Chapter 30
DEZ COLLAPSES AGAINST THE WALL outside the Vault. She feels nothing. Sees nothing. Hears—
Footsteps.
“Go away,” she orders, her voice so hollow, deep, and cold she doesn’t recognize it.
Someone kneels before her.
“Dez.” It’s Rafe.
“No.” She puts up her hands to block him. “No.”
“I know,” he says softly.
She flinches away, shoulders shaking with a sob. She doesn’t want to see him. She doesn’t want anyone but her brother.
“Dez.”
“Leave me alone.” She can’t breathe. She’s choking on air she can’t get into her lungs. There’s been a mistake. What the director said can’t be true. But the light she saw around Rafe when he nodded was. She’s broken into a new phase of her life. This is happening. It’s real.
She’s trembling with rage and blind with grief. The cold stone walls feel like they’re closing in.
Rafe puts a hand on her shoulder. His touch means to be soothing, and Dez’s reaction is absolute fury. She won’t be soothed. She’ll shake him off her, hit him in the face, but when she looks up, his eyes still her. They steady her. For a moment, her panic ebbs.
He looks … like he can handle this. Handle her. Like he understands something ineffable, like he’s been destroyed like this, too.
“Deep breath,” he says.
She tries. It’s jagged, painful, but at least the walls stop feeling like they’re going to crush her.
She grips Rafe’s hands and holds his gaze. “How?”
“I’ll explain everything. But first”—he sits next to her and wraps an arm around her shoulders—“maybe just go ahead and cry.”
Dez can barely move, but leaning into him is easy. She buries her face in his shirt and sobs.
She cries for her brother, for her mother, for herself. She cries for being stuck at this fucked-up school, for her life blowing past the limits of what she can understand. She cries for lost time and lost love and for the powerlessness she feels.
Rafe holds her, saying nothing. When she finally lifts her head again, it’s like there’s nothing left inside.
His fingers brush her hair back from her face. He tips her chin up, stares into her eyes, and leans so close their faces almost touch.
“Did I kill him?” she whispers.
“No.” He shakes his head. “You tried to save him.”
“I had to tell myself he was getting better. So I could make it through the day. I’m such an idiot.” She sniffs. “I believed it.”
“You believed it because it was true. You sensed it. Moses was recovering. Until yesterday. He took a turn.”
“How do you know?”
“For you, Dez, life and death are still great mysteries,” Rafe says quietly. “But one thing you need to know: it mattered to Moses that you were there with him at the end.”
Fresh tears come. If what Rafe means is that her film was there, flashing before Mo’s eyes, it’s not the same as being there in person.
She should have been by Mo’s side. She should have heard his every breath this past month.
And even though she’s devoted herself to her brother’s film since she got to Acheron, it doesn’t matter.
Doesn’t count. She abandoned him when he needed her.
“He felt your love.”
Dez’s face twists. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he says with so much authority, Dez stares at him. “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
“Your brother died at 5:16 this afternoon, moments after you completed Lazarus. The doctors were hoping to release him this week, but last night he developed sepsis, which spread quickly through his system. When I lit the match in your Lens, to send your work to our Distribution Department, he was taking his last breaths.” Rafe closes his eyes.
“I was the one assigned to deliver the film to your brother. I know I promised you I’d get it to him, but it was also part of my job. ”
“How? How did it get inside his mind?”
“One day soon I’ll show you. But for now, understand the scenes were already deep within Mo’s mind. They’re memories, from across his life. Unedited, they’d overwhelm the human brain. Your film made sense of them. Made sense of his life.”
“You said those clips came from security cams,” Dez says, wiping a tear away, “soccer moms, cloud storage—”
“Some did, but not all. You had access to everything in the Vault, for research and cross-referencing. But the scenes you chose ultimately to include in Mo’s film all came directly from his memory.
Every other first-year has to be taught how to discern memories from iPhone footage, but you came in knowing it, all on your own.
It’s why your film is so powerful, because you see things others don’t. ”
When she tries to imagine Mo watching her film at the end of his life, her heart splits open with grief.
She bends at the waist, arms wrapped around herself as if they’re all that’s holding her intact.
She wants her brother back. She’d do anything to rewind his life and fix it. She feels so lost, so broken.
“I need to see him.”
“I’m sorry, Dez. He’s gone.”
She’s weeping again, pounding her fists against Rafe’s chest, pushing him away. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”
“You know I couldn’t do that,” he says, tortured. “For your own protection. But I was with him, at the hospital, when you couldn’t be,” he says with a quiet intensity that silences Dez. “I know peace when I see it. You gave it to your brother with your film.”
“If I hadn’t defied Zarlengo, begged you to let me make his film—”
“Mo would still be dead,” Rafe says. “And so would Lexa O’Rourke. It feels like you chose to make Mo’s film, but you were assigned this, directly or indirectly.”
“By who?” Dez demands.
He smiles. “The powers that be go by many names,” Rafe says. “Right now, what matters is they believe in your future here—”
“Forget my future. My brother is—”
“Dead. Yes. No escaping it.” Rafe nods. “But if you hadn’t made Mo’s film, someone else here would have.” He cups her face with his palm. “Aren’t you glad it was you?”
She looks into his eyes, distrusting the tenderness she finds in them. The things she needs to know are too big for her to handle in her state of grief. They’re too big to ask of Rafe, whom she can’t count on for more than a few seconds at a time.
Any moment now, he could turn on a dime.
“Ask me,” he whispers, like he’s reading her mind.
She shakes her head. “When you draw me in like this, you always push me away … I can’t take it tonight.”
“It’s all connected, Dez. Don’t you see? This attraction between us. The way I behave. Why you want me so much even when I infuriate you.” He touches her cheek. “You want answers. But deep inside you already know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You do,” he says. “What we’re really doing here. What we … are. Think about everything you’ve never understood about this place.”
Dez’s mind flashes to the coupling ritual her first day here, how something seemed to guide her skis.
Or when they all went to Villains and the last-years swung up the wire of the ski lift, defying death.
She sees Eri not appearing in the mirror behind the bar.
And the body she watched fall from the sky, how it looked like it was already dead.
“Are we dead?” she asks.
“No.” Rafe shakes his head. “But—”
“There’s a but?”
“I can’t say we’re technically living either. At least not in the way you’re accustomed to.”
A flat and miserable fear falls over Dez like a shadow.
“Do you remember the lightning bolt we flew through on our way here that first night?”
Dez nods. Of course she does. It had terrified her, striking the jet high in the sky.
“It wasn’t lightning,” Rafe says.
“You called it the barbelo?”
“The supreme limit. It’s a filter over reality, designed by Dr. Ezekiel. Once we crossed it, we entered a concealed realm.”
“Concealed from what?”
“From law enforcement, for one thing. From the mortal gaze in general.”
“And from the sun?” Dez guesses. “That’s why it’s always night here. Because of the barbelo?”
He nods. “The sun is collateral damage for the other protections the barbelo offers.”
“What other protections?” Dez presses.
He looks at her and says the next part like it’s nothing: “From death. While you’re inside its boundaries, the barbelo doesn’t let first-years die.”
Dez takes a moment with this information. It doesn’t sit right. “But Alice … Charles—”
“I know,” Rafe says, nodding as if he expected this. “Moriah will explain what happened there in a moment.”
“What about you? You said the barbelo protects first-years. Why not last-years?”
“Because we don’t need protection.”
“Why don’t you need protection?”
He swallows, opens his mouth but takes a moment before he speaks.
“Rafe?”
“Because we’re angels.”
He raises his arms to block his face just before Dez clocks him.
“Asshole,” she mutters, starting to stand up. Once more, she’s a fool for trusting him to tell her the truth. Her brother is dead, and everything’s a joke to Rafe. “I’m getting out of here.”
“I know the instinct to disbelieve is powerful,” he says quietly. “But doesn’t any part of you know it’s true?”
She stops walking and turns around.
“The first time you saw me,” he says, a strange look in his eyes, “on the Ventura pier, the day you were filming Glimpse.”
“What?” she says—but his words jog something in her memory. She doesn’t know what he means … and then she does.
“I walked right by you while you were setting up a shot,” Rafe says.
“And you saw me. You weren’t supposed to see me.
I should have been invisible to you, like I was invisible to every other mortal on that pier.
Like all angels are to all mortals outside of a barbelo.
But you saw me. I didn’t believe it at first, but then, the night of Mo’s accident, when I found you on the road, and you spoke to me?
There was no denying it.” He smiles at her, sadly.
“You have the eye, Desdemona. It’s a very rare gift. It led you here.”
“Can’t all the first-years—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “None of them can see what you can see. The others—Simon, Esther, Alice—they can only perceive angels inside the barbelo.”