It’s mid-morning in the iron city, and still the sky is red.
The sky was gray before and so was the city. You’ve always known the sky to be gray – heavy and thick with smog, coughed up by industrial factories long since shuttered – but you’ve only ever heard stories from the Old Folk of the way the iron city was before. The city now is yours, though, and the city that’s yours is red with rust. You’ve always been part of the ever-growing rust: it creeps across networks of pipes and ancient ladders; it creeps into your water and beneath your fingernails; it settles comfortably in your lungs. The city is the rust, and it is yours.
But now the sky is red.
You pull up a cloth kerchief over your mouth and step outside onto a rickety fire escape. You don’t spare a glance at the ground below. Instead, you hop the railing and land on a thick row of ruddy pipes that crisscrosses the buildings from high above street level. The pipes are thick enough to even lay down on – though you hold out your arms for balance, you never worry about falling. The city would never let you fall.
All around you, buildings are plastered with spray-painted declarations like PLANETSIDE WAS DOOMED FROM THE START and EVACS ARE COWARDS. They fight for space with tattered government posters on vouchers for evac cards and routes to the port. The only text still legible on the posters, though, are the dates – the same on every one. You don’t stop to read them. The city already knows.
As you walk your rusty path, you crane your neck upwards to search for signs of the end. You’re still not quite sure what you’re looking for, and the deep red haze is too thick to see through anyway. You know that you would like to see the angels. The takeoffs are starting soon.
Suddenly the pipes begin to quake. A few blocks away – and a few stories above – an old train rumbles past you on ancient tracks. Flashes of yellow spray-paint catch your attention: golden wings and patterned eyes decorate the full length of the train, and even as they disappear behind hollowed buildings, the images stay in your mind.
***
The moment you step into the subway station, you are nearly swept away in the crowd. The clamor is terrifying and it drowns you: officials shout to control a swell of Old Folk rushing to the nearest train; a graying man pleads with a soldier as she crumples papers in her metal hands; a woman shoves past you with a shrieking baby and you stumble to catch yourself. All of them, it seems, are fighting for a spot on the portbound trains.
Then one voice, for a single moment of clarity, rises above the noise. You look to the far end of the platform and you see him, standing on a metal crate. His face is cloaked by a kerchief that is itself cloaked with red debris. As he speaks, his voice echoing across the station, he pulls the cloth away – his face is creased with age but clean of rust. Then he meets your gaze, and this is how you know that the street preacher is speaking to you.
WE CHOSE THIS.
WE STRAYED FROM THE LIGHT, AND NOW WE ARE LEFT IN DARKNESS.
WE ARE THE RUST. WE ARE THE DARKNESS.
Then you blink, and he is lost in the crowd again. You shake your head and look away. You are going to see the angels. It’s time to get to the bridge.
You push through an endless tangle of limbs and clothes and luggage and papers; you let the Old Folk devour you, and force you through their organs, until finally you are spat out on the far side of the platform where a single, empty train car awaits. You are almost free.
A soldier catches your wrist – you freeze. When you look to him, you can only see his eyes. The rest is iron; nondescript and sharp-edged and spotted in rust. His hand bites into your skin.
He points to back to the crush of Old Folk, with their vouchers and papers, on the portbound side of the station. He tilts his head to the side.
You shrug, turning out your pockets. He sees the rust under your fingernails and in your lungs. He knows you have no evac card, and he knows that it wouldn’t matter anyway. The officer stares you down with a hardened gaze before dropping your wrist with a shake of his head.
You step backwards onto the empty train. Solid metal doors seal you in, shuttering out the station din. The interior is painted with more dripping golden eyes. You get a breath of silence for only a moment before the train roars to life, and then you are gone.
***
You find a pack of Young Folk out on the old factory bridge, legs swinging off the side without a care. You wonder for a moment if you might recognize a few, but really you recognize them all, and anyway, the second you sit down and dangle your feet over the drop you’re one of them again.
You dig your hands into the metal and the rust underneath crumbles to dirt. It grounds you. Looking down’s not so bad, you think, once you get used to it. A maze of twisting buildings rise out of the haze, all rooftops and clotheslines and wooden plank bridges. Though it creaks and sways when the wind picks up, the bridge belongs to the Young Folk, and so it belongs to you. Most importantly, the factory bridge is the best place to watch the angels take off.
You’d like to see one up close, someday, but you think it might be too late for that now. You picture them as hulking things, great masses of iron and fire too large and gray to stay in the city. Perhaps that’s why they leave.
From here, though, they’re rumbling bolts of light, rising out of the haze below like shooting stars. They soar into the sky, one by one, and your wide eyes follow their smoky trails till your neck cranes back and the red sky above swallows up their little lights. You can’t imagine where they’re going. You’ve never seen anything come back down.
And just like that, it happens. A single angel, a single spot of light, tumbles from the sky. It falls and falls and then vanishes in the smoke below. It disappears like nothing. One by one, the angels fall. They’re so small, so distant, that you can’t even hear it when they hit the ground. The angels fall out of the sky and the city simply welcomes them home.
Then the sky begins to glow, and you forget all about the angels.
The haze hasn’t cleared; the smoke still chokes the air. Instead, something past the sky seems bright enough to burn right through it. As if at dawn, the world around you lightens. Suddenly the Young Folk ripple with murmurs: IS THE CITY SAVED? ARE WE SAVED? The murmurs become chatter, which becomes cheer. You are bathed in glow. The rust on the bridge burns away. The rust in you burns away.
For one brief moment, you see the sunlight.