Though the piazza outside had been bustling with people, the church was relatively quiet. Luce was conscious of the sound of her riding boots on the marble floor as she passed a statue of the Madonna in one of the small gated chapels lining either side of the church. The statue’s flat marble eyes seemed impossibly big, her fingers impossibly long and thin, pressed together in prayer.

  Luce did not see the halo anywhere.

  At the end of the nave she stood in the center of the church, under the great dome, which let the tempered glow of morning sunlight brush through its towering windows. A man in a long gray robe kneeled before an altar. His pale face and white hands—cupped to his heart—were the only parts of his body exposed. He was chanting in Latin under his breath. Dies irae, dies illa.

  Luce recognized the words from her Latin class at Dover but couldn’t remember what they meant.

  As she approached, the man’s chant broke off and he lifted his head, as if her presence had disrupted his prayer. His skin was as pale as any she’d ever seen, his thin lips almost colorless as they frowned at her. She looked away and turned left into the transept, which formed the cross shape of the church, in an effort to give the man his space—

  And found herself before a formidable angel.

  It was a statue, sculpted from smooth pale pink marble, utterly different from the angels Luce had come to know so well. There was none of the fierce vitality she found in Cam, none of the infinite complexities she adored in Daniel. This was a statue created by the stolidly faithful for the stolidly faithful. To Luce, the angel seemed empty. He was looking up, toward Heaven, and his sculpted body shone through the soft ripples of fabric draped across his chest and waist. His face, tilted skyward, ten feet above Luce’s own, had been chiseled delicately, by someone with a practiced touch, from the ridge of his nose to the tiny tufts of hair curled above his ear.

  His hands gestured toward the sky, as if asking forgiveness from someone above for a long-ago-committed sin.

  “Buon giorno.” A sudden voice made Luce jump. She hadn’t seen the priest appear in the heavy floor-length black robe, had not seen the rectory at the edge of the transept, from whose carved mahogany door the priest had just emerged.

  He had a waxy nose and large earlobes and was tall enough to tower over her, which made her uneasy. She forced a smile and took a step away. How was she going to steal a relic from a public place like this? Why hadn’t she thought about that before in the piazza? She couldn’t even speak—

  Then she remembered: She could speak Italian. She had learned it—more or less—instantly when she’d stepped through the Announcer into the front lines of war near the Piave River.

  “This is a beautiful sculpture,” she said to the priest.

  Her Italian wasn’t perfect—she spoke more like she used to be fluent years ago but had lost her confidence.

  Still, her accent was good enough, and the priest seemed to understand. “Indeed it is.”

  “The artist’s work with the . . . chisel,” she said,

  spreading her arms wide as though she were critically regarding the work, “it is like he freed the angel from the stone.” Drawing her wide eyes back to the sculpture, trying to look as innocent as possible, Luce took a spin around the angel. Sure enough, a golden glass-filled halo capped his head. Only it wasn’t chipped in the places Daniel’s sketch had suggested. Maybe it had been restored.

  The priest nodded sagely and said, “No angel was ever free after the sin of the Fall. The able eye can see that, as well.”

  Daniel had told her the trick to releasing the halo from the angel’s head: to grasp the halo like a steering wheel and give it two firm but gentle counterclockwise turns. “Because it’s made of glass and gold, it had to be added to the sculpture later. So a base is carved into the stone, and a matching hole fashioned into the halo. Just two strong—but careful!—twists.” That would loosen it from its base.

  She glanced up at the vast statue towering over her and the priest’s heads.

  Right.

  The priest came to stand beside Luce. “This is Raphael, the Healer.”

  Luce didn’t know any angels named Raphael. She wondered if he was real or a church invention. “I, um, read in a guidebook that it dates back to before the classical era.” She eyed the thin beam of marble connecting the halo to the angel’s head. “Wasn’t this sculpture brought to the church during the Crusades?” The priest swept his arms over his chest, and the long loose sleeves of his robe bunched up at the elbow. “You are thinking of the original. It sat just south of Dorso-duro in the Chiesa dei Piccolos Miracolis on the Island of the Seals, and disappeared with the church and the island when both, as we know, sank into the sea centuries ago.”

  “No.” Luce swallowed hard. “I didn’t know that.” His round brown eyes fixed on hers. “You must be new to Venice,” he said. “Eventually, everything here crumbles into the sea. It isn’t so bad, really. How else would we become so skilled at reproductions?” He glanced up at the angel, ran his long brown fingers across the marble plinth. “This one was created on commission for only fifty thousand lire. Isn’t it remarkable?” It wasn’t remarkable; it was awful. The real halo had sunk into the sea? They would never find it now; they would never learn the true location of the Fall; they would never be able to stop Lucifer from destroying them. They’d only just begun this journey and already it seemed that all was lost.

  Luce stumbled backward, barely finding the breath to thank the priest. Feeling heavy and unbalanced, she nearly tripped over the pale supplicant, who scowled at her as she walked quickly to the door.

  As soon as she crossed the threshold, she broke into a run. Daniel caught her by the elbow at the fountain.

  “What happened?”

  Her face must have given everything away. She relayed the story to him, growing more despondent with each word. By the time she got to the way the priest had bragged about the bargain reproduction, a tear was sliding down her cheek.

  “You’re sure he called the cathedral la Chiesa dei Miracolis Piccolos?” Daniel said, spinning around to look across the piazza. “On the Island of the Seals?”

  “I’m sure, Daniel, it’s gone. It’s buried under the ocean—”

  “And we are going to find it.”

  “What? How?”

  He had already grabbed her by the hand and, with one sideways glance back through the doors of the church, started to jog across the square.

  “Daniel—”

  “You know how to swim.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He stopped running and turned to look at her, held her chin in his palm. Her heart was racing but his eyes on hers made everything slow down.

  “It’s not ideal, but if this is the only way to get the artifact, it’s the way we’re going to get the artifact. Nothing can stop us. You know that. Nothing can be allowed to stop us.”

  Moments later, they were back in the gondola, Daniel rowing them out to sea—powering them like an en-gine with each stroke of his oar. They sped past every other gondola in the canal, making hairpin turns around low bridges and the jutting corners of buildings, splashing water on alarmed faces in neighboring gondolas.

  “I know this island,” Daniel said, not even winded.

  “It used to lie halfway between Saint Mark’s and La Giudecca. But there’s nowhere to dock the boat nearby.

  We’ll have to leave the gondola. We’ll have to jump ship and swim.”

  Luce glanced over the side of the gondola into the cloudy green water moving fast below her. Lack of swim-suit. Hypothermia. Italian Loch Ness monsters in unseen depths of sludge. The gondola bench was freezing under her and the water smelled like mud laced with sewage.

  All this flashed through Luce’s mind, but when she locked on Daniel’s eyes, it quieted her fear.

  He needed her. She was at his side, no questions asked.

  “Okay.”

  When they reached the open channel where the canals emptied out into space between the islands’ edges, it was tourist chaos: The water teemed with vaporetti shut-tling tourists hauling roller bags toward hotels; motor-boats chartered by rich, elegant travelers; and bright aerodynamic kayaks carrying American backpackers wearing wraparound sunglasses. Gondolas and barges and police boats all crisscrossed the water at high speeds, barely avoiding one another.

  Daniel maneuvered effortlessly, pointing into the distance. “See the towers?”

  Luce stared out over the multicolored boats. The horizon was a faint line where the blue-gray of the sky touched the darker blue-gray of the water. “No.”

  “Focus, Luce.”

  After a few moments, two small greenish towers—farther away than she imagined she could ever see without a telescope—came into view. “Oh. There.”

  “That’s all that remains of the church.” Daniel’s paddling speed increased as the number of boats around them decreased. The water grew choppier, deepened to a dark evergreen color, began to smell more like the sea than the oddly appealing filth of Venice. Luce’s hair whipped in the wind, which felt colder the farther from land they got. “We’ll have to hope that our halo has not been pilfered by excavation teams of scuba divers.”

  After Luce had climbed back into the gondola, Daniel had asked her to wait for him for just a moment. He’d disappeared down a narrow alley and reappeared what seemed like seconds later with a small pink plastic bag.

  When he tossed it to her now, Luce pulled out a pair of goggles. They looked stupidly expensive and not very functional: mauve and black with fashionable angel wings at the edges of the lenses. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d swum with goggles, but as she looked out at the black-shadowed water, Luce was glad to have them to tug down over her eyes.

  “Goggles but no bathing suit?” she asked.

  Daniel blushed. “I guess that was stupid. But I was in a hurry, only thinking about what you would need to get the halo.” He drove the paddle back into the water, pro-pelling them more quickly than a speedboat. “You can swim in your underwear, right?”

  Now Luce blushed. Under normal circumstances, the question might have seemed thrilling, something they both would have giggled at. Not these nine days. She nodded. Eight days now. Daniel was deadly serious. Luce just swallowed hard and said, “Of course.” The pair of green-gray spires grew larger, more detailed, and then they were upon them. They were tall and conical, made of rusted slats of copper. They looked like they had once been capped by small teardrop-shaped copper flags, sculpted to look like they were rippling in the wind, but one flag was pocked with weathered holes, and the other had broken off completely from its pole.

  In the open water, the spires’ protrusion was bizarre, suggesting a cavernous cathedral of the deep. Luce wondered how long ago the church had sunk, how deep it sat below.

  The thought of diving down there in ridiculous goggles and mom-bought underwear made her shudder.

  “This church must be huge,” she said. She meant I don’t think I can do this. I can’t breathe underwater. How are we going to find one small halo sunk in the middle of the sea?

  “I can take you down as far as the chapel itself, but only that far. So long as you hold on to my hand.” Daniel extended a warm hand to help Luce stand up in the gondola. “Breathing will not be a problem. But the church will still be sanctified, which means I’ll need you to find the halo and bring it out to me.”

  Daniel yanked his T-shirt off over his head, dropping it to the bench of the gondola. He stepped out of his pants quickly, perfectly balanced in the boat, then kicked off his tennis shoes. Luce watched, feeling something stir inside her until she realized she was supposed to be strip-ping down, too. She kicked off her boots, tugged off her socks, stepped out of her jeans as modestly as she could.

  Daniel held her hand to help her balance; he was watching her but not the way she would have expected. He was worried about her, the goose bumps rising on her skin. He rubbed her arms when she slipped off her sweater and stood freezing in her sensible underwear in the gondola in the middle of the Venetian lagoon.

  Again she shivered, cold and fear and indecipherable mass inside her. But her voice sounded brave when she tugged the goggles, which pinched, down over her eyes and said, “Okay, let’s swim.”

  They held hands, just like they had the last time they’d swum together at Sword & Cross. As their feet lifted off the varnished floor of the gondola, Daniel’s hand tugged her upward, higher than she ever could have jumped herself—and then they dove.

  Her body broke the surface of the sea, which wasn’t as cold as she’d expected. In fact, the closer she swam beside Daniel, the warmer the wake around them grew.

  He was glowing.

  Of course he was. She hadn’t wanted to voice her fears about how dark and impassible the church would be underwater, and now she realized, as ever, that Daniel was always looking out for her. Daniel would light her way to the halo with the same shimmery incandescence Luce had seen in many of the past lives she’d visited. His glow played off the murky water, folding Luce inside it, as lovely and surprising as a rainbow arching boldly in a black night sky.

  They swam down, holding hands, bathed in violet light. The water was silky, silent as an empty tomb.

  Within a dozen feet, the sea became darker, but Daniel’s light still illuminated the ocean for several feet around them. A dozen feet more and the façade of the church came into view.

  It was beautiful. The ocean had preserved it, and the glow of Daniel’s glory cast a haunting violet sheen on its quiet old stones. The pair of spires above the surface punctuated a flat roof lined with stone sculptures of saints. There were panels of half-decayed mosaics depicting Jesus with some of the apostles. Everything was thick with moss and crawling with sea life: tiny silver fish flitting into and out of alcoves, sea anemones jutting out from the depictions of miracles, eels slipping out of crannies where ancient Venetian bodies used to be. Daniel stayed beside her, following her whim, lighting her way.

  She swam around the right side of the church, peering through busted stained-glass windows, always eyeing the distance back up to the surface, to air.

  At about the point that she’d expected, Luce’s lungs began to strain. But she wasn’t ready to go up yet. They’d only just made it down to where they could see what looked like the altar. She gritted her teeth and bore the burn a little longer.

  Holding his hand, she peeked inside one of the windows near the church’s transept. Her head and shoulders ventured in and Daniel flattened as much as he could against the wall of the church to light the inside for her.

  She saw nothing but rotting pews, a stone altar split in two. The rest was shadowed, and Daniel couldn’t get any closer to give her more light. She felt a tensing in her lungs and she panicked—but then, somehow, it released, and she felt as if she had a luxurious expanse of time before the tension and panic would return. It was as if there were breathing thresholds, and Luce could pass through a few of them before things would get really dire. Daniel watched her, nodding, as if he understood that she could go on a little longer.

  She swam past one more former window, and something golden gleamed in a sunken corner of the church.

  Daniel saw it, too. He swam to her side, careful not to press inside the church. He took her hand and pointed at it. Only the tip of the halo was visible. The statue itself looked as if it had sunk through a collapsed portion of the floor. Luce swam closer, clotting the air before her with bubbles, unsure how to wrest it free. She couldn’t wait any longer. Her lungs blazed. She gave Daniel the sign to go up.

  He shook his head.

  When she flinched in surprise, he pulled her fully outside the church and took her in his arms. He kissed her deeply, and it felt so good, but—

  But no, he wasn’t just kissing her. He was breathing air into her lungs. She gasped in his kisses, felt the pure air flow into her, sustaining her lungs just when they felt like they would burst. It was as if he had an endless supply and Luce was greedy for as much as she could get.

  Their hands searched each other’s almost naked bodies, as filled with passion as if they were kissing purely for pleasure. Luce didn’t want to stop. But they only had eight days. When at last she nodded that she was sati-ated, Daniel grinned and pulled away.

  They returned to the tiny opening where the window used to be. Daniel swam to it and stopped, directing his body to face the opening so his glow would shine in to light her way. She squirmed slowly through the window, feeling instantly cold and senselessly claustrophobic inside the church. That was strange, because the cathedral was huge: Its ceilings were a hundred feet high, and Luce had the place all to herself.

  Maybe that was the problem. On the other side of the window Daniel seemed too far away. At least she could see the angel up ahead—and Daniel’s glow just outside. She swam toward the golden halo, gripped it in her hands. She remembered Daniel’s instructions, and she turned the halo as if she were steering a Grey-hound bus.

  It didn’t budge.

  Luce gripped the slick halo harder. She rocked it back and forth, putting all the strength she had into it.

  Ever so slowly, the halo creaked and shifted a centimeter to the left. She strained again to make it budge, sending out bubbles of exasperation. Just as she began to feel exhausted, the halo loosened, turned. Daniel’s face filled with pride as he watched her and she watched him, their gazes intertwined. She was barely even thinking about her breath as she strained to unscrew the halo.

  It came off in her hands. She yelped with delight and admired its impressive heft. But when she looked up at Daniel, he wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was gazing upward, far in the distance.

  A second later, he was gone.

  FOUR

  BARGAINING BLIND

  Alone in the darkness, Luce treaded water.

  Where was he?

  She swam closer to the crater in the floorboards where the angel had sunk through—where, only seconds before, Daniel’s glow had been with her, lighting her way.