It didn’t.
It wasn’t that she understood. No one ever could. But… she knew the source.
Of everything.
It was among the things known and no longer buried, all of them part of her now, orderly and intertwined, and it was so beautiful she wanted to worship it, even though she knew it had no consciousness. It would make about as much sense as worshiping the wind. She saw that magic and science were heads and tails of the same bright coin.
And she beheld Time itself laid open before her, unzipped like a strand of DNA. Knowable. Possibly even navigable.
Her mind trembled at the brink of this new vastness. She was saved, she had thought, moments ago. She saw now that she was more than saved. So much more than saved.
“So,” she said, trying not to cry as she fixed her saviors with all the warmth her eyes could bestow. “Who are you guys?”
67
A SPRAY OF SPARKS
Karou followed Akiva away from the Papal Palace, and they were glamoured, so when she came to him it was clumsy. But only for the first surprised seconds.
She didn’t even mean to do it. Well, it’s not that it was an accident. They didn’t stumble against each other with their faces. It was only that her body didn’t run it by her brain first.
She knew where he was by heat and airflow, and she meant to follow him to the cupola of St. Peter’s. From there, the four of them planned to watch Jael’s exodus and escort the Dominion army unseen all the way back to Uzbekistan, and through to Eretz.
But a part of Karou was still poised at the edge of that hurled knife, hearing the scream she had almost become. She couldn’t see Akiva, to reassure herself that he was well, and so she couldn’t catch her breath. They had no victory to celebrate yet except for being alive, and that was all she could bring herself to care about in the moment it took her to catch up to him. They were over the plaza, Michelangelo’s colonnades curving beneath them like outstretched arms.
Karou reached for where Akiva’s shoulder might be and got wing instead. A spray of sparks, and he turned into her touch, startled by it, so she careened into him and he caught her against him, and that was all it took.
Magnets collide, and swiftly align.
Her hands found his face, and her lips followed. She was clumsy, showering kisses of thanks on his invisible face. She was overwhelmed, and her lips landed where they would—on his brow, then his cheekbone, then the bridge of his nose—and in the profound relief of the moment she barely registered the sensation of his skin against hers: the heat and texture—at last—of Akiva against her lips.
She dropped one hand to his heart to be sure it hadn’t been some illusion, that he was truly whole and uninjured, and he was, and so her palm, satisfied, joined her other in slipping to where his neck met his jaw to hold his face steady and gauge the location of his lips.
He didn’t wait for her to find them.
A beat of his wings and he surged through the air with such force that she was melded to him more completely even than when they had embraced in the shower, and her face was not against his chest this time, nor her feet planted on the floor.
Her legs twined with his. She smoothed her hands up his neck and into his hair and held his head as she was swept away with him, spiraling.
Finally. Finally, they kissed.
Akiva’s mouth was hungry and sweet and rich and slow and hot, and the kiss was long and deep and every other measure of scope there was except for infinite. It wasn’t that. A kiss must end for another to begin, and it did, and did again.
Kiss gave way to kiss, and in the eyes-closed, all-consuming world of their embrace, Karou had the sensation that each kiss encompassed the last. It was hallucinatory: Kiss within kiss within kiss, going deeper and deeper and sweeter and hotter and headier, and she hoped that Akiva’s equilibrium was guiding them because she’d lost all sense of her own. There was no up or down; there were only mouths, and hips, and hands—
—and now she registered the heat and texture of him. The smoothness, the roughness, the realness.
A kiss while flying, invisible, above St. Peter’s Square. It sounded like a fantasy but felt so very, very real.
And then a shared smile was shaping their mouths, and laughter came between them. They were breathless with relief—and with simple oxygen deprivation, too, because who had time to inhale? They rested their foreheads together, and the tips of their noses, and paused to let it all sink in. The kiss, their breath, and all that they’d just done.
Human soldiers patrolled beneath them, wondering at a sudden gust of sparks, and Karou and Akiva spun there in the air, held aloft by magic and languid wingbeats, and held together by a pull they’d felt from the very moment of first meeting, on a battlefield long ago.
Karou touched Akiva’s heart again, reassuring herself. “How did you do that?” she asked quietly, her head still spinning from the kiss. “Back there.”
“I don’t know. I never know. It just comes.”
“The knife passed right through you. Did you feel it?” She wished she could see him, but since she couldn’t, she kept a hand on his face and her forehead to his.
She felt his nod, and his breath brushed her lips when he spoke. “I did and didn’t. I can’t explain it. I was there and not there. I saw it hit me and keep going.”
She was silent for a moment, processing this. “Is it true, then, what Jael said? That you’re… invisible to death? I don’t have to worry about you ever dying?”
“I don’t think that’s true.” He traced the contours of her face with his lips, as though he could see her like that. “But you would have resurrected me in any case.”
Is that what would have happened, if Akiva had died? Or would they have lost control of the situation and all been overpowered? Karou didn’t even want to think about it. “Sure,” she said with false lightness. “But let’s not be casual about this body, okay?” She nuzzled him back. “It may be your soul that I love, but I’m pretty keen on its vessel, too.”
Her voice had dropped lower as she spoke, and his response was low and husky in kind. “I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and brushed his face past hers to kiss a place beneath her ear, sending instant, electric frissons coursing through her body.
She gave a faint murmur of surprise that sounded like the Oh in Oh my, but without the my, and then she saw, over Akiva’s shoulder, the ascension of the first ranks of Dominion from the Papal Palace, as Jael’s army returned to the sky.
68
FALLEN
“It wasn’t our fault!” Razgut had screamed when the Faerers were sentenced, but this was a lie. It was their fault, and this knowledge made a dimension of grief and guilt in their bodies and minds that supplanted everything else they had ever been or contained.
Home to Meliz, mindless with panic. Raise the alarm. The Six were only four now. Iaoth and Dvira had turned back to fight the Cataclysm and been devoured.
Back to the capital and cry out: Beasts are coming! Flee! Beasts are coming!
Some made it out, through a back door, as it were. The worlds were layered, like a stack of pages. The Beasts came from one direction, laying waste to everything in their path. Those who could fled in the other direction, to the neighbor world the other side: Eretz. There was no time to organize an evacuation. Some thousands out of millions made it out. Not even ten thousand, not even as many as that. All the rest were left behind.
The many, the colors. The jewels shaken out on a tapestry. A world’s richest offering. Lost.
Many made it all the way to the portal only to be denied. It was small, the cut. Two or three at a time might squeeze through; it was slow, and the Beasts were coming. Screams from on the other side, they echoed in Razgut’s ears to this day as the scream of a whole dying world. He remembered how abruptly it had cut to silence, and how some of the last to make it through were still reaching back for loved ones trapped on the other side.
So the portal was closed, but this the Faerers had done dozens of times in their retreat, and it had never held the Beasts out yet. Once wounded, the skin between the worlds never fully healed. It would have failed again, and the Cataclysm would have taken Eretz, too, and then Earth, and every world after, through each portal cut by the second Six, however far they’d voyaged.
But the Stelians were among those who made it out of Meliz, and they were ready. They had always opposed the Faering, and in the years since the Faerers’ departure, they had prepared themselves to do what no one else could or would: mend the skin, the veil, the membrane, the energy, the layers of the great All. They closed the portal and kept it closed, and Eretz was saved, and Earth, and all the rest.
It was the Stelians who had saved them.
As for the Faerers: damnation, infamy. And obliteration.
They heard, from their prison cell, what was done to the memories of the survivors. The magi hadn’t learned not to meddle. They stole from each seraph the past, not just the Cataclysm but Meliz, too, so that their people could begin a new life. So that the people, Razgut understood, wouldn’t wake up one morning and realize where the blame truly lay: with the magi who had dreamt up the Faering in the first place, and had chosen the best of their young folk to see it through. They shared the blame. But not the punishment. Oh no, not they.
Iaoth and Dvira were the lucky ones: swiftly eaten, swiftly dead.
As for the rest, their wings were wrenched off. That was the first thing. Not cut. Not sliced. Pulled. Splintering bone, oh pain, oh pain like nothing they had ever dreamt. Razgut saw the other three maimed alongside him, heavy hands laid to the joints of their beautiful wings, twisting, and their faces twisting, their agony unbearable, and he felt it all. They all did, because of what they were, and what had been done to them. They were linked. What each felt, all felt, oh godstars. And the sum of all their pain, it was too much.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Imagine. This was only the salt in the wound of their true punishment, which was exile.
And even that they might have borne, and made some crippled kind of life in their prison world, Earth, but oh, spite. Oh, misery.
They parted them. Four they were, and there were four portals, too, by ill luck or cruel planning, and they dragged them from one another to the far corners of Eretz, and threw them out. Alone. Wingless. Legs stomped to pulps. They pitched them into another world, four broken creatures, to fall from the skies and shatter against the alien landscapes there, and not even together.
Razgut they carried out over the Bay of Beasts, and it was a beautiful day and the water was green, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A beautiful day for agony, and they carried him by his armpits to the edge of that ragged, flapping cut in the sky, and they heaved him through, and he fell.
And fell. And fell.
And didn’t die, because of what he was: He was what the tests had proven that long-ago day of glory, and what they had made of him after. He was a Faerer, and he was strong beyond strong, too strong to die of falling, and so he lived, if you could call it that, and he never found the others in the world of their exile, though he felt their pain—and their grief and their guilt, fourfold—until it all began to fall away. Across the years he knew it when they died, each in turn. Not how or where, but which, yes, and they who had been part of him were taken, finally and fully—Kleos, Arieth, Elazael, gone one after another—and he was truly alone. He was a small thing adrift in a great absence. He lived with a crack in his mind, a thousand years in exile.
And oh, spite. Oh, misery. He lived still.
Esther Van de Vloet may have lost possession—temporarily—of her wishes, but her money and influence were untouched, and she didn’t lie despairing on the bathroom floor for long. She made phone calls, went online to find photographs of the miscreants—they made it so easy, idiot youth, no sense of privacy—and e-mailed them not to the police, who had their hands full these days keeping hell from breaking loose, but to a private firm who knew her reputation well enough to be at once pleased and dismayed to hear from her.
“They’re in Rome,” she said. “Find them. Payment will be twofold. First, a million euros. I imagine that will suffice?” Of course it would, they assured her, not more pleased by the obscene sum but less, sensing, surely, what must come next. “Second,” said Esther, “succeed and I won’t destroy you.”
After that, she paced. Waiting was for soldiers’ wives, and she abhorred it. Traveller and Methuselah kept out of her way, bewildered and miserable. The drapes were still yanked wide, not because Esther had any care for the sky, but because they’d been left that way. Her pacing carried her past the windows, but she didn’t turn her head. She felt fluorescent with rage. She had been robbed, violated. She had no sense of irony or just desserts. Only tremulous, vision-narrowing, warpath fury.
God knows how many turns she took, pacing past the window, before she finally noticed the change in the sky, and her night went from bad to oh so very very bad.
The angels had risen.
Cries spread through the streets below. Esther wrenched open the glass doors and rushed onto the balcony. “No.” She felt her voice in her gut, moanlike, and pulled it up and out, unreeling it in strips, moan by moan, each one the same simple word—“No. No. No.”—flayed from her like meat and pulled out raw.
The angels were leaving?
What about her? What about their deal? She had given them Karou, and promised so much more—everything they’d need to conquer the world beyond that veil of sky. Arms, ammunition, technology, even personnel. And what had she asked in return?
Not much. Only mining rights. To an entire world. An entire undeveloped world with a slave population already in place, and an army to guard her interests. Esther had made certain that she had no competition, that no other offers reached the angels, and no bribes topped her own. It was the single greatest negotiating coup of all time. Or, it had been, and Esther Van de Vloet had to watch, trembling and speechless, as wings carried it away.