Rapture

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 from 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 flash 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 Lu- ce’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 sand storm, 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 into 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 accommo-date 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 into 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?”