“Rest,” I tell her softly. I pull the tangled blankets up and over us, because she is trembling again. I reach for the lamp and douse the light. One of her legs slips over mine as if she needs the extra reassurance that I won’t slip out in the night. I squeeze her tighter, and she brings a hand to my chest, touching my scars.

  “I like them,” she says simply.

  We lay together, and it feels good, the touch of her breasts against my chest, pressing into me with each breath. It shouldn’t feel this comfortable. Don’t get too close. Especially now, I think.

  “Tarren?” Her voice comes out of the darkness a while later, just as my thoughts are beginning to slip away.

  “Yes?” I blink my eyes open and see the faint outline of her figure against me.

  Her face is tucked against my shoulder. “Thank you. For this night,” she whispers.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Now I know I’m gonna die. You never would’ve been that nice to me if I were going to survive.”

  I sigh and shift so that we face each other. “As soon as the sun comes up, I want you in front of the Prism again.”

  “There’s something I need you to do.” The humor is gone from her voice. So is the softness. Her words are hard as diamonds. “Call it my dying wish. No wait, call it a noble quest. You’re all about those, right?”

  I already know what she is going to ask. It’s the only thing she’s ever wanted, besides me. “I can’t,” I tell her softly. “I wouldn’t…know how, and it’d be too dangerous.”

  She shakes her head. “No more angels. No more mission. No more danger,” she says. “And since I’ll be dead, you wouldn’t have to worry about me accidentally draining her.”

  I open my mouth.

  “And as to not knowing how…Tarren, no one knows how to be a parent. You just make it up as you go along.”

  “She’s better in your sister’s care,” I say.

  “Mazy has four kids of her own and a shitty, alcoholic husband.”

  “What?” I didn’t know about the alcoholic husband, and now my stomach churns with the implications.

  “He doesn’t beat the kids or anything,” she says. “I wouldn’t let that happen. But he can’t keep a job, and he’s not a father to them.” She pulls herself up so that she’s looking down at me. “Tarren, our daughter needs you. Be her hero. Be her father.”

  ***

  As soon as the sun comes up, I make Danielle sit in front of the Prism while I gently sand down the scabs that seeped across her palms during the night. She is noticeably thinner, and her skin shines with fever. She locks herself in her bathroom for over an hour, wasting precious sunlight. I hear the murmur of her voice as she speaks on the phone, but when she comes out, she won’t answer my questions about it.

  Just before noon, she gives me an address and then doesn’t say much as I drive us to a glittering glass building near the heart of Las Vegas. Up on the sixth floor, a bored receptionist ushers us into a large office without a wait. A tall, round woman in an expensive suit sits behind a pristine desk. Every item, from the stapler to the Starbucks coffee cup lines up in perfect harmony along the edge. Even the short pile of forms at her elbow seems like it belongs there.

  I glance at the prepared forms. “You made an appointment; that’s what you were doing,” I say to Danielle. She shrugs without looking at me.

  The attorney speaks with us for a half hour. I immediately appreciate her candor and the clipped efficiency with which she answers my questions. Danielle asks no questions. I notice her shoulders slump. She needs to get back to the Prism. We are wasting daylight.

  The attorney slides the papers to us. Danielle presses her shaking hand on them. Despite the virus raging through her, she makes a concentrated effort to create a looping, dancing signature again and again.

  I stare at the papers. I need more time to process, to understand the implications of the responsibilities I am accepting.

  “Just sign the damn things,” Danielle hisses at me.

  This isn’t pre-mission prep, I realize. I’m in the mission right now. My mindset immediately shifts. No time to analyze and plan. I need to make instant decisions, follow my instincts to keep everyone safe. I sign my quick, clean signature again and again, accepting guardianship of the trust that now holds Danielle’s estate until the day that our daughter turns eighteen. Next, we shuffle down a hallway, where a young, balding attorney with a red-tipped nose has more paperwork waiting for us. Again we sit through a lecture. Again I sign, this time accepting full custody of our daughter.

  “My sister won’t contest it,” Danielle says, “but just in case.”

  Danielle is wilting as I drive away from the tall, glass building. She leans back against the seat and clamps her fingers down on the folders holding copies of all our signed paperwork in her lap.

  After a while she says, “Your little virus is hitting the news.”

  “I know.” Bodies are already stacking up in the morgues. It was mild chatter yesterday, but this morning a senator’s aide was found dead. The CDC is urging caution, but the news is already calling it a “highly virulent outbreak.”

  It won’t be long until the autopsies reveal the significant physical differences of the angels’ bodies, from their enlarged hearts and lungs to their shrunken stomachs and the entirely new feeding system hidden in each palm. Even on a cellular level, their uniqueness is stark, the mitochondria almost 30 percent larger in every angel cell. So many bodies in so many different morgues. The news will surely leak, and then what?

  “You thought I was lying.” Danielle’s voice is faint. I ease to a stop at a red light and look over to her. She put her makeup on while she was in the bathroom this morning. The paper white hue of her skin is hidden by a smooth layer of powder, and her eyes are bright with liner and eyeshadow. Even her bloodless lips are now a rich scarlet. She almost looks healthy, except her eyes are sunken in their sockets, and her makeup doesn’t seem quite as polished as usual.

  “You lie about a lot of things,” I say, wondering where she is leading me.

  “When I told you I was pregnant.”

  The light turns green, and the BMW jerks as I hit the accelerator too hard. I back off on the gas, letting the car ease into the speed limit. I glance at Danielle again, though I need to keep my eyes on the road.

  She’s right. When she’d told me, I’d assumed it was another game of hers, another way to throw me off balance.

  “I thought it was impossible,” I say simply.

  “I was so stupid. I had this…this idiot dream that…” Danielle pauses. She almost looks wistful, an expression that seems wholly wrong on her. “…that you would be happy about it. But you weren’t.”

  “No.”

  Grand, Maya’s biological father, had been obsessed with breeding angels. Before he discovered that a bone marrow transfer could affect the change, he attempted many other methods, including standard copulation. We’d discovered a hastily abandoned laptop when we raided one of his labs, and Gabe was able to crack it. Grand found that two angels together were infertile, but my mother’s pregnancy with Maya was proof that a male angel and a female human could procreate. The natural conclusion was that the female angel must be the point of failure. Perhaps a male angel’s sperm was unaffected by the transition into an angel, but a female with her uterus and fallopian tubes and all the cascades of hormones needed to bring a baby to term; how could all that sensitive biological machinery stay intact while everything else profoundly shifted as part of the change?

  Danielle is silent in the seat next to me. Is she remembering the day she told me? She’d been three months pregnant at that point. When she pulled up her blouse, her stomach, usually so flat and taut, was distended just enough to be noticeable. I’d put my hand there, sure that it was a trick or illusion, but I’d felt the hardness beneath, the pocket of something growing within her.

  But what? A human? An angel? Some mutated creature that was something wholly different? What were we bringing into the world?

  “No,” I say again. “I wasn’t happy. Not then.”

  “You told me to—“

  “I know what I told you to do.” I make an effort to loosen my grip on the steering wheel. “We need a child seat.”

  “I ordered one on Amazon,” she replies. “It’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “We’re here,” I say unnecessarily, as we reach the second address on Danielle’s list, a massive apartment complex. Old cars sit in the uncovered spaces in front of the apartments. Weary cars. I pull into a visitor spot and turn off the engine. We’re here, I think again, but the words have a whole new meaning. How am I going to do this?

  “Shhhhhhh,” Danielle says and touches my arm. “Your heart is pounding like crazy. She doesn’t bite…well, I don’t think she bites.” She opens her door and levers herself to her feet. Her breathing is more labored.

  She leans against me in the elevator, but stands up straight when I knock on the door of apartment 441. The manila folder with all our paperwork trembles against her chest. I hear a child screaming within the apartment. Is that our daughter?

  Danielle glances at me, smiles.

  I’m going to see her. See Tammy, I think. I’ve never felt so unprepared.

  After a second round of knocking, the door eases open to the length of the security chain. Big brown eyes peer out from a tired, round face. I recognize that face, the resigned expression on it identical to the one it held two years ago when we showed up on Mazy’s doorstep with a newborn infant.

  “I knew you would come back for her,” says Danielle’s sister as she unlatches the door.

  Chapter 48 – Gabe

  Call me a shithead. Call me the stupidest motherfucker who’s ever had the audacity to take up oxygen on this planet.

  I can’t find my sister…again.

  Seems like it shouldn’t even be possible to lose someone in this day and age unless she decided to bunk down in a nice cozy hut in the middle of the rainforest. Hell, last I heard there was hardly any rainforest left. But Maya returned my rental car, and she’s not using any of the fake identities I created for her. I would call lover boy Rain, ‘cept that Maya took my phone, the only thing that had everyone’s new post-STYX numbers in it. The whole Broken Wings network went dark, quadruple encrypted since Maya was taken. Took me almost a week to find it again, and I’ve been trying to work my way through the layers to reach one of the higher ups. Nothin’ doing; almost like they’re all having a big party without me.

  And don’t think I haven’t been calling my cell phone every minute of every day. Little sis isn’t picking up. Which leaves me utterly cut off.

  It’s all my fault, naturally. Maya gets kidnapped by some big baddies, almost starved down to a pile of bones, and what do I do? Give her tons of brotherly hugs and a shoulder to cry on? Nope. I drink myself stupid, puke all over the place, and decide that showering is optional. That’s what she wakes up to. Sure, I had a big gaping hole in my chest that Tarren exploded out of me, but that’s no excuse. Thing is, now I’ve got a brand new hole getting bigger and bigger inside me as the days pass and Maya is still gone.

  I don’t even know where to start looking, which means I’m stuck here in the rental house. I try to keep busy cleaning up all my mess. The kitchen was a doozy. I’m still picking up glass shards off the floor. I also scrubbed all the rings off the coffee table, dumped every kind of carpet cleaner on the vomit spots, and basically tried to undo the wreckage of my existence.

  After my rental ends in two days, I have absolutely no plan for what comes next. Tarren was always the man with a plan. Sometimes the only thing that gets me through the next hour, the next minute is looking at that picture collage Maya made for me. During the long nights, when my tired eyes can’t look at another pixel on the computer, I stare at the pictures. Here they are, the ones I love: Dr. Lee, Francesca, Maya, Tarren, my parents when they were almost as young as we are now, and Tammy as the little girl I remember telling me my first glorious fart jokes and making me wear Mom’s dresses and makeup until I cried and stormed away.

  In other news – and I suppose this is important too – the world’s apparently ending. The plague is upon us. Totally healthy people are dropping dead as doornails. Their veins turn all red, their skin gets rashy, and their body just basically melts from the inside out. They’re calling it the Red Death.

  Figures. My world is gone to hell. Seems kind of right that everything else is falling apart too.

  Some politician was found dead yesterday, and today the news anchors have practically been having on-air orgasms as they tick off a handful of dead CEOs, B-list celebrities, and washed-up sports stars. Naturally, people are handling the news calmly and rationally.

  …as in grocery stores are already selling out of jumbo bags of rice and water, and crackpot religious leaders are crowing that we’ve arrived on the doorstep of the end of days. The angry looking woman from the CDC is telling people to wear masks when in crowds, to isolate those with symptoms right away, and to keep kids and the old folks at home. I landed on a news update this morning long enough to see a reporter standing almost alone in Time’s Square.

  Weird. Scary. And Maya’s out there in this crazy plague stew pot.

  Right now I’m sitting on one of the beds upstairs, staring at the collage. My eyes are fixed on the picture Maya took of herself, the one where she’s crossing her blue eyes and sticking her tongue out like a lunatic. It’s the face she always made behind Tarren’s back whenever he went extra drill sergeanty, or calmly lectured us on all the ways we could have done better after a mission, or when he was just generally being his overbearing self. She made that face a lot.

  Stupid thing is, I know we got in a big fight, but I can’t remember what it was about. I hope I didn’t say anything horrible and nasty to her. I’m not a praying man, but I’m just about down to my last resort, which is to hit my knees and ask the big guy to bring her back.

  Someone knocks on the front door. I put the collage down and look up at the ceiling.

  “Really? You’re gonna give me this one?” I ask. I kind of feel like a dick for sounding so suspicious, but see Exhibit A: my life. Then I forget about all that and haul ass downstairs to the door. I swing it open, and my big, idiot grin crashes off my face. I think I hear it make a sad, wet plop on the ground.

  “What do you want?”

  “You look like shit,” Chain responds.

  “Yeah, probably the plague.”

  What the hell is this crazy motherfucker doing on the porch of my rented house? Then I know the answer. Only way he could’ve found me is if Maya told him where I was.

  “You can’t have the plague,” he says in that deep, fake Batman voice.

  “Oh yeah? Tell me where my sister is, or I’ll start French kissing you, and we can see which one of us is right.”

  “The plague was us,” Chain says shortly. “And Maya. She, uh…fuck.”

  “The plague was you?” I repeat like a parrot. My brain is trying to work, but I’m the stupid one in the family. “It only affects angels.” He’s looking way uncomfortable now. My stomach starts dropping. Chain can’t meet my eyes. My stomach might just burrow down to China, the way it’s going.

  “Where’s Maya?” I ask very softly.

  Chapter 49 – Maya

  Everything is heavy. Arms. Legs. Bones. It’s time.

  I can’t go home. I hurt Rain in that house. Stole his energy. No, not home. Somewhere else. A place with just one memory, a good memory.

  I have to focus, but I find the numbers in my mind, the latitude and longitude Tarren gave to us. I put them in my phone and drive slowly through the Nevada desert, my car weaving on the empty, pitted road. The craggy mountains loom, and sometimes I think they speak to me, whispering ancient secrets, but I know that’s just me dying.

  The world begins losing colors. Its bright greens and rosy pinks disappear, but some colors stay. The rocks show ochre faces, and the sky overhead is pure blue. Blue as blue, true as true.

  My mind is falling away, lost in the tangles of memories, but my good, good, good phone finds the way. I pull off the dusty road, and though the mountains all look the same, I recognize the one I want. This is Tarren’s mountain. He told us to come here if we ever got lost, if we ever couldn’t find each other.

  I am lost. And this is where I will find him.

  Chapter 50 – Tarren

  My daughter is an enigma. She is an alien world contained in a tiny, round body. In the guest bedroom of Danielle’s house, she looks at me with big, blue eyes from behind a tangle of black hair and hugs her stuffed horse to her chest.

  Based on the research I’ve conducted, I know that by age two, she should already know more than a hundred words, speak in short sentences, be able to turn doorknobs, and kick a ball. I have memorized every bit of child development minutia I could find, but I know nothing about her, about Tammy. I don’t know what foods she likes or any of the thoughts running behind those blue eyes.

  “My name is Tarren,” I tell her. I stand in the doorway of the bedroom, keeping my distance so as not to scare her. “Do you remember who I am?”

  She buries her face into the side of her horse.

  “I’m your father,” I remind her, though I told her this on the car ride back to the house. “I will be caring for you now. Are you hungry?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Thirsty?”

  Nothing.

  “Do you need your diaper changed?” I have already determined that we will begin potty training lessons in the near future.

  “I want, want go home,” she says softly into the horse.

  “This is your new home.”

  She shakes her head. “I want go home.”

  Then she begins to cry, her voice keening, her entire small body convulsing with sobs. I feel helpless in the face of her tears, uncertain if I should go to her, or if that will make things worse. I take a hesitant step inside the room, and she emits a high-pitched squeal, crawling across the floor and shimmying under the bed where the sobs continue.