They entered the Garden together. The plastic gloves hid the soft sagging of slowly aging skin, and there was a distinctly adolescent quality to their desperately locked fingers. Lily strapped on her gas mask with a quick glance at Sam, then unlocked the door, watching as the airlock slowly adjusted to compensate for the atmospheric change. The last thing they wanted to do, after all, was contaminate the air.

It was an abrupt transition, going from their office into the Garden, and once again Lily felt a pang in her stomach, a wistful feeling of melancholy. It was a beautiful place—draped with their home-grown trees and vines and flowers, some real, most artificial, all gleaming a rich green under the solar lights.

She carried the new plants cradled in her arms; he carried his pruning shears and the test kit. It didn’t take long for them to be noticed. Within five minutes, the Garden erupted into the swirl of babbling that always denoted the children’s arrival.  

The children. Little creatures, delicate, lithe, and so very, very young—Lily had no children of her own in the outside world, but in the Garden, these were her brood: six beautiful, beautiful girls and boys, each one with a smile as broad as their face. They clamored and swarmed and danced around the entering scientists, their voices rising in a cheerful chorus: “You’re back, you’re back, you’re back.”

It had only been a night, of course. Yesterday’s greeting had been far worse—Sam had been gone on a government trip for a week prior, and the children had been devastated. They had swamped him with their clinging hugs.

Lily laughed through her mask and bent down to stroke one of them, touching her gloved fingers to the delicate sprouts of down-covered bone protruding from his shoulderblades. The wing trembled under her touch, and the little boy laughed, his six-year-old cherub’s face grinning. “Lily!” he said. “That tickles!”

The customary round of greetings was made—“Good morning, good morning, we missed you, too!”—before she realized who was missing. Standing off to the side, as quiet as always, was Azrael, solemnity darkening his preteen face. His wings were impeccably groomed, arching out from his back in elegant sweeps of bleached feathers. Sam looked up from the crowd and smiled. “Azrael,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

The boy shook his head, sending white bangs cascading across his face. “Not really,” he mumbled. “Dreams.”

He crossed his arms and hugged them to his chest as he spoke, a gesture that he must have picked up from them. Cultural contamination. They would be warned for that.

“Dreams are a part of life, Azrael,” Sam said. “Would you like to talk about them?”

He shook his head, and Sam and Lily exchanged bemused glances. It was unusual for Azrael to keep anything from them. But then—Sam turned his attention to the plants that needed pruning, and Lily set about working with her new plants. These were a new breed—highly intelligent and quite adaptable, able to perform in both the regular atmosphere and within the Garden. This was an important feat; after all, the air outside was so choked that just getting the seeds to sprout was beginning to become an ordeal.

They did their jobs, and the other five children followed them, trailing along like a string of besotted, white-feathered ducklings.


                               -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


“Lily!”

Always Lily. She was the mother-figure, after all, even if their strange race had no mothers—

(they had been grown in test tubes)

—and it was always Lily who was called when something horrible went wrong. Terrace ran to her the instant she stepped through the threshold, eyes streaming, her piping voice choked with panic. “Azrael and Zachary are fighting!” Terrace cried, horror lighting her eyes, and Lily followed.

They were pummeling each other, struggling limbs locked as they tussled. Sam waded in and pulled them apart. Zachary’s nose was bleeding sluggishly; Azrael had a massive black eye, and his white hair was streaked with maroon.

“Azrael, Zachary,” Sam growled, gripping them each by the shoulder. “What happened?”

Zachary burst into tears, and Azrael winced. “He said—” the younger boy began, mumbling though his tightened throat. “He said that you guys were liars.”

Lily looked at Azrael, pain streaking through her heart. He pulled away from Sam and looked back. For eleven years, he hadn’t so much as questioned them; now, she had to wonder.

“It’s true,” he said quietly, and walked away. From behind, Lily could see his wings—could see where Zachary had yanked out his pinions. As he left, his little brother continued to cry.

What have we wrought?


                     -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


Sometimes Lily worried. Often, actually. The Garden wasn’t really under their control. The plants’ adaptability bordered on sentience; the only ones with the override switch were those who had commissioned the children’s existence in the first place.

They were supposed to be experiments, the children; lab rats, if one was blunt. They were a test, designed to see if it was possible for humans to live in peace, in harmony, or if such things had been bred out by natural selection. Nobody had expected the wings. Funny—even science wasn’t omnipotent. It couldn’t predict everything.

Lily was worried. If the experiment returned results as ‘failed,’ then the lab rats—

Well, they would just have to patch things up.


                -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


Outside, the air was even thicker than she remembered. She choked as the pollution hit her lungs and, briefly, wished for the return of her gas mask—but then her respiratory system adjusted, and she resumed breathing, if a little carefully.

Off in the distance, a bomb exploded. In the daylight, she couldn’t see where, exactly, but she certainly heard the impact. There went another city.


                       -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


One day Azrael asked them: “Who are we?”

Lily had no answers for that. “What do you mean?”

He pondered the question, his dark eyes thoughtful, before answering. “Are we the only people alive, Lily? Me and my brothers and sisters and you and Sam, the eight of us? And…why would it be just us?”

Lily stopped herself from inhaling sharply. He had already begun to ponder things that had taken humanity years and years to even notice—though with his genes, it was surprising that it had taken this long. “Yes,” she said. “And…I don’t know.”

His eyes narrowed. “Then why would you leave us every night, if there’s nothing out there?”

Caught in her lie, Lily could only retain her silence. He sighed and looked at the ground, wings drooping.

So much for angelic innocence. Azrael was already reaching for the forbidden fruit.


                    -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


Terrace laughed, clapping her hands together gleefully. “Thank you, Sam! Thank you, Lily!” she cried, throwing her little arms around them both in a hug. Sam smiled and ruffled her hair affectionately.

Sitting on a plate on the ground, because of the lack of a table, was a birthday cake. Sometimes cultural contamination was just too hard to resist.

The children swarmed around it, dipping their fingers into the icing and licking it off reverently. Lily watched them, biting back a feeling of surprise: Terrace was nine. Had it been that long?


                         -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


A few weeks later, it happened. They got to the Garden, only to realize that instead of the usual six, there were five.

“Zachary,” Sam said, bending down to talk to him because, despite their brawls, Zachary always followed Azrael, “where is your brother?”

Zachary looked at him, wide-eyed, and pointed to Luke, and then to Orion. Sam sighed. “Not your younger brothers,” he said. “Azrael.”

The siblings stared at them, mute, their wings shivering in the still air. Sam looked at Lily.

“Well,” she said, her voice catching. “I suppose we have to find him.”


                          -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


She couldn’t help it. She was happy. Azrael had escaped—wasn’t that worth something?

So what if peace and harmony could never be fully realized?

Even in the midst of the war, they had had something. You couldn’t reach utter tranquility any more than a war could eradicate love.

Maybe.


                           -x-x-x-x-x-x-x-


They never found him, of course, though they didn’t really look. There wasn’t time.

That night, the plants that she had spent a decade engineering quietly began excreting toxins. The children were all dead by the next morning, their hearts stopped by the manufactured enzymes. Well—not all dead. There was their little fallen one, somewhere.

A government convoy pulled up by noon. As she turned around and crossed her hands behind her head, Lily said:

“You know, we were really stupid. You can’t build heaven on earth.”

The lieutenant with the unit shrugged and pulled the trigger.

Two civilian deaths. Compared to the philosophers who had staked their hopes for humanity on the angels—it really wasn’t the true tragedy.

You’re missing the point, Lily would have said, but then, nobody was interested in her opinion any longer.