Читать книгу Snotty Saves the Day - Tod Davies - Страница 14

Prologue

An Angel flew through the dark blue sky between the stars, heading for a planet no other Angel¹ had visited for years. This was a tiny world in a faraway corner of one of the smallest universes in the cosmos. It was a long way away from the center of heaven, so she had plenty of time to contemplate her plan. The other Angels were appalled when she told them what she meant to do. They had long since given up on the place themselves and left it to the Enemy. Why not? It was so ugly. Angels dislike ugliness. They see no point in it.

Once the planet had been a beautiful one, blue and green and white and gold. But now it was mean and shabby: brown and gray and pinched looking, half-hidden under a yellow haze. As the Angel drew closer, she could see the grid of concrete and tarmac streets that covered it, not only on land, but on what had once been seas, canyons, mountains—even icebergs. She winced at this, at the waste and fecklessness and sheer stupidity the landscape showed. She wondered at the Enemy. He delighted in just this kind of ugliness and confusion, but as an Angel, of course, she couldn’t understand why.

She had long since given up trying to understand what possible pleasure the Enemy² could take in the misery and degradation of the many peoples under his rule. He took it—that was enough. She wouldn’t worry about why. She would just fight.

She would fight, she thought. And she would choose the battleground, not him. She had lost to him once, when she had made the mistake of letting him choose. Angels do not like to lose. Nothing can kill an Angel, of course, but nothing is more painful to one than the triumphant laugh of the Enemy.

This Angel had heard that laugh. She would hear it for Eternity. This was why she was determined, now, to fight—and in a place where he had long been left to reign supreme. Whether or not she would win, she would fight.

Because the Angel had her Idea. And her Idea was this: “Where the Enemy is, there must be Resistance. No matter how small or poor or funny, it must be there.”³ This was the Law of Everywhere. The Angel had learned it at her Tutor’s knee. The Law of Everywhere was everywhere the same. It taught that the best warriors against the Enemy always come from the most despised portion of any world.

So the Angel knew very well what she had to do, as she sank beneath the top layer of the yellow haze. Tilting parallel to the earth, and opening her wings to their full breadth, she shot through the smoke, the screaming, and the sirens coming up from the surface, and flew to where she knew the tip of the Resistance there would hide. She knew it would be in the ugliest, the meanest, the shabbiest, and the most cast-off of places. And it was to this place she flew now.