Chapter 47
“NO,” DEZ SAYS, PUTTING HERSELF between the screen and Dr. Ezekiel.
“Your ascension begins in an hour,” he says. “Congratulations.”
“You’re going to kill Asher?” Dez realizes, her stomach churning. She grabs Dr. Ezekiel’s shoulders. “Please! I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t hurt him.”
He takes her hands off him, gazing at Dez serenely. “I’d get started on the film if I were you.”
Impossible. Moments ago, Dez was kissing Asher on a beach. He cannot die. How can this be happening?
Because Rafe is punishing her. Rushing her into ascension for his own benefit.
By making her do the one thing that will break her.
“Let me talk to Rafe,” she demands. She needs to know what kind of danger Asher’s in.
“We all play our roles, Ms. Rae,” he says calmly. “Your role is to make Mr. Ibrahim’s film.”
One hour until her ascension. That means Asher has less than an hour to live. Dez needs to stall for time. To figure out how to save him.
“I can’t make a film in an hour.”
“We believe you can. You’ve been working on it already,” he says pointedly. “All these months.”
“There’s no script, no Scribe,” she says, stalling.
“You’ve already proven you can handle this on your own. Just as you did with your brother’s film.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Sheol can’t be as bad as they say it is,” Dr. Ezekiel muses. “Sometimes I envy the aesthetic—the absence of all things. Talk about minimalism!”
Dez stares at him, disgusted, incredulous.
Dr. Ezekiel dips his head in a modest bow before he turns to go.
Then Dez is alone with her Lens again, vibrating with fear and anger.
There’s no way in hell she’s making this film. But if she doesn’t, someone else will. Someone who doesn’t know or care about Asher. He will still die. Within the hour. And Dez will be doomed to Sheol forever.
Unless …
Her hand flies to her pocket and she fingers Eri’s Soma pill. What if she can slow time long enough to save him?
But she’s trapped here. No way down this godforsaken mountain. And she doesn’t even know where he is. Or what he’s up against.
Fear and fury quicken her mind as she opens her Lens again and turns back to Asher’s Lifeline. She needs to find him in the present moment.
Her thoughts run in a million directions.
Her Lens can’t even keep up. On the screen in front of her, Asher’s Lifeline spins out of control, blurring his life until Dez can’t see anything clearly.
She forces herself to breathe, to calm. When Asher’s teenaged body finally focuses on the screen, striding through a high school hallway, Dez springs into action, swiping through vast bands of time on film.
She needs to get all the way to the end of his Lifeline, to see what precipice of death he’s standing on.
Finally, she comes to the end, the scene before her snapping back when she tries to scroll ahead. So, this is him. This is now.
He’s in a bedroom, grabbing a T-shirt from a drawer.
So ordinary, so secure, she can’t accept what’s coming for him.
She stares at his hands, at every single detail, greedy to gather more.
Now he stands shirtless before a mirror, giving Dez a long look at his naked chest. She swallows, aching to know him more than she does.
The clock on his wall ticks like a bomb.
His lithe arms and broad shoulders squeeze Dez’s heart.
His serious, beautiful, unsuspecting face in the mirror’s reflection brings tears to her eyes.
He will not die. She will not let him.
He pulls the T-shirt over his head and grabs car keys from the dresser. And then, as he’s heading for the door, something impossible catches Dez’s eye.
Her royal-blue sweatshirt. The one with the white hibiscus flower embroidered on the sleeve. The one she wore at the Dairy Barn in the scene she took from Silas’s Lifeline. Which she then clipped and placed in Asher’s.
In the out-of-time moment at the beach, when she and Asher kissed, Dez was wearing that sweatshirt.
Now, somehow that sweatshirt is folded on Asher’s dresser.
Does it mean Dez took it off in Asher’s house? In Asher’s room? And left it here? Did she come home with him after the beach that day?
And if she left it there, what happened after that? Had they not seen each other again?
Less than two weeks passed between the day Dez met Asher and filmed Glimpse and the night she hurt Mo at the Dairy Barn.
The night Jet stole her car and her brother, and Rafe rolled up to her on the road when she was running after them.
And Rafe told her about Acheron. And Dez said yes. And left her life as she knew it.
If it’s true that when Dez dropped that clip of herself into Asher’s beach, she altered Asher’s experience of them … does he think she ghosted him when she left for Acheron?
She would never have done that.
But he might think she did.
This complicates things. Not enough to stop her from trying to save his life, but enough to make her worry that he may not want to see her.
It’s five o’clock at Acheron, four o’clock in California. He’ll be dead before dinner, dead before the sun sets, dead before Dez can do anything about it.
On-screen, he’s leaving the house, stepping into a bright blue day.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she tells him as he skips down three porch steps. From a crawl space under the porch, he grabs a surfboard and hoists it over his shoulder. He walks to his driveway, slides the board into the back seat of his green Jeep Wrangler. He’s going surfing. It’s going to kill him.
Dez can see it in her mind—a sudden, outrageous wave, Rafe floating on another board nearby. Then the flash of the syringe as it empties into Asher’s cerebral cortex.
Dez needs to find out exactly where he’s going.
Oasis rises on the stereo when Asher starts his car. “Live Forever.” Tears sting Dez’s eyes.
He backs out of the driveway, steering slowly through a beachside town.
She looks for signs, geography. Rows of nondescript houses.
A tall palm tree with a split trunk marking a traffic median.
She knows he’s somewhere in Ventura. But where is he headed?
She needs more clues, but every second she spends here, watching Asher on her Lens, a thousand miles away from him, he gets closer to death.
At a stoplight, his fingers reach for the center console, for the navigation system.
Dez holds her breath as he types in his destination.
Point Mugu Beach.
She watches as the Jeep’s console screen fills with a map. She notes the marker for the beach off the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s a fifteen-minute drive.
She’s got to get out of here. Got to get to Asher before the worst happens. She’s got to find a way to keep him out of the ocean, away from any angels. But how?
The only time she’s left Acheron—the only time she’s ventured beyond the barbelo in the months since she’s been here—was on wings. Rafe’s wings.
Who else could take her to Asher?
Yael has offered to help Dez before, but not for something like this. She’d never violate the angels’ code.
Would Simon?
He’s changed since he ascended, but once upon a time, when this place scared the shit out of them both, they were friends.
His friendship mattered to her, and she knows it mattered to him, too.
He’s distracted these days, sure, but Dez decides he’s her only chance.
All Simon has to do is get Dez there, drop her off, and fly away.
Dez will take the blame for any trouble he gets in.
If she can save Asher, she won’t care what consequences she has to face.
Even Sheol.
She runs for the Towers, taking the stairs three at a time. Lungs burning, she rushes inside her suite and barges into Simon’s room.
Where she finds him in his bed, wearing his golden scarf like a blindfold, and going down on Jet.
“Don’t you know how to knock?” Jet says, dropping the mask of false kindness he’s put on since she got to Acheron. She sees how much he hates her.
“I need to talk to you, Simon,” she says. “Alone.”
“Kind of busy now,” her roommate says with his mouth full.
“Please,” Dez says. “This is important.”
“So is this,” Simon says.
“Simon,” Dez pleads.
“Get out,” Jet says, without even lifting his head off the pillow.
Dez looks into Jet’s two different-colored eyes. The black one she’d first seen at the Dairy Barn through his ski mask. And the blue one, a glass eye he’d had transplanted after Dez tore the other one out.
In her mind, she sees it in her mother’s pill bottle. Under her mattress.
She turns to leave, walking—then running to her room. She plunges her hand under her mattress and finds it. Opens the pill bottle’s top and pours Jet’s eye into her hand.
It never decomposed. Because it’s aeviternal. Its integrity is unchanged from the day she wrenched it out of his head.
She’s holding his security clearance to everything at Acheron. Including one of those obsidian jets, right outside on the landing strip.
There’s no way I can get away with this, she thinks, but for the first time in a long time, Dez smiles. Jet, the reason her brother is dead, is going to pay her back. He’s going to help her save Asher’s life.
She came to Acheron, without a clue, aboard an obsidian jet. She’ll leave on one, too, wiser and stronger than she ever could have guessed she’d become.
From outside her room, there’s a heavy pounding on the suite’s main door.
“Desdemona!”
It’s Rafe. He sounds furious.
“I know you’re in there,” he calls. “Open up.”
“Shit,” Dez mutters.
She’s lost too much time hatching her plan. Now Rafe’s here with every means to stop her. For a moment, she has no idea what to do.
If it comes down to it, the bartender once told her, take this … It’ll buy you time to get free.
Dez pulls out Eri’s Soma pill and swallows it without thinking. The heady feeling tingles in her mind and the back of her neck. She steadies herself against the intoxication, remembering it’s brief.
She listens, hears no more sound of Rafe outside the door.
Did it work?