Another stroke of her wings.
And another.
Of course, she was still under the big top. She couldn't just go up to escape. Rather, she had to go down.
Just not too far down...
She folded her wings against her body, letting herself fall, confident that she could gain height again with another beat of the leathery membranes. It was an exhilarating fall, a thrilling fall, excitement rushing through her, a frisson passing over her. Her time sense contracted again, to let her enjoy the rush, experience the headlong, overwhelming pull of gravity, what she'd feared for so long now what she craved the most.
She had no doubt that she could stop her fall before she hit—he had promised, after all, and she wasn't the first to have made a bargain with him. Thousands—millions—before her must have made similar deals; even if she herself didn't intend to keep it, he would have to hold up his end as long as he thought he would eventually get her soul.
The screams from the crowd had risen in pitch as her time sense had returned to normal, but now they were growing deeper again as she neared the ground—close enough now to see the spiral galaxies of sawdust here and there, the circular pits of elephant footprints, the cloud-freckles caused by a spilled bag of popcorn.
She swooped now, heading out the great tent's entrance, out into the circus ground proper, out into the stinging light of day.
And then, at once, she began to rise higher and higher and higher and higher, beating her wings furiously, gaining as much altitude as she could. Soon she was far above the big top. She longed to look down, to see the fairgrounds from this new perspective, see the trailers, the animal cages, the horizontal circle of the merry-go-round, the vertical circle of the Ferris wheel. But she couldn't. She had to concentrate, just like when she was on the high wire, allowing no distractions, no stray thoughts.
Another beat of the wings, flying higher and higher and—
Pain.
Incredible pain—as though she'd hit a sheet of glass, hit the ceiling of the world.
No farther, said a voice in her head, a voice with a strange accent, a voice like liquid metal.
But she had to go higher—she had to catch the eye of God. She beat her wings again, and felt her face flatten—but not back into its original, human form. No, it was pressing against a transparency; there was no way to fly higher.
It's too close to Him, said the same voice, answering her unasked question.
She wanted to beat her fists against the transparency, but she had no fists—only elongated fingers supporting membranous wings. If she could just get God's attention—
You're not trying to cheat me, are you? said the splashing metallic voice in her head.
Her breathing was ragged from fighting so hard to break through the transparency. “No,” she gasped. “No, I'm not.”
I have a confession, he said. I lied when I said Carlo had turned me down; I lie a lot. He did take the deal, but he, too, tried to break it.
“And so you let him fall?” The words were forced out; her lungs were raw.
He didn't fall, said the voice. He jumped. He thought if he jumped, then the deal would be broken. Oh, yes, he would die, but his soul would go up, not down. A pause. The irony was too much for me to resist: for one who had come so close to touching the heavens to now not even be able to stand—a perfect living hell.
“No,” said Angela, the words a hoarse whisper. “No, please—not that. Don't make me fall.”
Of course not, splashed the voice. Of course not.
Angela breathed a sigh of relief.
For you, something different.
She was hit by an explosion of hot air, like the exhalation of a blast furnace, air so hot that sweat evaporated from her skin as soon as it beaded up. The wind slapped her like an open-palmed hand, pushing her down, down, down. Its impact had slammed her wings against her body, had flattened her little pink skirt against her thighs, had, she was sure, plastered her bat-ears flat against her skull once more. She tried to unfurl the wings, spreading her arms, splaying her protracted fingers, fingers as long as her legs. But the wind continued to blow, hot as hell, and she found herself tumbling, head over heels. Instinct took over, and instead of trying to extend her arms, she drew them in now to protect her face, her torso. Soon she was only a few meters above the ground, a ball of tightly wound limbs being pushed laterally through the air.
No, no. She had to fight her instincts. It was like being on the high wire. Do what your eyes tell you to do, and you'll fall for sure; the human mind wasn't made for such heights, such perspectives. She forced her arms to unfurl, forced the wings to try once more to catch the air, and—
Such pain, pain so sharp it made her wish her spinal cord was severed.
The wings were burning now, sheets of flame attached to her elongated, bony fingers. She could feel the membranes crisping, reducing to ash. Her long digits raked the air, but there was nothing much spread between them now to catch it—just a few singed and tattered pieces of skin. Incredibly, her clothes remained intact—or, perhaps not so incredibly, for all circus clothing had to be flame retardant...
She curled her sticklike fingers, as if clawing for purchase—but there was nothing but air, blisteringly hot, a wind from Hades propelling her along past the freak show, haunted faces looking up, past the arcade, children agape, past the fortune teller's tent, the line of suckers somehow parting just in time to permit her passage barely above their heads, farther and farther still, toward—
—toward the Ferris wheel, it rotating in one plane, she tumbling head over heels in a perpendicular plane.
She'd thought for sure that she would slam into the spokes of the Ferris wheel, knocking herself unconscious, but that didn't happen. Instead, she found herself reaching out instinctively with her feet, and hanging like the bat she'd become from one of the spokes, and—
No.
No, he could not be that cruel, that wicked...
But, if he could not, who could be?
It was as though her ankles were pierced through, like Christ's, and yet not like Christ's, for hers were joined now by a small axle, a spindle upon which she hung, rotating along with the great wheel, always facing down, pointing head-first toward the ground.
She thought briefly of a butterfly, pinned on a collector's sheet. He was a collector, too, of course...
The wheel rotated on, and she hung from it, a macabre bauble, with skeletal fingers that once had supported flight membranes now hanging limp, like the boughs of a dead willow.
He had won, of course. Angela imagined he always won—and, she supposed, always would win. And, as she hung upside down, a pendant, she thought of her Poppa, and her fear of falling, and of failing him. No, things hadn't turned out as she'd hoped, but, still, this wasn't so bad; the old fears were indeed dead.
The wheel continued to turn. She felt sure it would always turn; no fireman could cut her free, no ladder would ever reach her. She rather suspected that the devil did not leave fingerprints, that she—indeed, the whole damned wheel, and its other occupants, whom she caught only horrid glimpses of—could only be seen when the lighting was just so, when it was not quite dawn, or just past dusk, when you weren't really looking.
She was up high now, the wheel having rotated her to her topmost position, the zenith of the cycle, the pinnacle of her punishment. Here, facing down, looking at the ground, at the hard, unrelenting earth—the crust over the underworld, the veneer over the furnace from which the wind that had propelled her along had doubtless come—here, it was frightening, for if the spindle broke, if her ankles slipped off the axle, an axle greased with her own blood, she would plummet face first to the hard, hard ground.
But that wouldn't happen. It wouldn't ever happen.
The wheel continued its rotation, with Angela always pointing down. At the nadir of the cycle she was indeed rather close to the ground, the ground that had shattered Carlo's spine, the ground that she had feared for so long.
But then she started upward again.
Had Poppa seen any of it? Had Momma? Had Carlo looked up long enough to see her transformation, her fall, her flight, her capture? Or had it all happened somewhere outside of human perception; certainly, she, just nine when it had occurred, hadn't seen anything unusual when Carlo fell—jumped—from the high wire.
Poppa would now have to do what he'd always feared—bring an outsider into the act, take on someone new to be the pinnacle of the pyramid.
She hoped whoever it was would look after Carlo.
The wheel took her down once more, bringing her close again to the ground.
It really was a comfort knowing that she was never going to hit it.
* * *
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Robert J. Sawyer, Fallen Angel
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