throng who filled the streets. A straggler, one of the last, with Gabrielle’s head limp on his shoulder and the bled- clean ankles banging against his thigh, and if anyone noticed the condition of her they said nothing, because it was a day of miracles.
Their angel had returned, in the full splendor of their need and expectations.
It was a Memuneh that he’d never seen, stripped now and all but naked except for a white cloth wound modestly about his waist and loins. His skin was as creamy pale as the oil paints of a Botticelli or a Caravaggio, and his thighs chubbier than Austin remembered, plump and pleasing as a cherub’s.
But above the waist he was monstrous, as if he’d attempted to redefine his body to satisfy the demands of both aesthetics and logic. The wingspan he’d grown was huge, some forty feet, and the skeletal additions to anchor it grotesque. A great twin slab of breastbone jutted from the middle of his chest, roped over with muscle mass, and up from his back towered a spine that forced his head forward and stretched the skin of his shoulders into a fin like a dolphin’s.
He held his arms outstretched, wide and inviting, and the wings flapped with such force they could be heard even above the hubbub of the crowd. Whatever song he’d been trying to sing to them was drowned out, and the wings weren’t even white, but a mottled desert brown. Like a hawk’s.
Memuneh hovered where his light had been seen months ago, before the top floor of the hotel, scant yards away from the windows of the room where yesterday morning Austin had tasted a dozen deaths. And where was Scarlett? The entire town, it seemed, was crowded around the hotel’s foundation, screaming and crying and reaching for this messenger of the divine, while trampling those who fell beneath their eager feet.
But was it even happening? The furious unreality — this was only the latest in a lifetime of moments when Austin had wondered if it all hadn’t been some elaborate projection arcing through his mind as he fell from the train toward its wheels, sure to clip him off at the ankle, if not higher.
Or maybe he was still in the tunnel after falling clear but striking his head, waiting to awaken to the rough hands and reeking breath of the men nobody wanted, driven out and sent to live along the tracks.
Over the heads of the crowd their gazes met, and when the Kyyth’s eyes settled on the bundle in Austin’s arms, Memuneh began to cry. Tears spilled down his cheeks and fell on the crowd like raindrops, and they wailed with delight and waved their hands for more, opening mouths and wagging tongues as if for Eucharists or snowflakes.
The tilt of his wings changed and Memuneh began to drift groundward. Austin hadn’t wanted to believe it and now, with those copious tears, he knew that this murder could not have been Memuneh’s work. Memuneh may have been a liar but his heart was too soft to slay anything.
Yet would he have enough heart to undo the butchery of another? Mend the damage, reinfuse the drained blood? Cheat death?
Memuneh’s bare soles touched down on the asphalt thirty feet away, but before he could take two steps they swarmed him. He was engulfed in a clutching tide of hands and devotion, and soon all that was visible were his wings, beating at the heads of the crowd. Feathers were ripped out in tufts, quills and all, then even these vast limbs disappeared, churned into the frenzied rapture. Moments later, above the mob rose a triumphant fist, clutching a heart.
Austin turned to carry her away from the sight and was in the next block, almost as far as the road home before he dared to turn and look back.
Someone had taken the severed wings to the hotel roof and now stood at its edge. Austin recognized him — a teenage boy with a mongoloid face and a child’s mind, brought here months ago for a healing that had never been bestowed. He now held the skewed twists of membrane and tatter and hollow bone, teetering against blue sky, then he leapt, plummeting toward a crowd that scattered in panic and left him to strike the street alone.
Austin didn’t wait to see what they did with him next.
He carried Gabrielle past the edge of town, into that desert where it seemed he’d always lived. He stared into the face that lay against his shoulder, then looked for it in the sky, in the fleece of passing clouds.
How she shined. How she shined.
Sweat flowed and muscles began to scream, but no magick this time, no folding of the land upon itself. He would carry her the entire distance back, to reunite her with the pieces that had been plundered.
He would carry her every mile. Every yard. Every foot.
*
“All we desire is to coax you toward everything you are meant to be. But because your lives are short, it’s hard for you to comprehend all that exists and ever has and ever will. So we fan the flames of your wonder.
“There are Kyyth who have grown the bodies of pleisiosaurs around themselves and live in deep lakes, to remind you of a past your kind never knew. There are Kyyth who take on bodies that are neither human nor ape but somewhere between, and wander mountains and dense forests, to remind you of your own origins and how far you’ve come. The Kyyth have worn the flesh of things you yourselves have made up in your minds, because if you desired to believe in them that much, then that was all the justification they needed to be real.
“And in these ways we hope to bring you to belief in yourself, and the exalted position you hold…”
*
And the air smelled of ash.
Austin stood in smoke wafting from her pyre and watched the smudge it made against the sky. As it ebbed into a haze he ducked into the shack long enough to grab a simple stick.
He sat on the ground and drew a few spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. The air at the center of each would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He let them spin, fattening on their own momentum.
But whereas before he would bring his palm down to squash them, now he only snapped the stick and walked away.
*
“It is all out of love for you…”
*
Around noon on the day that Miracle was wiped from the face of the earth, they later stated for the record, the surviving crew of the southbound Union Pacific freight train that passed through the town witnessed a bizarre chaos in its streets. There was both violence and jubilation, as if a street fair had turned on itself. A few minutes and a few miles later they were still puzzling this over when the engines rounded a bend that cut between a pair of craggy red mesas and, on emerging, put them on their collision course with the cyclones.
Four, they saw — then three, then two, and finally one, the largest of this nest of whirlwinds sucking up each of the others and growing mightier with each meal. Their combined furies swelled into a towering colossus of dark
