Angelopolis A Novel Page 0,62
Siberia.”
Verlaine said, “Leave it to the Russians to have an angel gulag.”
“We are taking her for observation,” Yana said. “You’re lucky I agreed to allow you to accompany me.”
“And you think that you’re capable of getting information out of Eno?” Verlaine asked.
“There’s no other way,” Yana said. “Once Eno is taken into custody in Siberia, she’ll be forced to talk.”
“Have you witnessed such questioning before?” Verlaine asked Yana.
“The specialists at the prison have very particular methods of extracting information from their prisoners,” Yana replied, her voice quiet.
Verlaine moved through a mental list of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, trying to shake the feeling that he’d landed in an alternate universe, a kind of strange, lifelike game that was both real and unreal at the same time. He was on a train moving through the vast and frozen Siberian tundra in pursuit of a half-human, half-angel creature that he now knew—after ten years of doubt—he loved. After all that he’d seen he had thought he couldn’t be surprised anymore. He’d been wrong. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.
St. Ivan Island, Black Sea, Bulgaria
Azov’s chopper embodied just the sort of mixture of cultural references that inspired scholars like Vera to go to work every day. According to Sveti, the Vietnam-era machine had been lost by the Americans—abandoned by a crew after it crash-landed in Cambodia—and ended up in Azov’s possession by dint of various trades and handshakes over the past three decades. It had been confiscated by Communists, repaired in the USSR, and sent on to their Bulgarian allies during the seventies. By the time Azov got his hands on it, the cold war had ended and Bulgaria had joined NATO. Now, watching Sveti grip the cyclic control between her knees, Vera wondered what kind of realigned world children born today would grow up to live in.
Azov gave a nod and Sveti flipped switches, checking the monitors on the dash before taking them into the air. They lifted away from the earth, shouldering the wind. Vera watched the land recede as they climbed higher, the contours of the lighthouse losing verticality, the sea growing uniform until the water below seemed little more than an adamantine sheet against the muted shoreline. The sun was setting, casting the world in a darkening purple light. She strained to see the fishing villages nestled into the cove, the squat gray shacks like rocks basking in the rarefied light. The beaches were deserted—no umbrellas blooming from the sand, not a boat floating in the bay, only endless stretches of rocky coastline. Vera tried to imagine the settlements buried under cubic tons of dark water, the remnants of ancient civilizations frozen in the suffocating chill of a lightless underworld.
The helicopter tipped as Sveti flew them over a stretch of shoreline and then cut inland, the blades overhead banging their slow and steady rhythm. They swooped over baked clay rooftops, narrow highways, and empty fields, leaving the Black Sea behind.
Suddenly, from the corner of her eye, Vera saw something else flying in the distance. For a moment it seemed little more than the silhouette of a hang glider hovering in the air, a slash of red against the purple horizon. Then a second figure appeared, then a third, until a swarm surrounded the helicopter, their red wings beating in the air, their eyes fixed as they circled inward.
“You didn’t mention that St. Ivan Island is being guarded by Gibborim,” Vera said, glancing at Azov.
“It isn’t—they must have followed our jeep from Sozopol,” Sveti said, steering the helicopter inland as one of the creatures swung against the windscreen, its red wing brushing the plastic and leaving a streak of oil behind.
“We can’t fight them up here,” Azov said under his breath. “We’ll have to outrun them. We’ll have help on the ground if we can just make it to the airport.”
“Hold on,” Sveti said, as she manipulated the stick, swerving the helicopter.
It swayed and jerked, dipping like a ship on choppy water, but the creatures stayed with them. Suddenly the craft faltered and tipped, throwing Vera forward against her shoulder straps. She looked out the window and saw that two Gibborim had attached themselves to the runners. With their wings open, they were dragging the helicopter down toward the rocky shore.
Sveti bit her lip and bore onto the controls. It wasn’t until they approached the electrical wires and Sveti was angling the runners toward a bank of transmission towers that Vera realized their pilot intended to