I did not sleep well.
I never slept well. This was not a new development. I had not slept well since I was twelve years old and stood in a street that smelled of copper while something with white wings moved overhead with the patience of something that had nowhere urgent to be. Four years had passed since that October Tuesday. I had not recovered a single night of clean sleep in any of them.
The room did not help.
It was small, smaller than the wardrobe in my father's estate, which I had always considered an unremarkable room and now understood had been an extraordinary one. A bed that was technically a bed in the same way that a puddle is technically water. A desk with one leg slightly shorter than the others that rocked gently whenever I put weight on it. A window the size of a painting, set high in the wall, through which the morning light arrived at an angle that managed to miss the desk entirely and illuminate instead a section of floor that had nothing on it worth illuminating.
The walls were stone. They were always cold. In winter they were cold in a way that had opinions about it.
This was the Van Silvestria Academy. The greatest military institution in the known world. The pride of the Central Kingdom. The place where the finest young minds of three civilizations came to be forged into something capable of surviving what the world had become.
I had been here for six days.
The room had not improved.
I should explain, for those who have not lived through the end of the world, which I imagine is no one, but clarity costs nothing, what the world looked like four years after God decided it was finished.
It looked, from the outside, like something that had not received the message.
The three kingdoms stood. Not comfortably. Not without cost. But they stood, and standing, in the fourth year of the Divine Judgment, was the only form of victory available to the human species and they had learned to accept it as such.
The Eastern Kingdom, occupying what had once been the Americas, had responded to the angels the way it responded to everything: with an obsessive, almost feverish interest in understanding the mechanism. Their scholars had collected angel corpses from the first days of the Judgment with the focused efficiency of people who had decided that if something was going to kill them they were going to understand how it worked first. Four years later their academies were full of dissection tables and preserved specimens and theories that the Central Kingdom's clergy found deeply offensive and the Western Kingdom's empress found deeply useful. They were, by general consensus, either going to save humanity or destroy what remained of it in the attempt. Possibly both.
The Central Kingdom, my kingdom, the one that covered the bones of what had once been Europe and stretched south through the continent of Africa, had responded differently. It had built. Not out of optimism exactly. More out of the particular stubbornness of a civilization that had been building things for eight centuries and could not conceive of stopping simply because God had expressed a preference that it do so. The walls went up first. Then the dome.
The dome.
Four hundred meters of wall on each cardinal point, surrounding the city in a perimeter that had required more labor than I was capable of calculating. And above it, the dome. The product of the Eastern Kingdom's research and the Central Kingdom's engineering and the Western Kingdom's funding, constructed over eighteen months in conditions that should have made it impossible and completed three weeks before the angels discovered what was being built and attempted to prevent its completion.
It held.
That was the thing no one had expected, including the people who built it. The angels struck it seventeen times in the first week. The engineers had counted, had documented each impact with the particular devotion of people who understood they were recording something historic and were not certain they would survive to see it read. It held. The divine lances left marks on its surface that faded within hours. The angels retreated.
Humanity called it the greatest invention in its history.
I called it proof that our arrogance had no ceiling.
We had been condemned for building things we had no right to build, for reaching into territories that were not ours to reach into, for the particular human conviction that any problem could be solved with sufficient ingenuity and insufficient humility. And our response, our collective species-wide response to being told this, was to immediately build something else.
I thought about this often.
I thought about it that morning, standing at the small window of my dormitory room, looking out at the city below.
It was beautiful.
That was the obscene part. The city, enclosed within its walls and under its dome, with the morning light coming through the dome's surface at a slight refraction that made everything below it look as though it existed slightly outside of ordinary reality, it was genuinely, unreasonably beautiful. The rooftlines. The cobblestones catching the early light. The carriages beginning their morning routes, the horses' breath visible in the cold air, the particular sound of iron wheels on stone that I had grown up with and had not realized I would miss until the city I grew up in no longer existed in the form I had known it.
People moved below. Going about the business of survival with the practiced normalcy of people who had decided, collectively, that normalcy was the most defiant thing available to them.
I watched them for a moment.
Then I turned away from the window.
The mirror above the small basin in the corner of the room was not a kind mirror. It was too honest, the particular honesty of cheap glass in bad light that shows you exactly what is there without any of the corrections that a better mirror might charitably apply.
What was there, that morning, was this:
White hair, longer than was strictly practical, falling to just below the jaw. Silver eyes, the kind of color that made people look twice in a way I had spent years finding inconvenient. Skin that had always been too pale. I was, by most available accounts, well-built for sixteen. I had been training since I was thirteen, not by choice initially, but because the world had changed and the combination of available time and available instruction had produced something useful.
I dressed. I washed my face with water that was cold because it was always cold.
I looked at the window once more, at the beautiful enclosed city going about its defiant normalcy beneath a dome that existed because humanity had been told it was finished and had responded by building a ceiling.
The two years at Van Silvestria would end with an invitation to make a pact. That was what everyone was here for, ultimately. The training, the conditioning, the education. All of it leading toward that single moment at the end.
The corridors were already full of students discussing it in the tones of people who had been promised something extraordinary. I had heard them since the first day. I would hear them for two years.
I did not share their excitement.
The angels had not been wrong about us.
That was the thought I could not escape, that morning or any morning. Standing at a small window in a cold room in the greatest academy in the world, watching a city that should not have existed continue to exist through sheer collective refusal to accept what it had been told.
The angels had not been wrong.
We were exactly what they said we were.
And I was going to spend two years learning to fight them anyway.