A thousand worlds, spinning around a thousand stars, each containing a billion people with a billion souls…
And on one of those worlds, a bed.
The story of Jeremiah Singh would be too long and too heartfelt to put into words. Suffice it to say that he grew up in a middle-class family, became a cost accountant soon after leaving college, married a loving woman who worked as a secretary, and never had children. Just another blip on the statistics page.
If he were not seventy-nine and about to die, it might have been said that his humdrum life was about to change.
A senior care center, mushy foods, and the slow onset of dementia. That was Jeremiah Singh these days. He would spend hours in the sitting room, talking to long-dead friends and acquaintances that weren't there, cheerfully accepting the oatmeal the staff gave him and eating it when they reminded him to do so. A few days ago, however, he had collapsed. His surviving brother Zachary and his niece, Jennifer, sat by his bed nearly night and day, holding his hand. But no Jennifer was home with her sick four-year-old grandson, and Zachary had stepped out to use the restroom, and Jeremiah was alone.
Or not quite. Because into the room walked a woman, her long hair golden and flowing, her skin pale as alabaster. She was dressed in white so pure that she appeared to be glowing, and the click of her shoes on the marble of the floor was the same as the tick of the clock in the hall.
She hesitantly sat down in the seat so recently vacated by Zachary and took Jeremiah's hand, clasping it in her own. "You don't know me, Mr. Singh," she said hesitantly to his sleeping face, so peaceful under the dappled sunlight pouring in from the window. "At least—well, you don't know me. Not really. But I'd just like to tell you—" She paused. Jeremiah's eyes were flickering, his eyelids blinking open. His mouth was moving. He was trying to say something.
She leaned close, so close that her lips were nearly brushing his cheek, and said, "Yes? What is it?"
"Are you an angel?" said Jeremiah, in his first and last moment of lucidity in the past two years.
The woman met his eyes. Jeremiah's, she saw, were dark, the color of a coffee stain on an expensive wooden table. He was nearly blind, so he put the seeming absolute colorlessness of hers down to his bad vision.
"No," she said. "Not exactly."
Even Jeremiah Singh's eyes were able to see the sunlight glint off her teeth as she smiled.
He didn't even have time to scream.
"Well, I thought that was a success," the Angel said very soon afterwards, letting her hair revert into its natural short, straight cut to her shoulders, each strand the color of the darkest dream ever dreamed by the mind of man. A splash of color appeared on each cheek, and huge silver hoops abruptly swung from her ears. She had also suddenly acquired combat boots, a gun belt, and a long black trench coat with a slight bulge in one of the pockets. Only her eyes remained the same: the color of pure water, no color at all. Eyes don't change. "Didn't you?"
The Agent was silent.
"I said, didn't you?" the Angel said, sounding annoyed. The Agent had been nearly catatonic all day, lost in the realms of his own thoughts. "Another hospital staff bewildered. Another soul for our Master. Another cog in the murder machine. A good day's work, I thought." She paused impatiently. "Didn't you?"
The Agent walked along with her, his strides matching hers exactly.
"Well, I was only trying to make conversation," the Angel huffed, flipping her hair pointedly and staring straight ahead. They appeared to be on an ordinary suburban road. Birds tweeted in the trees. Each lawn they passed was green and perfectly clipped. The houses were like those of dolls: beautiful and exactly alike. Somewhere behind them, they could hear the laughter of children. On the sidewalk were engraved in gold the words Good Intentions.
The Agent stopped suddenly, and the Angel continued for a few huge strides before realizing she was leaving her partner behind. She yelped and spun around. "What have you been doing all day?" she demanded. "What is up with you? Are you mad at me for some reason? Has something gone wrong? I mean, just tell me, don't get all stony like this—"
"Gloria," the Agent interrupted her.
The color drained from the Angel's cheeks. "I told you to never call me by that name."
"Why are we doing this?" the Agent pressed on, relentless. "You, draining life and souls. Me, the Master's right-hand man. Where have we gone? How did we fall so far from where we were? From who we were?"
"We did not fall," the Angel hissed. "We chose. You chose. This. This is who you wanted to be. And never let the Master hear what you just said!"
"Gloria—" the Agent began.
The Angel closed the distance between them in a single second and landed a ringing slap across the Agent's face. "You will not call me by that name!" she shrieked, and for the second time in five minutes, her appearance changed: her dream-dark hair flashed to the red of a forest fire, she grew so she was almost as tall as the Agent, and for a moment, it seemed as if her perfectly manicured fingernails were claws. Then she gasped in a breath of air, and shrank in on herself to her previous shape.
"I am the Angel," she said tightly, and turned, and continued on. After a moment, the Agent jogged after her until he had reached her side, and then slowed until his strides once again exactly matched hers.
They walked in silence all the rest of the way down the road paved with good intentions.
The Angel sat by the banks of the Styx later, dangling her feet in the water and waving at the ferry passengers in the faint hope that they would be distracted and tumble in. After a while, a woman with lips red as blood, skin pale as snow, and a gaping hole in her chest settled by her side, picking up a stone and skimming it over the dark surface of the water.
"Rough day?" she said.
"Ngh," the Angel said moodily.
The woman nodded in sympathy. "What was it? A lucid old bastard? Have trouble getting into the hospital room? Another guardian featherhead, maybe?"
"No," the Angel sighed, splashing her feet. "We got the target fine. Well, I did."
The woman's face showed sudden understanding. "The Agent."
"Shut up, Snowglass," said the Angel.
Snowglass Apples looped an arm around her shoulders. "Been there, done that, wrote the fairy tale, sweetie. What was it? Tell me."
"Nothing."
Snowglass nodded in respect of her friend's privacy, but couldn't resist a last question. "How did you two meet, anyway? All I heard from the people who were here when the pair of you arrived was that you landed here just a few minutes after he did. You two know each other in… up there… or something?"
For a moment, the Angel's guarded expression dropped, and her eyes grew dreamy. "It was a long time ago," she murmured, "and we were both very different then… but yes. We met Up There." For a moment, her hair seemed golden, her eyes bluer. The ghost of white feathers whispered at her shoulders, and then evaporated.
Snowglass patted the Angel on the back, nearly knocking her into the Styx. "Well, the Master said for me to tell you he's got another job for the dream team in a week. I don't think he'll be all that receptive to hear you two are having troubles. I'd get it all sorted out, if I were you."
"Right," the Angel said moodily. She withdrew her bare feet from the river and shook them off in the direction of a nearby damned soul, who screamed in agony, his flesh burning where the drops touched him. "Can't disappoint the Master, can we? I'll go talk to him right now."
"Oh, good," Snowglass said cheerfully. "Oh, and you wouldn't have happened to have seen my heart, would you? I think I put it down somewhere in the Fourth Circle and I wouldn't ask ordinarily, you know it usually takes care of itself, but you know what they're like over there, can't keep their hands to themselves, and—"
"It'll be in the Lost and Found," the Angel said, not really listening. "It always is. Just go through the One Lost Sock section, and then wander around until you hear the heartbeats. Got to go."
"But I've searched the Lost and Found up and down—" Snowglass began. But the Angel was already gone.
She knocked loudly on the Agent's door a little while later, putting her hands on her hips and waiting. In a moment the door was open, and the Agent stood there, his face not registering even a drop of surprise.
"Come in," he said.
The Angel slipped into his quarters, shutting the door behind her. As usual, the Agent hadn't bothered to keep them clan. Even the entrance hallway was a mess, with one light bulb flickering madly and the other glowing an odd shade of green, and bags, boxes, and coats scattered over the floor. She picked her way over them with a certain sense of familiarity, wishing there was some stink she could pointedly wrinkle her nose at. There never was. Messy but clean, that was the Agent all over.
She followed him into the kitchen, which he had, like normally, devoted to testing the First Available Surface Theory of Filing, and motioned to a chair that was miraculously not heaped with junk. "Can I get you anything?" he said, his voice level and polite. "I'm afraid I'm out of alcohol, but I've got lemonade, apple cider, soda—"
"Shut up a second, will you?" the Angel burst out.
The agent went still with his hand reaching out from a glass from the cupboard, and then unfroze, putting it back and closing the door. "Excuse me," he said, still calm. "I apologize if I've offended you somehow. No drink, then." He sat in the chair across from the Angel, propping up his elbows on a pile of forgotten letters. "So, what might be the reason for this unexpected visit? Can I help you with something?"
The Angel slapped a hand on the table. "Stop being so blessed formal, will you? I need to talk to you!"
"About what?" the Agent said, wariness showing in his own colorless eyes.
"About us," the Angel replied, folding her arms. "About our… argument just now. About…" She gave a deep sigh and lowered her voice so that the Agent had to lean in to hear her. "About Jesse and Gloria."
The Agent focused suddenly, abruptly, and absolutely on the Angel's face, and she stiffened. "Jesse and Gloria are dead," he said, his voice devoid of any emotion. "They have been dead for nearly four thousand years. They chose to die, and have never looked back." He narrowed his eyes. "Unless you miss it."
"I don't miss it," the Angel said angrily. "I miss us. I miss Jesse, Jesse from the days just before he—before we—during the rebellion. I miss Gloria, from when she was new and happy and had lost her innocence but not her naïveté. I miss that, and you do too, I know you do. We never expected to be like this, you a hired sword and me a common soul-taker. We never expected to, to, to fall this far—"
She stopped, but the word had already passed her lips. The Agent stood up, his face absolutely still.
"I suspect there's another job coming up soon," he said. "This won't interfere with your work, will it? You'll come to your senses soon?" It was not a question so much as an order.
"Of course not," the Angel said, which wasn't what she wanted to say and certainly not what she was thinking but was probably, in the circumstances, the only smart thing to say. "I'll go see a therapist. Maybe toss him into the Styx when I'm done. We've got too many of them down here anyway. Snowglass Apples says the job's in a week."
"I'll see you then, then," the Agent said, smiling a smile at her that wasn't really a smile at all.
The Angel left his quarters in a thoughtful frame of mind. Instead of turning east and heading towards the Eighth Circle, Bolgia Eight to search for a therapist, she walked north, out of the Circles and out of the residential section. On and on she walked, through the gray, forbidding streets flickering with flame, through the happy suburban road paved with good intentions, on and on and out of Pandemonium altogether and into the uninhabited wastelands, and still further on, until she reached the edge of the world, where the dry red ground plunged into utter blackness. Gloria had stood by an edge like this, so long ago it seemed like only yesterday, and had been shoved firmly past rushing sky, and birds and trees, and then through the newly made land and sea until she landed on dry, red earth, stretched, went to flex her wings, and found they weren't there.
The Angel wondered what lay past this edge. Whether, down in the darkness, there was something beyond.
Then she looked up, past the rocky, stalactite-filled sky that covered this world, past the trees and birds that gloried in the universe she had watched being created, and spotted, so faintly she could hardly see it, a glimmer of bluest blue sky.
She stood there a long, long time.