Chapter 48
DEZ LOCATES THE GLOSSY BLACK panel to the left of the jet’s navigation screen. She raises Jet’s eye before it.
Welcome, Jet, it reads in the font style of old Bibles. Where are you flying today?
“Point Mugu Beach,” Dez says as calmly as she can.
I see a zone at the Chumash Trailhead that can accommodate our landing, reads the text on the screen. Would you like to set course for Chumash Trailhead in Malibu?
“Yes,” Dez says, and swallows, relieved at least someone’s thinking about how to land this plane. She’s been too focused on how to find Asher, how to save his life.
Please take a seat, the screen says.
Dez looks toward the four captain’s chairs. She remembers where Rafe sat and flew the plane when he brought her to Acheron. Keeping both hands in the air, Dez sits carefully in the corresponding chair, facing the navigation system.
Ready for departure, the screen reads.
But the plane doesn’t move.
She tries to remember Rafe’s motions that night, what he did to maneuver them out of the Death Valley desert, into the sky, and across several states—almost without her noticing it.
He made it look so easy Dez thought someone else was flying the plane.
And Asher had called just before they took off, leaving a voicemail that completely consumed her attention.
The mechanics of piloting the jet had been the furthest thing from her mind.
And yet, by the time they reached Acheron, Dez had begun to understand, if not consciously than intuitively, what was going on.
Glancing up directed the jet to climb higher. Glancing down made it descend. Left and right steered, like handlebars on a bike.
Somewhere there’s another scanner that’s not picking up Jet’s retina. Dez has to find it, trigger it. She holds the eyeball forward. She rolls it toward the ceiling. Nothing happens.
She moves it around, the way she used to with her phone, trying to get service in the desert. Her heart pounds as she glances out the window, back toward the dark, imposing windows of Acheron.
She pictures Rafe still at her door. What was going through his mind as he thundered up her stairs? What was he going to do when he reached her? Even in his frozen state, is he conscious? Can he feel himself moving at a different rate of time than her?
What did he expect? He should have known Dez would never make Asher’s film. He should have known she’d do anything to save Asher from death.
But if she doesn’t find a way to get out of here before the Soma wears off, Rafe will find her. He will win. And Asher will die.
Anger steels her resolve, but she doesn’t know how to do this on her own. She’s tired and out of ideas.
She misses Mo. He would tell her she can do this. He would say that if she didn’t, no one would. He would have believed in her, no matter how crazy her plan was.
“Thanks, Mo,” she whispers as she gets an idea. She raises Jet’s eye so that it’s level with her own. So that she’s looking directly at the back of it, at the jellied artery she’d severed from his head.
A narrow white beam shines through the darkened cabin.
The laser scanner. Dez has activated it.
She holds very still as it stretches across the walls.
Watches as, at last, it reaches the immortal eye in her hand.
And then, as easy as if she’d turned over the ignition in a car, an engine beneath her purrs to life.
She will not crash. She will not fail.
Her limbs go rigid as she tips Jet’s eye up. The jet jerks forward, then rockets up into the sky.
“Fuck,” she gasps.
Too much, too soon.
There are no seat belts, and Dez can’t let herself grip the armrests of her chair or she’ll come back into time. Her only option is to smooth this flight out. To respond the way a normal eye would operate in a normal angel’s head.
Glancing at the navigation screen, she sees she needs to make a U-turn so that she flies west, all the way to the edge of the country. She turns Jet’s eye slightly to the left, causing the plane to bank that way.
This time, the plane’s pivot is smoother. And when Acheron is over her shoulder, Dez doesn’t even look back at its false moonlight and snowcapped arches. She’s doing this. She looks toward the horizon, toward Asher and his worthy life.
Ahead the sky roils. It looks like a storm.
But it’s strange and otherworldly, the colors marbleized blues and blacks.
Not clouds. She must be approaching the barbelo.
Dr. Ezekiel’s filter was designed to shield the school from the rest of the world’s sight, to make them nothing but a dark spot on a mountain.
Flying headlong into the roiling clouds, she readies herself for the bolt of lightning.
But she isn’t prepared for what happens in slow time.
This time it strikes the plane with what feels like unending force, dropping the jet’s elevation ten times longer, making Dez feel as if the atmosphere is compressing into a single atom.
The force flings Dez out of the captain’s chair.
Airborne, she rolls across the plane as it rolls through the sky.
She screams as her shoulder smashes into the floor and her face collides with one of the footrests.
She has to get the eye back to the scanner, but she can’t use her hands to grab hold of anything.
She uses her elbows to prop herself up, struggles to crawl on her knees as the plane nosedives.
Red lights blink in the cabin. An urgent voice comes over the PA.
“Return to your seat. Return to your seat.”
Alarms sound as, out the window, Dez glimpses a fast-approaching mountainside. In a panic, she hooks her foot on the armrest of the captain’s chair where she sees the white beam searching the cabin again for Jet’s retina. She holds the eyeball up.
Just before crashing into the Rocky Mountains, the scanner finds Jet’s retina again, and the plane shoots vertically up from its death spiral—into shockingly blue sky. Dez gasps to catch her breath, squinting into sunlight after so much time away.
High above the mountains, the plane’s angle evens out.
It’s beautiful, so bright it seems to make a sound, a hum Dez hears in her soul.
It takes time for her eyes to adjust, but once they do, she inhales deeply, soaks it all up. Gold sun, lace-like clouds. Aching, brilliant sky. Sunlit mountains, verdant trees, and sparkling rivers. The real world is unspeakably gorgeous.
Now the mountains start receding. Lights twinkle in the flat expanses that must be eastern Utah.
Dez is moving at a speed that’s hard to fathom, especially given that everyone else in the world is frozen in time.
Even the sun will stay nearly fixed where it hangs in the sky, from now until the Soma wears off.
She watches the ground as she flies over the Martian recess of land she recognizes as her own.
Death Valley. The place she spent her whole life until six months ago.
Her heart pinches for her brother, for her mother, for Silas and her shitty old laptop and the date palm outside her bedroom—and then, just like that, her home is a distant spec on the horizon, and Dez has no choice but to keep looking forward.
She can see the ocean now. She tips Jet’s eye down slightly, beginning her descent. The jutting rocks in the distance must be Point Mugu. As she gets closer, she’s able to see more fully the strangeness of the Soma. First, it’s the stopped cars on the Pacific Coast Highway.
No, not stopped, but massively slowed.
For all perceptible purposes, everything is at a standstill.
Even the ocean is frozen in time. Its waves hang suspended on the sea.
The birds in the goldening sky, and the wind rippling the leaves of palms, all of it is reduced to the lowest rate of movement that still allows inertia.
It is the most peculiar feeling, to be free when everything else is frozen.
When somewhere nearby, Asher is frozen, too.
She turns her focus back to the coast. The map on the navigation system shows that the parking lot where Dez can discreetly land is a third of a mile up the coast from Point Mugu.
She sees the long and sandy stretch of beach, and at its edge, where the Pacific Coast Highway gives way to rocks again, she looks for the suggested landing zone.
When she finds it, she tips Jet’s solitary gaze down, and the jet responds by making a clean descent, near but not in the parking lot of the trailhead.
She touches down between the trees, blending into the natural world.
She clutches her heart in gratitude. She is moving at a different frequency than everything around her, but she is not invisible.
She wonders what it looked like to the frozen people parking their cars, loading children into carriers, and putting on sunscreen when she basically fell out of the sky.
Could they see her in their periphery? What will they remember when they come back into time?
But she can’t worry about that now. She’s out of the jet, Jet’s eye in her hand. She’s running for Point Mugu.
She reaches the beachfront parking lot, gasping for breath.
A few cars are there, but no green Jeep.
She runs to the edge to be sure, to look out at the stuck ocean.
She doesn’t see him on the beach or in the water.
She’s gotten here in time. And yet, something dangerous is waiting out there.
Something out there wants to kill Asher. Dez must stop him from going in.
But where is he? Turning from the beach, she notices another entrance to the parking lot, about a hundred yards away. She sees the bumper of a green Jeep, stopped in time, about to turn into the lot.
Asher.
She sprints.
Reaching the car, Dez stops running. She’s seen Asher a thousand times over the past several months, but it’s only the second time she’s been with him in person. His beautiful reality takes her breath away.
For several moments, she simply lets herself stare. At his lovely, tanned skin. The blond hair falling softly into his eyes. His strong, broad hands on the steering wheel. The thumb that once pulsed against her wrist, a secret language in a late-night parking lot.
The impact he has on her, even through the windshield of his car, makes her wonder what Asher will do when he sees her.
Her palms sweat, imagining it. A few months ago, Dez was sure Asher had forgotten her.
Now, with what she did to his Lifeline, she feels certain he’ll know her.
At least a version of her from an altered Lifeline.
But won’t it feel real to him? In his bedroom, his eyes fell on her sweatshirt for longer than seemed necessary.
He feels some way about her from that unknowable night, and Dez must face whatever it is.
She wishes she could get him away from this beach without having to bring him back into real time, without having to explain that his life is in danger, and Dez is here to save it.
But she can’t haul him back to the jet without touching him. And even if she could, sooner or later, he’d wake up and she’d have to explain how he got there, why she ripped him away from his life.
No, she needs to do this, face him, save him, now.
Without thinking, she plants both hands on the hood of Asher’s Jeep.
She feels the deep, shuddering jolt of time like the floor’s dropping out from under her.
The world comes screeching back into motion—cars blurring by on the highway, wind lashing her hair, the ocean crashing behind her—and Asher slamming hard on his brakes.
She looks up and locks eyes with him through the windshield. Both of them gasp for breath.
He’s just saved her life. Time to repay the favor.
Asher’s out of the Jeep in half a second. “What the hell is wrong with you—”
And then he breaks off because he’s standing right in front of her, a wild, dazed look on his face.
He’s so close that she can hear him breathing.
He’s wearing white board shorts and a red hoodie that reads Catalina Island Marine Institute.
And his eyes. She can see the complexity of emotion in his hazel eyes.
She could take one step forward, reach out, and touch him.
Being this close to his living, breathing body makes all the difference in the world.
“Desdemona?” he whispers.
Like he’s seen a ghost.
“It’s me,” she whispers. “Asher.”
Anger flashes in his eyes as he takes a step away from her. Like she might hurt him. Like she already has.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
Dez aches. She hears in his voice that when she spliced the clip of herself into his Lifeline, they didn’t just kiss on the beach. They went for coffee, or dinner, or a long drive, or the skate park.
They spent the night together.
And it changed them.
A whole love story between sunset and sunrise.
And then Dez disappeared. She went to Acheron, but he wouldn’t have known that. She never got to tell him.
The whole story’s there, clear as day, on Asher’s gorgeous, tortured face.
Twin tears roll down her cheeks.
“Hey,” he says, his voice suddenly tender. “Don’t. Don’t cry, Dez.”
She can’t believe she’s here, with him. She can’t believe she ever hurt him. And now, looking around her, at the beach, toward the sky, she can’t believe what they’re up against, very soon.
If only she’d picked up his call in the jet with Rafe that first day. She could have …
But she couldn’t have warned him she’d be disappearing, because she didn’t yet know it herself.
“I used to practice what I’d say if I ever ran into you,” Asher says. He takes a step closer now, tilting his head as if he’s trying to understand what’s happening. His gaze sends warmth through her that she feels under her skin. It reminds Dez of the first time they met.
She should never have let Asher go.
“Don’t say anything,” she says as she opens the passenger door of his Jeep. “Just drive.”