What was "this"? Ukiah was afraid to ask.
"The question is," Ice continued, "what exactly are you?"
Ice seemed to want an answer.
"I'm hungry," Ukiah said. "And I need to pee."
"We left you a litter box, water, and food."
"That?" Ukiah pointed to the kitten's food to clarify that they were referring to the same thing. Yes, Ice meant the cat food. "I'm not eating that."
"What, it's not good enough for you?"
"If I eat it, what would the kitten eat?"
"Schrцdinger Five? He's food too."
It took a moment for Ukiah to realize he meant the kitten. "I'm not eating him!"
"Perhaps if you get hungry enough, you will."
The view slot slid closed.
***
Ukiah used the litter box, and was surprised at how well it absorbed the smell of urine. Afterward, he distracted his empty stomach by playing with Schrцdinger. What was the point, he wondered, of kidnapping him if the cult only planned to starve him to death?
He'd been awake for approximately four hours when someone came furtively up to the door. Ukiah felt half-blind, unable to guess who was on the other side. The slot slid open, letting in a male's scent. The eyes looking in were dark brown; they glanced first to the kitten in Ukiah's lap and then rose to meet his gaze.
"Are you still hungry?" the man whispered.
"I'm starving," Ukiah said truthfully.
"Shhhhh." The man turned his head, showing that his hair was dark brown, straight, and cropped tight around his ears, making them seem too large for his head. The cultist looked down the hall for a minute, apparently trying to judge whether their conversation was being overheard. "I have something you can eat," he whispered once he was convinced that it was safe. He poked a candy bar in through the narrow slot and jiggled it.
The smell of chocolate pulled Ukiah across the room to snatch the candy bar quickly before the cultist could change his mind.
"Thank you," Ukiah mumbled out of habit around the warm, rich hit of complex carbohydrates. It was a stupid thing to say, he realized, considering the situation.
"I'm Mouse," the cultist whispered.
"Why are you giving this to me?"
"I wanted to ask you a question."
"What?" Ukiah asked, leery of answering any of their questions. He'd die before he gave up Kittanning or allowed the cult near his moms.
"Is Joachim Wolf correct in his theory of holon principles?"
Ukiah paused in chewing, confounded. "Hmmm?"
"Well, he points out that people living in a two-dimensional world would perceive a sphere passing through their plane of existence as a circle that grows larger and shrinks. And that if a number of cylinders were scattered onto their dimensions, they couldn't perceive that those lying on their sides—appearing as rods—were the same objects as those standing upright—thus seeming to be circles."
"Yeah," Ukiah said, meaning he understood.
"So if a four-dimensional creature intersected its hand into their plane," Mouse illustrated with his fingertips and the slot, "the two-dimensional inhabitants would see the fingers as separate beings and not as a unified whole."
Ukiah stuck to an "uh-huh."
"So it's reasonable to correlate that humans are in essence all members of an ьber-being that we can't perceive, yet is immanently in us. Just as flocks of birds fly together because of the ьber-being of birds, and schools of fish swim together because of the ьber-being of fish, so do humans follow lines of thinking when there is no apparent means of communication. The same idea occurs to individuals who aren't exposed to the same materials or line of thought—as if there's an ether-space that we share."
Mouse said this with the fire of someone who considered himself correct, but then squelched the fire with, "Right?"
"I suppose that's how it would seem," Ukiah said carefully.
"Well, it would explain why the Fallen all seem to be one creature. They are, in essence, evil intersecting our plane of existence—one creature, appearing as many—yet, when you look closely, you can recognize each piece as part of the same whole."
Since Mouse was right and wrong, Ukiah decided to stick with saying he was completely right. "Yeah."
"Wow," Mouse whispered. "Can you touch me?"
From his scent, Ukiah recognized him now as one of the cultists on the boat. Surely they'd come in contact several times, but apparently Mouse wanted something much more focused.
Why was it that as individuals the cultists seemed, by and large, good people, yet as a whole the cult was ruthless and deadly? Was there something to this ьber-being theory, where the cultists had been massed together into something more dangerous than any one alone would have been? Ukiah extended his fingers into the slot and touched Mouse's hand resting on the sill beyond.
"Thank you," Mouse breathed. He eased the slot closed with obvious reluctance and scurried away.
***
Mouse proved to be the first in a series of odd conversations. A pale-eyed woman by the name of Ether came whispering questions about string theory, offering up a sausage wrapped in a pancake. Luckily ancient memories from the Pack held information of how the universe worked from civilizations that had greater knowledge than Earth.
The third cultist was a green-eyed man called Link, who wanted to know if his father, a soldier, was in heaven. The light dawned on Ukiah: The cultists, suddenly finding themselves in possession of an angel, wanted to tap his holy knowledge.
"Yes" seemed the best answer to give Link.
"Even though the commandment is: 'Thou shalt not kill'?"
"A father gives his children rules, so they can know 'good' from 'bad,' but he also forgives them when they do wrong, because he knows that it's part of growing up. What child can be perfect?"
Link gave him a pack of gum as a treat. Ukiah rationed himself to one, crinkling up the silver wrapper to make a cat toy for Schrцdinger.
***
Ukiah recognized Ice's stride when he returned. He got to his feet, wondering what would happen now.
Ice opened the door this time and gazed at Ukiah with an odd, uncertain look. While Ice didn't point it at Ukiah, he carried a stun baton. The kitten, Schrцdinger Five, darted about their feet, blissfully unaware.
"We only suspected that you were an angel, but you know, you don't really look . . . holy." Ice swept his gaze down over Ukiah, and shrugged. "Perhaps the Mormons are right."
"How do you know . . ." It felt wrong to claim he was angelic, so Ukiah let the question trail off.
"Demons are usually easy to spot," Ice explained. "They all hold their bodies the same. It's like one person wearing different skins. They shuffle around like automatons." Ice slowly circled Ukiah. "But you . . . you've got that wild-animal grace, so we didn't spot you. And then there's the matter of the Blissfire—you could pour a bag over a demon and it might as well be water. You reacted."
"No, it doesn't work on them," Ukiah observed truthfully.
"And when you capture a demon, it's like a rabid dog. There's no reasoning with a demon, and certainly you can't intimidate it."
And the cult had done both with him.
"So when we caught you and took you to Eden Court, we thought you were just a human, guarding over the nephilim." Ice shook his head. "We'd only dug into your past deep enough to find your name and address. Something made me double-check our information, and there it was, like handwriting on the wall—in June you'd been shot dead."