Rapture

Dee smiled cryptically. “The words are Aramaic.

They mean . . . well, it’s better if you just see for yourselves.”

Beside them, Arriane was chewing noisily on a strand of her hair, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her overalls, her wings stiff and unmoving. She stared at the fig and olive trees, as if in a trance.

Luce noticed now what was strange about the trees.

The reason they seemed to grow diagonally out of the stone was that their trunks lay buried deep beneath the boulders.

“The trees,” she said.

“Yes, once they were fully exposed.” Dee bent down to caress the withering green leaves of the little fig tree.

“As was the Qayom Malak. ” She rose and patted the heap of boulders. “This whole mesa was once much larger. A lovely, vibrant place at times, though that’s hard to imagine now.”

“What happened to it?” Luce asked. “How was the sanctuary destroyed?”

“The most recent one was covered up by this rockslide. That was about seven hundred years ago, after a particularly severe earthquake. But even before that, the list of calamities to occur here was unprecedented—

flood, fire, murder, war, explosions.” She paused, peering into the pile of boulders as if it were a mass of crystal balls. “Still, the only part that matters endures. At least I hope it does. And that’s why we need to go inside.” Cam ambled over to one of the larger boulders, leaned against it with his arms crossed. “I excel at many things, Dee, not the least of which is rock. But passing through rock isn’t one of my gifts.” Dee clapped her hands. “That is precisely why I packed the shovels all those years ago. We’ll have to clear the rocks aside,” Dee said. “We seek what lies within.”

“You’re saying we’re going to excavate the Qayom Malak?” Annabelle asked, biting pink fingernails.

Dee touched a mossy patch at the center of the mound of boulders, spilled long before from the cliffs.

“I’d start here if I were you!”

When they realized that Dee was serious about dis-mantling the tower of boulders, Roland distributed the tools Dee had flung out of the wooden chest. They set to work.

“As you clear, make sure you leave this area free.” Dee gestured to the open space between the rockslide and the head of the trail that had brought them there.

She marked off an area of about ten square feet. “We’re going to need it.”

Luce took a pickax and tapped it uncertainly against the rock.

“Do you know what it looks like?” she said to Daniel, whose crowbar was wedged around a rock behind the fig tree. “How will we recognize the Qayom Malak when we find it?”

“There’s no illustration in my book for this.” Daniel split the rock easily with a tilt of his hand. The muscles of his arms trembled as he lifted the boulder halves, each the size of a large suitcase. He tossed them behind him, careful not to let them land inside the area Dee had marked off. “We’ll just have to trust that Dee remembers.”

Luce stepped into the open space where the boulder Daniel moved aside had been. The rest of the olive and fig trees were now exposed, down to their trunks. They had been nearly flattened by the tons of fallen rock. Her gaze flew around the gigantic pile of rocks they’d have to clear. It was easily twenty feet high. Could anything have withstood the might of this landslide?

“Don’t worry,” Dee called out, as if reading Luce’s mind. “It’s in there somewhere, tucked away as safely as your first memory of love.”

The Outcasts had flown to the top of the slope. Phil showed the others where to cast the boulders they’d already chipped away, and they slammed them back into the face of the slope, causing the compounded rock to fracture and slide down the sides.

“Hey! I see some really old yellow brick.” Annabelle’s wings fluttered above the rockslide’s highest point, where it edged up against the mountain’s sheer, vertical walls. She heaved away some debris with her shovel. “I think it might be a wall of the sanctuary.”

“A wall, dear? Very good,” Dee said. “There should be three more of them, the way walls often go. Keep digging.” She was distracted, pacing the flat square of rock she’d marked off near the trailhead, not noticing the progress of the dig. She seemed to be counting something. Her gaze was fixed on the mesa floor. Luce watched Dee for a few moments and saw that the old lady was counting her steps, as if blocking a play.

She looked up, caught Luce’s eye. “Come with me.”

Luce glanced at Daniel, at his sweat-glistening skin.

He was busy with a large, unwieldy boulder. She turned and followed Dee into the mouth of the cave.

Dee’s lantern wobbled strobe-like into the dark recesses. The cave was infinitely darker and colder without the glow of angel wings. Dee rummaged for a few moments in her chest.

“Where is that bloody broom?” Dee asked.

Luce crouched over Dee, holding up another lantern to help light her search. She reached into the enormous trunk and her hands brushed the rough straw of a broom.

“Here.”

“Wonderful. Always the last place you look, especially when you can’t see.” Dee slung the broom over her shoulder. “I want to show you something while the others continue with the excavation.”

They walked back out onto the mesa, into the echoing of metal striking stone. Dee stopped at the edge of the rockslide, facing the space she’d asked the angels to leave clear. She began to drag the broom in brisk straight lines. Luce had thought the mesa was all made of the same flat red rock, but as Dee brushed and swept and brushed and swept, Luce noticed there was a shallow marble platform underneath. And a pattern was emerg-ing: Pale yellow stone alternated with white rocks to form an intricate, inlaid design.

Eventually Luce recognized a symbol: one long line of yellow stone, edged by white descending diagonal lines of decreasing length.

Luce crouched down to run her fingers along the stone. It looked like an arrowhead, pointing away from the top of the mountain, back down in the direction from which the angels had arrived.

“This is the Arrowhead Slab,” Dee said. “Once everything is ready, we will use it as a kind of stage. Cam crafted the mosaic many years ago, though I doubt that he remembers. He’s been through so much since then.

Heartbreak is its own form of amnesia.”

“You know about the woman who broke Cam’s heart?” Luce whispered, remembering that Daniel had told her never to mention it.

Dee frowned, nodded, and pointed to the yellow arrow in the marble tiles. “What do you think of the design?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Luce said.

“I do, too,” Dee said. “I have a similar one tattooed over my heart.”

Smiling, Dee unbuttoned the top two buttons of her cardigan to reveal a yellow camisole. She drew the neckline down a couple of inches, exposing the pale skin of her chest. At last, she pointed to a black tattoo over her breast. It was precisely the same shape as the lines in the stone on the ground.

“What does it mean?” Luce asked.

Dee patted the skin beneath the tattoo and pulled her camisole back up. “I can’t wait to tell you”—she smiled, pivoting to face the slope of rock behind them—“but first things first. Look how well they’re doing!” The angels and Outcasts had cleared away a portion of the exterior of the rockslide. The right angle of two old brick walls rose several feet out of the debris. They were badly damaged, unintended windows smashed into existence here and there. The roof was gone. Some of the bricks were blackened by a long-forgotten fire.

Others looked moldy, as if recovering from a prehistoric flood. But the rectangular shape of the former temple was starting to become clear.

“Dee,” Roland called, waving the woman over to the northern wall to inspect his progress.

Luce returned to Daniel’s side. In the time she’d been with Dee, he’d cleared a heaping pile of rock and stacked it neatly to the right of the slope. She felt bad that she was barely helping. She picked up the pickax again.

They worked for hours. It was well after midnight by the time they’d cleared half the slope. Dee’s lanterns lit