Angel Country - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alex T. Singer lives in coastal Connecticut with her wife, daughter, and more sci-fi fantasy novels than she can count. She is the author of the graphic novel Mirrorverse: Belle. Her short stories have appeared in Luna Station Quarterly, Apparition Literary Magazine, Clarkesworld, and PseudoPod. Her short story, “Nothing but the Gods On Their Backs” was a finalist in the 2024 WSFA Small Press Award category for short fiction. For more of her work, visit LittleFoolery.com.

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In an alternate early 1900s, a scientist hunts down her former research partner after he steals her life’s work before his greed reshapes the world in this darkly wondrous cosmic horror.

One morning in 1904, scientist Ada Franklin wakes up in her own grave. Clawing her way out, she discovers her lab abandoned and her research partner gone—along with her life’s work: a prototype designed to enable human-angel communication. But Ada wasn’t completely unprepared. Missing specimens and stolen notes have long hinted at an increasingly tenuous partnership and hidden deals with the institutions funding their work.

Angelic infestations have kept the original thirteen colonies in place, halting westward expansion. Now, as Manifest Destiny gains momentum, Ada’s attempted murder suggests the ability to communicate with—and perhaps control—angels is a power worth killing for.

With no one else to trust, Ada allies with her ex-lover, now monstrously transformed by the forces they once studied. Together, they hunt down the man who betrayed her, racing to reclaim the prototype before his greed upends the nation.

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Chapter 1: Lady Lazarus CHAPTER 1 Lady Lazarus
TRANSCRIPT, [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], following the Grace Event known as “The Morrison Church Incident.”

• SPEAKER 1: Angelic emergence occurred via ocular, vocal, and nasal orifices. Evidence of divine tissue in cranial cavity, with evidence of movement down the cervical spine.
• SPEAKER 2: Cause?
• SPEAKER 1: Organist shifted from 120 to 130 and back again, I would consider this the source of the subject’s agitation.
• SPEAKER 2: Cognitive effects of Grace?
• SPEAKER 1: Late stage. Delusions. Patient was convinced they had made contact with the entities.
• SPEAKER 2: Just delusions? And you’re sure there wasn’t actual contact involved?
• SPEAKER 1: Absolutely. There’s no evidence of any real communication.
• SPEAKER 2: I’m not sure what more you could want.
• SPEAKER 1: A response.
• SPEAKER 2: You’ve had one.
• SPEAKER 1: A better one.

IF YOU WISH to know how I came to be here, know that it began in a grave.

My own, as it happens.

The way it happened was frustratingly simple. I’d been suffering from a chronic condition as the result of the trials we’d been doing. As treatment, I’d chosen to undergo surgery and, while under sedation, Tennyson and the other associates took me off the table, out of the clinic, out into the marshes behind the lighthouse, and dumped my body into a square-shaped ditch they’d dug out the night before. One of the men from the docks prepared the hole. I know this, because they shot him and dumped him in there with me. He made for poor company when I woke up, but at least I knew from the way he lay which way was up.

As I clawed my way out, I imagined it a sight: scrawny woman that I had been, married to her research notes, weak from my operation, throwing hunks of stone aside as I burst snarling from my grave like some cherub from the heavens. The earth heaved. The marsh pooled and grasped at me, desperate to have me back, but I tore and twisted until it gave way, and I was free. Gasping among the grasses, I coughed up mud and snails and who knows what else. Before the project, before the trials, before the booster shots, I’d have been as dead as Tennyson had hoped.

I was a marvel of modern science, standing there in my muddied hospital gown, and I was too furious to revel in it. During my four-and-a-half-foot trip to the surface, I realized what they had done.

I hadn’t been wholly unaware, when I had undergone my operation.

“I wish you’d told us, Ada,” said Tennyson, as though he hadn’t known. As though we hadn’t been conspirators a lifetime ago. Maybe even friends, two lifetimes ago. “We’ve been worried. How are you?”

I couldn’t answer. He knew that. He lost interest in my health almost instantly.

“Secure the prototype,” said Tennyson.

“Are you sure—?” I heard Morton stumble. He did that a lot, towards the end. “I thought we were going to—it’s—”

Tennyson seemed to feed off the weakness in him. His voice hit a stern, authoritative timbre, the sort he’d never dared to use on me. “Do you want to tell the client why we were late?”

“That—”

“Or shall we have it out when we get to the Association?”

“No, no need for that…”

I remembered they took it. They took it, wrapped it, and put it in a box. They shoved me in a body bag, and they stole it. Oh, my love. You knew they’d do this. I’d been convinced they’d never dare. But you knew.

My life’s work…

But I digress.

I could still feel it, beating, distantly. Farther and growing farther. I’d done such dreadful things to create it, I’d made such terrible compromises, and now I was separated from it. The prototype. My prototype. Its absence burned like the crawling flesh in my abdomen, knitting back together, but sharp and prickling. I had created it to speak with the angels, and with any luck, hear their reply, now it was gone, gone, gone, and I could do nothing to stop them.

I made a poor attempt to resonate with it, right there on the beach. The seagrass stuck to my scraped ankles. The ocean’s froth bunched around the jagged stones, and I was no less sharp and miserable. The great flat backs of cherubim breached the whitecaps. A sailor might have thought it some wailing woman, screaming and screaming into the wind, which I suppose in that moment I was. I couldn’t find a tune, my throat was too full of grit. If I closed my eyes, all I saw was darkness. All I felt was cold, creaking movement.

Something. Not enough.

When I opened my eyes, I saw the marsh. I felt the prick of the sea spray on my filthy flesh.

But what did I expect from the Association? I expected I’d have more time. I’d expected Tennyson would have been thorough and meticulous in discrediting me. I didn’t think they’d surprise me while I was at my weakest, and I didn’t think the Association had gotten so desperate for results.

But I didn’t wholly count it out.

I took the clothes off that dead gravedigger. They were heavy with mud, but more substantial than my ruined hospital gown, and marginally less bloodied. The young man was as much a victim as me, but he had taken a job from a mysterious organization operating out of a long-abandoned lighthouse. He’d dug a ditch that just so happened to be the right size to fit an adult woman. He can’t have been completely blind to the circumstance. I certainly hadn’t been to my own. The clothes fit poorly, but it was at least something.

The tidal winds lashed at my back as I stumbled up the narrow path. The lighthouse. I needed to return to the lighthouse. It swam in my vision, that dark grey through the grey, stabbing through the low clouds like a pin made of bone, its pallid light pulsing as it did its turns against the mists.

There was no question that it would be my first stop. I had no desire to stumble into town in my condition. The townspeople would ask questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Besides, I had to know the extent of Tennyson’s betrayal.

I didn’t meet anyone along the way. I knew I wouldn’t. Residents ignored the marshes if they could, especially when the skies were grey, while the Pequot who lived on the point kept to their sentry. They watched for what came out of the marshes, not what wandered about inside it.

This land belonged to the angels. Though, most in the marsh itself were fairly low ranked in the celestial host. A few minor “putti,” as they would say in the south, but, to the uneducated or the pious, even the smallest member of the host is an intimidating encounter—and encounter them I did. They pushed their way out from under the marsh, their radiant eyes rolling in their sockets, their slippery wings buzzing in the mud. They sensed the blood on my clothes. They might have smelled the remnants of my modifications, too. It’s hard to know the ways of angels, and anyway I smashed a few of them with a rock and they fled quickly back into the oozing marshes from which they’d come. How luminous their blood was as it sank among the sea spray and the marsh, but I gave no pause as I marched on.

I was weak from my surgery, but not that weak.

The lighthouse was a wreck—more of one than usual. The lights wouldn’t switch on. The first floor, where we’d done most of our trial work, lay bare. The second floor, where we’d...