Angel Stations by Gary Gibson Page B

the wrong path, and the truth lay elsewhere. Some variations on the story maintained he’d been a soldier serving on the re-contact missions to the colonies which were originally lost for two centuries, thanks to the Hiatus. He had, the legends further claimed, the power to bring people back to life, a power he’d gained when he met an Angel, the last of its kind. Nonetheless, there was a resonance to all these stories that Elias couldn’t have been conscious of before the events he experienced out there amongst the Rocks.
    Listening to the old man’s story, Elias remembered the twisted, ruined bodies of the God’s Pioneers, and became suddenly obsessed with uncovering the truth behind the legend.
    And if there might be someone else like himself.
    He began to scour the streets of London, hustling contacts and information, until he found himself standing before the entrance to a service tunnel running under one of the big maglev stations servicing London’s lower levels. The kid who’d shown him the way there led him through a broken vent tucked behind an abandoned access corridor, which only a few people knew about. Down there, the kid had whispered, you could hear people walking about, people from all over the world.
    That was when he’d found the name behind all the stories.
    Trencher.
    Trencher told Elias he remembered what it was like before they excavated the great tunnels that carried the maglev trains between continents, but Elias doubted that. The tunnels had been in place for over a century and Trencher was an old man, but Elias knew he couldn’t be that old. Elias returned to the service tunnel many times, and once Trencher trusted Elias enough, Elias got to see the miracle worker at work. He watched the old man cure a woman of cancer simply by touching her, and again he remembered the miracle out amongst the Rocks.
    Whenever Elias asked him about his past, Trencher had been guarded, but it was clear to both of them that they shared a gift, though a gift that was more like a curse. In turn, Elias told Trencher about his life in the military, the terrible things that had happened there. Elias came across Dan Farell who had been in the Rocks with him, and found that Danny had escaped not long after Elias himself, and had since become a priest. Elias became part of his world too, and for a while, his life found a meaning and a depth that he had never realized was missing from it. It was from Trencher he first learned about Vaughn and about the Primalists.
    ‘You mean this guy Vaughn is like a ghost?’
    ‘Not a ghost.’ Trencher had coughed. They were somewhere high up, near the curve of the Dome, the bleached grey wall of some vertical slum visible through an open window. Rain streamed through a crack in the city’s facade, falling a quarter of a mile or more to the streets far below. ‘He’s human. As human as you or me, at any rate. It’s as if he can be in two places at once, like a kind of astral projection.’
    Elias cocked his head to one side. ‘Is it something we can do?’
    ‘There are only two I know of, Vaughn and one other, who have that ability.’ They drank mint tea out of stainless steel mugs that belonged to an elderly woman Trencher knew, who to all intents and purposes ruled the building Trencher was now sheltered in. ‘Vaughn comes to me sometimes, like a ghost, but that’s because really he’s far away. He wants me to go back to the Primalists.’ The old man laughed. ‘Imagine? Did I ever tell you about the Primalists, Elias?’
    ‘No,’ said Elias, wondering if he should say anything else or wait and see what the old man said next. He’d been trying for months to get some idea of Trencher’s origins, but the other had remained taciturn.
    Until now.
    ‘I’ll tell you, then,’ said Trencher.
    The Primalists had started out in Japan a long time ago, before the Stations were found, and centuries before Elias was born. They’d used a different name back then and their