Chapter Text
There was only waiting.
Not the restless kind—the kind that thrums with the promise of motion. This was the waiting of a man who had stopped believing anything would ever change, and then, slowly, started believing it again. The knife in his hand was sharp. The bunker was stocked. The Tower still loomed in the distance, its lights flickering like a promise kept—still humming, still bleeding something holy into something ravenous.
He wasn’t a hero. He never had been. He was just a man who had lost his sister and, in the hollow space she left behind, found a rage so pure it felt like purpose.
His name was Debaditya. And he didn’t believe in God.
Not out of anger. God had never factored into his world. His parents didn’t pray. They didn’t kneel in church or debate heaven or hell or salvation. They discussed bills, work, survival. Their lives were a ledger of debts and days, not prayers.
He learned agnosticism the way children learn the alphabet: through absence, not rebellion.
His sister was different.
Older by two, maybe three years. The math blurred after she vanished—the way time stuttered when grief took hold. Before, she was twenty-four. After, she was twenty-four forever. He aged. She didn’t.
She was the good one. The one who smiled at strangers, who believed—truly believed—the world was fundamentally decent. That people tried their best. That things worked out if you just worked hard enough.
Debaditya loved her.
That was the only softness in him. The only part of his childhood that survived into adulthood without turning to ice. They didn’t say it often—his family wasn’t like that—but the love was there, buried under silences, under distance.
She went to university. Business management. Human resources. Something stable, with benefits. She got the job.
At the Second Tower of Babel.
He barely registered it at first. She was excited. Clean energy, she said. The future. She showed him articles about the Angel Engine Initiative, about humanity finally solving the resource crisis.
He nodded. Said congratulations. Didn’t read the articles.
Why would he?
She was administrative. Paperwork. Schedules. Reports on energy output and resource allocation. She didn’t know those reports were about an angel. She didn’t know the energy came from a divine being strapped to a machine, drained slowly so she wouldn’t die.
She thought she was helping.
That was what gutted him later. Not that she died. That she died believing.
She stopped calling on a Tuesday.
He didn’t notice at first. They weren’t close like that—calls every few weeks, texts on birthdays. A rhythm. When a week passed, he thought nothing of it. When two weeks passed, he texted.
You okay?
No response.
Another week. Another text.
Hey. Just checking in.
Nothing.
He called. Straight to voicemail. The automated voice said the mailbox was full—not full as in storage, but full as if no one had listened in years.
He went to her apartment.
Empty. Immaculate. The kind of clean that followed bleach and garbage bags, erasing a person. No mail. No clothes. No toothbrush. No sign she’d ever lived there.
The landlord said she moved out. No forwarding address. No explanation. Just gone.
Debaditya went to the Tower.
Security turned him away at the gate. Private property. Leave now or they’d call the police.
He went to the police.
They filed a report. Gave him a case number. Said they’d look into it.
They didn’t.
He wasn’t a detective. He wasn’t a hero. He was just a man with a missing sister and no one who cared enough to help.
So he did it himself.
Months of bribes and favors. Breaking into databases he wasn’t supposed to access. Learning to talk to people who didn’t want to talk. Following paper trails meant to be dead ends. Reading between lines written in blood.
He found her file.
Personnel record. March 2032 to November 2033. Terminated with no explanation.
And then the other file.
The one she’d accessed three days before she disappeared. Restricted. Level Five clearance. She shouldn’t have had it. She must’ve borrowed credentials. Or hacked in. Or clicked something she shouldn’t have.
The file was about containment protocols for divine asset #001.
The file was about an angel.
The file was about Uriel.
He read about the needles. The machines. The slow draining so she wouldn’t die. He read about the scientists taking notes while she screamed. The executives calling it energy harvesting, giving themselves bonuses. The way they prayed to her—to the angel they were torturing—because somehow that made it holy.
His sister had found the truth.
And the Tower had made her disappear.
He never found her body. Never found a trace. She was just gone. Erased. Like she’d never existed.
He stopped searching after a while. Not because he gave up—because he realized the search was keeping him human. Keeping him soft. Keeping him from doing what needed to be done.
His sister was dead.
The angel was dying.
The world was burning.
He would do something about it.
Before his sister vanished, Debaditya had been adrift. Not angry. Not sad. Just existing. A job. An apartment. A life that was fine enough not to question. He voted sometimes. Paid taxes. Helped a neighbor carry groceries once. He wasn’t bad. He wasn’t good. He was just there.
After she disappeared, something shifted.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. A creeping cold that started in his chest, spread to his fingers, his tongue, his choices.
He stopped going to work. Stopped answering calls. Stopped pretending to care about things that didn’t matter.
He started planning.
He learned how to fight—not martial arts, but violence. The kind without rules or judges or points. The kind that ended with someone on the ground and someone still standing.
He learned how to break into buildings. Disarm cameras. Move through shadows without sound.
He learned how to disappear. How to leave no trace. How to become a ghost in a world that had already erased his sister.
He learned the world didn’t care about her.
So he stopped caring about the world.
He didn’t hate humanity.
Hate was too warm. Too invested. Too passionate.
He was simply done with them.
They had taken his sister. Built a machine on angel blood. Prayed to her while torturing her. They weren’t worth saving. They weren’t worth hating. They were just in the way.
Humanity failed the test. The Tower was proof. His sister was proof. Uriel was proof.
He didn’t need to save the world.
He needed to save one being.
And then let the world burn.
In her files, he found transcripts of Uriel’s voice.
Her pleas. Her warnings. Her kindness.
Do not let the forgotten find you. They do not take kindly to foreigners.
How to find the angel engine. Step 1: Journey to the Holy Land. Step 2: Search the desolate terrain for the great thorns.
She was warning people. Even from inside the cage. Even with needles in her arms and machines draining her grace. She was still trying to save them.
He read about her power. How she could break free at any time. How she chose not to. For humanity.
For the same humanity that had put her in chains.
He read about the scientists who ignored her pleas. The executives who called her suffering acceptable losses. The guards who stood outside her cell and listened to her scream and did nothing.
She was better than them. Than all of them.
And they put her in a cage.
He didn’t decide to save her because he was good.
Good men prayed. Good men went to church. Good men believed in something bigger than themselves.
Debaditya didn’t believe in anything.
He decided to save her because no one else would.
Heaven hadn’t come. The churches hadn’t moved. The world had prayed for help, and when help arrived, they put it in chains.
He decided to save her because his sister would have wanted him to. Because the Tower needed to lose something precious. Because he had nothing else left to live for.
It wasn’t heroism.
It was spite.
Spite at a world that took his sister. Spite at a Heaven that did nothing. Spite at a God who wasn’t watching.
He would save the angel because no one else would.
And then he would keep her.
And the world could burn.
He found the bunker six months before the rescue.
An old Cold War shelter in a forest no one visited. Thick trees. No roads. The nearest town was three hours away, and the townspeople didn’t go into the woods. Something about the sky. Something about what happened to your eyes if you looked too long.
He cleaned the bunker. Stocked it. Made it safe.
Canned goods. Medical supplies. Weapons. A small stove. A cot. A table. Two chairs. A radio that picked up mostly static—except sometimes, when the wind was right, he heard voices. Survivors. Warning each other about the Forgotten. About the sky. About the Tower, still standing, still running on angel blood.
He didn’t know if the angel would need food or water or blood.
He prepared for everything.
For a year, he studied the Tower’s security.
Shift changes. Camera angles. Weak points. Guard rotations. Door codes. Emergency protocols.
He knew every guard’s name. Every scientist’s schedule. Every executive’s blind spot.
He wasn’t a ghost.
He was just prepared.
Infiltrate during shift change—chaos, less attention. Navigate to the lowest level. Uriel was kept underground, away from windows, away from sky. Disable the machines. Cut the power. Break the chains. Carry her out. She’d be weak. Skeletal. He’d need to carry her. Disappear into the forest. The bunker was three hours away. A car hidden. Routes planned. Backup routes planned.
He didn’t have a backup plan for failure.
If he died, he died.
Dying was easier than living with the knowledge he hadn’t tried.
The night before the rescue, he sat in his empty apartment and sharpened his knife.
He didn’t pray. He never prayed.
No luck. No blessings. No divine intervention.
He trusted his hands. His knife. His rage.
His sister was dead.
The angel was dying.
The world was burning.
Tomorrow, he’d do something about it.
The Tower loomed in the distance.
Lights. Guards. Walls. Fences. Cameras.
He’d been watching for hours. Waiting for the right moment. Shift change in fifteen minutes. Night guards tired. Day guards eager to leave. No one paid attention during shift change. No one looked at the shadows.
His sister had walked through those doors every day. Smiled at the guards. Brought coffee to the scientists. Filed reports on energy output. She hadn’t known. And when she found out, they killed her.
He wouldn’t make the same mistake.
He knew exactly what was inside.
And he was going to take it back.
He checked his weapons. His knife. His backup knife—because you could never have too many knives when breaking into a facility that tortured angels.
He checked his route. Committed it to memory one last time.
He thought about his sister. Her smile. Her braids. The way she said I love you like it was nothing, like it was just air, like it didn’t mean everything.
He thought about Uriel. The transcripts. Her voice. Her warnings. Her kindness.
She could break free at any time.
She chose not to.
For humanity.
He would make her choose differently.
He didn’t believe in God.
He didn’t believe in angels.
He didn’t believe in anything except the knife in his hand and the sister in the ground.
But the Tower had something that didn’t belong to them. Something that had screamed for years while the world pretended not to hear.
He was going to take it back.
Not because he was good.
Because he was angry.
And anger was the only prayer he had left.
The guards changed shifts.
The shadows deepened.
Debaditya moved.