Then
A new saint has been found.
I stand on the street corner, watching through the gaps between people as the footage plays on the dailies and chapel bells ring across Covenant.
The images flash by in a dazzling stream—shots of an elegant homestead floating up in the skyline, a well-dressed family with the kind of air and refinement that comes from long-term familiarity with wealth.
The parents and older sibling beam proudly down at the youngest.
Gabriel Cirillo. Six years old.
He’s all long limbs and elbows and elfin hands. Big, round hazel eyes that are even bigger and rounder under the bursts of flashlight powder erupting all around him. Light skin gone pale and peaked as the wall of attention and excitement pounds down on him like a dust storm.
The crowd ebbs and flows around me, but I stay, watching the reel again and again and again.
I listen to the announcer telling Gabriel’s story—A brilliant child.
A prodigy. The family’s personal preacher discovered the boy’s storm-touched ability—and the statement from his parents recorded in crackly audio—So grateful to have been blessed with bringing a new saint to Trinity.
I hear the unique cadence of the chapel bells, the song that rings in every city and town across Trinity whenever a saint is found.
But mostly I stare at Gabriel’s young, round face.
At the fear flickering behind the excitement in his eyes when the Archangels land and he stares up at their towering metal bodies and their masks shaped into frozen, benevolent smiles.
A fear that ignites into terror when their giant articulated hands wrap around his tiny body and pick him up, away from his family, who beam and wave even as he cries out and reaches for them.
The dailies catch it all, rolling it out in perfect detail, all the way up to the moment when the Archangels and Gabriel Cirillo disappear into the sky, winging their way upward, beyond the clouds to the Gate of Heaven.
Better him than me.
I gag a little on the thought, glad no one around me can hear inside my mind. Mama would say it’s a horribly dark thought for a twelve-year-old kid to have, and maybe she’s right. But it’s true all the same.
I only learned the full story of my birth about a year ago when I’d admitted what I was to Mama, only to find out she already knew.
Mama had told me she’d been heavily pregnant when she’d been caught out on the streets in the middle of a quick-moving magnastorm.
She’d never seen the lightning arc so low like it had that night—not when it’s usually blocked by the copper sails or the skyliner ships eager to absorb the Heraldic blessings of the storms for themselves.
She’d felt something strike her, go through her, and thought for certain that she was going to die. But she hadn’t. She’d survived.
And so had I.
A storm-touched duster. The only one among hundreds of saints across thousands of years.
Mama said she loves me too much, that’s why she’s never said a word about what I am, not even to Papa.
I stare at Gabriel Cirillo’s family, at the blankness behind their happy smiles. Do Gabriel Cirillo’s parents feel the same way about him? Are they just putting on a good face for the dailies, but they’re secretly devastated to have him taken away?
Or maybe because skyliners have so much more than they will ever need, they just fill the spaces of their storm-touched children with more paper, more water, more tithes and bribes to preachers, more ornamentations for their airships and homesteads, until they don’t miss them anymore.
Trinity’s song whispers across my ears, curling around, beckoning as a cool breeze, but I’ve gotten good at not listening to it. I keep my promise to Orion. And to Mama, too.
Because I will never, never end up trapped in an Archangel’s grasp.