Chapter 35
“I’VE BEEN THINKING,” DEZ SAYS to Rafe on a cold January morning as they cross the moonlit courtyard. “That place in the Vault I fell into—what is it really?”
It’s been two months since Mo died, since Dez learned Acheron’s secrets, since she decided to stay, and everything has changed. Rafe takes her questions seriously now, answers them honestly. It feels like they’re on the same side.
It’s changed her life, but it hasn’t made it easier.
She grieves her brother every day. And the first-years’ workload is so impossible, it feels like they’re being set up to fail.
Dez no longer works in the kitchen, and she’s stopped going to Kohenet for classes every morning, but the faculty still haunt the first-years’ Lenses with spot checks most afternoons.
Every time they visit Dez, they remind her she’s behind everyone else.
“It really is a data hub,” Rafe says. His arms around Dez’s waist, which is how they often walk now. In public. Though they’re not a couple. Just an angel and a mortal everyone knows are hooking up to the brink of death. “But it’s not the kind you’re familiar with. It’s a storage room for souls.”
Dez nods. She had an instinct this was what he’d say. “You told me I fell in because I tripped where the platform was cracked—”
“You did. I suspect because you were so invested in the scene playing on your Lens, you wanted to become a part of it. We’ve known from your first introduction to the Vault that your mind was capable of overriding the system. I think, that day you fell, you also shattered your Lens’s foundation.”
“No matter how many times Dr. Ezekiel fixes it, the crack keeps coming back.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Rafe says. “We’ll find a better solution.”
“No.” Dez turns to face him. He’s so pretty as the snow drifts between them, his dark hair framing his face, the snow caught in his long, thick lashes melting like her bones do when he takes her to bed. “I want to go back there.”
“Dez.” His eyes run over her, hungry again as if he hadn’t just eaten her out for an hour. “No way—”
“I think it’s holding me back,” she says. “Slowing me down.”
“What is?”
“My fear that I’ll fall in again, that I’ll be so immersed in a film that the same thing will happen. I’ll break it again and fall through.” She presses a hand to his chest, thrilling at the muscles there. “What if you’re not there to catch me?”
He trails his fingertips down the side of her face, sending a surging river of heat through her. “I’ll always catch you.”
“Not if you’re not there.” Dez steps away from him. Recently, Rafe’s been AWOL more often than not when she’s needed him in the Vault. “Where have you been these last few weeks?”
“In your bed with my face between your legs.”
That part, she likes. Most nights, he hovers at her casement until she lets him in, staying until she’s spent and drifts off to sleep.
She’s always fantasized about being with an older man with confidence and experience, but a millennia-old angel with the ripped body of a twenty-eight-year-old?
It’s the erotic jackpot, lucky sevens ringing through the cosmos.
It’s what Rafe’s doing when he’s not in her bed that’s the mystery.
He never stays over. And during the day, recently, he’s a ghost.
“I need your help. I’m drowning in my assignments. And I don’t feel safe in my Lens.”
“You are safe. You’re not drowning.”
“Do you know how many films I’m supposed to make every single day?”
“Nine.”
“And I’m lucky if I finish one. I need a Soma. I need fifteen hundred Somas.”
Rafe shakes his head. “You just need to focus.”
“I need to go back down there. I need to prove to myself I can get out on my own. If you’re too busy to help me, I can ask Yael—”
Rafe’s face darkens, casting a chill over the frozen air. “I’m your mentor. No one else.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, surprised by his intensity. “I didn’t realize it was a big deal.”
Worry twists inside her. Rafe has so much power over her.
She doesn’t want to lose him, to put any more distance between them.
When he comes to her at night, she comes alive.
And while it’s maddening that he can’t fuck her, won’t even let her touch him below the belt, the pleasure he brings her is the best thing Dez has going here.
“I am your mentor,” he says again. “If you insist on going back beneath the Vault, no one’s taking you there but me.”
“Thank you, Rafe,” Dez says.
A sudden sick feeling slides over her. She looks at Rafe and senses … danger. A dark premonition.
Something bad is coming.
“Look out!” she shouts, grabbing Rafe by his coat collar and yanking him—
Just as a body slams hard into the snow, barely missing Rafe’s head.
Pink mist rises from a frag. This one’s face up, his jaw twisted, features obscured by hideous, festering cuts and bruises. He wears a woman’s nightgown. Broad male forearms give way to the hands of a child. The sight of him is so sickening, so wrong, Dez sees stars.
She tries to remind herself he’s just a soul in a grotesque body who didn’t get to enter the White Light. It’s not his fault.
Rafe isn’t even looking at the frag. He’s looking at her. “How did you know he was coming? You didn’t even look up. Yet you sensed him. How?”
“I don’t know. I got a feeling. That he was going to hurt you. Fall on you, I mean.”
Then she hears a groan that sounds like it’s coming from the bowels of the earth. It’s coming from the creature’s lips.
“What was that?” Dez whispers.
“It’s not dead.” Now Rafe kneels beside the body, his eyes running over its disparate parts.
“How is that possible?” Dez asks. “That fall would kill anything.”
“Mortals tend toward life,” Rafe says, “until we leave them with no other choice. The passage to death has always been seamless. But recently, there are gaps. Holes. Making souls feel as if there is a choice: To die or … not to die.”
“What do we do with him?” Dez says, feeling sick. “How do we help?”
“Leave it to us.” A voice startles Dez, coming from behind her. She turns to see a gas-masked member of the Maintenance Crew, a body bag draped over the arm of his hazmat suit.
Dez reaches a hand toward the frag. “He isn’t dead—”
“We’ll handle it from here,” the maintenance man says, and gets to work.
But Dez knows his moans will haunt her nightmares for months. There’s life inside this creature, a soul in deep unrest.
Inside Dez’s Lens, she and Rafe stand on the subtly glowing platform. She eyes the cracked, darkened space between her platform and the base of the dome.
She’s scared, but if she doesn’t go back to the abyss below the platform, if she doesn’t learn how to get herself out of it on her own, she’ll never feel fully safe immersing herself in her work.
“Three rules,” Rafe says. “First, if you fall, you’re already screwed. Falling increases velocity. That’s one reason you dropped so fast last time.”
“What’s the other reason?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. What’s important is never to fall. If you ever feel yourself slipping over the edge again, jump.”
Dez looks beyond the edge of the platform into the bottomless black depth. She swallows. “Okay. Jump.”
“Second rule,” Rafe continues. “The lights down there are called halos. Each one contains a current mortal life. Grab them to climb back up. But handle them lightly.”
“There’s a halo down there for every living person in the world?”
“Encased in bands of electromagnetic radiation.”
Tenth-grade science homework flashes through Dez’s mind. “Like stellar flares. The flames that shoot from stars?”
“Very good.” Rafe smiles.
“Aren’t those incredibly hot?”
“Yes. You’ll only be able to handle each one briefly.”
Dez tries to fathom this, the immensity of what she’s standing on.
“Is my life down there?” Dez asks. “In a halo?”
“No,” Rafe says. “Moriah keeps the first-years’ halos elsewhere. Now, the third rule is the hardest. You must completely clear your mind. Of everything outside the climb back up. You must be absolutely focused.”
“Like meditating?” She’s never been good at that.
“More like a video game,” Rafe says. “You’re trying to accomplish a task, and there’s nothing beyond that. If you get distracted, you’re going to fall farther, deeper. So forget everything but making it back to the platform.”
She stands with her toes at the edge of the platform.
She looks down at the infinity of darkness, dotted with pinpricks of light.
She used to think they looked like stars.
She lets her gaze soften, so she stops seeing it in its dizzying, specific vastness.
So that she’s looking at it more like the way she looks up at the night sky.
Rafe turns around so his back’s at the edge of the platform. “Now all that’s left to do is decide on your approach.”
He bends his knees, then springs backward, arms arched over his head. Then he tucks into a tight back flip before straightening his body into a long and lovely plank. He falls.
And falls.
Dez’s chest tightens until—at a distance of fifty feet down—Rafe reaches out and grabs one of the halos.
And Dez sees what she hadn’t noticed last time. How it’s actually a ring.
It bobs under his weight, but it catches him, stops him from falling. He grabs another halo, then another, and so on, treading air with the fiery manifestations of every mortal life.
“Get down here,” he calls. “Dive in.”
Dez’s palms are slick with sweat as she edges closer to the platform’s end. This feels crazy, what she’s about to do.
She tries to clear her mind. Be like Mo playing Halo, Dez tells herself. No court date or part-time job ever disturbed her brother’s Xbox focus.
“This millennia, Dez,” Rafe calls.
She raises her arms over her head.
And dives.
The first few moments take her breath away. She feels a deep exhilaration, less in her body than in her soul. Like the jump has rooted her, for the first time in her life, completely in her soul.
Is this what dying feels like? This great and whooshing wonder? This mix of letting go and not being able to hold on?
“Time to slow your roll.”
Rafe’s voice, the distant echo of it, snaps Dez back to reality. Such as it is. She isn’t dying; she’s just plummeting—faster and farther than she meant to.
Her body seizes up in panic.
“How?” she shouts.
“Like anything else,” he calls, his voice growing fainter. “Decide you’re going to do it, then do it.”
Dez thrusts out her arms and legs, making herself as large as she can. But she’s not going to luck into snagging one of the halos like this. She needs to choose one, set her sights on it, seize it with both hands.
Her eyes find a glowing band below her. She tumbles toward it, closing in, reaching her arms out farther, until—
The halo’s in her hand. Scalding hot and tingling, like it’s filled with fire from the creation of the universe. She lightens her grip on the halo as her body swings to stillness. She looks up and sees Rafe moving toward her with an ease she doesn’t comprehend.
“Grab another halo,” he says as he reaches her.
“Ouch,” Dez gasps. “It doesn’t seem fair that you can fly down here while some of us have to climb.”
“Someday we’ll fly together,” he says. Their gazes catch, and she gets that breathless feeling she gets when they’re alone in her bed. But she can’t fuck around right now. She needs to learn to get out of here on her own.
She finds another halo and takes it lightly in her hand. Then another. Her mind builds an invisible rope of halos all the way back where she needs to go.
“At first,” Rafe says, “like with your Lens, you’ll probably need to gently tug each halo as you climb. But with practice, you can learn to do it with your mind.”
Dez is listening. Focusing on Rafe’s instructions … right up until the moment that she’s not listening at all. Because right there, inside the halo in Rafe’s hand—the one he’s using as an example of how this process works—radiates a life that Dez can see.
Someone she recognizes instantly.
The scene is shrunk down and at an awkward angle, so at first, it’s hard to see. Dez isn’t sure—and then she’s so sure.
It’s Asher. On the half-pipe in Ventura. Ocean breeze rippling his shirt. Asher’s life is in Rafe’s hand.
Dez feels a searing pain in her hand as the halo she’s holding slips loose from her fingers. She doesn’t mean to, doesn’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late. When she drops, it’s faster than she’s ever dropped before.
“Dez!” Rafe shouts, his voice already light-years away.
She plummets. She has absolutely no ability to slow or stop herself.
It seems like years before Rafe catches her. In his arms again, she gasps for breath. He holds her fast, one arm curved around her waist, one arm linked through a halo. But it’s a different halo. A stranger’s halo.
Asher’s is gone, lost in a sea of scalding stars.
“I can’t believe you made me catch you again,” Rafe says, but like he isn’t mad, like he’s almost pleased he had to catch her.
Dez is shaking as she wraps her limp limbs around Rafe’s body.
“What happened?” he asks.
Her eyes search above for the halo he’d just been holding.
What are the odds that out of all the halos in the world, he seized that one?
But Dez will never tell Rafe who she saw in the halo.
He seemed jealous months ago when he asked her about casting Asher in her film.
She can’t imagine how he’d react if he knew of the pull Asher still had over her.
Much less that for the past two months, ever since she learned the truth about Acheron, Dez has found herself feeling routinely lost. So she started glimpsing at Asher’s life in the Vault, a reminder of her life before.
She taught herself how to let her emotions override the system, let her mind practically cook with wanting to see him.
She studies his Lifeline. And it soothes her.
“You thought of your brother,” Rafe says. “Didn’t you?”
Dez turns her face away. She doesn’t deny it.
“Do me a favor,” Rafe says, raising the halo in his hand high. “Stay out of here. Please. Until your pain isn’t so fresh. It isn’t safe for you.”
She says nothing, but she watches as the halos glide them up, studying Rafe’s technique.
She hates this place.
And someday, soon, she’ll be back.
Alone.