Rapture

THREE THE SUNKEN SANCTUARY

Daniel had been knocking on the weathered wooden door in the middle of the night for what felt to Luce like half an hour. The three-story Venetian townhouse belonged to a colleague, a professor, and Daniel was certain this man would let them crash, because they had been great friends ‘years ago,’ which, with Daniel, could encompass quite a span of time.

“He must be a heavy sleeper.” Luce yawned, half lulled back into sleep herself by the steady pounding of Daniel’s fists. Either that, she thought blearily, or the professor was sitting in some bohemian all-night café, sipping wine over a book crammed with incomprehen-sible terms.

It was three in the morning—their touchdown amid the silvery web of Venice’s canals had been accompanied by the chiming of a clock tower somewhere in the darkened distance of the city—and Luce was overcome with fatigue. She leaned miserably against the cold tin mail-box, causing it to wobble loose from one of the nails holding it upright. This sent the whole box slanting, making Luce stumble backward and nearly hurtle into the murky black-green canal, whose water lapped over the lip of the mossy stoop like an inky tongue.

The whole exterior of the house seemed to be rotting in layers: from the painted blue wood peeling off the windowsills in slimy sheets, to red bricks crawling with dark green mold, to the damp cement of the stoop, which crumbled under their feet. For a moment, Luce thought she could actually feel the city sinking.

“He’s got to be here,” Daniel muttered, still pounding.

When they’d landed on the canal-side ledge usually accessed only by gondola, Daniel had promised Luce a bed inside, a hot drink, a reprise from the damp and bracing wind they’d been flying through for hours.

At last, the slow shuffling of feet thumping down stairs inside perked a shivering Luce to attention. Daniel exhaled and closed his eyes, relieved, as the brass knob turned. Hinges moaned as the door swung open.

“Who the devil—” The older Italian man’s wiry tufts of white hair stood out at all angles from his head. He had sensationally bushy white eyebrows, and a mustache to match, and thick white chest hair protruding from the V-neck of his dark gray robe.

Luce watched Daniel blink in surprise, as if he was second-guessing their address. Then the old man’s pale brown eyes lit up. He lurched forward, pulling Daniel into a tight embrace.

“I was beginning to wonder if you were going to visit before I kicked the inevitable bucket,” the man whispered hoarsely. His eyes traveled to Luce, and he smiled as if they hadn’t woken him, as if he’d been expecting them for months. “After all these years, you finally brought over Lucinda. What a treat.”

His name was Professor Mazotta. He and Daniel had studied history together at the University of Bologna in the thirties. He was not appalled or bewildered by Daniel’s lack of aging: Mazotta understood what Daniel was.

He seemed to feel only joy at being reunited with an old friend, a joy that was augmented by the introduction to the love of that friend’s life.

He escorted them into his office, which was also a study of varying degrees of decay. His bookshelves dipped at the centers; his desk was piled with yellowing paper; the rug was worn to threads and splashed with coffee stains. Mazotta set immediately to making each of them a cup of dense hot chocolate—an old man’s old bad habit, he rasped to Luce with a nudge. But Daniel barely took a sip before thrusting his book into Mazotta’s hands and opening it to the description of the first relic.

Mazotta slipped on thin wire-framed glasses and squinted at the page, mumbling to himself in Italian. He stood up, walked to the bookshelf, scratched his head, turned back to the desk, paced the office, sipped his chocolate, then returned to the bookshelf to pull out a fat leather-bound tome. Luce stifled a yawn. Her eyelids felt like they were working hard to hold up something heavy. She was trying not to drift, pinching the inside of her palm to keep herself awake. But Daniel’s and Professor Mazotta’s voices met each other like distant clouds of fog as they argued over the impossibility of everything the other was saying.

“It’s absolutely not a windowpane from the church of Saint Ignatius.” Mazotta wrung his hands. “Those are slightly hexagonal, and this illustration is resoundingly oblong.”

“What are we doing here?” Daniel suddenly shouted, rattling an amateur painting of a blue sailboat on the wall. “We clearly need to be at the library at Bologna. Do you still have keys to get in? In your office you must have had—”

“I became emeritus thirteen years ago, Daniel. And we’re not traveling two hundred kilometers in the middle of the night to look at . . .” He paused. “Look at Lucinda, she’s sleeping standing up, like a horse!” Luce grimaced groggily. She was afraid to start down the path of a dream for fear she might meet Bill. He had a tendency to turn up when she closed her eyes these days. She wanted to stay awake, to stay away from him, to be a part of the conversation about the relic she and Daniel would need to find the next day. But sleep was insistent and would not be denied.

Seconds or hours later, Daniel’s arms lifted her from the ground and carried her up a dark and narrow flight of stairs.

“I’m sorry, Luce,” she thought he said. She was too deep asleep to respond. “I should have let you rest sooner. I’m just so scared,” he whispered. “Scared we’re going to run out of time.”

Luce blinked and shifted backward, surprised to find herself in a bed, further surprised by the single white peony in a short glass vase drooping onto the pillow next to her head.

She plucked the flower from its vase and twirled it in her palm, causing drops of water to bead on the brocaded rose duvet. The bed creaked as she propped the pillow up against the brass headboard to look around the room.

For a moment, she felt disoriented by finding herself in an unfamiliar place, dreamed memories of traveling through the Announcers slowly fading as she fully awoke.

She no longer had Bill to give her clues about where she’d ended up. He was only there in her dreams, and the previous night he’d been Lucifer, a monster, laughing at the idea that she and Daniel could change or stop a thing.

A white envelope was propped against the vase on the nightstand.

Daniel.

She remembered only a single soft sweet kiss and his arms pulling away as he’d tucked her into bed the previous night and shut the door.

Where had he gone after that?

She ripped open the envelope and slid out the stiff white card it held. On the card were three words: On the balcony.

Smiling, Luce threw back the covers and heaved her legs over the side of the bed. She padded across the giant woven rug, the white peony scissored between her fingers. The windows in the bedroom were tall and narrow and rose nearly twenty feet to the cathedral ceiling. Behind one of the rich brown curtains was a glass door leading out to a terrace. She turned the metal latch and stepped outside, expecting to find Daniel and sink into his arms.

But the crescent-moon-shaped terrace was empty.

Just a short stone railing and a one-story drop to the green waters of the canal, and a small glass-topped table with a red canvas folding chair beside it. The morning was beautiful. The air smelled murky but crisp. On the river shiny narrow black gondolas glided past one another as elegantly as swans. A pair of speckled thrushes chirped from a clothesline one floor up, and on the other side of the canal was a row of cramped pastel apart-ments. It was charming, sure, the Venice of most people’s dreams, but Luce wasn’t here to be a tourist. She and Daniel were here to save their history, and the world’s.

And the clock was ticking. And Daniel was gone.

Then she noticed a second white envelope on the balcony table, propped up against a tiny white to-go cup and a small paper bag. Again, she tore open the card, and again found only three words:

Please wait here.

“Annoying yet romantic,” she said aloud. She sat down on the folding chair and peered inside the paper bag. A handful of tiny jam-filled donuts dusted with cinnamon and sugar sent up an intoxicating scent.

The bag was warm in her hands, flecked with little bits of oil seeping through. Luce popped one into her mouth and took a sip from the tiny white cup, which contained the richest, most delightful espresso Luce had ever tasted.

“Enjoying the bombolini?” Daniel called from below.

Luce shot to her feet and leaned over the railing to find him standing at the back of a gondola painted with images of angels. He wore a flat straw hat bound with a thick red ribbon, and used a broad wooden paddle to steer the boat slowly toward her.

Her heart surged the way it did each time she first saw Daniel in another life. But he was here. He was hers.

This was happening now.

“Dip them in the espresso, then tell me what it’s like to be in Heaven,” Daniel said, smiling up at her.

“How do I get down to you?” she called.

He pointed to the narrowest spiral staircase Luce had ever seen, just to the right of the railing. She grabbed the coffee and bag of donuts, slipped the peony stem behind her ear, and made for the steps.

She could feel Daniel’s eyes on her as she climbed over the railing and slinked down the stairs. Every time she made a full rotation on the staircase, she caught a teasing flash of his violet eyes. By the time she made it to the bottom, he had extended his hand to help her onto the boat.

There was the electricity she’d been yearning for since she awoke. The spark that passed between them every time they touched. Daniel wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her in so that there wasn’t any space between their bodies. He kissed her, long and deep, until she was dizzy.

“Now that’s the way to start a morning.” Daniel’s fingers traced the petals of the peony behind her ear.

A slight weight suddenly tugged at her neck and when she reached up, her hands found a fine chain, which her fingers traced down to a silver locket. She held it out and looked at the red rose engraved on its face.

Her locket! It was the one Daniel had given to her on her last night at Sword & Cross. She had kept it tucked in the front cover of The Book of the Watchers during the short time she’d spent alone in the cabin, but everything about those days was blurry. The next thing she remembered was Mr. Cole rushing her to the airport to catch her flight to California. She hadn’t remembered the locket or the book until she’d arrived at Shoreline, and by then she was certain she’d lost them.

Daniel must have slipped it around her neck when she was sleeping. Her eyes teared again, this time with happiness. “Where did you—”

“Open it.” Daniel smiled.

The last time she’d held the locket, the image of a former Luce and Daniel had baffled her. Daniel said he’d tell her when the photograph had been taken the next time he saw her. That hadn’t happened. Their stolen time together in California had been mostly stressful and too brief, filled with silly arguments she couldn’t imagine having with Daniel anymore.

Luce was glad to have waited, because when she opened the locket this time and saw the tiny photograph behind its glass plate—Daniel in a bowtie and Luce with coiffed short hair—she instantly recognized what it was.

“Lucia,” she whispered. It was the young nurse Luce had encountered when she stepped through into World War I Milan. The girl had been much younger when Luce met her, sweet and a little sassy, but so genuine Luce had admired her right away.

She smiled now, remembering the way Lucia kept staring at Luce’s shorter modern haircut, and the way Lucia joked that all the soldiers had a crush on Luce. She remembered mostly that if Luce had stayed at the Italian hospital a little longer and if the circumstances had been . . . well, entirely different, the two of them could have been great friends.

She looked up at Daniel, beaming, but her expression quickly darkened. He was staring at her as if he’d been punched.

“What’s wrong?” She let go of the locket and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his neck.

He shook his head, stunned. “I’m just not used to being able to share this with you. The look on your face when you recognized that picture? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Luce blushed and smiled and felt speechless and wanted to cry all at once. She understood Daniel completely.

“I’m sorry I left you alone like that,” he said. “I had to go and check something in one of Mazotta’s books in Bologna. I figured you’d need every bit of rest you could get, and you looked so beautiful asleep, I couldn’t bear to wake you up.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Luce asked.

“Possibly. Mazotta gave me a clue about one of the piazzas here in town. He’s mostly an art historian, but he knows his divinity better than any mortal I’ve ever met.” Luce slid down to the gondola’s low red velvet bench, which was like a love seat, with a padded black leather cushion and a high, sculpted back.

Daniel sank the oar into the water and the boat slid forward. The water was a bright pastel green, and as they glided, Luce could see the whole city reflected in the glassy wobble of its surface.

“The good news,” Daniel said, looking down at her from under the brim of his hat, “is that Mazotta thinks he knows where the artifact is located. I kept him up bickering until sunrise, but we finally matched my sketch to an interesting old photograph.”

“And?”

“As it turns out”—Daniel flicked his wrist and the gondola curved gracefully around a tight corner, then dipped under the low slant of a footbridge—“the serving tray is a halo.”

“A halo? I thought only angels on greeting cards had halos.” She cocked her head at Daniel. “Do you have a halo?”

Daniel smiled as if he found the question charming.

“Not in the golden-ring fashion, I don’t think. As far as we can tell, halos are representations of our light, in a way that mortals can comprehend. The violet light you saw around me at Sword & Cross, for example. I’m guessing Gabbe never told you stories about posing for da Vinci?”

“She did what?” Luce almost choked on her bombolini.

“He didn’t know she was an angel, of course, but according to her, Leonardo talked about the light that seemed to radiate from within her. That’s why he painted her with a halo circling her head.”

“Whoa.” Luce shook her head, astonished, as they glided past a pair of lovers in matching felt fedoras kissing in a balcony corner.

“It’s not just him. Artists have been depicting angels that way since we first fell to Earth.”

“And the halo we need to find today?”

“Another artist’s depiction.” Daniel’s face grew somber. The brass of a scratchy jazz record drifted out an open window and seemed to fill the space around the gondola, scoring Daniel’s narration. “This one is a sculpture of an angel, and much older, from the pre-classical era. So old, the artist’s identity is unknown. It’s from Anatolia and, like the rest of these artifacts, was stolen during the Second Crusade.”

“So we just go find the sculpture in a church or museum or whatever, lift the halo off the angel’s head, and sprint to Mount Sinai?” Luce asked.

Daniel’s eyes darkened for a split second. “For now, yes, that’s the plan.”

“That sounds too simple,” Luce said, noting the intri-cacies of the buildings around her—the high onion-domed windows in one, the verdant herb garden creeping out the window of another. Everything seemed to be sinking into the bright green water with a kind of serene surrender.

Daniel stared past her, the sunlit water reflecting in his eyes. “We’ll see how simple it is.” He squinted at a wooden sign farther down the block, then steered them out of the center of the canal. The gondola rocked as Daniel guided it to a stop against a brick wall crawling with vines. He grabbed hold of one of the mooring poles and knotting the gondola’s rope around it. The boat groaned and strained against its bindings.

“This is the address Mazotta gave me.” Daniel gestured at an ancient curved stone bridge that spanned between romantic and decrepit. “We’ll head up these stairs and head to the palazzo. It shouldn’t be far.” He hopped out of the gondola and onto the sidewalk, holding out his hand for Luce. She followed his lead, and together they crossed the bridge, hand in hand.

As they walked past bakery stand after bakery stand and vendors selling VENICE T-shirts, Luce couldn’t help looking around at all the other happy couples: Everyone here seemed to be kissing, laughing. She tugged the peony out from behind her ear and slipped it inside her purse. She and Daniel were on a mission, not a honeymoon, and there would never be another romantic encounter if they failed.

Their pace quickened as they turned left onto a narrow street, then right into a broad open piazza.

Daniel stopped abruptly.

“It is supposed to be here. In the square.” He looked down at the address, shaking his head in weary disbelief.

“What’s wrong?”

“The address Mazotta gave me is that church. He didn’t tell me that.” He pointed at the tall, spired Fran-ciscan building, with its triangle of stained-glass roseate windows. It was a massive, commanding chapel with a pale orange exterior and bright white trim around its windows and its large dome. “The sculpture—the halo—must be inside.”

“Okay.” Luce took a step toward the church, giving Daniel a bewildered shrug. “Let’s go in and check it out.” Daniel shifted his weight. His face suddenly looked pale. “I can’t, Luce.”

“Why not?”

Daniel’s body had stiffened with a palpable nervous-ness. His arms seemed nailed to his sides and his jaw was clenched so tightly it could have been wired. She wasn’t used to Daniel’s being anything other than confident.

This was strange behavior.

“Then you don’t know?” he asked.

Luce shook her head and Daniel sighed.

“I thought maybe at Shoreline, they might have taught you . . . the thing is, actually, if a fallen angel enters a sanctuary of God, the structure and all those inside it burst into flames.”

He finished his sentence quickly, just as a group of plaid-skirted German schoolgirls on a tour passed them in the piazza, filing toward the entrance of the church.

Luce watched as a few of them turned to look at Daniel, whispering and giggling to each other, smoothing their braids in case he happened to glance their way.

He fixed on Luce. He still seemed nervous. “It’s one of the many lesser-known details of our punishment. If a fallen angel desires to reenter the jurisdiction of the grace of God, we must approach the Throne directly.

There are no shortcuts.”

“You’re saying you’ve never set foot in a church? Not once in the thousands of years you’ve been here?” Daniel shook his head. “Or a temple, or a synagogue, or a mosque. Never. The closest I’ve come is the natato-rium at Sword & Cross. When it was desanctified and repurposed as a gym, the taboo was lifted.” He closed his eyes. “Arriane did once, very early on before she’d reallied herself with Heaven. She didn’t know any better.

The way she describes it—”

“Is that where she got the scars on her neck?” Luce touched her own neck instinctively, thinking back to her first hour at Sword & Cross: Arriane handing over a stolen Swiss Army knife, demanding that Luce give her a haircut. She hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the angel’s strange marbled scars.

“No.” Daniel looked away, uncomfortable. “That was something else.”

A group of tourists were posing with their guide in front of the entrance. In the time they had been talking, ten people had drifted into and out of the church without seeming to appreciate the building’s beauty or its import—and yet Daniel, Arriane, and a whole legion of angels could never step inside.

But Luce could.

“I’ll go. I know what the halo looks like from your sketch. If it’s in there, I’ll find it and—”

“You can enter, it’s true.” Daniel nodded curtly.

“There is no other way.”

“No problem.” Luce tried nonchalance.

“I’ll wait right here.” Daniel looked reluctant and relieved at the same time. He squeezed her hand and sat down on the raised rim of a fountain in the center of the square and explained what the halo should look like and how to remove it. “But be careful! It’s more than a thousand years old and delicate!” Behind him, a cherub spat out an unending stream of water. “If you have any trou-ble, Luce, if anything looks even remotely suspicious, run back out here and find me.”

The church was dark and cool, a cross-shaped structure with low rafters and the heavy scent of incense cloaking the air. Luce picked up an English pamphlet from the entryway, then realized she didn’t know what the name of the sculpture was. Annoyed with herself for not asking—Daniel would have known—she walked up the narrow nave, past row after row of empty pews, her eyes tracing the stained-glass Stations of the Cross lining the high windows.

Though the piazza outside had been bustling with people, the church was relatively quiet. Luce was conscious of the sound of her riding boots on the marble floor as she passed a statue of the Madonna in one of the small gated chapels lining either side of the church. The statue’s flat marble eyes seemed impossibly big, her fingers impossibly long and thin, pressed together in prayer.

Luce did not see the halo anywhere.

At the end of the nave she stood in the center of the church, under the great dome, which let the tempered glow of morning sunlight brush through its towering windows. A man in a long gray robe kneeled before an altar. His pale face and white hands—cupped to his heart—were the only parts of his body exposed. He was chanting in Latin under his breath. Dies irae, dies illa.

Luce recognized the words from her Latin class at Dover but couldn’t remember what they meant.

As she approached, the man’s chant broke off and he lifted his head, as if her presence had disrupted his prayer. His skin was as pale as any she’d ever seen, his thin lips almost colorless as they frowned at her. She looked away and turned left into the transept, which formed the cross shape of the church, in an effort to give the man his space—

And found herself before a formidable angel.

It was a statue, sculpted from smooth pale pink marble, utterly different from the angels Luce had come to know so well. There was none of the fierce vitality she found in Cam, none of the infinite complexities she adored in Daniel. This was a statue created by the stolidly faithful for the stolidly faithful. To Luce, the angel seemed empty. He was looking up, toward Heaven, and his sculpted body shone through the soft ripples of fabric draped across his chest and waist. His face, tilted skyward, ten feet above Luce’s own, had been chiseled delicately, by someone with a practiced touch, from the ridge of his nose to the tiny tufts of hair curled above his ear.

His hands gestured toward the sky, as if asking forgiveness from someone above for a long-ago-committed sin.

“Buon giorno.” A sudden voice made Luce jump. She hadn’t seen the priest appear in the heavy floor-length black robe, had not seen the rectory at the edge of the transept, from whose carved mahogany door the priest had just emerged.

He had a waxy nose and large earlobes and was tall enough to tower over her, which made her uneasy. She forced a smile and took a step away. How was she going to steal a relic from a public place like this? Why hadn’t she thought about that before in the piazza? She couldn’t even speak—

Then she remembered: She could speak Italian. She had learned it—more or less—instantly when she’d stepped through the Announcer into the front lines of war near the Piave River.

“This is a beautiful sculpture,” she said to the priest.

Her Italian wasn’t perfect—she spoke more like she used to be fluent years ago but had lost her confidence.

Still, her accent was good enough, and the priest seemed to understand. “Indeed it is.”

“The artist’s work with the . . . chisel,” she said,

spreading her arms wide as though she were critically regarding the work, “it is like he freed the angel from the stone.” Drawing her wide eyes back to the sculpture, trying to look as innocent as possible, Luce took a spin around the angel. Sure enough, a golden glass-filled halo capped his head. Only it wasn’t chipped in the places Daniel’s sketch had suggested. Maybe it had been restored.

The priest nodded sagely and said, “No angel was ever free after the sin of the Fall. The able eye can see that, as well.”

Daniel had told her the trick to releasing the halo from the angel’s head: to grasp the halo like a steering wheel and give it two firm but gentle counterclockwise turns. “Because it’s made of glass and gold, it had to be added to the sculpture later. So a base is carved into the stone, and a matching hole fashioned into the halo. Just two strong—but careful!—twists.” That would loosen it from its base.

She glanced up at the vast statue towering over her and the priest’s heads.

Right.

The priest came to stand beside Luce. “This is Raphael, the Healer.”

Luce didn’t know any angels named Raphael. She wondered if he was real or a church invention. “I, um, read in a guidebook that it dates back to before the classical era.” She eyed the thin beam of marble connecting the halo to the angel’s head. “Wasn’t this sculpture brought to the church during the Crusades?” The priest swept his arms over his chest, and the long loose sleeves of his robe bunched up at the elbow. “You are thinking of the original. It sat just south of Dorso-duro in the Chiesa dei Piccolos Miracolis on the Island of the Seals, and disappeared with the church and the island when both, as we know, sank into the sea centuries ago.”

“No.” Luce swallowed hard. “I didn’t know that.” His round brown eyes fixed on hers. “You must be new to Venice,” he said. “Eventually, everything here crumbles into the sea. It isn’t so bad, really. How else would we become so skilled at reproductions?” He glanced up at the angel, ran his long brown fingers across the marble plinth. “This one was created on commission for only fifty thousand lire. Isn’t it remarkable?” It wasn’t remarkable; it was awful. The real halo had sunk into the sea? They would never find it now; they would never learn the true location of the Fall; they would never be able to stop Lucifer from destroying them. They’d only just begun this journey and already it seemed that all was lost.

Luce stumbled backward, barely finding the breath to thank the priest. Feeling heavy and unbalanced, she nearly tripped over the pale supplicant, who scowled at her as she walked quickly to the door.

As soon as she crossed the threshold, she broke into a run. Daniel caught her by the elbow at the fountain.

“What happened?”

Her face must have given everything away. She relayed the story to him, growing more despondent with each word. By the time she got to the way the priest had bragged about the bargain reproduction, a tear was sliding down her cheek.

“You’re sure he called the cathedral la Chiesa dei Miracolis Piccolos?” Daniel said, spinning around to look across the piazza. “On the Island of the Seals?”

“I’m sure, Daniel, it’s gone. It’s buried under the ocean—”

“And we are going to find it.”

“What? How?”

He had already grabbed her by the hand and, with one sideways glance back through the doors of the church, started to jog across the square.

“Daniel—”

“You know how to swim.”

“That isn’t funny.”

“No, it isn’t.” He stopped running and turned to look at her, held her chin in his palm. Her heart was racing but his eyes on hers made everything slow down.

“It’s not ideal, but if this is the only way to get the artifact, it’s the way we’re going to get the artifact. Nothing can stop us. You know that. Nothing can be allowed to stop us.”

Moments later, they were back in the gondola, Daniel rowing them out to sea—powering them like an en-gine with each stroke of his oar. They sped past every other gondola in the canal, making hairpin turns around low bridges and the jutting corners of buildings, splashing water on alarmed faces in neighboring gondolas.

“I know this island,” Daniel said, not even winded.

“It used to lie halfway between Saint Mark’s and La Giudecca. But there’s nowhere to dock the boat nearby.

We’ll have to leave the gondola. We’ll have to jump ship and swim.”

Luce glanced over the side of the gondola into the cloudy green water moving fast below her. Lack of swim-suit. Hypothermia. Italian Loch Ness monsters in unseen depths of sludge. The gondola bench was freezing under her and the water smelled like mud laced with sewage.

All this flashed through Luce’s mind, but when she locked on Daniel’s eyes, it quieted her fear.

He needed her. She was at his side, no questions asked.

“Okay.”

When they reached the open channel where the canals emptied out into space between the islands’ edges, it was tourist chaos: The water teemed with vaporetti shut-tling tourists hauling roller bags toward hotels; motor-boats chartered by rich, elegant travelers; and bright aerodynamic kayaks carrying American backpackers wearing wraparound sunglasses. Gondolas and barges and police boats all crisscrossed the water at high speeds, barely avoiding one another.

Daniel maneuvered effortlessly, pointing into the distance. “See the towers?”

Luce stared out over the multicolored boats. The horizon was a faint line where the blue-gray of the sky touched the darker blue-gray of the water. “No.”

“Focus, Luce.”

After a few moments, two small greenish towers—farther away than she imagined she could ever see without a telescope—came into view. “Oh. There.”

“That’s all that remains of the church.” Daniel’s paddling speed increased as the number of boats around them decreased. The water grew choppier, deepened to a dark evergreen color, began to smell more like the sea than the oddly appealing filth of Venice. Luce’s hair whipped in the wind, which felt colder the farther from land they got. “We’ll have to hope that our halo has not been pilfered by excavation teams of scuba divers.”

After Luce had climbed back into the gondola, Daniel had asked her to wait for him for just a moment. He’d disappeared down a narrow alley and reappeared what seemed like seconds later with a small pink plastic bag.

When he tossed it to her now, Luce pulled out a pair of goggles. They looked stupidly expensive and not very functional: mauve and black with fashionable angel wings at the edges of the lenses. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d swum with goggles, but as she looked out at the black-shadowed water, Luce was glad to have them to tug down over her eyes.

“Goggles but no bathing suit?” she asked.

Daniel blushed. “I guess that was stupid. But I was in a hurry, only thinking about what you would need to get the halo.” He drove the paddle back into the water, pro-pelling them more quickly than a speedboat. “You can swim in your underwear, right?”

Now Luce blushed. Under normal circumstances, the question might have seemed thrilling, something they both would have giggled at. Not these nine days. She nodded. Eight days now. Daniel was deadly serious. Luce just swallowed hard and said, “Of course.” The pair of green-gray spires grew larger, more detailed, and then they were upon them. They were tall and conical, made of rusted slats of copper. They looked like they had once been capped by small teardrop-shaped copper flags, sculpted to look like they were rippling in the wind, but one flag was pocked with weathered holes, and the other had broken off completely from its pole.

In the open water, the spires’ protrusion was bizarre, suggesting a cavernous cathedral of the deep. Luce wondered how long ago the church had sunk, how deep it sat below.

The thought of diving down there in ridiculous goggles and mom-bought underwear made her shudder.

“This church must be huge,” she said. She meant I don’t think I can do this. I can’t breathe underwater. How are we going to find one small halo sunk in the middle of the sea?

“I can take you down as far as the chapel itself, but only that far. So long as you hold on to my hand.” Daniel extended a warm hand to help Luce stand up in the gondola. “Breathing will not be a problem. But the church will still be sanctified, which means I’ll need you to find the halo and bring it out to me.”

Daniel yanked his T-shirt off over his head, dropping it to the bench of the gondola. He stepped out of his pants quickly, perfectly balanced in the boat, then kicked off his tennis shoes. Luce watched, feeling something stir inside her until she realized she was supposed to be strip-ping down, too. She kicked off her boots, tugged off her socks, stepped out of her jeans as modestly as she could.

Daniel held her hand to help her balance; he was watching her but not the way she would have expected. He was worried about her, the goose bumps rising on her skin. He rubbed her arms when she slipped off her sweater and stood freezing in her sensible underwear in the gondola in the middle of the Venetian lagoon.

Again she shivered, cold and fear and indecipherable mass inside her. But her voice sounded brave when she tugged the goggles, which pinched, down over her eyes and said, “Okay, let’s swim.”

They held hands, just like they had the last time they’d swum together at Sword & Cross. As their feet lifted off the varnished floor of the gondola, Daniel’s hand tugged her upward, higher than she ever could have jumped herself—and then they dove.

Her body broke the surface of the sea, which wasn’t as cold as she’d expected. In fact, the closer she swam beside Daniel, the warmer the wake around them grew.

He was glowing.

Of course he was. She hadn’t wanted to voice her fears about how dark and impassible the church would be underwater, and now she realized, as ever, that Daniel was always looking out for her. Daniel would light her way to the halo with the same shimmery incandescence Luce had seen in many of the past lives she’d visited. His glow played off the murky water, folding Luce inside it, as lovely and surprising as a rainbow arching boldly in a black night sky.

They swam down, holding hands, bathed in violet light. The water was silky, silent as an empty tomb.

Within a dozen feet, the sea became darker, but Daniel’s light still illuminated the ocean for several feet around them. A dozen feet more and the façade of the church came into view.

It was beautiful. The ocean had preserved it, and the glow of Daniel’s glory cast a haunting violet sheen on its quiet old stones. The pair of spires above the surface punctuated a flat roof lined with stone sculptures of saints. There were panels of half-decayed mosaics depicting Jesus with some of the apostles. Everything was thick with moss and crawling with sea life: tiny silver fish flitting into and out of alcoves, sea anemones jutting out from the depictions of miracles, eels slipping out of crannies where ancient Venetian bodies used to be. Daniel stayed beside her, following her whim, lighting her way.

She swam around the right side of the church, peering through busted stained-glass windows, always eyeing the distance back up to the surface, to air.

At about the point that she’d expected, Luce’s lungs began to strain. But she wasn’t ready to go up yet. They’d only just made it down to where they could see what looked like the altar. She gritted her teeth and bore the burn a little longer.

Holding his hand, she peeked inside one of the windows near the church’s transept. Her head and shoulders ventured in and Daniel flattened as much as he could against the wall of the church to light the inside for her.

She saw nothing but rotting pews, a stone altar split in two. The rest was shadowed, and Daniel couldn’t get any closer to give her more light. She felt a tensing in her lungs and she panicked—but then, somehow, it released, and she felt as if she had a luxurious expanse of time before the tension and panic would return. It was as if there were breathing thresholds, and Luce could pass through a few of them before things would get really dire. Daniel watched her, nodding, as if he understood that she could go on a little longer.

She swam past one more former window, and something golden gleamed in a sunken corner of the church.

Daniel saw it, too. He swam to her side, careful not to press inside the church. He took her hand and pointed at it. Only the tip of the halo was visible. The statue itself looked as if it had sunk through a collapsed portion of the floor. Luce swam closer, clotting the air before her with bubbles, unsure how to wrest it free. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her lungs blazed. She gave Daniel the sign to go up.

He shook his head.

When she flinched in surprise, he pulled her fully outside the church and took her in his arms. He kissed her deeply, and it felt so good, but—

But no, he wasn’t just kissing her. He was breathing air into her lungs. She gasped in his kisses, felt the pure air flow into her, sustaining her lungs just when they felt like they would burst. It was as if he had an endless supply and Luce was greedy for as much as she could get.

Their hands searched each other’s almost naked bodies, as filled with passion as if they were kissing purely for pleasure. Luce didn’t want to stop. But they only had eight days. When at last she nodded that she was sati-ated, Daniel grinned and pulled away.

They returned to the tiny opening where the window used to be. Daniel swam to it and stopped, directing his body to face the opening so his glow would shine in to light her way. She squirmed slowly through the window, feeling instantly cold and senselessly claustrophobic inside the church. That was strange, because the cathedral was huge: Its ceilings were a hundred feet high, and Luce had the place all to herself.

Maybe that was the problem. On the other side of the window Daniel seemed too far away. At least she could see the angel up ahead—and Daniel’s glow just outside. She swam toward the golden halo, gripped it in her hands. She remembered Daniel’s instructions, and she turned the halo as if she were steering a Grey-hound bus.

It didn’t budge.

Luce gripped the slick halo harder. She rocked it back and forth, putting all the strength she had into it.

Ever so slowly, the halo creaked and shifted a centimeter to the left. She strained again to make it budge, sending out bubbles of exasperation. Just as she began to feel exhausted, the halo loosened, turned. Daniel’s face filled with pride as he watched her and she watched him, their gazes intertwined. She was barely even thinking about her breath as she strained to unscrew the halo.

It came off in her hands. She yelped with delight and admired its impressive heft. But when she looked up at Daniel, he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was gazing upward, far in the distance.

A second later, he was gone.