Rapture

FIFTEEN THE GIFT

“I can’t!”

“You can,” Dee said. “And you will. No one else can do it.”

“Why?”

Dee looked over her shoulder in Daniel’s direction.

He was still seated, looking at Luce, but he didn’t seem to see her. None of the angels rose to help her.

Dee spoke in a whisper. “If you are, as you say you are, fully resolved to break your curse—”

“You know I am.”

“Then you must use my blood to break it.” No. How could her curse be bound up in someone else’s blood? Dee had brought them up here to the Qayom Malak to reveal the site of the angels’ Fall. That was her role as the desideratum. It didn’t have anything to do with Luce’s curse.

Did it?

Break the curse. Of course Luce wanted to; it was all she wanted.

Could she break it, right here, right now? How would she live with herself if she killed Dee? Luce looked to the old woman, who took her by the hands.

“Don’t you want to know the truth of your original life?”

“Of course I do. But why would killing you reveal my past?”

“It will reveal all kinds of things.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Oh dear.” Dee sighed, looking past Luce at the others. “These angels have done well to keep you safe—

but they have also protected you into complacency. The time has come for you to awaken, Lucinda, and to awaken, you must act. ”

Luce turned away. The look in Dee’s golden eyes was too pleading, too intense. “I’ve seen enough death.” A single angel rose in the darkness from the circle they’d formed around the Qayom Malak. “If she can’t do it, she can’t do it.”

“Shut up, Cam,” Arriane said. “Sit down.” Cam stepped forward, approaching Luce. His narrow frame cast its shadow across the Slab. “We’ve taken it this far. You can’t say we haven’t given it every kind of shot.” He turned to face the others. “But maybe she just can’t. There is only so much you can ask a person to do.

She wouldn’t be the first filly anybody lost a fortune on.

So what if she happens to be the last?” His tone did not match his words, and neither did his eyes, which said with desperate sincerity, You can do this.

You have to.

Luce weighed the dagger in her hand. She’d seen its blade slice the life out of Penn. She had felt it sting her flesh when Sophia tried to murder her in the chapel at Sword & Cross. The only reason Luce wasn’t dead now was that Daniel had crashed through the roseate window to save her. The only reason she bore no scar was Gabbe’s healing touch. They’d saved her life for this moment. So that she could take another.

Dee perceived how far away fear had carried Luce.

She motioned for Cam to sit down. “Perhaps it would be better, dear, if you didn’t think of this as taking my life.

You would be giving me the greatest gift, Lucinda. Can’t you see that I’m ready to move on?” She pressed her lips together in a smile. “I know it’s hard to understand, but there comes a time in a mortal body’s journey when it seeks to die in the most advantageous way it can. They used to call it a ‘good death.’ It is time for me to go, and if you give me the gift of this very good death, I promise you won’t regret it.”

With tears stinging her eyes, Luce looked past Dee.

“Dan—”

“I can’t help you, Luce.” Daniel spoke before she’d even finished saying his name. “You must do this alone.” Roland rose from his seat and examined the map. He looked east at the moon. “If it were done when it is done, then it would be well it were done quickly.”

“There isn’t much time,” Dee interpreted, resting a frail hand on Luce’s shoulder.

Luce’s hands were shaking, sweating on the heavy silver hilt of the dagger, making it difficult to hold. Behind Dee she could see the Slab with its half-drawn map, and beyond the map, the Qayom Malak, in which the glass halo was secured. The Silver Pennon sat at Dee’s feet.

Luce had been through a sacrifice before: in Chichén Itzá, when she’d cleaved to her past self Ix Cuat. The ritual made no sense to Luce. Why did something dear have to die so other dear things could live? Didn’t who-ever made these rules think they deserved an explanation? It was like Abraham’s being asked to sacrifice Isaac.

Had God created love to make pain feel even worse?

“Will you do this for me?” Dee asked.

Break the curse.

“Will you do it for yourself?”

Luce held the knife between her open palms. “What do I do?”

“I’ll guide you through it.” Dee’s left hand closed around Luce’s right, which closed around the dagger.

The hilt was slick from the sweat on her palms.

With her right hand free, Dee unbound her cloak and slipped it off, standing before Luce in a long white tunic.

Her upper chest was bare, revealing her arrowhead tattoo.

Luce whimpered at the sight of it.

“Please don’t worry, dear. I’m a special breed, and this moment has always been my destiny. One quick thrust of the blade into my heart should release me.” It was what Luce needed to hear. The dagger trembled as Dee guided it toward the tattoo on her chest. The old woman could steady Luce only so much, though; Luce knew that soon she would have to hold the blade alone.

“You’re doing fine.”

“Wait!” Luce cried as the blade pricked Dee’s flesh. A red dot of blood bloomed on her skin, just above the hem of the tunic. “What will happen to you when you die?”

Dee smiled so peacefully that Luce had no doubt it was for her benefit. “Why, dear, I shall slip into the mas-terpiece.”

“You’ll go to Heaven, won’t you?”

“Lucinda, let’s not talk of—”

“Please. I can’t send you out of this life unless I know what your next one will look like. Will I see you again?

Do you just go away like an angel?”

“Oh no, my death will be a secret life, like sleep,” Dee said. “Better than sleep, actually, because for once I shall be able to dream. In life, transeternals never dream.

I shall dream of Dr. Otto. It’s been so long since I have seen my love, Lucinda. Surely you can understand?” Luce wanted to weep. She understood. Of course she understood that much.

Trembling ever harder, she drew the knife back over the tattoo on Dee’s breast. The old woman gave her hands the softest squeeze. “Bless you, child. Bless you abundantly. Hurry up, now.” Dee looked anxiously at the sky, blinking at the moon. “In you go.” Luce grunted as she plunged the knife into the old woman’s chest. The blade ground through flesh and bone and muscle—and then it was inside her beautiful heart, up to the hilt. Luce’s and Dee’s faces were almost touching. The clouds their breath made mingled in the air.

Dee gritted her teeth and gripped Luce’s hand as she gave the blade a sharp twist to the left. Her gold eyes widened, then froze in pain or shock. Luce wanted to look away but couldn’t. She searched for the scream inside her.

“Expel the blade,” Dee whispered. “Pour my blood into the Silver Pennon.”

Wincing, Luce yanked the dagger out. She felt something deep inside Dee rip apart. The wound was a yawn-ing black cavern. Blood streamed to its surface. It was terrifying to see Dee’s gold eyes go cloudy. The lady fell in a heap on the moonlit plateau.

In the distance, the shriek of a Scale rang out. All the angels looked above.

“Luce, we need you to move quickly,” Daniel said, his forced calmness sparking more alarm in her than open panic would.

Luce still held the dagger in her hands. It was slick and red and dripping with transeternal blood. She tossed it to the ground. It landed with a tinny clank that made her furious because it sounded like a toy instead of the mighty weapon that had killed two souls Luce loved.

She wiped her bloody hands on her cloak. She gasped for air. She would have fallen to her knees if Daniel hadn’t caught her.

“I’m sorry, Luce.” He kissed her, his eyes beaming their old tenderness.

“For what?”

“That I couldn’t help you do it.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

“You did what none of us could do. You did it on your own.” Taking her by the shoulders, Daniel turned Luce toward the sight she did not want to see.

“No. Please, don’t make me—”

“Look,” Daniel said.

Dee was sitting up, cradling the Silver Pennon in her arms so that its rim pressed against her breast. Blood poured from her heart freely, surging with each powerful beat, as if it were not blood but something magical and strange from another world. Luce supposed it was. Dee’s eyes were closed but she was beaming, her face lifted, lit up by the moon. She didn’t look like she had ever been in any pain.

When the goblet was filled, Luce stepped forward, bending down to take it and place it back on the yellow arrow on the Slab. When she wrested the Silver Pennon from Dee, the old woman tried to stand. Her bloody hands pressed into the ground to prop her up. Her knees trembled as she struggled to one foot, then the other.

She slouched forward, her body convulsing slightly, as she took the black cloak in her hands. She was trying to drape it back over her shoulders, Luce realized, so that her wound would be covered. Arriane stepped forward to help her, but it didn’t matter. Fresh blood flooded through the cloak.

Dee’s gold eyes were paler, her skin almost translucent. Everything about her seemed muted and soft, as if she were already someplace else. A new sob rose in Lu-ce’s chest as Dee took a halting step toward her.

“Dee!” Luce closed the gap between them, holding out her arms to catch the dying woman. Her body felt like a shard of what she’d been before Luce had taken the dagger in her hands.

“Shhh,” Dee cooed. “I only wanted to thank you, dear. And to give you this small parting gift.” She reached her hand inside her cloak. When she withdrew it, her thumb was dark with blood. “The gift of self-knowledge.

You must remember how to dream what you already know. Now it’s time for me to sleep and for you to wake up.”

Dee’s eyes swept over Luce’s face, and it seemed like she could see everything there was to see about her—all her past and all her future. Finally, she daubed the center of Luce’s forehead with her bloody thumb.

“Enjoy it, dear.”

Then she hit the ground.

“Dee!” Luce lunged for her, but the old woman was dead. “No!”

Behind Luce, Daniel clasped her shoulders with his hands, giving her all the strength he could. It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t bring Dee back or change the fact that Luce had killed her. Nothing could.

Tears blurred Luce’s eyes. Wind swept in from the west and whistled off the curving cliffs, bringing with it another shriek of Scale. It felt like every inch of the world was in chaos, and nothing would ever settle down.

She reached up and touched the bloody thumbprint on her forehead—

White light blazed around her. Her insides seared with heat. She staggered, holding her arms out in front of her and swaying as her body filled with . . .

Light.

“Luce?” Daniel’s voice sounded far away.

Was she dying?

She felt suddenly galvanized, as if the thumbprint on her forehead were an ignition switch and Dee had launched her soul.

“Is this another timequake?” she asked, though the sky was not gray but a brilliant white. So bright she couldn’t see Daniel or any of the other angels around her on the slab.

“No.” Roland’s voice. “It’s her.”

“It’s you, Luce.” Daniel’s voice trembled.

Her feet skimmed the stone as her body rose in a splendor of weightlessness. For a moment, the world hummed with incandescent harmony.

Now it’s time for you to wake up.

The air before Luce seemed to sputter, turning from white to blurry gray. Then deep in the distance came the vision of Bill’s cackling face. His black wings spread wider than the sky, wider than a thousand galaxies, filling her mind, filling every crevice in the universe, engulfing Luce with infinite fury.

This time I will win.

His voice like shards of glass dragging across bare skin.

How close was he now?

Luce’s feet slammed into the mesa floor. The light was gone.

She fell to her knees, landing next to Dee, who had come to rest on her side, one arm slung out to cradle her head, her long red hair spilling out like blood. Her eyes were closed, her face serene, so unlike the face that had been haunting Luce for the past week. She tried to stand, but she felt clumsy.

Daniel dropped to his knees at her side. Sitting next to her on the Slab, he took her in his arms. The smell of his hair and the touch of his hands soothed her. He whispered, “I’m here, Luce, it’s okay.”

She didn’t want to tell him she kept seeing Bill. She wanted to go back to that light. She touched the thumbprint on her forehead and nothing happened. Dee’s blood was dry.

Daniel was staring at her, lips tight. He brushed the hair out of her eyes and pressed his palm to her forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“I’m fine.” She did feel feverish, but there was no time to worry about that. She staggered to her feet and looked up at the moon.

It was directly overhead, in the center of the sky. This was the moment Dee had told them to wait for, the moment her death would become worthwhile.

“Luce. Daniel.” Roland’s voice. “You’d better look at this.”

He held the goblet at an angle and was tipping the last of Dee’s blood into the depression at the base of the map. When Luce and Daniel filed in next to the others, the blood had already flowed into most of the marble’s broken lines. Though Dee had said that the Earth was different back at the time of the angels’ Fall, the map before them looked increasingly similar to a contemporary map of the Earth.

South America was nearer to bumping against Africa.

The northeast corner of North America nudged more closely to Europe, but mostly it was the same. There was the slip of water where the Gulf of Suez parted mainland Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula, and in the middle of the peninsula was the yellow stone marking the plateau where they were right now. To the north was the Medi-terranean, dimpled with a thousand tiny islands—and on the other side of its narrow belt, at the point where Asia reached for Europe, was a shallow pool of blood sharpening slowly into a star.

Luce heard Daniel swallow at her side. The angels all looked stupefied as Dee’s blood filled out the points of the star, indicating modern Turkey—more specifically—

“Troy,” Daniel said finally, shaking his head in amaze-ment. “Who would have guessed . . .”

“There again,” Roland said, his tone conveying a tortured history with the city.

“I always got the sense that place was doomed.” Arriane shivered. “But I—”

“Never knew why,” Annabelle finished.

“Cam?” Daniel said, and the others looked away from the map to eye the demon.

“I’ll go,” Cam said quickly. “I’m fine.”

“Then that’s it,” Daniel said as if he couldn’t believe it. “Phillip,” he called, looking upward.

Phil and his three Outcasts rose from their perches on the cliff peaks overhead.

“Alert the others.”

What others? Who else was left by now? Luce thought.

“What will I tell them?” Phil asked.

“Tell them we know the site of the Fall, that we’re leaving now for Troy.”

“No.” Luce’s voice halted the Outcasts’ movement.

“We can’t leave yet. What about Dee?”

In the end, it was no surprise that Dee had taken care of everything, down to the details for her memorial. Annabelle found them tucked into a slat on the roof of the creaky wooden trunk, which, as Dee’s letter explained, flipped over to form a catafalque. The sun was low in the sky by the time they began to make her memorial. It was the end of the seventh day; Dee’s letter assured them this wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

Roland, Cam, and Daniel carried the catafalque to the center of the marble platform. They covered the map completely so that when the Scale descended there, they would see a funeral, not the site of the angels’ Fall.

Annabelle and Arriane carried Dee’s body behind the catafalque. They laid her carefully on its center, so that her heart was directly above the star of her blood. Luce remembered that Dee had said that sanctuaries were built on top of sanctuaries. Her body would form a sanctuary for the map it hid.

Cam draped Dee’s cloak over her body, but he left her face exposed to the sky. In her final resting place, Dee, their desideratum, looked small but mighty. She looked at peace. Luce wanted to believe Dee was wandering through dreams with Dr Otto.

“She wants Luce to be the one to bless her,” Annabelle read from the letter.

Daniel squeezed her hand, as if to say, Are you okay?

Luce had never done anything like this before. She waited to feel awkward, guilty for speaking at the funeral for someone she had slain, but in those emotions’ place sat a sense of honor and awe.

She stepped up to the catafalque. She gave herself a few moments to gather her thoughts.

“Dee was our desideratum,” she began. “But she was more than one desired thing.”

She took a breath and realized she wasn’t blessing just Dee, but also Gabbe and Molly, whose bodies were air—and Penn, whose funeral she couldn’t attend. It was all too much. Her vision swirled and the words vanished and all she knew was that Dee had smeared sacrificial blood on Luce’s forehead.

It was Dee’s gift to Luce.

You must remember how to dream what you already know.

Blood thrummed at her temples. Her head and her heart were ablaze with heat, her hands icy as she wove them through Dee’s.

“Something’s happening.” Luce held her face in her hands, her hair spilling down around her. She closed her eyes and found bright white light on the backs of her eyelids.

“Luce—”

When she opened her eyes, the angels had flung off their cloaks and unfurled their wings. The mesa flooded with light. A great mass of Scale shrieked somewhere just above her.

“What’s happening?” She shielded her eyes.

“We need to hurry, Daniel,” Roland shouted from above. Had the other angels already alighted? What was the source of the light?

Daniel’s arms wrapped around her waist. He held her tightly. It felt good but she was still afraid.

“I’m here with you, Lucinda. I love you, no matter what.”

She knew that her feet were drifting from the ground, that her body was taking flight. She knew she was with Daniel. But she was barely aware of their transit through the burning sky, barely aware of anything beyond the strange new pulsing in her soul.