By the time he was done, they were all outside—even poor Journee, who ‘Lij had badgered Katz and Lao into helping roll up in a tarp, stowing her for transport in the back of the one blessedly still-operative truck Camberwell’d managed to excavate from the missile-strike’s wreckage. Better yet, it ensued that ‘Lij’s back-up sat-phone was now once again functional; once contacted, the production office informed them that border skirmishes had definitely spilled over into undeclared war, thus necessitating a quick retreat to the airstrip they’d rented near Karima town. Camberwell reckoned they could make it if they started now, though the last mile or so might be mainly on fumes.
“Better saddle up,” she told Goss, briskly, as she brushed past, headed for the truck’s cab. Adding, to a visibly gobsmacked Hynde: “Yo, Professor: you gonna be okay? ‘Cause the fact is, we kinda can’t stop to let you process.”
Hynde shook his head, wincing; one hand went to his chest, probably just as raw as Goss’s mouth-roof. “No, I’ll...be okay. Eventually.”
“Mmm. Won’t we all.”
Lao opened the truck’s back door and beckoned, face wan—all cried out, at least for the nonce. Prayed too, probably.
Goss clambered in first, offering his hand. “Did we at least get enough footage to make a show?” Hynde had the insufferable balls to ask him, taking it.
“Just get in the fucking truck, Lyman.”
—
Weeks after, Goss came awake with a full-body slam, tangled in his sleeping bag and coated with cold sweat, as though having just been ejected from his dreams like a cannonball. They were in the Falklands by then, investigating a weird earthwork discovered in and amongst the 1982 war’s detritus—it wound downward like a harrow, a potential subterranean grinding room for squishy human corn, but thankfully, nothing they’d discovered inside seemed (thus far) to indicate any sort of connection to the Seven, either directly or metaphorically.
In the interim since the Sudan, Katz had quit, for which Goss could hardly blame him—but Camberwell was still with them, which didn’t make either Goss or Hynde exactly comfortable, though neither felt like calling her on it. When pressed, she’d admitted to ‘Lij that her hunting “methods” involved a fair deal of intuition-surfing, moving hither and yon at the call of her own angel voice-tainted subconscious, letting her post-Immoelization hangover do the psychic driving. Which did all seem to imply they were stuck with her, at least until the tides told her to move elsewhere...
She is a woman of fate, your huntress, the still, small voice of Eshphoriel Maskim told him, in the darkness of his tent. Thus, where we go, she follows—and vice versa.
Goss took a breath, tasting his own fear-stink. Are you here for me? he made himself wonder, though the possible answer terrified him even more.
Oh, I am not here at all, meat-sack. I suppose I am...bored, you might say, and find you a welcome distraction. For there is so much misery everywhere here, in this world of yours, and so very little I am allowed to do with it.
Having frankly no idea what to say to that, Goss simply hugged his knees and struggled to keep his breathing regular, his pulse calm and steady. His mouth prickled with gooseflesh, as though something were feeling its way around his tongue: the Whisper-angel, exploring his soul’s ill-kept boundaries with unsympathetic care, from somewhere entirely other.
I thought you were—done, is all. With me.
Did you? Yet the universe is far too complicated a place for that. And so it is that you are none of you ever so alone as you fear, nor as you hope. A pause. Nonetheless, I am...glad to see you well, I find, or as much as I can be. Her too, for all her inconvenience.
Here, however, Goss felt fear give way to anger, a welcome palate-cleanser. Because it seemed like maybe he’d finally developed an allergy to bullshit, at least when it came to the Maskim—or this Maskim, to be exact—and their fucked-up version of what passed for a celestial-to-human pep-talk.
Would’ve been perfectly content to let Camberwell cut her own throat, though, wouldn’t you? he pointed out, shoulders rucking, hair rising like quills. If that—brother-sister-whatever of yours hadn’t made ‘Lij interfere...
Indubitably, yes. Did you expect anything else?
Yes! What kind of angels are you, goddamnit?
The God-damned kind, Eshphoriel Maskim replied, without a shred of irony.
You damned yourselves, is what I hear, Goss snapped back—then froze, appalled by his own hubris. But no bolt of lightning fell; the ground stayed firm, the night around him quiet, aside from lapping waves. outside, someone turned in their sleep, moaning. And beyond it all, the earthwork’s narrow descending groove stood open to the stars, ready to receive whatever might arrive, as Heaven dictated.
...There is that, too, the still, small voice admitted, so low Goss could feel more than hear it, tolling like a dim bone bell.
(But then again—what is free will for, in the end, except to let us make our own mistakes?)
Even quieter still, that last part. So much so that, in the end—no matter how long, or hard, he considered it—Goss eventually realized it was impossible to tell if it had been meant to be the angel’s thought, or his own.
Doesn’t matter, he thought, closing his eyes. And went back to sleep.
WHEN I’M ARMORING MY BELLY
Much later, he would recall the exact moment when he finally forgot his own name: Face-down on a bumpy mattress smelling of semen and Vicks, with Goran pushing and biting into him at once—dry drag and relentless ache, icy and burning in equal amounts, the full Isobel Gowdie daemon lover treatment. Wasn’t like it’d never happened before, and yet, that particular time…something broke, never to be repaired. He felt it run out of him like the blood itself, greedily lapped and savoured: Waste not, want not.
When they flipped him over, meanwhile, Cija came settling onto him from above like Fuseli’s nightmare or Munch’s red-headed whore-dream, her teeth almost meeting around the bed of one nipple—with him in too much nethermost pain even to fuck forward ‘til she made him, reached back to dip her too-sharp thumbnail right into the seat of his deep, laid-open hurt and pressed inward. His hips bucked in a jerky frenzy, and she just laughed to see it; that same laugh they all had, a rippling silver-glass tri
ll, delighted most by the spectacle of damage. Her insides milking him hard enough to bruise all the while, wet and tight and numbing-cold as a close-packed box of snow.