}}}Kaitlyn. 2013. Los Angeles, California. Costa Soberbia.}}}}}}}}}
I was floating through black and dreamless sleep. Somewhere far away, I knew my body was cold and uncomfortable. It lay right where it fell, its head on a thin layer of damp old carpet and chilled concrete. That place stank like burned meat and mold with just a hit of ozone. I didn’t want to go there. So I didn’t. I just tucked myself into a nice dark place where I was allowed to be nothing.
Somebody coughed and cleared their throat in the grossest way.
I felt brief but seizing panic, like waking up the morning after a drunken one-night stand only to find they’re still in your bed.
I trudged reluctantly toward consciousness. I opened one eye so slightly that I could barely see through the curtain of my own eyelashes. A blurry shape squatted in the corner.
The angel the Empty Ones not dead dark ruins danger—
I startled awake, gasping like I’d just had an apnea. I scared the hell out of Carey.
He’d never admit it.
Memory came back in a flood: the sunken city, the tar men burning, the Empty Ones clawing at me, the static chimes of the angel.…
“Welcome to the land of the living,” Carey said.
“How long was I out?” I asked. My mouth tasted like cotton. Soaked in stagnant hot dog water.
“No idea,” he answered. “But it must be afternoon now.”
He gestured up at the sky. A spot of glaring white bleeding into opaque crystal blue. The sun was directly overhead. Not a cloud in the sky. And even still, the light barely filtered down here, only rendering the sinkhole in gloomy twilight rather than impenetrable black.
I blinked, trying to get my super-senses back, but the effort just made my head hurt.
Carey was on his heels, knees tucked up against his stomach, back against the massive fireplace that dominated the abandoned lounge. The only signs left of the Empty Ones were some charred spots in the carpet and burn marks on the walls. I looked to where I’d last seen Zang and Jie. A coal-black stain eating through the soggy gray floor.
Carey saw me staring.
“Zang?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “And Jie. Last time I saw them, he had her pinned right there. I guess they went up in the blast when I took the angel. I’m sorry.…”
“Don’t be,” Carey said. “That’s all he ever wanted.”
“I meant I’m sorry for you. I know he was your friend.”
Carey laughed.
“I guess so,” he said. “Shit, how sad is that?”
I didn’t have an answer.
Oh, crap, what about—
“Jackie’s fine,” he said, guessing my intent. “When it got light enough to see, I helped her back to the trail. Told her I was coming back for you. It was a bitch, convincing her to go on without you.”
I smiled, even though it made my face hurt.
“I told her I couldn’t help you both up the cliff, so the best way for her to help you was to head up with the others.”
“The others?”
“Indian fellas,” he said. “The dot-head kind, not the scalping kind. You didn’t see those two? Seemed pretty all right for homos.”
“Jesus, Carey.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Wait—two guys? Not three?”
“I took some pretty good hits back there, but I can still count to two.”
The bearded guy didn’t make it.
Was that my fault, or the angel’s? Would he have lived if I’d done something different? Tried to contain the blast when the angel collapsed, like I did in Mexico? That would have left the Empty Ones alive and waiting for me when I emerged. Would they have spared him? Or was it all moot? Was he dead before I ever went in?
Fingers knit across his face. Light spilling out from the spaces between.
Don’t worry, Kaitlyn. You’ll only have the rest of your life to dwell over questions like that.
I heard a strange click. Metal on metal. Purposeful, like something engaging.
Maybe I wouldn’t have that long after all.…
I tried to scale up my vision again. It still hurt, but the pain was diminishing. Now it was just stretching a muscle I’d overused, rather than an agonizing cramp. The visibility rose like I’d raised a dimmer switch on the world.
Carey looked like hell. Even for him. One side of his face was caked with blood. His thin, salt-and-pepper hair was splayed and spiked with filth. His leather jacket—always barely held together with strategically placed band patches and safety pins—was in a more advanced state of deterioration. He was about to lose a sleeve. He’d already lost a shoe. His facial expression was somewhere between “just got dumped” and “about to be hit by a bus.” In one hand he held an old-timey pistol, like something out of a Western. His thumb was on the hammer.
“This again, huh?” I asked.
He’d pulled that gun on me once before, after I’d taken the angel in Mexico. He told me he was just confused. I didn’t buy it then, but I didn’t want to think about what it meant at the time. It was pretty clear now, though.…
“This is the last time, I promise,” he said.
I peered into him, and found that Carey was shimmering. Not like fairy dust, but like a thin layer of water over new ice. I thought about what Zang told me—about how my enhanced sight wasn’t because my eyes were better. I focused on Carey and tried the same trick: seeing without physical constraints. Just looking at things for what they are, instead of how I perceived them.
Layers began to slough off of Carey, like somebody pulling individual pages from an animated flipbook. There were billions of them, and the deeper I went, the less they looked like Carey. Or at least, how I thought of Carey. The layers were more like impulses, decisions, memories—maybe some combination of all three. He was squatting there in front of me in a sunken suburb lost to the Pacific, but he was also ten years old, throwing rocks at a parked cop car on a street in Brooklyn. He was seventeen and laughing with friends, swimming in a lake somewhere at dusk. He was twenty-two and watching a man being brutally beaten through the chain-link fence surrounding an amusement park. He was thirty-eight and dry-heaving in an alleyway in Koreatown. He was reaching out to touch a pale young girl with dyed black hair, then pulling back at the last second. He was watching the look of betrayal in her eyes. He was leveling this very same pistol at another girl in a wind-blown shack. He was pulling the trigger.
I watched his entire lifetime and beyond—thoughts he refused to think, truths he refused to acknowledge—but then I blinked and we’d barely moved. Only a second had passed.
But I knew so much now.
It wasn’t coincidence that he pulled me out of Marco’s Mercedes just as the pervert slipped his life-draining tongue into me. Carey had been watching. None of what I went through was new to him—killing the angels, the strange new abilities, the rituals—he was just stringing me along, eking out only enough information to keep me going, but not enough so that I no longer needed him.
I had to need him, because he needed to be here with me, at the end.
Just like he was there for the other girls. One he failed to save, and one he doomed. Both, he killed. With that gun.
A quick burst of images: Carey and Zang standing over the prone body of a dark-skinned girl.
“I always bring the gun.”
“Then you always knew.”
He still had the pistol. Whatever he told himself, he knew this day was coming the whole time.
But he was hoping it wouldn’t.
I remembered Carey’s face when he first told me about all this—the Unnoticeables, the Empty Ones, the angels—and I told him he was crazy and needed to leave. He looked so happy and relieved. Then I called him back, and his heart broke.
He was trying to give me an out. Trying to give both of us an out.
Because he knew this was where we’d end up: Me on the ground, rapidly losing my humanity. Him standing over me, pointing a gun at my face, about to throw away the last of his.
He loved those girls, and he loved me. And he killed them. And he was going to kill me, too.
And you have to let him.
A spiral of branching paths flowed outward from Carey. It would take eons to follow them, but eons were irrelevant here, so I did. Somewhere far, far down the line of potential futures, there was another screaming white light and another young girl, dying.
The angels would come back, if I let them.
Not now. Not in my lifetime. Maybe not even here, in our specific dimension. But somewhere out there, they hid in the realm of possibility, patiently rebuilding.
The things I could do were amazing. I could enhance my own senses, I could heal from mortal wounds, I could tap strength beyond human ability, and I could even pause time, in a sense, and change the flow of events. But as extraordinary as those things seemed to me, they were still paltry. They were limited by my own little human brain, mired in its idea of what should be possible. I could see better in the dark, but not like it was daylight. Why? Because buried somewhere deep in my mind was the idea that I could not. Night vision, healing, strength—all things that I could, on some level, accept as possible. Seeing everything? Not taking wounds in the first place? Being strong enough to move literally anything?
I just couldn’t believe it.
The very notion was absurd. I was Katey from Barstow, California. I hated school because kids made fun of my extra finger. I was a daddy’s girl and a tomboy and lost little sheep following her friend’s dreams because I didn’t have any of my own. I’m not some grand cosmic force. I’m a sad, tiny little human being.
And that has to stop.
Not a second had passed since I’d first glimpsed Carey’s code. My brain was processing information far faster than it should be able to, and the second I thought that—
Carey stood up and crossed the few steps to where I lay. He lifted the gun like it was a barbell. It seemed like the weight of it might tip him over.
“I know it ain’t worth much,” he said. “But I am sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know.”
I waited.
Nothing happened.
His hand started to shake.
He’s not going to do it.
He has to do it.
I found my realm of stillness, and I settled in there. I let the now-familiar ghostly silhouettes of possibility flow outward from Carey. I sifted through them.
He dropped the gun and started crying.
He turned and threw the gun into the ocean.
He put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Thousands upon thousands of potential actions that he could take, and in none of them did he do what I actually needed him to.
He tucked the gun into his waistband and helped me up.
He took off his jacket, peeled away a single patch—a crazy-looking mime in a bowler hat—and set it in my hand, then walked away.
He sneezed, firing the gun into his own shoeless foot, then hopped around screaming in pain.
A seagull died in mid-flight directly above us. Its carcass landed perfectly between where he stood with the gun and I sat, waiting. We both looked up in confusion, then back down, and started laughing.
God damn it, where is it?
There were a dozen permutations of the dead seagull—how unlikely could it possibly be that he would actually pull the trigger?
He sat down with me and we both started singing something together.
He took off his pants and threw them in the bay, then did a bizarre gyrating dance.
He flipped the gun around and offered it to me. I took it and shot him right in the chest.
Jesus, Kaitlyn. Really?
It has to be here somewhere. There are literally an infinite number of possibilities, the only variable is how likely an outcome is to occur, not whether or not it does occur. It has to be here. It must be here.
He dropped—
He threw—
He jumped—
He walked—
There! There …
A single spectral apparition of an aging punk rocker, holding an ancient pistol to an exhausted blond girl’s head. He paused. He closed his eyes. He pulled the trigger. He looked as surprised as anybody when the gun actually fired.
I focused on the scene. I built the details in my mind. Willed the opacity to fade in. I grabbed one single frame of that possible reality, and I brought it over into ours. I layered it into the stream of events, ignoring the billion possible paths where it did not occur. I made the possible real.
I hesitated.
No going back now.
I blinked, and smelled gunpowder.