When we arrived at Dollmaker City, it was under attack. Chazaqiel and his followers, the Reconstructionists, had broken through the city’s walls.

Angels lay on the ground screaming in pain, limbs and wings ripped off their bodies, black blood pouring from their wounds, but the angels were unable to die.

Near the river, Chazaqiel forced another angel to the ground and then twisted off her head. It rolled toward the water, still alive and still screaming.

Yevun set me on the ground and then ran toward Chazaqiel.

“You’ll destroy all of us!” he yelled.

Chazaqiel had changed since I’d seen him in the basement of the Parallax lab. His black skin had become translucent. His nerves, veins and muscles all glowed neon inside his body.

He and Yevun grabbed each other and began tearing at each other’s flesh.

“I’ll take us back to Heaven!” Chazaqiel yelled. “Our own Heaven. A paradise where we bow to nobody else.”

“God will never allow it.”

“All these years, and you’re still afraid of Him?”

Yevun tore off Chazaqiel’s left arm and threw it on the ground. Blood sprayed from Chazaqiel’s shoulder. Neon light poured from his eyes.

“You coward!” Chazaqiel yelled. “You’ve always been afraid. Even when we swore the oath on the mountain, you were shaking with fear.”

He lowered his jaw like a snake and then bit down on Yevun’s head. Yevun screamed in pain. Other angels began chanting.

Yevun struggled but freed himself from Chazaqiel’s teeth. His neck had mostly detached from his body, but his flesh and muscle tissues melded back together.

He dug his fingers into Chazaqiel’s stomach and tore out his intestines. Chazaqiel fell to the ground, light pouring from his body, his veins writhing like worms.

The sky filled with black clouds. Lightning crashed into the ground. Behind me, I heard Destiny calling my name.

I turned and saw her and Anselmo hiding underneath one of the pomegranate trees. The child-dolls that hung from the tree’s branches were screaming.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“We’re fine,” Destiny said. “What about you?”

“I’m just glad to be on the ground again. Yevun’s palace isn’t far from here. I’ll take you there. We’ll be safer there than out here.”

I led them toward the palace. The child-dolls watched us, screaming.

“They’re alive?” Anselmo asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Why does Yevun do this to these children?”

“I’m not sure.”

Around us, the city began to distort. The limestone walls grew and shrank. The ground split open and then resealed. Black clouds swirled in the sky.

Finally, I saw the palace ahead of us. I brought Anselmo and Destiny inside. More of Yevun’s dolls sat near the throne, whimpering.

“There’s a cave underneath the palace,” I said. “I’m not sure how deep it goes.”

“This is where you saw the other Nephilim before?” Destiny asked.

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure we’re safer there?”

“It has to be safer than being outside.”

The ground shook again. The limbs of the dolls rattled. Chunks of limestone fell from the ceiling.

I brought Anselmo and Destiny to the staircase behind the throne. Then we went down the stairs to Yevun’s workshop.

Doll parts had been left scattered on the tables. A young Afghan girl sat in a cage in the corner. Destiny ran toward her.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

The girl spoke in Dari.

“We need to help her,” Destiny said. “Do you see a key anywhere?”

Anselmo searched the tables. “Maybe we could break the lock with a hammer.”

He picked up a hammer and a screwdriver and then used them to break the lock open. The young girl ran into Destiny’s arms.

Above us, the ground shook, raining dirt on our heads.

“We need to go deeper,” I said.

We went down the next staircase, into the room where I’d seen the blood machine before.

The other Nephilim stood against the walls of the cave. Between them, I saw the blood machine, filled with wires and gears and the heads of young children.

Destiny and Anselmo stared at the machine, not speaking anymore.

One of the Nephilim walked toward us. A twelve-foot-tall woman with black hair, wearing a tattered dress.

The young Afghan girl hugged Destiny’s leg.

“You speak English?” the Nephilim asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you tell us what’s happening up there?”

“Chazaqiel and the Reconstructionists have attacked the city.”

She turned to the other Nephilim and spoke in what sounded like Yiddish. The other Nephilim whispered to each other.

“If the Reconstructionists win, it will be very bad for us,” the female Nephilim said.

“They’ll kill you?” Destiny asked.

“They can’t kill us, but they can destroy our bodies. We need to go into the tunnels. It’s safer there.”

“The tunnels?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.”

We followed her past the blood machine, toward a tunnel that led deeper underground.

“My name is Esther,” she told me. “You’re Chazaqiel’s new son?”

“I’m not his son, but he did this to me. My name’s Vadym.”

As we went deeper, the ground stopped shaking and the distortions faded.

The walls of the tunnels were filled with gigantic bones. The bones of dead Nephilim. A burial ground.

The tunnel broke off in two different directions. We turned down the left path and then went left again.

Encased in the walls, rather than bones, were strange objects. Stones that glowed with ethereal colors. Paintings of ancient worlds. Strange mechanical devices like clocks with six hands.

“What are these things?” I asked Esther.

“Artifacts that the Watchers brought here from Heaven. They keep them hidden here.”

“If these angels can’t die, how will this end?” Destiny asked her.

“I’m not sure, but it will end eventually.”

The Nephilim began sitting against the walls.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I think we’ve gone deep enough,” Esther said.

Exhausted, I sat down, too. Then I closed my eyes, and I slept.

Two days passed before Yevun finally appeared. I was happy to see him, but only because I imagined seeing Chazaqiel would have been much, much worse.

“Is it over?” Esther asked.

“Yes,” Yevun said. “We’ve won. Come with me, please.”

We followed him back through the tunnels.

“Where are Chazaqiel and the others now?” Esther asked.

“In the mortar pit,” he said.

He turned left and then we went deeper again.

The little Afghan girl stayed close to Destiny, holding her hand.

Soon, we reached a large, open pit, filled with dried mortar. Looking into the pit, I saw the limbs, torsos, and heads of angels scattered across the ground. Other angels buried these body parts in the mortar walls.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We’re binding the Reconstructionists to the pit,” Yevun said.

He led us down the stairs into the mortar pit.

“Vadym,” Chazaqiel hissed.

I saw him in the wall, staring back, his head stuck in the mortar. His skull shone through his translucent skin. His veins wriggled against the white bone.

“It doesn’t end here,” he said. “One day, I’ll be free again, and you’ll pay for your betrayal.”

The faces of other angels jutted out from the mortar. They cried in pain. Their scattered limbs squirmed as they tried to break free from the mortar, but they’d become a part of it now.

“We could have been gods, Yevun,” Chazaqiel cried. “We could have ruled our own Heaven. Do you know what life you have left to you now?”

“I know,” Yevun said.

Yevun, Armaros, Azazel, and the other Dollmakers began chanting. Slowly, the heads and limbs of the angels in the mortar walls turned to mortar, too.

Once Yevun and the others were done chanting, we followed them back through the tunnels to the room with the blood machine.

“We need to feed now,” Yevun told us.

The other Nephilim hung their heads, walked to the cave walls and sat on the ground. Destiny, Anselmo, and I stood where we were, though. The little Afghan girl clutched Destiny’s leg.

Yevun walked toward us.

“You can’t leave now, you understand?” he said. “You’re part of this city now too.”

“You can’t keep us here forever,” Destiny said.

“This is the only place in the world left for you.”

“What are you going to do to us?” Anselmo asked.

“You’ll become Nephilim, too. You’ll live here with the rest of us. You’ll help us stay pure.”

“I won’t!” Destiny yelled.

The girl cried out and hugged her leg tighter.

“It’s not your choice,” Yevun said.

Destiny took the girl’s hand and ran with her toward the staircase that led back up to the workshop. A few angels chased after them, caught them, and held them on the ground.

I turned myself into fog and tried to move toward the stairs to help them, but then another angel started chanting and my body turned back to flesh.

“We know your tricks now,” Yevun said. “There’s no escape this time, Vadym.”

A few of the other angels picked up the tubes that extended from the machine. The tips of the tubes ended in sharp needles. The angels jabbed the needles into the veins in the Nephilim’s necks. As their blood was drawn into the blood machine, its gears began turning.

Armaros ran toward Destiny and the Afghan girl, trying to save them too, but one of the angels swatted him away.

He flew into the cave wall and then fell onto the floor, unconscious.

“I know this seems cruel to you,” Yevun told Destiny. “But this cruelty is nothing like you’d see if we allowed ourselves to become demonic. The purity of these children purifies us just like the blood of our Nephilim. It brings us back to God.”

He went to the young girl and stroked her hair.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Heaven is real, and soon you’ll be saved.”

“If God is real, how could you turn your back on Him?” Destiny asked.

“To live our lives how we wanted meant more to us than to live how we were intended to live.” He pointed at me. “Now go, Vadym, and take your place with the others.”

I stared at the other Nephilim, blood draining from their necks. They seemed to be sleeping now.

“It won’t hurt much,” Yevun told me. “You’ll grow tired. You’ll sleep. After, we’ll let you rest.”

Was this really my fate? Was this really what the world had in store for me?

I felt like I did in the courtroom, hearing the judge read out my sentence. Fifteen years in Hell seemed like a gift, though, compared to eternity.

I went and sat against the wall with the other Nephilim. An angel shoved the needle-tip of one of the tubes into my neck. The tube filled with blood and my eyes grew heavy.

I thought about what would happen to Destiny and Anselmo. I thought about the pain they’d go through as they changed. The suffering.

I thought about Alexei, still bound to the dirt where the Parallax Medical building had once stood. Where Chazaqiel had spent decades bolted to a metal wall.

I thought about my mother in Saint Petersburg, telling me all her dreams for me. All her hopes.

She’d died before I could help her. I was happy she hadn’t seen me being arrested. I was happy she wasn’t around to miss me anymore.

I remembered lying in her arms as a child, feeling her kisses on my forehead, feeling loved.

She would have done anything for me, but there was nobody to miss me now, and that was good. There was nobody to mourn me. Nobody to remember who I was.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore.

I leaned against the wall, and I slept.

Every few weeks, the angels drank my blood. Afterward, I’d feel very weak. But I’d wander the garden, I’d drink the pomegranate juice, and I’d sleep in the grass next to the trees.

Slowly, my strength would come back, but just as soon as I felt like myself again, the angels would feed again. They’d feed on Destiny and Anselmo and all the others trapped here in this hellish city.

I sat with Destiny and Anselmo in the shade of one of the pomegranate trees. Destiny had grown white feathered wings on her back. Anselmo’s wings were black and scaled, with a texture like hard leather.

I looked around at the city. During the fighting, the palace had been destroyed. The trees had been burnt to the ground. The porcelain doll-children had been smashed to pieces. In the months that had passed, though, Yevun and the other angels had worked hard to rebuild the city. To turn it back into what it once was.

“We could leave if we wanted to,” Anselmo said. “The walls are still broken. We could escape.”

“Where would we go, though?” I asked.

“We could go back to my ranch.”

“We’d need money,” Destiny said. “We wouldn’t last long without jobs.”

“We could grow our own food. Learn how to be self-sufficient.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Above us, hanging from one of the tree branches, was a doll with the head of the Afghan girl who Destiny had tried to save. The girl began singing, but her voice wasn’t hers. It was Frank’s. The Pinkerton detective who’d freed Chazaqiel from a circus cage a hundred years ago.

“Over in Killarney, many years ago, my mother sang a song to me in tones so soft and low.”

“It’s awful to be a soul forced to wander this world forever,” Yevun had told me. “I’m sympathetic to the dead Nephilim. The dolls give them a bit of happiness to look forward to. A few hours to feel alive again. To see the world. To feel the sun on their skin.”

A fate worse than death. Endless suffering in a dark and silent tomb.

The same fate as Alexei and Reid, who Yevun had moved to the mortar pit and bound to the walls. Still alive and unable to escape this world.

But maybe the mortar would rot and one day, they would be free again. Like Chazaqiel said, everything needs to end eventually, even this world, even the God who created it.

That’s the only hope I have left.

I looked up at the clouds. At the summit of Mount Hermon, two hundred angels had sworn a curse-oath together. They would turn their backs on God and Heaven.

Two hundred angels, damning us to purgatory just like they’d damned themselves.

Did they know how many other people would suffer, too? Did they care?

Destiny started to cry. I put my hand on her back.

“No matter what happens, we’ll always have each other,” I told her.

The child-doll stopped singing. The wind blew through the pomegranate trees.

It was such an awful feeling. To know that Heaven is real. To know I’ll never see it.

“Destiny posted the Heaven.exe videos online yesterday,” he told me. “A few of them went viral. Lots of people are calling them fake, though.”

He chewed gum while he talked. I stared at his tattooed hands on the steering wheel. A skull on one, a spider on the other.

“Has Reid commented on them yet?”

“He’s been quiet. But I think he’s got bigger things to worry about right now. He’s back in New Mexico. Me and Destiny saw him over at the old Parallax Medical building a few weeks ago.”

He turned onto the dirt road that led between a few fields filled with clumps of dead grass and cracked, dry dirt.

At the end of the road, I saw an adobe house with chipped tan plaster and exposed wood beams. Destiny sat on the porch, underneath the sheet of rusted aluminum that extended from the house’s roof.

As soon as Destiny saw me, she hugged me. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said.

“I didn’t either.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for in Kandahar.”

“At least we know what Chazaqiel is trying to do now.”

We went inside Anselmo’s house. Near the door, a few faraday bags hung from key hooks. Then, near the closet, were two bug-out bags packed with supplies. Every window was covered with tinfoil.

Anselmo got three beers out of his fridge and then we all sat down in the living room.

“Anselmo told me Reid’s at the Parallax building,” I said.

“We saw him bringing some equipment in there,” Destiny said. “Freezers, incubators, stainless steel cabinets. This morning, someone claiming to be a bioengineer at Apotheosis Labs messaged me to say Reid had created a new Cas enzyme that can rewrite human DNA. They sounded really freaked out. They wanted me to help get the truth out.”

“Do you think Reid’s getting ready to test it on himself?” Anselmo asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure he has a few guinea pigs lined up first.”

“Like you?”

Destiny laughed but then realized it wasn’t really that funny. She drank the last of her beer and then said she was going to bed.

That night, I dreamed I was walking through a circus tent in Marchetti’s Palace of Wonders again. Chazaqiel stood on the freak show stage, flapping his wings while people watched in horror.

Then Chazaqiel saw me and walked towards me. The other people froze with their jaws still hanging open.

“Reid is just a stepping stone,” Chazaqiel told me. “A proxy variable. Human blood is too different from ours, too different from God’s.”

“You’re testing it, though? This new enzyme you’ve created?”

“We’re testing the transformation, yes, but it hasn’t been going well. We need you, Vadym. Your blood is still pure. You’re not like the rest of us. Sin hasn’t ruined you yet.”

“I’m not going to help you.”

“You are, though. I don’t care what Yevun thinks. You’re mine. You’ll always be.”

I woke to Destiny screaming. I ran into her room.

Chazaqiel loomed over her bed, his wings pressed against the ceiling.

He grabbed Destiny’s arms. She kicked at him, trying to push him away, but he was too strong. He lifted her off the bed.

“Let go of her!” I yelled.

“Her life for yours, Vadym.” Chazaqiel said. “What do you think? A fair trade?”

Anselmo ran into the room with a shotgun. He fired a round of buckshot at Chazaqiel’s back. The buckshot tore into his skin, splattering black blood across the floor.

Before the blood had even dried, the wounds on Chazaqiel’s back had disappeared, his body quickly healing itself.

“I saw your videos,” he told her. “Not that smart.”

“Fuck you!” she yelled.

He dragged Destiny toward the front door. Anselmo and I ran after him and tried to pull Destiny away.

Chazaqiel flung Anselmo across the room, as if he were tossing a doll.

“If you want me, take me now,” I said. “Leave Destiny here.”

“We’re not ready for you yet,” he said. “Come back to where you found me, and I’ll let her go.”

I ran at him again, but he tossed me to the side of the room, too.

He dragged Destiny outside, spread his wings and carried her up into the sky.

Anselmo sat up against the fireplace, blood leaking from his arm.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine. Where is he taking her?”

“To the basement of the Parallax Labs building. The same place where I found him before.”

“We need to call the police.”

“And tell them what? They’ll never believe us. Reid will deny everything, too.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Do you think you can get your hands on some explosives?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Whatever they’re building, we need to destroy it. We need to make sure their enzyme doesn’t leave the lab. Because if it does, this world isn’t going to exist anymore.”

Anselmo had some cousins who worked in demolition. He reached out to them and, without saying too much, they agreed to sell us some C-4 demolition blocks. They just made us promise we wouldn’t say where we got them from.

Even though we were both worried sick about Destiny, we took a few days to prepare.

We’d both go into the building. I’d head down to the lab while Anselmo set the explosives. Then, as soon as Destiny was safe, Anselmo would set the C-4 off.

“What if you’re still in the lab?” he asked me.

“My life’s over anyway. I’ll keep one of the blocks of C-4 strapped to my chest, wired to your detonator.”

Anselmo and I drove to the Parallax building late Thursday night. A few white vans were parked in the parking lot. Fluorescent lights flickered in the office windows.

We parked on the street and then took the duffel bags of C-4 out of the trunk and carried them toward the building.

“If you see anything come out the building,” I said, “anything that doesn’t look human, it doesn’t matter whether me and Destiny are safe, you need to set the bombs off.”

“I know.”

The doors to the building had been left unlocked. They were waiting for us.

The cubicles I’d seen before were gone. The whole first floor had been cleared out. All that was left were the grey carpeting and the dull tube lights.

Anselmo was terrified. Pale white and shaking. But he got to work right away, finding the support beams and placing the C-4.

I found the stairs near the elevator and headed downstairs to the lab.

Walking down the stairs, I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before. The air was thick and hard to breathe. My skin itched with static electricity.

The storage rooms had been filled with glass cabinets, freezers, frost-covered metal tanks, and DNA sequencing machines.

The door to the sub-basement had been left wide open, its lock still broken.

I thought about the last time I was in the basement, kneeling next to the door with a drill, slowly drilling the lock out, scared out of my mind. I didn’t want to believe I’d find him but, at the time, I knew I would.

Deeper in the basement, I heard someone moaning in pain. Their voice was deep. Guttural.

I walked down the next set of stairs, into the labs.

Black lights shone from the hallway ceiling. I walked into the first lab.

The lab’s walls were lined with glass containers. Inside the containers, human organs floated inside pink fluid, pulsing next to copper wire.

Hearts beat like they were pumping blood. Lungs expanded like they were inhaling air.

I turned on my flashlight and shone it over the glass vials on one of the shelves. The labels were a mix of English and Italian. A few were labeled with names I recognized from The Book of Enoch. CHAZAQIEL-7, RAMIEL-2, BARAQIJAL-1.

I walked into the next room. At the center of it, a surgical table was surrounded by a ventilator and IV lines. The IV lines were connected to something in the corner. An enormous ball of flesh with six legs and six arms.

It moaned in pain. The same moans I’d heard from upstairs.

Walking forward, I bumped against a metal chair.

“Who’s there?” the flesh ball asked.

It used its legs to roll itself into the light. It had ears, a nose, and a mouth, but no eyes.

The nose looked so familiar. The mole on the right nostril.

The mouth.

“Is that you, Alexei?” I asked.

“Vadym?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

He laughed. “You led them right to me. Right to my house. They threatened me. Swore they’d go to the police. They’d let it all go, though, if I agreed to help test their new drug. It was safe, they promised, it just wasn’t legal. They needed someone they could trust to keep their mouth shut.”

He rolled closer toward me, pushing his body with his legs, knocking over the metal chairs and canisters.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “The drug wouldn’t change me. It was just supposed to make me a stronger, healthier version of myself.”

He laughed. His mouth widened, becoming so large it looked like he was turning himself inside out.

Saliva sprayed out from inside his body, splattered across the floor.

“I know I’m different now, I can feel it, but I can’t see what they’ve done.”

He rolled forward again, and he tried to grab me with his arms.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I want to feel you. Come closer. Let me touch your face.”

“Stay away from me, Alexei.”

I backed away, moving closer to the door.

Alexei rolled forward again. “I just need one of your eyes. Just for a minute. Just to see what they’ve done to me.”

He lunged at me this time, and he managed to grab hold of my wrist with one of his hands.

His other hands grabbed onto me, too. My legs, my arms, my throat, my hair. Then he began to feel my face.

“Stop it.”

“Just one eye, Vadym. Just for a second. I need to see what I am. I need to see if I’m still here.”

“Stop it, Alexei!”

He dug his fingers into my eye socket. I screamed in pain. But then I remembered what I’d done before.

I thought of my mother, barely unconscious on the floor of my apartment, so high she was barely able to move. Then that man who crawled on top of her. That dirty, skinny man. I watched her, helpless, wondering why me? Why of all the lives God could have given me, why did he give me this one?

I moved the sadness from my brain into my heart, and I turned myself to fog.

Alexei’s hand passed through my head. He rolled forward and then ran his hands over the wall, searching for me. “Where did you go, Vadym?”

I moved forward to the hallway at the other end of the room.

“This is your fault, Vadym! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened to me!”

I guess it was my fault, in a way. But it was also his fault, too. If I hadn’t gone to prison, I never would have met Reid. If I hadn’t met Reid, I would have never found Chazaqiel.

But none of it seemed random. Everything was filled with patterns. But even though I saw the patterns, I still couldn’t predict what would happen next. What would happen to Alexei? What would happen to all of us?

The hallway brought me deeper into the lab, to the same room where I’d found Chazaqiel before, bolted to the wall with wire embedded in his muscles.

This time, bolted to the wall, rather than Chazaqiel, I saw Reid. Or what he’d been turned into.

Reid’s neck had been elongated. His head had been deformed to resemble a bird’s head with a long beak. His stomach protruded like he was pregnant. I could see both male and female sex organs between his legs.

He moaned in pleasure, impregnating himself.

Across from him, Chazaqiel stood with two other angels. Like Chazaqiel, the angels’ skin had blackened, the feathers had rotted off their wings, their faces had become skull-like.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” one of the angels asked.

“What should we call them?” the other asked.

“The God of Wombs,” Chazaqiel said. “The God of Human Creation.”

“Where’s Destiny?” I asked.

They all turned toward me. A smile spread across Chazaqiel’s face.

“You finally came,” he said. “You arrived just in time, too, to see our new creation. Our new God.”

“You told me if I came here, you’d let her go.”

“I will, in good time, but let me introduce my friends first, Kokabiel and Sariel.”

The angels watched me with empty eyes, curious.

“He’s the pure one?” Kokabiel asked.

“He was just born a year ago,” Sariel said. “Before him, there hasn’t been a birth since Annika in 1962 in Sweden.”

“We’re growing older,” Chazaqiel said. “It’s becoming harder to reproduce. No doubt, God doesn’t intend anything but God to live forever. But we’ll change that.”

Reid’s moans became louder. His eyes flickered and then became solid black.

The walls of the room began to distort. The room became larger, then extremely small, and then the ceiling turned in circles as if it had disconnected from the walls.

“What’s happening?” Sariel asked.

“I think our new God is giving birth,” Chazaqiel said.

Reid’s stomach expanded, falling to the floor and spreading across the tiles.

The walls of the lab cracked. Black water poured through the cracks, pooling on the floor.

Black water dripped from Reid’s genitals, too. He threw his head back in ecstasy.

Suddenly, I was lying in bed in my old apartment. Destiny lay next to me. Both of us were naked.

“Vadym?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I was alone somewhere, in a dark room, and then I was here.”

“It’s Reid, I think. Did you see what they did to him?”

“No.”

“They’ve given him the enzyme.”

We got out of the bed. Destiny tried opening the bedroom door, but it was shut tight.

The walls of the bedroom began to dissolve.

“This can’t be real,” she said. “This is a dream.”

The floor disappeared, and we fell through the darkness. As we screamed, our screams echoed, fading into nothingness.

I don’t know how long we fell for. Minutes, days, hours.

But then we fell into an endless expanse of black water.

The cold water woke us up. Snapped us back to reality.

We flailed our arms, trying to keep our heads above the water, as the waves washed over us.

“Vadym!” Destiny yelled.

The water pulled her away from me. I reached out and grabbed onto her arm.

“What do we do?” she asked.

I looked around us. In the distance, I saw a small island.

“There,” I said, and I pointed at it.

We swam toward the island.

It seemed very far away, but nearly as soon as we started swimming, we were crawling up onto the sand.

Beautiful men and women lay naked on the shore, suntanning their bodies. Destiny and I walked past them, toward the trees, when there was a loud crash behind us. We turned and saw Reid rising from the water, transformed into an enormous, phallic serpent, his face carved into the glans.

“Do you see this?” he asked us. “My own world? Everything you see ripped from my brain.”

He moaned again. Mountains shot upward from the water. Within a few seconds, the island disappeared, and Destiny and I were left standing in a desert valley.

Reid sank into the sand and then reappeared as a swollen face in the clouds.

A herd of half-formed buffalo raced toward us.

“We need to get out of the way, or they’ll kill us,” Destiny said.

We took shelter behind a rock. The herd of buffalo trampled past us, shaking the ground.

As soon as they passed, the mountains distorted, growing and shrinking, finally exploding into a cloud of diamonds.

The diamonds scattered through the black void, transforming into a diamond palace.

Reid sat on a throne, looking just like he had before, wearing a gold crown on his head.

“You’ll worship me,” he said. “You’ll do everything I tell you. Get on your knees.”

“What have you done to yourself?” Destiny asked.

He forced her to her knees. Then he stood and walked toward us. “You too, Vadym.”

He forced me to my knees as well, and then he laughed at us.

The walls of the palace began distorting, too. Expanding and contracting. Spiraling.

Reid’s head began expanding, too. I heard his skull cracking. He pressed his palms against his temples and screamed.

For a second, I saw a glimpse of the lab with Reid bolted to the wall. But then I was back in the palace.

“I think he’s losing control,” I told Destiny.

The Reid with the crown placed his hand on Destiny’s head. Then he lowered her head and kissed her forehead. Kissed her cheek.

His head expanded again, and he screamed in agony.

We were back in the lab.

I ran toward Reid, bolted to the wall, and I began to beat his face. He laughed as blood poured from his mouth.

“You can’t hurt a God.”

Reid’s stomach kept expanding, pushing me backward, until I could no longer reach his face.

The basement filled with Christmas trees, covered with flickering red, green, blue, yellow lights.

“Mother,” Reid said. “Help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Destiny threw a metal canister at Reid’s head and then grabbed my arm. “We need to run.”

She pulled me back through the lab, the same way I’d come in.

In the previous room, Alexei was sobbing in the corner.

“You’d just leave me here, Vadym?” he asked.

I stopped and looked at him. I pitied him. I hated him, but I would never have wished him such a horrible fate. A long time ago, we’d been like brothers.

Could I save him? And even if I could carry him out of that building, what kind of life would he have now?

Destiny grabbed my arm again. “Come on!”

I followed her upstairs, back to the first floor, with its grey carpeting and tubes of fluorescent lights.

I tore the block of C-4 off my chest, snapped its wire, and threw it on the floor.

Destiny and I ran towards the front doors, but the room widened, stretching out for miles.

“He won’t let us leave,” I said.

“Just keep running.”

We kept running toward the doors. The walls contracted again and suddenly, the doors were right in front of us.

We shoved them open and ran outside into the parking lot. Anselmo was at the end of the parking lot, standing next to his truck.

I looked back at the Parallax Medical building. The entire building was deforming, growing and shrinking and twisting around itself.

Destiny and I kept running toward Anselmo.

Behind me, I heard Reid screaming.

“Do it!” I yelled. “Do it now!”

The explosion threw me to the ground.

“You’re alive?”

I blinked my eyes, disoriented and confused at first, but quickly remembering.

My skin felt scorched. My head throbbed with pain.

A giant angel stood over me, holding out his hand.

Yevun.

Why?

“Can you stand?”

I took his hand, and he helped me to my feet.

“Where are my friends?” I asked.

He pointed to the street. Anselmo and Destiny stood with three other angels.

“Where is Chazaqiel?” Yevun asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“You saw him in that building, though?”

“Yes, in the basement. Kokabiel and Sariel were with him, too.”

More angels flew down from the sky. Azazel, Armaros, and two more I didn’t recognize.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We came to stop him,” Yevun said. “I’m glad we aren’t too late.”

Reid screamed from inside the pit of fire, which was all that remained of the Parallax Medical building.

“That’s the human God they made?” Yevun asked me.

“One of them.”

“How many more?”

“At least one more.”

“Can we kill them?” Armaros asked.

“We can only bind them to the dirt.”

Armaros went to the fire and raised his arms. The ground folded over itself, burying the flames. Azazel repeated a chant and the dirt settled, becoming even and still.

The screaming stopped.

Yevun grabbed onto my chest and carried me into the sky. Then the other angels flew upward, too, two of them carrying Anselmo and Destiny.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked.

“Dollmaker City,” Yevun said.

I watched the ground pass by below me. The desert, then the forest, then the mountains, then the oceans, flying above it all.

What had become of Frank? I wondered. Had he been killed or only taught a lesson?

And where had Chazaqiel gone? Had he managed to save the enzyme? Was he creating new Gods right now?

I thought of the porcelain dolls that hung from tree branches. The four mutilated angels I’d seen drinking blood from copper spouts.

A return to the city of dolls. What was waiting for us there? Just more suffering, or finally the answers I’d been looking for?

I’d landed in Kabul the night before. After checking into my hotel room, I slept thirty hours straight.

I texted Destiny to let her know I was okay.

“Are you still in San Francisco?” I asked her.

“I’m back in New Mexico. I’m getting ready to post the videos we took at Apotheosis Labs. I’m sure Reid won’t be happy when they go online.”

“You should probably keep out of sight for a while.”

“I’m staying at a friend’s place. You’re still planning to go to Kandahar?”

“I hired a driver to take me there tomorrow.”

The driver’s name was Rahmat. I’d found him online, on a tour guide website. He was very young, but he claimed he spoke English.

My neck was still throbbing from where Chazaqiel had bitten me. I went to the bathroom, took off the bandage, and looked at the bite marks in the mirror. A bit of blood was still oozing out.

I felt so strange to be trapped in a body that didn’t feel like mine. A body changing in ways I didn’t understand.

A numb sadness spread through me. A sinking depression like I’d never felt before.

Suddenly, my arms turned into fog.

I stepped back from the mirror, panicked. I tried to touch my chest, but my hands passed right through the body.

I sat on the floor, took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes and told myself to relax.

When I opened my eyes again a few minutes later, my arms had turned back into flesh and blood.

Rahmat’s rusted Toyota rattled across the dirt road, past the sandy hills and sun-baked limestone.

“There’ve been a lot more English tourists coming to Afghanistan lately,” Rahmat told me. “I’m thinking of starting my own tour business, just for English-speakers.”

I nodded, uh-uh, barely listening to him while I stared at my phone. I zoomed in on one of the red Xs on the map of Afghanistan I’d found in Apotheosis Labs. It marked the hills right outside of Kandahar.

“Have you heard about a place called Dollmaker City?” I asked Rahmat.

“Last year, there was a Jewish Iranian who came through Kabul, asking about it,” Rahmat said. “He said it was a city built by angels. A home for all the world’s lost children.”

Fields filled with grape vines appeared beside the road. Orchards filled with pomegranate trees.

We drove down into another valley, and I saw Kandahar City ahead of us.

The streets in Kandahar were crowded with carts and motorcycles. The houses were made of brick and mud. Old men sat in the shade of the doorways, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

Rahmat parked at my hotel. We went inside together. I showed the clerk the reservation on my phone. He pointed at my phone’s screen and said something in Dari.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“He said you booked a room for two weeks,” Rahmat told me. “He wants to know if that’s right. Most tourists only stay a day or two.”

“Two weeks is right.”

Rahmat translated what I said. The clerk gave me the keys to my room.

“Where do you want to go tomorrow?” Rahmat asked. “There’s a pomegranate orchard not too far from here that does a great tour. I can take you there, if you want.”

“I need to go to the Arghandab River Valley.”

Rahmat stopped smiling. “The valley is dangerous. The Taliban is still there.”

“But you can take me?”

“I’ll need more money.”

“How much more?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

I gave him the money. He looked like he regretted not asking for more.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

I went up to my room and took off my coat. Then I stood underneath the ceiling fan, letting the cold air blow on my body.

Online, in the conspiracy forums and conspiracy subreddits, people told stories of giants in Kandahar. Soldiers who’d been attacked by Nephilim. Lost travelers who’d wandered into hidden cities filled with young boys and girls.

I was sure the truth was hidden somewhere in the hills around Kandahar. I wasn’t going to leave until I found it.

That night, I dreamt of Chazaqiel again. He sat locked in a cage in a circus tent. Beside him, a teenage boy with claws for hands ate a hot dog, and a two-headed woman brushed the hair on her right head.

Chazaqiel pressed his face against the bars.

“You’re special, Vadym,” he told me. “Very smart and also very willing to throw your life away.”

“I won’t be your lab rat.”

“Your blood is my blood now. You’re already part of this experiment.”

“I’ll find a way to fix this. I always do.”

He smiled.

I woke up in a cold sweat, my neck throbbing.

The bite marks had started bleeding again. I put on a fresh bandage and then went down to the hotel lobby. Rahmat was waiting for me, pacing in front of the door.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“I’ll be fine. I just want to get this over with.”

We got into his car and then drove in silence through the desert. We crossed the Arghandab River and then descended into the valley, toward the orchards filled with pomegranate trees.

Between the trees, drainage channels had been dug in the dirt. The farmers had built wooden huts throughout the orchards to hide from the sun.

Rahmat parked near one of the fences.

“I won’t drive any farther,” he told me.

“Then I’ll get out here.”

“How will you get home?”

“I’ll walk to the gas station we passed earlier and call you from there.”

“Okay.”

I stepped out of his car. He looked at me like it was the time he’d see me, and he turned his car around and drove back the way we’d come.

I stared at the hills in the distance. Then I looked at my map on my phone. The X was straight ahead of me. I walked towards it, through the pomegranate trees.

In the distance, men shouted in Dari.

I’d walked for about an hour, when I heard a man moaning in pain. I found him in one of the drainage channels. A young farmer. His throat had been cut open. His tunic was soaked with blood.

He saw me and muttered something.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Blood sputtered from his mouth. His pupils widened.

Through my work as investigator, on the dark web I’d watched thousands of people tortured and killed. Death never bothered me much. As a child, I’d taught myself to shut my emotions off, to not let myself ever feel anything. Complex PTSD, my therapist had called it.

I thought about killing the man. Putting him out of his misery. But I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t a killer. I wasn’t a hero, either. I wasn’t the type to pick him up, drag him to the road and shout for help.

I just watched him die and kept walking.

The sun set. Darkness filled the orchards.

I climbed over the last fence and then walked towards the hills.

I could see a fire burning in the distance, inside one of the caves. Taliban, maybe, but maybe something else.

I heard footsteps behind me.

“Vadym?”

I turned and saw a giant with bright red hair.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m Frank.”

Frank led me to the cave where he’d been living. We sat together next to his fire.

“We’re like brothers, you and me,” he told me. “The sons of Chazaqiel.”

“Are there any more of us?”

“There were a few more, but they’re all dead now. It’s just you and me left.”

“How did they die?”

“They were killed by Yevun and the others.”

Frank bit into the arm of a corpse he’d found in the orchards. He tore off a chunk of flesh and chewed on it as blood dripped down his chin.

“There’s a war,” he said. “You’ll need to pick a side, too.”

“A war between who?”

“The Watchers. But you’ll learn about the war soon enough.” He bit into the arm again, tearing off another chunk of flesh. “We all have different powers. Some of us can raise the dead. Some of us can cure diseases. Others, like you and me, can change the weather or turn our bodies into fog.”

“It just happened to me earlier, my arms dissolved.”

Frank nodded. “You fill yourself with sadness, and your body becomes water. Then you put your sadness in the sky whenever you want the rain to fall. I’d rather be able to raise the dead, but this is what we got.”

He laughed and then bit into the arm again, licking the blood off his lips.

“Tomorrow, I’ll take you to Dollmaker City and introduce you to Yevun and the others. They’re all excited to meet you.”

“So, the city is real?”

He nodded. “Very real. It’s where most of us live now. Those of us on Yevun’s side of the war, anyway.” He held the severed arm toward me. “Do you want some?”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t like the taste of it at first, either, but there’s not a lot of good meat around here. You get used to it.”

He ate the last bit of flesh off the arm and then threw what was left of it into the corner of the cave.

He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes. I lay down and tried to get some sleep, too.

The next day, as soon as it was dark again, Frank and I kept walking through the hills.

“Chazaqiel has been working with a billionaire in San Francisco,” I said. “They’ve set up a lab where they’re using Nephilim to try and decode angel DNA.”

“It’s not just Chazaqiel. It’s him, Ramiel, Baraqijal, and the other Reconstructionists. They want to make themselves Gods.”

“What about Yevun and the other Watchers in Dollmaker City?”

“They just want to be left alone.”

We walked through the desert all night. Then, when the sun began to rise, we hid ourselves behind a few large stones and made camp for the day.

“We can’t let anyone see us going in Dollmaker City,” Frank said. “If humans found the entrance, Yevun would be very upset with us.”

We tried to sleep, but neither of us slept much. As soon as it was night again, we kept walking, until we reached a limestone bluff that had been hollowed by sinkholes.

Frank felt along the side of the stone.

“The entrance should be right around here,” he said.

He squeezed himself into a large crack. I followed behind him, sucking my stomach and chest in as close to my spine as I could.

We pressed through the limestone and came out into a garden filled with flowers and pomegranate trees. Light shone from strange stones that had been placed along the paths and near the tree trunks.

A porcelain doll with the head of a human girl sat on the ground near the entrance.

“Welcome to Dollmaker City,” she said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Isabelle.”

“She’s one of Yevun’s dolls,” Frank told me.

“A doll with a human head?”

“Yevun likes the children this way. He likes their singing, but he doesn’t like them running around.”

I followed Frank deeper into the garden.

More of the dolls with the heads of children hung from the trees. They sung strange lullabies.

I began to feel uneasy.

Frank and I crossed a bridge over a narrow river. To our right, I saw two angels sitting in a rose garden, staring at the sky.

They were beautiful. Tall and elegant with enormous, white-feathered wings.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“That’s Azazel and Armaros,” Frank said.

We kept walking until we reached a church made of limestone. An inverted cross rose from its steeple.

Frank brought me inside the church. Another angel sat on a throne at the far end of the room, surrounded by dolls. Frank knelt on the floor.

“I’ve brought him to you,” Frank said. “Just like I promised.”

Yevun stood and walked toward me. He was enormous. Twenty-feet tall. He towered over me.

“You’re Vadym?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Dollmaker City.”

“What is this place?”

“A home for all this world’s lost children. Are you lost?”

“I’m confused.”

He put his long fingers on my face. “And you want answers?”

“I want to know the truth about this world.”

“Then come with me.”

I followed him to a staircase behind his throne, which led underground. The dolls all turned and stared at me.

The stairs led to a studio filled with doll parts and wire. A few human children sat against walls.

“What’s your name?” I asked a young boy.

He refused to speak to me, though, and just stared at the floor.

“He looks terrified,” I said.

“He is,” Yevun told me.

“Why are you doing to these children?”

“I’m giving them happiness. I’m giving them the peace they never found in this world. But this isn’t what I want to show you.”

He put his hand on my back and led me down another staircase, deeper underground.

We stepped out into a dimly lit cave.

“Don’t be shocked by what you see here,” Yevun said. “None of the other Nephilim are in pain. They’ve all agreed to this.”

Hundreds of Nephilim sat against the walls, just like the children I’d seen upstairs. They looked like they were sleeping. Their eyes were closed, their bodies hunched slightly forward.

Tubes connected their bodies to a strange machine in the center of the cave.

Inside the machine’s bars, I could see gears intertwined with Yevun’s dolls. As the gears turned, blood was sucked from the Nephilim’s bodies. The blood washed over the gears and the doll-children, falling into the base of the machine, where there were four different copper spouts.

Four mutilated angels sat next to the spouts, drinking from them. As they drank the blood, their bodies changed. The feathers grew back on their wings. Their skin began to whiten.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“This is where we feed.”

“You feed on your blood?”

“When God banished us from Heaven, he punished us by separating us from what makes us pure and good. Living in this world, the sin slowly seeps into us, corrupting us, changing us from what we were before. We don’t want to be evil. We don’t hurt humans. Your blood helps us stay holy and pure.”

He put his hand on my back again. I stepped away from him.

“They’ve all agreed to give us their blood,” Yevun said. “We don’t feed too often. And when we’re not feeding, all the Nephilim free to roam the garden. I know this is hard to understand, but this is what’s best for the world. If we were to allow ourselves to become corrupted… I can’t even think of what would happen.”

“I’m not going to live like a farm animal.”

“You won’t be an animal here. You’ll be treated with respect and with dignity.”

I stepped back toward the staircase.

“Just talk to the others,” Yevun said. “They’ll tell you. They’ll tell you they’re very happy here.”

I turned and ran.

Yevun ran after me. “Vadym!”

I ran past the dolls in the studio. I’d nearly made it to the second staircase, but then Yevun grabbed my arms and lifted me into the air.

“I can’t let you leave, Vadym,” he said. “Not after we’ve waited so long for you to come here.”

He opened his mouth. His teeth extended from his gums, doubling in size.

“Let me taste you,” he said. “It’s been so long since I tasted Chazaqiel’s blood. Frank’s has become so muddy.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of my mother. I thought of my grandmother. I thought of Alexei. I thought of every night I’d spent in prison. I thought of every horrible thing that ever happened to me.

And then I shoved that sadness into the sky.

The thunder roared. I heard the rain falling.

Yevun’s teeth tore into my shoulder. I screamed in pain. The dolls upstairs started screaming, too.

I moved the sadness back into my body and made myself dissolve.

“Where did you go!” Yevun yelled.

I felt like I was everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. I looked down at Yevun, floating above him, but behind him, too. Beside him. Underneath him.

He ran upstairs, searching for me, screaming.

Water trickled down the staircase. The city was flooding.

I emptied my mind. Forced myself not to think of anything at all.

I don’t know how much time passed, but one moment I was gone, the next I was sitting on the floor of the studio, the water soaking my pants.

I stood and ran upstairs.

I felt unsteady, but I knew I needed to leave while I still had a chance.

Outside, Frank stood against one of the trees.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Show me where the way out is.”

I ran back the way we’d come. Frank followed behind me.

Rain poured from the sky. The water had risen up to my ankles already, and it was quickly rising higher.

Yevun’s dolls lay face down in the water, screaming, clinking their porcelain limbs together as they tried to swim.

I saw the limestone wall ahead of us. I ran to it and searched for the crack I’d entered the garden through.

“Help me!” I yelled.

But Frank just stood there, hanging his head. “There’s nowhere else for us to go. We’ll just end up in another cage. It’s not so bad here.”

Armaros flew down from the sky, landing a few feet from us. He lifted his arms. The rain began to slow. The clouds scattered.

I finally found the crack that led out of the city, and I squeezed myself into it.

Armaros ran toward me. But before he could reach me, Frank stepped in front of him. He threw Frank to the ground.

I squeezed myself deeper into the crack.

Frank screamed. I heard the sickening sound of bones cracking. Then Frank’s screams turned to laughter.

“Kill me then! Kill me!” he yelled. “I’ve been dead a hundred years.”

I squeezed through the rest of the crack and fell out onto the sand.

I ran toward the hills in the distance.

The rain had stopped. The sky was blue and cloudless again.

I didn’t look back. I just kept running until night had fallen on the desert again.

I walked southwest, away from Kandahar, following the dirt roads at night and hiding in the orchards during the day. Eventually, a farmer saw me and gave me a ride to an old agriculture compound the U.S. Army had built during the Afghanistan War.

The compound still had electricity. I charged my phone, and I called Destiny. I told her everything that happened. I told her about Frank, Yevun, the child-dolls, the machine that drained Nephilim blood.

She became quiet for a while, and then she told me that Reid was in New Mexico.

“He’s doing something at the old Parallax Medical building,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of construction crews coming by. Him and Chazaqiel must be building something. Are you staying in Afghanistan, or are you coming back here?”

“I’m coming home.”

I called Rahmat.

“You’re still alive?” he asked.

“I’m in Lashkar Gah. I need a ride to the Kabul airport.”

“Lashkar Gah is Taliban territory.”

“Can you help or not?”

“Give me your address.”

I gave him the address of the building behind me. He said he’d be there in a few hours.

I sat on the steps of the building. I looked around at all the ranch houses, the cracked driveways, the rusted mailboxes, and the overgrown lawns. It could have been America, if everything hadn’t been swallowed by sand.

But I’d be home soon.

With Destiny’s help, I’d get the truth out.

There are angels on Earth, and they’re at war. One side wants our children, and the other wants our souls.

Continue to Part 4

In the picture Destiny had given me, Chazaqiel sat on a wooden chair. His black wings spread out behind him. A web of wires connected to his skinless skull. The wires hooked into a wall of computer monitors behind him, each screen displaying a different, distorted face.

“In my father’s notes, he said Parallax was using Nephilim as decoders,” Destiny told me. “They thought the secrets of the world were hidden inside angel blood. If they could decode it, they’d know everything God knew.”

Destiny was thin and pale, with long, greying black hair. When I told her I’d grown wings, she hadn’t believed me. She’d driven to San Francisco to see my wings for herself.

Her father, Jose, had leaked the first photos of Chazaqiel to a BBS conspiracy board in 1992. Three months later, he’d been found dead in his apartment. A heroin overdose, the police said, but Destiny claimed he’d never touched a drug in his life.

Destiny was desperate for proof that Parallax had murdered her father. She’d been searching for it since she was eighteen. She was forty-three now. She was tired, but she’d learned to be smarter and more cautious, too.

I promised I’d help her as long as she helped me first. She’d led me to Chazaqiel, still chained up inside Parallax’s old underground lab. He’d promised he wouldn’t hurt me if I freed him, but then he’d done this to me. Turned me into a Nephilim, Destiny said. Half human, half angel.

But why?

“You think Chazaqiel wants to use me as one of these decoders?” I asked.

“Reid’s been quiet since he went on the news and announced he was launching a new genetics company. I’m sure Chazaqiel’s helping him rebuild the Parallax lab, so he can continue the experiments. Threll never finished what he’d set out to do. But I still don’t know why he stopped. Maybe he was scared by what he saw.”

An addict outside banged his fist against the café window and screamed. Destiny looked at him and then sipped her coffee. She checked her phone and put it back in her purse.

“Have you heard anything from Reid yet?” she asked.

“He still won’t answer my emails. I think he’s having me followed, though. The same black Suburban’s been parked outside my apartment since I got back from New Mexico.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“I don’t think I’m being paranoid enough.”

“You’re sure you want to do this? If we get caught breaking into the Apotheosis Labs building, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You already did fifteen years in prison.”

“I don’t think I have much time left. Whatever Chazaqiel has done to me, I need to stop it.”

“I don’t think you can stop what’s happening to you, though.”

“I need to try.”

“And you’re sure your friend, Alexei, can help?”

“He’s the best hacker I know, and he owes me a favor.”

Alexei jumped backward when he saw me, two feet taller than the last time he’d seen me. Pale and bone thin.

“Vadym?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You look different.”

“A lot has changed since the last time we talked.”

I stepped into his apartment and closed the door. Then I took off my jacket and let my wings fill the kitchen.

Alexei’s jaw dropped. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m not sure. That’s what I need your help with.”

Alexei opened his fridge, took out two bottles of beer, and handed me one. I took it.

For a second, I remembered when we were both younger and still living in Saint Petersburg, Alexei laughing loudly after realizing the simple shell script I’d written had just made us fifty thousand dollars.

“You fucking did it, Vadym!”

But then I remembered the fear I’d felt sitting alone in my cell that first night in prison, and the anger returned.

Alexei sipped his beer and then sat in front of his laptop.

“I looked into Apotheosis Labs, like you asked me to. I found a misconfigured S3 bucket on their AWS account with an old Terraform state file inside. The state file got me a set of credentials that I used to get into their Databricks workspace. Through Databricks, I got into their Okta tenant.”

I stood over him, looking at his screen.

“That’s great,” I said. “Now I just need you to provision two new employees and clone the badges.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I need to get into that building.”

“It’s too risky.” He stood and walked to his window. “I’m not doing it.”

“I always thought of you like a brother, you know that?”

“I think of you like a brother, too.”

“Then why’d you fuck me over like that? Why’d you trade my life to save your own?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You fucked up hacking that crypto exchange, you got caught, and to save yourself from getting thrown in jail, you helped the feds lay a trap for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is, Alexei.” I put my beer down on the coffee table. “Look at what’s happening to me. I’d rather be dead than keep living like this.”

“If I clone these badges for you, what are you planning to do with them? Break into the Apotheosis Labs and demand they cut the wings off your back?”

“I need to figure out what’s happening to me. What they want. You owe me.”

He thought about it for a minute, but then he sat down at his laptop again. He created the employee profiles and then used his Flipper Zero to write the profiles onto blank badges.

“We’re even now,” he said, and he handed the badges to me.

I took the badges, and then I spat in his face.

“If you’ve screwed me again, I’ll make sure you pay for it this time,” I told him.

I left his apartment and walked toward mine, avoiding the streetlights.

I felt like I was being followed. Once, I looked back, and I swore I saw a winged shadow in the sky above me. But when I looked back, it was gone.

That night, I had a horrible dream.

My mother sat in a dirty apartment, barely clothed. She held a needle in her shaking hand, staring at it for a moment before plunging it into a vein.

Then she let the needle fall to the floor.

Her head fell backward. She leaned against the wall. Then she slumped to the floor.

Another addict, a man, walked over to her. He touched her. She didn’t move.

He lay on top of her.

She finally moved a little. Told him to get off. But then her eyes rolled backward into her skull again.

I woke up covered in cold sweat. My clock read 3:37 AM.

I met Destiny at the same café that afternoon, and I told her about the dream.

“I had the same dreams right before I headed into the Parallax Medical building,” I said.

Destiny nodded, but she wasn’t listening. She was still thinking about breaking into Apotheosis Labs without getting arrested.

“You’re sure the badges will get us past Apotheosis Labs security?” Destiny asked.

“Alexei knows what he’s doing. As long as he isn’t secretly screwing me again, they’ll work. Once we get into the building, we’ll only have a few hours before Apotheosis flags the employee profiles as fakes, though. We need to get whatever evidence we can find and then get out of there.”

Destiny and I stayed at the café until midnight, barely talking, just sitting in nervous silence. Then we got into her car and drove to the Apotheosis Labs building. She parked a few blocks away from it, and we walked the rest of the way.

“You go first,” she told me.

I walked into the building lobby and scanned my badge at the gate. The security guard looked up at me. The light on the badge scanner flashed green.

Destiny followed behind me. The scanner flashed green on her badge, too.

“Working late?” the guard asked.

Destiny smiled at him. “We got a call about one of the servers going down. It’s going to be a long night.”

We walked past him, toward the elevators, keeping our heads down.

“That was a little too easy,” Destiny said. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“The main lab should be on the fifth floor.”

We got into one of the elevators, and then I scanned my card again and pressed the button for floor five.

The elevator climbed upward. I held my breath. Still nervous that something was about to go very wrong.

When the elevator doors opened again, Destiny and I walked out into the lab.

I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before standing in the basement of the old Parallax Medical building. The air was heavy. I smelt hot wire. A low hum of electricity whirred in my ears.

Destiny flipped a light switch, and the lab filled with fluorescent light.

Against walls, I saw metal shelves filled with microscopes, DNA extraction kits, spectrophotometers, sequencers, and vials of blood. Cells were being incubated in test tubes. Circuitry wired with veins and blood, and branded with the Ophidia Global logo, powered computers that displayed video footage that bled from one clip into another.

On one monitor, a child with an old man’s eyes and teeth smiled. On another, a woman with black eyes and a hunched back swallowed a young girl whole. On a third, a happy family sat at their dinner table, eating turkey and peas and mashed potatoes.

In the videos, the faces of people looked wrong. Their eyes didn’t match. They had extra fingers. Their noses and lips were the wrong proportions.

In the corner of the lab, a map of Afghanistan had been pinned to a corkboard. Near Kandahar, someone had marked six red Xs.

“What’s in Kandahar City?” I asked.

“Maybe more Nephilim?”

Destiny took a picture of the map. Then she took pictures of all the monitors and blood-filled test-tubes, too.

From the back of the lab, we heard a man scream. We looked toward the sound. Lights flickered near the brick wall past the sinks and the ice buckets.

We walked to the end of the lab and found a hallway that led to a small projection room.

Inside the room, a twelve-foot-tall man with long black hair had been chained to a metal chair. Vein-filled circuitry covered the wall behind him. Wires connected the organic circuitry to his head. Then more wires connected his head to a projector mounted on the ceiling.

The giant’s eyes flickered white and blue while the projector projected a video onto the brick wall across from him.

The video showed a man and woman holding hands on a beach at sunset. The gears of the projector clicked as the video played.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Heaven.exe,” Destiny said. “My father wrote about it in his notes. It’s a program Parallax developed to visualize decoded angel DNA.”

The video flickered. A woman appeared, holding her face. A second face sprouted from her forehead. The second face was identical to her own. The same mouth, the same eyes, and screaming, too.

A third face sprouted. Then a fourth and a fifth.

“That doesn’t look like Heaven,” I said.

“It’s not just Heaven encoded in angel blood. There’re lots of other things, including Hell.”

I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. Reid appeared in the doorway of the room.

“What are you two doing here?” he asked.

Reid looked twenty years younger than he did when I’d met him in his office earlier that year, when he was dying of cancer. His hair had grown back, too. He was lean and muscular.

Destiny took a picture of the Nephilim with the projector wired to his head.

“We’re going to show the whole world what you’re doing here,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody will believe you,” Reid said, and he walked into the room.

“Did Chazaqiel tell you what he did to me?” I asked him.

“He said you’re part of the plan.”

“And the plan is to hook me up to one of these projectors, too?” I pointed at the Nephilim chained to the chair.

Reid smiled. “We’re building a new Heaven with new Gods. And Chazaqiel’s promised he’ll make me a God, too.”

“He’s using you,” Destiny said.

“We’re using each other.” He held out his hand. “Give me your phone, and I’ll let you leave.”

“No.”

“You’re making a big mistake. Do you understand what Chazaqiel will do to you if you interfere with these experiments? What he’ll do to all of us?”

Reid’s eyes glazed over. His muscles tightened.

The Nephilim screamed again. The video on the wall flickered and changed.

Reid lunged at Destiny and threw her to the ground. He tried to tear the phone from her hand, but she held the phone tightly against her chest, refusing to let go of it.

I ran and pulled Reid off her.

The building alarms went off. The lab filled with red light.

I grabbed Destiny’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “We need to go. We’ve gotten what we needed.”

“You can run, but we’ll find you,” Reid told me. “You’re part of this now, Vadym. You can’t escape.”

Destiny and I ran back to the elevators, but the power had been cut off. To our right, I saw a fire exit sign, glowing red at the end of a hallway. We ran toward it and then followed the emergency stairs out the back of the building, into an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.

“We need to get out of San Francisco,” Destiny said.

“I need to help him first.”

“Who?”

“That other Nephilim.”

“You need to help yourself first, and I need to get the pictures I took somewhere safe. I’ll talk to you later, ok?”

She ran toward the street and then disappeared.

I stood and walked out of the alley. My apartment wasn’t far. I walked toward it, staying in the shadows to keep out of sight.

I’d get on a bus, I thought. Maybe head down to Mexico. I’d be safe there, at least for a little while.

Back inside my apartment, I went to my bedroom to start packing my suitcase, but then I noticed a winged figure standing in front of my living room window.

“You’re too impatient, Vadym.”

Chazaqiel stepped into the light.

“We aren’t ready for you yet. The changes take time. A few more months at least.”

“What have you done to me?”

“You don’t understand yet?” He stroked his long, bony fingers across my face. “I’ve made you immortal.”

“I didn’t ask you to do this.”

“You did. You spoke to me through your soul, and I heard you.”

His jaw dropped and his mouth widened.

I felt strange. My apartment seemed smaller. The walls had closed in on me. The air had become heavy and thick.

He lowered his face to mine. His hunched back pressed against my apartment ceiling.

His breath smelt like burnt wire.

“Do you know what it feels like to be banished from Heaven?” he asked me. “To feel Paradise only to be told that you will never feel it again? Just because you wanted a bit of human flesh?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m so thirsty. It’s not good for us to be this far away from God. It changes us, this distance. I used to be so white, Vadym. So pure. But it doesn’t matter. God can’t hide his secrets from us forever. Piece by piece, bit by bit, we’ll uncover them. We have nothing but time.”

Saliva dripped from his mouth. He wiped it from his lips.

“I’m sorry, Vadym. I’m starving. I just need a quick drink.”

He grabbed my shoulders and sank his teeth into my neck. I felt his wires spread inside me, draining my blood. I screamed.

My eyes filled with light, and then colors.

I saw my mother crying as she left me at my grandmother’s apartment, promising she’d be back soon.

I saw myself at seven, alone in a Saint Petersburg stairwell, waiting for her.

I saw Chazaqiel chained to the wall of the Parallax lab, telling me, “I heard you the moment you were born, Vadym. I’ve been waiting all your life.”

As tears fell down my cheeks, all I could do was beg him.

“Please just tell me my mother’s ok.”

I’d woken up on the floor of my apartment. Chazaqiel was gone. Through the window, the morning light shone in the sky.

I’d gone to the bathroom and vomited. In the mirror, my body looked even paler than it had before.

He’d drained most of my blood.

It took three days before I was able to leave my apartment again.

I texted Alexei. “I forgive you.”

“The badges worked?”

“Yes, thank you. I got what I needed. You’ll never see me again.”

I put my phone away. My flight was boarding soon. In thirty hours, I’d be landing in Kabul.

I’d already found a driver to take me to Kandahar City. I was sure there were other Nephilim out there, and I was going to find them.

I walked onto the plane. It was mostly empty. I’d paid for two seats, to make sure nobody felt my wings underneath my coat.

I found my seats and sat down. Then I rubbed my neck. It still ached. My whole body did.

“Are you all right?” the flight attendant asked me. “You look pale.”

“I’m a little nervous, but I’ll be fine,” I told her.

She kept walking down the aisle.

I closed my eyes and tried to get a bit of sleep.

The last time I’d slept on a plane, Chazaqiel had come to me in my dreams and told me he was waiting for me. I wondered what he’d say to me this time.

Continue to Part 3

I checked the photo for signs of manipulation, but I didn’t see any.

The man had been shackled to the stage floor. He was so thin his ribcage pressed through his skin.

“This man vanished in 1922,” Reid told me. “I need help finding out what happened to him.”

Reid was a cloud data entrepreneur worth around three billion dollars. In the news, I read that he’d recently been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. I wondered if he was still in his right mind.

I called the number in his signature. His secretary answered and then scheduled a meeting for me and Reid later that week.

I met Reid at his office downtown. He sat at his desk but stood to shake my hand.

He looked sick. Thin and frail. He’d lost all his hair. His handshake was firm, though, and he still had his confident, salesman’s smile.

“The famous Red Prymara,” he said.

“I just go by Vadym now.”

“How’d they catch you? I’ve always wanted to know.”

“The FBI said I’d used a canary token that leaked my IP address. I’ve never believed that explanation, though. Someone must have told on me. Someone close to me, too. My partner, Alexei, did two years in federal prison. I did fifteen. Now, I strictly do white hat work.”

Reid coughed into his handkerchief. Then he sat at his desk again and turned his computer monitor toward me.

On the screen was an old newspaper article from The Bismarck Tribune, dated October 1922.

“The performer whose picture I sent you went by the name Chazaqiel,” Reid told me. “He performed as part of a traveling circus called Marchetti’s Palace of Wonders. The owner of the circus, Ignazio, claimed Chazaqiel was one of The Watchers from the Book of Enoch.”

“What’s the Book of Enoch?”

“An old religious text that claims there was a group of angels who abandoned heaven to sleep with human women. The women who became pregnant gave birth to hideous giants called Nephilim.”

Reid scrolled through the newspaper article. It described the different performers. A sword-swallower, a strongman, a fortune teller with milk-white eyes, and then Chazaqiel, the angel. The same picture I’d seen before.

“Chazaqiel was the circus’s star attraction,” Reid told me. “Stories about him spread all over the USA and eventually reached the ear of a railroad tycoon named Threll. Threll was obsessed with the occult. He was also a practicing Hermeticist, who sought to use the metaphysical world to control physical reality. He hired a Pinkerton detective to travel to North Dakota and find out if the stories about Chazaqiel were true. The detective arrived in North Dakota but never made it back to Threll. The Pinkertons sent a few more detectives to North Dakota to look for this missing detective, but they couldn’t find him. But they did learn that Chazaqiel had disappeared, too.”

“And nobody ever found out what happened to them?”

“That’s where the story gets stranger. In the late 1980s, this picture was posted to a BBS conspiracy board. It shows an angel lying on an operating table in some kind of medical lab.”

Reid opened the picture. The angel looked just like Chazaqiel. His head was shaved, his wings had been mutilated, and his flesh was covered with surgical scars.

I’ve seen things on the dark web that would put most people in therapy. Cartel executions, freak accidents, exploitation rings. I’ve learned to look at horror like data, separating the facts from the suffering. But this picture of Chazaqiel made my stomach turn.

“The person who leaked this photo claimed they worked at Parallax, a genetics company founded by Threll’s grandson.”

“So, you think the Thrells have had Chazaqiel locked up somewhere this whole time?”

Reid leaned across his desk.

“Threll’s grandson was a heavy smoker. He was around my age when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I have a few friends who know him. They say he managed to cure his cancer. They say he’s stopped aging, too.”

I knew it all sounded crazy. I knew Reid was probably out of his mind. Work had been slow, though, and Reid’s contract was generous. I told him I’d look into Parallax and see what I could find.

For the next three days, I searched archived Reddit and 4chan threads, old forum sites like Godlike Productions and Lunatic Outpost, and Tor sites like Dread and DarkForums.

On an archived alt.conspiracy Usenet chain, someone calling themselves NullSequence claimed they were the one who’d first posted the Parallax angel photo. Their email was NullSequence at netcom dot com.

I took a chance and tried to email the address. “Did you take this picture?” I asked, and I attached a copy of it.

I’d nearly given up on them when, two weeks later, they wrote me back with an invite to join a Signal chat group.

I joined.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“My name’s Vadym. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to look into Parallax’s angel experiments.”

“Send me a picture of your face with your driver’s license beside it.”

I didn’t like to give strangers copies of my ID cards, but I didn’t have any other leads. I needed to know what they did. I could always get a new driver’s license if I had to.

I sent them the picture.

An hour later, they called me.

A woman spoke. “You’re not working for Parallax, are you?”

“Just for someone they’ve screwed over.”

“They’ve screwed over a lot of people.”

“How long ago did you work for them?”

“I didn’t. My father, Jose, did. He’s NullSequence. He worked at Parallax from 1986 until he was found dead in his apartment on June 5, 1992.”

“How’d he die?”

“The police said it was a heroin overdose, but he’d never touched heroin in his life. He hated drugs. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol when he had a headache.”

“Did your father tell you anything about what Parallax was working on?”

“They called it Project Nephilim. They were trying to sequence the angel’s DNA. They thought his DNA held all kinds of secrets and, if they could map it, they’d unlock the truth about the universe.”

She paused.

“My father had more pictures. He kept a journal, too. I can send you everything, but on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“If you find proof that Parallax killed my father, you need to give it to me.”

I agreed.

She sent me the photos and a text file containing her father’s journal entries.

In the new photos, Chazaqiel’s body had been even more mutilated. Wires had been embedded in his arms and chest. Plastic tubes sucked the blood from his veins, transferring it into test tubes.

In a journal entry dated January 14, 1992, Jose wrote, “I managed to get a camera into the basement of the New Mexico lab and take a few pictures. I don’t know where Parallax found these surgeons. They can’t speak English, just Italian. They took six vials of blood out of the angel and then sent them upstairs to Gideon, our Ontological Geneticist.”

Jose’s final entry was dated June 2, 1992. In it, he wrote: “Gideon thinks Threll has lost his mind. Threll thinks the angel wants revenge. He wants to keep it chained up in the lab forever. Or at least for as long as he’s still alive.”

I called Reid and told him what I’d learned.

“This is great work,” he said. “Now we just need to get you into that lab building.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Work faster.”

Searching through New Mexico real estate listings, I learned the old Parallax lab building had been put up for sale by its new owner, a company called Ophidia Global. I called Reid and asked if he could get me a tour of the building. He called me back the next day and said the tour had already been scheduled.

I got on a plane to New Mexico.

During the flight, I had a strange dream. Chazaqiel leaned over me, smiling in my face, while his wings flapped behind his back.

I stared up at his hideous smile, frozen. Unable to move. Unable to scream.

He ran his long, bony fingers over my face.

“I’m waiting for you, Vadym,” he said.

I woke as the plane landed, covered in sweat.

I took a cab to my hotel. I spent the night looking through pictures of the old lab, trying to figure out where Threll might have Chazaqiel hidden.

The next morning, I met the realtor, Katie, at the building. She looked like a typical suburban mom. Curly blonde hair. She wore a black blazer. She shook my hand and asked me how long I’d worked for Reid.

“About two years,” I said.

“What’s he planning to do in New Mexico?”

“I really can’t say anything. Reid wants to keep this project quiet.”

She said she understood, and then she brought me inside the Parallax lab.

The first floor was filled with cubicle dividers. Gray carpet covered the floor. Gray blinds covered the windows.

“It’s really a great building,” she told me. “Lots of space, lots of potential.”

“The building’s been empty since Parallax shut down?”

“Yes. Ophidia Global acquired the building recently, but they haven’t been able to find a buyer yet.”

“The building has been on the market a while, hasn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, there used to be some rumors going around that this building is haunted.”

She led me past the cubicles.

“The building is still in very good shape, though,” she said. “The owners send cleaners in every two weeks. They’ve kept the place in very good condition.”

“Do you think I could see the basement?”

“I’m not supposed to take people down there.”

“Why not?”

“The cleaners don’t get to it as often.”

“I’d really like to see it. Reid’s going to need a space to set up his server racks.”

“I guess I could show it to you quickly.”

She brought me downstairs and flipped the light switch. Fluorescent tube lights lit up the concrete hallway.

“The furnace room is on your right,” she told me. “Then next to it is a storage room you might be able to use for servers or whatever other kind of equipment Reid needs to put in here.”

At the end of the hallway, I noticed a metal door.

“Where does that door go?”

“I have no idea. I’d need to ask the Thrells.”

I tried to open the door, but it was locked.

The handle felt strangely warm.

I began to feel dizzy, and I knelt on the floor. The room spun around me. My vision blurred.

For a moment, I saw Chazaqiel sitting in a cage inside a circus tent. A man in a suit and a hat stood next to him.

“Ignazio keeps his keys underneath his pillow,” Chazaqiel said. “He drank an entire bottle of rum tonight. Just reach under his pillow and take the keys. He won’t wake up.”

“And if I free you, you promise you’ll come back to California with me?”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Chazaqiel smiled, his lips stretching across his face.

Katie put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Sorry. I just lost my balance for a second.”

“It’s the air down here. It’s very dusty. We should go back upstairs.”

I agreed. I followed her back upstairs.

“So, what do you think?” she asked me.

“The building has a lot of potential. I really need to talk to Mr. Reid first, though, before I can say anything else.”

“Of course. As soon as you do, please let me know what he thinks.”

We shook hands and said goodbye to each other.

Then I went back into the city and rented a van. I drove around and bought everything I’d need to get through that metal door. A bolt cutter, a flashlight, a 20V drill, and a big pack of tungsten carbide-tipped drill bits.

I drove back to the lab at midnight.

I shut off the building’s alarm, got through the front entrance, and then made my way back down to the basement, where I started drilling out the metal door’s keyway.

The first drill bit lasted four minutes before it broke.

I looked over my shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that somebody was watching me.

I put in the second bit and kept drilling. Burning hot metal shavings sprayed across my hands, but I ignored the pain.

The drill hit the security pins and kicked sideways. But I grabbed onto it and held it tighter.

Sweat dripped down my face.

Dull pain spread through my forearms.

The second drill bit broke, and I put in the third. The third bit finally got the door open.

Behind the door, concrete stairs led deeper underground.

I looked over my shoulder again, and then I turned on my flashlight and followed the stairs down into the sub-basement.

I came out into a lab filled with metal tables, overturned chairs, and computer monitors with shattered screens. Surgical instruments lay scattered across the floor. The counters were covered with broken syringes.

In the next room, someone moaned.

“Hello?” I yelled.

But no answer.

I walked through the lab, into the adjacent room.

An enormous shadow stretched across the back wall.

I raised my flashlight. I nearly dropped it on the floor when I saw him.

Chazaqiel.

His arms outstretched, his legs pressed together, as if he’d been crucified.

I thought I’d prepared myself to see him. I thought I’d be fine. But my brain struggled to process the fact that he was real. Not just a photograph anymore.

My legs buckled.

The longer I looked at him, the more horrific the scene became.

His body had been embedded into the wall. His hands, feet, and shoulders had been pinned to the wall with steel bolts.

Thousands of wires entered every part of his body. Some were thin; others were thick cables. The wires connected his body to junction boxes mounted on the walls.

What remained of his wings spread out behind him. Most of the feathers had been plucked out. In the gaps between the feathers, the veins of the membrane pulsed.

He slowly raised his head and locked his eyes with mine.

Another memory entered my head.

Threll’s grandson knelt on the floor in tears. “What have you done to me?”

Chazaqiel looked down at him from the wall. “I’ve given you everything you ever wanted.”

“You’ve cursed me.”

Chazaqiel’s voice brought me out of the dream.

“You found me, Vadym.”

He was smiling now. The same smile from my dream.

“Are you in pain?” I asked him.

“I’ve suffered worse. Now, are you going to save me? Take me to see Reid?”

“How do you know about Reid?”

“I know everything that happens next. Everything that Reid wants from me. But what do you want, Vadym?”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“You want to know who betrayed you. I’ll tell you if you free me. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

So, I was betrayed then.

I knew it.

I’d always wanted the name. I’d always wanted the truth.

I picked up the bolt cutter and cut the steel bolts. Chazaqiel stepped forward from the wall. The wires stretched and then began snapping.

Chazaqiel leaned forward, bringing his face toward mine.

“It was Alexei,” he told me.

“Of course.”

It had always been so obvious. He’d made the mistake, not me. He must have hacked that crypto exchange, even after I’d warned him not to, and then gotten caught just like I’d warned him he would. To save himself, he’d traded my life for his.

All the tears. All the times he’d visited me in prison, trying to cheer me up.

I laughed.

I’d make sure I paid him back. Before I died, I’d make sure he suffered just like I had.

Chazaqiel lifted me off the ground.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

His mouth widened. His jaw unhinged with the crack of splitting bone. Then the lower half dropped to his chest.

Inside his widening mouth, I saw a cave of pale, ribbed flesh.

“Stop!”

He swallowed me whole, like a snake devouring a rat.

My eyes filled with darkness.

Knives stabbed into my shoulder blades. The pain spread down my spine.

My veins squirmed like worms against my muscles.

I began bleeding from every part of my body. Soon, my clothes were soaked with blood.

Again and again, my veins emptied and then soaked up fresh blood.

I screamed in agony, begging Chazaqiel to make the torture stop.

I don’t know how long it went on for. Hours or days.

But then I woke up on the floor. Black blood dripped from my mouth. My clothes were soaked with black blood, too. My body ached.

Chazaqiel hovered over me, the same black blood dripping from his mouth.

“What did you do to me?” I asked.

He turned and walked down the hallway.

“Where are you going?” I yelled.

I ran after him, but I became dizzy, and I leaned against the wall to steady myself.

Outside, I found Chazaqiel in the back of the van, waiting for me.

“Take me to Reid now,” he said.

I called Reid and asked him where he wanted me to go. Reid gave me the address for a warehouse in Northern California.

I drove all night. Fifteen hours. Only stopping for gas.

I felt relieved to be done with Reid and with chasing after missing angels.

I got back to work on other projects. But then the changes started, slowly at first.

The first few weeks, my muscles and bones felt sore, but I blamed the soreness on stress and lack of sleep.

But then I began growing. My shoulders had widened. My legs and arms lengthened. My hands and feet became longer and thinner. Soon, my clothes didn’t fit anymore.

I bought a tape measure and began measuring myself every morning. I grew from six-foot-one to six-two to six-three.

No matter how much I ate, I was horribly hungry. I couldn’t eat cooked food, either. Even the smell of it made me gag. All I could eat was raw meat.

Then, three months after whatever Chazaqiel did to me, wings began to grow from my back. They were small at first, but as they grew in size, they became difficult to hide under my jacket.

I thought about calling Jose’s daughter, but I didn’t know what to tell her. That I’d found the angel and freed him, but then he’d made me an angel, too? Cursed me just like he’d cursed Threll.

I kept trying to call Reid. I wanted to tell him what was happening to me. I wanted to warn him. But he wouldn’t answer his phone.

Then I saw Reid on TV, talking to a reporter. He looked different than he had before. He looked healthy and strong now. All his hair had grown back.

He told the reporter he’d just launched a new genetics company. He’d taken an interest in genome-editing technology like CRISPR. He was going to use his fortune to fund research that would explore how to unlock the true potential of human DNA.

He would continue Threll’s work on Project Nephilim.

I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt. I barely recognized myself anymore. My ribs pressed through my skin. My flesh had become pale white.

And the wings on my back. I opened them and let them fill the bathroom. Then I closed them again, and I put my shirt back on.

I looked at my reflection one last time, and I wondered what I was becoming.

—
Continue to Part 2 - HEAVEN.EXE