Great. One of these Tuesdays. Wait no. It’s Friday. Thank god. Marianne had some explaining to do. She always did. Why do I keep hiring her?

I was about to answer my own question with a pretty good reason when another seraph erupted from the clouds like a Da Vinci painting on psychedelics. “fffffffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFAAAAAAAAaaaaaa!!” It shrieked and shrieked, and then it pirouetted back into the vaporous sky, cackling nonsense, looking like nothing so much as a skeletal marionette. Message delivered.

City Hall detonated then in screaming shards of glee. Citizens ducked or ran or screamed. Dogs died. Whirling tornadoes appeared and sucked the homeless away. They’re in a better place now, don’t worry. Tempests scoured my face and for a moment I imagined I lived in the Bible Belt where this kind of thing allegedly happens all the time.

These assignments were getting unreasonable. Marianne again. She needed to work on her placements. Ten days into this one and not a trace of the shipments, though that’s not her fault. Sometimes they just don’t come up. Couriers from heaven, though, that’s gotta be a sign. Right?

“I said, ‘RIGHT?!’”

“Yeah I heard you!” Rothstadter exclaimed, unconsciously adjusting his freezer and placing his eyeballs back into his face. “The fuck was that?!”

ROTHSTADTER: not a rookie anymore but still spooked. Been on the job with me for three years. Great guy. Crack shot. Former atheist. Three years in the angel trade had you believing again, trust me. That’s what we do. Angels. We track ‘em down, get a confession if we’re lucky, then put ‘em in the freezer. Easter Bunny? Santa? North Dakota? All real. All criminals. And all frozen.

Thanks to me.

ME: Hark is the name. Eight years on the force and I’ve seen it all. Well, now I have, as I glance around at the clicking wreckage our quarry left for us. Trees smoldered and the warped sidewalk at our feet revealed calcified eddies in a concrete puddle; we’re in an entirely new league here. Hunting archangels. Not too sure why I’m still in this line of work. It’s partly my promise to Angela I guess, but mostly because I just hate these GOD damn things. Many of the seraphim were still in line but it’s these higher-level creatures you couldn’t trust. Now that the rebels were getting stronger and sabotaging THEIR OWN SHIPMENTS. It doesn’t add up.

Rothstadter was still shaken. His face reminded me of a drowned man's. I remember feeling like that, back when I did the Matsumoto job. Ask me later. “Didn’t sign up for this, buddy, I can tell you that.” He checked his freezer needlessly again. Still charged.

“Get used to it, kid, he’ll be back.”

Rothstadter exhaled. “Christ.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Can we move?” Rothstadter was always business. Good.

Nettled lightning speared across the sky, a celestial map for those who could read it, lasting longer than any natural lightning and looking more like an ibogaine hellscape with every passing second. These guys loved showing us where they were. Tricky bastards, though. Other teams were ruined when they read the sky wrong, but we’ve learned in the months since Averson’s disaster.

I notified the dispatchers. They were in for quite a show down at 4th & State, right at the crater where City hall once stood, where I once stood thirty fucking seconds ago. Settle in, boys! If the catchers were in place this would be over in another half hour. And then it was on to the next one. This shit never ended. It was part of some deal the Guardians had made, I don’t really know. Something tells me Marianne knows more than she lets on but she’s only the dispatcher. Or is she? I dunno. They don't tell me much. Once you have enough information to act, you wonder how many times it’s been filtered. C’mon, Hark, get out of your head. Let’s do the job.

At least it’s Friday. Thank god.