For the return trip, Captain Steele decided to complete the square, going over the Arizona desert first to avoid the Rockies almost entirely, and then making the trip north in the middle of the continent. The Perdix had left San Francisco a little before sunset, and crossing the desert at night would prevent having to fly through hot air that would reduce the airship's buoyancy and force her to spend more fuel.

"The Mimal route" Lawrence had explained to Judd and Vicki" from the states initials, although we tend to stay further West in real life. He drew them a map of Mimal the Elf Chef on some scratch paper. Neither of them had heard of the mnemonic.

"I remember it from school, actually. You guys teach school, right?"

"I guess we're co-principals, but yes, we also teach. K-to-twelve, well, K-to-8 right now on account of the Rapture gap, obviously."

"It's going to be interesting to have high schools again."

"Not looking forward to dealing with it, personally. My girl, she's got a little boy on the way. We're going to get married as soon as we can afford a decent wedding, either after next trip, or the one after."

Vicki smiled. "You know, if you ask the Captain, he's probably going to be OK with giving you an advance if you want to make a honest woman out of your lady. Do you want me to talk to him about it?"

Laurence tilted his head at Vicki. Judd just nodded in agreement. "That would be a kindness, ma'am."

After the desert, the Perdix passed close enough to a long-range beacon that Vicki was able to check her messages. The news from home were fairly positive: the accreditation paper had arrived, there had been another unplanned, paid-for pizza delivery - this time from a Christian business, Lelo's - and Dr. Roszenweig had agreed to cover the small pantry discrepancy with a groceries drop.

With Hans at the helm, the Perdix was making her way north back to Chicago; Rayford was already planning his next trip from the choices that the Icarus dispatcher had transmitted him. By the look of it, there was nothing short-range enough that would cause Kenny to only miss one day of school; Vicki had an absence longer than that.

"I'm sure something will come up, if you request it now it will give them some time to line something up." Judd opined. After that, the conversation at the small captain's table moved to other matter. Rayford took a bit of time to listen to Vicki noting the goings-on at COT.

"A trickle of food missing, eh? If COT was a ship I'd say you've got a stowaway."

"And the extra shipments, the pizza and so on?" Judd asked.

"A very considerate stowaway, then, he obviously wants to pay you back!"

"But... why? I mean, whoever it is, there's still plenty of empty houses around COT. It's not as if they have to worry about rent."

The stowaway idea made sense, though. Vicki decided that when they got back they'd use it as an excuse for some very late spring cleaning.

The little space used to be the two backrooms of one of the stores that COT had originally been built of. It was small, close to an area that had been deemed structurally unsafe for people and best used as architectural support only, and at some point shelves had been put in front of its only door so as to be able to use a bit of the space as a closet. A few of the smaller kids, as kids do, had wandered in and saw past he tool boxes and ancient office supplies to notice that the closet had space beyond them. After moving a few boxes, they had a kid-sized hole to crawl through.

Over the few years that COT had been in operation, the kids had grown up - enough to need a bigger aperture, and with it better camouflaging - but the secret had not been spilled; enterprising preteens had put up scavenged plywood, wires, and even a terminal. The back room had been decorated, of sorts, with a Narnia theme - it felt appropriate - and filled with the sort of thing that one would expect to find in a treehouse or reclaimed crawlspace; old blankets, board games, some books of questionable provenance, and the like. An elaborate plan to repair a mini-fridge and sneak it in so as to be able to store beer had been meticulously made, tested, prepared, and then abandoned when the kids talked about it focusing on the destination rather than on the journey and decided that none of them actually cared terribly much about beer even if they could figure out how to buy it. As it is, it was a good spot to hide after pulling a prank, have the occasional extra cookie, read a bit of Harry Potter, and play D&D. Such had been the case a few weeks earlier.

"...the thief, Black Leaf, did not find the poison trap, and I declare her... dead." Cindy said solemnly.

"No, not Black Leaf! No, no! I'm going to die! Don't make me quit the game. Please don't! Somebody save me! You can't do this!"

"Marcie, get out of here. You're dead! You don't exist any more."

The kids laughed at how stern Cindy had managed to sound throughout; Marcie looked a bit upset for real, so Debbie got up and gave her a hug before she left. Tomb of Horrors was pretty unforgiving, and adding stakes to the game - in this case, character death meant having to leave the room, to decrease the chance of the adults worrying about kids not being visibly around - had made it a bit more interesting.

Marcie quickly gobbled a dry cookie, and the light bulb was turned off to let her leave without drawing undue attention to the closet door.

When the lights came back on, a diminutive Angel was standing on top of the game map. The four remaining kids looked up.

The creature looked like a black haired young woman in her late teens, in a white tunic, with red-brownish wings poking out of two cuts in the back. Elianto took a brief peek and confirmed that she was, in fact, wearing some sort of underwear under the tunic.

The celestial being spoke in what sounded a lot like a stage whisper. "I am Lailah-lan-Phanuel-lan-Michael-lan-Yahweh, Angel of Night. Please, hide me!"

And that had been the end of D&D club, at least until the Angel had been taught the rules for all the board games and tried them all at least once.

Life at Children of the Tribulation went on, as lives do; Rayford and Judd had come back with an interesting story or two to tell about their trip, and even though the pilot's subsequent outing a week later had been more mundane (and shorter range), the trip had inflamed the students' imaginations. Judd, for his part, was mostly happy that the Captain and himself had been blessed with the opportunity of being positive role models.

"It's the third time Rayford tells this story today. The kids are just eating it up."

"Are you surprised? It's got a zeppelin pirate in it. Besides, it's not like he's exaggerating it."

"I'm worried about what that crewman said about Protagonist Syndrome, that's all. Rayford does... well, he does have a bit of an ego."

"I looked up Protagonist Syndrome and Science Related Memetic Disorder. Sounds like a made-up psychobabble thing to me. Rayford handled things well and prevented anybody from getting hurt, he should get to brag about it a bit."

"You did that too, and you haven't."

"Do you think I should?"

"You stopped a street fight with a prayer. It'd make for a really good lesson in ethics class." Vicki gave Judd a gentle peck on the cheek. "Come on. I'll make you a new top hat."

Judd lifted his hands in mock surrender.

Mr. Pessimal's demonstration hacking attempt had reset the terminal in the hidden room as well; much to their delight, the kids there found that the system still had admin access, since Naomi's fix had been applied manually to each terminal and thus hadn't reached the hidden one.

From there to adding a bit of chocolate or berries to COT's foodstuffs delivery agreement was a few minutes' tapping on a keyboard; from there to feeling guilty about it and undoing the operation was thinking about it for thirty seconds.

Still, there was an extra mouth to feed: Lailah had explained that in this dispensation, an Angel deployed on Earth would require at least some substenance. Was it possible to use a terminal to make enough money to cover for it?

Rayford always felt a little uneasy at night. In Petra, he would discuss the Millennial Kingdom that was to come with Tsion, with the theologian doing most of the talking. One time, he'd told hm that the Moon would give as much light as the Sun, and the Sun would likewise be supercharged in proportion. Tsion cited Isaiah 30:26: "Moreover the light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be sevenfold.". Tsion had added that it would be so bright that people will have to wear sunglasses any time they are outside, twenty-four hours a day; Rayford couldn't tell at the time if his friend had meant it, or if he was just making fun of the pilot's habit of nearly always having sunglasses on his nose.

Rayford reasoned that Tsion had figured out that they were prescription, and wanted to poke a bit of fun at this little bit of vanity. Even so... cloud cover and stratospheric phenomena permitting, the stars were all there to see. What did the darkness hide? Rayford wasn't really worried about crime, per se, and it was a simple fact that the animal kinds that had populated the Earth before the Rapture had been rendered peaceful after the Glorious Appearing. Yet, the sheer scale of the world's depopulation during the Tribulation had left large swaths of the world with no artificial lightning; even what remained of the interstate road system was generally not lit at night.

Given how sensitive GPS was to electrical noise, Rayford had had to retrain to be able to orient using the stars, like the ancient sailors. Yet, every time he did so, he felt uneasy. It's all part of God's creation, he reminded himself.

"All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by..." The Perdix continued on her trade route, steered steadily by Captain Steele.

By the beginning of the following week, someone had set up a mat with a suspended beam three feet above it in the gym. It looked safe enough, so Judd decided it could stay; they had decided to not have a martial arts course at COT as a matter of principle, but it seemed like a good idea for older boys to blow off steam in a controlled environment. Someone had even suspended some cotton-and-cardboard clouds around the beam.

The older kids had set things up pretty well: let Lailah do her thing on the network - she showed them the basic of building what would have been called a website during the Tribulation years, although nowadays it had to be optimized to work with the decentralized Ethernet - and put money in the COT account, which would then be withdrawn for the occasional grab of pizza, candy, and the like. They figured that as long as she was putting in more money than she was taking out, well, she was paying rent, really.

And, she had really good stories about Bible times. Cindy got in trouble once for repeating the one about Lilith in class, but otherwise, it was a good way to pick up mnemonics, which Lailah referred to as "psi algorithms".

And, if you got hurt on the playground or only got a C on the test that you legitimately studied for as hard as you could, a winged hug and the encouragement of an adult friend who doesn't report to the teachers can be truly uplifting.

All was going well until Vicki, after reviewing the accounts, decided that Children of the Tribulation was overdue for a spot of spring cleaning. Being smart, she started doing the work herself a few days before announcing it. How would Chloe handle this one, she asked herself? By being clever. After confirming with Marjorie Armherst, their biology teacher, that where there's candy there's ants, all she had to do was watch ant movements for a while...

The winged girl was found in a room hidden between a tool cabinet, eyes wide open in the dark, plugging away at a terminal. Around here were board games, bags of candy, and various bits of half-built things. She seemed to own nothing but a mattress and what little clothing she was wearing. She had safety goggles on.

Judd, having been called in by Vicki, locked the door behind himself and joined his wife; she was beginning to show, and if it came to a physical confrontation - even though Vicki had said it was unlikely - he wanted to be between them.

"Okay. Who are you?"

"I am Lailah-lan-Phanuel-lan-Michael-lan-Yahweh, Angel of Night. I've been... uh, fired. I need to learn how the world works. This was a safe place to do it in. It says so on your front door sign. Please."

"Angels don't get fired. They fall, if that. That'd make you a demon. I think you're a transient who took advantage of our students' good heart, personally... so give me one reason why I shouldn't just call the police and have you removed from the premises." Judd simply didn't want to deal with this person.

"There's a problem, having an unauthorized adult in here looks really bad on us" Vicki added. "I understand you haven't done anything untoward, but I can't let you stay here. What I think we should do is give her a meal and send her on her way. As for you calling yourself an Angel, if I had to find anything offensive in your behavior, that would be it. Lying to children. Really? Couldn't you just knock at the door?"

Lailah stood up and spread her wings - she hadn't in a while, and there wasn't exactly a whole lot of room to do so, so the movement looked less impressive than it was intended to. "I do not lie! I told you why I'm here."

"There's no such thing as female Angels."

"Look me up. I'm in the Talmud. Sanhedrin 96a. And if you want, I can explain why-" Lailah stepped away from the terminal; oddly enough, it was open to a relevant datalink. Judd and Vicki paid no attention.

"It isn't part of canon scriptures. If you want to talk your way out of this, at least limit your stories to the inspired word of God."

"My wife is right, you know. If you had approached us in the open, maybe we'd have..." Judd, like just about everyone else he knew, didn't particularly care for those who would sully the Imago Dei with things like tattoos or implants; wings were definitely right out. "... I don't know, helped you find a job or something. I've heard enough. You're going to stay here and wait until the cops show up."

Lailah flinched, and took a half step back. Judd had already reached for the wall telephone to call 112 with.

"Wait, that's going to scare the kids... and possibly the parents" Vicki told him. "Maybe we should just let her go."

"That's not safe. If we let a transient go after she ate under our table for months, it sets a bad precedent. Besides, even if you believe her story about having been fired, well... what does that make her? She's dangerous."

Vicki sighed and nodded - Judd had made up his mind, and as much as she was curious, she had to admit that he had a point. "All right. Just tell them to come and take her away, don't explain, we'll save that for a judge if it ever goes to court, OK?"

Judd agreed, and made the call. Lailah looked resigned, more than frightened; Vicki pointed out that COT was unlikely to press charges, since it'd make the school look bad. Lailah actually thanked her. Vicki couldn't resist making a bit of conversation while they waited for the police.

"So what do you mean fired? Not that I believe your story, don't get me wrong, but let's hear the rest of it."

"There is to be no night in the Millennial Kingdom, since the light of the moon should be as the light of the sun, so what's the Angel of Night good for? There was no more point to me, literally. Satan is bound for a thousand years. Nowhere for me to go, so here I am, walking the Earth and flying when the weather's good. Sounds a bit like a comic book, doesn't it?"

Vicki had to agree to the last part. "But... there is night. If there's one thing that hasn't gone weird on this Earth, is the day-night cycle. So how do you explain that?"

"I'm still here, aren't I? Some people say that the Battle of Armageddon hasn't ended yet, and the world is holding its breath. Except it's been doing so for years."

"Yeah, yeah, I read that in the same usenet threads you have. So you, supposedly being an Angel, have the inside scoop?"

Lailah shrugged. "I don't. If I did, I would tell you, and you wouldn't believe me, but I don't. But seriously, look me up. Ask Dr. Chaim, or any other Jewish scholar that you trust. People like me, well... being told that we don't exist, hurts."

Vicki felt a maternal pang for the winged girl, then realized that it was probably part of the scam. She didn't want to put the children under her care at risk.

"Well, Angel of Night, here's a suggestion for you, maybe don't hide in the shadows. You obviously can hold a job, and there's no shortage of them. Walk up to a place - during the day - and see if they're hiring."

"They're sending a squad wagon in a few minutes, since it's not an emergency" Judd interrupted "oh, and some guy from CATS. I think it's the same guy that did the inspection a while ago, so we should be okay."

Vicki noticed Lailah freeze in terror for a second.

The paddy wagon got there in record time. Unsurprisingly, A. E. Pessimal was riding shotgun, the Chicago cop having been sent to make the pickup looking none too happy about it.

"Layla Luckett, a.k.a. NiteOwl81. Cat burglar and hacker. Identity pre-Armageddon unknown, records missing. Order a DNA test."

"Hold on, don't we get a say?" the local cop asked.

"No. Custody is now transfered to CATS."

"Because she's really an Angel?" Cindy asked before being told to go back inside by Judd.

"Because her crimes were against the network infrastructure. Whether she's an Angel or not does not concern us."

A. E. Pessimal turned towards Vicki, seemingly having ignored his young interlocutor having been shooed off, and continued.

"However, we would like to interview your students about-"

"You know what? No. This has been disruptive enough, maybe even traumatic."

"Ma'am, you operate a school, not an Academy. You don't have the right-"

"She does" said the local cop "because, you habeas your corpus and I can't stop that, but I say we are done with our inquiries, so don't harass these folks any more."

A. E. Pessimal figured he'd better not push his luck, and nodded to the cop. After checking with Central about the live capture and DNA test equipment being prepared, he watched the paddy wagon speed off while wrapping up the preliminary report on his stenopad.

"Unknown why an Empyrean would take the trouble to establish an identity as a cat burglar, since they usually just try to make a beeline for Ground Minus One and the Throne. Recommend gentle interrogation. The entity has taken time to learn from humans about the workings of our network, and even then, did not immediately try to use it to further its presumed immediate goal. Entity signature confirmed to be Empyrean, but mode of action closer to Dysprosian. Have the Red and Blue team made peace? Possibility is troubling enough to consider it a potential terminal danger to the data network."

Pessimal was refused a ride in the cop car, and, after bowing stiffly to the COT headmistress and her husband, started walking off towards the next closest network node. He really hoped Central would read the report before Dr. Vahlen did, or the "gentle interrogation" part would go right out of the window and possibly into a probing pan.

"Dr. Roszenweig-"

"Chaim, please. Or Micah, if you like." The older man gave the COT faculty a twinkly smile; after all, that's how a good chunk of them had come to know him. After Layla had been found, a staff meeting had been called - COT was obviously getting too big for the current informal style of leadership, and would need to change some of its procedures. Taking the opportunity, Chaim had made a radical proposal to Judd and Vicki.

"-Chaim, why do you want COT to be an Academy? It's a lot of extra overhead..."

"Two reasons. One, more autonomy, that's never a bad thing and right now we can afford the overhead. Two, Saint Michael's Council."

"What about it?"

"It's seven votes, one per commonwealth, one for the churches, and one for the Academies. Right now, Christians outnumber any one pagan cult, obviously. I fear that this may change in two or three generations."

"And us having Academy status would give a leg up to missionaries! Storytellers get some diplomatic immunity, right?"

"Correct. The other reason is that the Church vote is pretty much always decided by the largest ekklesia, which again is us for the foreseeable future, but the Academy vote, by gentlemen's agreement, is rotated. This would give us two votes at least some of the time, and with some lobbying, it can be used for the times when it really matters."

"This is ridiculous! Why are we scrambling about for two votes out of seven? This is His Kingdom, and it is our world! We should-"

"Captain Steele, please. Jesus is on His Throne, and all is well with the world, but at present, we should focus on the possible, not the ideal. I move we vote." Lionel's interjection had been sudden enough to cause Rayford to shut up.

"Second." the older man said, still sounding as resolute as he did earlier.

After a brief prayer for guidance, the staff voted, and the motion easily passed. Children of the Tribulation would take steps to become one of the Planetary Academies.

The room was cozy: no uncomfortable chairs, no harsh lights, no handcuffs. If anything, it looked like a counselor's office at a community college. It also had about fifty thousand Nicks worth of telemetry equipment recording everything on every portion of the spectrum, all artfully hidden.

Unsurprisingly, the interrogator had gotten the Empyrean to defend its Master, even after said Master had, by the Empyrean's account, rejected it. The words were unimportant; all intel had been extracted already. Behind an optical curtain, the little bald man was more interested in pheromone density in the air, body heat, and tonal inflections. Quantifying emotions was more an art than a science, of course, but fuzzy numbers beat no numbers.

"There was a battle, and we fired the last shot. I think that counts for something."

"It doesn't! It's like... there was a ball game, and it ended Jesus 1, Satan nothing, and it doesn't matter how many goals you score, it's past the end whistle, and anyway, you weren't playing! If a streaker runs in and scores a goal, it doesn't count!"

"It does when ending the game means the death of ninety percent of the human population. Besides, strange game, if one of the teams has the referee in it. The only winning move would have been not to play."

"Yeah, well... that's how it was written, and that's how it went, live with it!"

"Ah, but you see, that's just the thing. This wasn't a game. It was a boxing match."

"What's the difference?"

"The difference is that in boxing, even if the ref is against you, you can still win by TKO."

"Is that what you think you did? Jesus is on His throne."

"Yeah, well, you tell me if all is right with the world." Now for the one-two punch. The interrogator played back, at accelerated speed, the last few minutes of the conversation. Lailah had no problems following, or even noticing her own reactions.

"You think the ringmaster runs the circus, do you? Only by the consent of the clowns, Mrs Layla. Only by the consent of the clowns. Now, why were you defending Him, if He supposedly fired you?"

Lailah sat down, deflated. "I... I don't know. I know what the right thing to do is. Everything in my being demands that I do it. But you are right, it would result in an intolerable amount of death and perdition, just so that the Rapture martyrs and Old Testament saints can come back from Heaven for a while. And yet- Wait, that was Terry Pratchett, right?"

The interrogator let Lailah change the subject after noticing that, in the last twenty seconds, her heart rate and perspiration had gone up to near-heart-attack levels. "Right. Hmm, so you did sit yourself down to learn. That's new."

"Storytelling theory is... important. Will be important."

That was definitely new; she'd come across the British author as parts of a memetics course, rather than just picking up some fiction. "Agreed."

Lailah smiled, for the first time in the interview. "I know where his sword is. I can take you to it. It has power. It can have more power. I know that you've been looking for things like that."

Now it was the interrogator's turn to freeze in shock. "Mr. Pessimal, call Central. Lailah, why would you be helping us? What's the trick here?"

"I don't... I can't do tricks. Why am I helping you? Why am I defending Him? I don't know! I've been pushed out and there's no room for me and I know what the right thing to do is and the right thing to do is worse than the Holocaust! How do you people deal with it! I... I want to do the wrong thing! I want to see the world before it gets flattened to a pancake! Why can't we just - live!"

The interrogator let himself fall for what he intellectually knew to be a pheromone-induced effect, and gave Lailah a brief hug. "Welcome to the human race. Now, what do you know about that sword?"

During the Tribulation, shortly before the dissolution of the UK government into the United Great Britain States, Queen Elizabeth knighted fantasy author Terry Pratchett, who reportedly saying on the occasion that "you can't ask a fantasy writer not to want a knighthood. You know, for two pins I'd get myself a horse and a sword." Later that year, he took his new station of Knight Bachelor seriously: Pratchett took it upon himself to forge a sword using more than 175 pounds of iron ore found in a deposit near his home in Wiltshire. For good measure, he added several chunks of meteorite — "thunderbolt iron" for their "highly magical" properties: "you've got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not." With help from his friend Jake Keen — an expert on ancient metal-making techniques — the author dug up 81kg of ore and smelted it in the grounds of his house, using a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure. After days of hammering the metal into bars, he took it to a blacksmith, whom he helped to shape it into a blade, which was finished with silverwork. Said Pratchett: "Most of my life I've been producing stuff which is intangible and so it's amazing the achievement you feel when you have made something which is really real." After the Battle of Armageddon, his whereabouts are unknown and he is presumed deceased. The SABRE commonwealth has a standing order to rebuff treasure-seeker for supposed mystical artifacts such as Excalibur, and the inclusion of this sword in the protected artifact lists indicates...

- Storytelling and Memetic Momentum in the post-Armageddon Age, McGraw-Hill Ethernet Press, Datalinks