Page 75 of Night in a Waste Land

She wasn’t and didn’t think she ever would be – but innovation had always been fueled by vengeance, for her, and she wanted another crack at Shubert. Even worse: she wanted to understand how it was possible for a human and angel to share the host body equally, and speak through the mouth with two separate voices.

Morgan seemed equally baffled the next day, when Rose went to have lunch with her.

The conduit still looked too-pale and unsteady, and she only picked at her food, though Rose had brought all her favorites: pudding, cake, French fries. “I’ve not ever seen the like,” she said, shaking her head, dragging a lone fry listlessly through a ketchup puddle. “But the line between possible and impossible is flexible and inconstant for my kind.”

“Isthat what was happening? Could you tell? That they were sharing the body?”

“Yes, I believe so. A true symbiotic relationship.” She frowned, the grave expression at odds with her young face. “I did not recognize the angel in residence.”

“Not one of the big ones, huh?” Rose asked, half-teasing.

But Morgan shook her head, still coldly serious. “No.”

Huh.

“That hell beast,” Rose started.

Morgan set the fry down and gave over her full attention.

“What did you do to him, exactly?”

“I sent him to hell.”

“Body and all?”

“Extracting the demon and preserving the conduit takes time and a great amount of energy – energy I did not possess at the time, after having dealt with the guards.”

Rose let out a breath. “Right. Well. I’m not criticizing.” The girl’s gaze was fixed on her, so blue and deep and inhuman. The prickling buzz of awareness on the back of Rose’s neck had never been the needling of other conduits; never felt like a threat. Carefully, she said, “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me your real name? It can be just a secret between us. I don’t have to tell Lance and the others.”

But Morgan shook her head, and picked up the cake.

Rose spent the next few days throwing herself at the treadmill and various training dummies – and at the problem at hand. Bedlam had been in constant contact with the higher-ups, and there was lots of noise about needing to ramp up the war effort. They needed new weapons, new tech, new armor, new troops, newideas.

One came to Rose one evening on the treadmill, and she nearly fell off.

Several attempts had been made over the last few years to capture and interrogate a hell beast conduit. It had never ended well, and nothing had been learned. Heavenly conduits saw humans as beneath notice, but weren’t shy about sharing their plans for humanity: namely, extermination. But Beck had always thought that hell was the key – his pet hell theory, as Kay had called it. They needed angels fighting demons, instead of people, and she’d always had the impression he thought hell was, somehow, more easily understood.

Humans were no strangers to sin, after all.

What they needed was a window to hell. An informant. Someone who could prove to be an ally. But where would that lead? Not all demons were created equal; how could they choose a likely, and reliable hell ally?

She did knowoneperson in hell.

It hit her like a slap. Or like a truck.

She managed to switch the treadmill off with shaking fingers, stagger off of it, and go sit down against the wall, all but falling the last few inches. She pressed her face into her hands, heedless of the Knight from Blue Company asking if she was alright.

She’d joined the military with the intent of using it. She’d not come to it like a lamb to slaughter; she’d not been aimless, and searching for an outlet. The military had what she hadn’t, then: resources. Resources she could use to figure out how to go down to hell and fetch Beck. A fire that had burned in her for months and months…until she’d banked it. Until the missions had become too dangerous and time-consuming to be brushed off as inconveniences to her research. She’d thrown herself at her work, because she’d had to – and then she’d been so good at it that it had started to become a kind of outlet for her grief and rage. She’d been swept up in a tide of busyness; the Companies’ goals of stemming the war had become her own.

And then she’d gotten swept up in Lance.

She felt sick and dizzy, as she stared down at the rubber mat between her sneakers, heart squeezing. When she thought of Beck now, it was with an ache, and a clench, and a grief mellowed by time and new experience. But she’d lost the fervor of trying to find him.

She’d all but abandoned him. While she fought monsters, and worked alongside a conduit, and fucked another man.

When she could, she stood, and walked straight to the library – a sad name for the concrete-walled space with the harsh lights; where metal shelves held some books, but mostly files, and metal tables offered uninviting places to sit and pore over them. A few computers sat along a bank on the far wall, and that was where she went.

Between possibly illegal searches on conjuring spells, pentagrams, and hell portals, she was slapped full in the face with a memory: Beck’s warm and woodsy library, a fire crackling in the hearth, ink-scented books spread out before her.

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