Page 51 of Property of Prophet

“You fell from the Alaskan sky in a blaze of dying light. You have been here since, diminished and mortal. Aching in the joints every morning. Carrying the weight of what you were without any of the capacity left to use it.”

I keep my eyes on his face through every word.

“You are nothing now.” The voice is not cruel. Cruelty would require investment. “Less than nothing. An angel without grace, without wings, without purpose. Heaven will not forgive. It never will. The door that closed when you fell is not a door that opens again...” A fractional pause. “You know this. You have known it since the memory came back far enough to show you the shape of what you lost.”

“She lived...” Calix pauses, and Prophet moves closer to the glass. “That’s the part you keep leaving out. Tessa fucking lived.”

“And you fell.”

“I’d do it again.”

My chest tightens. “But you lost your immortality.”

“I’d do it again.”

“You lost your place in Heaven.”

Prophet’s voice drops. “She. Lived.”

The figure at the tree line tilts his head slightly. “Come with me. I offer you something Heaven will not... a new purpose. What remains of your grace, given willingly—”

“Fuck you.”

Prophet turns his head to look at me.

“What?” I say. “He’s pissing me off.”

For one completely inappropriate second, I swear Prophet nearly smiles.

Calix’s borrowed face remains perfectly still. “Come with me.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard my offer.”

“Don’t need to.”

“What remains of your grace could still—”

“I said... no.”

“You always were stubborn,” says Calix.

“I thought you said I was obedient.”

Twelve people in the dark, not moving, waiting for something to pass through the window or not pass through. The spruce at the tree line stand rigid. Above them, the sky is the absolute black of a January morning in interior Alaska, not a shade of gray in it yet, not a suggestion of dawn.

Prophet stands very still beside me. Hands open at his sides. Eyes on the tree line and nowhere else, and he says nothing.

Thirty seconds pass, then a minute. Bear presses harder against my leg.

Another minute.

The figure at the eastern tree line tilts his head at a listening angle, the posture of something waiting for a signal that isn’t arriving. The body he’s using sways very slightly, barely perceptible, the way a person sways when they’ve been standing in this kind of cold long enough that the body has started making involuntary adjustments to keep the blood moving. The man inside is still in there. Still feeling the temperature, whatever Calix is doing with him notwithstanding.

Prophet says nothing.

The twelve figures at the perimeter move. Not in panic or with any visible communication passing between them. The withdrawal happens the way the arrival did—in the synchronized, slightly too-deliberate manner of people whose timing is controlled from somewhere outside themselves. They step back into the trees, one after another, and the spaces where they stood return to nothing but dark ground and shadow.