towards us. I can’t take my eyes off them, though they both repel and fascinate.
Juliana follows the line of my sight and says haltingly, in heavily accented English, ‘You don’t … like them?’
I swallow hard, feeling nausea as the wings reach the doorway of the studio. I hear Juliana’s two assistants — one male, one female — squabbling a little in Italian as they try to manoeuvre the rack through the door without upsetting its cargo.
‘They’re so beautiful,’ I whisper, ‘that they look real.’
‘As if I have reached up and plucked them myself from the backs of angels?’ Juliana says happily. ‘That is what I hoped to achieve! Giovanni said I was mad to make them all — and all different. But when I see his designs, I could think of nothing else but the wings.’
‘You should see Juliana’s workroom,’ interjects Tommy with a grin. ‘It’s like a flock of angels moulted in there.’
‘A power,’ I say absently. ‘A power of angels.’
I want to look away from them, but I can’t. When I look at those wings, in my mind’s eye I see elohim with flaming swords upraised, engaged in combat, slaying their enemies with holy fire. And I don’t know if these are real memories — my memories — or whether they are things I have witnessed through touching another’s skin. All I know is that when we are angered, when we are called to do battle, when we are of a mind to kill, then and only then do we show our wings.
Like furies. Like harpies. Like birds of prey.
No, that’s not quite right.
We don’t need wings to propel ourselves from the ground, because we can materialise anywhere we wish — any height, any depth — so long as we know where, so long as we can see it in our mind’s eye. Will it, and it is done.
No, we use our wings to strike fear into the hearts of our enemies. Like a cobra’s hood, a scorpion’s tail, they are a symbol of power, a portent. They serve as a warning of the terror to come.
We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful, when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes.
As I stare at Juliana’s wings, I realise where the sensation of vertigo came from. It’s something I keep buried, something I try not to think about too much, because I can’t reconcile this phobia of mine with what I used to be. I have a terrible fear of heights.
Fear doesn’t even begin to describe how terrified I become when I even visualise myself being any great distance off the ground. When I think about the actual mechanics, even the bare concept, of flying, I break out in a cold sweat and my left hand burns with pain.
I look at the circle of concerned faces and, refusing all offers of assistance, climb unsteadily to my feet. Juliana takes down the first set of wings — every feather on the balsawood frame handcrafted from a light, brittle kind of metal and painted gold — and guides my arms through the leather straps of the harness. The wings are a perfect fit; they’re lighter even than the dress. They could be my wings; although, in truth, the wings of the elohim, our weaponry, our glowing raiment, all these are fashioned out of our own energy. We don’t carry them around with us. They’re part of us. When we need them, they’re simply there.
Tommy arranges my unbound hair upon my shoulders then says triumphantly, ‘Voila!’
Everyone in the room takes a small step away from me, their hands clasped together, their eyes welded upon me. And, to a man, to a woman, they all sigh.
The wings are taller than I am. They’re like the wings from a painted religious icon made real. And every second they are on my back, I shudder.
Tommy tilts his head and cups the side of his face in his hand as he studies me. ‘You were right, Juliana. Nothing else is needed. Just the wings. They’re enough.’
He walks around me a couple more times with Juliana and Valentina following anxiously in his wake. I wonder if they can see me shaking.
‘Perfection,’ Tommy finally pronounces, and I almost collapse again — with relief, this time — as Juliana finally removes the wings from my shoulders.
It’s after 5 pm when I’m allowed at last to leave Studio 4, bound for another part of the building where the moneyed haute couture clients have their private showings. Gia and Juliana chat in rapidfire Italian like old friends as they lead me back through Atelier Re. I see that the building is steadily emptying of its fashionable occupants. In small groups, they leave their seamless workstations, their pattern-cutting tables, bead boxes, rolls of fabric and hat blocks, meeting rooms and endlessly curated collections of elegant clothing, grouped by season, for the front exit, where Giovanni’s security team looks into each person’s face and bids them farewell by name.
Someone has turned off the sound system and the building is quiet, but I’m still haunted by that aria that was playing when I entered the building, so many hours ago. The melody keeps tugging at me, and I realise that, like the ability to recognise certain languages, the ability to recognise snatches of music is beginning to return in me, too.
I’m back in the leather pants and simple cashmere tunic that Gia picked out earlier today, but I’ve had her throw the high-shine, high-heeled, torture-device shoes into Irina’s holdall. I stalk the cold, brushed-concrete floors in my long, bare feet, still wearing the heavy, mask-like make-up that Tommy and his team of stylists came up with for the fourteen models taking part in the anniversary parade. I catch sight of my reflection in a glass window as I pass by: eyes ringed in smoky black kohl, lids filled in right up to the brow line with a glittering grey eye shadow, the inner and outer corners of my eyes illuminated in gold. My lips and nails are the same blood red that I first saw on Gudrun — rosso Re, my manicurist had confided as she’d filled in the nails of my hand, Giovanni Re’s signature shade of red, his trademark colour. The make-up artists had finished by dusting my cheek and brow bones with a fine, gold powder. I don’t think I’ve ever looked so truly alien.
As I walk barefoot through the emptying building — almost weaving with exhaustion — I rip off my false eyelashes and let them flutter to the ground like butterflies. Shake out the sleek topknot Tommy insisted on for the bridal look and run my fingers down through the wavy strands of Irina’s hair. There’s so much pressure inside my skull that it feels as if it’s about to split open. The heavy pounding of Irina’s heart forms the soundtrack to my progress.
Gia takes my elbow as we cross the now quiet atrium. Juliana is leading us towards a spiral concrete ramp at the far side of the building, and I realise it’s the main staircase connecting all four floors of Atelier Re. I study the elegant spiral that rises and twists so far above us.
‘How far up are we going?’ I say through gritted teeth.
Two storeys I can handle. Four might kind of be pushing it, for me.
Three lives back, when I’d woken as a single mother called Lucy who lived in a filthy, high-rise apartment in a virtual ghetto of government-owned tenements, I’d had to make sure that I never looked out the windows. Every time I stepped out of the lift that had stunk of vomit on the twenty-second floor, I’d stayed clear of the balcony that ran parallel to the apartment entrances on that level. Each time I’d been forced to return to Lucy’s flat — because it was nightfall, because there was nowhere else safe to go — I’d hugged the inner wall, inching painfully towards Lucy’s front door, her listless, malnourished baby on my hip, almost overcome with vertigo and a strange sense of shame. Back then, I hadn’t understood why. But I do now, because it’s somehow linked to the reason I’m even here on earth at all.
‘Second floor,’ Gia replies, shooting me a glance. ‘You didn’t go back to sleep this morning, did you? After that … nightmare you had. Your eyes are practically burning holes in your head.’
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I reply simply. ‘And it didn’t help that Felipe offered me a morning heart-starter of vodka mixed with pure liquid meth.’
‘He what?’ Gia says, turning to me in disbelief.
‘No biggie,’ I say wearily, the way Ryan would, forgetting how strange it might sound in Irina’s Moscow- via-Novosibirsk accent until I’ve said the words. ‘I handled it.’
The thought of Ryan fires off more starbursts of pain somewhere in the region of Irina’s neural cortex and I clutch at my head momentarily, hearing that achingly familiar voice crying into the border between sleep and wakefulness: Mercy, where are you?
Gia pulls her mobile phone out of her leather jacket. ‘Management have got to be told. I knew there was a
