Damn it. There really weren’t all that many people whose opinions mattered deeply to her, but his did, and now this. Her mind was circling back to it yet again—another rotation on the shame carousel—when she noticed a commotion rippling through the assembled workers.
There was a kind of makeshift refreshment station set up in front of the massive, ancient gates of the fortress: a truck serving tea and plates of food, a few plastic chairs to sit on. The kasbah itself was cordoned off; a team of forensic anthropologists was going over it with fine-tooth combs. Literally. They had found long azure hairs in one of the rooms, apparently—the same room in which they’d found, scattered across the floor, a peculiar assortment of teeth that had led to speculation that “the Girl on the Bridge” and the “Tooth Phantom”—the silhouette caught on surveillance cam at Chicago’s Field Museum—might be one and the same.
The plot thickened.
And now, something else. Eliza didn’t see where it began, the commotion, but she watched it move from one cluster of workers to the next by way of gesticulations and loud, fast chatter in Arabic. Someone pointed to the mountains. Up, into the sky above the peaks—in the same direction that Dr. Amhali had pointed when he’d said, wryly, “They went that way.”
They. The living “beasts.” Eliza drew a hard breath. Had they found them?
She made out the glint of aircraft moving in the distance, and then, at her right, a couple of men disengaged from the general mass of people whose function she couldn’t determine—there were a lot of men here, and most of them didn’t appear to be doing anything—and made for the helicopter that was at rest on a piece of flat terrain. She kept watching, her tea forgotten in her hand, as the rotors began to spin, picking up speed until billows of dirt were kicking their way toward her and the helicopter lifted up and flew. It was loud—whumpwhumpwhump—and her heart was pounding as she scanned the faces of the people around her. She felt handicapped by the language barrier, and very much an outsider here. Surely someone spoke English, though, and this was a small enough feat of courage to perform. With a deep breath, Eliza threw her paper cup in a bin and approached one of the few female workers on-site. It only took a couple of questions to ascertain the source of the commotion.
A fire in the sky, she was told.
Fire? “More angels?” she asked.
“Insha’Allah,” the woman replied, gazing into the distance. Allah willing.
Eliza recalled Dr. Amhali saying, the day before, “It’s all very nice for Christians, yes?” “Angels” in Rome, “demons” here. How neat, how tidy for the Western worldview, and how wrong. Muslims believed in angels, too, and Eliza gathered that they wouldn’t mind getting some for themselves. For her own part, she had a presentiment that they were better off without them, and she had to wonder—especially in light of what she was beginning to believe—why the prospect of angels frightened her more than the prospect of beasts.
44
THIS JUST IN
The seraphim had had the advantage of staging their arrival. They brought their own musical accompaniment, had costumes made for the occasion, and calculated their destination for effect. And even if they hadn’t managed all of this, they were beautiful and graceful. Centuries of beneficent mythology anticipated them. They could scarcely have gone wrong.
The “beasts” made their debut with somewhat less aplomb. Their clothing was wrinkled and dark with dried blood, their music was chosen for them by sensationalistic television producers, and their beauty and grace were somewhat lacking.
On account of their being dead.
Two days after the angelic leader’s stunning proclamation of “The Beasts are coming for you”—two days of riots and suicide pacts and mass baptisms in overcrowded churches, two days of furrowed brows and hemming and hawing on the part of a closed council of world leaders—a news bulletin preempted a preempt and exploded in the collective human consciousness with as much force as the Arrival had, if not more.
“This just in.”
The media was already operating at a pretty fevered pitch—it was hummingbird-metabolism journalism: fast fast fast, and voracious. The many flavors of fear were seasoned liberally with glee; such times as these were the stuff of broadcasters’ dreams. Be afraid. No. Be more afraid! This is not a drill.
In that context, the delivery of the latest “this just in” stood apart for its solemnity and gravitas.
The story was broken by the highest-paid news anchor in the world, a kind of human comfort food delivered nightly to American living rooms, year after year, his youthful face changeless save for a subtle lengthening effect brought on by a slow-climbing hairline. He had dignity, and not just the faux kind created by a real-or-fake sprinkling of salt in his pepper, and, to his credit, if it hadn’t been for his willingness to use his clout in the service of journalistic ethics, things could have been far worse.
“My fellow Americans, citizens of Earth…” Oh, to be able to say that, Citizens of Earth! Lesser broadcasters trembled with envy. “This station has just come into possession of evidence that appears to validate the Visitors’ claims. You know what claims I mean. Early independent inquiry suggests these photographs are legitimate, though as you’ll see, many questions arise to which we do not yet have answers. I warn you. These images are not suitable for children.” Pause. Millions leaned forward, breath held. “They may not be suitable for anyone, but this is our world, and we cannot look away.”
And no one did, and very few sent their children from the room as, without further preamble, he showed the pictures in silence.
In living rooms across the nation, and in bars and offices and dorm commons and fire stations and the basement laboratories of the National Museum of Natural History and everywhere else, when the first image appeared, brows furrowed.
This was the grace period—the furrowing of brows, the knee-jerk disbelief—but it didn’t last long. Knee-jerk disbelief had, over the past forty-eight hours, been knuckled under by credulity. Many people were newly learning how to believe. And so, swiftly and in a great wave, viewer cognition swept from What the hell? to Oh my god, and panic on Earth met its new high-water mark.
Demon.
It was Ziri, though of course no one knew his name, or wondered at it, the way Eliza had.
The personals ad Zuzana and Mik had composed for the Kirin in flight was something along the lines of: “Heroic sweetheart currently occupying smoking-hot maniac body in order to save the world. Would sacrifice everything for love, but hopefully won’t have to. I really deserve a happy ending.”