Ethnicity: Indeterminate.
Age: Estimate mid-to-late teens. Postadolescent.
Physical Characteristics:
Slightly underweight. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Skin characterized by some discoloration indicative of elemental exposure. Exhibits human protein markers and low body weight indicative of predominantly agrarian diet. Staining patterns on teeth consistent with consumption habits of local Grass cultures.
Distinguishing Physical Markings:
A recognizable
Cause of Death:
Survivors:
Note: Body will be cremated following lab processing.
Embassy City Waste Facility Assignment: Landfill
3
THE PIETÀ OF LA PURÍSIMA
Feelings are memories.
That’s what I’m thinking as I stand there in the Mission chapel, the morning of my birthday. It’s what the Padre says. He also says that chapels turn regular people into philosophers.
I’m not a regular person, but I’m still no philosopher. And either way, what I remember and how I feel are the only two things I can’t escape, no matter how much I want to.
No matter how hard I try.
For the moment, I tell myself not to think. I focus on trying to see. The chapel is dark but the doorway to outside is blindingly bright. That’s what morning always looks like in the chapel. The little light there prickles and stings my eyes.
Like in the Mission itself, in the chapel you can pretend that nothing has changed for hundreds of years, that nothing has happened. Not like in the Hole, where they say the buildings have fallen into ruins, and Sympa soldiers control the streets with fear, and you think about nothing but The Day, every day.
Los Angeles, that’s what the Hole used to be called. First Los Angeles, then the City of Angels, then the Holy City, then the Hole. When I was little, that’s how I used to think of the House of Lords, as angels. Nobody calls them alien anymore, because they aren’t. They’re familiar. We never see them, but we’ve never known a world without them, not Ro and me. I grew up thinking they were angels because back on The Day they sent my parents to heaven. At least, that’s what the Grass missionaries told me, when I was old enough to ask.
Heaven, not their graves.
Angels, not aliens.
But just because something comes from the sky doesn’t make it an angel. The Lords didn’t come here from the heavens to save us. They came from some faraway solar system to colonize our planet, on The Day. We don’t know what they look like inside their ships, but they’re not angels. They destroyed my family the year I was born. What kind of angel would do that?
Now we call them the House of Lords—and Ambassador Amare, she tells us not to fear them—but we do.
Just as we fear her.
On The Day, the dead dropped silently in their homes, never seeing what hit them. Never knowing anything about our new Lords, about the way they could use their Icons to control the energy that flowed through our own bodies, our machines, our cities.
About how they could stop it.
Either way, my family is gone. There was no reason for me to have survived. Nobody understood why I did.
The Padre suspected, of course. That’s why he took me.
First me, and then Ro.
I hear a sound from the far end of the chapel.
I squint, turning my back to the door.
The Padre has sent for me, but he’s late. I catch the eye of the Lady from the painting on the wall. Her face is so sad, I think she knows what has happened. I think she knows everything. She’s part of what General Ambassador to the Planet Hiro Miyazawa, the head of the United Embassies, calls the old ways of humanity. How we believed in ourselves—how we survived ourselves. What we looked up to, back when we thought there was someone up above.
Not something.
I look back to the Lady a moment longer, until the sadness surges and the pain radiates through me. It pulses from my temples and I feel my mind stumble, folding at the edge of unconsciousness. Something is wrong. It must be, for the familiar ache to come on so suddenly. I press my hand to my temple, willing it to stop. I breathe deep, until I can see clearly.
“Padre?”
My voice echoes against the wood and stone. It sounds as small as I am. An animal has lurched into my leg, one of many more entering the chapel, and my nostrils fill with smells—hair and hides and hooves, paint and mold and manure. My birthday falls on the Blessing of the Animals, which will begin just hours from now. Local Grass farmers and ranchers will come to have the Padre bless their livestock, as they have for three hundred years. It is Grass tradition, and we are a Grass Mission.
Appearing in the door, the Padre smiles at me, moving to light the ceremonial candles. Then his smile fades. “Where’s Furo? Bigger and Biggest haven’t seen him at all this morning.”
I shrug. I can’t account for every second of Ro’s day. Ro could be lifting all the dried cereal cakes out of Bigger’s emergency supplies. Chasing Biggest’s donkeys. Sneaking down the Tracks toward the Hole, to buy more parts for the Padre’s busted-up old pistola, shot only on New Year’s Eve. Meeting people he doesn’t want me to meet, learning things he doesn’t want me to know. Preparing for a war he’ll never fight with an enemy that can’t be defeated.
He’s on his own.
The Padre, preoccupied as always, is no longer paying attention to himself or to me. “Careful …” I catch his elbow, pulling him out of the way of a pile of pig waste. A near miss.
He clicks his tongue and leans down to chuck Ramona Jamona on the chin. “Ramona. Not in the chapel.” It’s an act—really, he doesn’t mind. The big pink pig sleeps in his chamber on cold nights, we all know she does. He loves Ro and me just as he does Ramona—in spite of everything we do and beyond anything he says. He’s the only father we have ever known, and though I call him the Padre, I think of him as my Padre.
“She’s a pig, Padre. She’s going to go wherever she wants. She can’t understand you.”
“Ah, well. It’s only once a year, the Blessing of the Animals. We can clean the floors tomorrow. All Earth’s creatures need our prayers.”
“I know.