Except the angel and the demon weren’t coercing me into anything.
I was the one pushing them.
The elevator doors parted, and I led them into the tiny cube. Both frowned at me as I remained uncharacteristically quiet as we shot into the sky. We rode in silence to the forty-eighth floor. They trailed behind me as I led them to a corner suite.
“Everything okay, Marlow?” Silas was the first to ask.
The door beeped twice as the lock turned from black to green. He held the door open with a large hand while I released all the air in my lungs and dragged my bag into the room. I stepped out of my shoes, dropping my bag amidst the couches and mini bar in the first room, walking through the door, bypassing the bed, and heading directly for the balcony. I yanked the door open and let the dry, desert heat into the air-conditioned room, gripping the silver rods meant to stand between drunken guests and their demise.
“Marlow?” He repeated my name.
I tried to turn toward him but couldn’t quite muster it. My mouth twitched in a half-smile. He was the only one in this world of realms and veils who called me by the moniker printed on my birth certificate. Az hung back as Silas joined me on the cement slab.
Nothing would ever be okay.
Even in our disastrous, apocalyptic plan, I was already failing.
The angels knew where we were. Silas’s timeline wasn’t the only one in jeopardy. I’d tipped our hand.
Silas folded his arms on the balcony, shifting his weight forward. I waited for him to impart wisdom, or to guess what was on my mind, but he didn’t. He stayed quiet, listening to the cars, the tires, the horns, the buzz of city life below. Hiseyes were fixed in the middle distance, mouth pressed into a line as he watched nothing and everything at once.
I looked over my shoulder into the muted dark of the room, then back at him. “It’s not easy for me, either,” I said.
He continued to look forward, but his mouth turned down.
“I grew up terrified of going to Hell. It was a threat. Whenever I did something my parents didn’t like, they told me I’d broken God’s heart. I had to be the only seven-year-old shivering with existential anxiety over what would make a deity feel good or bad. But…I’m human. To know that angels are my main threat? That they’re the ones I’m running from?”
He looked at me.
“I have to imagine that however bad my blasphemy is—my unforgivable sin—I’m still human. It’s not like an angel, specifically crafted to serve and worship. Yet Hell is full of fallen angels. And the Watchers from the book of Enoch—”
His eyebrows lifted.
“Yes, I reread it last night after you mentioned you were in it. They’re…well, they’re not being pulled apart for eternity. They aren’t exactly Prometheus chained to a rock with their guts gobbled by an eagle or whatever. And if a being specifically crafted for worship still exercises their free will and gets out alive, why do we, as mortal beings with agency, live in fear of having our eyeballs plucked out and our flesh peeled off and…” I lost my train of thought to fire and brimstone.
“Because fear is an effective tactic,” he supplied. “Telling you not to do something because it makes a deity sad is more effective than asking you to do something because it makes them happy.”
I watched the ant-sized humans on the sidewalk nearly fifty stories below. I squished them with my thumb, one by one. “Is that all it is? Psychology for behavior modification?”
He rotated his body fully toward me. “I don’t want to dothis with you, Marlow.”
I stopped squishing the ants, uncomfortable cortisol entering my bloodstream. I straightened my spine and faced him.
His brows bunched. His voice wasn’t unkind, but it also held no warmth as he said, “I don’t want to play coy about theology. You’re so far past subtleties. You’re about to set the world into a tailspin. And the small details are an important step, but they’re steps so far before this one. I know you’re the human, but you’re steering the ship right now. I’m following your script, quite literally. I fall today, Marlow. In five hours, it’s all over for me. Not just a human lifetime. Every lifetime.”
He was blindly following me, and I was leading him off a cliff.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say more.I’m sorry for sleeping with you and then pretending like it never happened. I’m sorry for damning you. I’m sorry you ever had the misfortune of meeting me. I’m sorry for everything.
We stared out at the haze that obscured the red, sunbaked mountains.
“Tell me something,” he replied.
I shrank, gripping the balcony.
“Are you doing the right thing?”
I inhaled sharply. “Yes,” I said after a beat.
