Chapter 46
DEZ IS AT THE VAULT early the next morning. She hasn’t slept or talked to anyone since Rafe shattered her with the truth. She’s sick over his solipsistic darkness. She can’t believe she was beginning to think she could trust him. He’s never cared about her, only about what she could give him.
Fuck Rafe. Fuck this school, this breeding ground for dark angels.
Fuck ascension and the White Lights. Dez wants no part of Acheron anymore.
She’ll never make another film for them again.
She’d rather go to Sheol than be complicit in a system that exalts someone like Rafe.
A system that prioritizes death over life, humanity, love.
This wasn’t worth her brother’s life. If only she’d known when she made the choice to stay.
She misses Mo so much she can barely move.
Her grief is deep, an aching canyon. She misses Death Valley, too.
Her house. Her mom. Silas. The person Dez was there and the person she dreamed of becoming.
Now she’s trapped in this unnatural place, somewhere between a mortal and an angel. She has no way of leaving campus.
Cut off from everything she used to know, Dez feels her real life ebbing away. She fears the story Rafe told her last night will start to become her truth.
He said he saved her. He said she was supposed to die the night Mo came into the Dairy Barn. And he swooped in and fixed things by casting Jet in the scene.
All her life, people in power—in government, school, and religion—have gaslit her like this: We know more than you do. Doubt yourself and put your faith in us.
She knows what really happened at the Dairy Barn. She remembers the real moment when she did think she was going to die, when Jet pulled the gun on her by the cash register. It was right before she grabbed the deep fryer, intending to throw it, to save herself and her brother.
She remembers what went through her mind.
Enough.
It wasn’t what she expected to think, facing death at twenty-four. But she was thinking of Asher, of the day they’d spent together on the pier. She was thinking of the moment they said goodbye in the parking lot of the bar. Asher’s thumb against her wrist.
Pulse pulsepluse pulse.
She remembered how he’d looked at her, and how she’d looked at him back. They saw each other. So simple, yet so rare. To get to have that feeling of being truly seen just once in her life? Dez thought at the time it was enough.
She doesn’t feel that way now. If nothing else, these months at Acheron have opened Dez’s heart to the point where she can ask for more.
She knows if she were to get a Life Review right now, that moment in the parking lot with Asher would be censored.
Because for Dez, that scene no longer signals enough.
It begs for more.
Stop thinking of it as a scene, she tells herself. It happened to you. It was real.
The kind of real that would tempt anyone with a soul to stay alive, to … kill death. And what would be so wrong with that? Can the evil that Moriah warned them about possibly be worse than Rafe’s evil? Is killing death actually bad for humanity—or is it just bad for Acheron?
How does she get out of here? How can she help herself? What would someone who loves her tell her to do?
She knows Moriah still has Asher’s halo, wisely suspecting Dez would dive back in for it the next chance she got. But the director might not know about Asher’s Lifeline, about the secret moment Dez spliced inside it.
She pulls it up now. It’s been less than a day since she looked at the scene she modified of the two of them on the beach. But everything has changed. Dez is not afraid of getting caught anymore. She doesn’t care if she messes with the Vault in some irreversible way.
She has no fear. Nothing to lose.
She finds the scene and almost breaks at the beauty of it.
The way Asher sees her walking toward him.
In his eyes, she looks like the heroine in a love story wearing her blue sweatshirt with the white hibiscus embroidered on the sleeve.
She wishes she could see him, his face—not just see the world as he sees it.
But looking at herself through his point of view will have to be enough for now.
She feels highlighted by Asher, accepted and desired.
She can hear his heartbeat pick up, and the sound of his breath at the sight of her.
She could watch this moment every second for the rest of her life.
When he opens his arms, she feels herself inside of them.
When he tucks his head to hers, she knows she’s safe.
Maybe not now, but in another realm. A realm as real as this one, where she and Asher are together.
Yesterday, there was nothing to the scene beyond her embrace with Asher. It was gorgeous, and natural, and then it was over. His Lifeline moved on to another scene.
Today, somehow, there’s more.
The scene has taken on a life of its own.
Inside her Lens, Asher is speaking. He sounds genuinely amazed. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
The Dez on-screen is quiet. The Dez in the Vault waits too long for the Dez on-screen to speak. Asher’s waiting, too.
“I decided to take matters into my own hands,” Dez finally says aloud in the Vault, like she’s feeding herself a line.
And then, on-screen—
Her likeness mirrors her words, speaking with the exact same inflection, the exact same timing and flirtatiousness. In the Vault, Dez sucks in her breath. She can talk to him. She can speak to him all the way from here.
What else can she do? Can she kiss him? She laughs.
In spite of every awful thing going on outside this Lens, in here, all she wants to do is close the distance to the man before her.
She wills the version of herself on the beach to look up into his eyes, to let her gaze linger on his lips, to step in and go for it already.
Nothing.
She reaches forward, trying to physically manipulate her on-screen likeness. There’s something essential in this untested kiss that Dez needs to know. It isn’t only physical, not like the way she felt with Rafe.
It’s existential, as if somehow, everything depends on if and how they kiss.
But the Dez on the beach can’t be moved into action the way she can be moved into speaking. Dez practically tears at the screen, her heart pounding with exertion. Nothing happens. Nothing works.
Finally, from the Vault, she says, “Asher, would you do me a favor?”
Her likeness on the beach repeats the request.
“Anything.” Asher smiles.
“Kiss me. Like it’s the last thing you’ll ever get to do.”
Through the Lens, Dez experiences him studying her. It’s her face she can see, her open desire and vulnerability. She feels him stepping forward, taking a hitched breath, then wrapping his arms around the Dez on the beach. He pulls her up and into him.
Then his lips crash into hers like waves.
When he closes his eyes, it’s not that Dez stops seeing so much as she begins to feel what he’s feeling inside of her own body. And it’s not only the physicality of the kiss. It’s the singularity, the sense that this kiss could happen between no other two people in the world. Just them. Only them.
When Asher opens his eyes, Dez sees herself through his gaze—every fleck of light in her blue irises, every hint of longing in her lips. And the recognition she feels? It’s as if, at last, someone is seeing her precisely as she longs to be seen. It’s soul-expanding, life-affirming. Death-defying.
It’s a kiss that will change her forever, even standing breathless in the Vault a thousand miles away.
Dez has never known anything like this. It’s all there—everything that matters most is there—in Asher’s kiss.
If only it could happen in the real world. If only she had a way to see him again.
“Ms. Rae?”
The voice inside her Lens startles Dez so much she retracts the Lens without closing Asher’s Lifeline. When she finds Dr. Ezekiel on the other side, she jumps back.
“How did you do that?” she asks. “How did your voice get inside my Lens?”
“Special effects,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
“I thought these things were private. Soundproof.”
“You’re on probation, remember?”
“You scared me.”
“I bring good news,” he says with a warm smile Dez no longer trusts. “There’s been a change in the rules.”
“What is it?” Dez says, girding herself. Not like she’s planning to play by their rules anymore, ever again. But she understands they can still be used against her.
“Rafe came to see us this morning,” Dr. Ezekiel says.
“I don’t care.”
“You should. He’s requested that you no longer be required to complete the requisite fifteen hundred films. And we’ve come around to his opinion.”
“You’re sending me to Sheol?”
“On the contrary,” Ezekiel says. “We believe you’re nearly ready for ascension. Given the entropic energy in our world, the existential threats to the White Lights system, it’s only appropriate to accelerate your promotion.”
“I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to ascend.”
“But you will,” Ezekiel says. “We request that you complete only one more Life Review.”
He turns toward Dez’s retracted Lens, where the image of Asher and her on the beach still shows on the screen. The old man smiles, like there’s nothing sick and twisted at the heart of Acheron.
“Oh, good,” he says. “You already have his Lifeline pulled up and ready to go.”