Tears Such as Angels Weep, Chapter Two

Steam fell into a deep and troubled silence, while the angel, for that was what she surely was, stood and waited. In the quiet, Neetra turned to Jiang Jiang.

“Whoever that is, she looks exactly like my friend Carrie,” she declared. “Back in the Nottingham I’m from, Steam’s met Carrie at least once. If this memory’s as precious to him as you say it is, why didn’t he see that too?”

“Be patient with him,” was Jiang Jiang’s reply. “The only reason we’re seeing this sequence of events with such impersonal detachment, like one of those 3D films that hadn’t been invented when I was alive, is because of the way we came in from outside. That’s not how Steam looks back on it. It’s too long ago, and too close to the deepest part of him, for that sort of objectivity. He couldn’t note facial similarities or recite lines of dialogue…but the emotions it left behind, and the ways it taught him to feel, have directed the course of his entire life. Actually, everyone has a memory like this,” she added as an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the boy-Steam had looked up.

“No,” he said at last to the angel. “You can’t be. I’m not having it, ’cause…’cause look, I’m still talking, I’m still walking around, and…and we’re going home, it’s Christmas Eve and we’re on our way home! All I have to do is get there, and we’ll still be in time for Christmas Day…”

But he cast uneasily about him as he concluded. This featureless domain of undulating snowdrifts was clearly not any route home he knew.

The angel slipped a gentle arm around him. “We can try,” she said kindly, though the sorrow was still there.

“Are you staying with me, then?” Steam asked, sounding as if this thought raised his spirits a good deal.

“Of course I am!” the angel glowed in response, and her face could not have been lovelier. “You’ve been assigned to me! That’s how this works. Whatever else we go through from here on in, I’ll always be with you.”

They set off walking, and Neetra and Jiang Jiang’s astral selves rose from the ground to glide after them. The plain rolled by as the snow continued to fall, and but for an occasional white-topped tree, all remained preternaturally bare and lifeless. The angel, however, seemed to know the way.

“Er,” Steam’s boy-self began after a little while, sounding slightly embarrassed. “Just wondered, why have I got me pyjamas on? I wasn’t wearing them in the car, and we’re not home yet.”

The angel smiled. “You say so, but most of you already was,” she told him. “Do you remember? Sitting next to your brother in the back seat, half-asleep as the dark road sped by outside the snowy windows, most of you was already there. You were already tucked up in bed, yours with the red eiderdown and your brother’s with the green one, both of you safe and warm in that bedroom with your Christmas stockings hanging up, and presents and dinner and television and so much happiness stretching ahead of you.”

“How do you know all that about me?” Steam asked her, fascinated.

The angel’s smile wavered. “I know that’s why you’ve appeared to me in your pyjamas,” she said quietly. “It also explains what’s going to happen next.”

Emerging from the snowstorm ahead of them was a line of terraced houses, sitting oddly in the midst of the isolation with no town or city to accompany them. One of the row stood out even among its few neighbours, however, for crowding every square foot of its façade were Christmas fairy-lights of every shape and size, neon candy-canes and holly-sprigs and red-nosed reindeer beaming a veritable riot of gaudy and cheerful colour. The child-Steam did not appear to notice that this street had been plucked from where it should have been and laid down in the barren emptiness. His eyes and face were shining as bright as the decorations that adorned his home.

“I told you! Said we could get there, didn’t I?” he exclaimed jubilantly. “Dad said the timer he bought was sound as a pound, and it’d all be switched-on by the time we got back! Best lot of lights in our whole road, every year!”

He looked up, giving his companion a broad and merry grin. It was only when he did so that he saw she was close to tears.

“What’s up with you?” he laughed, not understanding. “What are you looking so sad for?”

“It’s where you were on your way to, and in every real sense you’d already arrived,” the angel repeated to him softly. “Don’t you see? You’ll always be going there now. You’ll forever be on your way to that lit-up house, to sleep in the bedroom with the red and green eiderdowns, on this Christmas Eve. You’ll never stop trying to reach it. But you never will.”

“What are you talking about?” the young Steam cried. “It’s just over there! Right, watch this!”

He strode in the direction of the line of houses, but as he neared, brickwork and windows and roofs and all the twinkling Christmas lights turned back into blizzard and blew away on the wind. Steam and the angel were alone again in the darkness and the cold, but for the two watching girls who were not even there.

“What’s going on?” the boy whispered, and his voice trembled on the verge of crying as the angel’s had done.

“You must see by now what’s become of you,” she said to him. “And you also know enough about my people to understand why I’m here, and where it is I’m required to take you.”

“Then…then why don’t you get on with it?” Steam stammered frantically. “What are we still doing here? If that’s where we’re off to, let’s just go!”

The angel’s eyes were full of helplessness and pain.

“I can’t,” she said weakly. “There’s been a terrible mistake. I’m not able to take you the rest of the way.”

Do you need me there, Joe? Dylan asked his fellow hero over their telepathic link. Joe, still waiting at Nottingham Castle’s gate with Bret, Gala, The Chancellor, D’Carthage and the comatose Neetra, looked upward. The fearsome ball of light had made its way half-way down the cliffside, and it scaled so high into the darkened heavens that its upper hemisphere could no longer be seen.

I fear you could be of little more help than I, my friend, Joe replied, making sure he was safely out of the Next Four’s psychic range. All rests upon Neetra now. Evacuation of the city will be our only option should my loved one fail, but if she succeeds, we will still need Blaster-Track Commander’s ship operational in order to pursue the advantage over Gala he has given us. Your work must continue, Dylan, to that end.

Got it, responded Dylan, and came back to himself aboard the orbiting galactic cruiser. Blaster-Track, the Commander and Flashtease were standing by, all concerned by the crisis taking place below them on Earth. With them too was Phoenix, who had left off mending the linkages as soon as the news broke. She had spoken not a word so far, but now she said to Dylan: “Neetra?”

Dylan opened his hands in a powerless gesture. “We don’t know,” was all he could say.

Still without words, Phoenix walked to him. He took her in his arms and there they held each other, as a fragile blue-green world hung in the viewport behind them. Phoenix had clung rigidly to her resolution to feel no more than a product of technology should, but now she knew her sister might be taken from her on this night that was meant for family and love, while she, Phoenix, had chosen to exile herself too far away to help her. That moved Phoenix more than she could bear in the part of her man-made being she had tried to deny, the part that could not be described as cloned biological matter.

Steam’s younger self in his pyjamas and the angel were walking again, through the everlasting night and the everlasting snow. Neetra could not see that they had anywhere to walk to, given the angel’s last pronouncement, but nevertheless she had set off when they did. Now her psychic self was following the lonely twosome once more, Jiang Jiang peacefully levitating cross-legged by her side. It was clear the child-Steam was still afraid and confused by the strange circumstances he had fallen into, but despite this a genuine trust of and affection for his winged companion was evident. Her arm was back around his shoulders, and he was grateful for it.

“So then,” he was saying. “I can’t get home and we can’t get to where we’re going. Can I ask you summat?”

“You can ask me anything,” the angel said warmly.

“How did everything get so mucked-up?” was the question.

“Well, this is always the busiest night of the year,” she began. “Everybody has to be on call, just in case one of us needs cover. That’s how I ended up being assigned to you at the last minute…but there was something my people didn’t know, something we couldn’t anticipate.”

“What was that?” asked Steam.

The angel sighed. “I’m in love with a man from your mortal realm, the last sort of person you’d expect one of my kind to fall for,” said she. “I’m expecting his child…and I can’t take an unborn baby from your world into mine. It would be doing things completely the wrong way round. So we’ve ended up stuck here, in a place that’s neither one world nor the other. You left yours on schedule, and I was able to find you – by which I mean your soul, to put it in the language you’d use. But now, because of the human infant I’m carrying inside, we can’t proceed any further.”

She stopped walking at this.

“It’s all my fault,” she went on, her voice quavering. “All this…everything that’s gone wrong…it’s all because of me.”

“Hey,” Steam put in, sounding worried by her distress. “You’re alright. No need to cry.”

“But I’ve never heard of this happening before!” the angel burst out fitfully. “I don’t know what we’re meant to do now, or if there’s anyone who can help! If I’d only kept better control over my feelings in the first place…!”

“You couldn’t help falling in love, I guess,” was all the child-Steam could say. “I don’t know that much about it. Probably never will now.”

The angel fiercely drew his small self to her. “We also love the ones whose souls are entrusted to us,” she told him in anguish. “That’s what makes us what we are, and you can’t imagine how we love. Knowing I may not be able to save you, and that I’m to blame…nothing could rip me apart as much as – ”

Suddenly she froze. The tears that were on the verge of gushing out halted at once, checked by something far worse than heartbreak.

“Oh no,” the angel breathed.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” cried Steam, panicked by the sheer dread in her voice.

She let go his body and gripped his hand. “Run,” was her only word.

END OF CHAPTER TWO