Page 57 of Even Angels fall
But that’s not what bothers me the most.
No, what bothers me the most is the color in itself.
White. Archangel white.
I hate it. I hate it so much that it took me a minute to calm down when I saw the dresses.
My first reaction was wanting to destroy them, to burn them, to tear them down and to stain them.
I never wear white and there’s a good reason for it.
White istheircolor. It’s the color of their oppression.
It’s the color of my failure, too.
Not that I could have done any differently. I didn’t pick my bird form after all.
But it feels like I failed the expectations of my father.
But I also could be wrong.
By force of habit, the men and the women who took the mantle of an archangel were all above twenty, but there is nothing that says one can’t do it while being younger, and yet my father is still reigning when my little brother is eighteen, an age the country we settled in already consider as an adult.
It’s been centuries that the French decided eighteen was the adulthood age and gave the right to vote for people above that age, not that it really matters anymore. They don’t vote for much anymore. Everything is decided by the archangels council.
Or used to be.
Léandre’s message hasn’t stopped spinning in my head.
I’m sure that it wasn’t too late to save Léandre, but he sent that message to me a week ago, and his father had already been poisoned. I hope we can save Gabriel, but deep down, I have suspicions that it might be too late for him already.
What is even surprising is that no one has reported it. There is absolutely no news that has been displayed on the TV—I would have noticed after dinner over the week—or not even rumors.
It is both scary for Gabriel and for the world as we know it.
It also begs the question of who will be the new Gabriel. Léandre has been ruled out long ago because of his wings, but no one has really been trained to be the new Gabriel yet. He had been in place for only twenty-seven years, so there was still time and now I’m wondering which of Léandre’s cousins will take the mantle.
Will they have enough of a brain to keep their positions against my father? Or maybe, no, will they be smart enough to satisfy him enough for them not to disappear, either?
I’m getting ahead of myself. I can’t get scared for whoever will be the new Gabriel when I don’t even know if Gabriel is still alive.
I come back to the display on my bed.
Three perfectly white dresses.
I can’t think about them yet.
As I shuffle them to get them to fit in the wardrobe again, I feel that damn thong rubbing me the wrong way again.
Enough.
I make my way to the laundry room that is on the other side of the corridor.
The new clothes that were brought this morning were accompanied by a holo and a card that said:
“Little Devil,
As long as you call someone that’s already in the holo, no one can listen to your calls. There’s a laundry room on the other side of this corridor.
