WWC WK11: Heart Gear

Darkness.

It is all around me, swamping me like the waves of the sea. I have been in this cocoon of blackness for what seemed an eternity, but I can't remember why. Who brought me here? Was it... the boy? What was his name?

Everything is different now. I know that much. I'd been sent to take care of... someone. But I don't remember who. It is simply my task to watch over... watch over... I can't remember.

I am a Recording Angel. Even now, I can feel the gears and wheels inside my chest rotating, spinning in my internal darkness. Like some well-oiled machine, my levers slide up and down, my wheels turn, my pulleys shift. And in the pitch blackness of what I can only assume is my prison, only my memories keep me sane. I was meant to record the death and resurrection of mankind. I am a recording angel.

Remember, I tell myself. Weightless madness creeps close, so I cling to my thoughts, the sound of my own voice in my head. Remember the ones you have lost. Remember the boy. He is the resurrection, the savior of mankind. What is his name?

Remember, remember, remember, remember....

***

Once there was a place for the recording angels. I can still recall the smell of aloe gel greasing the gears in my wings, the oil smoothed over my bronze feathers to make them shine. I remembered the house, stucco the color of the inside of a conch shell. In the middle of the vast desert, that house reminded me of the sea. Towering Joshua trees shaded the walls.

And I remembered the child.

I saw him, long ago before the world exploded in countless atomic fires. He ran through the desert, tears pouring down his face. Even half-complete, in my mistress's work shed, I could see the grief twisting his face. The guitar in his hands gleamed like sweat and tears. In the fading sun, the strings glinted like metallic blood. The boy rushed by me, desperate to escape some evil. And behind him, I could see the hounds.

The hounds have always been, as long as there were recording angels. They are the creatures of shadow and blackness, birthed from the life in shattered springs and gears. Vomited up after bombs and nuclear destruction decimate life. All creation brings life. Even the destructive creations made by mankind.

Those black shadow hounds chased the boy. The light turned their gears to razored wheels of bloody metal. Their eyes burned like hellfire. The child couldn't see them. I knew that. But he could feel them, the fetid breath on his neck from beasts that should not breathe. They would chase him until his pain fell away. The hounds hungered for the pain of man, pain they could not feel because of their broken circuits and springs.

I tried to move. My wings flexed, and my feathers screeched as they bent and buckled. My gears slid through the aloe my mistress used to oil them. One arm, bronze framework wrapped in brown leather, lifted. My metal fingers reached for the child. I wanted to save him. I was a recording angel, and my task was to protect man until the day of the world's resurrection. But I was not finished. I could do nothing but watch.

He outran them. This was before children grew sickly and frail, before the great atomic fires that burned the world. I watched him outrun the hounds, up a hill of scrub, cactus and red stone. And he took shade beneath a Joshua tree. In those times, the sacred still existed in the wilds in abundance.

The sun groped its way towards the mountains, desperate to hide its face from humanity as the world slowly moved toward Armageddon. Night fell like a shroud.

When the boy came back, he didn't run. He walked, hand in hand with a girl I knew was like me. Deep inside, there were gears and springs instead of a heart. Cream colored silk and dark green and brown leather hugged the framework of her body, moving as fluidly as aloe oil with each step she took.

Here was a child of clockwork, the ones that occurred naturally, that man could only try to poorly imitate. The girl was one of the clockwork pieces made by the Lord of Creation to watch over the world. She was clockwork, but the girl loved that human boy.

I could see it, even then, in her eyes.

***

My mistress finished me soon six months after I saw the boy's flight to the mountains and his return with a clockwork tree spirit. Did he know what she was? I doubted it. Except for the angels, most of us were meant to blend with the humans.

The last bolt was finished none too soon. My mistress laid aside her soldering tool, wiped the sweat from her brow, and smiled. I knew enough of human emotions to realize she was tired, and that the glimmer in her dark eyes was what mankind called fear. Was she afraid of me?

"You know what you're to do, Seraphine?" She asked, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her white coat.

I searched her face, wishing there was some clue to her fear. Was it the tiny burns flecking her skin from wayward sparks? Or the bruise on one cheek that told me someone had hurt her? When she pulled her hand out of her pocket to adjust one of my facial pieces, I saw the smallest of her fingers had been splinted. If I'd had a face capable of expression, I would have frowned.

"Tucson's been evacuated, but there are children here still. You have to find them. You have to protect them. The Avenging Angels have already been loosed in the city to create safe havens for them once you and the other Recorders find them."

Why is she here? I thought, confusing buzzing through the copper coils and along the surfaces of the gears in my body. She should not be here. Dangerous.

"Soldiers are coming," my maker continued, helping me down from the platform where she had set me to make it easier to weld me together. The feel of the dust and wood of the floor beneath my feet made my head gears whirl and click. Whatever my mistress used for my brain and my memory processed and stored the sensory input.

"Everything is going to hell," she whispered, glancing at the shuttered windows. They had never been closed before... until today. What had happened? "You've got to keep the children safe, Seraphine. There are others like you - a thousand choirs of angels. They will help."

"W-w-why? Why... soldiers?"

"We lost the war," she said, and somehow I knew her voice was sad. A drop of water trailed from the corner of her eye down one cheek: a tear. "They're going to come here first. The enemy governments suspect we've been working on clockwork life forms. You have to be gone before then. Please go."

"L-leave?"

"Yes," my mistress said, swiping at her undamaged cheek. Pushing back the wisps of fly-away hair that I had seen her fiddle with throughout my creation, she added, "Yes, Seraphine. You can't be here when they come. If they knew you existed, they'd simply bomb the city until none of you were left. They won't risk nuclear fallout if they're uncertain. We cannot allow them certainty."

"Go... now?"

"Go now."

"Goodbye?" I asked.

"Yes, this is goodbye." She touched my face. I could feel the pressure of her fingers against the thin shell of brass that made up my cheek. "You are the last one, the last Recorder, the last Angel I will ever make. I only pray I've done enough. Go well, and endure to the end, until the day of the Resurrection of Man comes. Find the one who will lead them. The boy who once could fly. Go quickly."

And she left her work shed and disappeared inside her house. I never saw my mistress again.

***

It took another six months to find the boy and his clockwork girl again. Six months of wandering blisteringly hot streets inhabited by feral strays of all kinds.

Animals like coyotes, cats, and javalinas learned quickly that to bite one such as I would result in broken teeth or bleeding cuts to the tongue. The bronze strips that held me together were edged with razored iron and though my leather skin soon cracked and became brittle under the desert sun, the sharp steel edging my "bones" kept me safe from predators.

Children whispered from their shadowy hideouts as I passed, searching for the Savior. Sometimes they would send their leaders to speak to me. Some of them knew about the Angels. Some conclaves of stray children were even guarded by the Warrior Angels that had been made by humans like my mistress.

Always I recorded their child faces and their thin voices, their stories. I was to record as much of mankind as I could for the time of Man's resurrection. They could not be allowed to lose too much of their civilization. Their words are imprinted in my gears.

"My name is Katie and I'm a scout with the Nest."

"I'm Jake. The soldiers killed my mom and dad and my older brother. I hid in the dumpster by our apartment complex until they left."

"Coraline never talks. She always has the cat with her because the cat can smell soldiers a bazillion miles away. Kitty and Coraline always tell us when to hide and where to go so the soldiers can't find us."

"I'm Janie, the leader of the Hawks, and we need medicine for our sick people. Do you know if the UMC has anything left in its stores? Or did soldiers take it all?"

"David knows how to fix cars so we can travel if things get too bad. We have army cars. He said those kinds are called... um... HumVees! Yeah, HumVees...."

Thousands of children let me record them, so they would never be lost. There was more than Katie, Jake, Coraline, Janie, and David. Too many children to count. If I were human, I could never remember them all. My mistress knew that when she made the Recording Angels.

Yet I couldn’t find the one child I needed. The boy with the clockwork tree spirit was the one. He would lead mankind to freedom, to hope. He was the one who would save us all. I had to find him.

***

Eventually I did.

Soldiers marched through the streets, shooting at stray animals and crushing the snakes that slithered under their boots. The boy with the guitar huddled inside the abandoned shell of a McDonald's. The clockwork girl peered over the row of ovens, her strange eyes intent. They widened fractionally when she saw me.

"What are you?" She hissed, her voice as golden as the gears that served as her heart. "You are not a dryad or naiad."

"Natural clockwork, I am not," I replied, hunkering down behind the scorched and half-melted ovens beside them. The boy did not seem surprised by my appearance. Had he known I tracked them? "I am a Recording Angel. I was made by Dr. Kate Martin."

"A Recording Angel?" The clockwork dryad demanded, crossing her arms. I'd never seen such a dainty clockwork creation. Whereas I had been forged of brass, iron, and leather, she was silver, gold, and silk brocade. How did she keep from tearing? I could not be so fragile and survive as long, I knew.

"I've heard of you," the boy said. "Orpheus wrote songs about you."

"Orpheus?"

"The leader of Cassandra," he muttered. If I had been human, I would have smiled. Cassandra - the resistance movement against the humans who had invaded this place. "He swore he'd been saved by an angel made of brass and leather," the boy continued. "Was that you?"

I shook my head. It had to have been one of the others of my kind, and I said so. Then I added, "I saw you running."

"What?"

"The day you found her," I said, gesturing to the clockwork girl. "I saw you running. What were you running from? You ran to the foot of the mountain."

He stared at me, his gray eyes wide in his dusty, soot-smudged face. How had the boy I had seen warped into this thin, sickly child of the resistance? He muttered, "My dad enlisted in the army."

I nodded. The war had taken nearly everyone over the age of seventeen. No wonder the hounds had howled and chased after the boy's pain.

A noise touched my sound sensors - feet on pavement, the rumble of machinery. "We have to go," I said.

"Why should Peter or I go anywhere with you?" The clockwork girl demanded. I tried to shrug. It was difficult, with the ball-sockets of my shoulders covered thickly with grit.

"Stay or go, it is your choice. But soldiers come. Will you stay to die?"

The girl turned to the boy. After six months of living, of wandering among men, I could easily read the doubt in her eyes. This, then, was the difference between a natural clockwork entity and one made by men: she could feel emotion, and I could not.

The boy, Peter, glanced over his shoulder as the rumble of tanks and Humvees made the loose scraps of metal on the stoves and dusty floor rattle. Then he turned to the girl. His determined expression affirmed what I had known all along: this boy was the One.

"We have to trust her, Bell."

The girl eyed me, nodded, and we bolted and ran.

Peter stayed between us. Bell, the clockwork dryad with the golden voice, raced ahead, the wind streaming through her hair. I smelled aloe when her scent touched my facial sensory screen. The human boy, ungainly as only a human could be, kept steady between us. I could see the sweat pouring from his skin and dampening his ragged green t-shirt shirt. And I ran, effortless, enjoying the ability to stretch my wings, to let the dust and dirt drift from my bolts.

Someone shouted behind us. I glanced over my shoulder. Soldiers were lining up beside the McDonald's, priming their rifles. If I'd been human, or natural clockwork, fear would have shivered through me. These men could run us down with their vehicles, but why not shoot us like the animals they thought we were? Did they even realize what Bell and I were? Or did they have eyes only for Peter?

"Faster, human!" I yelled, pointing to strip mall across the parking lot. Once, it had been a chain of little shops and a large grocery store. Now they were hallow, dark shells. And I knew what lay within the darkness of those empty structures. "Into the shops, there!"

I stopped and turned to the soldiers.

Peter yelled, "What are you doing?" The clockwork girl did not let him remain to challenge me. She dragged him away to the safety I had pointed out to them.

"I am a Recording Angel," I whispered. The sun glinted off my feathers. "It is my duty to protect humans. If I am destroyed, it will be because I would save mankind. All the stories I have collected have been filed and sent to Choir."

That boy would be key. He had been the first human I had ever seen besides my mistress. He would go, with the clockwork girl, into the strip mall empty of all life and find the secret that my mistress had told me of. He would find the Recording Angels, and the Avenging and Warrior Angels. And he would bring us to the Resistance he had spoken of, and we would save humanity from itself.

"I am a Recording Angel," I said, as the first bullet bit into the joint of my arm. "I must protect man." If I had been human, I might have prayed. Instead, I simply repeated, "I must protect man" as the bullets of the enemy soldiers ripped into my metal body.

One bullet slammed into my heart gear, the one that allowed me to function. Aloe oil spilled from the cushion sacks in my chest, dribbled from the voice screen on my face.

And then I heard the screech of iron and bronze, Peter screaming, and I fell into darkness.

***

So that is what happened. I remember now. But how did I survive the shot to my heart gear? I touch my chest, but all I am is strips of bronze holding brass gears and wheels together. I cannot see to discern any damage. How did I survive?

Something is swimming in my tank, the metal box that keeps me in darkness. I can't see it, only feel it, like a shark sensing a larger, deadlier predator. Is it hunting me, this creature? Or is it here to set me free? I don't know.

I flex my fingers, my thin arms, even my battered wings. Feathers fall loose from the brass frames, but it doesn't matter. I was never meant to fly. The liquid darkness that surrounds me has eaten away at the leather strips wrapping my metal body. Now I am nothing but a skeleton of brass rods and iron bolts.

But I am still a Recording Angel. I still have a mission. Just as I always have.

Light explodes overhead, a supernova blinding me with its brilliance. When my ocular screen can take in everything around me, I realize I'm not in the tank anymore. I'm on a floor surrounded by bronze and leather feet - the feet of Recording, Avenging, and Warrior angels, and two pairs of boots I don't recognize.

"Welcome back, Seraphine."

I look up to see Peter and the clockwork girl, Bell, looking down at me. Peter is older now, though Bell is just the same. She is still fierce and mechanical, like me. And Peter....

"You are leader now." My voice croaks from my voice filter. The gangly, sickly blond boy with the haunted gray eyes is gone. In his place is a barbarian king of a man in leather and denim. He holds an assault rifle in his hand, which has been replaced by a clockwork construct. "You lead Cassandra."

He nods.

"You saved me," I say.

"Yeah," he says, and grins. "You're my Recording Angel and the war is about to begin. The Angels have agreed to help, and I wanted you to be there. You saved my life first. You helped me find the Choir."

"Choir?"

The Choir was meant to protect man. We were not made to fight battles. Avenging and Warrior Angels were meant to be protectors only. What has he done? What war is he talking about?

If I were human, fear would be my response now.

"A Choir of Angels," Peter says, and laughs.

I wonder then if I have saved mankind... or doomed it. Because the key that I have saved is now entirely mad. What happened while I was in the dark? Our Savior is now our Destroyer.

I am a Recording Angel, meant to preserve the civilization of man until the Day of Resurrection. Now I must wonder, am I doomed to record the end of the world? Though I am not human, I find that I can weep for the end of the world, for the end of humanity.

I weep, for the answer is yes.