Chapter 41
THEY’RE ALL WAITING IN MORIAH’S office when Dez arrives—Zarlengo, Ezekiel, Moriah, the cobra Hanachesh. Even Rafe sits on the front of Moriah’s desk, his expression inscrutable.
“Sit,” Moriah commands.
Dez lowers herself to the edge of one of the tufted green chairs. She looks at her hands, which, only a little while ago, held Asher’s halo. That scene when they met glows in her heart like a secret weapon.
They’re going to punish her, surely. They can kick her out and mess with her memory, but they can’t take away Asher’s experience of the day they met.
They can’t erase the connection Dez has now seen through his eyes.
So even if they do send her home, even if all this ends tonight, she can still find him.
And once she does, she’ll have something to live for again.
“Start talking,” Moriah says.
Dez sets her hands over the armrest of the chair and gazes straight ahead. She considers playing dumb, but what’s the point? She knows what this meeting is about.
“You want me to say I’m sorry. I’m not sorry.”
“An inauspicious beginning,” Moriah says.
“You teach us that the Vault contains everything, but that’s a lie. You hide important moments from us. Without explanation. If we’re supposed to make sense of mortal lives, to prime them to enter the White Light, why do you censor their Lifelines?”
“Death isn’t a democracy,” Moriah says.
“Do you want your mother to feel conflicted on her deathbed?” Rafe asks. “Would you have wished that on your brother?”
“Of course not,” Dez says. “But sooner or later, any filmmaker who cares about their subjects is going to go looking for the truth of what you’re hiding down there.”
“When you choose what to put in your films,” Dr. Ezekiel says, “what to leave out, aren’t you cutting important scenes? Aren’t you censoring your subjects’ lives?”
“But those are my decisions,” Dez says, “as the filmmaker assigned to them.”
“Dez,” Rafe says, “your curiosity about how all this works, your sympathy for your kind—it’s understandable. Hell, you’re still one of them.”
“But it’s time for you to own your privileged position,” Moriah says.
“You’re at Acheron!” Zarlengo says. “Act like it. When you went down there tonight, you weren’t even looking for a scene belonging to one of your subjects, were you?”
“I—” Dez breaks off, caught.
There’s a pause in the room. The administration looks at each other, as if waiting to see which one will take the lead.
“Dr. Zarlengo,” Moriah says. “Would you please read us Ms. Rae’s statistics?”
“To date,” Zarlengo reads from a tablet, “you have completed two hundred and twelve films since your arrival.”
“Most first-years are a thousand films ahead of you,” Moriah says.
“The reason I’m behind,” Dez argues, “the reason the films take me so long, is that I always sense that something’s missing. That there’s more to a subject’s life than I have access to. And tonight, I learned my suspicion is true.”
Dez thinks again of Asher’s point of view in the scene. How she’d shined in his eyes. “Why are those scenes being censored?”
“Perhaps,” Moriah says with a flourish of her hand, “you are familiar with the ancient adage attributed to Enoch: There is no dream without the worthless things. It is our job to keep the worthless things out so that the soul can enter the White Lights unimpeded.”
“What I found down there wasn’t worthless,” Dez says.
Moriah smiles. “Well, now we’re getting somewhere.” She pets Hanachesh, who swivels in Dez’s direction, locking black eyes on hers. “Dr. Ezekiel, shall we take a look?”
Dr. Ezekiel closes his eyes and starts humming, a deep, melodious sound.
Dez feels a rumbling beneath her feet, and then, a moment later, something bursts into the room, shattering the wood panel to the left of Moriah’s desk.
Zarlengo ducks just in time to avoid the flying golden object that shoots into the center of the office and hovers, spinning, in front of Dez.
A halo.
“You couldn’t have used the open door?” Moriah shakes her head.
Oblivious to the destruction, Dr. Ezekiel ceases humming with a sharp final note. Dez stares as the halo stops spinning—and she recognizes the scene within it.
It’s Asher’s halo. She can see the scene of the day they met.
“Who is this man?” Moriah demands.
Dez glances at Rafe, who’s staring into the halo like he’s about to pummel it.
“He’s …” Dez starts to say. “He’s the subject of the film I made before I came to Acheron.” The words feel so insufficient that they sound like a lie. “It was the film that got me accepted here.”
Moriah and Zarlengo exchange a mystified look.
“Why did you go looking for it?” Moriah asks.
“Because it was missing from his Lifeline,” Dez says.
“Are you in love with him?” Moriah demands.
“What?” Dez whispers, taken aback.
“Are you in love with Asher Ibrahim?”
Dez shakes her head. “I barely know him.”
“That’s never stopped a mortal before,” Moriah says.
“What do my feelings for someone I’ll probably never see again have to do with you censoring Lifelines?” Dez says.
“Because we’re trying to figure out why you’d steal another soul’s halo,” Moriah says. “It’s unbecoming of an Acheron filmmaker.”
“Because you’re this close to a Dream Expulsion,” Zarlengo says.
“Because love makes us do idiotic things,” Rafe says, now looking straight at Dez.
She swallows. “I looked in one person’s halo, yes,” she says, emboldened by finally being able to tell the truth of her intentions.
“But I know there’s more down there. My brother had a censored scene I should have been able to see.
Every film I make is a person with a life you’re cutting off from them for reasons I can assume benefit you, not them.
If all those other halos are anything like this one, they hold moments that deserve to be part of people’s stories at the end.
And I think every filmmaker at Acheron should know the truth. ”
The snake hisses, drawing Moriah’s attention back to her desk. She gazes into the snake’s eyes, as if receiving a message, then says, “Mr. Zarlengo, escort Ms. Rae to Sheol.”
“No!” Rafe cries, leaping to his feet.
Dez rears back, startled by Rafe’s intensity. She doesn’t know what Sheol is, but judging by Rafe’s reaction, it isn’t anyplace she wants to go.
“You can’t,” Rafe says.
Dez rises to her feet. “What’s he talking about? What is Sheol?”
Moriah folds her hands over her desk and holds Dez’s gaze. “It is a realm of opaque mist, bereft of both free will and fate.”
“Don’t do this,” Rafe says quietly. “It’s my fault.
Not hers. I should have been there to stop her.
But the fact that she’s capable of cracking her own Lens, of even finding the halos below, of knowing there was more to the Lifelines—that alone should tell you what she’s capable of.
She broke the rules, but … Dez sees things other mortals don’t. ”
“Such as?” Moriah says.
“Me. Outside the barbelo,” Rafe says. “She saw me when I went to recruit her.”
Moriah tips her head at Rafe, then at Dez. “I see.”
“She deserves one more chance,” Rafe says. “Please.”
Moriah looks at Rafe, amused. “If Mr. de la Cruz agrees to supervise you with increased attention, will you stay away from halos?”
“I still don’t understand why we can’t use those scenes—”
“Take the offer, Dez,” Rafe says through his teeth.
It’s shut up or Sheol, she senses.
“Fine,” Dez says.
“Very well,” Moriah says. “A probationary period until the fifteenth hundredth film is complete. No more missteps.” With her pointer finger, she pets the cobra between the eyes. “Dr. Ezekiel, fix my wall.”
“Shall I return the halo?” he asks.
Moriah eyes the halo, beckoning it closer with her hand.
Dez fights to keep herself from wresting it out of the director’s grip.
“Leave it here with me,” Moriah says.
“Hurry up,” Rafe says as he escorts her out of the meeting.
“Where are we going?” Dez says.
Rafe’s walking briskly, like he’s trying to lose her as they weave back through the dark, empty halls outside the Vault.
“Somewhere I can answer your questions,” he says.
Dez jogs to catch up with him. “Really?”
He stops walking, turns to face her. “But first, you’re going to answer one of mine.”
She knows what he’s going to ask before the words leave his lips.
“Do you love him?”
“I already told you, I barely know him. I didn’t go down there for love. I went for the truth.”
“Are you lying? Because I can’t—we can’t do this if you’re not ready to give up your mortal world.”
Dez holds her hands out at her side. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Are you here because you want this?” Rafe asks. “Or because you think you’re trapped?”
It’s too much for Dez to consider, especially under Rafe’s searing azure gaze. She made her decision once, and she wanted to stick by it. But that was before she’d seen Asher’s memory of their meeting in his halo.
That was before she’d seen herself through his eyes.
“I don’t know if I love him,” she says honestly, “but if none of this had happened, if I’d stayed where I was in my life, I think I would have tried.”
“Falling in love with Asher?”
She closes her eyes. She nods.
“Did you sleep with him?” Rafe asks.
“What? No. We met one time, and that’s none of your business anyway.”
“Shit,” he says, and shakes his head.
“You wish I had slept with him?”
“Of course, because now a part of you will always wonder. Whereas, if you’d gotten it out of the way, I could very simply blow him out of the water.”
“You and I haven’t even—”
Rafe steps forward and pins her against the wall of Goliath. His eyes trace her features, hungrily, and she breathes in his musky, petrichor scent. He’s got her attention now.
“I acknowledge that things between us must be as frustrating for you as they are for me,” Rafe says. “But there is an end in sight where I could give you more than you’ve ever dreamed is possible.”
His intensity sends a pulse of pleasure through her. “Rafe—”
“Do you want to see something no other first-year gets to see?” he asks. “Do you want me to show you what we’re here for, what this is all about?”
“Obviously.”
He tugs her hand. “Come on.”
They leave Goliath, walking outside to stand in the snow at the edge of the labyrinth. Dez shivers. This is the last place she wants to be.
From inside the tall hedges, something rustles.
“I don’t want to go in there,” she says.
“Too bad. It’s my favorite place on campus. It reminds me of home.”
“Home?” Dez asks. “You mean Heaven?”
“No, I mean my first home on earth.”
Dez studies him. “Where are you from, Rafe?”
“Where all White Lights are from,” he says. “The Garden.”
“The Garden of Eden?” Dez says. It makes sense, and yet it’s crazy to stand here just talking about such things. Like Rafe just told her he was from Dayton, Ohio.
“Where exactly is the Garden of Eden?”
“Lost,” Rafe says quietly. “No one knows anymore. It was lost a long time ago in a war that blurred the boundaries. What you’ve been taught to call the Big Bang was that war’s final blast. All of us were dragged into it.
Many didn’t make it out. But before Yael fled the Garden, she took a clipping from one of the pomegranate trees.
” Rafe runs his hands along the rustling edges of the topiary maze.
“She brought it here and made this. That’s why we built the school on this site. ”
Dez touches the leaves, bristling with wonder. Leaves from the Garden of Eden. They’re warm. The strangest feeling in the frozen night.
“What are we doing here, Rafe?”
“You asked me once how films get into the mortal mind,” Rafe says. “Would you like to see it?”
Dez thinks of her brother, how Rafe went to him as he died. “Yes.”
He puts out his hand. She takes it.
The false moon hanging in the sky offers the only light.
Pebbles crunch beneath their feet as they walk.
A young owl coos high and trebly in the pines.
Dez feels lost and claustrophobic, as if the walls are pressing in around her.
She holds fast to Rafe’s hand as he leads the way down narrow corridors, around angles of branch and shadow.
“Left, right, left, right, left, right,” Rafe says under his breath, moving deeper into the maze. Suddenly, he stops, and Dez realizes they’ve reached the small clearing at the center.
“We’ll need to fly now.”
“Oh,” Dez whispers.
“Soon you’ll be able to do this yourself. But for now, I’ll need to carry you. Is that okay?”
“You’re asking my consent to fly me with your angel wings?” Dez laughs. “I consent.”
He smiles, lifting his golden scarf from his shoulders and placing it carefully on hers. When Dez reaches up to touch it, it shimmers in her fingers, a fizzy sensation she can almost hear. It’s warm and more supple than anything she’s ever felt.
He bends down to loop one arm under her knees, one arm around her back, then lifts her up. Dez hears a whoosh explode behind her, but before she can look over her shoulders at Rafe’s beating wings, she feels a sudden lurch in her stomach.
The world disappears beneath her as they rise, out of the labyrinth and into the wider maze of sky.