“I don’t blame you for who you are, Eliza,” said Anuj Chaudhary. “We can’t change where we come from.”
“Well, that’s big of you.”
“But perhaps it’s time now to seek help. You’ve been through so much.”
And that’s when things started to go sideways. He still had his hands upraised in that let’s-not-do-anything-rash manner, and Eliza just stared at him. What was that all about? He was acting like she was hysterical, and for a second, it made her doubt herself. Had she raised her voice? Was she wide-eyed and nostril-flared, like some kind of lunatic? No. She was just standing there, arms at her sides, and she would have sworn by anything worth swearing on—if there was anything worth swearing on—that she didn’t look crazy.
She didn’t know how to react. It brought on a bizarre feeling of helplessness to face such an exaggerated response. “What I need help with,” she said, “is proving that I didn’t do this.”
“Eliza. Eliza. It doesn’t matter now. Let’s just get you home, and worry about that later.”
Her heartbeat started to pound in her ears. It was anger, it was frustration, and it was something else. Free as dandelions, she remembered. Normal as pie. Well, maybe not normal. Maybe not ever, but she would be free. She looked at her mentor, this dignified man of rare reason and intellect who stood to her as a kind of paragon of human enlightenment, and she felt his hypocrisy weighed against her truth—her own new knowing—and there was no contest. “No,” she said, and she heard her tone, which had gone soft and slippery with her own shame, slough off all weakness. “Let’s worry about it now.”
“I don’t think—”
“Oh, you think plenty. But you’re wrong.” A flick of her hand toward the laptop and all it stood for with its freeze-framed news broadcast. “Morgan Toth did this. Look into it. The truth is so far beyond him, I wouldn’t expect him to get it. He might be smart, but he’s a shallow pond. You, though.” Again he tried to interject, and again Eliza silenced him. “I expected more from you. You’ve got gods strolling the hallways of your ‘mind palace’.” She put good, fat air quotes around that. “And they’re trying not to bump into the… what was it? The delegates of Science, so they can keep it cordial in there. That’s how open-minded you are, right? And now you’ve seen angels, and you’ve touched chimaera.” Chimaera. The word came to her the same way godstars had: a card flipped upside. “You know they’re real. And you know—surely you know—that, wherever they came from, they’ve been here before. All our myths and stories have a real, physical origin. Sphinxes. Demons. Angels.”
He was frowning, listening.
“But the idea that I could be descended from one? Now that’s crazy! Ship Eliza home, get her some help, and for heaven’s sake, keep her the hell out of my mind palace!” She laughed, mirthless. “You don’t serve my kind in there, isn’t that it? Whoever heard of a black angel, anyway? And a woman to boot. This must be so difficult for you, doctor.”
He shook his head. He looked pained. “Eliza. That’s not it.”
“I’ll tell you what ‘it’ is,” she said, but she held on to it, for a second, wondering if she was really going to do it. Tell it. Here. To these hypocritical, doubting men. She looked from one to the other, from Dr. Chaudhary’s pained dismay and… embarrassment, for her—for her delusion, her sad display—to Dr. Amhali’s trembling contempt. Not the greatest audience for a revelation, but in the end it didn’t matter. Eliza’s new certainties had grown beyond concealing.
“My family,” she said, “are miserable, vicious, pitiless people, and I will never forgive them for what they did to me, but… they’re right.” She raised her eyebrows and turned to Dr. Amhali. “And yes, I do still have visions, and I hate them. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I didn’t want to be part of it. I tried to escape from it, but it doesn’t matter what I want, because I am. Funny, isn’t it? My fate, it’s my DNA.” Back to Dr. Chaudhary. “This should keep the delegates of Science and Faith busy arguing in the halls. I am descended from an angel. It’s my goddamn genetic destiny.”
47
THE BOOK OF ELAZAEL
There was nothing for it, after that. After they perp-walked her through the site, every set of eyes drilling into her, malicious and condemning. After they put her in a car and slammed the door and ordered her returned to Tamnougalt to await her escort home. It was a couple of hours’ drive, the sere pre-Saharan landscape of the Drâa Valley surrounding her in all directions, and she had nothing to occupy her but her strange coursing exaltation and outrage.
Well, nothing but that and… all the things known and buried.
All the many stirring things. A corner protruding from a floodplain—maybe a cask or maybe a world. All she had to do was blow away the dust. Eliza started laughing. There, in the backseat of the car, laughter poured from her like a new language. Later, when the government agents came to fetch her, the driver would report it, as preamble to explaining what happened after.
When she stopped laughing.
Back in the “good old days” when she’d had nothing to worry about but building a monster army in a giant sandcastle in the wilderness, Karou had periodically driven a rusty truck over rutted earth and long straight roads to reach Agdz, the nearest town where she might, with her hair covered by a hijab, pass unremarked while buying supplies. Bulk bags of couscous, crates and crates of vegetables, chewy, hardscrabble chickens, and a king’s treasury of dried dates and apricots.
She looked down on Agdz now, from the sky. Unremarkable. She passed over it, feeling the pull of the others in her wake, and kept going. Their destination lay a little farther on, and was somewhat more remarkable. She spotted the palm grove first, an oasis, the green as surprising as spilled paint on brown ground. And there, within: crumbling mud walls so like the crumbling mud walls they’d just left behind. Another kasbah. Tamnougalt. It had a hotel, Karou remembered, the sort of sprawling out-of-the-way place that would allow for a quiet interlude for their small, strange band, while not so out of the way that they wouldn’t find what they needed.
“We can get ourselves together here,” she said. “They should have Internet and outlets. Showers, beds, water. Food.”