The Fallen Sequence (160 page)

Had Luce been up there? She felt almost as if she had.

Then she realized something:
Those were the angels. This was the Fall
.

The memory of witnessing their fall to Earth agonized Luce. It was like watching all the stars fall out of the night sky.

The farther they fell, the looser their aimless formation became. Single entities became visible, autonomous. She couldn’t imagine any of her angels, her friends, ever looking like this. More lost and out of control than the most destitute mortal on the worst day of his life. Was Arriane among them? Was Cam?

Her gaze traced one orb of light directly overhead. It grew larger and brighter as it approached.

Daniel looked up, too. Luce realized he didn’t recognize the falling forms, either. His impact on Earth had shuddered through him so thoroughly that it had erased his memory of who he was, where he’d come from, how
magnificent he used to be. He watched the sky with raw terror in his eyes.

A smattering of falling angels were hundreds of feet above their heads one second … then close enough that Luce could make out the strange, dark bodies within their vessels of light. The bodies did not move but seemed undeniably alive.

Closer they fell, bearing down on Luce until she screamed—and the great mass of dark and light crashed into the field beside her.

An explosion of fire and black smoke knocked Daniel out of Luce’s sight. More were coming. Over a million more were coming. They would pummel the Earth and every living thing on it to a pulp. Luce ducked and shielded her eyes and opened her mouth to scream again.

But the sound that came out was no scream—

Because the memory had shifted into something even further back. Further back than the Fall?

Luce was no longer in the field of smoking craters and meteoric angels.

She was standing in a landscape of pure light. Any terror in her voice did not belong here, could not have
existed
in this place, which she knew and did not know. She had a sense of where she was, but it couldn’t possibly be real.

Streaming from her soul was a strong, rich chord of music so beautiful that it turned everything around her
white. The crater was gone. The Earth was gone. Her body was—

She didn’t know. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything but this fantastic silver-tinged white glow. The brightness unfolded like a package until Luce could make out a vast white meadow spread out before her. Splendid groves of white trees lined either side of the field.

In the distance was a rippling silver ledge. Luce sensed it was important. Then she saw that there were seven more of them, forming a grand arch in the air around something so bright Luce couldn’t stand to look at it.

She focused on the ledge, the third one from the left. She could not wrest her gaze from it. Why?

Because … Her memory reeled back.… Because—

This ledge belonged to her.

Long before, she used to sit here, next to … whom? It seemed to matter.

Her vision swirled and faded and the silver ledge dissolved. The remaining whiteness focused, separating into shapes, into—

Faces. Bodies. Wings. A backdrop of blue sky.

This was not a memory. She was back in the present, her real and final life. Around her stood her teachers Francesca and Steven; her allies the Outcasts; her friends Roland, Arriane, Annabelle, and Cam. And her love, Daniel. She stared at each one of them and she found
them so beautiful. They were watching her with dumb joy on their faces. They were also crying.

The gift of self-knowledge
, Dee had told her.
You must remember how to dream what you already know
.

All this had been within her the whole time, in every instant of her every life. Yet only now did Luce feel awake beyond her capacity to imagine what it meant to be awake. A light wind blew across her skin and she could
feel
the distant sea carried on it from the Mediterranean, telling her she was still in Troy. Her vision, too, was clearer than it had ever been before. She saw brilliant dots of pigment making up the wings of a passing golden butterfly. She breathed in the cold air, filling her lungs, smelling the zinc in the loamy soil that would make it fertile in the spring.

“I was there,” she whispered. “I was in—”

Heaven
.

But she couldn’t say it. She knew too much to deny it—and yet not enough to speak the words. Daniel. He would help her.

Go on
, his eyes were pleading.

Where did she begin? She touched the locket with the picture taken when she and Daniel had lived in Milan.

“When I visited my past life in Helston,” she began, “I learned that our love ran deeper than who we were in any single lifetime—”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “Our love transcends everything.”

“And … when I visited Tibet, I learned that a single touch or kiss was not the trigger to my curse.”

“Not touch.” Roland’s voice. He was smiling, standing next to Daniel with his hands clasped behind his back. “Not touch but self-awareness. A level you weren’t ready for—until now.”

“Yes.” Luce touched her forehead. There was more, so much more. “Versailles.” She began to speak more quickly. “I was condemned to marry a man I didn’t love. And your kiss released me, and my death was glorious because we would always find each other again. Forever.”

“Together forever, whatever the weather,” Arriane chimed in, swiping damp eyes on Roland’s shirtsleeve.

By now Luce’s throat felt so tight it was difficult to speak. But it was no longer sore. “I didn’t realize until London that your curse was so much worse than mine,” she said to Daniel. “What you had to go through, losing me—”

“It never mattered,” Annabelle murmured, her wings buzzing so much that her feet were inches off the ground. “He would always wait for you.”

“Chichén Itzá.” Luce closed her eyes. “I learned that an angel’s glory could be deadly to mortals.”

“Yes,” Steven said. “But you’re still here.”

“Keep going, Luce.” Francesca’s voice was more encouraging than it had ever been at Shoreline.

“Ancient China.” She paused. This one’s significance was different from the others. “You showed me that our love was more important than any arbitrary war.”

No one spoke. Daniel gave the faintest nod.

And that was when Luce understood not just who she was—but what it all added up to. There was another lifetime from her voyage through the Announcers that Luce felt she had to mention. She took a breath.

Don’t think of Bill
, she told herself.
You are not afraid
.

“When I was locked in the tomb in Egypt, I knew once and for all that I would always choose your love.”

That was when the angels dropped to one knee, gazing up at her expectantly—all of them except Daniel. His eyes glowed the most potent shade of violet she had ever seen. He reached for her, but before his hands met hers:

“Auugh!”
Luce cried out as a sharp pain sliced through her back. Her body convulsed with a foreign, piercing sensation. Her eyes teared. Her ears rang. She thought she might be sick from the pain. But slowly, it localized, from an acute agony all over her back, into two small sections at the tops of her shoulder blades.

Was she bleeding? She reached back, over her shoulder. The wound felt tender and raw, and also as if something were being drawn out from within her. It didn’t hurt, but it was bewildering. Panicked, she whirled her head around but she could see nothing, could only hear the sound of skin sliding and being
stretched, the
thrrrrrp
that sounded like new muscles were being generated.

Then came a sudden feeling of heaviness, as if weights had been strapped around her shoulders.

And then—in her peripheral vision, vast billowing whiteness on either side of her as a collective gasp rose from the angels’ lips.

“Oh, Lucinda,” Daniel whispered, his hand covering his mouth.

It was this easy: She spread her wings.

They were luminous, buoyant, impossibly light, made of the finest, most reflective empyrean matter. From tip to tip, her wingspan was maybe thirty feet, but they felt vast, endless. She felt no more pain. When her fingers curled around the base of them behind her shoulders, they were several inches thick and plush. They were silver, yet not silver, like the surface of a mirror. They were inconceivable; they were inevitable.

They were her wings
.

They contained every ounce of strength and empowerment she had amassed over the millennia she had lived. And at the slightest whim of a thought, her wings began to beat.

Her first thought:
I can do anything now
.

Wordlessly, she and Daniel reached for one another’s hands. Their wings’ top edges arched forward in a kind of kiss, like the angels’ wings on the
Qayom Malak
. They were crying and laughing, and soon, they were kissing.

“So?” he asked.

She was stunned and amazed—and happier than she’d ever been before. It couldn’t possibly be real, she thought—unless she spoke the truth aloud, with Daniel and the rest of the fallen angels there to witness.

“I’m Lucinda,” she said. “I’m your angel.”

SEVENTEEN

THE INVENTION OF LOVE

F
lying was like swimming, and Luce was good at both.

Her feet lifted off the ground. It took no thought or preparation. Her wings beat with sudden intuition. Wind hummed against the fibers of her wings, carrying her in the gauzy pink sky. Aloft, she felt the weight of her body, especially in her feet, but overpowering that was a new, unimaginable buoyancy. She slid over low tiers of clouds, causing the slightest disruption, like a breeze passing through a chime.

She gazed from one wing tip to the other, examining their silver-pearl luster, in awe of all her changes. It was as if the rest of her body deferred to her wings now. They responded at the first inkling of desire with elegant strokes that generated tremendous velocity. They flattened like an airfoil to glide solely on momentum, then pulled back into a heart shape behind her shoulders as she swizzled straight into the air.

Her first flight
.

Except … it wasn’t. What Luce knew now, as keenly as her wings knew how to fly, was that there had been a monumental
before
. Before Lucinda Price, before her soul had ever seen the curving Earth. For all the lives on Earth she’d witnessed in the Announcers, all the bodies she had inhabited, Luce had barely scratched the surface of who she was, who she had been. There was a history older than history during which she’d beat these wings.

She could see the others watching her from the ground. Daniel’s face shone with tears. He had known this all along. He had waited for her. She wanted to reach him, wanted him to soar up and fly with her—but then, suddenly, she couldn’t see him anymore.

The light gave way to the total darkness …

Of another memory crashing through.

She closed her eyes and surrendered to it, letting it carry her back. Somehow she knew that this was the earliest memory, the moment at the furthest reaches of her
soul. Lucinda had been there from the beginning of the beginning.

The Bible had left this part out:

Before there was light, there were angels. One moment, darkness; the next, the warm feeling of being coaxed out of inexistence by a gentle, magnificent hand.

God created the Heavenly host of angels—all three hundred and eighteen million of them—in a single, brilliant moment. Lucinda was there, and Daniel, and Roland and Annabelle and Cam—and millions more, all perfect, all glorious, all designed to adore their Creator.

Their bodies were made of the same substance that composed the firmament of heaven. They were not flesh and blood, but empyreal matter, the stuff of light itself—strong, indestructible, beautiful to behold. Their shoulders, arms, and legs shimmered into being, foreshadowing the shapes mortals would take upon their own creation. The angels all discovered their wings simultaneously, each pair slightly different, reflecting the soul of its possessor.

As early as the angels’ genesis, Lucinda’s wings were bright reflective silver, the color of starlight. They had shone in their singular glory since the dawn of the dawn of time.

Creation occurred at the speed of God’s will, but it unfolded in Luce’s memory like a story, another of God’s earliest creations, a by-product of time. One moment
there was nothing; then Heaven was replete with angels. In those days, Heaven was limitless, its ground covered by cloudsoil, a soft white substance like misty cloud that covered the angels’ feet and wing tips when they walked along the ground.

There were endless tiers in Heaven, each level teeming with alcoves and winding paths fanning out in all directions under a honey-colored sky. The air was perfumed with nectar welling in delicate white flowers springing up in delightful groves. Their round blooms dotted all of Heaven’s nooks and crannies, looking something like ancestors of white peonies.

Orchards of silver trees bore the most delicious fruits that had ever existed. The angels feasted and gave thanks for their first and only home. Their voices joined together in praise of their Creator, forming a blended sound that in humans’ throats would later be known as harmony.