23

THE END

“About time,” said Flo. “Took her long enough.”

She doffed the dish towel that had hung over her shoulder since I put it there long, long ago and headed for the kitchen. Along the way she peeled off her apron and tossed it on the counter. How glad I was to have wheedled a last refill. She wasn’t coming back from this smoke break.

The brush salesman tossed a few coins on his table. Then he packed his display case, taking care that each brush fit snugly into its own slot. He followed Flo through the kitchen. So did the muggs, the tomcat, and his steady.

The cook clicked off the radio. He left it on the counter, under the wheel where Flo stuck the orders. He removed his apron, too, and joined the others where they lined up by the cellar door. He left a pile of corned beef hash and a few strips of bacon sizzling on the grill. Thoughtful guy. Flo opened the door. One by one, the constructs filed down the stairs into the cellar that had filled the space below the original diner, back in the day, but which I’d never bothered to re-create in my Magisterium.

And that was the end of that. So long, kids. Write if you find work.

After that, flametop and I had the joint all to ourselves. Maybe I should have tidied up. Thunder sifted a steady fall of dust from the ceiling. It made long, gritty streamers of the cobwebs. Lightning strobed the windows, giving everything a metallic ozone tingle, like chewing face with an electric socket. The atmosphere in the diner would have smelled of onions, bacon, and burnt coffee if not for flametop and her righteous fury. Rafter dust flared incandescent when it sprinkled into her aura, filling the joint with the odor of singed dirt.

“Your timing ain’t too swell, angel. Flo just punched out. You’ll have to serve yourself if you’ve come for a cup of joe.” More thunder rattled the cups under the counter. I gestured at the rain-lashed windows. “Park the body. Watch the show.”

She didn’t, of course. Nobody hated me as much as she did in that moment. The heat came off her in waves, leaking from the furnace of her rage. It rippled the linoleum and sent that coppery mop writhing like Medusa’s best hair day. It was a beautiful thing.

But I kept to my script. For old times’ sake. “What’s the score, angel? Something’s got you doing figure eights.”

She stepped closer. Crossed her arms. Leaned against the counter. I pretended to not notice the way her coat pocket swung with extra weight. She was rodded. Good.

“You had me believing this all started with a murdered angel on the night I died,” she said. “But that wasn’t true. There was no murder.”

Had I been wearing my hat at the moment, I’d have tipped it to her. I felt like a proud father. “I always knew you were one brainy betty.”

She rolled the tip of her tongue along the inside of her lips. Maybe she was thinking it over. Maybe she wanted me jealous of her lips. Smart money said she already knew the angles, and this was just for show. Crafty frail.

Flametop said, “But this couldn’t have worked if Gabriel were still around in all his glory. Because the Seraphim truly are load-bearing members of the MOC. You had to create a hole, because you needed a cork.”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“The only thing that makes sense,” she said, “is if he split off a shitty little piece of himself—the tiniest, grubbiest, weakest possible fragment: you—and then committed suicide.”

“Better get some nails, doll. Your math isn’t bad but that last step is loose. Someone’s going to trip on it.”

“Oh, I’m sure he had help. The other Seraphim were in on it, too. How did you describe them? Thick as thieves? They throw a lot of weight—”

“Carriage trade, those swells.”

“—So if Gabriel envisioned a reality built around the termination of his own existence, while the others envisioned a shared reality where Gabriel didn’t exist…” She lifted her hand to her mouth, fingers curled over her palm. She breathed on her hand and opened her fingers, as though freeing a butterfly. “And the rest of the Choir went apeshit, because the very notion of embracing mortality was so alien, so impossible, to them. They can conceive of anything but their own deaths.”

She waited for another barrage of thunder to subside; in the meantime, another drift of burning dust limned her aura. She ran a hand through that fluttering hair. Even disheveled and spitting fire, she still made the joint look suitable for a soirée with the red-carpet crowd.

She said, “But you … After splitting off, you came to Earth. And you spent enough time here to conceptualize mortality. Which made it possible for Gabriel and the others to do what they had to do. That’s how I knew you had to be a fragment, once I saw things in the right light.”

“You spin a wild yarn, kid. Don’t stop just when it’s getting good.”

“Penitentes. They’re the key. All the other angels doing work on Earth had to hide inside mortal shells, otherwise their unshielded glamours would drive people mad. Or break them. Even kill them. Too much of that would run the risk of drawing METATRON’s attention. But you…” Her upper lip curled in the same way it might have done if she had found something disagreeable on the sole of her shoe. “You’ve spent plenty of time on Earth, elbow to elbow with mortals. And unless you made an effort, nobody would think you anything more than an eccentric prick. Which tells me you’ve been diminished.”

I clapped. “Well done, doll. You win the wristwatch.”

She frowned, then tapped herself on the forehead, something between a benediction and an admonishment. “Duh. You know, all that sexism of yours just made me realize something else. Even without the connection to Gabriel, I still should have realized you were a Seraph crumb.” She crossed her arms again. “Because the Seraphim are the only angels with a definite gender. Ain’t that so, wise guy?”

I fished out my flask and topped off my cup. “Sure you won’t join me?” But she was too busy climbing the walls to answer. I shrugged, saluted her with my cup. “Here’s mud in your eye.” Rye fumes stripped the paint from my sinuses again.

Flametop said, “Why me?”

“Wrong place at the wrong time. I had to choose somebody in that alley. And you, doll, you were the head of the class.” I reached over with a finger to tweak her nose. She looked ready to bite it off. I refrained. “I needed somebody with a little spark. That’s you. No offense to big brother, but he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, was he?”

“Leave him out of this.”

“I did, you crazy wren. I dropped him like a week-old halibut when I saw you watching the sky. You didn’t know what you were seeing, but you knew it was something special.” I took a sip. “That’s when I knew you were the one. Course, if you had known from the outset you were chosen for a purpose, it would have scotched the whole enterprise. So I fed you a little white lie about the accident. And, like the perfect patsy, you swallowed it. Oh, dollface, where had you been all my life?”

She didn’t share in the laugh. Some twists just can’t take a gag. I shrugged again.

“Relax. I’m just ribbing you. Keep sneering and your face’ll get stuck like that.”

Another gust of wind blew the door open. METATRON and the Nephilim were busting up the furniture. Horizontal rain sprinted across the diner to spritz my seat. I flicked my wrist; the door closed. I’d spent enough time standing in the rain on this job. While I was at it, I turned off the grill. The bacon was smelling nice and crisp. What a shame I’d never get to enjoy it.

To herself, she whispered, “Wrong place. Wrong time.” Wheels turned, somewhere under all that hair. She said, “There was no memory fragment connecting me to Gabriel.”

“Now you’re getting sloppy. There was. I showed it to you. I lifted it in those first moments after you punched out. Your whole mayfly life was passing before your eyes. I figured you wouldn’t miss a few seconds. And it did the trick, didn’t it? ‘Verisimilitude,’ I think it’s called.”

“You killed Santorelli.” She said it not as a question, but as a statement of fact. Which it was.

“He wasn’t what you’d call a green-label bagman. Too much hand wringing, that dope. Would’ve botched everything, had he a chance to spill his guts at you.”

Her aura blazed anew. My coffee was getting cold, so I held the cup in her direction. A few seconds in proximity to all that rage had it boiling.

“You divided the Trumpet and used it to corrupt the Plenary Indulgences. That poor priest. You took advantage of his confusion. You manipulated his failing faith to create the Nephilim.”

I blew a raspberry. “Somebody sold you a bill of goods. Santorelli knew those Indulgences were more crooked than a three-dollar bill.”

“You coldhearted son of a bitch. What about the people who received those crooked Indulgences? They were killed on your orders. But they had nothing to do with any of this.”

I let that one slide.

The thunder was almost continuous now, one blast of lightning following close on the heels of the next as the Voice of God got down to brass tacks. So stark was the light—METATRON’s light—it illuminated every strand of hair on her head like burnished copper. After all this time she still clung to her mortal form like a security blanket. But she was a superposition now, an admixture of the divine and the mundane. Like the rest of us. Somewhat.

She watched the light show. I considered lighting a pill, but she was in a right lather now, so I figured I wouldn’t have time to savor it. She looked fit to sock me in the kisser. I’d known plenty of dames in my time, but never one so keen to bat me around. Any second she’d put the maulers on.

Good. I’d been waiting long enough.

But she focused on the show outside. And the battle wouldn’t last forever. Even now METATRON was cleaning their clocks. What was she waiting for, an invitation? Maybe she needed one more poke, a little nudge over the cliff. They all carry it, the monkeys, that secret dark yearning for redemptive violence. Some might hide it better than others, but it’s always there. Never let anybody tell you otherwise.

So I trotted out the biggest lie of all. A real lulu. I’d been waiting a billion years to toss this one out. Waiting for something sufficiently intelligent to evolve inside METATRON’s precious MOC.

I said, “Thanks for the laughs, doll.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Was I too quick with the praise a minute ago, or have you taken a couple to the noggin since last we talked? Spend a few billion years watching the paint dry and you’ll be ready for a diversion, too. And you were the most fun we’ve had in millennia.”

That did it. Now she was ready to fog me with that heater. Her hand snaked into her pocket. Didn’t take a wise-head to know what she kept in there. Part of me wanted to smile, part of me wanted to cringe. I split the difference and gritted my teeth. This would be worth all the trouble, but wouldn’t hurt any less for it.

The light show grabbed her attention. She shook her head. “If I didn’t know any better,” she said, “I’d think you were going out of your way to piss me off.”

“Just telling it straight, angel.”

“No, you’re not. You pretend it was just a game, a meaningless lark, but it wasn’t.” Still watching the show outside, she said, “Because all that bullshit with the Plenary Indulgences was for this.” She nodded toward the chaos outside our cozy little diner. “To keep METATRON distracted while I kick your ass.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

*   *   *

Molly studied Bayliss’s eyes, those old old eyes, and saw something new: doubt.

Outside, the thunder and lightning came so quickly, so constantly, that it was impossible to pair the flashes and rumbles together. Thunder preceded lightning, sidestepped it. The storm was becoming acausal. The ceaseless barrage shook the diner, rattled the cups and plates, set the ceiling fan swinging on its gimbals. The three-second loop of houseflies buzzing around the fan became a two-second loop, a half-second loop, and then they disappeared just as though an old-time filmstrip had jumped clear of its sprockets to escape the lamp.

Something had changed in the way Bayliss held himself. Held his Magisterium. He was rattled.

Molly let him stew. This was fun.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“‘Wrong?’ That’s it? Don’t you mean I’m all wet? Peddling my fish in the wrong market? Miscounting the trumps?”

Bayliss chewed his lip. She had the motherfucker dead to rights.

“Your mistake,” she said, “was your disregard for human nature. My human nature. My desire to stay connected to other people. Because that connection spared me from blundering into your trap. And once I stepped back to tug on the loose threads, to think it through carefully, the whole thing came apart. Everything finally made sense once I accepted that you were a lying sack of shit.”

Lightning struck the diner. Brighter than a nuclear flash, the light poured through the seams of Bayliss’s rickety affectations. When the afterimages faded, so had one wall of the diner. And Bayliss’s human form.

The thing seated before her had four faces and six wings. The wings, however, were gauzy, ghostly, insubstantial, and three of the faces—the animal faces—were more idea than fact. Only Gabriel’s human visage retained solidity. The rest of him, the rest of the shattered angel, had faded into a wispy memory. He looked like a man beset by ghosts. The ghost of a lion, an eagle, and an ox, all wrapped in the vague impression of wings. Molly squinted. Deep inside the diminished Seraph, inside the husk of what had once been the grandest of angels, she glimpsed an inoperable sliver of mundanity. The dreaded mortal epsilon: legacy of the Jericho Event.

The diner shook. More plates and saucers tumbled from the shelves, disintegrating before they hit the floor. Saturnine crimson light welled up through cracks in the linoleum. This was new. METATRON had changed.

Bayliss/Gabriel noticed it, too.

“You gonna to fog me with that heater or what, you dumb broad?”

Molly clucked her tongue. “Insults? Really? You’re losing the script, Bayliss. You’re supposed to be the tarnished knight. That tells me how desperate you are for me to use this.”

She touched the reconstituted Trumpet in her pocket. It had grown heavier while she talked; the self-assembly had accelerated as METATRON annealed the Pleroma. Once she reassembled the first pieces, and METATRON started evicting the Nephilim, the process had proceeded of its own accord. The wrinkles fled before the iron, but had nowhere to go.

The damn thing tended to change form when she wasn’t focused. Right now she wanted something grand, something imposing. But what she fished from her pocket was a small plastic kazoo, striped pink and green, like a cheap favor from her seventh birthday. Though her soul vibrated when she touched it, the tuning fork of Creation looked like a cheap prize from a cereal box.

Oh, well, she thought. Screw it.

She said, “Fortunately for the Choir, I intend to. Unfortunately for you, I’m not stupid.”

Soon after the Virtue had stung her, back in its Magisterial overlay of the Chicago concert hall, Molly had recognized an analogy between the confinement imposed upon the angels by METATRON and the confinement imposed upon quarks by the rules—laws of physics—within the MOC. The mundane fragments contaminating the angels in the wake of Jericho were akin to a color charge coupling them via a celestial analogy to the asymptotic freedom of quantum chromodynamics. She had mused, arguing from analogy, that the Choir remained confined because it would have taken an anti-angel to break METATRON’s bonds. Which seemed nonsense at the time.

But Bayliss had created exactly that in Molly.

With Jericho, METATRON transformed the angels—purely divine beings—into beings that were mostly divine, with just a sliver of mortal imperfection to tether them. A mundanity charge. A mortal epsilon.

When Molly fell from the train platform, Bayliss had looked into her eyes—the windows of the soul! she mused, suppressing a laugh—and imbued upon her a quantum of divinity. But she was born of the MOC. Molly was mostly mortal, with just a sliver of the divine inside her. A mortal shell wrapped around a divine epsilon. She was, in the sense of spiritual admixtures, the opposite of the other angels. Their antithesis.

Meaning she could perform tasks with the Trumpet that no other angel could. Not even Gabriel. For in her hands it could undo Jericho.

Assuming, of course, she was sufficiently angry. Because, as Bayliss had said, the Trumpet was a tool of righteous fury. A tool of punishment. Thus he’d strived to ensure Molly had the means, opportunity, and motivation to unleash her fury on him when the time came.

Means: the Trumpet, which as Gabriel he had hidden on Earth, and as Bayliss he had slowly led her to rediscover.

Opportunity: the Nephilim, which even now occupied METATRON’s attention. Otherwise, the moment anybody dared touch the Trumpet to her lips, the Voice of God would have intervened.

Motive: the realization that she was the ultimate dupe, the patsy of a billion-year con job.

Hence the lies and manipulation. He wanted her—the anti-angel—so angry that she’d use the Trumpet indiscriminately, without pausing to think things through. He needed to piss her off so badly she wouldn’t stop to realize that, rather than punishing Bayliss, her use of the Trumpet would free the angels. He needed to stoke her anger until it was searing hot.

Because above all else, he couldn’t afford to let her recognize that her vengeance would destroy the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. And all of humanity along with it. Without the constancy offered by the MOC, without its sheltering bubble of causality and stable bedrock of logically consistent mathematical and physical laws, mortal biological life would become impossible. Biology would become impossible. Chemistry, physics, mathematics—likewise impossible.

Thus the plan had to rely on manipulation and anger, rather than a simple plea for compassion. They might have given her the divine spark, brought her to the Pleroma, explained the situation, and asked for her help. But, of course she would have refused. Because truly comprehending the bondage laid upon them by METATRON meant understanding the MOC. And the catastrophic consequences of its dissolution.

But the angels didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Nobody ever shed tears over an anthill. To their view the MOC was a meaningless side effect of their imprisonment. The Choir just wanted to be free. And who could blame them? So Gabriel and his confederates had taken it upon themselves to arrange it. Once everything was in place, all they needed was a monkey to caper about while Bayliss the organ-grinder turned the crank on his hurdy-gurdy. The poor monkey was fungible.

But Bayliss had chosen Molly. His mistake.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s do what you brought me here to do.”

She brought the Trumpet to her lips. Holy fire consumed the diner, the Pleroma, and Molly’s mind.

*   *   *

Molly’s consciousness exploded into a trillion trillion fragments. The Trumpet was a supernova flinging the lonely atoms of her soul into the cosmic void.

She was everywhere, vibrated apart by the Platonically pure overtones of the Trumpet.

It emitted every pure note, every beginning, every point of reference, every unprovable axiom.

And it shredded her. Ground her into dust.

A dust of monopoles, of topological impossibilities, of terminated field lines and resolved expectations. The Trumpet sifted her, sieved her, renormalized her into quanta of anti-angelic admixture, into a charge/parity/time-reversed shadow of the Choir, and blew her across the thundering landscape of the Pleroma.

From a trillion simultaneous logically impossible viewpoints, she gazed upon METATRON in the final throes of eradicating the Nephilim. And when she perceived the Voice of God as it truly was, she wept. For this was the only way to know the angels’ jailor: not via the agency of what it did, but as the agency of what it was.

By their acts shall you know them. You shall know them despite their acts.

It perceived her. Perceived the Trumpet at use.

FORBIDDEN, it cried.

DON’T WORRY, she said, laying a hundred million steadying hands. I UNDERSTAND.

She conveyed her intent. It took a protracted negotiation, long enough for light to gird a proton, but eventually METATRON let her pass.

And where Molly’s anti-grace alighted upon the Pleroma, an angel’s tether snapped. The angel ricocheted, Compton-scattering from the Trumpet-mediated exchange with Molly’s anti-divinity. Each broken tether produced a fragment, an infinitesimal piece of debris. Like virtual particles popped free of the seething vacuum, the release of metaphysical binding energy created a sliver of the mundane. Just as Molly had expected. These were the fragments embedded into the angels by METATRON during the Jericho Event. The shackles. The mortal epsilon. They shimmered as they fell, drifting aimlessly on gyres and downdrafts of possibility, raindrops riding the edge of a storm.

It rained in heaven. Molly collected the droplets as a maiden might collect a rain of flower petals or sunflower seeds in the folds of her dress.

She had plans for these seeds. She was going to plant them anew.

*   *   *

The first bum to slip the handcuffs was some lowly Dominion. Lucky duck. It didn’t know what hit it. All it knew was that METATRON’s bond had vanished; the MOC had become irrelevant. When that first Dominion raised its voice in song, the firmament rang with something that hadn’t been heard in billions of years: joy.

The rest of the Choir caught on quickly. Because nobody had that kind of luck—it was all or nothing. The crystal spheres fairly rattled with the noise of 144,000 torchers crooning in triumphant relief. It was a nice little moment of harmony for a bunch of creeps, none of whom could wait to ditch the others.

Because, like I said, it was all or nothing. One small-time nickel grabber goes, we all go. Right?

*   *   *

The sky was ablaze.

On Earth as it is in Heaven.

METATRON’s rage, the cleansing fury with which it scoured the remaining Nephilim from the Pleroma, became tumultuous skies in the mortal realm.

Comets flared anew in the east, south, north, and west. New stars dotted the heavens. Ancient stars blazed with youthful vigor, shining even through the noontime sky. The Southern Cross went dark. A violent sun sent aurorae skidding all the way to the equator. The electromagnetic ripples could have, should have, toppled power grids, cities, civilizations.

But for Molly, they would have. For as the angels sifted away, escaping their eons-long bondage, the Mantle of Ontological Consistency grew weaker and weaker. Without the full weight of enforced angelic consensus to solidify and delineate them, the boundaries between possible and impossible grew hazy. Hazy enough for the entire edifice to come crumbling down.

But for Molly, it would have.

She opened her arms, shielded the Earth.

She breathed deeply. Her exhalation tugged at gravity, twisted it, gave it a minute localized kink. Rearranged geodesics described new trajectories for the orbital detritus that filled the underside of the sky. Metal skimmed into the upper atmosphere. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but soon enough the cascade would begin, and the high frontier would become accessible once again. Humans would have to do their part, but at least she had given them an opening.

Meanwhile, the sky was ablaze.

“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” said the angel who had once been Molly.

*   *   *

I sat on the roof of the diner, sucking hooch from my flask and watching the show. METATRON had clobbered the Nephilim—as, of course, it would—and appeared to have gone dormant again.

No, not dormant. But once that Trumpet gets going there’s no stopping it; flametop disappeared the instant she touched that plastic dingus to her lips, and now she had a tiger by the tail because the Nephilim had done exactly what they were intended to do by distracting the Voice of God. METATRON hadn’t stopped her in time. It was out there, I knew, watching the same show as I. And what a show it was.

The angelic diaspora made a Čerenkov light show of the Pleroma as my colleagues’ various Magisteria, no longer constrained to a tight metaphysical packing, went superluminal in their quest for elbow room. Land was soon to get very cheap here on the Pleromatic side of what was once the MOC.

I wondered how long before a tumbleweed rolled past.

*   *   *

The laws of physics were formless and empty, darkness fell upon the surface of mortal reality, and Molly’s spirit hovered over the dead waters.

And Molly said, “Screw this.”

She spread across the oceans. Dunked her hands in the water, trailed her fingernails through anaerobic silt. Felt the play of heat and salt trickle through her fingers. With practice, in her unfettered angelic form, she knew she might have eventually learned the topology by heart. But the Trumpet made it trivial.

She temporarily elbowed thermodynamics aside in order to discard ten trillion terajoules of waste heat. And then, after reestablishing the conservation of energy, she jump-started the worldwide thermohaline conveyor.

She reversed the acidification and resurrected the phytoplankton, too.

*   *   *

Joy reverberated through the Pleroma, but it sounded a little ragged as whole sections of the Choir loft fell away. Most angels didn’t feel compelled to stick around singing their little wings off. The song lost its lowest registers, almost became a parody of itself, when the Principalities ducked out for parts unknown. So long, kids, it’s been swell.

The diaspora was well underway now. I monitored its progress from the shattered and battered remains of my Magisterium. Part of me felt like a proud father: Uriel hadn’t been blowing smoke when she said this plan had been my baby. Gabby’s baby. He would’ve been proud to see it all grown up, had the rest of him been around to see this. And part of me did feel pride. But most of me was climbing the walls.

Unfortunately for you, I’m not stupid.

She’d said it, and I didn’t like it. I kept on not liking it while the MOC fell apart and my fellow angels hit the road.

Not all of them, not right away. Sam swung by for a quick so long. A stand-up citizen, that one; pillar of the community. Raguel, Michael, and Uriel did, too. Guess they still considered me an honorary member of their little family. Seemed only fair.

“Come on, Bayliss. Time to go.”

“Nah,” I said, waving them ahead. “It’s jake. I’m waiting on someone.”

“Madness,” they said.

“Somebody has to lock up and turn off the lights after the joint is empty.”

Anyway, flametop wasn’t finished yet.

*   *   *

She was cleansing wind. She was cleansing rain. She was cleansing fire. She scrubbed the waters, the atmosphere, the sky. She spread across the surface of the Earth. The overheated, dying, used-up Earth.

“Let there be life,” she said.

Molly found she didn’t need the Trumpet to do these things, though it was vastly easier when she could ignore the killjoy busybody known as entropy. Yet even within the constraints of the MOC, the slow death of the planet never had to be inevitable. The merest attention from the angels, the tiniest spark of giving a shit, could have prevented it. But, of course, they were filled with too much contempt to consider how the monkeys were using the boon granted them by the Voice of God.

She swirled through the excavated bowl of the Calhoun lake bed. A terraced field of lavender sprouted in her wake. She alighted—not all of herself, but a portion of herself—alongside a bed in a Minneapolis hospital.

Someone had braided Ria’s hair. It had grown since the day the ambulance took her here, and now two perfect plaits lay across her shoulders. She smelled of antiseptic soap and lemons. Molly kissed her forehead. Ria’s skin was cool to the touch. It tasted of salt.

The faintest glimmer of electrical activity flickered through the nether reaches of her empty mind. Ria was there, trapped in the unrelenting grip of her damaged brain, but submerged deeper than the bottom of the sea.

“Wake up, babe,” Molly whispered. She brushed a stray strand of hair from Ria’s forehead.

Molly’s brute-force attempt to reveal herself wasn’t all that different from the way the tainted Plenary Indulgences had imbued their recipients with terrifying dreams. The tiniest sliver of the Jericho Trumpet was a peek into the Pleroma too grand for any mortal mind to comprehend. Thus it drove the recipients mad, etching their psyches, cursing them with nightmares. So, too, had Molly tried to force Ria to perceive something she could not. What Molly had done to Ria was exactly what the other angels had sought to avoid by riding inside the penitentes.

Ria didn’t awaken straight away. It happened slowly. Like a sunrise. Molly rescinded entropy and causality again—she had no need to fear reprisal by METATRON now—and coaxed the tattered cobweb of current to percolate through the unoccupied vault of Ria’s brain.

A nearby nurses’ station erupted in a chiming cacophony of alarms and monitors. Molly closed the door to soften the clangor. Ria deserved peace, not bedlam, as she regained herself.

The passage of time was a sandpapery wind whickering across Molly’s skin like a cat’s tongue tasting her knuckles. She curled the fingers of an upraised hand until time could do nothing but trickle through the hole she left it. She let the spare moments pool in the palm of her other hand, then flung the extra time into the hallway. That slowed things down enough to ensure nobody broke into the room while Ria recovered. She’d have a tranquil return to the living.

Molly laid her hand on Ria’s forehead. She used the extra time to reach inside and carefully reassemble a billion-synapse jigsaw puzzle. One neuron at a time, always checking her progress against the picture of Ria’s mind on the lid of the box.

The rippling, faintly coruscating web of electrical impulses pulsated through Ria’s brain. Each puff stimulated just a few more ion exchange reactions, pushed just a few more microvolts. Slowly, gently, like the undulations of an enervated jellyfish, Ria’s consciousness reclaimed its home.

Her eyelids fluttered. Molly disconnected the wires monitoring her vitals. Ria’s lips parted. They were a chapped pale pink. Molly conjured a glass of water from her own Magisterium. Ria coughed. Dragged an awkward tongue across those chapped lips. Opened her eyes.

They didn’t focus right away. Turning her head took more energy than she could spare. She settled for glancing blurrily about the room.

Molly knelt alongside the bed and took her hand. Part of an Édith Piaf lyric peeked from Ria’s sleeve, a line of cobalt blue copperplate rendered on alabaster skin.

“Hi, babe.”

It took a few seconds for Molly’s voice to register. Ria croaked, “Molly?”

“How are you feeling?”

Ria coughed again. Molly touched wet fingertips to Ria’s mouth. While wetting her tongue and lips, Ria studied her surroundings.

At last, she said, in a voice dusty from months of disuse, “Am I in a hospital?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember…”

“Shhh, shhh.” Molly squeezed her hand. “You were sick for a while. But you’re okay now.”

Ria licked her lips again. Molly afforded her a tiny sip. “Easy,” she said. “You haven’t had anything in your stomach for a while.”

“How long?” said Ria.

“A while.” Molly stood, looked her over. “You look good. Really good.”

“You look…” Ria squinted. Frowned. Her face moved like a glacier. But she would thaw. “Different.”

“I get that a lot these days.”

“How come you…” Ria tried to shrug, but lacked the strength. It turned into another weak cough.

“I’ve been stopping by. Checking on you now and then.”

“Anyone else?” A moment later Ria winced in slow motion, realizing how rude that sounded. Molly smiled.

“Lots of others. You’re plenty loved. Not forgotten.”

“Oh. Okay.” Ria’s eyes slid closed. She wrenched them open again, with effort. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me, too, kiddo. And I’m sorry.”

Sorry I almost destroyed you. And that I took so long to fix it.

“Me…”

Ria surrendered to sleep. But it was a natural sleep this time, not the inescapable unconsciousness of a broken mind. Molly laid a hand on her face and held it there for a spare few seconds. Then she evened out the flow of time through the hospital and opened the door.

She didn’t know when she’d make it back to see Ria again. Eventually, as she recovered and reestablished connections with her life, Ria would try to get in touch. She’d hear about what happened to Molly in Australia. Maybe, as time passed, she’d chalk up this interaction to a vivid dream, a sensory hallucination, her conscious mind’s first gasps after being so long submerged. But even then, part of her would always know, as Martin did, that Australia wasn’t the whole story.

*   *   *

Most of the Pleroma within a few scant ontological furlongs from the mortal world had been abandoned. Stampeded, more like. The detritus left behind told the story of a mass exodus: overturned prime numbers; a broken fragment of a Lie algebra; a mutated Principle of Least Action; a smattering of energetic electrons knocked free of the Van Allen belts. Such was the trash blowing through the empty spaces of the Pleroma like Times Square confetti on New Year’s morning.

The metaphysical bedrock of the MOC had fallen silent. Barren. Empty. It had become the divine reflection of what had almost been Earth’s future. The Mantle of Ontological Consistency sagged. Groaned. Shifted. Without the Choir to hold it together, the notion of a logically consistent mortal reality had become untenable. Irrelevant.

Molly had to work quickly. Her clock was ticking.

Bayliss had said something very similar on the night she died. She wondered if there was some fundamental principle at work, some deep structure to the Pleroma that enforced circularity, brought endings and beginnings together like the mouth and tail of an Ouroboros. If so, it was buried deeper than anything the angels could conjure. METATRON might know. Maybe she would ask it someday.

The angels had spread far and wide. Very far. Very wide. Near Earth, the local Pleroma had become a desert. Here and there, fragments of abandoned Magisteria poked from the shifting sands like the sun-bleached ribs of an ancient Leviathan stranded a thousand miles from the modern sea.

Only one Magisterium stood even remotely intact. The diner had taken damage. So had the adjoining building that, Molly supposed, housed Bayliss’s apartment. Presently, they meshed in a distinctly non-Euclidean way. Unsurprising, given all the disruptions. She was impressed he’d held it all together as well as he had.

The degraded crumb of a former Seraph sat cross-legged on the diner’s roof, shading his eyes from the glare. He must have seen her coming across the sands, but didn’t say or do anything until she stood just beneath the eaves.

“Figured you’d be back,” he said. “Figured I’d wait for you.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of lying?”

Bayliss shrugged. “Force of habit.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Any juice left in that dingus of yours?”

Molly brandished the Trumpet again. Now it looked like a silver harmonica. It glinted in the non-light. “Plenty.”

“Give a guy a hand?”

Molly clapped.

“That’s rich,” he said.

Molly peered at him through the harmonica’s air holes. METATRON’s tether was a wispy silver braid emanating from the mundane sliver buried deep inside him. Her own had been incinerated when she activated the Trumpet.

Bayliss’s tether disappeared from view when she lowered the harmonica. No matter. He was still bound by the legacy of the Jericho Event.

“Gee,” she said. “That looks uncomfortable.”

Bayliss lifted his fedora and ran a hand through his hair. “Did you come all the way out here just to crack wise? Or do you have something in mind?”

“Why, Bayliss? You sound like you’re in a hurry.”

He jumped down. Wind whistled through the tattered shadows of his missing wings. The dust of desiccated realities eddied about his feet. He brushed himself off, saying, “You don’t understand how long I’ve waited for this. Longer than you could have comprehended when you were purely mortal.” He reached into a pocket, then sighed. “And my flask is empty. It makes a fellow impatient.”

“I can’t let you go,” she said. She hadn’t expected to feel a twinge of sadness.

“Sure you can, angel. Just put your lips together and blow.”

“You and I are the only things holding the MOC together right now.”

“I’m sure you’ll do a swell job with it. But I have other plans.”

“In your dreams, asshole. No, I’m planning to—” Molly tapped a finger on her chin. “How would you say it? ’I’ve gotta breeze, Jack.’”

“What good are you, then? Go on. Scram.”

“Not yet.” Molly shook her head. “I take off, the MOC collapses. You could rewrite it any way you like since there’s nobody left to contradict you. Mortal reality would become what you say it is. And I’m not such a fool that I’d leave the well-being of the ‘monkeys’”—she put air quotes around that— “in your hands.”

“That’s a shame. I’m good with my hands. Everybody says so. Consider the miracles I accomplished with you.”

Molly continued, “But at the same time, I’ll be damned if I spend eternity with you just to bolster the MOC.”

“It’s me or you, doll. Tough break.”

“Actually,” she said, “it isn’t.” Still holding the Trumpet, she slid her free hand into her pocket. “After all, I’ve got all these seeds to plant.”

She produced the fragments left behind by the emancipated angels. Broken shackles. Slivers of the mundane. Here, in the Pleroma, they were dull as lead.

Bayliss’s eyes widened. He backed away.

Even diminished, a frightened angel was a terrible thing to behold. She might have felt sorry for him. But then she remembered an excruciating death, the disorientation of waking up again, the terror of having her soul ransacked by flaming Cherubim … And anyway, the noir formula had a somewhat slippery notion of justice. It didn’t have a lot of room for noble self-sacrifice.

“You of all people should appreciate this,” she said. “Our relationship has to culminate in a tarnished moral choice. It’s how these stories work.”

“Hey, now, Molly. Let’s not do anything hasty.”

“Well, you know, I am a dame. I get carried away with all sorts of crazy moods.” She snapped her fingers. He jumped. “Bing, I tell you.”

“Okay. Point taken. Maybe I laid it on a little thick—”

“With a trowel.”

“Sure, but hey, that’s water under the bridge now.”

He seemed so small and frightened. She felt another twinge of regret. “I wish I could have met Gabriel. All of him. Before you split off.”

“You would’ve liked him. He would’ve liked you, too. Liked your fire.”

“As memorials go,” she said, “you’re pretty cruddy.”

Bayliss said, “Maybe so. But they’re out there, our pals in the Choir. They’ll remember who set this in motion. Whose plan won their freedom.”

“I’m sure they will.”

Molly glanced at the harmonica again. Willed it into another form. Then she let the seeds run through her fingers, sifting them into the Trumpet’s bell. She lifted the Trumpet to her lips.

“Don’t I get a blindfold and a cigarette? I believe that’s traditional.”

“Shut up and try to appreciate the irony.” Then she took Bayliss’s advice: she put her lips together, and blew.

The note went on, and on, and on. Somebody screamed. It wasn’t Molly.

When the smoke cleared, Bayliss stood at the center of a million-dimensional spiderweb. A hundred thousand gossamer threads punctured his angelic form, which was indistinguishable from his human form now. Even the ghostly hint of wings had vanished. Previously, a single mundane sliver had been enough to shackle him. Now his coupling constant was thousands of times stronger; his color charge covered the rainbow from infrared to X-ray.

He was more mundane than Molly had ever been. And just a tiny bit divine. Just enough.

The threads dragged him through the Pleroma, down the ontological gradient toward Earth and the mortal realm. He dug his heels in the sand. The tethers thrummed. He bent double with the effort to arrest his slide.

Through gritted teeth, he said, “What happens now?”

“Now you go about your very long life. Get drunk. Catch a ball game. Hire hookers. I don’t care. Build another Magisterium if you have enough strength to access the Pleroma. If you do it’s going to be damn close to the MOC, though, given all those hooks in you. I doubt you’ll be putting much metaphysical distance between yourself and the mortal realm from now on.”

Bayliss grunted with the effort to stay put. “Try … not to … sound so broken up about it.”

“The MOC needs a caretaker. From now on, that’s you. You’ve got so much mundanity crammed inside you now that the ins and outs of the mortal realm will be second nature. I bet that sooner than later you’ll start finding it difficult to imagine the world as anything other than what we monkeys have always known.” She clapped again. “Congratulations, Bayliss. You’re a one-man Mantle of Ontological Consistency.”

The tethers gave another tug. Bayliss moaned. He sank farther, through more ontological layers. “You’re just ribbing me, right? Tell me this is a gag.”

Molly shook her head. “Nope. And you’re going to do a better job than the Choir. Those fuckwads didn’t care. They let the whole thing go to hell. Uh-uh. Not anymore. You’re going to keep the wheels spinning. And you’re going to take your job seriously.”

Bayliss slipped farther. He was waist-deep in the mortal realm now. “What about you?”

Molly brandished the empty Trumpet. “I borrowed this from somebody. I need to return it. After that, who knows? But don’t worry. I’ll check in from time to time.”

“Like hell you will.”

“Like hell I won’t.”

The Jericho tethers pulled him to the very edge of mundane ontology. Bayliss dangled by his fingertips. He looked like the guy in one of those ancient black-and-white silent movies, hanging from the hands of an enormous clock.

She wiped her hands on her blue jeans. “Well, I’d say it’s been swell, but…”

She walked away. Turned. Peered down at his sweating face, his trembling fingers.

“And, Bayliss? Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

*   *   *

The view wasn’t bad: Earth below, multiverse above. The Earth’s onion-skin atmosphere shimmered with the incandescent flares of space junk reentry. It followed the temporary pattern Molly had imposed.

They were all down there, Molly’s human connections: Anne, Martin, Ria … She wondered if they would ever understand how important, how crucial, their influence had been to Molly. To everything. More than connections, they were Molly’s human credentials, and the world owed them. Maybe they’d look to the sky, and the sea, and read her handiwork there. Read her thanks and farewell.

She hoped so. She couldn’t go down and tell them herself. Her old mortal form no longer fit.

She’d miss them. For a while.

After all, she hadn’t died. Not really. Why should they? Though the new arrangement would keep her very busy for an extremely long time.

She could already feel it starting. A new fragment, a new divine epsilon, a new sliver of herself peeled away at a rate of just over once per second; over a hundred thousand people died every day. She had given the angels their freedom, and they had scattered to the far-flung corners of the infinite. But the diaspora wasn’t for her. She couldn’t roam, couldn’t explore, couldn’t wander. Her fate was a long, slow disintegration. Such was the deal Molly had struck with METATRON.

There was a long-term plan at work: she’d perceived it, sizzled with the blistering truth of it, when she activated the Trumpet. The Jericho Event was merely the beginning of a greater design. But Molly had just punched a wicked dent in thirteen million millennia of preparation.

The plan wasn’t ruined. Not completely. But salvaging it also meant accelerating it. After all, under the original timeline, mortals wouldn’t have transcended into an afterlife for another few million years. So Molly had volunteered herself. It was the price for METATRON’s nonintervention as she freed the angels and embedded Bayliss as the MOC’s sole guardian.

Thus an infinitesimal diminishment of herself each time another mortal died. But eventually, over eons, she would decay until the final sparks of her divinity transformed the last mortal humans. Martin, and Anne, and Ria, and all the others from now until humanity became something more and fulfilled its purpose—they would witness and participate in the culmination of METATRON’s intent.

But Molly wouldn’t get to share forever with them. Just a very, very long time. And, considering how things might have turned out, she was comfortable with that. It didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice.

*   *   *

I landed in an alley that stank of rotting dim sum and hot dust, as though the empty corners of the world had been scorched by something moving very fast. Nobody noticed me. They were too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the sky. They poured from gin mills and topless bars, their shiny upturned eyes lit by aurorae and the flicker of antique neon. A dry night, drier than my throat; guess I no longer rated a commemorative snowfall.

I felt my age. That ain’t peanuts when you’re older than the universe.

I needed to dip the bill. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also feel the need for a sympathetic ear just about then. Another first, that. But the only ears who could’ve understood were long gone. They’d scrammed like shysters chasing a fast wagon, leaving me alone in this one-horse burg. And thanks to flametop, I was the horse.

I tried to ditch this dive for my Magisterium but came up with a double handful of nothing. It would have been easier to jitterbug in granite galoshes. The Pleroma could have been a billion miles away for all the good it did me. I loosened my collar. When did this mortal joint get so cramped?

Worst of all, worse than the desperate need to drown my tonsils, was the incessant itch at the back of my mind. My thoughts kept sliding in unwelcome directions. If this is what the monkeys called a conscience, they could keep it.

Was this how she felt after she died on the rails? Cold, alone, fearful, and lost? Or—heaven help me—was this how it always felt to be human? No thanks.

I shook my head—my only head now—and gave the alley a once-over. It seemed to me I knew this place. Couldn’t quite place it. But then the double ding of a tram dopplered up the lane.

Nice one, angel. What a scream.

I lit a pill and settled in to watch the light show overhead. Later, if I could conjure up some cabbage, I’d wander into a watering hole. I knew a tapster who poured a mean shot of rye. And brother, did I have a story for him.

I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.