City of Angels

Bael chose a church because he found blasphemy amusing.

The building had been abandoned long enough for Orison to forget it possessed a basement. The government still illuminated the cathedral above every evening, however, feeding simulated candlelight through stained-glass saints whose faces had been replaced by the seven Names. My own likeness occupied the eastern transept, forty meters above the floor I crossed now.

Groundwater shifted beneath my shoes as the halo above my head dimmed itself to the lowest setting its regulatory architecture permitted. Complete darkness remained beyond my privileges. Named Angels were never allowed to disappear entirely, even in places we were forbidden to know existed.

“Gabriel,” Bael called from beyond the old sanctuary, his voice making itself comfortable in the dark. “You came alone. Either you trust me more than you should, or you’ve finally developed the death wish everyone keeps assigning to Azrael.”

He stood where the altar had once been, broad enough that the column behind him disappeared whenever he shifted. Four compact wings rested against his back, their black plating unmistakably heavier than the flight equipment issued to most of his operatives. The elaborate horns following the shape of his skull marked him as clearly as my halo marked me.

According to records that officially did not exist, Bael had begun as an ordinary operative. Twenty-three years of survival had since turned him into the commander of a military body the public did not know protected them.

“I came alone because you specified that I should,” I replied, stopping several steps inside the sanctuary. Rainwater whispered through the ceiling, slipped down severed cables and gathered beneath the cracked remains of the altar. “I assumed disobedience would offend your delicate temperament.”

Bael’s smile exposed one gold canine as he regarded me through the wan light. “You’re beginning to understand me.”

Five figures waited behind him, arranged with the casual irregularity of people trained until formation had become unnecessary. Darkness concealed most of their faces, but demons ceased being anonymous once they survived long enough to modify the standard equipment issued to them. Even in silhouette, the first four carried their identities in the choices they had made about their bodies.

Sitri leaned against a pillar, her dark equipment traced with copper. Stolas occupied the remains of the choir stalls, narrow sensory arrays shifting whenever the building creaked around us. Beneath a collapsed arch waited Malphas, enough machinery integrated into her frame to dismantle the church or rebuild it depending upon what Bael asked of her.

Andras stood closest to the eastern exit, stripped down to black edges and predatory stillness. He had not shifted his weight since I entered, which meant he had already selected the fastest way to kill me. He was merely waiting to learn whether it would be necessary.

Behind them stood the only operative I could not identify.

A hood concealed the head, while matte fabric covered the lower face. A cloak engineered to disrupt depth perception fell from the shoulders over the wing roots. I caught only fragments of smoky material and a restrained pulse of red beneath the cloth—not enough to recognize the operative or understand why concealment remained necessary in a room where no one else had bothered.

The anonymity was deliberate, which made it more conspicuous than any customization could have been.

When my halo attempted a scan, Bael’s countermeasures answered with a pressure behind my eyes. The request dissolved before it could leave the sanctuary.

“You summoned me to admire your personnel?” I asked, directing my attention toward him again, though the covered figure remained lodged at its edge. “I recognize that secrecy deprives you of the usual opportunities for ceremony, but this seems excessive.”

“I summoned you because I heard something interesting.” Bael descended from the altar, his boots crushing fragments of devotional glass as he approached. “Apparently, Gabriel has misplaced something.”

The water beneath my shoes reflected the gold of my halo. Its distorted ring shivered whenever another drop struck. “Your intelligence is usually more precise.”

“Oh, it was precise.” He stopped close enough that refusing to retreat became a decision rather than a default. His gaze moved over my face with deliberate vulgarity. “A competitor disappears from an Ascension, and suddenly the city’s incorruptible overseer begins opening sealed hospital records. Transport records. Detention records. Border records. You even searched our deployment rosters, Gabe, which was very rude considering you aren’t supposed to know we have deployment rosters.”

Behind him, Sitri made a small sound that might have been laughter. She was wise enough not to give it sufficient shape for me to accuse her of it.

“If my access offended you,” I told Bael, “you should improve your encryption.”

“Our encryption is excellent. Your obsession was simply better.” He watched for whatever the office of Gabriel had failed to smooth from my expression. When he found it, his satisfaction settled into something quieter and more dangerous. “The great overseer, peering into cupboards and turning over stones because he’s looking for a lost little lamb.”

Lucie had been missing for twelve weeks.

The government told the public she had withdrawn after an illegal enhancement was discovered in her blood. Her quarters were emptied within twenty minutes of the announcement, and her family received a relocation notice they had never requested. Her name then disappeared from the Ascension archives. Her medical scans, citizenship records and every frame of footage containing our private training sessions followed.

I had searched for her without speaking her name to anyone I did not trust. Bael’s amusement made it clear that trust had never been necessary for him to recognize the shape of my desperation.

“I am investigating the unlawful disappearance of an Orison citizen,” I said, keeping my voice within the smooth parameters the office of Gabriel had trained into it. “If that sounds like obsession to you, your standards have deteriorated.”

Bael’s smile receded, leaving behind an attention I disliked far more than his amusement. “There he is.”

He turned and walked toward the others, passing Sitri and Stolas before stopping beside the covered operative. The stranger had remained motionless throughout our exchange, but the red illumination beneath the cloak had begun to pulse more quickly. The concealed body betrayed what its posture would not.

Bael rested one hand upon the demon’s shoulder, and every muscle in my body tightened.

Recognition should have belonged to a face, a voice, a familiar gesture or the architecture of a body I had once known well enough to find in darkness. It should not have lived in the angle of a gloved hand beneath unmarked fabric. Even so, something inside me had already begun resisting what Bael intended to reveal.

“Your investigation may be closer to complete than you realize.” Humor returned to his voice, quieter now and sharpened by his awareness that the room’s balance had shifted. He kept his hand upon the operative and inclined his head. “Asmoday, step forward.”

The demon obeyed, moving past Stolas and then Malphas with an economy Lucie had never possessed. Lucie had walked as though the world would accommodate her because she had not yet received sufficient evidence that it might refuse. This woman measured the floor before committing her weight to it. Every step was a negotiation completed before anyone else realized terms had been offered.

She stopped several paces from me, close enough that the cloak could no longer entirely disguise the equipment beneath it. Angular structures shifted behind her shoulders. Their surfaces changed from black to gray to deep red with each alteration in the light. The restrained precision was too advanced for any public Angel and too unfamiliar for me to identify by sight.

The principles controlling them, however, were not unfamiliar.

Lucie had discovered their foundation with a broken simulation rig during the fifth Ascension trial. Equipment designed to test two-wing compatibility failed around her, and she taught herself to divide the stabilizers into independent surfaces before she hit the ground. After landing, she looked at the judges, who were too stunned to applaud, and asked whether she could try again because she understood what she had done wrong.

The recollection pushed my heartbeat hard enough against my ribs that Bael’s technicians could likely have recorded it through the floor.

“Asmoday,” Bael said, his hand still resting upon her shoulder, “remove the coverings.”

Her armored hands rose. A red interface traveled over the back of her right glove as she reached for the clasp at her throat, but her left thumb arrived first. It found the wrong mechanism and retreated with a tiny, impatient movement.

Lucie had always attempted clasps left-handed despite being right-handed.

The cloak slid from her shoulders, releasing four wings that unfolded with almost no sound. The upper pair lifted while the lower pair swept outward through the gaps the others created for them. Their red light crossed the sanctuary walls until Gabriel’s sainted likeness in the window above appeared wounded by it.

Then she pulled the fabric from her face.

The government had altered her with the care of people who understood that destruction became more useful when it resembled refinement. A thin red circuit followed her left cheekbone, and the line beneath her jaw had been sharpened by surgical reinforcement. Small standard-issue horns emerged from her hairline, black and unadorned. Her braid fell over one shoulder, longer than it had been when she disappeared.

None of those differences reached the part of me that had already recognized her.

When Lucie looked at me, the sanctuary became too small to contain all the places I had imagined finding her. I had pictured hospitals, cells, corporate laboratories and unregistered graves. I had rehearsed what I would say if she hated me for failing to stop them, what I would offer if she believed I had betrayed her, and how carefully I would approach if the things done to her had left her frightened of my touch.

None of those imaginings had prepared me for the composed assessment of a stranger.

My halo brightened without permission, spilling gold across her face. She narrowed her eyes against it, but recognition did not disturb their calm.

“Lucie.” Her name emerged stripped of every argument I might have made for my own control.

She glanced toward Bael, not frightened or confused, merely requesting context for an error she expected her commander to correct.

His hand fell from her shoulder as something uncharacteristically grim settled around his mouth. He watched us fail to know one another before telling me, with none of his earlier satisfaction, “She doesn’t answer to that.”

Because I could not make myself look anywhere else, the question came out rougher than I intended. “Why?”

Asmoday studied me with unnerving patience. The red circuitry beside her eye contracted, bringing my face into sharper focus. Bael’s answer reached me from somewhere beyond the narrowing boundaries of my attention.

“Because she doesn’t remember it.”

Disbelief should have followed, yet too many details aligned behind his words. The deliberate concealment, the standard modifications and her unfamiliar control of a body built for purposes Lucie had never chosen all supported him. So did the blankness in her expression, where shock should have lived.

I moved one step closer before the room answered.

Andras altered his position near the door, something inside Malphas’s frame stirred, and Asmoday’s lower wings opened far enough to change the air between us. Their warning was more eloquent than any threat Bael might have delivered, so I let the movement end there.

Her gaze traveled over my halo, my insignia and the two regulated wings folded behind my coat. Every symbol the government had attached to me was familiar to her. Only the man inside them meant nothing.

“You know me,” I said, hearing the accusation after it had already left my mouth, though it was never intended for her.

“I know Gabriel’s office.” Her voice remained Lucie’s in pitch and nowhere else, each word rendered precise by training she had not possessed twelve weeks ago. “Law, internal discipline and government oversight.”

Lucie had once called my title three elaborate ways of admitting I attended too many meetings. I waited for some remnant of that joke to disturb Asmoday’s expression. Whatever instinct preserved the habit of her left hand had not restored the private language between us.

Bael came to stand beside her, regarding me with the uncomfortable stillness of a commander witnessing an injury he could neither prevent nor dismiss. “She was delivered to us eleven days ago with a complete service record and six years of operational memory. Stolas found inconsistencies. Sitri found more. Then I heard about your lamb.”

“Six years,” I repeated, because Lucie had been human twelve weeks earlier. She had stood beneath the Ascension lights and argued that the government could not call something a test objective if the competitors were punished for understanding it.

Asmoday’s attention snapped toward Bael, and in that sharp movement, certainty finally fractured.

He saw it as clearly as I did. “Apparently,” Bael said, the unexpected gentleness of his delivery making the conclusion more dangerous than mockery ever could, “someone has been lying to all of us.”

When Asmoday looked at me again, recognition still did not return, nor did affection soften the suspicion gathering behind her eyes.

She did not see Gabriel.

She saw evidence.