The Angel Within

Summer break, day 11, 19:40

“And finally tonight, something the whole world has been waiting for.”

The woman at the news desk turned from her co-anchor to the camera. Behind them the studio wall showed a night sky full of stars, and a banner slid along the bottom of the screen in gold capitals. ONCE IN A MILLION YEARS. WATCH THE SKY TONIGHT.

“In just a few hours, people in almost every country will look up and see the same thing. Scientists are calling it a...” She glanced down at her notes for it. “A once in a million years event. Thousands of meteors, all at once, lighting up the sky from one end to the other.”

The man next to her smiled. “And you don’t need any special equipment for this one. No telescope, nothing. Just clear skies and somewhere to look up from.”

“That’s right.”

“Though I read they only spotted it, what was it... two weeks ago? Short notice, for once in a million years.”

“Two weeks, yes.” For half a second neither of them said anything, and her hand went to her earpiece. Then the smile was back. “And they’re saying it’s perfectly safe, so no need to worry there. Cities all over the world are getting ready. Parks are staying open through the night, people are climbing onto their rooftops. They’re saying it’ll be the brightest the sky has looked in a hundred years.”

“So whatever you’ve got planned tonight, try to step outside for a few minutes. Look up. You may never see anything like it again.”

The picture cut to a clip of tiny lights moving across a globe, soft music underneath, and then it faded into an ad for car insurance.

I turned the TV off and sat there staring at the black screen.

Look up. You may never see anything like it again.

Yeah. Sure.

I dropped my phone onto the bed next to me. It had been in my hand for about an hour without doing anything. Just scrolling. I couldn’t even tell you one thing I’d looked at.

Most days I wake up at noon and reach for my phone before I’ve opened my eyes. I scroll until they adjust. Then it’s up, bathroom, back, PC. The house goes quiet at some point. That’s when I sneak down to the kitchen without being seen, eat standing up in the dark, go back to my room, and scroll until I fall asleep. I wake up. I do it again.

That’s the whole day. It’s been the whole day for almost two months.

I’m so deep in this thing now. That’s the only way I can describe it. I’ve been digging myself into this place, this hole, with my own hands. At first it was small, just a pit, deep enough to sit in where nobody could see me. I dug it for protection. Nobody could reach me down there, or look at me the way they looked at me. It felt warm and safe, and I told myself I just needed to sit here for a while until things got better.

But things didn’t get better, and I kept digging. Deeper and deeper, because the sounds from up there still came in, the laughing, the looks, other people doing the things I couldn’t do. So I dug until I couldn’t hear them anymore. By the time I stopped, the opening above me was so far away that the light from up there didn’t reach me at all. I couldn’t feel the sun on my skin or see the sky. It was just cold and dark and me at the bottom of this deep black hole called depression.

I was too deep to climb out on my own. Not that I hadn’t tried. You grab the wall, and the dirt crumbles, and you slide back down, and you sit there and think, okay. This is where I live now.

But somewhere in the back of my head, there was this thought. Small and stupid. That someday someone would walk past the edge of this hole, look down, and see me. And instead of walking away, they’d reach their hand in. Just one person. One hand reaching down into the dark. I didn’t know who or when. But I waited for them anyway. I had nothing else to do down here.

My phone screen lit up. 19:40.

I don’t know why the time did something to me, but it did. Maybe it was the meteor thing, or the lady on TV telling everyone to go outside. Everyone except me.

I should go out.

Not because I wanted to. I never want to. But if I spent one more night locked in my room, my parents were going to start asking questions again, and I couldn’t do that to them. So I got up, pulled on a hoodie and some jeans, grabbed my card and my jacket off the desk, and went downstairs.

The living room was warm and bright. Some cooking show was running on low. My mum was on the couch with her feet up, scrolling on her tablet. Dad sat in his chair with a cup of tea that had probably gone cold an hour ago, still holding it anyway. From the outside, we were a happy home.

My dad looked up first and tried not to look too surprised. He lost.

“Oh.” He sat up a little. “You’re... heading out?”

“Yeah. The meteor thing. Everyone’s watching it tonight.”

My mum lowered her tablet and gave me a little smile. “Everyone, huh.” She let that sit, then the eyebrow went up. “Is there a girl?”

“Mum.”

“What? I’m only asking.”

“There’s no girl. I’m just going with Brad and a couple of the others.”

The second his name left my mouth I wanted to grab it back. But it was out, and my dad nodded slowly, twice, choosing his words.

“Brad.” He set the tea down. “Just... be careful with that one, alright? He’s got a reputation, and not a good one. I don’t love how much you’ve been hanging around him.”

If only you knew, I thought.

“It’s fine, Dad.”

“And don’t come home too late.”

“I won’t.”

Outside, the evening air was still warm against my face. The sky over the rooftops had gone half orange and half purple, and the streetlights hadn’t come on yet. Three gardens down somebody had a barbecue going, and a little kid was doing the happy kind of shrieking. Everyone was staying up tonight.

I put my earphones in and turned the music up until it was the only thing I could hear. That’s the trick I use. Loud enough music, and the rest of it goes quiet, and for three minutes it’s only me and the song and nothing out there can get to me. Three minutes at a time is how I get anywhere. I took the steps down into the subway.

The train was packed with people heading out to watch the meteors. A group of girls leaned over one phone, laughing at whatever was on it. Down the car a couple had one set of earbuds split between them, a bud each. Two little kids in football shirts shoved at each other while their dad stood over them and pretended not to notice. From my spot by the doors I watched the window go black as the train dropped into the tunnel.

Back before all of this, I was normal, or close enough that nobody checked. There were people I sat with at lunch once, places I went on weekends. Somewhere in the last couple of years I just stopped. The longer I stayed shut in my room, the harder going anywhere got, until walking out my front door took everything I had. Other people do it without one thought. Tonight it had taken me an hour, most of it spent standing in my room with my shoes already on.

But I’d done it. I was out here.

The train slowed at my stop and I got off with half the car, everyone peeling away in twos and threes toward wherever their evenings were happening. My evening was a supermarket. The little one on the corner was still open, and the bell over its door gave about half a ding when I pushed in. Nobody in there has ever tried to make conversation with me. My kind of place.

I went straight to the back, opened the fridge, and took the same thing I always take. Dark red can, cherry vanilla. Don’t judge me. It’s the one thing in my life that has never once let me down.

At the till I pulled one earbud out, some leftover politeness. The door went again behind me right on cue.

“Yo, Aleks!”

That voice I knew. I’d have known it through both earbuds and a wall. Tall, big smile, the guy everyone in school knows and half of them want to be. Brad. He crossed the shop in four steps, dropped a hand on my shoulder, and left it there, heavy, for whoever might be watching.

“Didn’t think I’d see you out here, man. You good?”

And for one stupid second, something in me lifted. Oh, I thought. Okay. Maybe tonight isn’t so bad after all. Two months of nobody, and it took Brad, of all people, to get my hopes up.

Then he leaned in close to my ear. His voice came down with him, so low only I could catch it.

“Still hiding in your room all day, freak? Honestly thought you’d died in there.”

He pulled back and put the big smile on again, for the room, and gave my shoulder two friendly pats. There it was.

A girl stood a few steps behind him. Carmen.

Dark hair, brown eyes, and a few loose strands she kept tucking behind her ear, which is what she does when she wants to be anywhere else. She used to do it in middle school every time a teacher said the words group project.

Carmen moved here from Spain when we were ten, and for about two years she was my best friend and the only person I actually talked to. We walked home together every day, right past this shop. At lunch she’d put her hand flat on the seat next to her without looking up. That seat was mine, and nobody argued about it. For a while I kept meaning to tell her how I felt. I got as far as her street corner once with the whole speech rehearsed. She said “see you tomorrow” before I’d got a word of it out, and I said “yeah.” That was the whole confession. I never did tell her, and now she was standing next to Brad.

“Brad, come on,” she said. It came out quiet and tired, and it wasn’t really telling him off. “Leave him.”

She didn’t step away from him, either. For half a second her eyes came to mine and held. She knew exactly who I was. I watched her know it. Then her eyes went somewhere else, down and to the side, off me and onto the floor. Her hand came up and tucked the strands back again, even though they hadn’t moved. Nothing moved in her face, not anger, not even pity. Pity I could’ve worked with.

The card machine beeped. I’d paid at some point in the middle of all that, my hand moving on its own while the rest of me was still stuck on Carmen. None of it actually registered.

“Have a good one,” the guy at the till mumbled, not looking up from his phone.

I took my can and walked out, and Brad got nothing out of me on the way past. He never does. The words I owe him turn up about four hours too late, all of them at once, while I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

Outside, the warm air came back against my face, and my hands were shaking. Both of them, down at my sides. And the stupid part, the part that actually got to me, was that nothing had even happened. He didn’t hit me. Nobody laid a hand on me. Fourteen words. I counted them on the walk up, twice. The tightness high in my chest, hard and cold, didn’t care how small the number was. It stayed.

Here’s something I didn’t tell my parents at that table. Nobody’s ever heard me say it out loud.

I don’t have any friends.

There’s no group waiting for me anywhere, and no chat I’m ignoring either. Brad isn’t my friend, he’s the closest thing I’ve got to an enemy, and I used his name at my own dinner table because it was the first name that popped into my head.

A few weeks ago I heard my parents talking in the kitchen, late, when they thought I was asleep. My mum said I never go out anymore, that I hadn’t been myself in a long time, that she didn’t know what to do with me. She didn’t cry, but her voice sat close to it. My dad didn’t have an answer for her. I stood behind the door with a glass of water going warm in my hand, listening to the two of them run out of things to say about me. Then I went back up to my room. Nobody mentioned it in the morning, me included.

So every now and then I invent friends. I get dressed, I say a name or two, I leave the house, and I sit somewhere alone until enough time has passed for the story to hold up. Then I come home and say it was nice. It’s easier than watching them worry.

I took the quiet way up, past the hedges and along the old metal fence, to the top of the little hill at the back of the park. Nobody ever comes up to that corner: half gravel, half weeds, one streetlight that’s been buzzing and flickering for years. Under the light there’s a bench that leans left because two of its bolts are gone. My bench. This is where the friends live, if you’re keeping track. That’s the whole lie: a kid, a bench, a can of soda.

The bench creaked when I sat down. It always does. I cracked the can open and took a sip, cold and sweet. For about two seconds it was the best thing in the world. The first stars were coming out over the trees. I leaned my head back against the top slat and went over the day, all of it: the room, the dinner-table lie, Brad’s mouth at my ear, Carmen’s eyes going to the floor. Sixteen years old, and the biggest thing I’d managed all summer was carrying a can of soda up a hill to drink it alone.

Something went tight in my chest, and it let go all at once. It came up my throat before I could stop it. I stood up on the seat of the bench. Nobody was around to see, so none of it mattered. Then I filled my lungs and let it out as loud as it would go.

“I just want to do something with my fucking life!”

My voice cracked right in the middle of it. Of course it did. Even my one big dramatic moment came out in two pieces.

The wind hit before I’d got back down off the bench. It came out of nothing. One second the air on the hill was dead still. The next, it was shoving into me from the front, hard enough to rock me back a step, cold where the evening had been warm. It pushed my hair flat against my head, and the buzz of the streetlight disappeared under the sound of it. I grabbed the back of the bench so I wouldn’t go off.

Then the sky lit up. A wide band of light came across it, end to end, sliding slow from one side to the other. Behind it the colors stretched and widened the further it went. The front of the band burned a hard gold, almost white. Behind the gold came a band of turquoise, and behind that a deep pink, and at the very tail a violet so dark it sat right at the edge of black. In a few seconds the trail had spread across nearly the whole sky over my head. The news had promised thousands of meteors. What I got was one, enormous, alone, and I told myself the rest were just late.

And it was beautiful. For a moment I forgot Brad and the bench and the whole rotten day. I stood there with my head tipped all the way back and my mouth open and the cold wind in my teeth, glad, actually glad, that I’d come outside.

Then the light stopped spreading. The band of color held still across the sky. A line opened down the center of it, and the line widened, slow, left to right. Black filled the gap where the sky should have been, a black with no shine to it, one that took in the colored light at its edges and gave none of it back. The gap kept opening until it stopped. What hung there in the middle of everything was a huge black oval, its rim still burning gold and turquoise and pink.

By then the wind had dropped. The streetlight had gone quiet too, and out in the trees not one bird was making a sound. I could hear my own breath going in and out too fast.

Far back inside the black, a small light came on, white and round. It swelled and grew rounder until it filled the middle of the oval. Then the whole of it rolled downward, toward the ground, toward the bench I was standing on.

It was an eye.

There was no other word for it. A single eye, white and wet and far too big, open in the middle of the torn sky. It found me on the bench and looked straight at me, and it went on looking. My whole body went cold from the scalp down, and both legs locked up under me. Somewhere in there the can slid out of my fingers and hit the path, and I never heard it land.

Then the eye began to bleed. Red welled up around it and ran down out of the black, slow and heavy, each drop dragging a thin bright line behind it as it fell. More of them broke loose, and more after that, until the whole torn sky was running red over my head. One drop came down at the hill, at me, I thought, but it struck the path a few steps short of the bench and sat there glowing. Then it moved. It spread out flat across the ground, gathered itself back into a lump, and went darker and darker as it pulled upward. A shape stood up out of it onto the path.

I went backward off the bench without deciding to and came down hard on my back behind it. From down there I watched the thing finish putting itself together. Its outline jerked and stuttered, there one instant and broken the next, edges never holding still. On top of the body sat a head, set exactly where a head should go. It got that part right.

The head came around until it pointed at me. Then it opened, the whole front of it at once, and screamed. The sound went into my skull and stayed, and it scraped through both ears at once, high enough to hurt and low enough to hit somewhere under my ribs. I felt it in my back teeth, in the bone behind my ears, down the middle of my chest. Every other thought went out of my head, and the one left standing was run. So I ran. I’m not fast and never have been. It didn’t matter, because I was up out of the weeds and moving before I’d decided anything. Down the hill I went, along the metal fence and out onto the street, with my heart slamming up in my throat and the scream still going behind me.

Out on the street the screaming stopped coming from any one place. It came from every side at once, out of the doorways and the windows and down out of the torn sky on top of all of it. A car alarm somewhere held one flat note and wouldn’t quit. Glass broke, close by, then far off, then close by again. A man ran past me with both hands red to the wrist and never even saw me. I didn’t stop, and I didn’t try to understand any of it.

The mistake came two streets later. I cut into the alley behind the gym, because it was dark and I wanted a wall at my back and somewhere to be small. Halfway down it, I remembered the thing I’d always known. That alley doesn’t go anywhere. It ends on the gym’s back wall, no door, no gap, nothing. I’d known that my whole life. In the one second it counted, the knowing wasn’t there.

I turned around, and the mouth of the alley was no longer empty. The thing from the hill stood in it, or another one off the same sky. It didn’t run at me. The walk was enough, slow, one foot down and then the other, in no hurry. Running would’ve been better. I can’t explain why, but it would’ve been. My back found the wall, shoulder blades first. I got both hands up in front of me, palms out. Even while I did it, I knew they weren’t going to stop a thing that had fallen out of the sky.

“Please,” I said. “Please don’t.”

It came at me, and everything went white. I didn’t see what happened to it. A wave of heat rolled over my face, and a hard crack came with it that hit me in the chest before it hit my ears. When the white cleared out of my eyes, the thing was gone. I was sitting at the foot of the wall, with no memory of getting down there. Someone was standing between me and the street.

It was tall, taller than a person should be. Behind its shoulders was the shape of wings, half lost in the light that came off it. I couldn’t hold my eyes on it straight, because the brightness pushed them away every time I tried. It didn’t reach down to help me up, and it didn’t come a step closer. The figure only looked down at where I sat against the wall. When it spoke, the voice came out level and quiet. The calm of it was the part I never managed to forget.

“Hold on a little longer, Aleksander.”

Then the light went out of the alley, and the figure went with it. I was alone on the ground, my heart hitting so hard I could feel every beat of it up in my throat. Under the hammering, one thought kept turning over and would not stop. It had known my full name, the version even my mum only reaches for when something’s really wrong. Aleksander.

I don’t know how long I stayed down there. Long enough for my legs to go stiff, because getting them under me took three tries, and everything hurt, my back, my hands, my throat. Then I walked, because I couldn’t think of one other thing a person could do.

The city I grew up in was gone. Buildings stood open along their whole fronts, rooms showing, beds and kitchen tables out in the evening air. Smoke came off them low along the street, and every breath caught hot and burnt at the back of my throat. In one of the broken-open shops a phone rang and rang, and nobody picked it up. I listened the whole way past, because it was the last normal sound left on the street. Moving kept happening, one step and then the next. By then I’d mostly stopped thinking. There was a body walking forward. And there was me, packed away somewhere small inside it, watching the steps happen.

Then the ground lit up under my feet. A circle, right there in the pavement, wide enough to take in both my shoes. Around its edge strange marks were coming on one after another, each one throwing a thin light up my legs. I got as far as looking down. That was my entire contribution, because between one blink and the next there was no pavement under me at all.

The ground was gone, and I fell. There was no wind on my skin, no sense of which way was up, nothing below to fall toward. I couldn’t feel my own body, couldn’t find where my arms ended. My thoughts kept breaking apart in the middle of themselves, half a thought, then nothing, then half of a different one. I reached for something, anything at all, and my hands closed on nothing.

So this is it, I thought. That one arrived in one piece. Sixteen years of nothing, and then this.

And if this was dying, shouldn’t it be darker? Shouldn’t there be something, my parents, their faces, anything at all? There was nothing, nothing the whole way down. Then stone came up into my back and knocked everything out of me.

Cold air dragged into my lungs, and I rolled onto my side and coughed until my ribs hurt with it. When I could see anything again, the sky was blue, clear all the way across, with no edge to it anywhere I looked. No tear in it, no red. I blinked twice to be sure, and it stayed exactly that. Blue, quiet, wide.

Getting up was its own project. My arms shook the whole way, and the shirt on me had gone heavy, soaked through with sweat and dust and a couple of things I chose not to look at too closely. I wasn’t home. Wherever this was, it was nowhere near home.

And I wasn’t on my own. Voices came from every side at once, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, crying, screaming, the same words repeated over and over in languages I’d never heard. I turned my head toward them, and there they were.

A crowd filled the field, packed in tight, with no edge to it that I could find. The grass under all of it was a green I’d never seen before. People in office suits stood pressed up against people in hospital gowns. A teenager still had her school bag on, the little reflector swinging off its zip. Small kids clung to the legs of strangers, grabbing whoever was closest and tallest. Old people sat flat on the ground and stared at nothing at all. Every face I could find had the same thing on it, the thing I’d been seeing in my bathroom mirror for two months. They were lost. All of them, and me right in the middle of them. For once in my life, I matched.

I looked for one thing I knew, a building, a road sign, a shop front. There was none of it. The field ran out to a line of trees a long way off, and past the trees there was nothing but that hard clean sky. Even the light was wrong. It came down at an angle I didn’t trust and laid the shadows out on the wrong sides of people. My chest pulled tight on it.

“This isn’t Earth,” I said, out loud, to no one.

Then I looked at the crowd again, and the second look was the one that did it, because not all of them were human. Off to one side stood a group a little apart from everyone else, our height, ordinary in build. And nothing about them was ordinary at all. Their ears ran up long and came to points at the top. The clothes were old and fine at once, layered, embroidered, nothing any actual person has ever worn outside a costume. I stared longer than I meant to. Enough games, enough anime, and I knew exactly what I was looking at, but I still refused to let the word through. The word was insane. Then one of them turned his head, and I saw the ear plain against the light. Blinking, breathing, alive, a few meters in front of me.

Elves.

The short ones took me another four seconds, wide and solid through the chest and shoulders, arms thicker than my legs, beards halfway down their fronts. By then there was no refusing anything anymore. Dwarves. My legs went out from under me and I sat back down hard on the grass.

“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out with a shake in it. “Am I dreaming? Did I finally lose it?”

Nobody answered me. To be fair, everyone in earshot had their own situation going on. What came instead was one long pulse out of the ground, up through my hands and knees. Every hair on my arms stood up.

Then a voice came down out of the sky, and I know how that sounds, but there’s no other way to put it. The sound was simply everywhere, the whole sky at once, with no speaker and no mouth behind it. It arrived in my chest before my ears, pressing flat against the ribs and setting a hum going in the bone of my skull. Around me thousands of heads went up in one motion. Nobody needed to tell me they were all feeling it land in their own chests too.

“You have been spared.”

The field went silent between one heartbeat and the next, thousands of people stopping mid-breath in the same second. My own pulse was suddenly the loudest thing I had. Nobody moved, not even to shift their feet.

“The creatures which destroyed your worlds will also come for this one.”

Everything in my stomach pulled in on itself. Underneath the fear, one slow stubborn part of me snagged on a single word, worlds, more than one. The voice was already moving on.

“You have six months.”

Somebody out in the crowd screamed back at it. “Six months for what?!”

The voice didn’t answer him. It didn’t slow down and it didn’t soften.

“Unite. Learn. Survive.”

Then, nothing. The pause went on exactly long enough to start hoping it was over.

“Or perish, like your world did.”