15

What do we do?” Scribe IV had never felt more like a coward.

Angel hadn’t spoken since pulling them back up to the caverns, to a niche where they had a view of the beach but were safe from the water, where the floor was stable enough that they wouldn’t fall. Below, the Sisters gathered on the rocky shore, encircled by the arms of the half-beached leviathan.

Agnetta had been laid out on a flat bit of stone, out of reach of the sea, though the spray still drenched her. The wind battered the group, but in their thick diving suits, the Sisters wouldn’t feel it. Quin, however, must be shivering, teeth chattering with the wet and the cold where they’d left him to kneel in the sand, hands bound.

Scribe IV had expected the Sisters to take Quin to the labyrinth. To the Chalice. He’d expected to have more time. But this hasty trial-and-execution all in one made him even more certain that the Sisters hadn’t merely overlooked the clues and information he, Angel and Quin had uncovered. They had no interest in discovering the truth. They had come to the Bastion for purposes of their own.

His processors felt sludged, sand-clogged, salt-rotted. He couldn’t see beyond this moment, couldn’t think what to do. He felt not only cowardly, but powerless.

The Sisters had chosen a spot where the waters churned into a shallow bowl of eroded rock, a chalice formed by nature, much larger than the one in the labyrinth. They could Drown Quin right here.

The water glowed a green similar to the sky, but brighter, shadows visible within – fish spinning just below the surface to form a whirlpool at the Sisters’ bidding. The Sisters’ chanting was just audible over the waves – eerie, watery somehow, even on dry land. Changed as their jaws were, as their throats were, as their lungs were, rebuilt for life underwater.

“What do we do?” he repeated, losing track of how many times he’d asked, turning to look at Angel.

Since their retreat, Angel had shrunk xemself even smaller. Xe’d manifested wings, which arced over xyr body now, swallowing it in a protective cocoon. Xyr knees were drawn up against xyr chest, arms wrapped around xyr legs, face buried against them.

At Scribe IV’s question, xe looked up. “There’s something I can do,” Angel said, the words barely a whisper.

Individual salt crystals shone in Angel’s wind-wracked hair, no longer crackling with flames. Xyr face was salt-tracked as well, and Scribe IV doubted it was from the spray. Xe looked more like a child than ever. “I was afraid,” Angel said. It sounded like the second half of the apology xe’d offered in the cave. “I’m still afraid now.”

“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to Scribe IV that an angel could feel fear.

Scribe IV could no longer sense the voice, that deep, shivering sound speaking words he couldn’t hear. He wondered if Angel still could.

He crouched, joints whining in protest, and put a hand on Angel’s shoulder. For once, Angel’s eyes weren’t smoke or fire, liquid gold or honey. They were green-gray, reflecting the sky, reflecting the sea.

Why had he assumed xe would be impervious to fear, to desire, to pain? Angel’s behavior should have told him that if anything, xe felt everything more keenly, more fully. Perhaps every angel did. Every moment and any moment, they might burn in the pure fire of joy, or drown in the absoluteness of sorrow.

“I thought because they didn’t pray, you couldn’t…” Scribe IV let the words trail, afraid they sounded too much like blame.

Angel’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears.

“The rules governing angels, like all rules, can be broken. But when they are…” Xe paused, taking a hitching breath. “The rules are there, and I follow them, because a worse thing will happen if I don’t. If I do this, if I help Quin, I will change. I’m not sure how much, and once I do, I’m not sure I can change back again.”

“I’m sorry.” Scribe IV couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Is there anything I can do?”

Angel shook xyr head. The motion rippled across xyr body to become a pushing out of xyr chest, a squaring of xyr shoulders and wings. Xe didn’t expand, but that only made it more impressive – xyr fragility against the weight of whatever it was xe intended to do. Angel stood, jutting out xyr chin. Xe moved to the mouth of the alcove above the sea, glancing back at Scribe IV, painful vulnerability etched clear in xyr narrow and pointed features, determination sealed over it.

“Stay with me.” Angel’s voice was very small. “Don’t leave me, please, no matter what you see.”

Before Scribe IV could question xem, Angel snapped xyr wings wide, a sound like thunder that buffeted him backward a step. Angel shot into the air, burning into the sky like a shooting star in reverse, a point of brightness against the sullen gray-green. Scribe IV imagined Angel as concentrated light, pulling into xemself, tumbling end over end in xyr upward fall until he lost sight of xem against the roiling clouds. Until he couldn’t tell if xe had exploded into vastness to fill the sky, or if xe had simply reversed course in the smallness of xyr body and fallen.

The Sisters’ chanting reached a fever pitch, and Scribe IV snapped his attention back to the rocky shore below. Whatever Angel was doing, would do, it seemed it would be too late. The leviathan hauled Quin into the air. The Sisters intoned their final words. The limb holding Quin aloft uncurled and let him fall into the whirling maw of the chalice below.

*   *   *

And in the chalice of whirling green, Aquinas St. John Drowned. As he Drowned, he saw – a slumbering god, far below the waves. His death, the first of many the Sisters had planned, not merely a death, but a prayer. A holy act not to wake their god, but to reshape them entirely, to make them a thing of the Sisters’ will, not the other way around. Quin’s terror, his pain, was once more the key to making a god. Even as he Drowned, inside all that terrible green, Quin screamed.

*   *   *

And far above the Bastion and the sea, in the void that was everywhere and nowhere, occupying every point in space and time, the angel Murmuration howled, a keening wail to shake the very foundation of Heaven.

*   *   *

And in the cave above the sea, time slowed to a syrupy crawl. Scribe IV braced himself and leaned outward.

Far below, Quin Drowned.

The wind battered Scribe IV, pushing him backward, tucking him away so he wouldn’t have to see. Then, all at once, it dropped out. The waves calmed impossibly. The sea became flat glass, stealing the distinction between it and the sky.

The Sisters’ chant faltered. The whirlpool froze. Was Quin still Drowning? Or had time truly stopped?

A vast shape, terrible in aspect and height, towered over the Sisters, at once as distant as the horizon and rising up from the water right against the shore. Angel. Scribe IV understood it to be xem, and not xem at the same time. Xe spoke, a voice that was many voices overlapping, as awful as xyr appearance had become.

“I am an angel of no mercy and I speak with the voice of God. Every god. Sisters of the Drowned, I speak to you now with the voice of your god.”

Even up in the alcove, Scribe IV felt Angel’s attention fall upon the Sisters – a weight, a shroud. It was the kind of attention that flayed, looked through skin, through bone, to the very core. The kind of attention that could take a person apart until they were nothing. No matter what they believed, or professed to believe.

“Too long, you have willfully misinterpreted Our dreams, claiming to act in Our name. All the while, you seek to remake Us in your image. If this angel, Our humble servant, but speaks a Holy Word, We will wake fully, and there will be nowhere in the seas below, or the Bastion above, or even among the stars, where you can hide.”

Reality overlapped in planes, each as thin as a hair, as a breath, and as vast as all existence. Scribe IV saw Angel as he had known xem – like marble and like flame and like a child curled in the shadow of xyr wings. And he saw xem as a storm, covering the ocean, covering the Bastion, ready to wash this entire world clean. He saw xem as the Drowned God, not only speaking with their voice, but becoming them – ribs pressed outward against fish-eaten skin slit with gills, eyes churning with the tide, hair in ropes of kelp and seaweed, drowned and ever-drowning, dead and deathless, asleep and dreaming.

And in the vast depths, the same Drowned God whose voice tolled from Angel’s lips turned over in their sleep. Scribe IV felt the very core of the planet shift. Felt the waters heave. He recognized the voice Angel spoke in, had felt it slither across his skin in the cavern above. He’d felt it calling to Angel, and xe’d finally answered, drawing it up from the depths of the sea to the cusp of waking, and holding it there. The shuddering attention that Angel had turned on the Sisters, but ten times over, a thousand times more terrible, was poised to break like a wave. And all that held it back in this moment was Angel.

Scribe IV wanted to duck, to wrap his arms around his head, crouch low and disappear. But he heard Angel’s voice too, the moment before xe had taken to the sky.

Don’t leave me.

Angel had been asking for more than Scribe IV’s presence. Xe’d been asking Scribe IV not to be afraid. To see and know xem as an angel in all xyr awful glory, and not to turn away. Angel needed Scribe IV to witness xem, and still be xyr friend when all was said and done. To be an anchor to follow back to shore. The way Angel had been an anchor for Scribe IV, touching his shoulder, letting him know that he was not alone.

Scribe IV lowered his arms. He straightened his knees and lifted his head, forcing himself to keep looking at Angel, to keep looking at the Drowned God, and not turn away.

The Sisters, on the other hand, fled, scrambling, tripping over themselves and each other in their desperation to get back to the leviathan. Scribe IV recalled the way the Mother Superior had blanched in Angel’s presence. Now that xe spoke with the voice of her god, he imagined that all her blood had found a way to completely desert her body.

As the Sisters ran, their hold broke. The chalice coughed, giving Quin up. He landed roughly on the stones of the beach. The whirlpool dispersed, along with the glow and shadows of fish within it.

“Go now.” Angel’s voice rolled like a storm, making the leviathan shudder as its maw creaked shut and it struggled to haul itself back into the waves. “Pray and ask forgiveness, and learn again what it means to be a Sister of the Drowned.”

The tide sloshed and lurched. The leviathan groaned, as if its rivets might pop, its bones might crack, but it slid back into the sea – a thing chastened and whipped. In its wake, Agnetta lay like an offering on the stone.

On the empty beach, Quin rolled onto his side, his body shuddering. The sea had released him, but Quin still Drowned. Quin would always be Drowning. That was the nature of the Sisters’ punishment. Once enacted, the Drowning would never stop.

Angel folded back into xemself, landing on xyr knees next to Quin. Xe lifted him, even as his body fought and gasped and jerked in xyr arms. In a breath, xe appeared beside Scribe IV, xyr eyes large and filled with tears.

“We have to go now,” Angel said. “We have to help him.”