Rapture

“Well done, Daniel.” Dee smiled. “You knew it all along. Though Qayom Malak is much easier for modern tongues to pronounce than—” She made a string of complicated guttural noises Luce couldn’t have replicated.



“I never knew what it meant,” Daniel said.



Dee looked out the open window, at the holy city’s afternoon sky. “Soon you will, my boy. Very soon you will.”



THIRTEEN



THE EXCAVATION



Throosh of wingbeats overhead.



Tendrils of ambling cloud sliding over skin.



Luce was soaring across darkness, deep in the drug-like tunnel of another flight. She was weightless as the wind.



A single star hung in the center of a navy sky, miles above the belt of rainbow light near the horizon.



Twinkling lights on darkened ground seemed impossibly far away. Luce was in another world, ascending into infinity, lit up by the glow of brilliant silver wings.



They beat again, thrusting forward, then back, carrying her higher . . . higher . . .



The world was quiet up here, like she had it all to herself.



Higher . . . higher . . .



No matter how high, she was always canopied by the warm silver winglight overhead.



She reached for Daniel, as if to share this peace, to caress his hand where it always rested, clasped around her waist.



Her hand met her own bare skin. His hand wasn’t there.



Daniel wasn’t there.



There were only Luce’s body, and a darkening horizon, and a single distant star.



She jolted from her sleep. Aloft, awake, she found Daniel’s hands again—one holding her waist, the other higher, draped across her chest. Right where they always were.



It was late afternoon—not nighttime. She and Daniel and the others climbed a ladder of puffy white clouds that obscurred the stars.



Just a dream.



A dream in which Luce had been the one flying. Everybody had these dreams. You were supposed to wake up just before you hit the ground. But Luce, who flew in real life every day, had awakened when she realized she was flying under her own power. Why hadn’t she looked up then, to see what her wings looked like, to see if they were glorious and proud?



She closed her eyes, wanting to return to that simpler sky, where Lucifer wasn’t thundering toward them, where Gabbe and Molly weren’t gone.



“I don’t know if I can do this,” Daniel said.



Her eyes shot open, back to reality. Below, the red granite peaks of the Sinai Peninsula were so jagged they looked like they were made of shards of broken glass.



“What is it you can’t do?” Luce asked. “Find the location of the Fall? Dee’s going to help us, Daniel. I think she knows exaclty how to find it.”



“Sure,” he said, unconvinced. “Dee’s great. We’re lucky to have her. But even if we find the Fall site, I don’t know how we’re going to stop Lucifer. And if we can’t”—



his chest heaved against her back—“I can’t go through another six thousand years of losing you.” Throughout her lives, Luce had seen Daniel brooding, frustrated, worried, passionate, brooding again, tender, diffident, desperately sad. But she had never heard him sound defeated. The dull surrender in his tone cut into her, sudden and deep, the way a starshot sliced through angel flesh.



“You won’t have to do that.”



“I keep picturing what we’re looking at if Lucifer succeeds.” He fell back slightly from the formation they were flying in—Cam and Dee taking the lead, Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle just behind, the Outcasts fanned out around them all. “It’s too much, Luce. This is why angels choose sides, why people join teams. It costs too much not to; it weighs too heavily to soldier on alone.” There was a time when Luce would have turned instinctively inward, made insecure by Daniel’s doubt, as if it suggested a weakness in their relationship. But now she was armed with the lessons from their past. She knew, when Daniel was too tired to remember, the mea-sure of his love.



“I don’t want to go through it all again. All that time without you, always waiting, my foolish optimism that someday it would be different—”



“Your optimism was justified! Look at me. Look at us! This is different. I know it is, Daniel. I saw us in Helston and Tibet and Tahiti. We were in love, sure, but it was nothing like what we have now.” They’d dropped back farther, out of earshot of the others. They were just Luce and Daniel, two lovers talking in the sky. “I’m still here,” she said. “I’m here because you believed in us. You believed in me.”



“I did—I do believe in you.”



“I believe in you, too.” She heard a smile enter her voice. “I always have.”



They were not going to fail.



They descended into a dust storm.



It hung over the desert like a vast comforter, as if enormous hands had tossed the Sahara into the air.



Within the thick, tawny haze, the angels and their surroundings merged into indistinction: ground was overlapped with whirling sand; horizon was erased by great pulsating sheets of brown. Everything looked pixilated, bathed in dusty static, like white noise rusted, a foreshadowing of what would come if Lucifer got his way.



Sand filled Luce’s nose and mouth. It reached beneath her clothes and scratched her skin. It was far harsher than the velvety dust left behind by Gabbe’s and Molly’s deaths, a bleak reminder of something more beautiful and worse.



Luce lost all sense of her surroundings. She had no idea how close they were to landing until her feet brushed the invisible rocky ground. She sensed that there were great rocks, maybe mountains, to their left, but she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. Only the glow of the angels’ wings, dulled by waves of sand and wind, signaled where the others were.



When Daniel released her on the uneven rock, Luce tugged her Israeli army jacket up around her ears to block her face from the sting of the sand. They had gathered in a circle, the angels’ wings generating a halo of light on a rocky path at the foothills of a mountain: Phil and the other remaining three Outcasts, Arriane, Annbelle, Cam and Roland, Luce and Daniel, and Dee standing in the center of them all, as calmly as a museum docent giving a tour.



“Don’t worry, it’s often like this in the afternoon!” Dee shouted over a wind so rough it tossed the angels’



wings. She used her hand like a visor, placing it sideways on her brow. “This will all blow over soon! Once we reach the location of the Qayom Malak, we will bring all three relics together. They will tell us the true story of the Fall.”



“Exactly where is the Qayom Malak?” Daniel shouted.



“We’re going to have to climb that mountain.” Dee pointed behind her at the barely visible promontory whose foothills had been the angels’ landing place. What little Luce could see of the mountain looked unfathomably sheer.



“You mean fly, right?” Arriane clicked the heels of her black sneakers together. “Never been much of a ‘climber.’”



Dee shook her head. She reached for the duffel bag Phil was holding, unzipped it, and pulled out a pair of sturdy brown hiking boots. “I’m glad the rest of you are already wearing sensible shoes.” She kicked off her pointy high heels, tossed them into the bag, and began lacing up the boots. “It’s no picnic of a hike, but in these conditions, the path to the Qayom Malak is really best navigated by foot. You can use your wings for balance against the winds.”



“Why don’t we wait out the sand storm?” Luce suggested, her eyes tearing in the dusty wind.



“No, dear.” Dee slipped the black strap of the duffel bag back over Phil’s narrow shoulder. “There’s no time.



It must be now.”



So they formed a line behind Dee, trusting her to navigate again. Daniel’s hand found Luce’s. He still seemed morose after their conversation, but his grip on her hand never slackened.



“Well, so long, it’s been good to know ya!” Arriane joked as the others began to climb.



“If you seek me, ask the dust,” Cam said in reply.



Dee’s route led them up into the mountains, along a rocky path that grew narrow and steeper. It was strewn with jagged rocks Luce couldn’t see until she’d tripped on them. The sinking sun looked like the moon, its light diminished and pale behind the clogged curtain of air.



She was coughing, gagging on dust, her throat still sore from the battle in Vienna. She zigzagged left and right, never seeing where she went, only sensing it was always vaguely up. She focused on Dee’s yellow cardigan, which rippled like a flag from the old woman’s little body. Always Luce held on to Daniel’s hand.



Here and there the dust storm snagged around a boulder, creating a brief pocket of visibility. In one of those moments, Luce spotted a pale green speck in the distance. It sat along a path hundreds of feet above them and equally as far to the right from where they stood.



That dash of muted color was the only thing breaking the rhythm of the barren sepia landscape for miles. Luce stared at it as if it were a mirage until Dee’s hand brushed her shoulder.



“That’s our destination, dear. Good to keep your eyes on the prize.”



Then the storm wrested itself free from the boulder’s angles, dust swirled, and the green speck was gone. The world became a mass of grainy bullets once again.



Images of Bill seemed to form in the swirling sand: the way he’d cackled at their first meeting, changing from an imposter Daniel to a toad; his inscrutable expression when she’d met Shakespeare at the Globe. The images helped Luce right herself when she stumbled on the path. She would not stop until she beat the devil.



Images of Gabbe and Molly drove Luce forward, too.



The flash of their wings in two great gold and silver arcs played out again before Luce’s eyes.



You’re not tired, she told herself. You’re not hungry.



At last they felt their way around a tall boulder shaped like an arrowhead, its tip pointed to the sky. Dee gestured for them to huddle against the up-mountain face of the arrowhead, and there, finally, the wind died down.



Dusk had fallen. The mountains wore a darkening silver dress. They stood on a mesa about the size of Lu-ce’s living room at home. Except for a small gap where the path had dropped them off, the small round expanse was bordered on all sides by sheer, curving russet cliffs of rock, forming a space that could have served as a natural amphitheater. It shielded them from more than merely wind: Even if there hadn’t been a sand storm, most of the mesa would have been hidden by the arrowhead boulder and the high surrounding rocks.



Here, no one coming up the path could see them.



Pursuing Scale would have to luck into flying directly over them. This enclosed steppe was a kind of sanctuary.



“I’d like to say I’m on a natural high,” Cam said.



“This hike would have ruined John Denver,” Roland agreed.



Ghosts of rivers left winding veins into the dust-encrusted ground. The craggy mouth of a cave opened at the base of the rock wall to the left of the arrowhead boulder.



On the far side of the mesa, slightly to the right of where they stood, a rockslide had come to rest against the sheer curving wall of stone. The pile was made of boulders that varied in size from small as a snowball to bigger than a refrigerator. Lichen grew between cracks in the rocks, seeming to hold the boulders together on the slope.