26.4

 

The Artist tilts his head upward. “Justice for what, exactly? Famine?”

Roisin’s gaze is beyond the room now, beyond the city. She is beset by visions, each of which lasts only a few seconds before switching to another, leaving her disorientated and nauseated like a low-resolution, three-dimensional Minecraft game played on a rolling ship. She sees a city skyline where a residential tower block is burning but she can’t identify any landmarks – it could be Kensington or Madrid, Los Angeles or Dubai. She hears the screams of people traps inside, and they continue even when the scene shifts to a hospital ward where nurses and doctors in hazmat suits a working around dozens of isolation chambers like a low budget science fiction movie set in a starship full of cryotubes. It switches again to a muddy field where child soldiers wearing red and blue armbands thrust machetes into women and babies and the air smells like iron and copper pennies. She sees a blade thrust into a crying girl and the girl is in a first-world kitchen with drawings stuck to the fridge with magnets and a woman lies on the floor, her stomach distended from starvation and her ribs protruding like a toast rack. A bluebottle circles her lips and lands on the leaf of an English nettle while above it a body swings from a clumsily knotted noose slung over an oak branch while a small girl stands at a busy intersection while cars and lorries rumble past in all directions, hesitantly placing a foot onto the road surface and pulling it back again as a petroleum tanker roars past without seeing her, shedding gallon after gallon of crude oil into the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean.

They are all places where judgement is needed; judgements on landlords, judgements of the living wage spreading from gaps in government spending to neglectful and greedy landlords; on the increasing price for the most basic foods; on the wave of fascism sweeping across over supposedly liberal countries and a child, left alone and ignored at a major intersection of its young life while its carers absolve themselves of responsibility, their attention on brighter destinations than parenting.

These are points where the Four have been distracted or have deviated from their purpose of keeping the balance; points where they have neglected their duties in one place to concentrate on another; point where the Fifth is needed to intercede.

Roisin gasps and drops to one knee, clutching her chest. “It’s too much. I can’t do this. The world needs more than one Justice. It needs ten! A hundred!”

The Nephilim moves a hand to her shoulder, but whether this is meant to steady her, comfort her or absolve her she doesn’t know. All she does know is that the mantle expects her to be able to bring justice to all these places, and that Astaroth seems delighted with this turn of events.

Steve reaches for her arm. “Roisin, what’s happening to you? What are you seeing?”

She opens her eyes and sees him flinch as her gaze focuses down from the whole world back to this tiny microcosm of it. She can see every capillary in his cornea reacting to her, the pupil closing like the shutter of a camera held to the sun. “I can feel where I’m needed,” she says softly. “I can feel the imbalance.”

Steve shakes his head. “No. No, Roisin, you just got this—whatever this is. You need time to get accustomed to it, to know its abilities and limits. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to do anything yet.”

But she does. She nods and attempts to smile through the pains and horrors she has just witnessed. “I feel it calling to me. Begging me to correct the imbalances of the world, pleading with me to bring some order to the chaos. It is the tug of a child on its mothers hand to point out the dog that bit it, the bee that stung, the trusted adult who laid a hand on it. The world is tilting, Steve, and I need to redress the iniquity.” She looks into his eyes and the grief he holds in them is almost unbearable. “I can’t stay,” she whispers.

He nods, and draws back a step, shifting his grip on the imp like a parent would with a toddler.

She presses her hand to his chest. “But I’m not leaving you,” she adds quickly, urgently. “I’m not abandoning you. I’m not disappearing. I’m just being asked to step in.”

Paul closes the gap between them, leaving the assistant looking suddenly lost and alone by the gas fire. His voice cracks. “By whom?”

Roisin shakes her head. “Not who. What. It’s the world. The world needs the balance restored before it’s too late.”

Astaroth steps forward, hands clasped behind his back. “She has to take Justice to the world,” he says. “The balance depends upon her and the architecture she now belongs to.” He glances at Steve. “She cannot wait. The Fifth does not wait. The Fifth responds.”

Roisin nods lightly. There is no discussion to be had. “He’s right,” she says. “Time and Tide and all that.”

Paul looks at her, his eyes shining with unspent tears, either for her of his hammer, but the latter was around here somewhere. “Do you have to go right now?”

Roisin hesitates and the mantle answers for her with a soft pulse in her chest and a the whisper of direction in the marrow of her bones. She nods again. “Right now.”

Paul closes his eyes, opens them and grins. “But you’re not a man.”

Roisin feels her face crease as she laughs. This is what it means to be the bridge between humans and the Four. A connection to both groups is necessary to be a reliable Justice. “No,” she says, smiling, and for the first time, she feels the mantle not as a burden but as an extension of herself; one that can take her far further than the 3:33 AM Laverstone to Glasgow ever could. She blows him a kiss. “I’m a fucking angel.”

And she is gone.