The Fallen Sequence (90 page)

The girl was on the move again. Running so fast Luce couldn’t have caught her if she’d wanted to. They ran around giant craters cut into the cobblestone road. They ran past burning buildings, crackling with the awful racket a fire makes when it spreads to a new target. They ran past smashed, overturned military trucks, blackened arms hanging out at the sides.

Then Luschka hooked left down a street and Luce couldn’t see her anymore.

Adrenaline kicked in. Luce pressed forward, her feet pounding harder, faster on the snowy street. People only ran this fast when they were desperate. When something bigger than them spurred them on.

Luschka could only be running toward one thing.

“Luschka—”

His voice
.

Where was he? For a moment, Luce forgot her past self, forgot the Russian girl whose life was in danger of ending at any moment, forgot that this Daniel wasn’t
her
Daniel, but then—

Of course he was.

He never died. He had always been there. He was always
hers and she was always his. All she wanted was to find his arms, to bury herself in their grasp. He would know what she should be doing; he would be able to help her. Why had she doubted him before?

She ran, pulled in the direction of his voice. But she couldn’t see Daniel anywhere. Nor Luschka. A block away from the river, Luce stopped short in a barren intersection.

Her breath felt strangled in her frozen lungs. A cold, throbbing pain tunneled deep inside her ears, and the icy pinpricks stabbing her feet made standing still unbearable.

But which way should she go?

Before her was a vast and empty lot, filled with rubble and cordoned off from the street by scaffolding and an iron fence. But even in the darkness, Luce could tell that this was an older demolition, not something destroyed by a bomb in the air raids.

It didn’t look like much, just an ugly, abandoned sinkhole. She didn’t know why she was still standing in front of it. Why she’d stopped running after Daniel’s voice—

Until she gripped the fence, blinked, and saw a flash of something brilliant.

A church. A majestic white church filling this gaping hole. A huge triptych of marble arches on the front façade. Five golden spires extending high into the sky. And inside:
rows of waxed wooden pews as far as the eye could see. An altar at the top of a white flight of stairs. And all the walls and high arched ceilings covered with gorgeously ornate frescoes. Angels everywhere
.

The Church of Christ the Savior.

How did Luce know that? Why would she feel with every fiber of her being that this nothingness had once been a formidable white church?

Because she had been there moments before. She saw someone else’s handprints in the ash on the metal: Luschka had stopped here, too, had gazed at the ruins of the church and felt something.

Luce gripped the railing and blinked again and saw herself—or Luschka—as a girl.

She was seated inside on one of the pews in a white lace dress. An organ played as people filed in before a service. The handsome man to her left must have been her father, and the woman next to him, her mother. There was the grandmother Luce had just met, and Kristina. Both of them looked younger, better fed. Luce remembered her grandmother saying that both her parents were dead. But here they looked so alive. They seemed to know everyone, greeting each family passing their pew. Luce studied her past self watching her father as he shook hands with a good-looking young blond man. The young man leaned down over the pew and smiled at her. He had the most beautiful violet eyes
.

She blinked again and the vision disappeared. The lot was once again little more than rubble. She was freezing. And alone. Another bomb went off across the river, and the shock of it dropped Luce to her knees. She covered her face with her hands—

Until she heard someone softly crying. She lifted her head and squinted into the deeper darkness of the ruins, and she saw him.

“Daniel,” she whispered. He looked just the same. Almost radiating light, even in the freezing darkness. The blond hair she never wanted to stop running her fingers through, the violet-gray eyes that seemed to have been made to lock with hers. That formidable face, the high cheekbones, those lips. Her heart pounded and she had to tighten her grip on the iron fence to keep from running to him.

Because he wasn’t alone.

He was with Luschka. Consoling her, stroking her cheek and kissing her tears away. Their arms were wrapped around one another, their heads tipped forward in a never-ending kiss. They were so lost in their embrace they didn’t seem to feel the street rolling and quaking with another explosion. They looked like all there was in the world was just the two of them.

There was no space between their bodies. It was too dim to see where one of them ended and the other one began.

Lucinda got to her feet and crept forward, moving from one pile of rubble in the dark to the next, just longing to be closer to him.

“I thought I’d never find you,” Luce heard her past self say.

“We will always find each other,” Daniel answered, lifting her off the ground and squeezing her closer. “Always.”

“Hey, you two!” A voice shouted from a doorway in a neighboring building. “Are you coming?”

Across the square from the empty lot, a small group of people were being herded into a solid stone building by a guy whose face Luce couldn’t make out. That was where Luschka and Daniel were headed. It must have been their plan all along, to take shelter from the bombs together.

“Yes,” Luschka called to the others. She looked at Daniel. “Let’s go with them.”

“No.” His voice was curt. Nervous. Luce knew that tone all too well.

“We’ll be safer off the street. Isn’t this why we agreed to meet here?”

Daniel turned to look back behind them, his eyes sweeping right past the place where Luce was hiding. When the sky lit up with another round of golden-red explosions, Luschka screamed and buried her face in Daniel’s chest. So Luce was the only one who saw his expression.

Something was weighing on him. Something greater than fear of the bombs.

Oh no
.

“Daniil!” A boy near the building was still holding open the door to the shelter. “Luschka! Daniil!”

Everyone else was already inside.

That was when Daniil spun Luschka around, pulled her ear close to his lips. In her shadowy hiding place, Luce ached to know what he was whispering. If he was saying any of the things Daniel ever told
her
when she was upset or overwhelmed. She wanted to run to them, to pull Luschka away—but she couldn’t. Something deep inside her would not budge.

She fixed on Luschka’s expression as if her whole life depended on it.

Maybe it did.

Luschka nodded as Daniil spoke, and her face changed from terrified to calm, almost peaceful. She closed her eyes. She nodded one more time. Then she tipped back her head, and a smile spread slowly across her lips.

A smile?

But why? How? It was almost like she knew what was about to happen.

Daniil held her in his arms and dipped her low. He leaned in for another kiss, pressing his lips firmly against hers, running his hands through her hair, then down her sides, across every inch of her.

It was so passionate that Luce blushed, so intimate
she couldn’t breathe, so gorgeous that she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Not for a second.

Not even when Luschka screamed.

And burst into a column of searing white flame.

The cyclone of flames was otherworldly, fluid and almost elegant in a ghastly way, like a long silk scarf twisting around her pale body. It engulfed Luschka, flowed out of her and all around her, lighting up the spectacle of her burning limbs flailing, and flailing—and then not flailing anymore. Daniil didn’t let go, not when the fire singed his clothes, not when he had to support the full weight of her slack, unconscious body, not when the flames burned away her flesh with an ugly, acrid hiss, not when her skin began to char and blacken.

Only when the blaze fizzled out—so fast, in the end, like the snuffing of a single candle—and there was nothing left to hold on to, nothing left but ashes, did Daniil drop his arms to his sides.

In all of Luce’s wildest daydreams about going back and revisiting her past lives, she’d never once imagined this: her own death. The reality was more horrible than her darkest nightmares could ever have concocted. She stood in the cold snow, paralyzed by the vision, her body bereft of the capacity to move.

Daniil staggered back from the charred mass on the snow and began to weep. The tears streaming down his cheeks made clean tracks through the black soot that was all that was left of her. His face contorted. His
hands shook. They looked bare and big and empty to Luce, as if—even though the thought made her oddly jealous—his hands belonged around Luschka’s waist, in her hair, cupping her cheeks. What on earth did you do with your hands when the one thing they wanted to hold was suddenly, gruesomely gone? A whole girl, an entire life—gone.

The pain on his face took hold of Luce’s heart and squeezed, wringing her out completely. On top of all the pain and confusion she felt, seeing his agony was worse.

This was how he felt every life.

Every death.

Over and over and over again.

Luce had been wrong to imagine that Daniel was selfish. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he cared so much, it wrecked him. She still hated it, but she suddenly understood his bitterness, his reservations about everything. Miles might very well love her, but his love was nothing like Daniel’s.

It never could be.

“Daniel!” she cried, and left the shadows, racing toward him.

She wanted to return all the kisses and embraces she’d just witnessed him giving to her past self. She knew it was wrong, that everything was wrong.

Daniil’s eyes widened. A look of abject horror crossed his face.

“What is this?” he said slowly. Accusingly. As if he
hadn’t just let his Luschka die. As if Luce’s being there was worse than watching Luschka die. He raised his hand, painted black with ash, and pointed at her. “What’s going on?”

It was agony to have him look at her this way. She stopped in her tracks and blinked a tear away.

“Answer him,” someone said, a voice from the shadows. “How did you get here?”

Luce would have recognized the haughty voice anywhere. She didn’t need to see Cam step out of the doorway of the bomb shelter.

With a soft snap and rumble like an enormous flag being unfurled, he extended his great wings. They stretched out behind him, making him even more magnificent and intimidating than usual. Luce couldn’t keep herself from staring. They cast a gold-hued glow on the dark street.

Luce squinted, trying to make sense of the scene in front of her. There were more of them, more figures lurking in the shadows. Now they all stepped forward.

Gabbe. Roland. Molly. Arriane.

All of them were there. All with their wings arched tightly forward. A shimmering sea of gold and silver, blindingly bright on the dark street. They looked tense. Their wing tips quivered, as if ready to spring into battle.

For once, Luce didn’t feel intimidated by the glory of
their wings or the weight of their gazes. She felt disgusted.

“Do you all watch it
every
time?” she asked.

“Luschka,” Gabbe said in an even voice. “Just tell us what’s going on.”

And then Daniil was there, gripping her shoulders. Shaking her.

“Luschka!”

“I’m not Luschka!” Luce shouted, breaking away from him and backing up a half dozen steps.

She was horrified. How they could live with themselves? How they could all just sit back and watch her die?

It was all too much. She wasn’t ready to see this.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Daniil asked.

“She’s not who you think she is, Daniil,” Gabbe said. “Luschka’s dead. This is … this is—”

“What is she?”
Daniil asked. “How is she standing here? When—”

“Look at her clothes. She’s clearly—”

“Shut up, Cam, she might not be,” Arriane said, but she looked fearful, too, that Luce might be whatever Cam was about to say she was. Another shrieking from the air, and then a blast of artillery shells raining down on the buildings across the street, deafening Luce, igniting a wooden warehouse. The angels had no concern for the war going on around them, only for her. There were
twenty feet now between Luce and the angels, and they looked as wary of her as she felt of them. None of them drew closer.

In the light from the smoldering building, Daniil’s shadow was thrown far ahead of his body. She focused on summoning it to her. Would it work? Her eyes narrowed, and every muscle in her body tensed. She was still so clumsy at this, never knowing what it took to get the shadow into her hands.

When the dark lines began to quiver, she pounced. She gripped the shadow with both hands and started twirling the dark mass into a ball, just as she’d seen her teachers, Steven and Francesca, do on one of her first days at Shoreline. Just-summoned Announcers were always messy and amorphous. They needed first to be spun into a distinct contour. Only then could they be pulled and stretched into a larger flat surface. Then the Announcer would transform: into a screen through which to glimpse the past—or into a portal through which to step.

This Announcer was sticky, but she soon pulled it apart, guided it into shape. She reached inside and opened the portal.

She couldn’t stay here any longer. She had a mission now: to find herself alive in another time and learn what price the Outcasts had referred to, and eventually, to trace the origin of the curse between Daniel and her.

Then to break it.

The others gasped as she manipulated the Announcer.

“When did you learn how to do that?” Daniil whispered.

Luce shook her head. Her explanation would only baffle Daniil.

“Lucinda!” The last thing she heard was his voice calling out her true name.

Strange, she’d been looking right at his stricken face but hadn’t seen his lips move. Her mind was playing tricks.