29.4

 

The square has fallen silent. People are looking at each other, at the buildings, at the sky silent. It is the silence before panic, where everyone knows something is amiss, just not sure what. If this was a film, it would be the moment when the protagonist’s best friend and confidante glances at him as half his body slides away from the other half

Roisin and Hasmed are both invisible to those without enhanced sight, so the crowd doesn’t understand what they’re witnessing, but they feel it the pressure of destiny pressing down on them like water onto a submarine; they feel the stillness, cold as a chef’s tears in a walk-in fridge, that has nothing to do with the weather.

Roisin sends her conscious mind out into the crown, mentally identifying the gambler, the rapist, the paedophile, the unrepentant. She can taste the fragments of souls bubbling outwards. Reaping them would give her the strength she needs to defeat Hasmed in battle, but they could not be reconstituted like Steve’s imp. Their souls would become part of her until such time as she returned to the creator, too. Would that make her evil? It is, after all, what the angels were trying to do by bringing on the apocalypse, except there would be no regard for the weight of their souls; all would be taken, good and bad.

Hasmed does not blink, even if he had eyes to blink with. Neither does he breathe, if there are actually lungs beneath that hollow chest. Nor is there a heart she can hear pounding beneath that immobile exterior. He has however, stopped to consider her words. She doesn’t understand how she can know this – something of the mantle has passed on to here, perhaps, but nevertheless, Hasmed seems to have the ability to reason, rather than just obey his creator’s wishes.

Even the fact that he is examining her words counts as a win, here. Hasmed was not created to react. He is not created to stop, because Hasmed is the eraser and the executioner. Hasmed is the Left Hand of God which Heaven sends when something has gone wrong with the world. That he has paused to consider is a catastrophic change to his programming, and a change to his processes means that the Fifth must not be an error in the fabric of Creation.

Outwardly, nothing happens. The square is as still as the silence between an imminent head-on car crash and the moment the victims start screaming. There is no wind, no chanting, no clever rhetoric from the politician in the sharp suit, bur Roisin can feel a shift in the architecture of the world as tremor runs deep within the logic of creation.

Hasmed tilts his head.

It is but a tiny movement, but the air around him fractures — hairline cracks of silence spreading outward like fracture lines on glass as a head hits the windshield. It is the pressure wave of the first atomic bomb, experienced before the front line could guess the danger they were in. Roisin feels the mantle tighten, bracing her for the intrusion of the Void into the world.

Hasmed’s voice is not a voice. It is an absence shaped into a memory of sound; the reconstruction of a dead singer’s words from tape spliced in a thousand places; a hollow resonance that feels like an echo being supressed. “You are not written.”

Roisin’s breath catches. She can feel the angel considering the concept that change can occur; that Creation has the flexibility to allow for the new. She exists, therefore, surely she has always existed, like the twist in a murder mystery that was never revealed to the reader. She almost laughs. When she changed her name, she should have chosen Agatha.

Hasmed continues. “You are not ordained.”

The cracks in the air widen. This could still go either way, but to Roisin it looks promising. The politician tries to speak again, falters, turns on his heels.

Hasmed does not look at him but only at Roisin. He continues in his dull monotone. “You are not permitted.” There is a flicker where his eyes would be. A glimpse of an idea, or a opening of the Void?

“You are deviation.”

Roisin’s heart hammers like she’s been caught shoplifting but the mantle of Knowledge steadies her, filling her with a clarity that is not courage or defiance but truth. She lifts her chin, drawing herself to her full height, though her eyeline is still barely above his flat. Cockles groin. “I am Justice. I am the One who Stands Between. I am necessary.”

Hasmed’s wings shift.

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