Rapture

of all Luce, had expected her to be the one to remember where they would find the desiderata.

Daniel recovered first. He flashed her a funny smile Luce knew was full of pride. But Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle continued to gape at her as if they’d suddenly learned she spoke Chinese. Which, come to think of it, she did.

Arriane wiggled a finger around inside her ear. “Do I need to ease up on the psychedelics, or did LP just recall one of her past lives unprompted at the most crucial juncture ever?”

“You’re a genius,” Daniel said, leaning forward and kissing her deeply.

Luce blushed and leaned in to extend the kiss a little longer, but then heard a cough.

“Seriously, you two,” Annabelle said. “There will be time enough for snogs if we pull this off.”

“I’d say ‘get a room’ but I’m afraid we’d never see you again,” Arriane added, which caused them all to laugh.

When Luce opened her eyes, Daniel had spread his wings wide. The tips brushed away broken bits of plaster and blocked the Scale angels from view. Slung over his shoulder was the black leather satchel with the halo.

The Outcasts gathered the scattered starshots back into their silver sheaths. “Wingspeed, Daniel Grigori.”

“To you as well.” Daniel nodded at Phil. He spun Luce around so her back was pressed to his chest and his arms fit snugly around her waist. They clasped hands over her heart.

“The Foundation Library,” Daniel said to the other angels. “Follow me, I know exactly where it is.”

NINE THE DESIDERATA

Fog engulfed the angels. They flew back over the river, four pairs of wings making a tremendous throosh each time they beat. They stayed low enough to the ground that the muted orange glow of sodium lampposts looked like airport runway lights. But this flight did not land.

Daniel was tense. Luce could feel it running all through his body: in both his arms around her waist, in his shoulders aligned with hers, even in the manner his broad wings beat above them. She knew how he felt; she was as anxious to get to the Foundation Library as Daniel’s grip suggested he was.

Only a few landmarks cut through the fog. There was the towering spire of the massive Gothic church, and there the darkened Ferris wheel, its empty red cabins swaying in the night. There was the green copper dome of the palace where they’d landed when they first arrived in Vienna.

But wait—they’d passed the palace already. Maybe half an hour earlier. Luce had tried to look for Olianna, who the Scale angel had knocked unconscious. She hadn’t seen her on the roof then, and she didn’t see her now.

Why were they circling? Were they lost?

“Daniel?”

He didn’t answer.

Church bells rang in the distance. It was their fourth ringing since Luce, Daniel, and the others had taken off through the shattered skylight at the museum. They’d been flying for a long time. Could it really be three o’clock in the morning?

“Where is it?” Daniel muttered under his breath, banking to the left, following the groove of the river, then breaking from it to trace a broad avenue lined with darkened department stores. Luce had seen this street already, too. They were flying in circles.

“I thought you said you knew exactly where it was!”

Arriane dipped out of the formation they’d been flying in—Daniel and Luce at the front, with Roland, Arriane, and Annabelle forming a tight triangle behind them—

and swooped down about ten feet below Daniel and Luce, close enough to talk. Her hair was wild and frizzy and her iridescent wings flickered in and out of the fog.

“I do know where it is,” Daniel said. “At least, I know where it was. ”

“You’ve got an circuitous sense of direction, Daniel.”

“Arriane.” Roland used the warning tone he reserved for those too frequent occasions when Arriane went too far. “Let him concentrate.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.” Arriane rolled her eyes. “Better return to ‘formation.’” Arriane beat her wings the way some girls batted their eyelashes, flashed a peace sign with her fingers, and fell back.

“Okay, so where was the library?” Luce asked.

Daniel sighed, drew in his wings slightly, and dropped fifty feet straight down. Cold wind blasted Luce in the face. Her stomach surged up as they plummeted, then settled when Daniel stopped abruptly, as if he’d landed on an invisible tightrope, over a residential street.

It was quiet and empty and dark, just two long stretches of stone townhouses spanning either side. Shut-ters were drawn for the night. Tiny cars rested in narrow angled spaces on the street. Young urban oak trees punctuated the cobbled sidewalk that ran along the small well-maintained front yards.

The other angels hovered on either side of Daniel and Luce, about twenty feet above street level.

“This is where it was,” Daniel said. “It was here. Six blocks from the river, just west of Türkenschanzpark. I swear it was. None of this”—he waved his hand at the stretch of indistinguishable stone townhouses below—

“was here.”

Annabelle frowned and hugged her knees to her chest, her silver wings beating softly to keep her aloft.

Her crossed ankles revealed hot-pink striped socks peeking out from her jeans. “Do you think it was destroyed?”

“If it was,” Daniel said, “I have no idea how to recover it.”

“We’re screwed,” Arriane said, kicking a cloud in frustration. She glared at its wispy tendrils, which ambled eastward, unaffected. “That’s never as satisfying as I think it’s going to be.”

“Maybe we go to Avalon,” Roland suggested. “See if Cam’s group has had any more luck.”

“We need all three relics,” Daniel said.

Luce pivoted slightly in Daniel’s arms to face him.

“It’s just a hitch. Think about what we had to go through in Venice. But we got the halo. We’ll get the desiderata, too. That’s all that matters. When was the last time any of us were at this library, two hundred years ago? Of course things are going to change. It doesn’t mean we give up. We’ll just have to . . . just have to—” Everyone was looking at her. But Luce didn’t know what to do. She only knew that they couldn’t give up.

“The kid’s right,” Arriane said. “We don’t give up.

We—”

Arriane broke off when her wings began to rattle.

Then Annabelle yelped. Her body tossed in the air as her wings shuddered, too. Daniel’s hands shook against Luce as the foggy night sky morphed into that peculiar gray—the color of a rainstorm on the horizon—that Luce now recognized as the color of a timequake.

Lucifer.

She could almost hear the hiss of his voice, feel his breath against her neck.

Luce’s teeth chattered, but she felt it deeper, too, in her core, raw and turbulent, as if everything inside her were being wound up like a chain.

The buildings below shimmered. Lampposts doubled. The very atoms of the air seemed to fracture. Luce wondered what the quake was doing to the townspeople below, dreaming in their beds. Could they feel this? If not, she envied them.

She tried to call Daniel’s name but the sound of her voice was warped, as if she were underwater. She closed her eyes but that made her feel nauseated. She opened them and tried to focus on the solid white buildings, quaking in their foundations until they became abstract blurs of white.