Chains of smoke rose from the lavender candle I held. I was in front. David followed Ed, who trailed me. Both were still inside the office, the simulacrum. The old man and the lady remained in the office above, barricading and hoping. The Five we were, messengers of Gar, lost in a typhoon, there was no warning. The rain came down in triplets from roof beams outside the safe house, plink, plink, plink. The sound was like a bell, water hitting the cobbles in the yard. Around their landing places, straight aligned like Orion’s belt, other dots started appearing in the red light of dusk as the sun set into the sea in the west. The time was half past seven. Two minutes later the metronome had turned to a drumroll, the dots disappeared, and all the world was painted in shades of grey. The Seine formed in the yard, eroding the Collinsias' dirt, washing them away. The flow tugged at the bottoms of fenceposts, trees, the road out front drew its banks up to the first stair, lapping at the second. The car had been moved blocks down the road by Ed hours earlier, hidden in a lilac patch where the blue coats could find it, abandoned. Pattering on the roof, then battering. In the west the sun had been replaced with wind, blotted out just minutes early by a storm. There was no time left. The sun had been pushed down. We flew through the vestibule into the street. I grabbed only the diary, the transcription, and my hair. The latter I grabbed as I saw the timing of it all, the torrent cast down in the final hour, the flood of Zinsudra, of Noah, of Gar. The journal will try to stop you, son. It will try to convince you it would be better given up willingly. Yes, you told me. It was true. The street lamps cast solid cones of light down to the ground. The current ran right, downhill. We followed it east and soon northeast up the peninsula, to the school. The clouds churned over the tops of buildings. I got a glimpse with each street we passed going north of a towering pillar of water ten thousand feet tall rising from the ocean to the very highest clouds, their bottoms reaching out through cracks in the swiftly moving lower layers. The tower was the grey of week-dead flesh, spiraling on itself with unfathomable power. The walls rippled with the force of the spin, tearing chunks off in ephemeral mist. The road was a tributary of a downward facing avenue where we rushed down half as fast as its waters, our steps lost in reflective black at our ankles. Above our heads the oceans poured down from total black, clouds like a starless night, sky covered by a black bowler hat and ocean dressed in a blue coat. The old man slowed us, drudging through the rapids bubbling white on the bases of streetlamps and stairs. The only dry place I had left was my mouth on account of the saltwater in the air. The rain had started clean. The clouds had been spent by then, all that remained was the cataract and the solid umbrella of ocean it had created over the city, constantly falling and being remade with seawater. I was an infantryman, not a sailor. This is the only memory of sea battle I have. My crew ran and slid through Poseidon’s eye, his tears wetting our boots. The school stretched away from us down hill. A flash came to my mind. I would never see Mary again. I was sure of it. We slammed against the front door until it buckled and we ran inside. I ushered them through the school, haunted by the man in the caretaker’s closet who disappeared when the door was opened, past Arthur Coen’s classroom. The floor was wet but not flowing, our steps echoed, slapping against the eerily empty halls. The rain pounded on the walls around us. I opened my office door, unlocked. I had locked it when I left the previous day. I paid it no mind, it only occurs to me now. I found the chink in the panelling and hauled the false floor aside, letting a meager dribble fall down into the room below. I’d never used it, though I suppose they’d wanted me to. I hadn’t been back since my initiation. I climbed down, David and Ed followed after, Mauve and Harrison stayed above as watchmen. Harrison passed me down a blue bottle, full but only of a few drops. I asked if it would be enough. It would be enough to kill the whole city, he said. More than enough for fifty such containers. I opened the tunnel door, water now flowing in at a steady rate and down into the tunnel. I turned and took a candlestick from the desk and lit it with a match laying on the wax pan. Chains of smoke rose from the lavender candle I held. I was in front. David followed Ed, who trailed me. Both were still inside the office, the simulacrum. The old man and the lady remained in the office above, barricading and hoping. They sealed the hole behind us. As soon as David was in the tunnel he closed the door behind him, leaving us in all but complete darkness save the candle’s flickering. We slowed then. None of us could have told the others why, but we slowed. Perhaps it was fear. Each step brought us closer to the stomach of the whale, the den of beasts we sought to smoke out. There was no protection, no guarantee of return, no shield against whatever imagined torment we had created in our minds. Had we lost already? Was the wind of fate blowing after all, blowing at our backs, pushing us toward death? Had the soldiers of the 93rd felt the same as they awoke that night to a blazing mound, loading their rifles for a battle they could only guess would come? How many men had reckoned the truth? Were they better for it? Had Marcel survived for his foresight? Was my own to be as useful? The world is filled with men who survived by thinking this way and I am one of them. We snuck through the tunnel, for each of us felt the eerie sense that it was necessary, that our lives were too precious and good to be thrown away by rushing into a trap, whether we were being led into one or not. Rippling water was the only sound. Thoughts started in my mind of possible endings to our mission, none of them good. The mind is easily twisted by the hands of mystery, the unknown. This is why men disguise their ignorance for themselves. I saw it in Morocco, boys eager to fight, eager to serve, all to cover the idea of it. We didn’t know war, we had no inkling of war, we pretended to love it. The three of us had no such protection. The truth was too immediate. This is why men send boys to war. Boys don’t know war. Men, some men, learn war and hate it enough to send boys in their place. You would think the men would abandon war altogether, but the truth is that war sticks to a man until it kills him. War is not a coat. We had no boys to send in our place, though we knew enough to hate it, and so the men left the bodies and conferred with themselves. I could tell you precisely what the other two were thinking: exactly the same as me. No one else would do it. We were the reinforcements. I came to the door. I handed the candlestick to Ed. I stood and stared at the two men. There was pity in their eyes. They had chosen to be there, they had enlisted of their own volition. I was drafted. I held the door handle. Most of all, they knew I had nothing left to lose, nothing but myself, and I, at the bottom of my barrel, was being forced to scrape the bottom and throw the damp shavings into the fire. I told them to crouch in the shadows. I opened the door. The laboratory was the same, the sickening smell of formaldehyde, the blinding sterility of the walls, the floor. All of it was the same, all of it save the first marble table, which was empty. Two women remained and one was gone. The far door was closed and the room was clear, so I waved Ed and David in. The only sound was the rainwater pooling at our feet, expanding out by degrees into the white openness between us and the empty bed. All was silent and still as the three of us stood shoulder to shoulder, staring at it. We dared not speak, though we wished so desperately to scream. One of the women was gone and they had but one place to take her, deeper in, into the heart. They knew I would come. This storm was the call they had me wait for. Did they expect my defiance, my guests, too? Charles, I need you to breathe, alright? Calm down. That’s it, now wipe your tears. Continue. I shifted my gaze to the far door. My eye could almost see through it, the chamber within with its rows of pews, all filled now, awaiting my arrival as midwife to a devilmother. I stepped forward, watching my body inch closer, not sure what laid next. My body knew I wasn’t coming back. There was no anger, only fear. Mind-warping, body-failing fear. My knees gave out. My comrades caught me before I could make a sound. They wordlessly stood me up and walked to the shelves on either side of the door, flattening themselves against them. I stood, a lone scarecrow, before the door. David and Ed nodded with pity in their eyes. I took the candlestick from Ed. Once again the doorknob was in my hand. Water soaked the mortar between the bricks in the floor, one fast moving line ran into my shoe and split around it. Above me sat the jar on the highest shelf, the two-headed boy waving his little fingers at me. I twisted the knob. I pulled the door. The room was dark but for the lit chandelier hanging above the cobble pit. I dripped seawater from my shirt, my hair. The pews closest to me were filled with cloaked figures, shrouded in darkness, encircling the pit. The other side was empty. Only one stood, Abraham, who was just a step ahead of me. It occurred to me that he was within arm’s reach of David on the other side of the wall. The pit was no longer empty. A woman laid on her back under the chandelier, still as the stones. Abraham took the candlestick from me. The scent of lavender left my nose, replaced with gunpowder, sulphur and flesh. I closed the door behind me, risking my eyes away for only a moment, though the moment could have been a year to me. In my shifting, I felt two masses move in my pockets. In the left I had the poison vial, and in the right was the diary. I hadn’t given either of them the diary. There was no time now. If all was well they would be on the women now, snuffing out two of the three sisters, for there was no time to transport them out. All that remained was the third. Abraham led me by candlelight between the pews, the silence rising with the low hum of a hundred voices, steadily growing around me. I had become entombed in a womb of sound, the rumble shaking my head, pulsating as I passed each row. We stood at the lip, looking down upon the birthing table. The mother was asleep, legs toward me, toward the crowd. The hum grew, echoing off the vaulted ceiling into the center. My body vibrated, the ground vibrated. The cobbles holding the mother shook, slowly coming apart, the pit’s shape gradually rounding, settling. The mother sank further in, until her back laid between the stones, her legs raised and spread. Abraham turned to me and nodded, backing away. I was out of time. I lowered myself, sitting on the lip, feet dangling, then dropped. The walls were then up to my navel; I was encased in the alley between the pit walls and the cobbles, staring at the mother. Abraham, towering above us, went to the opposite side and knelt, hands outstretched, and lifted her head from the stones, cradling it. Her eyes flickered, moving under the lids, then fluttered open. Her peaceful rest turned to revulsion, struggling, screaming, but the settled stones held her in place. Abraham’s hold loosened and he smiled his dead smile. Her screams grew into anguish as her stomach convulsed, the skin stretching from within. She bent her head down at me and pleaded for my help. It was then I returned to my body. I steadied my face before it could give tears. I took a breath of the heavy air and held out my hands. Her head bent back in pain and I heard, through the ever-increasing hum, a cry, like that of a mourning dove, creaking out from within her. Her stomach sagged and her flesh stretched, revealing a black, crowning head. The scalp was layered with black, wispy down, slick and matted at all but the ends. Another inhuman yell from the mother and a pair of dark brown, dazzling eyes appeared, open and peering out at me, followed closely by a button nose and pink mouth, both of and surrounded by fair skin. The rest, a body of short, brown and white feathers and skinny wings slithered out into my outstretched hands. It wriggled in my arms as I held it against myself, writhing against my touch. The last sister, the winged child. Her head faced up, the eyes now closed, mouth open and crying. The eyes opened to me and the writhing stopped. Her legs were fair and thick with baby fat, free of feathers, though they ended in talons in place of toes. She looked at me and opened her mouth wide, her cries stopped. She was hungry. My mind showed me a memory, long forgotten, of a seven year old Charles Duval holding his baby brother in his arms, the child’s hands grasping for his face, the little legs wiggling with glee at the attention he was receiving. The child’s legs wiggled. She cooed. The sound was soft as a meadow in my ears. A tear fell down my cheek and onto hers. I rocked her as the mother’s cries died out and the humming failed, leaving nothing but her soft sounds. Abraham walked around behind me and I lifted myself up onto the lip once more, careful to keep balance. I stood, still holding her close, as David and Ed burst through the door holding bloody knives. They yelled to me, finish it, and I ran through the opposite rows of empty pews to the far door, opened it, and grabbed the poison from my pocket. I stamped the top pane of glass in and tipped in a few drops, then rushed into the red darkness to find the second container, the child still cradled in my arm, now crying in distress. I found the second fifty meters ahead and cracked the top, pouring in the vial’s middle third. I heard footsteps behind me and the screams of a bloody battle in the other chamber. I reached the final tank by accident, reeling my foot into its side in the now complete darkness. I heard the glass shatter with the impact and the fluid flowed onto the floor. There was nothing left to pour the poison into, so I cursed at myself and dumped it blindly onto the ground. There was nothing else to be done. I looked behind me to see two silhouettes chasing me down the hallway. I stood facing them. The child had stopped crying, she had stopped after the first container, and begun cooing again. She began to wiggle her legs in delight, I could feel them against my chest. Suddenly, I felt nothing in my arm. In her place there was a gust of wind, then the sound and sight of two silhouettes attempting and failing to flee in terror. They fell one at a time in the redness of the room, swiping at a flying blur, and were silent. Then, another gust of wind and the wiggling of little legs returned. Though the light was too low to see her, I knew it was her. I ran back to the door, stepping around two cloaked bodies and into the birth chamber. David and Ed stood, fronts covered in crimson, fending off unarmed cloaks over a mounting pile of bodies in the outer ring of the room. I made use of the chandelier’s light to check the child, who was looking up at me with big, glistening eyes, wings newly reddened. I ran to my companions, kicking a cloak in the back to make way for myself. I continued on into the laboratory, where two mothers lay with split bellies, dead. I covered the child’s eyes and she cooed for playtime. I called after David and Ed, who followed me inside, closing the door behind them. They began to tilt the left side shelf over to barricade the door, and before I could stop them the two-headed boy toppled to the ground, jar smashing into a million pieces on the bricks. We went into the tunnel, scurried up and out into the lower office, where I punched open the hatch and made my way up. Harrison and Mauve were there, hunkered behind the overturned desk, and stood, Mauve crying as we emerged. The child was resting under my arm, cooing at me. The others planted their eyes on her, Mauve nearly collapsing at the sight. There was no time for debate. Ed sealed the hatch. We hauled the desk from its place leaning on the door to the back of the room, its top facing down to block the way behind us. We splashed through the hallways, retracing our steps to the entrance. Running down the main vein, we were stopped dead in our tracks. A door opened ahead. I knew it well, I had been inside it many times. Coen’s classroom. He emerged, the bottom of his cloak darkened, tracking a snail’s trail of red ripples through the water. His eyes were the same as ever. They were Mary’s eyes. He looked at me with the simplest disappointment, as if upset at his unruly child. In his mind I was.

“Charles, dear boy, where are you going?”

“Get out of the way, Coen! I don’t want to hurt you!”

“But, Charles, you already hurt me. You’ve hurt me down to my very core with this… this nonsense! Haven’t you learned anything from me?”

“I’ve learned everything I need to know. Your group is responsible for the death of my family! You! Why did it have to be you?” Tears started streaming down my cheeks. “Why did it have to be you?”

“Charles, it was always meant to be me, just as it was always meant to be you. Our families are tied irrevocably, tied by fate.”

“Tied by this!” I took the diary from my soaking pocket. It was bone dry. Coen looked confused.

“Anne?”

“Bastard!” I rushed toward him before my friends could catch me, treading water now ankle deep. Coen reached into his cloak and retrieved a sheriff’s short barrel, five shot revolver. He pointed it at me with both hands, raising it to eye level. I stopped in my tracks. The child cooed.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, dear boy. I need you to give me the beast so we can continue as planned. I need you to end this madness, Charles, of your own free will.”

“Madness? Who do you think you are? What could you possibly gain from destroying humanity? Don’t you care what happens to your family? To Mary?”

“My family died a long time ago, Charles. I have no family. All I’ve got is a means to an end, just as you’ve got means to an end there, hanging from your arm. I have half a mind to let you go, to see you let it free. Are you sure you aren’t on our side?”

I seethed in place. WIth a gun drawn I couldn’t act out my body’s wish to kill him right then and there, and it shook with the effort of staying still.

“Charles, your life is not a uniquely tragic tale. Pick a man off the street and he’ll tell you a story of how someone wronged him, some other man motivated only by selfishness, pride, anger. Pick one. Pick all of them! Any story starring a human being is a sad one, beginning, middle and end. Please, dear boy, we only wish to correct the mistake. We will draw out the infection, together, until only you and I remain. Then we will join the others, completing our task. Join me, Charles, Join me and we will cleanse the world.”

“I like this place.” I couldn’t understand the words coming out of my mouth. “I like it. There’s a sense of justice here. Every wrong is repaid with a right and I can’t see the payout on mine if I burn it to the ground.” My heart fluttered. I looked down to see a pair of brown eyes, misty with joyous tears. “You’re on your own, Coen, and this time it was your fault.”

“Ha!” he yelped, a mad fury appearing in his eyes. “Alone? Do you remember how it feels to be alone, my dear boy? Do you wish at times to be alone again?” He pointed the gun away from me, tilting the short barrel to my left, then swung to my right. “No need to be alone, Charles. I’ll stop at one. Choose. Choose one or I’ll kill them all. I have enough bullets for all of you! Go on! Choose!”

“Charles!” David said from my left. “I have a spot waiting for me on the other side, I’ll make it easy for you. It has to be me.”

“No, David,” I sputtered. “Wait a minute, just wait-”

“Take me!” Mauve yelled through tears. “I’ll warm your seat for you, dear!”

“Ha!” Ed kicked water to my right. “None of you are taking away my chance to see Anne again!”

“Wait a minute!” I yelled. “What’s stopping you from killing us all, even if I do choose?”

Coen’s laughter filled the hall. He raised the revolver to the ceiling and shot. A pinhole opened, and a fountain of water dropped down from above.

“Four bullets left. That’s enough insurance to guarantee your life, Charles. Now who will it be?”

Harrison stepped ahead of me, his back straight and proud. When he spoke, his voice was clear and full, as it had once been. The man had come back to the body.

“You vermin killed my friend. You didn’t even have the guts to kill him with a gun, you had to ambush him with a god. What weasel of a man sends a god to do his killing? I was fifteen years old when I killed my first confederate, looked into the whites of his eyes and shot him dead. You never shot a man in your life! You hold that pistol like a child! I’d say shoot me, had you the eye to do it! Axell would have gutted you with a boot spur faster than you could hit a-”

Bang. Bang, bang, bang.

The old man fell like a séquoia. We rushed Coen, who turned to flee down the hall, terror enveloping him. Writhing on the ground under the weight of the other three he was a child, crying for life. It was absurd, really. I had them flip him over onto his back, where he realized the child laid comfortably in my arms, giggling. I whispered into her ear, and that was the last thing he ever heard.

We hauled Harrison, bloody and dead, uphill toward the Duvals’ street, where we cleared the lilac to retrieve Ed’s car. The storm was still raging, the wind whipping rain like stinging nettles into my uncovered face. We loaded him into the back, the Duvals sitting on either side of him and myself next to the driver. David pulled the vinyl covering from the back up to Ed, who battered it down at the front, shielding us from the rain. I don’t know how long we drove. We lost the storm, the city disappearing behind us, the sky opening in twinkling indigo above vast fields of grass, rippling in the wind, up hills and down valleys. We rode the road down the steepest of them, which led down into a vast plain dotted with homesteads surrounded by sprouting fields and clumps of cattle, sheep and pigs.

“Salinas,” David said. “Salinas will hold us”