Page 9 of Out of the Blue
And then Perry begins to bark. She runs off, yanking on the leash so hard I almost fall into the bracken. I open my eyes and see a bulky shape stuck in a tree on the edge of the hill, just a few hundred metres away. My mouth goes dry. Images swirl around my head: dull eyes, a smashed skull, blood seeping into the ground. I don’t want to see that. I cannot,cannotsee that. Not again.
But for some reason I keep running. Perry bounds ahead, a white blur against the dark grass. I run full speed after her, sprinting until I’m just a few metres from the tree.
The shape moves.
I freeze.
It’smoving. It – he? She? – flounders between the leaves, thrashing and kicking. The tree’s trunk groans and, with a strangled yelp, a Being slips through the branches and comes tumbling down to earth.
And this time, for the first time since the Falls began, the Being is alive.
She’s not like any of the other Beings I’ve seen (or what was left of them, at least). Her skin is a shimmering shade of rose gold, and her hair falls in dusky-pink tangles around her shoulders. She’s young, maybe eighteen or nineteen in our terms, and small but muscular, like an athlete or a ballet dancer. Her cheekbones are sharp, her lips thick, her eyes the colour of garnet in the dim light – eyes that are wide and twitchy, darting around the hill and up to the sky before settling on me.
We stare at each other, this angel and me, both of us too shocked to move. Her eyes flicker past my shoulders, over the place where there should be wings but aren’t. Her mouth twists in disgust; mine opens and closes a dozen times, but I can’t form any words. I don’t know what to say. I come in peace? Welcome to Earth, population seven billion?
‘Um,’ I say. ‘Hello.’
My voice breaks the spell. A fault line of fear shudders through her and she scrambles backwards, scraping her wings against the gnarled tree trunk. She screams something in a language I can’t understand, though it hardly sounds like a language at all: more like whale song and waves and high-pitched pipes, all blended together with the volume turned up.
‘Shhh! Shhh!’ I stumble forward, my palms up. ‘It’s OK!’
I try to think, but my mind is full of white noise. I should help her. I should hide her. I should get Dad; let him know he was right. (Oh my god, Dad wasright– he’s going to be unbearable when he finds out.)
The Being grabs the lowest of the tree’s branches and hauls herself up on trembling legs. She teeters for a moment, but then her knees buckle and she slumps to the ground. I move forward to catch her, but she screams and swings a punch at me. I duck, and a great ripping sound tears through the air.
My breath catches in my throat.
Her right wing is torn down the middle, its pinkish feathers littering the ground. The left, however, is perfect: a vast sail of feather and sinew, curving in a slick arch a metre above her head. Even in the darkness, the fibres of the feathers glisten like oil on water: countless shades of pink, speckled with tiny hints of azure and turquoise and teal.
The Being’s face contorts in pain as she beats her wings together. There’s another light tearing sound, as if she’s ripped through gravity, and she begins to rise. She beats them a second time, creating a gust of wind so strong it sends me staggering backwards, my hair whipping around my face. Relief radiates out of her as she floats upwards: twenty centimetres, half a metre, a metre . . .
But then she starts to wobble. The wings move faster, but instead of taking her higher, she just spins in a jerky circle, arms and legs flailing as if she’s treading water. She falls back to earth with a bump, then gets up and tries again. And a third time, and a fourth. I can see the panic begin to set in. There’s no way to escape. She’s trapped here, on Earth, with me.
My brain is a swamp, but one idea keeps bubbling up to the surface: I need to get Dad. He came here to find a Being. Now that I’ve done his job for him, we could probably go back home. I could get back to my friends, back to the village and my own room –
The Being lands with another dull thud. This time, she doesn’t get up. Her lip quivers, her eyes close and she starts to cry.
‘No, shhh! It’s OK; you’re OK!’ I reach out a hand towards her, but the Being flinches and pulls away. The noise swells, her sobs growing louder and louder until Perry starts to howl along. The Being looks up, so surprised she forgets to keep crying, but then her entire body begins to tremble. Wherever she comes from, they clearly don’t have dogs there.
‘It’s OK! She won’t hurt you.’
They say dogs can sense fear, but mine doesn’t notice the Being’s. Perry climbs on to her knees and curls up in her lap, just like she would with Rani or me, then gives a lazy woof and starts licking at the scratches on the angel’s thighs. Thousands of pounds’ worth of Being’s blood, being eaten by my dog. If the Wingdings could see this. IfDadcould see this.
Then something happens. The Being sniffs. She puts her hand on Perry’s haunches, then snatches her fingers away as if she’s been scalded. After a moment, though, she touches Perry’s back. She strokes her fur, her expression teetering between fear and wonder.
As I watch, my thoughts of handing her over to Dad slowly curdle into sickly shame. It would be the simplest solution, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Everything about her, from her eyes to the tentative way she strokes Perry, is just too human. Dad might sell her to science, and I know better than to think those researchers would treat her kindly. They’d probably slice her open like a lab rat, pull her wings apart to find what makes her fly, maybe even try to inseminate her to create half-angel babies or some weird shit like that. The cults would be worse. She’d probably end up as a pet for some billionaire’s bratty kids, or a sort-of-human sacrifice.
I can’t let that happen. I have to help her. Not because I found her, not because it’s my destiny or any crap like that, but because she is, quite obviously, a person. She deserves to be treated like one.
And that means getting her out of here.
I squint into the darkness. I need to find somewhere to hide her, and fast: other people are sure to have noticed the streak of pink in the sky as she fell, and it won’t be long until they head up here to investigate. This part of the hills is stark, with hardly any trees or bushes for cover. I remember the ruined building on one of the lower peaks, where I saw the photographer taking pictures on my way up.
The Being wipes her hand across her nose, still crying softly.
‘We have to go.’ I point towards the other side of the hill and mime running. ‘You’re not safe here. Not safe! Bad! We have to go!’
Her expression stays blank. Slowly, I edge my hand towards her and slide my fingers into hers. The touch of her skin is soft as mist, like she’s hardly there at all. Our hands only meet for a split second before she snatches hers away, but she grabs the lower branches of the tree and reluctantly pulls herself to her feet.
