Umbel (Terminal Trilogy #3)

18: Ancients

Luckily, it rained sometime before I woke up, and the heat of the season was quelled and dampened by the time I went outside to garden.

Ms. Robles came out with me, pointed out a few species of weeds, and hobbled back inside. I was really starting to get curious about her age- everything about her screamed frail and elderly, but she couldn't have been older than forty. Her hair was greying, her movements pained, but she couldn't have been that old.

I had come to work for her when she had sent me a letter back in college, explaining that she was an old friend of my mother's, and that her health was worsening. When I met her then, her memory was gone and her hands were shaking. This was seventeen years earlier. She was stronger, but didn't seem younger.

I tended the garden, something that seemed without time. It was a task, and I set about to completing it. There was nothing fantastical to it, nothing extraordinary. It was uprooting plants, occasionally stopping to throw the current pile in the compost.

Somewhere below me, there was a bottled city and a coming war.

Though I did stop a few hours in, I had not come close to finishing my work. I had instead been interrupted by footsteps, boots scraping through the dust of the driveway and kicking at the rocks.

I heard the footsteps stop, and after about five minutes, realized they had never continued onwards. I looked up.

Mannie was watching me. Wearing the same clothes as always, a wrinkled white button down paired with dress slacks, though now she was sporting a pair of bulky boots. Like an office temp only slightly prepared for a camping trip.

"You're doing my job." She said.

"Gardening?"

"Yeah." She gestured with her head to the orphanage. "This is my house. Anyway, grab your things. We're heading to Hell."

"I'm trying to avoid Hell right now, sorry."

"Let me rephrase that: I'm taking you to Hell."

"Isn't the big thing you're sore about when it comes to me that you mistreated me in my past life? Ignoring my wishes now doesn't do much to rectify you." I said. "Also, excuse me, this is your house? What does that mean?"

"Being an asshole towards you seems to be an integral part of my personality. I'll gripe about it later, I'm sure. Right now I need to get away from this house."

"I don't want to leave. My sister's here."

"Alexandria will be fine." Mannie stared at the house, unmoving. "We both belong to Hell."

"I was only there for two months."

"Once you enter Hell, you can only be freed of it with death. The cycle, reality's way of trying to fix an erroneous mishap, grazes by any object that has spent a second in Hell. To live there is to be stained by it. To witness the cycle change is to have left your mark in the eternal reoccurrence." Mannie looked at me briefly. "Or some shit like that. I don't know."

"But demons aren't really demons though, right? This isn't really Hell. We're just... odd things with horns in a weird city. There's nothing biblical about it."

"Yeah. It's an old lab under a war bunker. Hell's a fuckup. That's why we belong there."

I didn't need much persuasion to do anything. For a moment, I was caught up wondering how best to seem slow with my decision, how to make it seem like I gave anything any thought.