Luc and Lila (The Chasm Trilogy #1)

Chapter 1

Two Aeons Pre-Great War

Carefree laughter floated on the aether, pierced by Adrianna’s bossy voice.

“No wings! You’re out!” she shouted, frowning in disapproval and pointing, her brown fingers smudged with dried yellow paint, at Eva.

Spots of yellow dotted Adrianna’s high cheekbones and her lean jaw; another spot clung to the tangled tendrils of her soft black hair, which blustered about a bronze face with honeyed tones that belied her fierce, fiery nature.

She stood at the highest point of the Crescent Arch, a raised section of Heaven’s play area where unevenly spaced marble tiles were held together by thin bars of gold.

Their small group of friends was playing Skip Aether, the idea of the game being to cross the arch without using wings to get from one marble tile to the other.

Currently, Lila stood on the downward slope of the arch, and the lineup went as follows: Lila was in the lead, with Eva standing on the same tile as her, literally clinging to her robes. Adrianna stood two tiles behind Lila and Eva, and Castor stood one tile behind Adrianna.

At that moment, Adrianna was as high above Heaven as any of them ever were, being among the youngest student angels.

The last to have been created, at least until the Creator popped out another batch: eighty-four angel children every half aeon, with precision.

Sometimes Lila thought the current half aeon would last forever.

In her current pose, even dressed in her standard white student robes, Adrianna looked like one of the warriors, stern and annoying, but Lila wasn’t the object of her wrath, so she didn’t care.

Eva was, and she demanded, from her position behind Lila, “What wings? You’re seeing things.

” She winked at Lila, twirling the ends of her strawberry-blonde locks.

Earlier, she’d plaited them with an assortment of flowers from the dormitory garden, and they hung in two golden braids on either side of her round ivory face.

A pearl and gold circlet sat askew on the crown of her head, the pearls protruding from gold wires like so many sprigs of berries, and a dusting of petal pink makeup, stolen from one of the older student angels, coated her eyes and cheeks.

She’d get a nice scolding for the makeup at dinner, but she’d reapply it as soon as Master Tabitha washed it off.

“Cheating!” Castor yelled, probably because Adrianna had said it and he didn’t want to be left out.

He had Eva’s ivory face and Adrianna’s sharp features, lean body, and long, dark hair, but he’d pulled half of his hair into a messy knot, and that was where any similarities ended.

For if Adrianna was the ringleader of their little group, and Eva was her second-in-command, Castor was the wedge always trying to come between them and assert his own authority.

Lila had the unpleasant duty of keeping Castor in check so the group didn’t constantly explode into dramatic disputes, falling in and out of friendship with each other as if there were endless opportunities for friendship in their class and not a mere eighty-four students.

The group, largely, exploded anyway.

“Was I cheating, Beni?” Eva pouted to their group’s final member. Beni was the calm, cheerful sort, always tasked with bringing them back together. Lila didn’t envy him that one bit.

“Uhhh…”

Twisting back and forth, Eva batted her eyelashes.

“I didn’t see.” Beni shrugged, his fingers dragging through a scalp of curly black hair. A solid wall of an angel, he had a face cut sharp as diamonds and skin the rich brown ocher of terracotta. Many of Lila’s classmates had a crush on him. Lila knew him too well and did not.

Maybe Beni hadn’t seen Eva cheat, or maybe he had and just wanted to keep the peace. He had little backbone but made up for it by being so amiable and amusing that no one could stay mad at him for long. Hence, his role in their group.

“Oh, come on!” Adrianna protested, looking as if she might fly off her tile simply to accost Beni.

Eva whipped around and blew her a raspberry. She giggled as she turned back to Lila, and Lila snorted.

“You’re still not beating me,” she informed Eva, toying with her black braid.

“Oh, of course not. Just make sure I’m second, okay?”

“How do I do that? I can’t read Beni’s mind.”

“But you can make sure I don’t fall. Let’s stick together.” Eva latched onto Lila’s robes again, and Lila nearly toppled off the marble tile hanging in mid-aether, taking Eva with her. She steadied herself and gave Eva a look.

“Sorry,” Eva said, lacing her pale hand with Lila’s dark brown one.

Beni, the game’s arbiter, called out for another set of numbers from one to one hundred.

“Ten!” Castor yelled.

“Forty-six,” Adrianna replied.

“Twenty-three,” Lila offered.

“Ninety-nine,” Eva said.

“The number was eleven,” Beni announced. “Castor moves up a space.”

“Ugh, great,” Adrianna groaned as Castor landed on the same tile as her.

Beni asked for another round of numbers, and Castor moved up again. Then again.

“Who’s cheating now?!” Eva scoffed at Castor as he grinned at her and Lila from the nearest tile. “Beni, you’re doing that on purpose. There’s no way he got that many numbers in a row!”

“Stop complaining. You’re still ahead of me. Besides, Lila’s up there. Maybe it’s the halves of our soul forcing us together.” Castor directed his smirk at Lila, but she glanced away.

“You’re weird.” Eva wrinkled her nose.

“Well, in that case, Eva…a little help here,” Adrianna demanded.

“If Lila wins, I win. I’m calling it,” Castor said.

“Well, then, if Eva wins, I win,” Adrianna shot back.

“Nuh-uh!” Eva cried. “If I win, I win! Win your own game!”

“Beni!” Lila called out. “Let’s just finish, please!”

“Beni, you better not let Castor get up here. There’s not even room!”

“Quit your whining, Eva. Hey!” Castor spun around, rubbing his head. Adrianna had taken a handful of aluminum balls out of her pocket—she’d made them from the thin sheets she’d stolen from the lessons room—and was rolling them around in her palm.

“No one bosses Eva but me, wingless.” Adrianna pelted Castor with another ball, then another.

Castor contorted his body; he tried to dodge the crumpled silver balls, but he could go nowhere without giving up his position.

“Hey! This is cheating! Beni, look! Cut it out!”

Adrianna cackled. Eva laughed so hard she teared up.

Lila cracked a smile, but Castor shot her a scathing glance.

“Lila! Quit standing there and help me!”

She sobered, the corners of her mouth returning to their usual level position. She bet if Castor was on the tile with her, he’d be cowering behind her while she got battered with aluminum.

Not that she could complain. Castor was her responsibility.

Her responsibility. Right.

With a deep inhale, Lila scolded, “All right, that’s enough. Stop it. Let’s just continue the game. Beni’s not going to cheat anymore. Are you, Beni?” She shot Beni a look.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Beni chuckled.

“Beni.”

“Uh, right. Okay, I’ve got a new number! Lila, you can go first. Let’s go in order.”

“Thirty-one.”

Beni pointed at Eva.

“Eighteen.”

“Fifty,” Castor replied.

“Nine.”

“The number was thirty-eight. Lila’s turn.”

Lila raised an eyebrow; she didn’t know that Beni wasn’t sucking up to her now, but she didn’t care.

She’d rather put as much space between herself and Castor as possible.

She’d been partnered with him during pottery lessons earlier—she was always partnered with him—and now he was gnawing on her last thread of patience.

She eyed the next to the last tile, diagonal from the one she was standing on. It would be harder to leap to it with Eva taking up space on her current tile, but she had no choice, and she thought she could manage it.

Eva moved aside, and she got as much of a running start as she could. One, two steps, and she pushed off the edge of the tile, launching into the air. She landed on her target, but her foot slid back, and she nearly lost her balance.

Righting herself, Lila flinched. Her wings had peeked out at the last second when she’d thought she was about to fall. Had Beni noticed?

His smug grin told her he had.

“Aaaand, Lila, you’re out!”

“Oh, come on, Lila! We were supposed to win this thing!” Castor complained, but Lila waved him off. Responsibility or not, he had no claim on her during playtime. She knew that much.

Leaving her friends to finish up their game, she fluttered down to the general play area where the other angel children were playing games like Angel on Your Shoulder.

She skirted the perimeter of the marble oval dotted with tiny wooden houses, steel climbing bars, and wooden bridges.

At this height, only white clouds and golden aether surrounded the oval, but if Lila peered over the edge, she would see the domed student dormitories—officially named the Enclave, though no one called them that—and the pillared Lessons Hall far below.

Technically, the Crescent Arch wasn’t part of the play area, but none of the masters enforced that rule.

Skip Aether wasn’t a real game either—Eva and Adrianna had invented it with their renowned collective brainpower—but that made it more special, in Lila’s opinion.

No one outside their group knew how to play.

Including Luc, for all his smarts. Lila spotted the golden angel child sitting on the edge of the oval, alone, his feet dangling in the aether. He didn’t notice her approach, concentrated as he was on the cloud figure he was forming. She couldn’t tell its shape at her current distance.

Curious, Lila crept closer and closer until she stood right behind him.

He made no sign of having heard her, but that wasn’t surprising.

Luc was always lost in his own world. When Lila sat down next to him, he stayed hunched over the ball of cloud, his unruly whitish blond hair spilling over a pale forehead creased in concentration.

“What are you making?” Lila ventured.