Page 43 of King Among the Dead

Kay sat on her usual stool, chain-smoking, and Rose met Beck’s gaze, briefly, as she approached the woman from behind. He offered a quick, upward tick with one corner of his mouth, wry but patient. Rose was ready, then, for Kay’s closed-off expression when she drew up alongside her.

“Good morning.”

Kay didn’t respond. Didn’t even glance toward her.

“Would you get the plates, Rose?” Beck asked, and she was glad of an excuse to turn away from Kay’s cold indifference.

“She’ll come around,” Beck said an hour later, when they were closeted in the library together. “She’s very tolerant of my – lifestyle – ordinarily. It was once her lifestyle, too. That’s how we first met. But then she’ll have a spell where she wants me to give it up. It’s too dangerous, she says, and not worth it.” He crossed from the shelves to the table and set down a stack of books. Lifted a single brow with faint amusement. “I think she’d hoped you would be a good influence on me, rather than the other way around.”

“I’m not being influenced,” Rose said, reaching for the topmost book. It was a thick, joyless tome about the Atmospheric Rift, the kind with tiny print and grainy black-and-white photos.

He chuckled. “Perhaps not.” He took his usual seat across from her. Folded his hands together. Cocked his head to the side. “Now. You were eavesdropping last week outside my bedroom.”

She stilled.

“When Kay was questioning what I’d seen the night I was hurt.” His head tipped a fraction more, hair sliding over his shoulder. “You heard all or part of that exchange, yes?”

She bit her lip – but he didn’t sound accusing. And he’d told her his real name; had killed with her, buried bodies with her. She squared up her shoulders and said, “Yes.”

He nodded, and looked pleased. “What do you know of conduits?”

“Only what they told us in school. Most of my teachers thought they were urban legends. Something made up to scare people into going along with the governmental takeovers.”

He nodded again, and flicked a tiny smile. “They’ve become more mythic the farther we get away from the Rift. Start there.” He motioned toward the book, and she opened to the early chapters; to the grainy photos of a shape like a fixed jagged lightning bolt in the sky, and security camera footage of men and women glowing.

“The first reports of the Atmospheric Rift – before it was called that – came from a pair of British airline pilots flying over the Atlantic,” he said, voice taking on a melodic, professorial tone. He was a good teacher; he would have been a wonder at a college, she thought. “The co-pilot radioed it in, and three hours later a scientific vessel had moved into position and began taking photos.”

One of them was the first one in the book, above the chapter heading; credit had been given to a British scientist aboard theDarwin, which had been tracking the migration patterns of right whales.

“Over the next twenty-four hours, the rift grew,” Beck continued. “Reports started cascading in from American and European coasts: it could be seen by the naked eye – it could be seengrowing.

“And then came the pulse.”

They’d watched a video on it at school, a documentary cut with shaky cellphone footage – screams and shouts of alarm in the backgrounds of each – of people across the globe reporting one massive power outage. The cell towers hadn’t worked; the videos had all been forwarded to news stations a few hours after the event, when the power had flickered back on in sporadic bursts.

“When the lights came back up,” Beck said, “We weren’t alone anymore.”

Photos of humans glowing: a glowing woman with an arm raised, staring at a burning house. A glowing man hovering ten feet off the ground, his shadow bracketed by the shadow of wings that weren’t there. Fire in the streets. A house full of bodies all bleeding from the eyes.

“I was four,” Beck said, gaze going distant. “My mother dragged us down into the basement, and we crouched beneath the stairs. She kept calling for our father, wanting him to come down. He’d been standing in the foyer holding a shotgun. There was fire outside in the street. I remember – I remember Simon took my hand, and squeezed so tight his nails drew blood. Mother was crying.”

Rose shivered. “Everyone thought the world was ending.”

“Oh, yes. This was fire and brimstone. The apocalypse wrought by the heavens. All we needed were the horsemen.

“We didn’t know what was really going on until the good senator made his broadcast.”

“Senator Fallon,” she said, nodding. She knew if she turned a few pages, she’d find a photo of him, all shiny JFK good looks and earnestness, gaze glowing with fervor.

“DanielFallon,” Beck stressed, his gaze wide. “And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings. Daniel Fallon had become a mouthpiece for a higher authority, he informed us all, on a national broadcast. Aconduit. That was his word. A conduit for an angel of the Lord to enact God’s will upon the earth. Gabriel had come to him, had filled him with light, and shown him the way forward.And I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Ulai, which called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.”

His gaze darkened. “Three million people were killed. And then it just…stopped. Those who’d claimed to be conduits immolated; they left nothing behind but blackened husks. The rift closed. A new age had begun; a new world order crawled out of the wreckage.

“Eventually, as time passed, it got easier and easier to attribute it all to basic, human evil. An uprising, a geo-political movement. The wordconduitbecame synonymous withterroristorzealot. Nothing divine or otherworldly had happened. It was a simple case of a natural phenomenon in the sky being used as justification for slaughter. Angels had never played a part in it.”

She paged through the book, and as the chapter headings progressed, she could see that he was right. That was how she’d learned it in school: it was far from the first time that miracles and the voice of God had been held up as excuses for war and destruction. “But these people,” she said, pointing to a photo of a burning woman, “they hadpowers.”

“Parlor tricks,” he said with a shrug. “People can explain away any sort of miracle if you give them enough time. The burnings were attributed to bombs and Molotov cocktails. The torture and killing blamed on mortal weapons.

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