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The angels had risen.
Cries spread through the streets below. Esther wrenched open the glass doors and rushed onto the balcony. “No.”She felt her voice in her gut, moanlike, and pulled it up and out, unreeling it in strips, moan by moan, each one the same simple word—“ No. No. No.”—flayed from her like meat and pulled out raw.
The angels were leaving?
What about her? What about their deal? She had given them Karou, and promised so much more—everything they’d need to conquer the world beyond that veil of sky. Arms, ammunition, technology, even perso
Not much. Only mining rights. To an entire world. An entire undeveloped world with a slave population already in place, and an army to guard her interests. Esther had made certain that she had no competition, that no other offers reached the angels, and no bribes topped her own. It was the single greatest negotiating coup of all time. Or, it had been, and Esther Van de Vloet had to watch, trembling and speechless, as wings carried it away.
“Not much,” Karou had said, evasive. “Just persuade them to go home.”
And so, it seemed, they had.
They were gone, and the sky was empty again. Esther fumbled on the TV and watched the helicopter’s-eye view along with the rest of the world as the “heavenly host” retraced the journey it had made from Uzbekistan three days earlier.
“The Visitors appear to be leaving,” a
The Pope could not be reached for comment.
By the time Esther’s phone rang, she had gone far beyond fury to a bright white echoing place that might have been the waiting room to madness. To have come so close to greatness and have it snatched away… But the sound of the ring was like fingers snapping in front of her eyes.
“Yes, what? Hello?” she answered, disoriented. She couldn’t have said who she expected it to be. The agency she’d hired to track down the wish thieves would probably have been her guess, and her best hope. The angels had flown. Esther had lost, somehow, and she was not such a fool as to imagine she would get another chance at a power play like this. So when it was Spivetti on the line—the steward who had, at Cardinal Schotte’s behest, been doing her bidding inside the Papal Palace—a flare of hope went up in her. Of salvation.
“What is it?” she demanded. “What’s happened, Spivetti? Why did they go?”
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. He sounded shaken. “But they’ve left something behind.”
“Well?” she demanded. “What is it?”
“I… I don’t know,” said Spivetti. The man was beside himself, and might have given some rudimentary description had Esther demanded it, but she did not. In her greed, she was already hurtling down the long hallway.
It took her hours to get into the Vatican, through the pulsing, stinking, wailing crowd and the military checkpoints. Hours and dozens of phone calls, favors cashed in and favors promised, and when she finally arrived, disheveled and wild-eyed, she mistook Spivetti’s look of horror for a reaction to the sight of her, when in fact it had predated her by some hours, and would linger long after she had gone.
“Take me there,” she barked.
And that was how Esther Van de Vloet came at last into Jael’s chamber and approached the grand, carved bed. It was dim. Her eyes were sca
It was both promise and threat when he said to her, in a coarse, chuckling mewl: “You’ll never be lonely again.”
ARRIVAL + 72 HOURS
69
DON’T LET THE SKY-FLAP THINGY HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT
On the twelfth of August at 9:12 GMT, a thousand angels vanished through a cut in the sky.
There had been no witnesses to their arrival. Heavenscapes of cumulus clouds had been imagined, rays of light escaping aslant, like a picture from a Sunday school workbook. The truth was less impressive. One by one through a flap. There was almost a livestock quality to it. Sheep to the shearing, cows to the slaughter, on you go. At a rate of approximately six seconds per soldier, it took more than two hours, and this was plenty of time for a cadre of helicopters to amass behind them.
In keeping with their established inability to decide on a course of action regarding the angels, the leaders of the world balked at attempting to send a mission through behind them. What message would this send? What diplomatic consequences might there be? Whose ass was on the line?
It took a billionaire independent adventurer to attempt it. Piloting his own state-of-the-art helicopter, he hesitated just long enough to line his craft up with the cut, keeping a fixed visual the whole time. He had begun acceleration when the fire flared.
Fire in the sky.
He kicked aside just in time and had a front-row view of the burn: fast and bright and over, and with it, his chance at his fourth world record. First ma
No one. And now they never would.
Zuzana, Mik, and Eliza watched the fire in the sky on the TV in a corner bar in Rome, and toasted success with prosecco.
“What do you want to bet Esther never drank that champagne she ordered?” Mik gloated, taking a deep swill of bubbly.
After all their worry and Evil Esther’s fell contrivances, Karou, Akiva, and Virko had pulled it off. The angels were out, and they had definitely not been carrying guns.
“In your face, fake grandma,” Zuzana crowed, but her triumph was chased by sorrow. The portal was closed, and a violin case full of wishes wouldn’t get her back to Eretz, where anything could still be happening. There was nothing to do now but keep worrying, and possibly mope.
“What do you want to do?” she asked Mik. “Go home?”
He blew out a breath. “I guess. See our families. Plus, a certain giant, wicked marionette is probably very lonely.”
Zuzana scoffed. “He can stay lonely. My ballerina days are over.”
“Well. You could make him a wife at least, so he can enjoy his retirement.”
At Mik’s mention of the word wife, something inside Zuzana fizzed. She smothered it with a scowl.