The Fallen Sequence (153 page)

“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 seven 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 measure 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 duvet, 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 remaining three Outcasts, Arriane, Annabelle,
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 sandstorm?” 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 on 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 flashes 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 Luce’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 sandstorm, 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 in 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.

A pale-leafed olive tree and a dwarf fig tree strained
to grow diagonally around the boulders on the slope. This must have been the green speck Luce had seen at a distance from below. Dee had said it was their destination, but Luce couldn’t believe they’d climbed all that way through the long expanse of writhing dust.

Everybody’s wings looked like they belonged to Outcasts, brown and battered, emitting the dullest glow. The actual Outcasts’ wings looked even more fragile than normal, like cobwebs. Dee used a wind-stretched sweater sleeve to wipe the dust from her face. She ran red-nail-polished fingers through wild red hair. Somehow the old lady still looked elegant. Luce didn’t want to consider what she looked like.

“Never a dull moment!” Dee’s voice trailed behind her as she disappeared into the cave.

They followed her inside, stopping a few feet in, where the dusky light withered into darkness. Luce leaned against a cold reddish-brown sandstone wall next to Daniel. His head nearly skimmed the low ceiling. All the angels had to tuck their wings down to accommodate the tightness of the cave.

Luce heard a scraping sound, and then Dee’s shadow stretched into the lit portion at the entrance of the cave. She pushed a large wooden chest toward them with the toe of her hiking boot.

Cam and Roland rushed to help her, the muted amber glow of their dusty wings altering the darkness of the
space. Each lifted a corner of the chest and they carried it to a natural alcove in the cave that Dee’s gestures indicated. At her approving nod, they set it down against the cave wall.

“Thank you, gentlemen.” Dee ran her fingers along the brass edge of the trunk. “It seems like only yesterday I had this carted up here. Though it must have been nearly two hundred years ago.” Her face furrowed into a small frown of nostalgia. “Oh, well, a person’s life is but a day. Gabbe helped me, though because of the dust storms, she never recalled the exact location. That was an angel who knew the value of advance preparation. She knew this day would come.”

Dee slipped an elegant silver key from the pocket of her cardigan and twisted it in the chest’s lock. As the old thing creaked open, Luce edged forward, expecting something magical—or at least historic—to be revealed. Instead, Dee tossed out six standard-issue army canteens, three small bronze lanterns, a heavy stack of blankets and towels, and an armful of crowbars, pickaxes, and shovels.

“Drink up if you need to. Lucinda first.” She distributed the canteens, which were filled with cold, delicious water. Luce inhaled the contents of her canteen and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. When she licked her lips, they were prickly with dry sand.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Dee smiled. She slid open a
box of matches and lit a candle in each one of the lanterns. Light flickered off the walls, generating dramatic shadows as the angels bent over, pivoted, brushed each other off.

Arriane and Annabelle scrubbed at their wings with the dry towels. Daniel, Roland, and Cam preferred to shake the sand out of theirs, beating them against the rocks until the soft
sssss
sound of sand falling on the stone floor faded. The Outcasts seemed content to stay dirty. Soon the cave was brightly lit with an angelic glow, as if someone had started a bonfire.

“What now?” Roland asked, pouring the sand out of one of his leather boots.

Dee had moved to the mouth of the cave, her back to the others. She walked to the flat stone expanse outside, then waited for them to follow.

They gathered in a small half circle, facing the sloping pile of boulders and the struggling olive and fig trees.

“We need to go
inside,
” Dee said.

“Inside where?” Luce turned around to look behind her. The cave they’d just walked out of was the only “inside” option Luce could see. Out here, there was only the flat floor of the mesa and the rockslide against the cliff wall.

“Sanctuaries are built on top of sanctuaries are built on top of sanctuaries,” Dee said. “The first one on Earth used to stand right here under this slope of fallen rock.
Inside it, the final piece of the fallens’ early history is encoded. This is the
Qayom Malak
. After the first sanctuary was destroyed, several others followed in its place, but the
Qayom Malak
always remained within them.”

“You mean that mortals have used the
Qayom Malak
, too?” Luce asked.

“Without much thought or understanding. Over the years it grew more and more misunderstood by each new group to build their temple here. For many, this site has been considered unlucky”—she glanced at Arriane, who shifted her weight—“but that is no one’s fault. It was a long time ago. Tonight, we unearth what once was lost.”

“You mean the knowledge of our Fall?” Roland paced the perimeter of the slope of rocks. “That’s what the
Qayom Malak
will tell us?”

Dee smiled cryptically. “The words are Aramaic. They mean … well, it’s better if you just see for yourselves.”

Beside them, Arriane was chewing noisily on a strand of her hair, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her overalls, her wings stiff and unmoving. She stared at the fig and olive trees, as if in a trance.

Luce noticed now what was strange about the trees. The reason they seemed to grow diagonally out of the stone was that their trunks lay buried deep beneath the boulders.

“The trees,” she said.

“Yes, once they were fully exposed.” Dee bent down to caress the withering green leaves of the little fig tree. “As was the
Qayom Malak
.” She rose and patted the heap of boulders. “This whole mesa was once much larger. A lovely, vibrant place at times, though that’s hard to imagine now.”