Ivan:
Where?
The old keypad was a clunky, uncooperative piece of junk. It beeped angrily at my spectral touch, had a character limit shorter than a pre-Veil tweet, and made me delete and retype my reply. But, another came in while I was trying
Ivan:
Is it bad? Are you safe? Can I help? Please, Jude, don’t go yet.
Each question hit like a punch. The last thing he needed was more chaos in his life. I stabbed at the keys, fighting the machine’s sluggishness.
I miss you. Don’t be sad.
A pause. Then, a single, heartbreaking symbol burned onto the paper.
Ivan:
:’(
I stared at the curled, emotive scrap of thermal paper. I wanted to reach through it. I wanted to kick the damned fax machine for its limitations, for reducing my little brother’s fear to a typed crying emoji.
Ivan:
Jude…
The trailing dots were worse than any words. I could hear the silence after them, heavy with everything he wasn’t typing.
Ivan:
Angel’s here. He misses you.
The words branded themselves onto the hollow space where my heart used to be. A phantom organ gave a violent, painfullurch. Tears I didn’t think I could still produce burned hot and sudden at the corners of my eyes.
My fingers, trembling with desperation, flew over the clunky keys.
Love him. He’s my heart.
The sound of a hand on the door handle cut through the machine’s final groan. I killed the power and shoved the stack of incriminating messages under a landslide of older scrolls just as Nat stepped inside. His gaze swept the room, landing on me just as I dropped into the worn leather chair, trying to look like a soul at rest and not a ghost who’d just been hacking the afterlife’s landline. He carried a stack of books.
“Hey,” I said, trying to fill the silence. “Everything okay?”
“For the moment,” Nat agreed, placing the books on the table nearest the chair I sat. “I brought you some reading.”
I took the heavy tomes. The first title translated in my head to something likeFundamental Thread Tension and Longevity. The second was more cryptic:Principles of Anchored Manifestation. It sounded like the syllabus for Metaphysics 101, taught by a ghost. These looked like things Nox would have brought. “Weirdly specific.”
“They are speculative,” he said, his gaze drifting toward the door as if listening for something. “For most, there is no… interim. No waiting. You arrive as you are, and you are processed as such. Your presence here is an anomaly. A fold in the page.”
“As a reader, that’s a criminal metaphor,” I mused. Then the chill of it hit me. Folds get smoothed out. Or torn free. “What does that make me? A correction waiting to happen?”
Nat didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes held mine, and in their endless depth I saw no judgment, no verdict, only a vast, patientstillness, like a library where every answer was written in a language I couldn’t yet read. Frustrating and timeless.
Finally, he met my gaze. “You are not ready for the deep end of any pool, Jude. Be grateful I am not tossing you into the shallows just to enjoy five minutes of quiet. Whatever waits for you in the beyond will still be there whether your soul is whole or whittled down to fragments.”
And that sounded terrifyingly ominous.
53
ANGEL
