World After

27

WHAT AT FIRST looked like a chaotic swarm turns out to be an ordered flight pattern.

Sort of.

Most of the scorpions follow an angel as he rises, then banks, then dives. The scorpions follow him around like baby birds. Most of them, anyway.

Some lag so far behind that they almost get in the angel’s way as he goes through his flight routine. And it is a routine. He repeats his flight pattern to stay near the island. He varies it here and there but it’s mostly a predictable pattern.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s teaching them to fly.

Baby birds are taught to fly and baby dolphins are taught to breathe air. Maybe baby monsters need to be taught how to be monster-like. Usually, babies are taught by their mothers, but these things don’t have mothers.

The angel is doing a poor job of teaching, though. Several of the scorpions are struggling. Even I can see that a few of them are flapping their wings too fast. They’re not hummingbirds and they’re likely to tire out or give themselves a heart attack, assuming they have a heart.

One of them falls right into the water. It flounders there, screeching.

Another scorpion swings down too low to the fallen one. I can’t tell which scorpion grabs which—whether the one in the air tries to help its buddy or the one in the water grabs the one in the air—but either way, the second one splashes into the water, too.

They thrash and try to climb on top of each other. Each fights for a few more seconds of air by trying to be the one standing on the other. But the winner only gets enough air for one final screech before they both sink.

The first time I saw these things in the aerie basement, they were suspended in tubes of liquid. But I guess they must have had some sort of umbilical cord, or they changed when they were “born,” because now they’re clearly drowning.

Footsteps make me spin and crouch lower. Mom and Clara hunker down beside me behind a broken crate.

There are so many shadows along the pier’s old shopping area that an army could be marching toward us and I wouldn’t see them. We huddle deeper into the darkness.

More footsteps. Running now.

People dart in and out of the shadows and dash into the open where the moonlight exposes them. A small stampede of people desperately running from something.

A couple of them glance behind them with a look of terror as they run.

Aside from their pounding feet on the buckled wooden planks, they don’t make any other noise. No screaming, no calling out to each other.

Even when a woman falls, obviously twisting an ankle, she makes no noise other than the soft thud of her impact. Her face contorts in pain and terror but no sound comes out of her mouth. She gets up and hobbles as fast as she can in a hop-run, frantically trying to keep up with the rest of the stampede.

Their panic echoes in my chest. I have the urge to run even though I have no idea what they’re running from.

Just as my leg twitches from indecision, the things chasing the crowd come around the corner.

There are three of them. Two scorpions hover low to the ground, buzzing on their insect wings. In the center limps an angel who looks like he’s been on steroids.

The huge angel has snowy wings.

Raffe’s wings.

Beliel.