Free Farewell Horizontal by K. W. Jeter

atmosphere. Different from Cooder’s celebrated tape, where the corpse had been undamaged, the membrane limp due to the stilled blood no longer replenishing its contents. And that one, long ago, had been blond, the hair pale, almost translucent. This one was dark; he gazed down at the black tangle over her shoulder and along her arm, high contrast against the white skin.
     
    The wind caught a fold of the membrane, billowing it behind the angel’s head. Her face turned from its kiss against the wall, the rise of the chin stretching the slender throat. The face returned his gaze, the unseeing eyes half-shaded by the dark lashes. His chest hollowed as he recognized the dead angel.
     
    It’s her . He knew it, the memory sharp; no need to call the tape file out of the camera’s archive. I’ll be goddamned; he reached down and shut off the Norton’s engine, the murmuring idle an intrusion on the scene and his thoughts. The face he had last seen, the lashes trembling, mouth opening in a small cry; head thrown back, dark hair a pennant in open air; her hands straining against the male’s chest, the taut spheres behind their shoulders filled with dawn light . . . he had seen the face then, in the camera’s viewfinder, lens tracking the mating angels as they had turned far from Cylinder’s steel wall. Now the same face lay below him, beyond the motorcycle’s wheel, the torn membrane a pillow for a longer sleep.
     
    He knew why the hollow in his chest. Irrational: I shouldn’t have taped her. Them . Stole all their life, right when they weren’t watching, busy at those other things. Way to go, champ; stole it and sold it, and the obliging world snared the husk and left it here for him to find. Just to make me feel like a shit.
     
    Disgust stifled the mercenary notion of taking out the camera again and taping the corpse. Fuck ’em; the hungry eyes stacked up inside the building already had one dead angel to look at.
     
    Axxter swung his legs off the Norton and let his boot pithons snap onto the wall. With one hand grasping the transit cable, he awkwardly clambered down to where the angel hung. The silklike tissue of the deflated membrane wrapped around his arm as he reached down toward her. He wanted to pull her loose from the angle of cable that had snagged the light body and let her fall free of the building, down through the cloud layer to whatever place all other dead angels went. His hand strayed for a moment, a centimeter from her face. In the cup of his palm, he felt a faint motion of air, warmer than the wind curling over his back. It disappeared, then came again, a breath shallower than the one he’d felt a moment before.
     
    “Christ!” His hand slid to the side of her throat. A feeble pulse touched his fingertips. The angel’s head lolled to one side as he pulled his hand back.
     
    Alive, barely – whatever had torn and burned the spherical membrane (a memory, the dark place behind the ripped metal the smell of burnt things , moved behind his thoughts) had left a small living thread inside the fragile body. But not for long, obviously. The flesh that had glowed with its own heat when he’d taped it two mornings ago now grayed with the dull tint of the silklike stuff fluttering around her limbs. He guessed shock, maybe some internal injury that he hadn’t discerned yet. The loss of blood seemed minimal, with no break that he could see in the naked skin. The burn damage had mercifully cauterized most of the blood vessels feeding into the torn membrane.
     
    “Shit.” The word slid around one gnawed thumbnail. Dead had been one thing, bad enough; a dying angel was even worse. What are you supposed to do with something like that? That nobody – not out here, at least – would know what you’d done made it no easier. Can’t just push her off into the clouds now . . . so then what? Watch and wait until she is dead? “Goddamn –” Gotta do something for her. And how easy would that be? Or