Luce had been awake only an instant when she felt Daniel’s hand lift her from the rocking chair and out the door of the quiet hut. He must have held her in his arms all night.

  “Wait,” she said. “Ready for what?”

  The others were watching her, gathered in a circle as if they had been waiting, the angels and Outcasts all with their wings extended.

  A cloud of storks crossed the sky, their black-tipped wings spread wide as palm fronds. Their flight darkened the sun for a moment, casting shadows on the angels’

  wings, before the birds moved on.

  “Tell me who I am,” Daniel said plainly.

  He was the only angel with his wings concealed inside his clothes. He stepped away from her, rolled back his shoulders, closed his eyes, and released his wings.

  They unfurled swiftly, with supreme elegance, blooming out on either side of him and sending back a gust of wind that swayed the boughs of the apricot trees.

  Daniel’s wings towered over his body, radiant and wondrous, making him look unfathomably beautiful. He shone like a sun—not only his wings, his whole body—

  and even more than that. What the angels called their glory radiated from Daniel. Luce couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  “You’re an angel.”

  He opened his violet eyes.

  “Tell me more.”

  “You’re—you’re Daniel Grigori,” Luce continued.

  “You’re the angel who has loved me for thousands of years. You’re the boy I’ve loved back from the moment—

  no, from every moment I first saw you.” She watched the sun play off the whiteness of his wings, yearned to feel them wrap around her. “You are the soul that fits into mine.”

  “Good,” Daniel said. “Now, tell me who you are.”

  “Well . . . I’m Lucinda Price. I’m the girl you fall in love with.”

  There was a tense stillness all around them. All the angels seemed to hold their breath.

  Daniel’s violet eyes filled with tears. He whispered:

  “More.”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  He shook his head.

  “Daniel?”

  “Lucinda.”

  The way he said her name—so gravely—made her stomach ache. What did he want from her?

  She blinked, and it sounded like a thunderbolt—and then the Trojan plain went black like it had the night before. The earth was marred by crooked fissures. Smoking craters stood where the field had been. Dust and ash and death were everywhere. The trees were on fire along the horizon, and a foul belch of rot rolled in on the wind.

  It was as if her soul had hurled her millennia back in time. There was no snow in the mountains, no tidy white hut before her, no circle of angels’ worried faces.

  But there was Daniel.

  His wings shone through the dusty air. His bare skin was perfect, dewy, pink. His eyes glowed with the same intoxicating violet, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the sky. He didn’t seem to know that Luce was next to him.

  Before she could follow his gaze upward, the world began to swirl. The scent on the air changed from rot to arid dust. She was back in Egypt, in the dark tomb where she’d been locked away and almost lost her soul. That scene played out before her eyes: the starshot warm inside her dress, the panic clear on her past face, the kiss that brought her back—and Bill flitting around the pha-raoh’s sarcophagus, already forming his most ambitious scheme. Her ears rang with his craggy laughter.

  And then the laughter was gone. The vision of Egypt morphed into another: A Lucinda from an even more distant past lay prone in a field of high flowers. She wore a deerskin dress and held a dandelion over her face, picking off the petals one by one. The last one wobbled in the wind and she thought, He loves me. The sun was blinding until something crossed before it. Daniel’s face, his eyes brimming violet love, his blond hair sculpting a halo from the rays of the sun.

  He smiled.

  Then his face disappeared. A new vision, another life: the heat of a bonfire on her skin, desire burning in her chest. There were strange, loud music; people laughing; friends and family all around. Luce saw herself with Daniel, dancing wildly around the flames. She could feel the rhythms of the movements deep within her, even as the music faded and the flames licking the sky shifted from hot red to silvery softness—

  A waterfall. A long lush drop of icy water down a limestone cliff. Luce was underneath it, parting a cloud of water lilies with her strokes. Her long wet hair gathered around her shoulders as she rose above the water, then dipped below. She came up on the other side of the waterfall’s torrent, in a humid stone lagoon. And there was Daniel, waiting as if he’d been waiting for her all his life.

  He dove from a rock, splashing her when his body struck the water. He swam toward her, drawing her to him, one arm around her back and the other cradled under her knees. She laced her hands around his neck and let him kiss her. She closed her eyes—

  Boom.

  The thunderbolt again. Luce was back on the smoking Trojan plain. But this time, she was trapped in one of the craters, her body pinned beneath a boulder. She couldn’t move her left arm or leg. She struggled, crying out, seeing spots of red and shards of something that looked like a broken mirror. Her head swirled with the most intense pain she had ever felt.

  “Help!”

  And then: Daniel hovering over her, his violet eyes roving her body in unblinking horror. “What happened to you?”

  Luce didn’t know the answer—didn’t know where she was or how she had gotten there. The Lucinda of her memory didn’t even recognize Daniel. But she did.

  Suddenly, she realized that this was the very first time she and Daniel had met on Earth. This was the moment she’d been begging for, the moment Daniel would never talk about.

  Neither recognized the other. They were already, instantly in love.

  How could this be the place of their first meeting?

  This plagued dark landscape reeked of filth and death.

  Her past self looked beaten, bloodied—like she had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Like she had fallen from an unfathomable height.

  Luce glanced at the sky. Something was there—a mass of infinitesimal sparks, as though Heaven had been electrocuted and shock waves would ripple from it for the rest of time.

  Except the sparks were drawing nearer. Dark forms limned with light tumbled from an infinity above. There must have been a million of them gathered in a chaotic, amorphous band across the sky, dark and light, suspended and falling simultaneously, as if beyond the reach of gravity.

  Had Luce been up there? She felt almost as if she had.

  Then she realized something: Those were the angels.

  This was the Fall.

  The memory of witnessing their fall to Earth ago-nized Luce. It was like watching all the stars fall out of the night sky.

  The farther they fell, the looser their aimless formation became. Single entities became visible, autonomous.

  She couldn’t imagine any of her angels, her friends, ever looking like this. More lost and out of control than the most destitute mortal on the worst day of his life. Was Arriane among them? Was Cam?

  Her gaze traced one orb of light directly overhead. It grew larger and brighter as it approached.

  Daniel looked up, too. Luce realized he didn’t recognize the falling forms, either. His impact on Earth had shuddered through him so thoroughly that it had erased his memory of who he was, where he’d come from, how magnificent he used to be. He watched the sky with raw terror in his eyes.

  A smattering of falling angels were hundreds of feet above their heads one second . . . then close enough that Luce could make out the strange, dark bodies within their vessels of light. The bodies did not move but seemed undeniably alive.

  Closer they fell, bearing down on Luce until she screamed—and the great mass of dark and light crashed into the field beside her.

  An explosion of fire and black smoke knocked Daniel out of Luce’s sight. More were coming. Over a million more were coming. They would pummel the Earth and every living thing on it to a pulp. Luce ducked and shielded her eyes and opened her mouth to scream again.

  But the sound that came out was no scream—

  Because the memory had shifted into something even further back. Further back than the Fall?

  Luce was no longer in the field of smoking craters and meteoric angels.

  She was standing in a landscape of pure light. Any terror in her voice did not belong here, could not have existed in this place, which she knew and did not know.

  She had a sense of where she was, but it couldn’t possibly be real.

  Streaming from her soul was a strong, rich chord of music so beautiful that it turned everything around her white. The crater was gone. The Earth was gone. Her body was—

  She didn’t know. She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything but this fantastic silver-tinged white glow. The brightness unfolded like a package until Luce could make out a vast white meadow spread out before her. Splendid groves of white trees lined either side of the field.

  In the distance was a rippling silver ledge. Luce sensed it was important. Then she saw that there were seven more of them, forming a grand arch in the air around something so bright Luce couldn’t stand to look at it.

  She focused on the ledge, the third one from the left.

  She could not wrest her gaze from it. Why?

  Because . . . Her memory reeled back. . . . Because—

  This ledge belonged to her.

  Long before, she used to sit here, next to . . . who? It seemed to matter.

  Her vision swirled and faded and the silver ledge dis-solved. The remaining whiteness focused, separating into shapes, into—

  Faces. Bodies. Wings. A backdrop of blue sky.

  This was not a memory. She was back in the present, her real and final life. Around her stood her teachers Francesca and Steven; her allies the Outcasts; her friends Roland, Arriane, Annabelle, and Cam. And her love, Daniel. She stared at each one of them and she found them so beautiful. They were watching her with dumb joy on their faces. They were also crying.

  The gift of self-knowledge, Dee had told her. You must remember how to dream what you already know.

  All this had been within her the whole time, in every instant of her every life. Yet only now did Luce feel awake beyond her capacity to imagine what it meant to be awake. A light wind blew across her skin and she could feel the distant sea carried on it from the Mediter-ranean, telling her she was still in Troy. Her vision, too, was clearer than it had ever been before. She saw brilliant dots of pigment making up the wings of a passing golden butterfly. She breathed in the cold air, filling her lungs, smelling the zinc in the loamy soil that would make it fertile in the spring.

  “I was there,” she whispered. “I was in—” Heaven.

  But she couldn’t say it. She knew too much to deny it—and yet not enough to speak the words. Daniel. He would help her.

  Go on, his eyes were pleading.

  Where did she begin? She touched the locket with the picture taken when she and Daniel had lived in Milan.

  “When I visited my past life in Helston,” she began,

  “I learned that our love ran deeper than who we were in any single lifetime—”

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “Our love transcends everything.”

  “And . . . when I visited Tibet, I learned that a single touch or kiss was not the trigger to my curse.”

  “Not touch.” Roland’s voice. He was smiling, standing next to Daniel with his hands clasped behind his back. “Not touch but self-awareness. A level you weren’t ready for—until now.”

  “Yes.” Luce touched her forehead. There was more, so much more. “Versailles.” She began to speak more quickly. “I was condemned to marry a man I didn’t love.

  And your kiss released me, and my death was glorious because we would always find each other again. Forever.”

  “Together forever, whatever the weather,” Arriane chimed in, swiping damp eyes on Roland’s shirtsleeve.

  By now Luce’s throat felt so tight it was difficult to speak. But it was no longer sore. “I didn’t realize until London that your curse was so much worse than mine,” she said to Daniel. “What you had to go through, losing me—”

  “It never mattered,” Annabelle murmured, her wings buzzing so much that her feet were inches off the ground.

  “He would always wait for you.”

  “Chichén Itzá.” Luce closed her eyes. “I learned that an angel’s glory could be deadly to mortals.”

  “Yes,” Steven said. “But you’re still here.”

  “Keep going, Luce.” Francesca’s voice was more encouraging than it had ever been at Shoreline.

  “Ancient China.” She paused. This one’s significance was different from the others. “You showed me that our love was more important than any arbitrary war.” No one spoke. Daniel gave the faintest nod.

  And that was when Luce understood, not just who she was—but what it all added up to. There was another lifetime from her voyage through the Announcers that Luce felt she had to mention. She took a breath.

  Don’t think of Bill, she told herself. You are not afraid.

  “When I was locked in the tomb in Egypt, I knew once and for all that I would always choose your love.” That was when the angels dropped to one knee, gazing up at her expectantly—all of them except Daniel.

  His eyes glowed the most potent shade of violet she had ever seen. He reached for her, but before his hands met hers:

  “Auugh!” Luce cried out as a sharp pain sliced through her back. Her body convulsed with a foreign, piercing sensation. Her eyes teared. Her ears rang. She thought she might be sick from the pain. But slowly, it localized, from an acute agony all over her back, into two small sections at the tops of her shoulder blades.

  Was she bleeding? She reached back, over her shoulder. The wound felt tender and raw, and also as if something were being drawn out from within her. It didn’t hurt, but it was bewildering. Panicked, she whirled her head around but she could see nothing, could only hear the sound of skin sliding and being stretched, the thrrrrrp that sounded like new muscles were being generated.

  Then came a sudden feeling of heaviness, as if weights had been strapped around her shoulders.

  And then—in her peripheral vision, vast billowing whiteness on either side of her as a collective gasp rose from the angels’ lips.

  “Oh, Lucinda,” Daniel whispered, his hand covering his mouth.

  It was this easy: She spread her wings.

  They were luminous, buoyant, impossibly light, made of the finest, most reflective empyrean matter. From tip to tip, her wingspan was maybe thirty feet, but they felt vast, endless. She felt no more pain. When her fingers curled around the base of them behind her shoulders, they were several inches thick and plush. They were silver, yet not silver, like the surface of a mirror. They were inconceivable; they were inevitable.

  They were her wings.

  They contained every ounce of strength and empow-erment she had amassed over the millennia she had lived.

  And at the slightest whim of a thought, her wings began to beat.

  Her first thought: I can do anything now.

  Wordlessly, she and Daniel reached for one another’s hands. Their wing tips arched forward in a kind of kiss, like the angels’ wings on the Qayom Malak. They were crying and laughing, and soon, they were kissing.

  “So?” he asked.

  She was stunned and amazed—and happier than she’d ever been before. It couldn’t possibly be real, she thought—unless she spoke the truth aloud, with Daniel and the rest of the fallen angels there to witness.

  “I’m Lucinda,” she said. “I’m your angel.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE INVENTION OF LOVE

  Flying was like swimming, and Luce was good at both.

  Her feet lifted off the ground. It took no thought or preparation. Her wings beat with sudden intuition. Wind hummed against the fibers of her wings, carrying her in the gauzy pink sky. Aloft, she felt the weight of her body, especially in her feet, but overpowering that was a new, unimaginable buoyancy. She slid over low tiers of clouds, causing the slightest disruption, like a breeze passing through a chime.

  She gazed from one wing tip to the other, examining their silver-pearl luster, in awe of all her changes. It was as if the rest of her body deferred to her wings now.

  They responded at the first inkling of desire, elegant strokes that generated tremendous velocity. They flattened like an airfoil to glide solely on momentum, then pulled back into a heart shape behind her shoulders as she swizzled straight into the air.

  Her first flight.

  Except . . . it wasn’t. What Luce knew now, as keenly as her wings knew how to fly, was that there had been a monumental before. Before Lucinda Price, before her soul had ever seen the curving Earth. For all the lives on Earth she’d witnessed in the Announcers, all the bodies she had inhabited, Luce had barely scratched the surface of who she was, who she had been. There was a history older than history during which she’d beat these wings.

  She could see the others watching her from the ground. Daniel’s face shone with tears. He had known this all along. He had waited for her. She wanted to reach him, wanted him to soar up and fly with her—but then, suddenly, she couldn’t see him anymore.

  The light gave way to total darkness . . .

  Of another memory crashing through.

  She closed her eyes and surrendered to it, letting it carry her back. Somehow she knew that this was the earliest memory, the moment at the furthest reaches of her soul. Lucinda had been there from the beginning of the beginning.

  The Bible had left this part out:

  Before there was light, there were angels. One moment, darkness; the next, the warm feeling of being coaxed out of inexistence by a gentle, magnificent hand.

  God created the Heavenly host of angels—all three hundred and eighteen million of them—a single, brilliant moment. Lucinda was there, and Daniel, and Roland and Annabelle and Cam—and millions more, all perfect, all glorious, all designed to adore their Creator.