Rapture

Page 34

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.”
FOURTEEN
AIR APPARENT
Boom.
It sounded like thunder, the brewing of a dark tornado. Luce jumped awake inside the cave, where she’d fallen asleep on Daniel’s shoulder. She hadn’t meant to doze off, but Dee had insisted on resting before explain-ing the purpose of the Qayom Malak. Stirred from sleep now, Luce had the feeling that many precious hours had passed. She was sweating in her flannel sleeping bag. The silver locket felt hot against her chest.