saturated with radioactivity, although the citizens of nearby villages were never informed. Yana’s uncle had wasted away with cancer and been buried at the site. Now most of the trees around the facility were dead, leaving a wasteland of ashy soil behind. The Russian government had only recently admitted to the nuclear contamination—for decades it had denied that the reactor existed at all—and newly posted signs warned of radioactivity. Yana wasn’t prone to doomsday scenarios, but she had the feeling that if the world were going to end, then the disaster would emerge from that desolate, godforsaken place in Chelyabinsk.
She halted abruptly before a fence ringed with barbed wire. Making her way into a corrugated steel outbuilding—a rusted-out shack that served as an entrance to the east tunnel—she pulled out her wallet and fingered her Russian Angelological Society identity card. At least she could identify herself, which was more than she could say for the others, whose French identity cards would mean nothing to these security goons. Getting them in would be difficult. For that she was going to need to call in a favor or two.
A pair of burly, stupid-looking guards—Russian military flunkies hired by the society in Moscow—greeted them.
“I have an appointment with Dmitri Melachev,” Yana said, imperiously, daring them to turn her away.
A guard with bloodshot eyes and the smell of vodka on his breath looked her over, sneered, and said, “You’re a bit old for Dmitri, honey.”
Another guard said, “His girls always come in the West entrance.”
“Tell him Yana Demidova is here.”
Yana crossed her arms and waited for the guard to place a call to Dmitri’s office. He relayed her name to another functionary at the other end of the line and then waved them toward some plastic chairs near an elevator. “Wait there. He’s sending someone up for you.”
Yana closed her eyes and took a deep breath, praying that Dmitri would give her a break. Before she’d been assigned to angel hunting in Siberia, she and Dmitri had been childhood sweethearts in Moscow. They had been deeply in love in the way that only teenagers can be—madly, blindly—and had been engaged until Yana broke things off. Yana had helped Dmitri get his first job as a bodyguard to one of the high-level angelologists. His career took off from there. Now he was the chief of security in the panopticon, a man with clout over everyone and everything bar
ring their path, and if she had to put herself on the line a little to get them inside, then so be it. Besides, Dmitri owed her.
After fifteen minutes of waiting, the elevator doors parted and Dmitri himself emerged. Yana hadn’t seen him for twenty years, but he hadn’t changed much. He was short and muscular, with sharp blue eyes and streaks of gray in his hair. She could see that she had surprised him.
“Bring us to your office, Dmitri, and I’ll explain everything,” Yana said, meeting his eye, hoping that he was still her friend after so many years.
Dmitri nodded and the security guards went to work. They searched the angelologists’ bags and clothes, examined their weapons, and then allowed them to go into the lift. Dmitri pushed 31, and the elevator began to descend, moving slowly deeper and deeper into the earth. Yana couldn’t say if it were her imagination, but she felt as if the pressure of the earth were pushing into her, as if she had to struggle to breathe.
Finally the doors parted, and they stepped into the east tunnel. Cool air blew through the shaft, sending a shiver of freezing air over her. She’d forgotten about the descriptions she had heard of the prison—it was cold, bereft of light, as if one would wither in its sterile darkness. They would walk for a few minutes through a narrow tunnel, the neon lights playing above, and emerge at the other end. It was a short walk, and yet Yana felt as though they were making a journey to another universe. She had always found it eerie that people aboveground knew nothing about the space. It could cave in, killing thousands of living beings, and nobody would know the difference.
When they reached the core of the panopticon, the immensity of the space pulled her eye up, and then, just as her vision adjusted to the scale and grandiosity of the structure, closed in on the rows and rows of creatures locked in their glass-and-metal cells, each angel back-lit by harsh neon.