The shooting range was in the lower level of the western wing, two floors below ground. No helmets. No protective glasses. Just the weapon in the hand and the echo of bullets against metal targets, a sound that lived in the chest long after it had left the room.
Lyza was on lane four.
Solandre stood on lane five and watched her.
She had not missed once. Not in the twenty minutes they had been down here, not in any of the thirty shots she had fired since they walked in without speaking and took their positions with the ease of two people who had shared enough silences to stop explaining them. Her form was exact in the way that distinguished talent from training, not the careful correctness of someone who had learned the right positions but the natural economy of someone for whom the right position was simply the one the body found on its own. She reloaded without looking at her hands. She fired without hesitation. The target registered dead center every time with the small metallic sound of something hit exactly where it was supposed to be hit.
Solandre raised his own weapon and fired once.
Then he lowered it and let his mind go where it always went when his hands were occupied with something that did not require it.
The weapons they trained with were standard issue, light enough to carry on a mission, precise enough to matter in close quarters. Capable of killing a human being without effort. Entirely useless against an angel. The bullets that passed through human flesh without mercy would not scratch what descended from the sky. The angels wore their bodies the way a cathedral wore its stone, not as protection but as a statement of what they were made of and what was not made of the same material.
Humanity had understood this early. The research that followed required bodies to conduct, angel bodies, the ones that fell in the first days of the Judgment before the angels understood what they were dealing with. From those bodies came the weapons that could actually wound them. From those bodies came the barrier. From those bodies came every advancement that had kept sixty three percent of humanity from becoming one hundred percent.
The rest was practice.
Lyza fired again.
Dead center.
Solandre asked himself a question he had been asking for years.
For simple soldiers to be this perfect, what then of the creator?
The angels moved with the efficiency of something that had never needed to doubt itself, never needed to hesitate, never needed to ask whether what it was doing was correct. They were instruments. Precise, obedient, terrible in the way of something built to be terrible and never asked to be anything else. If instruments could reach this level then the hand that made them existed at a distance he could not calculate and did not want to.
Why not suppress them directly?
That was the question underneath the question. If God had decided humanity had failed, if the verdict had been delivered and the executioners sent, why this? Why the years of it? Why the barrier that held and the kingdoms that stood and a war that should have ended in days if the intention behind it was truly absolute? He could end it. He had watched long enough to condemn. Watching long enough to finish required nothing additional. The capacity was there. The decision was not.
Which meant something.
Did he take pleasure in watching them suffer before the end? The way a human being watched an insect trapped under glass. Not cruelty exactly. More the absent curiosity of something that did not consider what it was observing to be in the same category as itself. An ant crushed underfoot received no malice. It received nothing. It simply stopped existing and the foot moved on without registering the event.
Were they the ant?
They had survived long enough to fight at something resembling equal footing. That fact alone should have been impossible and was not. The barrier held. The angels retreated from it. Sixty three percent was a catastrophe and also, from a certain angle, evidence that the other thirty seven had found something in themselves that the verdict had not accounted for. That was either proof of human resilience or proof that God was allowing it to continue for reasons that had nothing to do with the outcome.
Solandre raised his weapon and fired twice.
Both shots hit the target. Not dead center. Close enough.
He lowered the weapon.
Why create this environment of stress and false hope? Why build something capable of suffering and then watch it suffer before removing it? Does the process serve something? Or is this simply what it looks like when something infinite disposes of something finite and the finite takes longer to understand what is happening than the infinite anticipated.
He watched Lyza reload.
Would I die in my first battle? Of old age if God decides to allow it? Either way it is his choice. Not mine. Whatever I pretend. Whatever I decide. My ground will always be the palm of God. I have no power over that. I never did. None of us do. We built a barrier and called it victory and the hand that holds us simply waited to see what we would do next.
The thought did not produce despair. It produced something quieter and more permanent, the stillness of a conclusion reached too many times to generate feeling anymore.
More one knew, more one suffered.
Less one knew, the more one avoided the shape of things and lived inside something that resembled happiness without being it, warmth without source, comfort borrowed from the assumption that someone somewhere had answers and had chosen not to share them yet. It was a reasonable way to live. It produced functional people who ate their meals and formed their friendships and went to sleep without the weight of questions that had no ceiling.
Solandre paid the other price.
He paid it because the alternative was becoming something he could not respect, a person who rested on the words of others rather than finding his own, who chose the warmth of not knowing over the cold of seeing clearly.
The consequence was this. A room with twelve lanes and one other person and the echo of gunshots in stone and a mind that would not stop moving even when the hands were still.
He looked at Lyza.
She fired again.
Dead center.
He watched the target absorb the impact and felt, not for the first time, the loneliness of a frequency no one else was tuned to. Not arrogance. Something more honest than arrogance. The simple recognition that the questions he carried did not have a conversation waiting for them anywhere in this building. Perhaps anywhere in this city. Perhaps anywhere at all.
He raised his weapon.
Fired.
The echo moved through the room and settled into the stone and disappeared, indifferent to what it left behind.
Lyza lowered her weapon and turned to look at him for the first time since they had walked in.
She did not say anything.
Neither did he.