Rapture

THIRTEEN THE EXCAVATION

Throosh of wingbeats overhead.

Tendrils of ambling cloud sliding over skin.

Luce was soaring across darkness, deep in the drug-like tunnel of another flight. She was weightless as the wind.

A single star hung in the center of a navy sky, miles above the belt of rainbow light near the horizon.

Twinkling lights on darkened ground seemed impossibly far away. Luce was in another world, ascending into infinity, lit up by the glow of brilliant silver wings.

They beat again, thrusting forward, then back, carrying her higher . . . higher . . .

The world was quiet up here, like she had it all to herself.

Higher . . . higher . . .

No matter how high, she was always canopied by the warm silver winglight overhead.

She reached for Daniel, as if to share this peace, to caress his hand where it always rested, clasped around her waist.

Her hand met her own bare skin. His hand wasn’t there.

Daniel wasn’t there.

There were only Luce’s body, and a darkening horizon, and a single distant star.

She jolted from her sleep. Aloft, awake, she found Daniel’s hands again—one holding her waist, the other higher, draped across her chest. Right where they always were.

It was late afternoon—not nighttime. She and Daniel and the others climbed a ladder of puffy white clouds that obscurred the stars.

Just a dream.

A dream in which Luce had been the one flying. Everybody had these dreams. You were supposed to wake up just before you hit the ground. But Luce, who flew in real life every day, had awakened when she realized she was flying under her own power. Why hadn’t she looked up then, to see what her wings looked like, to see if they were glorious and proud?

She closed her eyes, wanting to return to that simpler sky, where Lucifer wasn’t thundering toward them, where Gabbe and Molly weren’t gone.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Daniel said.

Her eyes shot open, back to reality. Below, the red granite peaks of the Sinai Peninsula were so jagged they looked like they were made of shards of broken glass.

“What is it you can’t do?” Luce asked. “Find the location of the Fall? Dee’s going to help us, Daniel. I think she knows exaclty how to find it.”

“Sure,” he said, unconvinced. “Dee’s great. We’re lucky to have her. But even if we find the Fall site, I don’t know how we’re going to stop Lucifer. And if we can’t”—

his chest heaved against her back—“I can’t go through another six thousand years of losing you.” Throughout her lives, Luce had seen Daniel brooding, frustrated, worried, passionate, brooding again, tender, diffident, desperately sad. But she had never heard him sound defeated. The dull surrender in his tone cut into her, sudden and deep, the way a starshot sliced through angel flesh.

“You won’t have to do that.”

“I keep picturing what we’re looking at if Lucifer succeeds.” He fell back slightly from the formation they were flying in—Cam and Dee taking the lead, Arriane, Roland, and Annabelle just behind, the Outcasts fanned out around them all. “It’s too much, Luce. This is why angels choose sides, why people join teams. It costs too much not to; it weighs too heavily to soldier on alone.” There was a time when Luce would have turned instinctively inward, made insecure by Daniel’s doubt, as if it suggested a weakness in their relationship. But now she was armed with the lessons from their past. She knew, when Daniel was too tired to remember, the mea-sure of his love.

“I don’t want to go through it all again. All that time without you, always waiting, my foolish optimism that someday it would be different—”

“Your optimism was justified! Look at me. Look at us! This is different. I know it is, Daniel. I saw us in Helston and Tibet and Tahiti. We were in love, sure, but it was nothing like what we have now.” They’d dropped back farther, out of earshot of the others. They were just Luce and Daniel, two lovers talking in the sky. “I’m still here,” she said. “I’m here because you believed in us. You believed in me.”

“I did—I do believe in you.”

“I believe in you, too.” She heard a smile enter her voice. “I always have.”

They were not going to fail.

They descended into a dust storm.

It hung over the desert like a vast comforter, as if enormous hands had tossed the Sahara into the air.

Within the thick, tawny haze, the angels and their surroundings merged into indistinction: ground was overlapped with whirling sand; horizon was erased by great pulsating sheets of brown. Everything looked pixilated, bathed in dusty static, like white noise rusted, a foreshadowing of what would come if Lucifer got his way.

Sand filled Luce’s nose and mouth. It reached beneath her clothes and scratched her skin. It was far harsher than the velvety dust left behind by Gabbe’s and Molly’s deaths, a bleak reminder of something more beautiful and worse.

Luce lost all sense of her surroundings. She had no idea how close they were to landing until her feet brushed the invisible rocky ground. She sensed that there were great rocks, maybe mountains, to their left, but she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. Only the glow of the angels’ wings, dulled by waves of sand and wind, signaled where the others were.

When Daniel released her on the uneven rock, Luce tugged her Israeli army jacket up around her ears to block her face from the sting of the sand. They had gathered in a circle, the angels’ wings generating a halo of light on a rocky path at the foothills of a mountain: Phil and the other remaining three Outcasts, Arriane, Annbelle, Cam and Roland, Luce and Daniel, and Dee standing in the center of them all, as calmly as a museum docent giving a tour.

“Don’t worry, it’s often like this in the afternoon!” Dee shouted over a wind so rough it tossed the angels’

wings. She used her hand like a visor, placing it sideways on her brow. “This will all blow over soon! Once we reach the location of the Qayom Malak, we will bring all three relics together. They will tell us the true story of the Fall.”

“Exactly where is the Qayom Malak?” Daniel shouted.

“We’re going to have to climb that mountain.” Dee pointed behind her at the barely visible promontory whose foothills had been the angels’ landing place. What little Luce could see of the mountain looked unfathomably sheer.

“You mean fly, right?” Arriane clicked the heels of her black sneakers together. “Never been much of a ‘climber.’”

Dee shook her head. She reached for the duffel bag Phil was holding, unzipped it, and pulled out a pair of sturdy brown hiking boots. “I’m glad the rest of you are already wearing sensible shoes.” She kicked off her pointy high heels, tossed them into the bag, and began lacing up the boots. “It’s no picnic of a hike, but in these conditions, the path to the Qayom Malak is really best navigated by foot. You can use your wings for balance against the winds.”

“Why don’t we wait out the sand storm?” Luce suggested, her eyes tearing in the dusty wind.

“No, dear.” Dee slipped the black strap of the duffel bag back over Phil’s narrow shoulder. “There’s no time.

It must be now.”

So they formed a line behind Dee, trusting her to navigate again. Daniel’s hand found Luce’s. He still seemed morose after their conversation, but his grip on her hand never slackened.

“Well, so long, it’s been good to know ya!” Arriane joked as the others began to climb.

“If you seek me, ask the dust,” Cam said in reply.

Dee’s route led them up into the mountains, along a rocky path that grew narrow and steeper. It was strewn with jagged rocks Luce couldn’t see until she’d tripped on them. The sinking sun looked like the moon, its light diminished and pale behind the clogged curtain of air.

She was coughing, gagging on dust, her throat still sore from the battle in Vienna. She zigzagged left and right, never seeing where she went, only sensing it was always vaguely up. She focused on Dee’s yellow cardigan, which rippled like a flag from the old woman’s little body. Always Luce held on to Daniel’s hand.

Here and there the dust storm snagged around a boulder, creating a brief pocket of visibility. In one of those moments, Luce spotted a pale green speck in the distance. It sat along a path hundreds of feet above them and equally as far to the right from where they stood.

That dash of muted color was the only thing breaking the rhythm of the barren sepia landscape for miles. Luce stared at it as if it were a mirage until Dee’s hand brushed her shoulder.

“That’s our destination, dear. Good to keep your eyes on the prize.”

Then the storm wrested itself free from the boulder’s angles, dust swirled, and the green speck was gone. The world became a mass of grainy bullets once again.

Images of Bill seemed to form in the swirling sand: the way he’d cackled at their first meeting, changing from an imposter Daniel to a toad; his inscrutable expression when she’d met Shakespeare at the Globe. The images helped Luce right herself when she stumbled on the path. She would not stop until she beat the devil.

Images of Gabbe and Molly drove Luce forward, too.

The flash of their wings in two great gold and silver arcs played out again before Luce’s eyes.

You’re not tired, she told herself. You’re not hungry.

At last they felt their way around a tall boulder shaped like an arrowhead, its tip pointed to the sky. Dee gestured for them to huddle against the up-mountain face of the arrowhead, and there, finally, the wind died down.

Dusk had fallen. The mountains wore a darkening silver dress. They stood on a mesa about the size of Lu-ce’s living room at home. Except for a small gap where the path had dropped them off, the small round expanse was bordered on all sides by sheer, curving russet cliffs of rock, forming a space that could have served as a natural amphitheater. It shielded them from more than merely wind: Even if there hadn’t been a sand storm, most of the mesa would have been hidden by the arrowhead boulder and the high surrounding rocks.

Here, no one coming up the path could see them.

Pursuing Scale would have to luck into flying directly over them. This enclosed steppe was a kind of sanctuary.

“I’d like to say I’m on a natural high,” Cam said.

“This hike would have ruined John Denver,” Roland agreed.

Ghosts of rivers left winding veins into the dust-encrusted ground. The craggy mouth of a cave opened at the base of the rock wall to the left of the arrowhead boulder.

On the far side of the mesa, slightly to the right of where they stood, a rockslide had come to rest against the sheer curving wall of stone. The pile was made of boulders that varied in size from small as a snowball to bigger than a refrigerator. Lichen grew between cracks in the rocks, seeming to hold the boulders together on the slope.

A pale-leafed olive tree and a dwarf fig tree strained to grow diagonally around the boulders on the slope.

This must have been the green speck Luce had seen at a distance from below. Dee had said it was their destination, but Luce couldn’t believe they’d climbed all that way through the long expanse of writhing dust.

Everybody’s wings looked like they belonged to Outcasts, brown and battered, emitting the dullest glow. The actual Outcasts’ wings looked even more fragile than normal, like cobwebs. Dee used a wind-stretched sweater sleeve to wipe the dust from her face. She ran red-nail-polished fingers through wild red hair. Somehow the old lady still looked elegant. Luce didn’t want to consider what she looked like.

“Never a dull moment!” Dee’s voice trailed behind her as she disappeared into the cave.

They followed her inside, stopping a few feet in, where the dusky light withered into darkness. Luce leaned against a cold reddish-brown sandstone wall next to Daniel. His head nearly skimmed the low ceiling. All the angels had to tuck their wings down to accommo-date the tightness of the cave.

Luce heard a scraping sound, and then Dee’s shadow stretched into the lit portion at the entrance of the cave.

She pushed a large wooden chest toward them with the toe of her hiking boot.

Cam and Roland rushed to help her, the muted amber glow of their dusty wings altering the darkness of the space. Each lifted a corner of the chest and they carried it to a natural alcove in the cave that Dee’s gestures indicated. At her approving nod, they set it down against the cave wall.

“Thank you, gentlemen.” Dee ran her fingers along the brass edge of the trunk. “It seems like only yesterday I had this carted up here. Though it must have been nearly two hundred years ago.” Her face furrowed into a small frown of nostalgia. “Oh, well, a person’s life is but a day. Gabbe helped me, though because of the dust storms, she never recalled the exact location. That was an angel who knew the value of advance preparation.

She knew this day would come.”

Dee slipped an elegant silver key from the pocket of her cardigan and twisted it into the chest’s lock. As the old thing creaked open, Luce edged forward, expecting something magical—or at least historic—to be revealed.

Instead, Dee tossed out six standard-issue army canteens, three small bronze lanterns, a heavy stack of blankets and towels, and an armful of crowbars, pickaxes, and shovels.

“Drink up if you need to. Lucinda first.” She distributed the canteens, which were filled with cold, delicious water. Luce inhaled the contents of her canteen and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. When she licked her lips, they were prickly with dry sand.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Dee smiled. She slid open a box of matches and lit a candle in each one of the lanterns. Light flickered off the walls, generating dramatic shadows as the angels bent over, pivoted, brushed each other off.

Arriane and Annabelle scrubbed at their wings with the dry towels. Daniel, Roland, and Cam preferred to shake the sand out of theirs, beating them against the rocks until the soft sssss sound of sand falling on the stone floor faded. The Outcasts seemed content to stay dirty. Soon the cave was brightly lit with an angelic glow, as if someone had started a bonfire.

“What now?” Roland asked, pouring the sand out of one of his leather boots.

Dee had moved to the mouth of the cave, her back to the others. She walked to the flat stone expanse outside, then waited for them to follow.

They gathered in a small half circle, facing the sloping pile of boulders and the struggling olive and fig trees.

“We need to go inside, ” Dee said.

“Inside where?” Luce turned around to look behind her. The cave they’d just walked out of was the only “inside” option Luce could see. Out here, there was only the flat floor of the mesa and the rockslide against the cliff wall.

“Sanctuaries are built on top of sanctuaries are built on top of sanctuaries,” Dee said. “The first one on Earth used to stand right here under this slope of fallen rock.

Inside it, the final piece of the fallens’ early history is encoded. This is the Qayom Malak. After the first sanctuary was destroyed, several others followed in its place, but the Qayom Malak always remained within them.”

“You mean that mortals have used the Qayom Malak, too?” Luce asked.

“Without much thought or understanding. Over the years it grew more and more misunderstood by each new group to build their temple here. For many, this site has been considered unlucky”—she glanced at Arriane, who shifted her weight—“but that is no one’s fault. It was a long time ago. Tonight, we unearth what once was lost.”

“You mean the knowledge of our Fall?” Roland paced the perimeter of the slope of rocks. “That’s what the Qayom Malak will tell us?”

Dee smiled cryptically. “The words are Aramaic.

They mean . . . well, it’s better if you just see for yourselves.”

Beside them, Arriane was chewing noisily on a strand of her hair, her hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her overalls, her wings stiff and unmoving. She stared at the fig and olive trees, as if in a trance.

Luce noticed now what was strange about the trees.

The reason they seemed to grow diagonally out of the stone was that their trunks lay buried deep beneath the boulders.

“The trees,” she said.

“Yes, once they were fully exposed.” Dee bent down to caress the withering green leaves of the little fig tree.

“As was the Qayom Malak. ” She rose and patted the heap of boulders. “This whole mesa was once much larger. A lovely, vibrant place at times, though that’s hard to imagine now.”

“What happened to it?” Luce asked. “How was the sanctuary destroyed?”

“The most recent one was covered up by this rockslide. That was about seven hundred years ago, after a particularly severe earthquake. But even before that, the list of calamities to occur here was unprecedented—

flood, fire, murder, war, explosions.” She paused, peering into the pile of boulders as if it were a mass of crystal balls. “Still, the only part that matters endures. At least I hope it does. And that’s why we need to go inside.” Cam ambled over to one of the larger boulders, leaned against it with his arms crossed. “I excel at many things, Dee, not the least of which is rock. But passing through rock isn’t one of my gifts.” Dee clapped her hands. “That is precisely why I packed the shovels all those years ago. We’ll have to clear the rocks aside,” Dee said. “We seek what lies within.”

“You’re saying we’re going to excavate the Qayom Malak?” Annabelle asked, biting pink fingernails.

Dee touched a mossy patch at the center of the mound of boulders, spilled long before from the cliffs.

“I’d start here if I were you!”

When they realized that Dee was serious about dis-mantling the tower of boulders, Roland distributed the tools Dee had flung out of the wooden chest. They set to work.

“As you clear, make sure you leave this area free.” Dee gestured to the open space between the rockslide and the head of the trail that had brought them there.

She marked off an area of about ten square feet. “We’re going to need it.”

Luce took a pickax and tapped it uncertainly against the rock.

“Do you know what it looks like?” she said to Daniel, whose crowbar was wedged around a rock behind the fig tree. “How will we recognize the Qayom Malak when we find it?”

“There’s no illustration in my book for this.” Daniel split the rock easily with a tilt of his hand. The muscles of his arms trembled as he lifted the boulder halves, each the size of a large suitcase. He tossed them behind him, careful not to let them land inside the area Dee had marked off. “We’ll just have to trust that Dee remembers.”

Luce stepped into the open space where the boulder Daniel moved aside had been. The rest of the olive and fig trees were now exposed, down to their trunks. They had been nearly flattened by the tons of fallen rock. Her gaze flew around the gigantic pile of rocks they’d have to clear. It was easily twenty feet high. Could anything have withstood the might of this landslide?

“Don’t worry,” Dee called out, as if reading Luce’s mind. “It’s in there somewhere, tucked away as safely as your first memory of love.”

The Outcasts had flown to the top of the slope. Phil showed the others where to cast the boulders they’d already chipped away, and they slammed them back into the face of the slope, causing the compounded rock to fracture and slide down the sides.

“Hey! I see some really old yellow brick.” Annabelle’s wings fluttered above the rockslide’s highest point, where it edged up against the mountain’s sheer, vertical walls. She heaved away some debris with her shovel. “I think it might be a wall of the sanctuary.”

“A wall, dear? Very good,” Dee said. “There should be three more of them, the way walls often go. Keep digging.” She was distracted, pacing the flat square of rock she’d marked off near the trailhead, not noticing the progress of the dig. She seemed to be counting something. Her gaze was fixed on the mesa floor. Luce watched Dee for a few moments and saw that the old lady was counting her steps, as if blocking a play.

She looked up, caught Luce’s eye. “Come with me.”

Luce glanced at Daniel, at his sweat-glistening skin.

He was busy with a large, unwieldy boulder. She turned and followed Dee into the mouth of the cave.

Dee’s lantern wobbled strobe-like into the dark recesses. The cave was infinitely darker and colder without the glow of angel wings. Dee rummaged for a few moments in her chest.

“Where is that bloody broom?” Dee asked.

Luce crouched over Dee, holding up another lantern to help light her search. She reached into the enormous trunk and her hands brushed the rough straw of a broom.

“Here.”

“Wonderful. Always the last place you look, especially when you can’t see.” Dee slung the broom over her shoulder. “I want to show you something while the others continue with the excavation.”

They walked back out onto the mesa, into the echoing of metal striking stone. Dee stopped at the edge of the rockslide, facing the space she’d asked the angels to leave clear. She began to drag the broom in brisk straight lines. Luce had thought the mesa was all made of the same flat red rock, but as Dee brushed and swept and brushed and swept, Luce noticed there was a shallow marble platform underneath. And a pattern was emerg-ing: Pale yellow stone alternated with white rocks to form an intricate, inlaid design.

Eventually Luce recognized a symbol: one long line of yellow stone, edged by white descending diagonal lines of decreasing length.

Luce crouched down to run her fingers along the stone. It looked like an arrowhead, pointing away from the top of the mountain, back down in the direction from which the angels had arrived.

“This is the Arrowhead Slab,” Dee said. “Once everything is ready, we will use it as a kind of stage. Cam crafted the mosaic many years ago, though I doubt that he remembers. He’s been through so much since then.

Heartbreak is its own form of amnesia.”

“You know about the woman who broke Cam’s heart?” Luce whispered, remembering that Daniel had told her never to mention it.

Dee frowned, nodded, and pointed to the yellow arrow in the marble tiles. “What do you think of the design?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Luce said.

“I do, too,” Dee said. “I have a similar one tattooed over my heart.”

Smiling, Dee unbuttoned the top two buttons of her cardigan to reveal a yellow camisole. She drew the neckline down a couple of inches, exposing the pale skin of her chest. At last, she pointed to a black tattoo over her breast. It was precisely the same shape as the lines in the stone on the ground.

“What does it mean?” Luce asked.

Dee patted the skin beneath the tattoo and pulled her camisole back up. “I can’t wait to tell you”—she smiled, pivoting to face the slope of rock behind them—“but first things first. Look how well they’re doing!” The angels and Outcasts had cleared away a portion of the exterior of the rockslide. The right angle of two old brick walls rose several feet out of the debris. They were badly damaged, unintended windows smashed into existence here and there. The roof was gone. Some of the bricks were blackened by a long-forgotten fire.

Others looked moldy, as if recovering from a prehistoric flood. But the rectangular shape of the former temple was starting to become clear.

“Dee,” Roland called, waving the woman over to the northern wall to inspect his progress.

Luce returned to Daniel’s side. In the time she’d been with Dee, he’d cleared a heaping pile of rock and stacked it neatly to the right of the slope. She felt bad that she was barely helping. She picked up the pickax again.

They worked for hours. It was well after midnight by the time they’d cleared half the slope. Dee’s lanterns lit the mesa, but Luce liked staying close to Daniel, using the unique glow of his wings to see. Her jaw ached from the tension in her face. Her shoulders were sore and her eyes stung. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t complain.

She kept hacking. She took a swing at a square of pink stone exposed by a boulder Daniel had just removed, expecting her ax to glance off solid rock. Instead, she sliced into something soft. Luce dropped her ax and burrowed with her hands into this surprisingly claylike patch. She’d reached a layer of sandstone so crumbly it fell apart with the touch of a finger. She moved the lantern closer to get a better look as she tore away large chunks. Underneath several inches of clay she felt something smooth and hard. “I found something!” The others circled around as Luce wiped her hands on her jeans and used her fingers to brush clean a square tile about two feet in diameter. Once, it must have been completely painted, but all that was visible now was a thin outline of a man with a halo orbiting his head.

“Is this it?” she asked, excited.

Dee’s shoulder brushed against Luce’s. She touched the tile with her thumb. “I’m afraid not, dear. This is just a depiction of our friend Jesus. We have to go further back than him.”

“Further back?” Luce asked.

“All the way inside.” Dee knocked on the tile. “This is the façade of the most recent sanctuary, a medieval monastery for particularly antisocial monks. We must dig down to the original structure, behind this wall.” She noticed Luce’s hesitation. “Don’t be afraid to destroy ancient iconography,” Dee said. “It must be done to get to what’s really old.” She looked at the sky, as if searching for the sun, but it had long sunk below the flat drop of horizon behind them. The stars were out. “Oh dear. Time ticks on, doesn’t it? Keep going! You’re doing fine!”

Finally, Phil stepped forward with his crowbar and bashed through the Jesus tile. It left a hole, and the space behind it was hollow and dark and smelled strange and musky and old.

The Outcasts leaped on the busted tile, widening the crevice so they could dig deeper inside. They were hard workers, efficient in their destruction. They found that without a roof over the sanctuary, the rockslide had filled the interior, as well. The Outcasts took turns tearing the wall away and casting aside the boulders flowing out from the structure.

Arriane stood away from the group, in a darkened corner of the enclosed plateau, kicking a pile of rocks as if trying to start a lawn mower. Luce walked over to her.

“Hey,” Luce said. “You okay?”

Arriane looked up, thumbing the straps of her overalls. A crazy smile flashed across her face. “Remember when we had detention together? They made us clean up the cemetery at Sword & Cross? We got paired together, scrubbing that angel?”

“Of course.” Luce had been miserable that day—

chewed out by Molly, anxious about and infatuated with Daniel, and, come to think of it, unsure whether Arriane liked her or was simply taking pity on her.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Arriane’s voice sounded distant. “I’m always going to remember that.”

“Arriane,” Luce said, “that’s not what you’re really thinking about right now, is it? What is it about this place that’s making you hide over here?”

Arriane stood with her feet balanced on her shovel and swayed back and forth. She watched the Outcasts and the other angels unearthing a tall interior column from the rocks.

Finally, Arriane closed her eyes and blurted out, “I’m the reason this sanctuary doesn’t exist anymore. I’m the reason it’s bad luck.”

“But—Dee said it wasn’t anyone’s fault. What happened?”

“After the Fall,” she said, “I was getting my strength back, looking for shelter, for a way to mend my wings. I hadn’t yet returned to the Throne. I didn’t even know how to do that. I didn’t remember what I was. I was alone and I saw this place and I—”

“You wandered into the sanctuary that used to be here,” Luce said, remembering what Daniel had told her about the reason fallen angels didn’t go near churches.

They had all been edgy at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They wouldn’t go near the chapel on Pont Saint Benezet.

“I didn’t know!” Arriane’s chest shuddered when she inhaled.

“Of course you didn’t.” Luce put her arm around Arriane’s side. She was skin and bones and wings. The angel rested her head on Luce’s shoulder. “Did it blow up?” Arriane nodded. “The way you do . . . no”—she corrected herself—“the way you used to in your other lives.

Poof. The whole thing up in flames. Only, this wasn’t—

sorry for saying this—like, all beautifully tragic or romantic. This was bleak and black and absolute. Like a door slamming in my face. That’s when I knew that I was really kicked out of Heaven.” She turned to Luce, her wide blue eyes more innocent than Luce could remember seeing them. “I never meant to leave. It was an accident, a lot of us just got swept up in . . . someone else’s battle.”

She shrugged and a corner of her mouth curved mis-chievously. “Maybe I got too used to being a reject.

Kinda suits me, though, don’t you think?” She made a pistol with her fingers and fired it in Cam’s direction. “I guess I don’t mind running around with this pack of out-laws.” Then Arriane’s face changed, any trace of whimsy disappearing. She gripped Luce by the shoulders and whispered, “That’s it.”

“What?” Luce spun around.

The angels and the Outcasts had cleared away several tons of stone. They were now standing where thepile of rocks had stood. It had taken until just before dawn.

Around them rose the inner sanctuary Dee had promised they would find. The old, elegant lady was as good as her word.

Only two frail walls were left, forming a right angle, but the gray tile border on the floor suggested an original design that spanned roughly twenty square feet.

Large solid marble bricks made up the bases of the walls, where smaller crumbling sandstone bricks had once held up a roof. Weathered friezes decorated portions of the structure—winged creatures so old and worn they almost blended back into the stone. An ancient fire had scorched portions of the flared decorative cornices near the tops of the walls.

The now completely uncovered fig and olive trees marked the barrier between Dee’s broom-swept Arrowhead Slab and the excavated sanctuary. The two missing walls left the rest of the structure exposed to Luce’s imagination, which pictured ancient pilgrims kneeling to pray here. It was clear where they would kneel: Four Ionic marble columns with fluted bases and scrolled caps had been built around a raised platform in the center of the tile. And on that platform stood a giant rectangular altar built of pale tan stone.

It looked familiar, but unlike anything Luce had ever seen before. It was caked with dirt and rocks and Luce could make out the shadow of a decoration carved on top: two stone angels facing each other, each the size of a large doll. They’d once been painted with gold, it seemed, but now only flecks of their former sheen remained. The carved angels kneeled in prayer, heads down, halo-free, with their beautifully detailed wings arched forward so that the tips of them were touching.

“Yes.” Dee took a deep breath. “That’s it. Qayom Malak. It means ‘the Overseer of the Angels.’ Or, as I like to call it, ‘the Angels’ Aide.’ It holds a secret no soul has ever deciphered: the key to where the fallen fell to Earth.

Do you remember it, Arriane?”

“I think so.” Arriane seemed nervous as she stepped toward the sculpture. When she reached the platform, she stood still for a long time before the kneeling angels.

Then she kneeled herself. She touched their wing tips, the place where the two angels connected. She shivered.

“I only saw it for a second before—”

“Yes,” Dee said. “You were blasted out of the sanctuary. The force of the explosion caused the first avalanche that buried the Qayom Malak, but the fig and olive trees remained exposed, a beacon for the other sanctuaries that were built in the coming years. The Christians were here, the Greeks, the Jews, the Moors. Their sanctuaries fell, too, to avalanche, fire, to scandal or fear, creating an impenetrable wall around the Qayom Malak. You needed me to help you find it again. And you couldn’t find me until you really needed me.”

“What happens now?” Cam asked. “Don’t tell me we have to pray.”

Dee’s eyes never left the Qayom Malak, even as she tossed Cam the towel draped over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s far worse, Cam. Now you’ve got to clean. Polish the angels, especially their wings. Polish them until they shine. We are going to need the moonlight to shine on them in precisely the right way.”