29.7

 

Roisin’s knees buckle and she cries out – more in shock than pain, because seeing your own ribs exposed  because the flesh and muscle keeping them on the inside has vanished is traumatic for anyone. Inside her, the mantle is also screaming, and she wonders if part of it has vanished, too. She doesn’t feel any less knowledgeable – apart from the whole ‘missing part of her chest jobbie – but then, how could she tell she doesn’t know something if she doesn’t know she’s forgotten it?

And suddenly she understands: Hasmed is not attacking her. Hasmed is attacking the Mantle, for if the mantle is gone, there is no threat of knowledge, and without knowledge the Angels can re-shape the truth.

With the loss of the mantle Roisin will lose her role. Her meaning. Her right to exist as the Fifth. She forces herself upright to speak, but her voice is thin and shaky. She pushes through regardless. “I am not written,” she whispers. “But I do exist. I am real.”

Hasmed’s hand pauses as the mantle ignites with the truth of her words. Truth is immutable. There are three sides to any debate: The viewpoint of one side, the viewpoint of the other, and the truth, and Truth. The holocaust of the late 1930s and 1940’s happened because there are still people alive who remember it. There are photographs of the camps. There are the mass graves of the victims. There are Holocaust deniers just as there are people who refuse to believe the world is not flat, but Eratosthenes of Cyrene proved it was a globe with two sticks and an eighty kilometre walk in the third century BC, though whether or not someone believed in the ‘C’ of ‘BC’ was a matter of personal perspective. Roisin, for example, had been an atheist until yesterday.

Hasmed cannot erase a truth that the world has already accepted, even if that truth is one the world has already accepted and even if it is a truth that exists outside Heaven’s script.

Roisin lifts her hand and takes the angel’s outstretched wrist, pushing it back towards him and away from her chest. “I am the Fifth,” she says. “And I am not yours to unmake.”

Hasmed’s empty eyes flicker momentarily and the void around his hand shudders as the erasure falters, breaking his attack as his hand is pushed, gently but firmly, back toward his chest. The world snaps back into place.

For a heartbeat, Roisin thinks she has stopped him — that her declaration, her truth, her existence as the Fifth has been enough to make Hasmed accept the world as it has made itself and hesitate in his single-minded mission.

But angels do not hesitate. Not twice, anyway. Hasmed’s pause was not capitulation to her point of view but merely a calculation on his part and he re-examines his strategies, and a moment later he twists his arm clockwise to disengage her hold and expands once again.

Hasmed’s wings, dark as a starless night to begin with, become two great voids, their first beat sweeping through the air and wiping away the sky, leaving behind part of the void like a Windows 98 computer filling the screen with errors. They are two vast planes of unmaking, sweep around behind him with a sound lake ice cracking. The air buckles. The light dims. The square contracts around him as though reality is being pulled inward.

Roisin feels the mantle flare in alarm.

Hasmed’s voice resonates with the power of Tesla coils; the sound of a John Martin painting seen in real life for the first time; an echoing, hollow resonance: “You are addition. Addition destabilises. Addition must be removed.” He raises both hands and the world around Roisin begins to unwrite.

This time, he does not aim for the mantle and her role as Justice, he destabilises her place in the world. The pavement beneath her feet loses texture. The air around her loses colour. The sound of the crowd’s screaming at the absence of sky fades into nothing.

Not silence, but absence. She gasps as the edges of her perception blur into doubt. The world is being convinced she was never there; never existed; never interfered with its meticulous workings.

Hasmed opens his arms wide, as if in blessing, encompassing the world around them. Around his hands the air blinks out of existence. Space folds inward. Light bends. The square narrows to a tunnel of dimming reality. His voice deepens: “You are not written. You are not permitted. You have no place in Creation.” His hands close around the air in front of her.

And Roisin feels herself slipping.

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