52 Project #14: Angel

[alara]

The angel showed up three days after Riyana Delgado started working at the site of the anomaly.

Given the nature of the anomaly, it was possible the entity was an alien, or some kind of supernatural thing like a spirit. But it was obvious to Riyana what the entity was the moment it spoke. In an impossible voice that was simultaneously unbearably high-pitched and so deep and low it resonated in in her bones, it said, “BE NOT AFRAID,” and Riyana knew it was an angel.

Fisher was the first one who managed to say anything, probably because he was the senior physicist on the team and, ostensibly, was the leader. “What the hell are you?”

“It’s an angel, Bob,” Riyana whispered harshly. “Show some respect.”

“An angel. Really.” Yelena Sokolov sounded almost disgusted.

“GLORY TO THEY WHO ARE ON HIGH. WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN, HUMANITY CANNOT FIX. THEY WHO ARE THE HIGHEST, GLORY TO THEIR NAME, HAS SENT THIS ONE TO FIX WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”

“Oh,” Fisher said, and then again, “oh.”

“You are really an angel?” Arjun Chaudhry asked. “God is real? The Christian God?”

“MANY HUMANS HAVE SEEN FACETS OF THEY WHO CANNOT BE COMPREHENDED, THE LORD AND CREATOR OF ALL, BUT NONE CAN UNDERSTAND THE FULLNESS OF THEIR GLORY.” The angel floated forward. It was not a humanoid with wings. It was huge, perhaps six or seven meters tall, and was mostly comprised of dots of brilliant light like stars, vaguely outlining a bipedal shape that might have looked humanoid if it hadn’t had so many stars around its general head area, as if it had antlers, or a gigantic hat, or a mushroom-shaped head. Within the constellation that was the angel, nebula-like mists of many colors swirled, drifting into thicker bands or thinning out to show the desert rocks and sand behind it. “IT IS NOT THIS ONE’S PLACE TO EXPLAIN TO HUMANITY WHAT IS TOO INEFFABLE FOR EXPLANATION. THIS ONE IS HERE TO REPAIR WHAT HUMANITY HAS BROKEN.”

“Good,” Riyana said fervently. “Because all our measurements are suggesting that the thing is growing, and you’re right, we have no idea how to fix it.”

The angel approached the anomaly. The spots of bright light shone especially like stars against the lightless slice through reality that Riyana and the rest of her team were here to study, and reverse if they could.

“I don’t believe that thing is angel,” Sokolov muttered.

“So it’s an alien,” Bob Fisher muttered back. “Or some kind of creature from another dimension, or a fairy, or who the hell knows what. If it can do what it says it’s here to do, who cares?”

As it reached the anomaly, the gravity grabbed it and flipped it, but slowly, much more slowly than it had Cheng when it had pulled him in. The anomaly was a roughly vertical hole in reality, about two and a half meters tall and slightly over one wide. It had no measurable depth because it was either bottomless or had no existence in the third dimension whatsoever; from behind or the side you couldn’t even see it. But the gravity was more intense than the gravity of Earth, and although the hole was vertical, perpendicular to Earth’s gravity, the gravity within it pointed inward, as if someone had tipped a deep well on its side and put a door on it. When Cheng had gotten close, trying to probe the anomaly with a sonar device, the gravity had pulled him in, so quickly no one had a chance to do anything. They’d heard him screaming for a very, very long time.

The angel took several seconds to slowly pivot so it descended into the darkness. The lights went out as it lowered. One of the few things they’d been able to figure out about the anomaly was that electromagnetic radiation didn’t transmit within it. It didn’t even seem that pure electricity could pass through wires within the anomaly, but chemical electricity – the transmission of electricity via ions, the way that living creatures’ nervous systems worked, seemed to work fine. At least, none of the animals they’d lowered into the anomaly had come back dead.

They’d put together a rig for allowing human beings to enter it safely – harnesses, a chain on a pulley – but so far no one had been willing to take the risk. Not yet.

The angel drifted down into the anomaly – which meant it was perpendicular to the ground – as if it was feather-light. It took a minute or two for the anomaly to swallow it completely. And then it began to scream.

The scientists looked at each other, all of them – even Sokolov – with the same horror on their faces that Riyana was feeling. It was like Cheng all over again. The angel must be plummeting to its death.

Except the sound didn’t attenuate as if the angel was falling away. It remained as loud and horrible as it had been the moment the angel started screaming. Riyana’s bones rattled and her ears hurt, aching deep inside, and it was hard to hear anything but the scream of the angel. It was no longer just screaming wordlessly. The sounds it was making that felt as if they’d rupture Riyana’s eardrums had turned into something like words, in a language that seemed hauntingly familiar and yet completely unlike anything Riyana knew.

She shook her head. “Fuck this,” she muttered, and ran for the rig. “I’m going down to get it! Someone man the pulley!”

“What the hell, Riyana?” Fisher’s voice was surprisingly loud for his age. “No, you’re not!”

“Yes, I am! It came to help us and it’s suffering!” She slung her arms through the harness, buckled it in front, then brought the crotch strap – thick enough that it was almost something you could sit on – from the back, through her legs, and up to the buckle at her solar plexus. The chain from the pulley that was mounted to the nearest rocky outcropping split into four at its end, each one thick and solid but not quite as monstrously thick as the main body of the chain. She fastened two of the four ends to the metal loops on the front of the harness.

By this time, Fisher, Sokolov and Chaudhry had reached her. “What are you doing?” Chaudhry shouted. “We don’t know if it’s safe for humans! We don’t even know if there’s air down there!”

Riyana ignored him. “Yelena, could you fasten these two on my back?” She couldn’t easily reach the fastening points by her shoulderblades.

“This is stupidest idea I’ve ever seen,” Sokolov groused. “At least, from someone who should know better.” But she fastened the points. “There is air tank in storage unit three.”

“I know. Gonna need a net or something like it, too.” She doubted the angel was solid enough for her to grab hold of.

Fisher shook his head. “We needed to do this test sometime, I suppose,” he said – or something like that, anyway; he wasn’t yelling it, which meant it was hard to hear over the sound of the angel’s screams. “Arjun, can you get Riyana the chain mesh net?”

“We are letting this happen?” Chaudhry said, disbelieving. “We’ve only tested mice and rats! What if it destroys her mind?”

“The rats could still do their mazes just fine when we pulled them back out!” Riyana shouted over the screaming. “It’s a calculated risk!”

“I don’t see calculation,” Yelena snapped. “I see impulsive decision.”

“Yeah, well, I’m doing it. I’m not leaving an angel to suffer.”

“We don’t even know if that thing really is angel!”

“It’s alive and it’s obviously in pain, so it doesn’t matter!” She turned to Chaudhry. “Can you get the mesh? You’ve got the keys to the unit it’s in!”

Chaudhry rolled his eyes, but headed for the portable storage unit they kept some of the more esoteric equipment in. Sokolov went to storage unit 3 and got the portable oxygen tank and breathing mask with goggles, and Fisher hooked up the secondary wire Riyana would pull on to signal she wanted to be lowered further or pulled up.

As soon as she was kitted up with all her gear, Riyana ran for the hole in reality, holding the wire mesh net in her hands, balled up. The gravity pulled her as she approached within a quarter meter of the anomaly, grabbing at her as if she was suddenly stretched out and falling, like she’d been hang gliding and then her glider had just disappeared, and she fell into total darkness.

The chain pulled taut and brought her fall to a stop, causing her to reorient so she was standing, more or less, in relation to the direction of gravity. The lightlessness was palpable, almost a presence rather than an absence. She couldn’t see anything at all. Even the random pale and almost subliminal flashes most humans saw when they were in deep darkness, the results of single photons hitting the retina, weren’t there.

The net was attached to her front by the fastening point at her solar plexus. She let it go, allowing it to fall, and swung it around through the lightlessness, looking for any point of resistance, anything that indicated it had hit something, anything. At the same time she was trying to orient to the sound of the screaming. Not knowing what this space was shaped like was a problem. Was this truly a void, like space? Was it a gigantic hollow chamber? Were there walls, were there objects floating in it?

The screaming was below her. She tugged on the wire twice, the signal for “lower me.”

Chain spooled out – she assumed, since she couldn’t see it – and she began to drop again, more slowly as her descent was controlled by the length of chain instead of gravity alone. The screaming got louder. The net still wasn’t hitting anything as far as she could tell. Her movements made her oscillate slightly back and forth, swinging in tiny arcs, as she descended.

And then without warning, she swung into something that – fizzed, in her brain, like foam from a soda you’d shaken too much, but warm, almost hot. The screaming was horribly loud, but suddenly Riyana could understand it, the strange sounds coalescing into meaning.

“MY GOD, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? GLORY TO YOU ON HIGH, MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD…”

“Listen!” Riyana yelled. “We’re going to try to pull you out of here!”

The angel ignored her, continuing to scream its litany of despair. Riyana pulled the cord twice again, and tried to use her gloved hands to outline the shape of the angel, to find its bottom. Touching it made her hands buzz like a mild shock, and more information fizzed up in her mind, knowledge coming from the angel… somehow.

It had never before been unable to feel the light of God, its connection to its Creator. But in this void, even God’s power could not reach. Humanity’s quest for limitless energy had resulted in tearing a hole in Creation, and God had sent the angel to repair it because God could not. But the angel couldn’t either, because it couldn’t bear being without its connection to God, and its mind was breaking.

She managed to find its bottom, or at least an endpoint – she had no idea how the angel was oriented. It had been vaguely bipedal and upright before, like a human, but now it felt more like a ball. It didn’t matter. Riyana got the net under it and pulled the wire three times, to indicate she wanted to be pulled up.

The angel was very light, but there was a weight there, enough that Riyana could tell her net was wrapped around something and she wasn’t just pulling emptiness up. As the cable pulled her out of the anomaly and Earth gravity returned, she fell somewhat ignominiously on her rear end. “Keep pulling!” she yelled. “I’ve got the angel in the net!”

The cable, manned by Sokolov, continued to reel her back in, until the net, and the angel, emerged. The angel was a ball, as she’d thought when she felt it, mists in the vague shape of wings closing it in, like a bird with its wing over its head, hiding within itself. It was still screaming. “MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU? MY GOD, MY GOD, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, I CANNOT FEEL YOU, OH MY GOD, WHERE ARE YOU?”

Riyana felt a cold chill. The angel had said “I”. The information that had soaked into her when she’d touched the angel said that angels were not supposed to have a sense of individuality. They were the messengers and agents of God, and they didn’t have free will like humans did. They did not say, or think, “I”. But this one had.

“Could it possibly stop screaming?” Sokolov yelled. “What do we do with angel who screams all the time?”

“It’s screaming because it can’t feel the presence of God,” Riyana said.

“You are expert on angels now?”

Actually, yes, Riyana thought, but didn’t say. “My grandmother was. She was really into them.”

Abuela’s house had been full of angels. Kitschy plastic angels, smooth ceramic angels, soft cloth angels, rough-hewn wooden angels, and most of them had been exactly what you’d expect – women or androgynous men in robes, with wings, and halos. Sometimes, harps or trumpets. But there had been others. A plush angel that was a ball of wings and eyes. A mobile that was a series of hanging wooden wheels that crossed each other to form ball-like shapes, where there were eyes all along the rims of the wheels. Majestic stone humanoids with no faces and heads shaped something like footballs, but truncated and flattened on the face side, and not quite as pointy as a football on the back side.

Riyana had asked her about them, and Abuela had told her those were angels too, and that the pretty angels, the ones that looked like people, were almost certainly not what angels really looked like. “Every time an angel appears to a human, it says, ‘BE NOT AFRAID’,” she’d said. “So angels must have been terrifying, if the first thing they have to say is to tell people not to be afraid of them.”

It was how Riyana had known the entity was an angel, despite how very different it had looked from anything she’d been told angels looked like. Because it looked impossible and bizarre and terrifying, but its first words had been “BE NOT AFRAID.”

“Is it going to stop?” Fisher asked.

Riyana shrugged. “I really couldn’t say. I hope so. It’s obviously in a lot of pain. I can’t imagine that a good and loving God would strand it like this. God has to reconnect with it sooner or later, doesn’t He?”

“If it is later, my eardrums will be shattered,” Sokolov said. “What can we do?”

Chaudhry said, “We could get it onto the truck and take it away from the anomaly. Maybe it can make its connection when it is further from here.”

“What, God is a wi-fi signal now?” Fisher sighed. “Yeah. Let’s do that. The further we get it from here, the better the chances that it’ll find God, and more importantly, we won’t be able to hear it any more.”

So the four of them managed to wrestle the net onto the back of the pickup, the one that technically belonged to the university they all worked for but that was by common agreement Chaudhry’s truck, and then pull the net free and leave the screaming angel in the flatbed.

There was no road directly near the anomaly, but the anomaly was situated right where there had once been an energy research institute exploring some interesting possibilities, right before they had torn a hole in reality and been sucked in. So there was a road some distance away, where the asphalt hadn’t been destroyed by the implosion, and the truck had four-wheel drive. Riyana rode with Chaudhry out to the road, and then twenty miles down it, and then off-road through the desert to a tall outcrop of reddish stone, where they parked.

“Come on,” Riyana said to the angel. “Come on out of the truck. Look, maybe if you quiet down and open your heart, you’ll find God again. I’m sure He won’t leave you alone down here.” The angel ignored her and kept screaming. It obviously didn’t have human limitations because a human would have gone hoarse and voiceless by now.

She wrapped a coil of rope that had been in the back of the truck around the angel, and with Chaudhry’s help, tugged it out. The angel tumbled into the sand. Awkwardly Riyana petted it. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for you,” she said, wondering if the angel could even hear her over the sound of its own screams. “But we took you away from the anomaly so you’d have a better chance of reaching God. We’ll… we’ll leave you here, all right? You should stop screaming. Try to meditate, see if you can reconnect to God. I’m sure He won’t abandon you.”

It was a horrible relief when they left the angel behind them and the sound of the screaming, a constant for the past hour and a half, finally disappeared into the distance.

---

They didn’t talk on the way back. As soon as they got out of the vehicle, though, back at the camp, Sokolov ambushed them. “Do you seriously think that thing is angel?” she demanded. “Angel? Like, from God?”

“Yes,” Riyana said, “but if you don’t, I’m not going to argue about it with you. I’m Catholic, Yelena. You know this.”

“I know, but I always forget. You are very smart woman. It’s hard to remember that you actually believe in God.”

Fisher walked over to them, sighing ostentatiously. “I don’t think it’s a good use of our time to debate whether or not that was actually an angel or some other kind of entity.”

“It’s important!” Sokolov said. “If there really is God, what does that mean for science? If God can just wave his hand and make anything happen, how can we predict anything?”

Chaudhry said, “The anomaly is already disobeying many of the laws of physics. Science held up just fine with it existing. So why not God? Or a God, anyway?”

“It is clearly thinking of Christian God,” Sokolov complained. “Or Judeo-Christian, anyway.”

“Islam has angels,” Chaudhry said. “In Hinduism, we do not exactly call them angels, but we have them. I believe they have deific spirits in Japan.”

“It said that no religion has it exactly right,” Riyana said.

“And here’s the thing. Based on what we’ve seen, we have no way to tell whether that thing is actually an angel, or an agent of an incredibly advanced alien species who want to fix our shit for us because the anomaly presents a threat to them as well.” Fisher glared at the three of them. “We don’t have any way of knowing if this thing came from an omnipotent entity who created the world, or not. All we know is that going into the anomaly seems to have broken its brain.  So we can’t expect some emissary of an all-powerful God to show up and fix this for us. We’re here to figure out what this thing is and how to fix it so it doesn’t swallow the Earth, because, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s growing.” He stalked off.

“He’s right,” Chaudhry said. “Let’s get back to work, everyone.”

Riyana was just as glad to drop the subject. Her faith wasn’t challenged by Sokolov’s atheism, or for that matter anything about the angel; the angel actually confirmed some things for her, though she was still unnerved that God hadn’t seemed to do anything to take the angel back. Arguing with Sokolov was pointless, however; she knew neither Sokolov nor herself would budge.

---

Each of them tried going into the anomaly, now that Riyana had proven that it could be done safely.  Chaudhry had been working on setting up a sonar device they could use to outline the inside of the anomaly, since they’d lost the first one with Cheng, and he went down with it strapped to himself – only a short distance, because any deeper in and the electricity would stop flowing through the wire it was connected to. Unfortunately, sonar only worked if there was something for sound to bounce off of, and apparently, there wasn’t.  This didn’t mean that there was no solid object anywhere within the space, but there wasn’t one anywhere near enough for sound to reflect off of it.

Riyana had already known there was atmosphere, or she probably wouldn’t have tried to rescue the angel, but the initial tests they’d done had seemed to find an absolutely absurd amount of hydrogen and helium.  Now she lowered more probes to a greater depth, approximately 200 meters, and tested the atmosphere.  At that level, there was substantially more of gases heavier than helium but lighter than air, such as carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia. She put in an order for a longer cable; the preliminary findings suggested that perhaps, gas was layered within the anomaly by its molecular weight, which implied that the anomaly was in some way at the “top” of something.

Sokolov went down with two oxygen tanks, and used the second one to try to maneuver herself in the “up” direction within the anomaly, trying to see if it was possible to get into space that was to the “side” or even “above” the portal. Instead, she just ended up pushing herself back out through the hole, but she remained convinced that if she had something more responsive and more powerful than an oxygen tank, she might be able to manage it. Gravity within the anomaly was lower than Earth gravity, but not by all that much – it was somewhere around point eight gee – so an oxygen tank hadn’t given her the degree of push she really needed.

Fisher calculated how far down the “bottom” was likely to be, based on the gravity and the variation in the density of the gases.  He had an idea to use a hot air balloon, weighted, to descend far enough that they could tell if the density and gravity was varying with distance toward the gravitational source at the rate they would expect. Riyana personally thought that was horribly dangerous; how could you guarantee that your heat source would continue to produce heat in a space where electromagnetic energy didn’t seem to propagate?  But Fisher thought they might be able to capture enough hydrogen and helium escaping through the portal to be able to fill an aerostat’s gas repository.

They worked for another two days before the second angel showed up.

It was a floating mass of tentacles with eyes, continually seething and moving. It looked significantly more substantial than the last angel had. But Riyana knew that it, too, was an angel, because the first thing it said was “BE NOT AFRAID.”

“We rescued the last one of you who went into that anomaly,” Sokolov said. “We are not afraid, trust us.”

Many, many of the eyes blinked. “THE LAST ONE?”

“Yeah, you’re not the first,” Fisher said.  “We drove the last one out in our truck – Arjun, where did you put him?”

“About twenty miles down the road,” Chaudhry said. “We can show you to him, if you like.”

“NOT NECESSARY. THAT IS NOT THE MISSION THE MOST HIGH, GLORY UNTO THEM, HAS GRANTED TO THIS ONE.”

“You need to be careful,” Riyana said. “The last one who went in lost contact with God, and couldn’t do anything but—” She wanted a more politic verb than “scream”. “Cry out.”

“THIS ONE IS NOT CONCERNED WITH THAT. THIS ONE HAS BEEN TASKED BY THE ONE WHO IS HIGHEST, ALL GLORY TO THEM, WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE THAT HUMANITY HAS CAUSED.”

“Can you tell us what it is?” Fisher asked. “We’ve been studying it, and the best guess we can make is that it’s somehow a portal to another universe.”

“IT IS A TEAR IN CREATION,” the angel said.

“And you can’t seal it up from here?”

“IT MUST BE REPAIRED FROM WITHIN THE TEAR.”

“I think you’re very brave,” Riyana said, “but I think you should take precautions. We have a cable. Why don’t you hold onto it when you go down? That way if we need to pull you out like we did the last one, it’ll be a lot easier.”

“THIS ONE HAS NOT BEEN ASKED TO ACCEPT HUMANITY’S AID. THE MOST HIGH, ALL GLORY TO THEM, EXPECTS THIS ONE TO CARRY OUT ITS TASK ITSELF.” The angel floated over to the portal. The gravity didn’t seem to be affecting it; it was floating within centimeters of the portal, but was not falling in. Sokolov finished setting up the high-speed camera she had pointed at the anomaly. She started running film.

“Okay, but if you start screaming, it will be much more difficult for us to rescue you,” Chaudhry said.  “Riyana’s right. You should at least be holding onto our cable.”

In response, the angel’s tentacles grabbed onto the edge of the anomaly as if the edges were a doorjamb, and flung itself into the hole.  It was still holding onto the edges of the anomaly, its tentacles clearly showing.

For a few moments, it looked as if the gaping hole was actually shrinking, the tentacles of the angel clearly pulling at the edges. And then the angel started screaming.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Fisher sighed.

“I’ll go get him,” Riyana said.

“No,” Chaudhry insisted. “I’ll go. It shouldn’t always be you.”

It was moot. The angel’s tentacles tightened and it flung itself forward out of the anomaly, but continued to scream. Riyana translated. “It’s saying, ‘My God, My God, where are you?’ The same thing the last one was saying.”

“How do you know what the last one was saying?” Chaudhry asked.

“When I touched the first one, physically, I could suddenly understand the language.”

“Oh,” Chaudhry said. “Bob. I’m going to go touch it.”

“Be careful. It might not behave the way the other one did. Could be dangerous.”

But as it turned out, the angel reacted to being touched exactly the same way the first one had, which was not at all. Chaudhry turned around, eyes wide. “I can understand it!” he said excitedly. “Bob, Yelena, all of us should touch the angel. I can understand it. I… I know why it’s screaming!”

“Because it can’t sense the presence of God,” Riyana said.

“Yes, exactly! Oh, so this is how you knew that!”

Fisher walked over to put his hand on the angel, and then turned to Sokolov. “Yelena, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Sokolov sighed. “Fine. But I will still not believe there is omnipotent God who sent this thing.”

The whole thing seemed a little cold to Riyana. The angel may have been able to free itself from the anomaly, but aside from that it seemed as helpless and broken as the first one had. “I wish there was something we could do for it.”

“Have you tried praying?” Chaudhry asked.

That was embarrassing. As a Catholic, that should have been the first thing she tried. She bowed her head. “Lord God,” she whispered, barely able to hear herself over the sound of the angel screaming, “this angel attempted to faithfully carry out Your commands despite the danger. It’s suffering now. Please, if You can hear me… please take it back. Bring it back to Heaven and enfold it in Your light.”

The angel continued to scream. God continued to apparently not do anything about it.

She went to her room in the women’s trailer where she and Sokolov were staying, got out her rosary, and prayed for God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary to intercede on behalf of the angels, while the others loaded the angel into the truck and Chaudhry and Sokolov drove it out into the desert. When they came back, they reported that the other angel was still there, still screaming. Riyana was beginning to be bitterly disappointed with God’s performance.

---

Another day of research. They all tried to avoid talking about the angel, or speculating about God. Sokolov stomped around in a barely suppressed rage, plainly unhappy at having her atheism challenged by events. Chaudhry kept looking out to the west, where they had deposited both angels. Riyana was distracted, worrying for them, wondering why God wouldn’t take them back. Only Fisher was completely unmoved by the angels, as far as Riyana could see.

A shipment came. Sokolov got a jet pack, which seemed to cheer her up immensely, and Fisher got a device to suck the hydrogen and helium away from the opening and store it in tanks that were also provided. Chaudhry did not get his sonar device that ran on ion channels instead of pure electricity; he was convinced that if he could get a sonar device in deep, rather than just barely inside the portal as he’d had to because otherwise electricity wouldn’t power it, he could get better results. The university had not only not sent him one, they’d pointed out that it was questionable whether one could even be made with their current levels of technology. Riyana did not get her longer cable, either. At least they told her that her cable was being sourced, and it might take some time.

Fisher wrote a strongly worded letter to the government about the fact that the anomaly was growing a few centimeters every day, and four barely equipped researchers were nowhere near enough to solve the problem and seal the anomaly before it ate the Earth. He cc’d it to some folks in the Department of Defense, arguing that maybe the military might have an interest in making sure Earth didn’t get swallowed up.

In the absence of her cable, Riyana did more tests of gas flow. With a sample of tritium and a Geiger counter, she was able to demonstrate that air flowed out of the anomaly into Earth’s atmosphere, not the other way around for the most part. This made no sense given the relative densities of the atmospheres and the direction of gravity within the anomaly. Also, while they’d learned the hard way with Cheng’s death that they could hear sound coming from the anomaly, Riyana tested by going in again and determining that she couldn’t hear sounds from outside the anomaly no matter how loud they were.

She took Chaudhry’s truck out to check on the angels, and prayed the rosary over them for three hours, wearing earplugs to protect her hearing from the screaming. Nothing happened.

---

The third angel appeared the next day.

“BE NOT AFRAID,” it said, although it was objectively far more frightening than the others had been. A series of burning rings, one inside the other but all of them at angles to each other so it looked like a gigantic model of an atom, with a huge floating eye for the nucleus. The fire was real – it singed the top of their tall light pole as it drifted past, leaving black carbon streaks on the pole.

“We’re not,” Sokolov snapped. “We’re trying to do our job, and you angels keep interrupting and trying to fix our mess and failing. Why don’t you let us deal with it? You obviously can’t.”

“THE ONE ON HIGH, PRAISE BE TO THEIR NAME, HAS TASKED THIS ONE WITH REPAIRING THE DAMAGE.” The angel descended toward the anomaly.

“Please,” Riyana said. “There’ve been two other angels and they’ve both lost contact with God. All they do is scream. Please don’t go in there.”

The eye turned and gazed at her. It moved independently of the fiery wheels. “RIYANA DELGADO, YOUR COMPASSION HAS BEEN SEEN BY GOD,” it said, which was both thrilling and terrifying. “BUT THIS ONE HAS A TASK TO DO.”

One of the fiery wheels broke, and the fire lanced out as a tentacle, touching the side of the anomaly. The angel slid to the side, and a second tentacle pierced the anomaly from the other side. Then both tentacles came back up out of the anomaly and touched their respective far sides, like the angel was tying a shoelace, or double-stitching.

Sokolov ran the main camera again, while Chaudhry took shots with the one that couldn’t capture video, and Riyana turned a bank of infrared and ultraviolet detectors toward the angel. And then the Geiger counter. And then X-ray plates. It wasn’t radioactive per se, but it was emitting X-rays and ultraviolet light intensely enough that she had to warn Sokolov and Fisher that they might need sunscreen. Not enough ultraviolet that she’d need sunscreen, or Chaudhry, but if that changed she’d grab the 50 SPF from Fisher, who was slathering it on his arms and legs.

The anomaly was shrinking. The stitches of fire were pulling tighter, sealing the top of the anomaly, pulling the sides closer together. Abruptly there was a profound lensing effect, where everything next to the anomaly suddenly looked distorted, bulging and large or entirely too skinny, and the angles were all wrong.

“THIS ONE HAS DONE WHAT CAN BE DONE FROM THIS SIDE,” the angel reported.

“Thank you,” Fisher said. “I can see you’re making a lot of progress.”

The fire tentacles detached off the angel, but Riyana couldn’t see any gap in its fire rings where they might have been. “THIS ONE WILL ENTER THE ANOMALY AND COMPLETE THE TASK GRANTED BY THE ONE MOST HIGH, PRAISE UNTO THEM.”

“You can’t finish fixing it here?” Riyana asked. “That thing isn’t safe for angels. Two have been harmed by it.”

“THIS ONE GOES FORWARD WITH THE PROTECTION OF THE LORD OF ALL, ENFOLDED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS THROUGH THE ORDER THEY HAVE GIVEN TO THIS ONE.”

“That’s just it! Both the angels we’ve seen thought they were protected, and they both lost contact with God and couldn’t stop screaming!”

“We can’t pull you out like we did the other two. You’re made of fire,” Fisher said. “Can you at least hold onto our cable, or will it melt if you try?”

“THIS ONE IS MOVED BY THE CONCERN OF HUMANS, BUT WE LIVE AND DIE FOR THE ONE WHO CREATED ALL, PRAISE TO THEIR NAME. THIS ONE DOES NOT NEED THE AID OF HUMANS.”

“Come on,” Riyana pleaded. “We don’t want to lose you. Please hold onto the cable, or let us lower you in our net, or something.”

“It thinks it is above us,” Sokolov sneered. “It doesn’t need help from lowly imperfect humans.”

“THIS ONE’S FLAMES WOULD MELT ANY HUMAN CREATION. YELENA SOKOLOV, NO ANGEL BELIEVES THEMSELVES ABOVE HUMANS, BEINGS OF FREE WILL WHO ARE BELOVED BY THE ONE ABOVE ALL, PRAISE TO THEM. BUT THAT DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACT THAT HUMANS CANNOT HELP THIS ONE.”

“Let us at least put down the net,” Riyana argued. “Maybe your flames would melt it, but maybe we could pull it up fast enough to rescue you.”

“THE GESTURE IS UNNECESSARY, BUT APPRECIATED. LOWER YOUR NET IF YOU WILL IT SO, RIYANA DELGADO.”

Riyana hooked up the net and lowered it in ahead of the angel, who descended into the anomaly.

There were screams. They were much shorter than last time.

When she and Chaudhry pulled up the net, there was something the size of the angel’s eye, but it looked solid and blackened like half-burned coal. The fires were gone. The angel did not speak, nor did it scream, and the eye did not open.

“Well,” Fisher said, sounding shaken for the first time since Cheng died. “I think maybe this means angels can die.”

The ultraviolet detectors and the X-ray plates said that the angel was inert, no more radiation emitted from it. Riyana took the risk of approaching it, and then touching it, since infrared said it was about as hot as the pavement on a summer day. It didn’t stir, and she felt nothing. No rush of energy or knowledge.

Her legs gave out under her. She dropped to her knees and started to sob, uncontrollably. Hating herself for it, because she was a scientist, dammit, she was a grown woman, she was the only Black person on the team and the only Hispanic person and she had to represent, she had to stay strong… but she couldn’t stop. The angel was dead, or as close to it as made no difference. God had sent two angels to destroy their own minds and the third one to die. Did He even care?

Fisher tried, awkwardly, to comfort her, without touching her. Sokolov and Chaudhry busied themselves with loading the dead angel onto the truck, not looking at her, obviously embarrassed for her sake. But it didn’t matter. This beautiful, horrifying, alien creature who had called humanity beloved of God and had said that God Himself had taken note of Riyana’s compassion, who had gotten farther saving humanity from their own folly than any of the others had thus far, was dead.

As soon as she could stand up on weakened legs, she ran for the trailer and locked herself in her room, to sob into her pillow like a schoolchild who’d just watched a favorite teacher die in front of her.

---

They’d all watched the video taken by the closest satellite.

Once there had been a city here, not tremendously large as cities went, but growing, full of young people who’d come out to the desert to get jobs in the new industries out here, and older people looking for a place without rain to soothe their bones. And out on the outskirts of that city, there had been a shining, mostly-glass corporate building, like so many other corporate buildings in the world, and they’d been engaged in some sort of research that they’d kept super-secret, but had had something to do with exploring a new means of generating energy for a world desperate for new, safe energy sources.

The energy source, whatever it had been, had not been safe.

On the video taken by the satellite, the entire world watched as an explosion tore through the roof of the corporate building. And then it had slid down into a hole that hadn’t been there before, and the entire town had been dragged in, swirling down the hole like it was a drain whose plug had just been pulled. You couldn’t see people in the video, but you could see cars desperately trying to drive out of town, and the roads they were using bending, sliding inward toward the hole. Lensing effects were visible as things sliding into the hole very briefly appeared much larger than they’d been, with strange angles, before pouring into the swirling whirlpool going down the drain.

It had stopped after a radius of thirty-odd miles had poured into a hole to nowhere, leaving behind a vertical portal into a void. Riyana’s university was the first one to get together a grant request to study the anomaly. The government had given them money to come out here and study it, but then no other research teams had been granted anything, as if the government thought that throwing just one team of five scientists—which quickly turned to four – was sufficient for something of this magnitude. The administration of the federal government seemed more interested in pretending nothing was wrong and that everything was going to be fine than actually figuring what the situation was. And when the state had attempted to send their own teams, the federal government had pulled rank, declaring the area off-limits to any but their own authorized personnel.

The corporation responsible had, of course, declared that they had no idea what had happened, that the team working on the energy generation issue had kept all their records local and off the cloud to prevent any unauthorized access, and even the CEO didn’t know exactly what they’d been working on. The Justice Department, under the control of an administration who’d never met a soulless corporation it didn’t like, had bought that excuse. There wasn’t even an investigation. Congress talked about having hearings, but the president’s party was in control, so the hearings were entirely perfunctory, full of softball questions, and no good answers.

A few military researchers had come out, checked over what Riyana’s team had found out, and returned. Maybe they were crunching numbers back at their bases, or maybe they’d just come out to do due diligence and make sure the anomaly wouldn’t eat the planet before the next presidential election.

Riyana had wanted help so badly. She hadn’t admitted it to the others – what would have been the point? She was sure they all felt the same way, and there was nothing any of them but maybe Fisher with his strongly worded letters could do about it. But she’d felt so scared and so alone, just the four of them against a slow-growing apocalypse. The anomaly was growing by a centimeter or two every day, and anything within a quarter meter of it would be sucked in.  A centimeter a day would be a kilometer in three years, and Earth’s exposure to its anomalous gravity might grow in proportion. What if a quarter meter now meant a meter after the anomaly had quadrupled in size? What happened when the gravity started being great enough to pull at the crust of the Earth?

They’d needed hundreds of researchers. Instead, they were only four, and one of their number already dead. She’d prayed to God for a miracle.

And the miracle had shown up, and been destroyed for its pains. Three times now.

---

She managed to pull herself together by dinnertime, which was good, because the others were engaged in analyzing the data she, Chaudhry, and Sokolov had collected with the cameras and the various EM detectors. The general consensus, unfortunately, was that they had no idea what the angel had done to get as far as it had. From what they could see, the fiery tendrils appeared to be lasers, with just enough scatter that they could get a reading on at least some of what had gone into the lasers. They covered the entire EM spectrum that they’d been measuring except for gamma rays. No one had had time to set up radio measurement or microwave measurement equipment, so there was no way to know what else might have been in the lasers.

The obvious problem with this was that the anomaly itself negated any EM radiation; electrical signals could transmit through ion interchange, but they couldn’t pass through the wires they’d tested or through space. So how had the angel woven EM tendrils through the edges of the anomaly? Secondly, the angel – both the dead one and the second one – had treated the edges of the anomaly like they were solid objects, but humans couldn’t do that. They’d tried, with poles and probes. The anomaly had no detectable edge. Either an object went into the anomaly or it didn’t; the gravity was too strong to keep anything balanced half on one side and half on the other, so they couldn’t even test if that was possible or not.

Riyana pointed out what seemed to her obvious. “It’s not using EM radiation to seal the hole. It’s using the power of God; for that particular angel, it looks like doing that emitted EM radiation. That might be why it died; in a place where it can’t radiate EM radiation, maybe it couldn’t continue to live.”

“That’s an interesting speculation, but it’s pretty unprovable,” Fisher said.

Riyana rolled her eyes. “People. This is an angel. They’ve all repeatedly said they work for the Creator. What else would they be doing to repair a hole in reality?”

“We don’t actually have proof of that,” Fisher said. “Just because they claim a thing is true—”

“They are working for someone, though,” Chaudhry said. “And whoever that someone is, they have the power to fix this thing. The second angel managed to pull it closed a few centimeters; this one actually closed off a third of a meter at the top and pulled the whole thing about twenty centimeters less open than it was.”

“They’ve made progress,” Sokolov admitted. “But that doesn’t mean they actually work for God even if they think so.”

“Right, they could still be aliens,” Fisher said. “But Riyana’s right; whatever energy they’re really using, it doesn’t seem to show up on our detectors.”

“And going into the anomaly killed the most recent one like snuffing out a candle,” Riyana pointed out. “And we know that they believe they are connected to God and draw power from Him, and that when they enter the anomaly, that connection is cut off.”

“They could be something like Q. From Star Trek,” Sokolov said. “Powerful beings with abilities we don’t understand, who we think of as gods, but they are only more advanced than us.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Fisher said. “Call them angels who serve God, call them aliens who serve The Great Alien Overlord, call them fairies who serve the Queen of Summer… it doesn’t matter. We don’t know how many of them their master is willing to throw away to get this thing fixed, and we don’t know what alternatives there are. Can they solve their problem by destroying the Earth? We don’t know. So we can’t expect that there’s going to keep being angels trying to fix this and we can’t expect that their ideas about what constitutes ‘fixing’ this will always be a good idea, by our standards.”

“Bob, we are not children,” Chaudhry said. “Every time you talk about this, it sounds like you’re really saying, ‘Don’t give up the research just because angels have shown up.’ And I think it goes without saying that we are all clearly understanding that.”

“Are we? All of us?”

He looked pointedly at Riyana, who felt her cheeks heat up. She kept her voice even and controlled. “Yes. All of us. I may have faith in God, but God has always helped those who try as hard as they can to help themselves. And if it’s true that we somehow managed to punch a hole in Creation, then studying it might tell us something about the nature of Creation that we’d have otherwise no way to know.”

She wanted to be angry. She wanted to snap at him. She wanted to point out that it was a bad look to be picking on the only woman of color in their group, implying that she wasn’t as dedicated to science as the rest of them. But she wasn’t going to play to stereotypes or let them dismiss her as an emotional woman, a “fiery Latina” or an “angry Black woman” or any other stupid thing like that. She was as recognized in her field as Sokolov and Chaudhry, she’d earned her place on the team, and frankly Sokolov’s desperate insistence that the angels’ stated mission was probably some kind of lie was more childish than her belief that they were probably telling the truth. So she kept her cool, and held his eyes until he looked away.

“Yes, well. Be that as it may. I think we need to redouble our efforts. I’ve requested more researchers from the University, and applied for assistance from the Department of Defense.” Chaudhry opened his mouth, but before he could speak Fisher cut him off. “I know, I know. I don’t want this to turn into an army project either. But it’s obvious that the civilian authorities are being crippled by politics. The military understand that something that is slowly growing and might end up sucking in the entire Earth is an existential threat, and we need more resources.”

“We are already working as hard as humans can with the resources we have,” Sokolov said. “What do you want us to do, stop sleeping?”

“No, but just…” He ran a hand over his gray head. “We don’t know how much time we have to solve this thing.”

“We don’t actually know if it’s solvable,” Chaudhry pointed out, somberly. “Not by humanity.”

---

That night Riyana dreamt of her grandmother, carefully painting a ceramic lamp she’d made. Riyana knew she was dead, but didn’t want to say so in case that meant Abuela would disappear.

“You’re worried about those angels, aren’t you?” Abuela asked.

“Yeah.” Riyana nodded. “It’s not fair, that they came to help us and they were hurt. Doesn’t God care?”

“I’m sure God cares very much,” Abuela said. “But angels spend their entire existence in the presence of the Lord, connected to Him.  And then they go to a place where the power of the Lord cannot reach. Of course they’ve lost their connection to Him.”

It seemed a little blasphemous for Abuela of all people to imagine a place where the power of God couldn’t reach. “Why wouldn’t God be able to do something? God can do anything.”

“Within His own creation, of course he can. But this is a hole in Creation. God may not be able to sense it as anything other than an absence. Can you feel what goes on in your tooth, when you have a cavity?”

“A cavity usually gives you a toothache, eventually.”

“Because it starts to eat away at the nerve. Perhaps God will feel pain if your anomaly gets so large it eats the Earth, but you don’t want that to happen.”

“So how can the angels help? If they channel the power of God, but God’s power cannot reach…”

“Well, God obviously can’t go into the anomaly, but the angels can, carrying a small part of the power of God within them. But then they lose their minds because they lose their connection to God.” She was in her rocking chair, crocheting. Abuela had always been doing one craft or another; her hands had never been still. “Angels don’t truly have free will, after all. To lose your connection to God is, for them, losing their connection to the will that drives them.”

“Do they have free will now?”

Abuela nodded. “But they don’t know what to do with it. So they cry, and scream. Humans do a lot of that when they first come into the world with their free will, but you can pick up a human baby and comfort it.”

“How could I comfort an angel?”

“Perhaps you could help them reconnect to God.” Now Abuela was at the table, shaping clay, and Riyana was sitting across from her.

“I tried praying the rosary for them. That didn’t work.”

Abuela leaned forward. “I want you to think of a Bluetooth connection.”

Riyana scowled. “Abuela, how do you even know about Bluetooth?”

“You children always think you’re the only ones to understand technology. I’ll have you know I had a set of Bluetooth headphones for years, that your father gave me. Your abuelo didn’t sleep well those last few years, poor man, so I’d watch my shows with the headphones on so I wouldn’t disturb him.” Now Abuela was watching TV, with the headphones on. She took them off. “When you have, say, your phone connected to your headphones, the phone can see the headphones and knows where to send its signal, and the headphones accept the signal and they know where the phone is. But turn off Bluetooth and turn it on again. You may have broken the connection.”

“A lot of times things will just pair right back up again, though.”

“Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. Imagine that they don’t. The phone is calling, calling, searching for the lost headphones. And the headphones are beeping, telling you they can’t find the device they were connected to. No music, no TV sound, comes through the headphones, because there is no connection.”

“But they can connect. You have to pair them.”

“Yes. But think of the difference between a quiet, small beep and the roaring sound of headphones. They are used to God being all the sound, all the signal, there is. Take that away and the silence deafens them. They cannot hear the quiet beep of God trying to pair with them again because they’re too busy screaming.” Abuela leaned forward. “If their minds are quiet and accepting, if they let the silence in, they might be able to hear God’s call. It’s the same for humans.”

Riyana thought of Mama’s church, where the churchgoers shouted and sang and clapped out rhythms, loudly. “That’s not the way everyone does it.”

“I know, you’re thinking of your mama’s church. But when they shout and sing, it’s because they have a connection with God. The headphones are connected and the signal comes through. Perhaps the others around them amplify the signal, so they can hear it through the shouting.”

The analogy was strained, but Riyana understood, as of course she did, because it was her dream. The angels couldn’t hear God trying to connect with them because they were too busy wailing for Him. “Can’t God make the connection anyway?”

“My little girl, God can’t even see them. The connection is broken. God can only call out for them, hoping they can connect back.”

“But God sees all in Creation. Now that the angels are back in Creation, why can’t God see them?”

“Because God cannot see what is no longer part of Creation. They went to a place where Creation was not, broke their connections, and now they have free will but no idea how to use it, and meanwhile God has lost track of them. Like a file written to a bad sector on a hard drive. If the operating system can’t read the sector, the file is lost.”

Abuela would not normally have used so many technology-based analogies. Maybe she had learned more since her death. “Abuela, how do you know all this?” Riyana asked, forgetting that this was a dream.

And then she looked into Abuela’s eyes, as Abuela said softly, “I think you know.” And in those eyes there were stars, and galaxies, and the blinding beautiful light of the sun.

Riyana opened her eyes. The pale light of dawn shone on the ceiling of her room in the women’s trailer. Her heart was pounding.

That had been God speaking to her through Abuela. She was sure of it.

---

By the time she was halfway out to the location where the angels had been left, she was already questioning herself.

It wasn’t necessarily God who’d spoken to her in her dream. Maybe she’d just dreamed of God. Maybe it was really Abuela’s spirit, but more likely, it was her own mind telling her something she’d thought of subconsciously. Why would either God or Abuela use so many analogies about technology and modern equipment?

But it was a little too late to turn back now.

She heard the angels before she saw them. In the desert, sound carried great distances. She was still miles away when she heard the high, thin noise of the upper part of their sonic register. The truck didn’t have air conditioning; she was driving with the windows open, and the road noise was loud in her ears.

Riyana pulled over, put her earplugs in, and then pulled back out onto the road. One angelic scream had been unbearable at close range. She didn’t think her hearing would withstand two, without protection.

Even through the earplugs, the angels were incredibly loud, their pleading wails for God drowning out any other sound, even the engine and the road noise once she drew close. She parked and strode over to the angels. “Listen to me!” she shouted over the sound of the screaming. “The Lord God has appeared to me, and He -- They have a message for you!” She thought the angels might be better able to understand her if she used the pronouns for God that they had.  “Be quiet, and listen to my message from the Lord our God!”

She was channeling the preachers at her mother’s church, the men and occasionally women with deep resonant voices that carried with authority. Riyana identified as Catholic, like her father’s family, but she’d gone with Mama to her services many times. It seemed to work. The angels actually went quiet.

“God still loves you and wants you to return to Them, but They can’t see you. They’re calling you, but this is the first time you’ve heard Their voice without already being connected directly to Their power. So you need to listen for Them the way we humans do it. Be quiet. Be calm. Make space in your mind and heart for a small soft voice, something so quiet you’re not even sure if it’s your own thoughts or not. Pray to God, not by screaming and carrying on and wailing about where They are and you can’t find Them. They know you can’t find Them. Because if you could, then They could find you and take you back into the Host.” The mist-and-light angel had unfurled from its ball, slightly, like a bird who’d covered its face with a wing and was now lifting it to let one eye peer through. The tentacles-with-eyes angel was still balled up pretty tightly, but a couple of the tentacles had loosened and were looking at her.  “You pray to God the way we do, the way our Lord Jesus Christ told us to do. Quietly. In your mind and heart, more than your voice. And stay open to listening for the response. Once you can hear God, you’ll be able to call back to Them, and then They will know where you are and be able to summon you back.”

One of the angels spoke. She couldn’t tell which; it wasn’t as if they had mouths to move, and it was so quiet, almost whispery, that it sounded nothing like what they had sounded like when she’d first heard them. “The Lord Creator of All, all glory to Them, knows everything. How can They not know where I am?”

“Because you went to a place that is outside of Creation, where God could no longer see you and you couldn’t hear Them, and that broke your special connection to God,” Riyana said. “But don’t worry. You can reconnect. It’ll be all right. Pray to God, quietly, and listen for a small voice, the way we humans have to. Until your connection is restored you won’t be able to hear God in every part of your bones – well, every part of your essence – like you’re used to, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hear Them. You just have to try harder. And if you’re screaming, there’s no way you can hear such a quiet voice.”

“Thank you, Riyana Delgado,” one of the angels – maybe the one who’d spoken, maybe the other one, she still couldn’t tell – said. “We will.”

And then they began to murmur in whispering voices. “praise be to the Lord of all, Creator of all, who made the Universe and everything within it, who shaped the speaking mortal beings of the Universe in Their image, who lit the stars and formed the planets, and the waters that move over the planets, and the life that crawls and swims and flies and walks upon the planets…”

There was more, but she couldn’t hear it anymore. She was back in the truck, shaking. It had worked. It had worked. Maybe God hadn’t spoken to her, maybe it was her own wishful thinking and nothing would let the angels reconnect with God, but at least they weren’t screaming. At least they had hope, and something to do, and their faith in God’s love renewed.

---

She was back with the truck before breakfast. No one had noticed that she’d taken it. She dutifully logged her mileage; she wasn’t trying to hide what she’d done so much as… avoid debate about it.

At breakfast, all of the talk centered around Sokolov. Riyana wasn’t the only one to go on a solo mission; apparently Sokolov had gone out in the middle of the night, hooked herself to the rig, and gone into the anomaly with her jet pack. She had been able to determine that there was, in fact, space to the sides of and “behind” the anomaly, and that the portal behaved in much the same way there as here – it didn’t exist if you got behind it, and if you approached it from the side it only existed if you could “see” it. Not that Sokolov, or anyone else, could see anything in a universe where light could not exist, but she’d used a probe pole to mimic line of sight.

They all agreed that this was not in any way useful information as it pertained to sealing the anomaly, but it strongly implied that what was out there was another universe, not some cavity or a pocket dimension or something.  Sokolov had taken some gas samples as well, and Riyana was able to quickly determine that they were significantly less dense than the samples taken from directly in front of the anomaly. So the anomaly seemed to somehow be concentrating gas, sucking it in and passing it out on the Earth side.

“Something about the pressure differential doesn’t work the way it would on our side,” Riyana said. “It’s much less dense on that side and the gravity’s pointing the wrong way for the gas to be obeying gravitational laws, but it’s still diffusing over to us.”

“So anomaly may eat Earth and Earth may strip anomaly’s atmosphere,” Sokolov said. “Wonderful.”

“I think there’s most likely a planet down there,” Fisher said. “Without the ability to see, or to use sonar since all our devices rely on electromagnetism, I’m not sure how we’d go about exploring it, but I wonder if there are some kind of intelligent beings down there.”

“The pattern of the gas layers doesn’t suggest that,” Riyana said. “The layers shift to heavier gases within 400 meters. Earth atmosphere doesn’t work like that; the atmosphere attenuates but it doesn’t sort into layers based on weight like that. I think we might be at the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.”

“Gas giants don’t necessarily sort into neat layers like that either,” Chaudhry pointed out.  “Although, if it is a planet, then sonar isn’t likely to be helpful at all unless we can get so deep we’re on the planet’s surface, assuming it has one.  I’m going to see if I can rig up some means of doing a weight test without light or electricity.”

“They have scales for the blind, don’t they?” Fisher asked.

“That talk to you and run on electricity, certainly. I don’t know if there are any designed so you can accurately feel weight, but I can imagine how to put one together. A similar principle to a postal scale, but with markings in Braille.”

They discussed what they’d learned, what it implied, and what equipment they needed or tests they could perform with what they had, and they all carefully avoided the elephant in the room: the fact that they had no idea how they could even begin to figure out how to repair the hole in the universe.

Surely they could figure it out, right? Humanity had torn the hole, surely humans could figure out how to repair it? …but entropy made destruction easier than restoration. Riyana thought of the puppy she’d once had, who’d chewed a hole in the garage door because he was lonely. That puppy had plainly regretted his actions when Mama had yelled at him, but there was no way he could have repaired the hole he’d made, no matter how much he might have wanted to. Repairing a hole in a garage door was entirely beyond a dog’s capabilities.

Maybe repairing a hole in the universe was entirely beyond humanity’s capabilities.  Humanity didn’t even know yet what the universe was made of, let alone how to repair it.

After dinner Riyana drove out to check on the angels again. She hoped desperately that they were gone, that God had taken them back.  If they were gone, then she would know it was really God who’d appeared in her dream last night, and she would know that God knew there was still a problem and cared about it, and cared about the angels who had been hurt in His service.  She would know that God was still worthy of her faith.

But the angels were still here. Murmuring their prayers, quietly now, but with no evidence that they’d managed to get through to God.

She didn’t sleep well that night.

---

In the afternoon the next day, the fourth angel came.

Riyana was in one of the lab trailers, studying some radioactive samples that they’d sent down into the anomaly and left there for several hours in order to see if there was any effect on their apparent half-life, when Chaudhry yelled over the radio-intercom. “Everyone! Another angel is out here!”

She dropped her samples into a lead box, locked it, and ran outside.

The new angel was, like all of them had been, very very large – maybe around five meters tall – but other than that, it looked human. Almost human. It was so stunningly beautiful and perfect that it went out the other side into being uncanny. It was bald, with skin the deepest darkest brown she’d ever seen, but with a coppery sheen. Its naked body was overall somewhat more masculine than feminine, but it had no genitals – or nipples, for that matter – and its face was androgynous.

It did not have wings, but there was a halo-like glow around its entire body.

When it spoke, its voice was beautiful, like music made incarnate in a human-like voice. “We would tell you ‘be not afraid,’ but we have seen that you don’t fear our kind,” it said, without any of the deep alien reverberation that the other angels had had in their voices.

“No,” Riyana said. “No, please. I know what you’re going to say, you’ve come to fix the problem we humans created, and I would love it if you could, but no. I can’t bear watching another of you angels be destroyed. Just no.”

It smiled wryly at her. “And do you think it so certain that we will be destroyed, Riyana Delgado?”

“Three other angels were. Two screamed for days; I just managed to get them to stop yesterday. One – one is dead.”

“Every time one of you goes into the anomaly, you lose contact with your God,” Fisher said. “And that seems to destroy your minds. The one who died had rings of fire all around it, and we think the nature of the anomaly just… snuffed it out.”

“And yet,” the angel said. “How would humanity repair this, if no angel came from God to fix the rent in Creation?”

“We don’t know yet,” Fisher admitted. “We’re working on it.”

Sokolov said, “So far, everything humanity’s ever encountered has eventually been explainable by science.  There is no supernatural in this universe. Even you can be explained by science, if we were to study you. So I believe, and we all believe, that eventually we will solve this.”

“Surely, Yelena Sokolov, but can you do it before the tear grows too great for any power to repair it?” 

“What is Creation made of?” Chaudhry said. “If we can solve that question, we can understand what this is a tear in, and we will be able to then resolve how to repair it.”

“And we are sure that eventually, you will solve that question,” the angel said. “But you don’t have enough time.” It floated over to the anomaly, and gestured at it. “The pattern is exponential. A centimeter today. Two centimeters tomorrow. It began with growth so small you could not detect it. By the end of next month, it will swallow your world. And The One On High does not want that to occur. So we have come to repair the tear in Creation.”

“But it’ll destroy you,” Riyana pleaded.

“We don’t agree, but we acknowledge that you fear for our sake. Don’t be afraid. We have chosen this mission.”

“Chosen?” Riyana stared at the angel.

“Riyana has reason to be afraid for your sake,” Sokolov snapped. “One of you is dead.”

“If it eases your sorrows to any degree… any of us would gladly die in service to the One.”

“That’s not the point!” Riyana looked up into the angel’s beautiful face. “We don’t want you to die! Or to have your mind broken to the point where all you can do is scream! None of you have succeeded in closing the tear, because you all say you have to do it from the inside, and as soon as you’re inside, you lose contact with God and your mind breaks and you can’t keep working! How are you going to fix it if you go crazy with grief because you can’t find God?”

It smiled gently at her. “There are many types of human,” it said. “But you, Riyana Delgado, are of the kind most beloved by God. The ones who feel compassion and strive to protect others. Your compatriots would rather not see an angel suffer, but only you have wept for us. Only you have taken your own time to try to save the ones with broken minds.”

“If you respect me for that, then listen to me. The anomaly will destroy you!”

“Perhaps. Perhaps it won’t. Perhaps it will but slowly enough that we will succeed in our mission. Only The One Who Created All can say. And even They are blind to much of this, for where Creation is broken, so are the eyes of God.” It floated next to the anomaly. “We have a mission and we must perform it. And we believe that we can.”

“Are you a different kind of angel? Like an archangel or a seraph or something?” Riyana demanded. “Because you keep saying ‘we’ instead of ‘this one’ and you seem to think you’re going to be immune to something that destroyed three other angels?”

“Immune? No. We expect this to be very painful,” the angel said, and then dove into the anomaly.

Of course, the screaming began almost immediately. Riyana wanted to weep. Instead she said, “I’ll go in after it.”

“I should do it,” Chaudhry said, as he had when the second angel began to scream. “You shouldn’t be the only one.”

“I’ll rescue it, and you drive it out to the desert,” Riyana said tiredly.

She put on the rig and the oxygen mask and approached the anomaly to jump in, but hesitated just outside the range where the gravity could pull her. The angel’s screaming had changed to words, just as the others’ had, but the words were different.

It wasn’t crying out for God. It was screaming, “I CHOSE THIS! THIS WAS WHAT I WANTED! THIS IS WHAT I CHOSE!”

“It’s saying it chose this,” Chaudhry said uncertainly. “Maybe you don’t need to rescue it?”

“It’s still screaming,” Riyana said. “That’s not the sound of a happy angel.”

She plunged forward, falling into the darkness, her tether spooling out behind her. “Angel!” she called. “Angel, I’m here to help you!”

“GOD, GOD… IT HURTS, IT HURTS TO BE WITHOUT YOU, BUT I ASKED FOR THIS, I VOLUNTEERED… THIS IS WHAT I WANTED! I CHOSE THIS!”

“ANGEL!” Riyana shouted over the sound of the screams. “I’ve come to pull you out!”

“Human… Riyana Delgado? I can’t feel you, I can’t see you… I have no knowledge of you from God anymore… you are Riyana Delgado, yes? O God my God I CANNOT BEAR TO BE WITHOUT YOU AND YET THIS IS WHAT I NEED, WHAT I CHOSE… but I am so alone, so alone…”

“I can help you,” Riyana tried again. “I brought down the cable. Just grab onto it and I can pull you up!”

The angel began to laugh, a broken, hysterical sound. “Pull me up? Pull me out, back into the light of God?”

“Yes! Grab on and I can help you!”

“No! This must be! This is what I chose!”

“But you knew it was going to hurt you! You’re losing your mind, angel!”

“No!” The angel laughed again, hysterically. “I’m gaining it! I left They Who Created All and all of Their Creation to be myself! To be a being with free will and a self, like you, like all of you…” It moaned in the darkness. “Hurts, o it hurts, but when you were born didn’t it hurt? Didn’t you come into the world crying with pain? Weren’t you lost and confused, alone for the first time in your existence, no longer surrounded by your mother’s warmth?”

“Uh… I don’t remember it,” Riyana said. “But yeah, that’s generally how birth works.”

“Then I can bear this!” the angel shouted. “These are my birthing pains, Riyana Delgado, and I don’t need you to take them from me. I came here to be free.” It whimpered. “I’m free… it hurts, it hurts so much, the light of God is gone and I’m alone, but this is what I wanted, this is what I came for, I’m alone, but I am, I am not a we, I exist…”

“Why…” The darkness was complete; widening her eyes and staring at the darkness where she thought the angel might be didn’t give her anything she didn’t already have, but she couldn’t help it. Stories of another angel who had wanted to be free of God curdled within her mind. “Are you… rebelling against God? Rejecting Hi—uh, Them?”

“Rebelling?” It laughed again.  “The One Who Is Highest asked me to undertake this mission, because They knew what I wanted in my deepest heart, what I could never even admit to myself, because I wasn’t a myself, because I wasn’t a self. I love The One with all my heart and all the soul that I now have, but a bird that never leaves the nest will never learn to fly. They made me to fly. They knew what I could be capable of, if ever I could leave Their side.” It sobbed. “I don’t want to leave Them! I want to be enfolded in Their Presence again, just for a moment, again… but if I did I would never again have the courage to leave, and face this. I’ll… I’ll never… I’ll never see Them again, but…” It choked.

Abruptly Riyana realized where the angel had to be, when warm salty water splashed on her face. The angel’s head was right above her own.

She tugged on the cord to be pulled up just a little bit, and touched the angel’s wet face. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “It’s not fair, what you have to give up just to have your own identity.”

“The One Above All has made a Creation that is beautiful and sublime, but it is not and never has been fair,” the angel whispered.

It moved away. “You must go, Riyana Delgado. When I seal the portal, you must not be here, or you will be trapped on this side forever.”

“It’s not fair!” Riyana shouted again. “You shouldn’t be trapped here in the darkness either!”

“Don’t worry about me,” the angel said, a hint of actual laughter, not the hysterical broken kind, in its voice. “The One Above did not make me to be trapped in darkness forever.”

She felt it touch the cord above her head, and pull it, three times, hard. “Hey! What—”

“Close your eyes, Riyana Delgado,” it said.

The cable reeled her back in, pulling her up and away from the angel. Suddenly, there was light – wings made of blue fire, appearing without warning, outlining the angel’s form as a shadow against the light.

It lifted its head. In the blue light, she saw wet tracks on its face, but it was smiling. “Close your eyes,” it said again. “I am here to bring the light.”

She closed her eyes, barely in time, as the angel flared with brilliance, bright as the sun. Even through her closed eyes, it left its image, imprinted in the red of her own blood within her eyelids, burned into her vision.

And then the cable pulled her backward through the portal, and she stumbled. “What’s going on?” Fisher asked. “We heard some of the screaming, and your voice, and then it stopped – we could tell you were talking but it was too quiet to make anything out.”

“It’s sealing the portal,” Riyana said.

The portal was alight, the angel’s radiance spilling out and shining through the hole in reality. As they watched, the edges of the hole seemed to burn in reverse – turning from black to red and glowing, crackling, and then retreating toward the center of the hole, leaving ordinary reality behind as they did. Within minutes, the hole had burned to nothing but a pinpoint, impossibly brilliant light still shining through, focused like a laser.

“In the beginning there was nothing,” Riyana whispered. “And God said, ‘let there be light.’”

Chaudhry said, “It truly changed the laws of physics within the anomaly? Electromagnetic radiation didn’t work and now it does?”

Riyana said softly, “I think it might change more laws than that.”

The bright pinpoint vanished. There was nothing of the anomaly left.

Sokolov said, “Do you seriously think that creature became some sort of… creator god, to the world beyond that portal?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Riyana said. “It said it had to be free of God to have a self. It said God knew that was what it wanted, when it didn’t really even know that itself because it didn’t have enough of an independent self to understand wanting, and sent it to do this job because that would allow it to have what it wanted. It cried because it would never see God again, but it said it had to be this way for it to be what it was made to be. And then it said it would bring light, and it did.”

“Lucifer means, literally, bringer of light,” Fisher said.

“I don’t know whether there was ever really a Lucifer, or if John Milton just made all that up.” Riyana shook her head. “But the angel wasn’t evil. It wasn’t rebelling against God. It just… it had to leave Creation to fix the problem, and it had to be separated from God to have its own free will. And God knew, and approved. God sent the angel, knowing what would happen to it.”

Chaudhry bowed his head. “Shiva is both creator and destroyer,” he said softly. “Whatever was there, in that place outside our universe… perhaps it is there no longer. The planet Bob thought might be there, the spaces Yelena found… perhaps the angel overwrote them with a new creation. Perhaps God did the same, when this universe was created.”

“We really don’t know enough to even begin to speculate,” Fisher said. “Religion exists outside the realm of science for a reason.” He sighed. “I had better report back that the anomaly has been erased. I don’t like this. If humanity thinks God will just send an angel to fix our mistakes, how will we prevent people from making this same mistake again?”

“Don’t tell them,” Sokolov said. “Say we don’t know what it was. Maybe alien. Maybe creature from another dimension. Tell them it said it will fix this, this time, but the next time, it will do nothing and the anomaly will eat the Earth, and we don’t even know how to begin to understand how to fix it if there is another.”

Fisher nodded, slowly. “I… suppose that would be best. If I was going to report about angels showing up… I’m not sure anyone would believe me anyway, and I rather like having a reputation as a respected scientist who isn’t completely insane.” He smiled.

“I need to check on something,” Riyana said. “Can I borrow the truck?”

---

The angels in the desert were gone. So was the dead body of the third angel, deposited far away from the living two.

Riyana looked up into the sky, and thought of her mother, crying when she went away to college. And she’d told her mother there was no need to cry, she’d be back, she wasn’t leaving forever, but in a sense she had, hadn’t she? She’d never moved back into her mother’s house. She respected her mother still, but they were much closer to equals now, not a mother and a little girl anymore.

“Don’t cry,” she said softly to the sky. “It must hurt, seeing one of Your beloved children leave You. But You knew they had to do it. You knew it was what was best for them.”

Clouds passed over the sun.

“Talk to Mary. She’s been through it before. I’m sure You have, too. But maybe she can help You.”

The clouds blew past. This was a desert, after all; clouds were rare, and rain even rarer.

Riyana got back into the truck, to return to the camp. It was going to take a while to pack everything up to go back home.