Chapter 2
RAQ
Not yet.
Two words. I had said perhaps four hundred words aloud in the last decade, and I had chosen every one of them the way you choose footing on ice, and then a woman with paint on her hands had held my sleeve on Fifty-First Street and I had handed her two words I had no authority to give.
Not yet implies yet. Yet implies a future with her in it.
A future with her in it implied that somewhere in the ruin I use for a mind, a decision had been made — and I had not been present for it.
I have been present for every decision I have made in ten thousand years. Presence is what I am instead of alive.
So, I went back over it, the way she'd gone back over my sleeve. Not the bus. The other thing.
I was three blocks south when it hit me.
I want to be precise, because precision is the only prayer I have left: three blocks south, on an errand I'll come to, and something went through me that had not gone through me since before this city, before most cities.
A reaching. Wordless. Blind. Thrown out into the dark like a hand off a cliff face, no name on it, no address, nothing so organized as hope.
Nobody asks us. Understand that. Orders come down.
Bargains come up. Prayer goes past us entirely, addressed to the management, and the management does not forward it.
A fallen thing hears commands, and terms, and — on rare, unpleasant occasions — its own name in the mouth of something that wants to collect.
It does not get asked. Asking is what you do to a thing that might choose.
She asked. Some woman on a Midtown corner threw herself open to the empty air in front of eleven tons of bus, and the empty air was me, and I was moving before I knew I had weight. Whatever Heaven forgot to take when it took everything else answered yes — before I could review the question.
The facts, then. I collect facts the way she collects broken saints. It is the only hobby they left me.
Fact: paint under her nails, ochre and a white, worked in deep. The hands of someone whose work does not come off.
Fact: she pointed at that intersection like a prosecutor entering it into evidence. Shaking. Furious. Functioning. I have watched soldiers with better training do worse with less.
Fact: her last operating limb, and she spent it holding on to the most dangerous thing on that street, demanding an explanation.
And the sound — before all of that, the small animal sound she made against the granite, the one she bit off short, jaw tight, like she'd rather have died than let me hear it.
I have heard the last sound of a great many peoples.
I had never once carried one home. I carried that one up four flights, and it sat with me all evening in a room with nothing in it, playing on a loop, and I made no move to stop it.
The errand still wanted finishing. Hell's hierarchy does not note your absence because it never noted your presence; things end up where they end up, and something at the bottom signs for it.
A collection, this time. Sunset Park, under the expressway, a warehouse that handled fish at the front and worse at the loading dock.
The debtor was wearing a dockworker — big man, gone soft at the eyes the way they go when the tenant has been in too long — and he owed the broker I answer to a marker he had decided not to honor.
He saw the sleeves, the coat, the famous ruin come to run an errand, and he decided something else, too. They always do. The wing joke, or the courier joke. He got as far as "they clipped you and now they send you for—"
I am going to tell this part briefly, because it was brief.
I took his wrist and I folded the thing inside him back against its own grain until it came loose of the body, and I held it there, in the cold air over the fish pallets, while it screamed on a frequency the dockworkers upstairs would take home in their teeth without knowing why.
Then I put it out. Not with anger. Anger is a young man's instrument, and it dulls.
What I used was ten thousand years of practice at watching things end — turned, for four seconds, from watching to ending.
The dock went very quiet. Along the back wall, what passed for muscle in that room had stopped passing for anything; one of them was pressed into the racking with its eyes down, and I heard my name move through them — the whole name, the old one, the one from the book they buried — in the tone people reserve for weather sirens.
The man sat down on the concrete, alone in his body for the first time in a year and wept. I took the marker from his coat pocket. I left him the weeping.
At the cage upstairs the broker counted the marker twice, because pretending not to be afraid of me is the local currency, and slid across my fee, which is nothing, formalized. "The Watcher," he said, to the room, not to me. "They had you carrying now."
"It's carried," I said, and left.
That is my standing, so you have it: they send a name out of scripture to collect fish-market debts and pay it in the pleasure of being feared by things not worth frightening. It had not bothered me in centuries. Bother requires a self to insult, and I had economized that away.
It bothered me tonight. All of it bothered me tonight — the dock, the fee, the tenant's screaming, my four seconds of ending — because somewhere across the river was a woman who had asked the empty air for help, and the empty air had spent the evening doing this with its hands.
I was two neighborhoods into that thought when my brother fell into step beside me.
He does that. No sound, no arrival — the sidewalk is yours, and then Camael is on it, matching your stride with his hands behind his back, like an inspector failing a building.
He wears his own face down here, minus what would blind, and the severity survives the translation: my brother has the features of something designed for a purpose and displeased to be interrupted at it.
"Nine lanes of Fifth Avenue," he said. Nothing else, for a block.
My brother can make a silence stand at attention.
"In daylight. At speed. In front of two hundred and forty phones, all of which I have since visited, which cost me an afternoon I will not recover.
You were a smear and a rumor and a dead pixel. You're welcome."
"Cam."
"What was it, Baraqiel."
The full name, in my brother's mouth, has a weight I won't describe.
"A bus," I said. "A woman stepped in front of it. Now she is not in front of it."
"Yes," he said. "The woman." And something in the way he set the word down — with tongs, at arm's length — made me look at him.
"I had them pull what there is. Caterina.
A restorer, if you can call scraping varnish in a cellar a profession.
Back taxes. A dead grandmother. A brother circling the house like a gull.
" He recited it flat, itemized, a creature of files.
"Nothing. She is nothing, brother. Which is what makes it interesting, because nothing does not do what she did. "
"And what did she do."
He stopped walking. Made me stop too — he has always been able to do that, stop me with stillness; it is an older trick than any they list in the books that got us wrong.
"It was loud," Cam said, and his voice went down into the register he saves for the things that frighten him, which I had heard perhaps three times in ten thousand years.
"You think it reached you because it was meant for you?
It reached everything, Raq. Every ear between here and places I will not name on a public street.
Hell heard it. Things older and hungrier than hell heard it.
There has not been a cry like that in a very long time, and every one of them is now asking the same question I am, which is what, precisely, answered. "
The street did its street things around us. Gulls. A car alarm. Somewhere, a man arguing with a lottery machine.
"Do you know what she is?" my brother said, quiet now, and terrible. "She is the kind of thing that caused all the trouble in the first place. That exact kind. The reaching kind." His lip did something that on a human face would be called a curl. "Stay away from it."
It.
I want to be careful here, because what happened next I had no name for, and I have names for nearly everything; the collection is extensive.
Something came up through me from a floor I did not know the building had.
It was not protectiveness. Protectiveness I have felt — for cities, for the species in general.
Abstract. This was not abstract. This had teeth, and one object, and a single syllable I refused to let finish forming.
And it turned me on my own brother.
"Say that again," I said.
Cam went still. I watched him redo ten thousand years of arithmetic about me in the space of a breath — ten thousand years of me watching, obedient to nothing but inertia, and now this, squared up on a sidewalk over a pronoun —
"Shall I handle it?" he said, softly. "That would be cleanest. Before the others come sniffing. Quietly — kindly, even. You know I can make a problem very small, brother. It is the entire, wretched job."
And there it was, the thing about my brother that I had spent ten millennia declining to look at: I did not know what he would do.
I never have. He has come down through every century I've served out down here, fixing my collar, filing my disasters, insulting my coat — and he tore the wings off the only family I ever had, on schedule, with precision, and called it what the paperwork called it.
Both of those are Camael. There is no third Camael to break the tie.
"If anything comes near her," I said, "wings or no wings, yours or theirs, I will do what I did in Sunset Park tonight. Slower."
"Hm," said Cam. But he'd heard it. I saw him hear it.
The trouble in the first place. The phrase would not settle. And from somewhere under ten thousand years of still water a thought came up whole, looked at my brother, and went back down before I could hold it:
It was not the humans at all, was it, brother.
I did not say it. I did not know what it meant. I marked the spot and left it.
"So you will sit in your room," Cam said, straightening, hands behind his back, inspection concluded, "and carry hell's paper, and watch.
It is what you are for." He turned to go, and delivered the rest over his shoulder.
"Walk away from her, Baraqiel. They will notice.
They may have noticed already." A pause, one beat too long.
"And they are the kindest thing on the list of what's coming. "
He left first, because he always leaves first; being left is for the fallen.
At the corner he was a man. Then the air moved, and the corner was empty, and even I had almost missed the going.
The gulls went on with their argument overhead as if nothing four seconds older than the ocean had just been standing under them, deciding whether to be my brother or my problem.
I stood a while with the syllable I had not let finish, and the sentence I had not let surface, and the list he had not itemized.
Every ear between here and places he would not name.
Then I stopped standing.
Here is what walking away protects, when everything in the dark has already heard her: nothing. It protects nothing. She was lit up like a struck bell in a city full of things that hunt by ringing, and the only variable left on the board was what reached her first.
I crossed Brooklyn the slow way, on foot, sweeping the field.
Bay 50th at one in the morning is quiet the way the end of a line is quiet — gates down over the fish store and the botánica, the elevated dripping last night's rain onto the avenue, a basement window with a light still burning and the edge of an easel in it.
I walked her block once at human speed and read it.
Roofline: clear. The alley behind the row houses: clear, then not clear — at its mouth, where the fence gaps, the air had a wrongness on it.
Faint. Cold. Hours old. Not more. Not hell's stink; hell smells like commerce.
This was quieter than that. Something had stood in that gap tonight and looked at the back of her house and left without wanting anything yet, the way a surveyor leaves without wanting anything yet.
It had heard her this afternoon. It had come the same night. So had I. That was the field now, and everything in it was going to have to learn the same thing the dock learned.
I stood where it had stood. I looked at what it had looked at: the window, the light, the shoulder moving at the easel, the brush hand that would not quiet even after the kind of day that ends civilians.
Working. Of course she was working. Holding her line against the dark with three inches of sable, no idea what had followed her home, no idea what was already keeping her street.
I chose the doorway across from the gap — sightlines to the alley, the roofs, both corners — and I set my back against the brick and began the only work I have ever been good at.
I had not decided to come here. I noted the fact, filed it with the others, and did not examine it, because the light in her window was the only lit thing on the block, and whatever else had heard her would come for it eventually, out of the dark.
Let it.
It would find me first.