Chapter Text
I may be hyperventilating. It's hard to say when I don't technically have lungs.
Penny is a golden-brown swirl around me. (I kept forgetting, for some reason, that he'd have feathers. They're excellent feathers, like the soft leather you find on old books.) He is the nearest thing to a barrier in this place, which belongs, I think, to Revelation. No one else would build something that looks this much like a monastery without any fucking doors. This room is made of stone (do they quarry stone in Heaven, or just decide to have it?) and I would like to spend some time considering the choices they made in its design, but again, hyperventilating.
The Archangel was right. The hurting stopped. He just didn't mention the other issue. Which is so obvious that of course he wouldn't mention it, I'm smart, anyone who was even very stupid would know about this part.
I pull the shape of my best vessel around me, and that makes me feel slightly better. Feet on the ground. That's a thing. Feet, ground. Somewhat theoretical feet that are just a virtual representation of a corporeal possession of mine, and let's not get into the level of reality of the ground on this plane of existence, but I will take it.
"You can fly, here," Penny says, and he means it so encouragingly (I can understand a language now that I never did before, it is perfectly clear meaning in my brain, in a way Helltongue has never been, like verbal telepathy, and I can't think about that right now) but it's reminding me that I have no wings. I will never have wings again, unless something goes hideously wrong.
"Walking," I say. "Let's stick to walking. Anywhere. Maybe somewhere with more doors."
A line of feathers fluff up along the spines of his topmost wings--I will have to learn Seraph body language from scratch, and do Ofanim even have body language?--and he says, "Let's."
One foot in front of the other gets me out of the room. Souls who are not damned, though they look about the same regardless, chat with, god, so many angels. Not so many. We pass maybe a half dozen, mostly Seraphim, and flitting infant angels who are unnervingly uniform in appearance. Not tiny clones, but all following the same limb structure, wing placement, a face and how could anyone before the Fall doubt that humans were something peculiarly unique, when these creatures look so much like them?
They ask questions of Penny, and he answers them. I can't deal with that yet. One foot after another. I wear the memory of my own clothing on this image of a vessel. These aren't bad shoes; I bought them in New York, swapping vessels as I ran between Zhune and Ash. Cheap and practical and not as durable as I might like. Do things wear down, in Heaven? If they don't, with all those angels of Creation around, they must have warehouses of what's been discarded and forgotten and become superfluous. The opposite of a scarcity economy: not plenty, but too much.
It probably doesn't work like that.
I could ask Penny. Trade would know.
He gets the question to me first. We are in a corridor, alone for an instant, and he asks, "How does it feel?"
I have words for this place that will say exactly what I mean, and I would rather use less precise ones. It doesn't seem to be an option. (It must be an option, or how would they teach mortal languages? I'll figure it out later.) I look at my hands in front of me, which are not entirely there. My vessel, a polite fiction based on a distant reality, and everyone here can see what I really am. Now. I am something else now and let's just say I'm having a few issues with the topic. "I don't know how to cope with being made of...fire. Rings. Some indeterminate number of rings."
"Three," Penny says. "They lock together."
"Three rings of fire. It's not natural." I can't even say that without the subtext of opinion, not literally true, of course I know otherwise running through my words. It's impossible to lie in this language. I hadn't realized until now the depth of constraint this builds on people here. Even the humans can't lie. You can't even lie by accident, though I think it could be managed by omission; what you say carries your confidence and how you acquired it. I know this is true because I saw it myself and I know this is true because it fits what I already believe strongly will make the same sentence sound different. All I have to do is think these things to myself, and try mouthing them here, to know this much.
I wonder if this makes the poetry of Heaven banal, or more nuanced. It can't be anywhere near as slippery as the poetry of Hell.
"I like them," Penny says, which is true and opinion and true opinion and I am still trying to untangle the nuances of that (which aren't tangled, more like parallel lines, but too many for me to look at all at once) when we step out of a doorway into the sunlight.
#
So here's the thing about Heaven. The open spaces, I mean, where you can look straight up into presumably infinite blue sky. (I have not yet looked into whether or not it's actually infinite, because I have better things to spend my time researching this five minutes.) It's bright and blue and it ought to be like standing beneath a Texas summer sun. Searing. Blinding. The kind of light that washes out all the colors and makes it impossible to see anything but the glare off the sidewalks, much less this city that's trying to do for white marble and pearl what the Emerald City did for its eponymous gems.
It's not. It's impossibly clear, like the language. Terrifyingly direct, again, like the language. You can't hide in sunlight like this. (There are shadows around here, which I will be glad for.) And looking up at that sky, it's like the first time I reached the corporeal and walked outside of that Tether and felt like I was going to fall off the world. The lack of ceiling, there, after the eternal inside of Hell. But I know skies. I know horizons, and the infinite up, and this shouldn't bother me, but it's like that first step outside all over again.
"It's like Ash said," I tell Penny.
Things I am not thinking about right now: the impossible difficulty of having a friendly conversation with Ash again. I've known him for less than two years, and I've lost contact with better friends before. He'll be fine.
I could see Nik. Maybe. If they let her see anyone. If she's still alive. She's probably still alive, right? Heaven has this whole thing about having high quality, low mortality personnel. Maybe she's still doing penance for her years as an Outcast.
I have no idea where we're walking. I have been following Penny down these streets, and we are unexceptional here, Seraph and companion (if I think about the details I'm going to be queasy again) walking down white streets that don't hurt my eyes when the sunlight reflects off them. We are part of a thin crowd; every angelic form that still hits a part of my instincts with flee from the enemy that is serious business in visibility up and down this street, and so many humans. As if Shal-Mari had off-hours, and traffic control, and much better trash service. And Malakim. Whole lot of Malakim.
A herd of Cherubim gallops down the streets. It ought to be a running of the bulls level of chaos and danger, and yet no one so much as steps out of the way, and there is no difficulty. Never mind optional gravity, Heaven appears to have optional collision detection. Where the running Cherubim step, there never happens to be a pedestrian. Where a group of gawking souls (new to Heaven? as new as I am?) meanders, there's never a Cherub's hoof in the way.
It's as unreal and impossible as the ballroom the god of whales built in the Marches, but I'm used to things not making sense in the Marches. The celestial plane is supposed to be where everything is truest and most real, and--oh, well. It's not like I ever really believed that.
The corporeal still seems like the primary plane of reality. Which just goes to show I'm not quite right in the Forces as a. An angel goes. Still not quite right.
"Hey, Penny."
"Yes?"
"Is it traditional to have a shrieking meltdown right after redemption?"
He turns his eyes toward me, drifting along at my side with wings half-spread. "Traditional," he says carefully, "would be an overly strong word for it."
"What is traditional?"
"I haven't been to enough of them to know," Penny says. That one he doesn't have to think about. "There may be strong traditions in certain Words, but I don't know of any specific procedures as such. I thought we might stop by the central office to get your housing allocation and bank account set up."
"There's a bank?"
"Most of Heaven does business in Essence itself," Penny says, "but we find it convenient to be able to discuss it, and transfer ownership of it, in more precise units than simple body-to-body transfer allows. There are also periodic experiments in isolated economic theories, but that only uses individual reserves based on volunteers, and, ah, am I boring you?"
"No," I say. "I just." I drag my hands through my hair (it's all an illusion, but it's solid enough to let me feel okay about my self) and try not to look any Malakim in the eye. "I bet you get reliable cell phone service between principalities here, too. Or whatever you call the divisions between the territories."
"Archangels hold Cathedrals, some in a more bounded and finite manner than others. You'll find War and the Wind both in the Groves, with Stone beneath them, though Stone also crosses over into the area beneath Gabriel's Volcano. Judgment and the Sword are here in the Eternal City, though Judgment mostly keeps to the Council Spires, while the Sword manages much of the work focused on incoming souls." He flicks a wing here and there as he explains, and at some other point I'll ask if Heaven's geography is a little more static--or Euclidean--than Hell's. "Yves' Library is either adjacent to or a large portion of the Eternal City, depending on who you ask, though the Halls of Progress are distinctly separate. On a similar note, the Glade is directly adjacent to the Groves, but there's a clear division between them."
"You have such straightforward names for these things. It's all--nouns, maybe an adjective slapped on. Nothing like 'Tartarus' here."
"Most of these names came first," Penny says, which is obvious, but he doesn't say it as if my comment was stupid. For a Seraph, he is astoundingly considerate at times. "There was no reason to call them anything but what they were, and are. I gather that matters in Hell tend to be less...settled."
"Or distinct. Yeah." I shove my hands in my pockets. "Is Trade in the city?" It's like some sort of grim inverse of Shal-Mari, but I can't really think of it as the divine reflection of Hades. I've never been to Hades, but it can't have streets like this. Skies like this.
"No, Trade has its own territory. We live in Commerce Park." This gesture he makes with a flick of his forked tongue, indicating the direction we've been walking. "Some people think of it as nothing but the markets, but it's as much a place to live as any of the others."
"Opinion," I say.
He blinks at me, that three-pair ripple. "Yes," he says, "but honest opinion," and I swear to god, Seraphim can smile.
#
This is what it looks like when I sit down at the window seat in Penny's office, and stare out that window.
There's a market plaza spread out below us. The ground is laid with stone tiles, and I can't tell if they date back to shortly after the creation of the universe, or if they were set in place five minutes before we arrived. The pattern is abstract, asymmetrical, implying a kind of movement towards...the central skyscraper, I think, which we can only see the top of from this point. That's the kind of place that says an Archangel lives here, when you see it standing highest, but it doesn't loom. It's only high enough to be seen from a distance.
The plaza's busy, enough so that you'd expect people to be rubbing elbows as they move between the vendors--it's all stalls and tents and combinations of the two, as if permanence is only for living in, not for selling from--but again Heaven doesn't do crowds, just...lots of people all moving comfortably through a space. I can't wrap my head around the traffic patterns. Commerce itself seems pretty confined to the ground, though movement's in three dimensions. Relievers in particular fly rather than walking; they swarm like bats and bees, though presumably they're safer to handle than either.
And. God. It's green. It's a plaza, stone on the ground and tents on the stone, but the pattern includes planters of real growing things. I can't remember ever seeing plants growing in Hell, that I was sure was real and not some decorative imitation. This plaza has trees. If I look down, several of the windows below us flower boxes.
"Is she angry at me?" I ask Penny, while he finishes putting his coffee together.
"I'm afraid you'll have to narrow that down," he says, and slips over to coil beside me on the seat. Around would be better (and I can't help but think of these fiery rings long enough to contemplate the possibility of through), but he's being oh so careful, like I might flinch or shatter if he pushes.
It'll get annoying, if he keeps it up too long. Right now it's sort of...soothing. That he cares enough to do that. That he is, despite being so perfectly angelic and seraphic and otherwise closer to the heart of the Symphony's meaning, not always very good at figuring people out.
"I guess there's a list. Um. Luna?"
"I'm not sure. She may do some shouting, but she'll want to see you. We could send a message; she's usually with Vaina or Johannes."
I don't want to know right now if Vaina is still upset about that whole thing in the Marches. It feels like a thornier question. "Johannes? Has she--well, Mercurian, I guess she would make friends."
"A very young Elohite," Penny says. "They seem to get along well." He's being precise, there; he doesn't know the exact nature of their relationship, nor consider it enough his business to speculate.
"An Elohite? Really?"
"They're nothing like Habbalah," he says, and, okay, maybe he does understand people, sometimes.
"Depends on the Habbalite." I fold my knees in, and lean out. Falling out this window can't hurt me. I don't know what here can, or will, though I've heard some explanations of the Pax Dei, which prevents--well, never mind what they said it did, back in Hell. Everyone seems to agree, grudgingly or otherwise, that there's not a lot of violence in Heaven. Not the literal physical kind. "What about Nik?"
"I have not met the Kyriotate," he says, "and couldn't speak to her feelings." He extends a wing a little nearer to me, like an apology, and sips his coffee. "As for Katherine, the last I heard from her foster parents, she was being exceedingly...adolescent."
"She must be. What. Fifteen now? Sixteen?" I don't know her real birthday, just what we put down on paperwork when we moved around together with the War. Judgment is made of the sort of people who would track that down. "Maybe I should send a note. I'm better with kids than teenagers."
"Many people are."
"Yeah, makes sense."
I watch people move in the plaza, and Penny drink his coffee.
My Heart's waiting for me, somewhere out there. I could find my way to it right now. I'm not quite ready for that yet. It's somewhere safe, check, let's leave it at that.
No wonder it's quiet. I mean. I can hear people talking down there, nothing specific, just that the sound is there, and the wind in the curtains, but there's nothing whispering in the back of my head. Nothing that says keep running and don't get caught, no burn it down and get away, not even the war drums of stand your ground that I couldn't bear for a ten-minute stretch. It's like the sound of a fan that you've forgotten is buzzing until it turns off.
"What does the dissonance condition sound like?" I ask Penny. "Knowing how not to go wrong."
His head snakes nearer to me, which is all for the good. "I wouldn't have thought of it as having an aural component," he says. "I simply know, as I always have. I keep my promises."
"It seems," I say, "like I ought to be unable to sit here. What with what I am now."
"Do you have somewhere else you feel you ought to be?"
"Not specifically."
"Well, then," he says. "Do you have any inclination to break your promises?"
"No."
"Well, then."
I lean sideways against him, and he lets me.
#
There's a stupid part of me--I call it this because it's obsessed with things that are way down the priority list right now--that worries about the fidgety side-effects of having picked up a shiny new Choir to replace my Band. I mean, Calabim have some issues, no two ways around it. Mandatory Discord is no one's friend, I've always been crap with electronics, even regular possessions decay around me, and then the way people assume I'm an idiot with a short temper... Disadvantages. Sure. But I'm used to those. And so, yes, there's some bit of me that's been worrying that going Ofanite will make me some jittery distractible bastard who's even worse at laying down det cord on account of not being able to focus on one thing for more than five seconds at a stretch, or who can't lurk in shadows because lurking is right out if you need to be in constant motion.
So far it turns out that my own rotating self has got the constant motion covered, and nothing has seemed particularly urgent about leaving this office to explore the wonderful world of Heaven. And that's something. Especially as I know full well that Heaven is not Disneyland, however much the similarities do seem to crop up in places. The people who live here might incline towards being pleasant, but they're not all cast members working to give me a good time. People live here, and any place that has more than one person living in it is bound to get some arguments breaking out, if only over who gets to hold the remote.
Speaking of unpleasant people. I sit up a little straighter and say to Penny, "I should send Sean a fruit basket or something. You have actual fruit here, right?"
"Yes," Penny says. "What would be in a fruit basket instead of actual fruit, if we didn't?"
"I'm not sure you want to know," I say, and leave the window seat to--I am not pacing, I'm just checking out his office in more detail now that I'm not thinking so much about the view. "Okay. Here's the plan. I should check in with wherever they've got my Heart and figure out what I'm supposed to do with that--is there a quarantine or something?--and then see if there's, I don't know, some sort of organizational chart I'm in, and where I'm in it, so that I can. Do things. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to spend some time here as well, but it feels like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop." I shove my hands in my pockets. "Also, I'd like to find out if I can buy a pack of cigarettes somewhere around here."
"It's the Bazaar," Penny says, indicating with one excellent wing both the plaza out the window and a lot of the world beyond. "If it's the sort of thing it's ethical to own and sell, and not unbearably rare, I expect someone will own it and sell it to you."
"Unless there's a serious lung cancer problem in Heaven, or Judgment's passing laws about air quality, that probably means I'm go on the cigarettes. Great."
"Shall we go?" Penny asks, wings spreading wider.
"Yeah, sure."
He is smug, as only Seraphim can be, when he flicks a window open, and dives out.
Not following feels wrong, the way it feels wrong when--never mind that. But it's nice to know that this whole ridiculous Wheel thing doesn't mean I have to fling myself out the window after him. I step up onto the windowsill, and watch Penny corkscrew lazily down toward the plaza ground. Gold-embossed leather binding, that man. It's a wonder he's not with Destiny.
(And wouldn't that have almost made sense, too? But I never would've trusted one of those, even the Seraphim.)
I step out of the window. I do not quite believe that gravity won't pull me down to the ground, but, hey, who knows what happens when a set of fiery rings hit plaza stones? And it turns out that the gravity doesn't care whether or not I believe in it; I can amble downwards in my own spiral, following the lines of a staircase that doesn't exist anywhere outside of my memory, until I reach the ground.
It's not like the Marches at all, and somehow that's the most unsettling thing yet.
(If I'm not careful, I will wonder why there's no jaguar pacing after me, his tail lashing behind him, and that'll be more unsettling still, but I can think about that later. A far away sort of later.)
"He's likely set your Heart in his tower," Penny says.
I know which building he's talking about, just from the directional tug of my Heart when I think about that thing, which therefore surely exists. And there's no confusion as to who the he of that sentence would be. "It looks more like an office building," I say, "as towers go." The glass walls are dark green broken into geometric shapes by dusty gray lines, and I might not design a skyscraper the same way, but I don't dislike this one, either.
"The appearance has changed over the millennia," Penny says, "but the name tends to stick around." He sets out across the plaza, drifting a meter over ground level in deference to my pedestrian sensibilities. "Cigarettes first?"
"Checking in first. I don't exactly have cash on hand, and I'm not so desperate for a smoke that I'll pay a day's Essence for it." There's something odd about our movement through the crowds of buyers here, but I can't quite name it yet. Not just that it's easy to move forward without ever having to move around other pedestrians, but--oh. Yes. I'm used to having someone else at my side, who cuts through crowds with supernatural effect. Here we're just walking together while the crowd fails to be in our way. "Do you get much of a theft problem around here? I'm not seeing much that looks like security, and you're practically next door to the Wind."
"The Wind does tend to sweep through and redistribute physical items," Penny says, "but they're not malicious, and what's important can usually be recovered easily."
"Can't see how 'not malicious' would help if they redistributed something you really needed, just then."
"Mistakes happen," Penny says. "There's a great deal of flexibility in how possessions are handled in this place, and often a great deal of flexibility in the urgency of their location, if they're not already in a more secured position. But, yes, there are occasional problems. The Wind tends toward chaos, and disruption of patterns. It would hardly work properly if it never made people uncomfortable."
"Convenient, really, that they just make other people uncomfortable."
"They get their share of educational discomfort," Penny says serenely. "One of the many services that Judgment provides within Heaven itself."
I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Kinda like it, though.
#
For all that I'm most of the way convinced that this one isn't going to kill me out of hand, I'm relieved that I'm not expected to meet up with my latest Superior to get my Heart. There is, instead, a highly efficient Kyriotate in the lobby of the tower that's not a tower (Heaven would be better served to name things something interesting and non-descriptive instead) who takes approximately three seconds to identify us, greet us, and direct us to the right office.
We take a glass-walled elevator up a few dozen floors; this building is taller than it looked from the outside, and far more complex on the inside than I would've expected. Most of the floors we zip past look like generic offices, but we also pass through what looks to be a full-floor aquarium (I hope the elevator doesn't open onto that one) and twenty meters of rainforest, from dark floor to airy canopy.
"Break room?" I ask Penny, as we pass from the trees to another standard set of hallways and cubicles.
"I'm not sure," he says. "It's new since I was here last."
If Princes can make mountains and earthquakes, I suppose an Archangel can transplant a forest into his skyscraper if he damn well feels like it. And I can't disapprove of his elevator setup; clear glass makes me feel a lot less trapped than these things usually do.
The elevator finally lets us out into a floor of dark wood paneling and oil portraits on the wall. It's a bit like walking into a gentleman's club--the kind with cigars, not strippers--if the gentlemen in question were all angels. It's hard to get a good look at an Ofanite spinning through the sky, but the portraits tell me that they come in all varieties you can make out of the basic Ring and Fire components. Spoked wheels and chain links and knots and simple circles, on the portraits I see on the walk down the hall. Kyriotates are just as distinct, once you make them focus a little.
Malakim are all dark blurs, as far as I can tell. The least distinctive Choir. Maybe they seem to have more variety when you get to know them, but I'm not holding my breath.
I am not surprised to find that the person we're meeting in this place is a Mercurian, or that she has a pool table in her office.
"Hello, folks," she says, stepping around the table she was sitting at to offer us a hand. I can't help but think of Ash for a moment, though she looks nothing like him; as Mercurians go, she looks like she could drop-kick a pony. I end up shaking her hand, vessel-seeming good enough for that, and there's a flash of the same from Penny as he follows suit. "I'm Orlaith, you're Leo and Penny nee Peniel, everyone's here. Let's get this party started. Anyone want a seat?"
I glance to Penny to see if he looks like he desperately wants to sit, and with no indication of such, say, "Not particularly. Where's the party?"
"The party," Orlaith says, with a Vanna White sort of gesture towards the table, "is right here. The Boss thought you'd be by soon to get started. So! Let me get the checklist and we'll have you up and running faster than you can deliver an informed critique of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations."
"That," I say, "would take me at least three hours, if you wanted it in standard essay format. Not counting reading the damn thing in the first place."
"See? So I'm likely to be on time." She waves a conciliatory hand toward Penny. "Don't get your panties in a twist, Most Holy, I am taking this seriously. It's exciting! It's been fifteen years since I got to handle any new-redeemed checklists, and they've revamped half the details since then. I mean, the last time I did this, I had an actual clipboard." What she has now is a smartphone in a gold case, an electric blue lightning bolt emblazoned on the back. Either she's a big fan of Harry Potter, or Lightning still produces all the tech around here.
"I am a fan of the clipboards," Penny says.
"Well, we still keep the kids on them, don't we? It's nice and focused, lends itself well to passing around physical items--which some kids have trouble thinking about as significant, if they're too used to it all being electronic and this almost post-scarcity thing we have going on here--and it makes all the traditionalists settle down a bit when they were just about to get some cane-waving going on. Step one: Heart." She takes a box from the table, and offers it to me. "All yours. You've got a housing allotment a few steps down the list, if you want to go to that office next and find a place for it, but the last new angel I had through here wanted to store theirs in with the friend who they'd followed home. It's not a bad place to start while you're getting a feel for the area."
It's the kind of box that you'd be hard pressed to mass-produce: inlaid wood and a low-gloss finish, like someone in a woodworking class took an assignment to make an openable cube and just went wild with it. I crack open the lid long enough to discover that here in Trade, at least, Hearts are crystal shot with gold sparkles. It's ostentatious, as an ornament. It loves me and calls to me and tells me that together we'll do what we promised. It's part of me, and I hope to never break it the way I've had Hearts break before.
I close the lid. "Heart. Check."
She whips out a smartphone just like hers, and offers it over. "Phone."
"I'm not very good with electronics."
"You'll learn," she says. "Your file says you're smart, and we have you on a pretty intuitive OS. Mind, it's not an artifact, so it'll only keep you in touch with people while you're in Heaven, but unless you go into the Volcano itself, or deep into Stone territory--"
"That's damn unlikely."
"--the reception is excellent. So there you go." She ticks another item off on her own phone. "Oh, here we are, housing allotment. We're going mostly virtual with those now, so just check your inbox whenever, I have it sent. You may want to take a look at your finances, too; and if you want to deposit any Essence into your account to have some to work with for small purchases, there's a kiosk right in the lobby. Not all the vendors accept tap-and-pay yet, but we're working on coverage, and most of the people selling anything standard will. It's mostly the angels who saw the stars spring into exist who refuse to take anything but promises of significant deeds in exchange for their wares, right?"
"Even some of them have caught up with the modern age," Penny says. Opinion, but based on observed evidence. I keep forgetting that I'm even speaking this language, hearing it, until Penny says something and I realize how perfectly native it is to him. He can be more or less precise freely, because there's not even a risk of people thinking he's speaking pure seraphic truth when he's just stating a preference or hope.
"When you took a few billion years to form your first opinion, you can be excused for taking a few thousand more to notice any given tech upgrade." Orlaith has deposited the phone with me, and there's no escaping that now. I set it on top of the box. "Next up, cards."
"Cards?" If there's mandatory poker in Heaven, I sure hadn't heard about that one before.
"Cards," she repeats, and gives me a stack of...greeting cards? Or the kind that people use for writing thank-you notes. Nice white paper, the kind people send out wedding invites on, and each stamped on the front with a gold-embossed symbol of the archetypal Ofanite. "The Boss has mentioned, in that way he has, that while it's not obligatory, you might want to think about writing to the people in Heaven who you've encountered while on the other side. You know. 'Hi, thought you should know I'm an Ofanite now, sorry about that thing I did that time, please don't stab me if you see me on the corporeal, kisses, Leo.' That kind of thing."
"Really," Penny says, and the feathers all along the spines of his wings do ruffle up when he's annoyed. It's adorable. I probably shouldn't tell him that.
"Forgiving isn't forgetting," Orlaith says. "Sometimes it's best to clear the air."
"I don't know the names of most of the people I, uh, ran into," I say, "much less how to find them."
"We've compiled a partial list, based on our information! It's in your email. As you remember more, you can send us what details you have on the incident, and we'll try to locate the appropriate injured party to send an apology to."
I stare at the stack of cards she's so helpfully put on top of my box. "I'm going to need more cards."
"There's an app for that. You can reorder at any time."
"Do I also get to send cards to the people who injured me while we were on opposite sides?"
"Don't see why not," Orlaith says, with a cheery shrug. "No one's obliged to forgive you on a personal level, even if they're not allowed to pursue grudges in any serious manner now that you're on our side, but you're not obliged to forgive them either. Use your best judgment."
Penny eyes me sidelong. "Shall we compose a form letter for the Malakim?"
"...maybe."
#
About an hour later, give or take a round of pool, we escape that office with a bag of things that I apparently need as an angel. An Ofanite of Trade. This job comes with equipment, and that's not unprecedented--there was a uniform for the War, among other things--but it's still a bit. I don't know. It's not how Theft worked, and while I didn't start in Theft, it's what I'm still most used to. All I got allocated in Theft was a Djinn.
Probably still in Trauma.
Not thinking about that.
It is, I swear, a shorter walk back to the office than the reverse, though we take the same route. Which gets us into a discussion of relative distance and time and the ways in which Heaven finds static physics about as obligatory as Hell does. Which makes sense, both of them being on the celestial plane, but I had vaguely assumed that this was a function of Princes being jerks. And maybe it is; the optional physics of Heaven seem a lot more tuned towards making things convenient for the inhabitants, but that may just be a factor of Archangels liking to play nice with their employees and clientele. Especially when in the territory of the most commercial of all Archangels.
"It's not something I've studied," Penny says, "though it comes up occasionally in lectures and such. You could probably find some serious research on the topic through Lightning or Destiny."
"I'd prefer the latter," I say, while trying to figure out where in this office to stow my Heart. The desk, being designed for a Seraph, doesn't really have a footwell to shove the box into, and setting it on the window seat is just asking for hilarious accidents. I settle for stowing it on the top shelf of a bookcase that's mostly holding decorative knick-knacks. Penny may appreciate the classics, but he seems to have taken them digital by now. "They seem less likely to hold a grudge."
"Likely," Penny says. "Did you do anything particularly unfortunate to Lightning recently?"
"Not--um. Let me think." I sit down in an office chair that's designed for human-shaped people, and spin it around in a circle. "Little bits here and there recently, nothing big or murderous since that time with Industrial Espionage, and it's not like I did any of the Lightning murder in that case. Got away with a case of tech data and some bruising, by and large. Shit. I guess I'd better send them a note too." I hook my arms over the back of the chair, with my chin on top, and watch Penny that way. He's set himself in a loose circle around me, so if I keep the chair spinning, well, he's always there. I kinda like that. "When does someone sit me down and ask for all the secrets of my time in Hell?"
"We're not Judgment," Penny says, more mild than indignant on this one. "Nor Revelation, for all that we appreciate their help, and they would likely appreciate the consideration if you sent some information their way. And we're not War, to have those sorts of matters foremost in mind. If you think of something that's relevant, we expect you'll let someone appropriate know."
I spin around to look him in the eyes. (I think I could see in all directions, as a Wheel, if I let myself, and I am not going to think about that much yet either.) "And?"
"And," Penny says, "some people might be annoyed if you didn't pass on information that was particularly useful, if there was a way for you to know it could've been useful."
"I was expecting something more...formalized."
"If you came from Greed," Penny says, "I expect there would be. Or one of the Words more inclined towards particularly dangerous projects. Death? But by and large Theft is seen as...more irritant than opponent, through most of Heaven."
"I think that's a mistake."
"Quite possibly it is." He shrugs, a ripple all through the upper half of his body. "Would it do much good for your peace of mind if we did sit you down for days of going over every detail of whatever you've done in service to any Word of Hell?"
"...no."
"Well, then. We can leave confession to the Catholics."
I spin around in another circle. It's the right kind of quiet in here. Wind in the curtains, but not the kind of wind that'll steal your shirt. "So long as we're not getting to that," I start, and then stop because there's a knock on the door, which only goes to show that even in Heaven not everyone has perfect timing. And a good thing too; that'd be just creepy.
"What," I say to Penny, as he flows toward the door, "no cameras feeding to your phone that'll tell you exactly who's out there?"
"That seemed rather too surveillance state," he says, and opens the door. "Luna. Do come in. I'd meant to send you a message soon."
"Word got around," she says. She is a Mercurian. I mean. I knew that, I honestly did, but I knew that as a hypothetical sort of thing, and it's different than with Eder, who was so clearly always meant to be a Kyriotate, so much that becoming one again just seemed natural. A return to form. Luna has the exact same face she did in the Marches when she was looking human, behind that mask. The only different is the halo of light and the feathered wings, and the way she stands.
"Hello," I say, digging a heel into the floor so that my chair stops spinning. "It's been a while." Inane but true. I don't know quite what to make of her. It's clearly her, even from the little time I met her--what, a handful of hours?--with all her determination radiating out. The kind of fire that I can still care about. But.
Oh.
It's been more than half her life since she last thought anyone she was talking to might hurt her. No wonder she stands differently.
"It has been," she says. She draws in a deep breath, hands curled at her sides. "Can I yell at you? Or would that be terrible right now? I know you just got here, so it's probably a bad time, but you're here, and...I've been thinking about this. For a long time. Almost since we left."
"Yelling's not going to hurt me," I say, though I have to pick a particularly specific and limited word for hurt so that the sentence comes out. It's a lot like the type of hurt that can't happen to her here. "Go ahead."
Penny rests his head on my shoulder like he disagrees with my assessment. But he's not going to object. He doesn't. Someone asked, and I answered, and he won't tell anyone that I meant it differently or that my opinion's wrong when I'm speaking about my own mind.
How strange.
"How could you?" she says, and takes another breath before the rest is a rush. "How could you take so long, when you knew people were waiting, and you knew about this place enough to send me, and you knew just how to get here exactly, and then you didn't come! Over and over again! He's been waiting so long, and I've been waiting so much of my whole life for you to finally get here. How could you, Leo? I don't understand."
I would like to say It's not my fault or You'll understand when you're older, but even I don't think either of those is true. I don't have a good answer for this at all: it's not what I thought she'd be upset about.
"I was afraid," I say. "And I was in love."
"Love should've brought you here," she says. Fierce as ever. Now that's the kid who I took away from Althea.
"I can be in love with more than one person at a time, Luna. Still am. Some of them aren't on this side of the war." I sit back and scrub at my hair. "For what it's worth, I am sorry to have kept you all in suspense."
"At least you finally stopped being scared," she says. And now she sounds shaky, so I get up and push the chair her way. She sits down with a soft thump. "That's something."
"I never stopped being afraid. I got more afraid of other things, and more angry, and..." I don't know how to make this sound good, either. "I don't like being forced into a corner. It makes me contrary."
"I didn't know you could contrary your way to Heaven," Luna says.
Penny slips a loop widely around my feet. "You might be surprised at how often that works."