held him upright as force generators took him from their grasp, pulled him into the center of the spherical chamber.
Tongue wet lips, jaw unclenched in an attempt to form speech. The flesh of his face, hands, entire body was numb, pins and needles.
“Don’t try to speak; you’re far beyond that now.”
He heard footsteps, sensed the owner of the female voice approach.
“You don’t need to speak, Jean. Just see.”
Fingertips brushed his cheek with the touch of ice, sandpaper brush of something not human, yet in human form. He felt the silver teardrops solidify on his cheeks, so cold, so alien. They fell from his face, mercury pellets. He blinked and saw for the first time in
She smiled. “Not this time, Reynald. Call me Maire.”
“What is…Why am I—”
“I need the code.”
“I don’t know any—”
She struck out, slicing a fingernail into Reynald’s neck. The wound wasn’t deep, but a line of crimson slid down his neck, clavicle, puddled in supra-sternal notch before winding into the hair of his chest.
Maire leaned in close, looking directly into Reynald’s eyes as she licked a bit of blood from his neck. She pulled back, tasted her lips.
“That code, Jean. Genetic code.”
“Commander, what is it?”
Reynald did not have an answer for his subordinate. Windham stood beside him, in awe, weapon still held before him, as if a projectile weapon would be able to stop the enemy. The human forces were alive at the whim of the projected.
Reynald cleared his throat, tapped the side of his neck twice to activate the direct connection to Command. “We need aerial reinforcement. Align satkills to our coordinates.”
The connection responded in his ear. “Wait for orders.”
The atomic had created a beautiful blast crater in the countryside, dozens of miles across, at least a mile deep. The strike had been intended to destroy the entry point of the projected enemy, but the visual confirmation revealed otherwise.
“It goes deeper than we thought.”
Deeper was an understatement, Reynald thought to himself. They had assumed that the projected were coming out of an alien vessel under the surface of the planet. They had assumed that bombing the entry point would destroy the vessel and end the enemy threat.
At the bottom of the blast crater, Reynald saw the twisted and burned edge of a circular hole, an immense silver cylinder sinking into the earth. Their atomic attack had blown the top off of a tube that someone had built into the center of the planet.
Someone.
The projecteds were standing at the edge of the tube, androgynous, motionless. Some of the men had taken to calling their enemy “angels.” Reynald and his soldiers were among a very select group who had survived more than one engagement with the projected humans. He suspected that this would be the last encounter. He could feel the end of this war approaching, and something in his gut told him that it would not be an end beneficial to the human race.
“Orders, sir?”
Reynald impatiently raised his hand, silencing Windham. He looked at the crater’s floor with his implants, magnifying his field of vision until he could make out the individual faces of the projecteds. So uniform. So emotionless.
“Satkill offline. Reinforcement unavailable. Hold your position and wait for orders.”
Reynald shook his head. If those projecteds decided to attack, his forces would be outnumbered and slaughtered by the angels.
As if reading his thoughts, the angel within Reynald’s magnified layer of vision turned its head and started walking toward him. The hundreds of other projecteds began to follow.
Windham slammed another EM pack into his weapon, brought the scope up to his eye. Reynald placed his hand on the top of the weapon, pushed it down to aim at the ground.
“This time, I think they want to talk. Hold your fire.”
“I knew you would understand, Jean. I knew you were different than the hot-blooded men in suits who thought they ran the world.”
“Why the blood, Hannah?”
She grinned at his insistence in using that misnomer for this level. “It will be a gift, of sorts, to those who sent me here.”
“A gift?”
She leaned in close, whispered. “A child. We’ll send them a child of
silver is my favorite.”
He grumbled under his breath as Jo spoke to the jeweler.
“Jemie?”
“Jo?”
“How can you afford this?”
He shrugged. “I can’t afford it.”
“But I thought—”
“I can’t do it, Jo. You know we can’t afford it right now.”
“But James, I—”
“Not now, Jo. I don’t want to talk about it.”
Her lips began to tremble and James heard sobs as he stormed out of the jewelers and into the cobblestone Paris streets.
It was hours before he realized that he had been walking through the streets in a mindless torpor. He was on the docks, watching moonlight dance over the ripples when bright motion caught his eye from above: shooting stars, hundreds of them.
Whistler shook his head, blinked his eyes, but the stars kept falling.
crazy. Can’t you feel it? Different worlds, different times…We’ve known each other before.”
“I know.”
Stars fell in that stillness, and he wished, and she wished, and they probably wished for the same thing under that void, but neither spoke and neither acknowledged that struggle.
“I’ll make you a character in the book.” Hope felt his smile as he said that, felt her own smile as she heard it.
“Can you do that?”
“It’s my book. I can do anything. Fuck it.”
“Then your book needs to include cowboys. And teddy bears. And even that Whistler guy you love so much.”
“Me? Love? Shirley, you jest.”
“Of course. You could never love.”
“Never.”
“Never at all.”
“Nope.”
Stillness and distance breached.
“Keep your distance!”
The angels kept walking toward Reynald’s men, who nervously held weapons before them, watching for the
