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—”