By Vivian Moira Valentine

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01

Lady Equinox lounged elegantly across the loveseat on the back wall of the study – for values of “elegant” that included “holding a cocktail called a ‘Texas Highway Murder’.” It was a concoction she had invented herself, and other than a base of usually vodka she guarded its recipe like a dragon guarding its hoard. It helped her claim that the delicate balance of ingredients was, chemically speaking, technically non-alcoholic. As evidence, Lady Equinox submitted that she was on her third and hardly slurring at all. Her wife, Joan II, reminded her that she seldom slurred when intoxicated, as she deliberately over-enunciated her words while under the influence, and went on to suggest that this was in fact the only occasion in which her words were reliably clear. Lady Equinox declared this evidence inadmissible on grounds of hearsay and overruled Her Holiness.

“You can’t overrule us,” Joan said, refilling her inkwell. “We happen to be Pope, you know.”

Equinox’s pale brow furrowed. “You’re a Discordian. You’re all popes.”

“Even so,” Joan said. “Besides, don’t you have work to do? The city council wanted you to look into that haunted Metro line.”

“The city council,” Equinox said, checking an app on her phone, “is not actually a legitimate governing body. Also it hasn’t seen fit to deposit my retainer yet, and until it does I intend to enjoy The Chilling Tales of Vampironica and drink.”

Joan gave her wife a tolerant smile and turned back to her work, an illuminated copy of the 2018 Tax Code. She insisted it would be more clear with the addition of art nouveau renditions of the traditional tarot. The Tower featured prominently, along with the Nine of Staves and Seven of Swords. Lady Equinox respected her wife’s endeavors as a subtle magical working, as well as an educational service. At least one of them was productively engaged. Taking another quick look at her bank app, Equinox muttered a quiet curse against the city council and clicked on the “radio,” actually a multimedia streaming device encased in an antique wooden and brass chassis. The speakers crackled as the NoVox app loaded the next episode of her favorite podcast. A tinny fanfare played, and then…

“My brothers and sisters,” came the bright, clear voice of a man whose hand was never more than four inches from someone else’s wallet, “welcome to the Hour of Salvation!”

Lady Equinox narrowed her eyes at the radio. “This,” she said, “is not The Chilling Adventures of Vampironica.”

“My friends,” the man in the radio continued as if he hadn’t heard, which of course he couldn’t, “I have come to you bearing a message from the Outer Worlds! The hour of repentance is at hand! As time winds down, now is the time to join the Eternal Moment in the Body of His Chosen!”

The voice droned on in that wise for a few more minutes, and Equinox’s expression grew steadily more cross. She didn’t like apocalyptic preaching in the best of times, and this was during her personal time! Equinox set her glass down on the sideboard with an irritated clink and stopped the stream. She sat on the couch with one hand in her lap, ticking off a count on the other.

“It’s too early,” she said at last. “There’s not supposed to be a new prophet for another eight months.”

“Then he’s a fake?” Joan asked.

“Or things are happening faster,” Equinox said. “Either way, this can’t go on.”

“Sounds like you’ve got work to do after all.”

Equinox scowled for a moment, then pushed herself off the loveseat. She snapped her fingers and cast a quick cleansing spell, ridding her body of the alcohol she’d sworn she hadn’t been putting in it, and promised herself someone would pay for that. Then Lady Equinox, satirical aristo, radical, libertine, techgnostic troubleshooter and transgender witch bitch, announced that she was going to church.

02

Lady Equinox raced along the highway beneath the sick yellow sky, dodging the rusted hulks of abandoned cars. Her bike, a haphazardly maintained Takuro Locust, sported a millimeter-wave radar that fed a three-dimensional diagram of potential obstacles to her helmet’s head’s-up display, a necessity for navigating the roads at her preferred speeds. Maps of the highway wreckage were available for download, but they were updated too infrequently to account for the aftermath of explosive neighborhood battles.

As she tore across the highway, Equinox tapped the Homunculus app on her phone. The screen displayed an ultraviolet loading page. Then a chibi raven’s face popped up, looking adorably cross.

“You haven’t opened me in three days!” Equinox’s e-familiar said.

“Shush, you. You said you needed a break,” she replied. “Now I need you to run me a search. There’s a new church popped up and it’s giving me the creepies as well as the crawlies.”

Equinox fed Zoltan some data, and the screen went dim as the familiar ran the search. After about a minute, a browser window popped up on her HUD, showing the sort of baby’s first HTML website common to a certain sort of religious body. The Church of the Temporal Pentecost, which was apparently founded two weeks into the future, had set itself up downtown via an aggressive act of squatting. The website prominently displayed an ominous looking countdown timer. It was four days and sixteen hours plus change to… well, whatever. Something suitably apocalyptic, she assumed. The website offered little else, other than links to downloadable sermons and a PayPal account.

Clicking her tongue, Equinox told the familiar to route her to the church’s address and gunned the Locust’s engine. Time was running down.

03

The Church of the Temporal Pentecost had set itself up beneath the double-sloped mansard roof of a former fast-food restaurant on the edge of a No One’s Land. The sign, which had once sported a garish red and yellow corporate logo, was now topped by a large cracked clock face. Someone far less clever than they thought they were had set the hands five minutes to midnight. The blown-out plate glass windows had been boarded up with plywood, which was surprisingly clear of graffiti. And most incongruously, a half-complete broadcast aerial had been set up on the roof.

Lady Equinox leaned against her Locust across the street from the church and eyed it cautiously. It wouldn’t do to just burst it without knowing what was in it. Power was out in a ten-block radius, but she could hear a generator toiling away crankily inside, and the existence of a website suggested someone still had net access. She held up her phone and aimed it at the building, tapping the Homunculus app’s Search button. She smiled when she saw it find a signal.

“Pop in and see if you can get a look ‘round,” she said, tapping the familiar’s face with her thumb.

Zoltan’s face disappeared, and seconds later a grainy video popped up on her screen. Equinox smiled; evidently the building’s CC cameras were still working. It showed about a dozen people in terrycloth robes huddled together in the middle of the restaurant, now cleared of chairs and tables. They were looking toward the rear of the building, where the screens of disused self-service kiosks now displayed spiraling patterns of multi-colored circles.

Equinox directed the camera to pan across the room, searching for the new prophet. She found him leaning against the counter, a slender man with long dirty hair and a flannel shirt smiling beatifically at his congregation. On the other side a hunched over figure encased in a metal shell loomed ominously. It was at least a head taller than the prophet, its face a blank ceramic mask that looked something like a stylized owl’s face.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Lady Equinox said.

As she watched, the prophet picked up a wireless microphone from the counter and raised his other hand in a blessing. Equinox whispered a quick instruction to Zoltan, and it picked up the microphone’s feed just as the prophet began to speak.

“-eloved friends,” he said, “the time is almost upon us! In a little more than four days, our great work will be complete, and you will see the fruits of all your sacrifices! We have done a marvelous thing! Lesser souls than yours would hoard the blessing of the One Thing for themselves, but you have chosen to help spread the Eternal Moment across this city! Soon, all will join us in communion with the All!”

The prophet spread one arm wide, gesturing to the thing looming behind him. “Now, share in the sacrament!”

With a hiss of escaping steam, the metal shell encasing the thing unfolded into a double set of blade-feathered wings, spreading wide to reveal a squat body on spindly metal limbs. Its torso was strung with matte black speakers. Peeling elliptical eye decals were scattered haphazardly across the wings, staring blankly at the congregation.

“Hell’s bells,” Lady Equinox whispered entirely inaccurately, “he’s stolen an angel.”

The prophet opened his mouth and unleashed a stream of high-pitched glossolalia. The angel’s speakers shrieked with static, and Equinox stabbed the phone’s mute button before it could broadcast a coherent signal. Even so, from through the walls and across the street she could feel the electric hum of the radio hosanna resonating in her head bones. Her spinal column buzzed like an antenna, and she could feel sparks tingling along the nerves in her limbs, making muscles twitch.

Equinox had no need to imagine what it was like hearing the angel’s message inside the church. Through the camera feed, she saw the whole congregation standing as one. Moving in step to the angel’s electric beat, they separated and recombined in three interlocking circles. At an unspoken signal, they began whirling ‘round while tracing out the circles’ revolutions, like teeth in gears made of people. Equinox closed her two eyes and focused, seeing in her mind’s eye lines of electric fire tracing a shape around the congregation. They formed one small part of a vast mechanism. What it did, she could not say… but she could feel the world quaking through the chunky soles of her boots.

Lady Equinox opened her eyes again and looked up at the half-finished antenna looming over the abandoned restaurant. She thought now she knew what it was for.

04

The Takuro Locust flew through the plywood boards and slid across the tile floor. The angel, sensing a threat in the heartbeat between the first crack in the wood and the front tire ripping through it, shut down the signal and snapped its wings closed around itself. Freed of the signal, the congregation scattered against the walls, screaming in terror. The prophet scrambled up on top of the dingy plastic counter as the Locust skidded to a stop at his feet.

Lady Equinox was not sitting in its seat.

The prophet crawled across the counter, staring at the slowly cooling motorcycle through stray strands of dingy hair. The angel unfolded its wings enough to free its elongated limbs and clambered over the counter. Its blank-faced head extended forward on a spindly neck-shaft, twitching as it scanned the aether for contacts. The prophet babbled instructions that the angel ignored. It stalked around the open room, its body twitching to and fro, steadily-compounding errors in its operating soul throwing random commands at its components.

It advanced to the hole in the wooden window. It peered through it. It did not cross the boundary of the building’s wall. It couldn’t.

The angel turned to stare at the prophet, the shiny lenses of its eyes whirring in featureless sockets. The way it cocked its head to the side might have almost signified confusion.

Then Lady Equinox appeared behind the prophet, stepping out of the witch’s walk. She knew the spaces in-between the lines of normal geometry like the back of her hand; Equinox was a liminal entity, forever balanced on the knife’s edge between this world and that, from whatever angle one cared to look. There was power there, and obligation.

“What,” the prophet said.

Lady Equinox grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into the witch’s walk. The angel flung its wings wide and shrieked an electric scream. The congregation scattered, bolting for doors dusty with disuse.

The light around them muted. Perspective pulled like taffy. The angel’s cry fell away, replaced by the distant sound of high, thin pipes.

“The hell,” the prophet said, as he fell to his knees on the rooftop.

Lady Equinox ignored his complaints. She watched the hurried procession of soon-to-be-former congregationalists through the side door with a satisfied smile. The one question she’d had was whether the doors would open. She was glad to see them getting free.

But there was still one more to free.

She turned back to the prophet, who was not-so-quietly being sick in the shadow of the broadcast tower. She could see the essential problem inside his mind now, hanging in the back of his head like an enormously complex equation written in lines of pink neon. As it solved itself, she could see the thing behind it, the vast metal eye the size of the moon, slowly rotating in its void-socket to the sound of a thousand slowly turning gears. The Terminal Observer, Project 158, the Beast that Shouted “Eye” at the Heart of the World… iWorld.

“So,” she said to him. “Someone needs to learn not to search around sketchy websites without a really good antivirus installed.”

The prophet’s face blanched. “You are a vulgar woman who belongs to the eternal ignorance. I heard the voice of God! The fiber-optic canticle!”

“Your wetware was infected by some kind of mimetic worm written by a vast active living intelligence system,” Equinox replied. “A relic of one of the stupider cyber wars. I’m not saying it’s not divine now,” she added, throwing a glare up at the sky, at a point where its orbit ought to be taking it, “but it ought to know better than to meddle. It’s done enough already.”

While the prophet railed against her blasphemy, Equinox opened a photo app. Aiming the phone’s camera at him, she threw up the Hex filter and began tracing bright green lines around his head, drawing a complex seal. When it was complete, she paused with her thumb over the shutter button.

“I’d say you were going to go viral,” she said with a wry grin, “but that’s sort of the opposite of what we’re trying for, isn’t it?”

The prophet’s angry scream was cut off by the click of the camera. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and he fell off to one side, collapsing like a marionette whose strings she had just cut.

Under the roof, the angel screamed with electric rage. Lady Equinox could feel its voice vibrating up through the thick soles of her boots. She didn’t look down, however, but up at the half-complete broadcast tower.

“One last thing, I think,” she said, “and then I’m going home to listen to my stories.”

05

Moments later, Lady Equinox stood across the street, hands on her hips as she watched the church and waited. The former prophet (Johnny Devlin, just days ago a stockbroker in a firm of four and a half people that had collapsed after the dollar, yen and flaxscript did) lay curled up at her heels, gently murmuring to himself in his sleep. Equinox paid him and his half-conscious prayers no heed. She had a prayer of her own.

Two pounds of Semtex glued to the broadcast tower’s supports.

It would be a shame to lose the Locust, but it was only a thing, after all. She could always steal another one.

The timer ticked down. For just a moment, a tiny sun rose on the roof of the dilapidated restaurant. Then the tower collapsed through the roof with a sound like a giant groaning. The angel screamed again, briefly.

Nice and smooth.

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Vivian Moira Valentine is a rad trans lady who loves monsters. When she was a child, she found the Crestwood House Monster Series at her local library and it’s all been downhill from there. Now everything she likes is horrible. When not writing, Vivi enjoys card and board games and plotting out more tabletop RPG campaigns than she will ever have time to run. Vivi lives in Virginia Beach with her amazing wife Frankie and their son, as well as an ever-growing comic book collection. She is the author of The Amelia Temple Series and other work.

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