Radicle (Terminal trilogy #2, can stand alone)

20: THE BOY KING

I was quiet.

But my world did not come crashing down. There was still time in the elevator ride. The machinery filled the silence quite nicely.

She had been right. I was quite irritated with her, and her constant need to tell me things I didn't need to know.

And she had been right. I was ready to bolt as far away from her as possible.

And she had been right: I did remember her.

If you can call a couple dreams a memory, that is.

"Alright." I said. "I'm alright." I tried shrugging, but I was sitting in the corner of the elevator. My shoulders were stiff against the steel interior.

Tegan bit her lip. She was waiting for more words from me.

"You know," I offered, "Sometimes these things are some things, and there's no real point in them trying to be anything else."

"Very helpful." She said sarcastically.

She was my sister, but birds don't have sisters. The only family an avian american can have are the Brothers, and even then, they are brothers, not sisters. And they are only brothers of each other. The rest of us were alone- single children under a single parent. We would call ourselves brothers, but only in envy of the ones linked by blood.

There were no sisters in the world of birds, and that made sense, and that was proper because birds were proper. We knew what we were doing. Michael knew what he was doing.

And everything would make sense when I saw Michael again. Because Michael was psychic, and Michael knew the past, and Michael knew the future. And he was the only one who truly knew me and who truly completed me.

And Tegan was nothing to him- that was a given.

The elevator stopped some moments later. Three minutes, to be exact, but I wasn't going to return to Hell and it's system of time ever again. No point in keeping it around. Heaven was one hundred and seventy-six years old, but far more moments older.

I got up first, stood at the entrance to the dark outside, and turned back to grab the children. I hoisted them over my shoulders again. It wasn't the best way to carry them, truthfully.

Tegan collected her papers and books, and I stood a few steps ahead of her. The elevator came out to a short underground tunnel that smelled of plant rot. After all that time in a sterile underground, it was calming to breathe in the heavy forest air.

"Heaven's not a cult." I said as Tegan came to wait next to me. "Because Michael's power is real."

"He's only immortal because Alexander accidentally made him so. You're only forever young because of that accident. You all are only birds because of a mixture of whatevers found in a dusty lab in the depths of a city named Hell."

"His power is real, though, no matter how it was obtained. He is forever, we are forever, and our Grace runs through our veins no matter what came before it."

"Don't you find it at all ironic that you're running a cult while being in one yourself?"

"Heaven's not a cult. We are not followers. We are birds. The stray mean jerks I collected in Hell are nothing more than that: strays. They will never ascend, and never become more. There's nothing ironic about it. There's nothing to compare between the two."

"Heaven is-"

"Heaven is not a place that is asking for you to define it. You call it a cult because you don't understand it, plain and simple."