The Fallen Sequence (72 page)

“We did it,” Shelby whispered.

They were gazing into a long, deep, red-black tunnel. It was clammy inside and smelled like mildew and watered-down cocktails made with cheap liquor. Luce and Shelby looked at each other uncertainly. Where was the blackjack table? Where was the woman they’d been looking at before? A red glow pulsed from deep within, and then Luce could hear slot machines ringing, coins clinking into pay baskets with a clatter.

“Cool!” Miles said, grabbing for her hand. “I read about this part, it’s a transitional phase. We just have to keep going.”

Luce reached for Shelby’s hand, gripping it tightly as Miles stepped inside the clammy darkness—and pulled the three of them through.

They walked only a couple of feet forward, about far
enough to reach the real door of Luce and Shelby’s dorm room. But as soon as the cloudy gray Announcer door sealed shut behind them with a deeply unnerving
pfffffft
, their Shoreline room was gone. What had been a deep, glowing velvety red in the distance suddenly became bright white. The white light shot forward, enveloping them, filling their ears with sound. All three of them had to shield their eyes. Miles pressed ahead, drawing Luce and Shelby behind him. Otherwise, Luce might have been paralyzed. Both her palms were sweating inside her friends’ hands. She was listening to a single chord of music, loud and perfectly sonorous.

Luce rubbed her eyes, but it was the foggy curtain of Announcer that was obscuring the view. Miles reached forward and gently rubbed at it with a circular motion, until it started to peel away, like old paint chips flaking off a ceiling. And from each falling flake, blasts of arid desert air shot through the murky coolness, warming Luce’s skin. As the Announcer fell to pieces at their feet, the view before them suddenly made sense: They were looking down at the Las Vegas Strip. Luce had only seen it in pictures, but now she had the tip of the Paris Las Vegas Hotel’s Eiffel Tower at eye level in the distance.

Which meant they were very, very high. She dared a glance down: They were standing outside, on a roof somewhere, with the edge only a foot or two beyond their toes. And beyond that—the rush of Vegas traffic,
the heads of a line of palm trees, an elaborately lit swimming pool. All at least thirty stories down.

Shelby let go of Luce’s hand and began pacing the boundaries of the brown cement roof. Three identical long, rectangular wings extended from a center point. Luce spun around, taking in three hundred and sixty degrees of bright neon lights, and beyond the Strip, a range of far-off barren mountains, lit up eerily by the city’s light pollution.

“Damn, Miles,” Shelby said, hopping over skylights to explore more of the roof. “That step-through was amazing. I am almost attracted to you right now. Almost.”

Miles dug his hands in his pockets. “Um … thanks?”

“Where exactly are we?” Luce asked. The difference between her solo tumble through the Announcer and this experience was like night and day. This was so much more civilized. It hadn’t made anyone want to throw up. Plus, it had actually worked. At least, she thought it had. “What happened to the view we had before?”

“I had to zoom out,” Miles said. “I figured it would look weird if the three of us stepped out of a cloud in the middle of the casino floor.”

“Just a tad,” Shelby said, tugging on a locked door. “Any brilliant ideas about how to get down from here?”

Luce grimaced. The Announcer was trembling in
tatters at their feet. She couldn’t imagine it had the strength to help them now. No way off this roof and no way back to Shoreline.

“Never mind! I’m a genius,” Shelby called from across the roof. She was hunched over one of the skylights, wrestling with a lock. With a grunt, she pried it open, then lifted a hinged pane of glass. She stuck her head through, motioning for Luce and Miles to join her.

Cautiously, Luce peered down through the open skylight into a large, opulent bathroom. There were four generous-sized stalls on one side, a line of raised marble sinks facing a gilded mirror on the other. A mauve plush settee was set up in front of a vanity, and a single woman sat there, looking into the mirror. Luce could only see the top of her black bouffant hair, but her reflection showed a heavily made-up face, thick bangs, and a French-manicured hand reapplying an unnecessary coat of red lipstick.

“As soon as Cleopatra’s gone through that tube of lipstick, we’ll just shimmy on down,” Shelby whispered.

Below them, Cleopatra stood up from the vanity. She smacked her lips together and wiped a stray red stain off her teeth. Then she marched toward the door.

“Let me get this straight,” Miles said. “You want me to ‘shimmy’ into a women’s bathroom?”

Luce took one more look around the desolate roof.
There was really only one way in. “If anyone sees you, just pretend you went in the wrong door.”

“Or that you two were making out in one of the stalls,” Shelby added. “What? It’s Vegas.”

“Let’s just go.” Miles was blushing as he lowered himself feet-first through the window. He extended his arms slowly, until his feet hovered just over the high marble top of the vanity.

“Help Luce down,” Shelby called.

Miles moved to lock the bathroom door, then raised his arms to catch Luce. She tried to mimic his smooth technique, but her arms were wobbly as she lowered herself through the skylight. She couldn’t see much below her, but felt Miles’s strong grip around her waist sooner than she’d expected.

“You can let go,” he said, and when she did, he lowered her gracefully to the floor. His fingers spread out around her rib cage, just a thin black T-shirt away from her skin. His arms were still around her when her feet touched the tile. She was about to thank him, but when she looked up into his eyes, she got tongue-tied.

She backed out of his grasp too quickly, mumbling apologetically for tripping over his feet. Both of them leaned up against the vanity, nervously avoiding eye contact by staring at the wall.

That should not have happened. Miles was just her friend.

“
Hello!
Anyone going to help me?” Shelby’s ribbed-stockinged feet were dangling from the skylight, kicking impatiently. Miles moved under the window and roughly grabbed her belt, easing her down by the waist. He released Shelby a lot more quickly, Luce noticed, than he had released her.

Shelby bounded across the gold-tiled floor and unlocked the door. “Come on, you two, what are you waiting for?”

On the other side of the door, glamorously made-up black-clad waitresses bustled by in sequined high heels, trays of cocktail shakers balanced in the crooks of their arms. Men in expensive dark suits crowded around blackjack tables, where they whooped like teenage boys each time a hand was dealt. There were no slot machines clanking and banging on an endless loop here. It was hushed, and exclusive, and endlessly exciting—but it wasn’t anything like the scene they had watched in the Announcer.

A cocktail waitress approached them. “May I help you?” She lowered her stainless steel tray to scrutinize them.

“Ooh, caviar,” Shelby said, scooping up three blini and handing one to the others. “You guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

Luce nodded. “We were just going downstairs.”

When the elevator doors opened onto the bright and glaring lobby of the casino, Luce had to be pushed out by Miles. She could tell they’d finally come to the right place. The cocktail waitresses were older, tired, showing a lot less flesh. They didn’t glide across the stained orange carpet; they thumped. And the patrons looked much more like the ones they had seen crowding the table in the glimpsing: overweight, middle-class, middle-aged, sad, wallet-emptying automatons. All they had to do now was find Vera.

Shelby maneuvered them through a cramped maze of slot machines, past clots of people at roulette tables shouting at the tiny ball as it spun in the wheel, past big, boxy games at which people blew on dice and threw them and then cheered at the outcome, down a row of tables offering poker and strange games with names like Pai Gow, until they came to a cluster of blackjack tables.

Most of the dealers were men. Tall, hunched-over, oily-haired men, bespectacled gray-mustached men, one man wearing a surgical mask over his face. Shelby didn’t slow to gape at any of them, and she was right not to: There, at the far back corner of the casino, was Vera.

Her black hair was swept up in a lopsided bun. Her pale face looked thin and saggy. Luce didn’t feel the same emotional outpouring she’d felt when she looked at her previous life’s parents in Shasta. But then again, she still didn’t know who Vera was to her besides a tired,
middle-aged woman holding a deck of cards out for a half-asleep redheaded woman to cut. Sloppily, the redhead picked up the deck in the middle; then Vera’s hands started flying.

Other tables in the casino were overcrowded, but the redhead and her diminutive husband were the only two people at Vera’s. Still, she put on a good show for them, snapping the cards out with an easy dexterity that made the work look effortless. Luce could see an elegant side of Vera that she hadn’t noticed before. A flair for the dramatic.

“So,” Miles said, shifting his weight next to Luce. “Are we gonna … or …”

Shelby’s hands were suddenly on Luce’s shoulders, practically wedging her into one of the empty leather seats at the table.

Though she was dying to stare, Luce avoided eye contact at first. She was nervous that Vera might recognize her before she even had a chance. But Vera’s eyes passed over each of them with only the mildest of interest, and Luce remembered how different she looked now that she’d bleached her hair. She tugged at it nervously, not sure what to do next.

Then Miles plunked down a twenty-dollar bill in front of Luce, and she remembered the game she was supposed to be playing. She slid the money across the table.

Vera raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “Got ID?”

Luce shook her head. “Maybe we could just watch?”

Across the table, the redhead was nodding off, her head falling onto Shelby’s stiff shoulder. Vera rolled her eyes at the whole scene and pushed Luce’s money back, pointing at the neon billboard advertising Cirque du Soleil. “Circus is that way, kids.”

Luce sighed. They were going to have to wait until Vera got off work. And by then she’d probably be even less interested in talking to them. Feeling defeated, Luce reached out to take Miles’s money back. Vera’s fingers were drawing away just as Luce’s swept over the money, and their fingertips kissed. Both of them snapped up their heads. The weird shock briefly blinded Luce. She sucked in her breath. She looked deep into Vera’s wide hazel eyes.

And she saw everything:

A two-story cabin in a snowy Canadian town. Webs of ice on the windows, wind soughing at the panes. A ten-year-old girl watching TV in the living room, rocking a baby on her lap. It was Vera, pale and pretty in acid-washed jeans and Doc Martens, a thick navy turtleneck rising to her chin, a cheap wool blanket bunched up between her and the back of the couch. A bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, reduced to a handful of cold, unpopped kernels. A fat orange cat prowling the mantel, hissing at the radiator. And Luce—Luce was her sister, the baby sister in her arms
.

Luce felt herself rocking in her seat at the casino, aching to remember all of this. Just as quickly, the impression faded, replaced by another.

Luce as a toddler chasing Vera, up the stairs, down the stairs, the worn wide steps beneath her thumping feet, her chest tight from breathless laughter, when the doorbell sounded and a fair, slick-haired boy arrived to pick Vera up for a date, and she stopped and straightened her clothes and turned her back, turned away …
.

A heartbeat later and Luce was a teenager herself, with a mess of curly shoulder-length black hair. Sprawled on Vera’s denim bedspread, the coarse fabric somehow a comfort, flipping through Vera’s secret diary
. He loves me,
Vera had scrawled again and again and again, her handwriting getting loopier and loopier. And then the pages pulled away, her sister’s angry face looming, the tracks of her tears clear. …

And then again, a different scene, Luce older still, maybe seventeen. She braced herself for what was coming.

Snow pouring from the sky like soft white static. Vera and a few friends ice-skating on the frozen pond behind their house, gliding in swift circles, happy and laughing, and at the frayed icy edge of the pond, Luce crouched down, the cold seeping through her thin clothes while she laced up her skates, in a hurry, as usual, to catch up with her sister. And beside her, a warmth she didn’t have to
look at to identify, Daniel, who was silent, moody, his skates already tightly laced. She could feel the urge to kiss him—and yet no shadows were visible. The evening and everything about it were star-dotted and glittering, endlessly clear and full of possibility
.

Luce searched for the shadows, then realized that their absence made sense. These were Vera’s memories. And the snow made everything harder to see. Still, Daniel must know, as he had known when he dove into that lake. He must have sensed it every single time. Did he ever care what became of people like Vera after Luce was killed?