Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,22

from the dead angel in the Devil’s Throat. The upper walls were lined with thousands of Russian, Byzantine, and Eastern Orthodox manuscripts collected over the course of generations, most of them relocated to the Hermitage during the cold war. Were it not for Evangeline and the urgency he felt to find her, he could imagine spending a lifetime exploring this room.

A short man in a brown wool suit greeted them. “Vera Petrovna Varvara,” the man said, his reedy voice filled with weariness. After the night shift in the archives, he was clearly glad to have human contact.

Handing him the tiny golden plate, Vera said, “From the permanent collection, please.”

“You have clearance for this?” the man said, examining first the gold plate and then Vera.

Vera lifted the sleeve of her dress and presented the man with her forearm. He took a pen from his pocket, switched it on, and, in one quick gesture, scanned the chip implanted in her arm. A beep confirmed Vera’s identity.

“Very well, then,” the man said and, turning on his heel, he disappeared behind the desk and into a darkened room. It took nearly ten minutes for him to return, leading Verlaine to imagine that he had become lost in the folds of shelving, each one connected into the other like the bellows of an accordion. He was growing impatient. Maybe the whole idea of coming to the Hermitage had been a mistake to begin with. Evangeline could be food for vultures before the archivist got back to them. Finally the man arrived with a large manila envelope in his hands.

“This was deposited here in 1984,” the man said tersely as he handed Vera the envelope.

Vera slid her finger under the seal and opened it. A reel of 8mm film slid onto the table.

“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid,” Verlaine said, “And even then, 8mm was retro.”

“Eighty-four,” Bruno said, picking up the envelope and looking for something that might explain it. His voice was hollow, and Verlaine knew that something about the year loomed in his memory, immense and solid as a stone monument to a massacre. “That was the year Evangeline’s mother was murdered.”

Biowaste storage facility, Grigori Laboratoies, Ekaterinburg, Russia

Evangeline arched her back until the thick straps of leather tightened over her chest. She tried to move her legs, but they, too, were strapped down. She couldn’t even turn her head more than an inch. A dull pounding behind her temples caused her vision to blur. She closed her eyes and opened them again, trying to regain focus, willing herself to understand where she was and how she had gotten there, pinned like a butterfly to a board. Her memory held shapes she couldn’t decipher—forms of sensation that she felt but could not identify well enough to name: the whine of a jet engine; the prick of a needle; the cinching of buckles against her skin. Making out the sterile wash of white paint on concrete, she guessed that she was in a hospital or, perhaps, in a prison. The strange pulsing sound took on the pitch and tempo of a voice before dissolving into a rain of static. Whoever was speaking could have been nearby, but she heard the voice as if it were at the far end of a tunnel, distant and echoing.

The noise suddenly ceased and, as if a door had opened in her mind, memories rushed into her consciousness. She remembered the rooftop, the black-winged angel, the duel. She remembered the fleeting freedom, that brief but exhilarating buoyancy she’d felt before her surrender. She remembered Verlaine, standing nearby, helpless. She remembered what it had felt like to be touched by him. She remembered the heat of his skin against hers as he ran his finger along her cheek, and the shiver that went through her as he touched the delicate skin that joined her wings to her back.

And then her thoughts were driven even further back to the only time in her life that she had felt as frightened as she did now. It was 1999, New Year’s Eve in New York City. While the rest of the world celebrated the coming of the new millennium, Evangeline was caught in her own private apocalypse. She found a park bench and sat in Central Park, too stunned to move, watching the crowds passing by. The angelic creatures had blended into the population with such skill that—despite the eerie colored light that surrounded them—they appeared to be entirely human.