Chapter 40
“SO THEN JET SAID, ‘IF I was in the mood for a slave, I would have summoned Simon,’” Simon tells Dez on a dark March morning so warm there’s actually slush on the tri as they walk from breakfast to the Vault.
Through the filter of the barbelo, the sky is its usual filmstock-black, but Dez gets the sense that if she were somehow to pass through it, she would find a cloudless, sunny day on the other side.
And this sense—of the near-proximity of brightness, warmth—fills her with yearning to be anywhere but here.
“You’re an angel now,” Dez tells Simon. “Why does he treat you like that?”
Simon laughs. “There’s a massive hierarchy among angels. And for the time being, I’m at the bottom,” he says cheerily. “I know some of the stuff Jet says sounds bad, but they’re inside jokes, which I finally get—”
Dez stops short, grabbing hold of her roommate and yanking him backward—just before he steps on a frag half buried in the melting snow. Her breath catches in her throat as she stares down at the latest monstrosity.
There’s no way to tell how long it’s been there. Its body wears a ratty orange housecoat. It has thin bare frostbitten feet, and an older woman’s cropped silver hair. The neck is twisted at a gruesome angle, its forehead in the mud. But Dez can see its mouth, yawning open in a scream. She shudders.
“Yuck,” Simon says as he steps over the body.
“Hey,” Dez says, still frozen in place. She gestures at the unlucky creature, stunned by her friend’s insensitivity.
“Oh, right.” Simon sighs, taking out a phone from his pocket. “Someone should clean this up.”
“You have a phone now?” Dez says, a rickety sense of envy inside her. What she wouldn’t have given for a phone six months ago. Now she doesn’t even know who she would call.
“Ascension gift from Jet,” Simon tells her, then talks into the phone. “We need a cleanup on aisle tri.”
“How can you be so callous?” Dez asks when Simon hangs up. “This was a person.”
“I was a person once, too. But I’m not anymore, and neither is she. The difference is I’m alive in aeviternity. She’s roadkill.”
Dez shakes her head, her stomach roiling.
Simon’s been different recently. Since the night of his ascension, both he and Jet have seemed sharper, darker.
Dez can rationalize the change in Jet as the dropping of a friendly facade put on to charm first-years at the start of the school year.
That maybe all Jet’s doing now is revealing his true angelic core.
But she thought she knew Simon better. She’s tried to be open to the way her roommate is evolving—gallows humor makes sense when you’ve come as close to death as Simon has—but this? She doesn’t even recognize him.
“What’s aeviternity?”
“The state of being an angel. Our lives have a beginning, but they don’t have an end.” He tries to link arms with Dez, as if to help her step over the frag. “Look, if you want my advice—”
“I didn’t ask for your advice.” She steps away from him.
“You’re here to become an angel,” he says. “You need to start thinking like one. Which means exerting your energy on what matters.” He curls his lip at the frag. “Not lost causes.”
“Rafe doesn’t think they’re lost causes,” Dez says quietly.
“I guarantee you,” Simon says, “Rafe only cares about frags insofar as it benefits Rafe. Once you become a part of the hierarchy, all you can think about is rising in it. You can’t see it yet, but you will.”
“No thanks,” Dez says.
The Maintenance Crew arrives, as they always do, trudging through the slush. It’s horrifying, the mundanity with which everyone else treats these lost souls. Dez watches, her heart wrenching, as the men drop the frozen, lifeless body into the body bag, tying it with practiced motions.
“Oh, Pet?” Jet’s voice sings from the door of the Vault.
Dez narrows her eyes as Simon perks up.
“Gotta go,” he says, blowing Dez a kiss before he hurries off to his mentor.
Settling into her Lens, Dez lets out her breath. She knows Simon’s partly right: She is here to become an angel. She agreed to stay at Acheron because she wanted to have something to show for leaving her brother like she did.
If she pulls it off, it might be worth it. Maybe she does need to start thinking more like one of them.
But recently, she finds herself increasingly seeking the opposite.
What she wants more of these days is the human.
Maybe it’s because of how Simon’s changed since his ascension, or because her nights in bed with Rafe are far from mortal comprehension, but Dez is most comfortable now in the Vault.
Spending time with her subjects and their simple human lives.
Their flaws and fragile health. Their capacity for pain. Their senses of humor and fears of death. Their physical limitations. Their faith in a distant, unknowable God. Inside her Lens, Dez doesn’t have to worry about angels. She gets to wrap herself in humanity like a cloak.
Near midnight, she lights the match to send her latest film to the Distribution Department. For the first time since she’s been at Acheron, Dez completed a full day’s work. Nine films. Nine mortal souls she’s helped slip the surly bonds of earth.
She’s still behind the other first-years, but she wants to celebrate this one small victory. And she doesn’t want to do it alone.
She opens her Lens and pulls up Asher’s Lifeline.
She takes herself to that moment on the beach.
The one she made for the two of them. She hasn’t watched it in weeks, not since she first put herself inside it.
When the scene plays now, Dez notices something amazing.
Where before, there were traces of splicing, the background that didn’t exactly sync up between the stale Dairy Barn parking lot and the soft sands of Ventura—now it’s as if Dez has grown into the scene with Asher.
She’s taken off her combat boots. There’s sand between her toes.
Her hair whips in the ocean wind, like it never did in Death Valley.
It’s like she belongs there, walking toward Asher. Like she was there all along.
When they reach each other, their embrace is so real, Dez can sense it on her skin inside the Lens.
His hands. How right they feel on her body.
She steps closer, to be nearer to him, as close as she can get without falling into the abyss below.
And when Asher looks in her eyes, Dez senses that the recognition—the ease he feels with her—is rooted in the actual time they spent together the day they shot her film.
You don’t hug someone like that unless the day before it existed.
It’s not in his Lifeline, but it is in Asher’s soul.
Dez needs to see that day again, to live it through Asher’s eyes.
She needs that missing scene, wherever it is.
She pauses his Lifeline. Asher’s point of view is close on her face.
She studies this spliced version of herself, who doesn’t belong on the beach that night, who broke the rules, jumped a Lifeline, and somehow, miraculously, made it work.
What does this Dez know that she can learn from?
Where is that original scene?
Dives like this do have the best atmosphere, Eri told her at the bar.
Dives like this.
And then Dez hears another voice in her mind. Rafe, standing right here, months ago, telling her: Dive in.
Dez looks down. Her toes dance at the cracked edge of the platform. She’d watched him dive from here. Into the abyss below.
And a halo containing Asher was down there. Rafe grabbed hold of it. And Dez saw Asher on the half-pipe.
What if Eri meant this dive? Not her dive bar. Not the deep, icy river behind it. But the dive that had been right under Dez’s nose all along.
The last time she went down there with Rafe, Dez thought Asher’s halo was the same thing as his Lifeline up in her Lens.
But maybe they’re different. Maybe one is censored, one is not.
If she goes down today, Rafe won’t be there to rescue her. She can’t let what happened last time happen again. She can’t fall.
She inches farther toward the edge, trying to remember everything Rafe told her. She has to jump—no, dive into it. She has to clear her mind of everything but the dive. When she finds Asher’s halo, she must grab it. Bring it with her carefully to the safety of her platform.
Before she can second-guess herself, Dez dives in.
Dark wind whips her hair. The air’s so thin she can barely breathe.
She passes black metal towers holding untold orbs of light.
She has no control over her tumble into the vast essence of humanity, but she does have her intuition.
She feels it sharpened from months of working telepathically in the Vault.
She knows what she wants, and she can make it happen.
Out of the billions of halos, Dez calls on one.
She plummets deeper, so deep she can’t see her platform anymore. But she doesn’t lose sight of her faith.
A hundred halos gravitate to her, as if they want to be seen. Gently, she pushes all of them away. She’s looking for just one.
It comes first as a glow in her heart, telling her she’s near.
Her eyes are closed when she reaches out, grasping in one focused direction.
Her hand hinges on a halo. Her fingers hook around it.
Yes. At the first touch, she knows it’s him.
The particular heat is familiar. It feels like she’s found what she’s been seeking for longer than just this life.
She opens her eyes. Smiles at it in her hand. She endures the burning pain it causes as she uses her other hand to grip new halos, pulling herself and Asher’s halo up to her platform.
Soon, she’s climbing out of the realm beneath the Vault, sitting down breathless on the platform with Asher’s halo in her hands.
It’s like a miniature handheld Lens. She can’t control it with her mind, but her touch can navigate its contents. She’s looking for one scene. One day.
And after several moments searching, she finds it.
At first Dez almost doesn’t recognize it.
It’s the same beach, same pier, same Pacific waves.
But the way Asher sees Dez makes everything feel unfamiliar.
Almost as if her features have been transformed, augmented under his gaze.
She’s beautiful … and strange. Her smile seems ever-present, which she knows it never is.
He focuses often on her hands, her lips, the freckles on her nose.
She likes the way she looks, even if she’s never seen this version of herself in a mirror.
The Dez Asher sees appears fresher, more magnetic and profound than the woman Dez thinks herself to be.
But is she that woman? Could she be? With him?
There are so many fresh details, things Dez didn’t catch on film and hadn’t noticed in person, because she was too busy noticing him.
The way her eyes match the ocean crashing beyond the pier.
Her chipped burgundy nail polish pressing the jukebox buttons in the bar.
The shiver in Asher’s voice when he said, “I like everything I’ve seen about you so far, Desdemona Rae. What else you got?”
She hadn’t heard his nervousness, only the pounding of her heart.
Laughing with some guys he knew, regulars at the bar, all of them curious about the woman Asher brought in. And then the harsh lights of closing time, which meant Dez had to leave.
In the parking lot, his thumb on hers. Pulse. Pulsepulse. Pulse.
Don’t forget me.
Asher didn’t say that, but now she hears it, feels it in his thoughts.
Don’t forget this. Come back.
That’s what he meant.
The scene ends, and Dez watches it again. Again. She’s gutted by its beauty. How had she not gone back to Asher the very next day? How had weeks gone by and neither of them called? How had Dez let six months pass before she knew his side of the story?
It changes everything.