Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter Three

They were no longer alone. From the darkness behind them shapes were fast advancing, and it took just one over-the-shoulder glimpse for the boy and his angel guide to start pounding their bare feet into the snow in frenzied desperation to get away. Even Neetra, who had fought enemies of every description and knew these ghosts from the distant past could not harm her, turned tail likewise at the sight of the pursuers. They could barely be made out from the night that surrounded them, and the flashes of gaping red mouths and glittering malicious eyes, though gruesome, were not in themselves reason enough for one of The Four Heroes to flee. However, every instinct our heroine possessed was screaming at her to run, to hide, to escape, for this mass of monstrosities was an evil against which she could not hope to prevail.

Through a spiralling tunnel of cold pitiless snow the angel and child led a breathless nightmare chase, hand-in-hand with both spectral girls speeding after them. Neetra did not need her telepathy to know how sorely both fugitives’ legs ached, or how their hearts pounded in their throats, or the blind terror that all but consumed them each time they nearly tripped and fell, or the certainty, most petrifying of all, that what was behind them this instant would be upon them the next. How such fear and such haste could seem to last so long without abating, no-one knew, but finally shelter in the form of a sparse grove of ice-tipped firs appeared at hand. The angel, all but dragging her stumbling charge, skidded to a halt amid the trees and clenched both fists. A dome of pearlescent light emanated from her, encasing herself, Steam and the girls within its concave wall.

It could dimly be seen that the things chasing them were now at rest. They skulked, swung heavy heads from left to right and grunted and growled, seeking the spoor they had lost. Steam was holding onto the angel as if for dear life, and she folded her two wings protectively around him. With trembling lips the boy tried to frame the question: “What are they?”

“There are other worlds besides yours and mine – I believe that’s something else your people have become aware of,” the angel replied, speaking not without effort, as though maintaining the shield of light bore some cost to her. “They’re from one of those worlds. They can sense we’re stranded here, and so they’ve come to drag us back to where they came from.”

The beasts were lurching off again, a dust-storm of hooting gloating belligerence kicking its way through snowdrifts and forging into the black. For long minutes after their departure Steam’s angel-guardian held her luminous veil, and only then did she relax and dispel the light. On doing so, she dropped to her knees.

“We’re safe,” the angel panted as she crouched in the snow.

“Never mind safe!” Steam flung back at her, his frantic voice raw with horror. “They’re still out there, and it don’t look to me like you can do that many more times!”

“I’ve been assigned to you,” she responded in weary gasps. “It’s my duty…to keep you safe…and I will.”

Here voice was not only stubborn. It was also terrifyingly thin and unconvincing.

There was no more conversation, no more explanations or sharing of feelings, after that incident. Steam and the angel talked little as they moved slowly and on-edge through the wilderness, fearful and alert for the tiniest sign of the menace they now knew this land contained. Neetra felt as they did, and found herself scanning the drifts with the same restlessness while she hovered beside the pair. Jiang Jiang, for her part, was as serene and unruffled as ever. This helped Neetra to a little confidence, though she had not a clue how the scenario she was observing could ever be happily resolved.

Presently something new revealed itself. It was the wreck of a car, lying half-submerged in the snow at an angle that suggested it had hit a buried ditch, and still burning in places from the petrol tank that had ruptured. Most of the flames were gone though, leaving only black charring behind.

“That’s our car,” the boy-Steam said faintly.

“I was afraid of this,” responded the angel. “If you’re here, it means we’re caught in a loop. From where this started to where you were bound, and back again, all on the night it happened which will never be over. We’ll just keep going to and fro between them, again and again, the pair of us…”

Her voice trailed off in a small chill of fear. She had not mentioned what else was with them in their loop. Both she and the boy knew, and neither could bring themselves to speak of it.

Meanwhile the child-Steam was stepping gradually towards the ruined car, his eyes wide. Beyond the soot-smeared windows, bathed in plumes of trapped dark smoke, four rough silhouettes were becoming visible. Two adult-sized ones in the front seats and two smaller ones behind them, they slumped twisted and unmoving.

“Don’t look in there,” the angel said in a frightened, hollow voice, reaching out her hand.

“Is that all that’s left?” Steam asked her brokenly, not taking his eyes away. “Of me? And of them?”

“No!” she cried in a passion, grasping his shoulders and turning him round to look at her. “Your parents and your brother – they’ve gone on, in the care of three of my kind who’ve taken everything they were to a place where they’ll live forevermore! And you…you’re still here too! This is what’s really left of you, thinking and feeling as you ever did! And you’re in my care, so no matter what happens, no matter how much trouble we’re in, I’ll make sure no harm comes to you!”

“But you can’t!” Steam yelled, his voice raised not in anger but in pleading. “How can you not see that? Anyone can tell you haven’t got enough power to keep protecting me from them things that are after us! How are you going to save us once your strength’s run out, and they find us, and take the pair of us off to somewhere we’ll never get back from?”

“I…” the angel began, her exhausted voice close to defeat. “I…don’t know!”

Just then, sliver-blue light fell upon the scene. Neetra recognised it and turned to see, sure enough, one of the Next Four’s time-portals opening beside the car. Into the snowy wilds stepped Gala and The Chancellor, and for a moment Neetra thought they had followed her from the present day. Then she remembered they were using a Time-Shifting Device, and on top of that noticed they were wearing different clothes to the ones they’d had on when she saw them last. Our heroine realised they were not the Gala and Chancellor she had parted from at the castle gates, but slightly younger versions of both who came from a time before she ever met them. Nor would they have been able to see or hear Neetra even if they had known who she was, for they were as much a part of this memory as the angel and the boy-Steam.

“Are we too late?” Gala asked The Chancellor.

“For conventional medical science, without doubt,” he replied, already passing scanners over the burnt-out car with one hand while ramming short mechanized stakes into the snow with the other, marking out a perimeter around the vehicle. “Cellular decay and fire-damage are extensive, but readings indicate that with my experimental stasis field in place, some salvage should be possible.”

“Do everything you can, Chancellor,” Gala instructed. “We don’t need much – just enough preserved organic tissue for the soul to be re-knit. There’s no shortage of raw material to build the rest of the body out of.”

She turned at last to the angel and the child. They were clinging together and gazing at her, wearing identical expressions of wonder and bewilderment.

“Greetings. I am Gala,” she said to the angel, ignoring Steam. “My associate and I have ventured far and risked much to join you. It’s our belief we may be able to rescue you from your plight.”

The angel’s eyes widened. “How?” she breathed.

“I lead a team called the Next Four, who it’s prophesised will one day take over guardianship of our entire world,” Gala said. “One of our number, however, has been unexpectedly lost to us. We need a replacement…but we are time-travellers, compellled by our cause to respect the intricate equilibrium of fate and chronology. The person we seek can’t be anybody who already has a destined part to play. We require someone the time-space continuum won’t miss, someone whose destined role has already ended but who hasn’t yet gone on to worlds beyond our scope. You can appreciate this doesn’t happen very often, but at long last, after painstaking research and study, The Chancellor and I tracked down one such instance that occurred on this night.”

The angel stared, not comprehending.

“The boy,” Gala explained. “He’s what we need. His preordained contribution to history concluded a little while ago, but he’s still here. He can safely join us, taking the part of our absent member, and it won’t interfere with his or anybody else’s fate. The fabric of space-time will remain undisrupted.”

“So…” the angel managed to ask. “What do I have to do?”

“Give up the boy,” Gala replied. “Hand over your custody of his soul to me. Once he’s no longer your responsibility, you’ll both be released from this limbo in which you’re trapped. You can go back to your life, while I take the boy with me to begin life anew. It’s the perfect solution for all of us…but you have to surrender him to me of your own free will. I can’t act against the authority of one of your kind. Nobody mortal could.”

“Then you mean…” began the angel. She looked down at her small charge, who was clutching her and looking up into her face out of huge green eyes that did not understand, but merely trusted and beseeched. “You mean it has to be my decision to…”

It was only then that the tears, held off for so long, burst forth. Throughout this tragic mission, even during the deadly peril that had come looking for them out of the darkest depths, the angel had resisted, but on hearing these words from Gala that she knew to be irrefutable and correct, there was suddenly no strength left any more. The crystal drops that flooded from her cheeks turned to snowflakes and twinkled away on the wind, a blizzard within a blizzard, and one of far more beauty and far more woe than that which shrouded the world.

“You can’t ask that of me,” sobbed the angel. “Don’t you know what connects him to me now? The bond that forms when a soul is assigned to one of my race?”

“I’m aware of it theoretically,” said Gala, sounding none too eager to become embroiled in the subject. “But surely it’s something you can sacrifice, if it means survival for you both?”

“What you call a theory or a sacrifice is love!” the angel cried, her voice wracked. “I do see our lives depend on my severing that love. But to have to face the deed itself…!”

“Think of what will happen if you don’t,” Gala pressed on intently. “Think of those who’ll suffer if you and the boy never come back from this place. Must I remind you my team needs its fourth member if we’re to fulfil our destiny of saving the Earth and everyone on it? Prophecies, and the good of all mankind, are supposed to be your people’s stock-in-trade. And think of yourself. Stay here and you’ll never be able to return to your own world. Your human husband will never see you again. Your daughter will never be born – ”

“My daughter? I’m having a little girl?” exclaimed the angel, startled out of her weeping for a moment. “Forgive me, we don’t know everything, that’s a popular myth.”

“Where divine omniscience fails, time-travel may come in handy,” Gala replied with well-mannered impatience. “Yes, you’re having a little girl. Now we’re pressed for time, and the chance I’m offering you is your only hope. Will you do as I ask?”

The angel, taking a shuddering breath, looked again to the small soul in her charge. Neetra did the same and saw that the eyes of Steam’s boy-self were wet too, for the inevitability of their situation had not been lost on him. He gathered well enough that he and his strange loving friend were confronted by a decision that was no decision at all, and there was nothing for them to do but say goodbye. The angel turned slowly back to Gala, hanging her beautiful head, as more sparkling tears of snow fell.

“Yes,” she said at last, in a voice that could barely be heard. “I relinquish his soul to you.”

Gala gave her a single nod of some gratitude, then cast her on the one whose very life and essence had just been handed to her. She looked the little pyjama-clad boy up and down.

“Hardly what I was picturing as the replacement for our lost fourth member,” Gala declared. “But we’re not exactly spoiled for choice. Come, boy.”

She put out her hand. The child-Steam, shivering and with tears trickling down his face, gazed up for the last time at the angel who had come through the darkness and the snow to care for his lost wandering spirit that fateful night. He was far past speaking. She knelt, threw her arms around his tiny frame, and held him in a final embrace.

“Don’t look back,” the angel whispered. “Just never forget me.”

Steam’s younger self obeyed. Swallowing down his sorrow and his fear, he drew away and walked numbly to where Gala was waiting. There he extended a meek hand, which she took.

END OF CHAPTER THREE