Ten thousand shards of glass leaped away from her, flying across the intervening distance like a horizontal ice storm. They ripped into Halyna, the closer of the two. Oxana dove to the side, but I saw glass tear into her as well, freeing tiny rills of blood that lifted and spread like more flowers blossoming. It seemed to take half a minute before Oxana hit the floor.
Then suddenly everything was moving fast again. The glittering lions snarled and fell back beside their mistress, troubled for only a split-instant in the real world. Released from the power of Anaita’s hand, I had stumbled and almost fallen, but I caught at the wall and kept myself upright. For an instant I was confused, because I had been in that spot along the wall, that same spot, only moments earlier, as if time had looped around. But why did that seem so important? Why couldn’t I remember?
Anaita yanked the arrow from her chest, dislodging bits of glass and stone, and threw it away. Sam still lay sprawled on the floor, and both Amazons were down. In an instant Anaita would send the lions to finish them off, then turn back to me. I had resisted to my utmost, but it hadn’t been enough. And now she was angry.
The thing I needed to remember came to me then. I took a staggering step along the wall, reached up to where I thought, hoped, prayed it would be, and opened the Zipper I had closed only minutes earlier.
As I dove to the floor, angry bugbears spilled out of their prison, exploding back into the real world in great stretching globs of purple black, as if a dam had broken and released a river of animate goo. They flowed down onto the floor and over the nearest stone and glass lion in a second. They flowed over Anaita as well, and for a moment I hoped she too might vanish for good under a heaving blob, but instead I saw light and heat lance out through the pulsating waves of jelly. If there had only been one or two of the creatures it would have been over right then, but all the bugbears were out of the Zipper by now, furious at their imprisonment, and they followed the others in what looked like a feeding frenzy. The translucent glob that had swallowed the Angel of Moisture stretched and bellied out, and I could smell the hideous stench of burning bugbear, but they were old, strong things and they weren’t so easily beaten, even by someone as powerful as Anaita.
But she would win, that I was sure. We had seconds at the most.
I scrambled across the floor to Sam, dragged him to his feet, then staggered toward the Amazons. Oxana was on her hands and knees trying to get Halyna up, but one look told me that it was too late. Halyna was pin-cushioned with pointy shards of glass, many in her chest and throat, and had lost so much blood that it spread for several feet around her.
“It’s no use,” I said, dragging at Oxana, but she fought me.
“Halya!” she screamed, a heart-piercing sound.
We had no time. I put my fingers to Halyna’s throat where the pulse should have been, but it was only for Oxana’s benefit. “She’s gone. I’m sorry, but we have to get out of here.” I grabbed Oxana again, held her tight. “Come on!”
She wasn’t crying, but her face was lost, just lost. “No. Not go. Only with her!”
It was pointless—I could tell Halyna was already dead—but I knew it would be impossible to get Oxana moving without bringing her friend’s body. The burning smell was getting stronger. I scooped and levered up Halyna’s limp weight, then slung it over my shoulder.
“Where?” Sam asked. He looked as bad as the women, bloodied and ghostlike with dust.
“The door down in the office. The door to the Third Way.”
He shook his head. “She can follow us!”
“She can follow us anywhere else just as fast, but that door will get us out of here quicker. Come on!”
Stumbling through the shambles of smashed exhibits, skidding on broken glass, we waded past the seething, burning, bruise-colored swamp that was Anaita swarmed by bugbears. Something as bright as the flame of a welder’s torch was burning inside the mass, and I could tell things were going to get ugly in this particular vicinity real soon.
Halyna’s limp weight almost tipped me over going down the stairs, but I made it somehow. Sam was standing in front of the marble rectangle, the God Glove on his hand. He said, as if to nobody, “You realize if she’s locked it somehow, we’re fucked.”
There was nothing to say to that. We were already fucked so many ways they could have dedicated an entire revision of the Kama Sutra just to us.
As Sam gestured, the line down the middle of the marble rectangle glowed, but only for a moment, a seam of pure white radiance. Then it was gone, as was the wall and everything else, replaced by what I can only describe as a froth of bubbling light. Sam shoved Oxana through, then followed her. I took a deep breath, clutched Halyna’s body close to my chest, and leaped after them.
• • •
Grass. That was the first thing I noticed as I fell forward, grass beneath my feet, then I tumbled, and it was against my chest, my head, all of me, even up my nose in spiky, tickling profusion. When I stopped rolling, I dragged myself to my knees. I seemed to have lost Halyna’s body on the way through, but in the first moments that absence barely registered because of what was all around me.
One of the strange things about being me is the way “beautiful” and “horrible” keep squishing into each other. Only seconds beyond what had seemed like certain destruction, we had landed in paradise.
We were in a forest glade, but what was around us was as far beyond the usual state park picnic area as Heaven was beyond Hoboken. The vegetation was so vividly green it seemed to have been freshly painted. There was never a sky so blue, so triumphantly skylike, and even the gray mountains I glimpsed through the trees seemed to have been constructed specifically to give people a reason to use the word “majestic.” Some extremely eccentric gardener might have watered everything with pure psilocybin, just to grow these beautiful, heartbreakingly realistic hallucinations. But they weren’t hallucinations. This was real.
I would have happily stood there for hours, drinking it all in. But I had just realized there were only two of us in this magic place. Only Sam and me.
“This way,” my buddy said. “Hurry. We’ve got to get rest of the Third Way people moving, get them hidden. Who knows what she’s going to do now we got her really mad?”
Even in the middle of all this perfection, I was suddenly empty and hopeless. “They’re gone. The Amazons, Sam. They didn’t come through.”
He stared at me, then slowly turned and looked all around. “Shit. They’re not angels. Of course, they couldn’t pass through to Kainos.”
“But other souls came here, all your volunteers . . .”
“Souls. Not bodies.”
“But Halyna . . . she was dead, Sam.”
“Then her soul’s somewhere else. Being judged.” He started through the trees. “It’s shitty luck, but now we have to save the ones we can, the rest of the souls here.”
“No, Sam. I can’t just leave them.”
He spun and came back to me. “One of them is dead, Bobby. You just said so.” He wasn’t angry, just confused and hurting.
“That doesn’t matter. You don’t leave a soldier behind if you can help it. You know that. Can you open that passage again?”
Now he was angry. “You want to go back to that museum? To Anaita?”
“Just open the doorway or whatever it is. Oxana and Halyna have to be somewhere. Maybe I won’t have to go all the way back. Maybe they’re . . . in-between, somehow. I don’t even know what that means, but I have to find them.”
He only thought about it for a second. “I can’t come with you, Bobby. I owe it to the Kainos people to stay and help them.”
“I know. Just do it.”
“I can’t just open it, or it’ll dump you right back into the museum, so I’ll try to open the far end somewhere else. But I’ve gotta warn you, I’ve never tried anything like that. And after everything today, I don?
??t know if I’ve got the strength.” He lifted his hand, closed his eyes. A moment later a shaky vertical shimmer of light appeared beside me. “I don’t know how long I can hold it, or exactly where it’s going to take you. I’m hoping it doesn’t just drop you into—”
“Don’t say it. I’ll find out in a minute, anyway.” I took a quick last sniff at the clean air of this brave new unfamiliar world. Why do I only get these fleeting glimpses of happiness, these moments, then they’re ripped away again? “Hang in, Sam. We’re not beaten yet.” But my buddy looked pretty damned beaten, and I had no doubt I did too. “Remember our motto—confusion to our enemies!”
Then I left paradise behind and climbed back into the light.
thirty-two
sad and beautiful music
ACTUALLY, I still don’t know why I didn’t wind up back in Anaita’s museum office, especially with Sam in the kind of condition he was in. Maybe there’s more kindness to the universe than I ever guessed. Maybe instead of being one of the world’s unluckiest angels, I’ve actually been a bit more fortunate than I realize sometimes. Whatever the case, Sam’s God-Glove doorway didn’t drop me into the middle of the Anaita-versus-jamblob death match, for which I can only be grateful. Extremely grateful.
• • •
Back in the way old days, when people believed (or wanted to believe) that the Sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, one of those old Greek guys proclaimed that the universe had built-in music, that the very existence of everything was underlined by cosmic sounds, and that even distances like the Earth to the Moon were measures of this “music of the spheres,” the musica universalis.
Later on, that kind of fell apart, especially when Galileo was all, “The Earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around,” and then the Vatican was all, “We’re about to go seriously Inquisition on your ass if you don’t shut up,” and Galileo was like, “Okay, you win,” but under his breath he was all, “But it still totally revolves around the sun. Dicks.”
Anyway, I give you this short history update to prepare you for what I heard when I stepped back into the door of light Sam opened, which was either the actual music of the spheres or an extremely convincing simulation.
I was surrounded by, or maybe engulfed in, what seemed not just white light, but different kinds of white light—not different colors, just different intensities. And as I tried to make sense of my surroundings, I heard something I’ll never forget.
Now, mind you, I’m a guy who’s heard the singing of the celestial choirs in Heaven, and screams wafting up from the deepest pits of Hell. I’m no rookie. But what I heard when I crossed back through, what surrounded me like the breathing of some immense creature the size of a galaxy, was unlike anything else I’d experienced. It was as different from any other sound I’d heard as day is different from night. It was deeper than the deepest rumble, but it had edges—harmonics, I guess a musician might say—that stretched beyond my ability to hear or even perceive, and yet somehow I could still feel them. I was in the heart of the greatest living thing that could ever be, as if I were only a cell in that body—no, as if I were a single electrical impulse in the endless nerves of the Highest, God Himself. The sound, the music, the vibration, whatever you call it, it was all around me and everywhere. I was nowhere at all, but I was also everywhere, and that was right where I needed to be.
This all washed across me in far less subjective time than it takes to describe, then my rational mind (no jokes, please) finally showed up, took my mental hand, and kindly led me back to current reality.
It was literally a sobering experience. The beautiful chaos hardened into something less diffuse, and the different tones of light resolved into a three-dimensional structure of sorts. I stood in an endless white corridor of glowing motes, like billions of tiny bubbles, but each one different, each one shining with its own tiny white fire, some brighter than others, but none of them dark. Everything around me, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, was made of these shining white cells, like the packing material out of the box the cosmos had been shipped in.
I sat up, and in doing so I realized that I was wearing my Earth body, and that until I made it move again it had been lying in a crumpled heap. Also, close by me, somebody was crying.
I turned, the white scintillations around me smearing into streaks, and saw Oxana, just as I had last seen her, her face buried in Halyna’s red hair. Halyna was just as pale and lifeless as she had been when I carried her in my arms.
“Oxana?”
She jumped, or at least she tried to, but the cellular glow around us was nothing so simple as a floor: when she moved she seemed to be swimming in something viscous, and a scatter of tiny lights drifted up around her like startled fish.
“Oh, what is . . . ?” In the midst of so much sparkling brightness, Oxana’s eyes were muddy holes. “Ja ne rozumiju. Don’t understand. You are alive, Bobby?” A tiny glint of hope crept into her stare, but when she looked down at Halyna’s body, the glint died. “No. Not her, just you.” Tears filtered her eyes. “What is this? What place?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t think either of us are supposed to be here—especially not you. But it’s okay. I’m going to take you back.”
Her eyes got big. “Back where? Not there! Not where Halya . . .”
“No. God, no, not to the museum. We’re going back to the apartment.” At least I hoped that was what Sam had managed to arrange, but I wasn’t going to share my concerns with her unless I had to. She’d already suffered too much for my mistakes.
I stood, struggling with the strange surfaces, the oddly thick air. My feet sank into the cellular material of the tunnel, but the resistance was uneven. I couldn’t even make any sense of what I was standing in, whether it was one big thing or a billion tiny things, but the white glow made everything feel relatively safe, if not exactly cheerful.
“No, Bobby. I don’t want it.” Oxana, clearly driven past what any sane person should have to endure, slumped back down beside her friend’s body. “I want to stay. With my Halya.”
“We can’t. This place isn’t meant for people—not living people, anyway.” Remembering what Sam had said, that only angels and souls could pass through, I wondered if we were inside some kind of lining for the universe we knew, a placental barrier to keep things out that should stay out and keep in that which was appropriate. Certainly the living, vibrating vastness of it felt more like some kind of organism than any artificial construction.
It took a while to convince Oxana. I was beginning to worry that Anaita herself might pass through this place on her way to Kainos, and when I told her that, Oxana finally got up onto her hands and knees and then onto her feet, shaky as a newborn foal. “Where we take her?” she asked.
It took me a moment to understand she was talking about her friend and lover, Halyna. “Nowhere,” I said. “I think we should leave her here.”
“No! Never!”
“Halyna’s gone, Oxana, believe me. This isn’t her, this isn’t the woman you love—it’s just a body. The reason I came back but she didn’t is because she died. Now her soul has gone somewhere else. If anyone knows that, I do.”
A sudden, new worry struck me like cold water—what would happen when Halyna’s soul was taken to Judgement? Like everyone else, she must have had a guardian angel. Now that she’d died, the authorities would know everything, including every crime of mine that Halyna had witnessed. And wouldn’t they find out about Anaita, too? She was the cause of Halyna’s death, after all. How could even Anaita interfere with such a basic function of the heavenly system?
As had been the case far too often lately, I could only shake my head. Too many questions that even an angel couldn’t answer. “Come with me, Oxana,” I said. “After all we’ve been through, all my fuck-ups, I’m afraid you still have to trust me. This part of Halyna will stay here, maybe forever. I think somehow this is the body
of the universe itself, or at least, as much as we can understand it. The most important part of her has moved on, Oxana, but her body will be safe here. It won’t be any different than burying her in the earth, just . . . cleaner.”
“No!” Oxana would not look at me. “No. We don’t go.” I was close to carrying her out by force when she added, “Give me small time. To say goodbye.”
She bent over Halyna’s body and arranged the limbs, placing the young woman’s pale, freckled hands on her chest, drawing her legs straight. She brushed a coil of glorious red hair back from the bruised face, stroking Halyna’s skin, and murmuring to her in Ukrainian. At last she sat up.
“I wish she had weapon. We bury Scythian with weapon.”
“God will know she was a warrior,” I said. “I have no doubt about that.”
“She was. She shot the Persian bitch! She hurt her.”
“She did, and it saved my life, I think. All of our lives.” I kneeled down and touched the corpse’s bruised, pale cheek. “Thank you, Halyna. God loves you. May your journey be a good one and may you find the reward you deserve.”
• • •
Oxana and I walked along the glimmering, soap-bubble corridor until the light closed behind us like a shining curtain, and we could no longer see Halyna’s body. Oxana seemed nearly catatonic, but even for me it was like pacing through a dream. I wish I could explain that place better, but I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. I don’t know if I will ever see it again, feel the musical air and the all-blanketing light (which tells you nothing about the weird physicality of the place) but I know I’ll remember it until I finally stop thinking.