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 Venetians had walked. Daniel stayed beside her, following her whimsical course, 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 through 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 satiated, Daniel grinned and pulled away.

  They returned to the tiny opening where the window used to be. Daniel swam to it and stopped, positioning 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 Greyhound 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.

  Up. It was the only option.

  The pressure in her lungs built rapidly and spread through the rest of her body, thrumming inside her head. The surface was far away, and by now the air Daniel had breathed into her was gone. She could not see her hand before her face. She could not think. She could not panic.

  Luce thrashed away from the rotted floorboards, somersaulting in the water to face where she thought the basement window she’d used to enter the cathedral should be. Her trembling hands probed the barnacled basement walls, groping for the narrow opening she had to fit back through.

  There.

  Her fingers reached outside the ruin and felt the warmer water beyond. In the darkness, the passage seemed even smaller and more impossible to pass through than it had when Daniel had been there, glowing, lighting her way. But it was the only way out.

  With the halo tucked awkwardly under her chin, Luce thrust herself forward, jamming her elbows against the exterior of the building to pull her body through. First her shoulders, then her waist, then—

  Pain ripped through her hip.

  Her left foot was stuck, snagged against something she couldn’t reach or see. Tears stung her eyes and she cried out in frustration. She watched the bubbles from her mouth float up—up where she needed to be—carrying with them more energy and air than she had left in her.

  With half her body through the window and half her body wedged within, Luce struggled, stiff with terror. If only Daniel were here …

  But Daniel wasn’t here.

  Holding the halo with one hand, she snaked the other back through the tight window, sliding it down against her body, trying to reach her foot. Her fingers met something cold and rubbery and unrecognizable. A piece of it came off in her hands, then crumbled into nothing. She squirmed in disgust as she tried to wrench her foot free from the grip of whatever it was. Her vision was starting to cloud as her fingernails snagged and tore and her ankle grew raw from all her straining to get free—then suddenly she was loose.

  Her leg jerked forward and her knee struck the crumbling wall sharply enough that she knew she’d cut it, but no matter: She furiously shimmied the rest of her body through the window.

  She had the halo. She was free.

  But there was no way she had enough air in her lungs to make it to the surface. Her body was shaking badly, her legs barely responding to commands to swim, and a haze of black-red spots swarmed before her eyes. She felt dull, like she was swimming through wet cement.

  Then something amazing happened: The dark waters around her grew bright with a shimmery glow, and she was enveloped in warmth and light like summer dawn.

  A hand appeared, extended toward her.

  Daniel. She slipped the fingers of one hand inside his strong broad palm, hugging the halo close to her chest with the other hand.

  Luce closed her eyes as she flew upward with Daniel, in underwater sky.

  A second seemed to pass and they broke through the surface into blindingly bright sunlight. Instinctively, Luce gulped for the biggest lungful of air she could take in, startling herself with the raw groan her throat made, one hand around her neck to guide the air down, the other ripping off her goggles.

  But—it was weird. Her body didn’t seem to need as much air as her mind told her it did. She felt dizzy, struck dumb by the sudden shocking sunlight, but strangely, she wasn’t on the verge of blacking out. Had she not been down there as long as she thought she had? Was she suddenly that much better at holding her breath? Luce let a surge of athletic pride complement her relief at having survived.

  Daniel’s hands found hers underwater. “Are you all right?”

  “What happened to you?” she cried. “I almost—”

  “Luce,” he warned. “Shhh.”

  His fingers traced over hers and wordlessly relieved her of the halo. She hadn’t realized how heavy that thing was until she was free of it. But why was Daniel acting so strangely, slipping the halo away from her so stealthily, as if he had something to hide?

  All she had to do was follow his dark violet gaze.

  When Daniel had swum her swiftly to the surface, they had broken through in a different place than where they’d entered. Before, Luce realized, they’d seen the sunken cathedral from the front—just the twin green-gray spires rising from their sunken towers—but now they were almost precisely above the center of the church, where the nave would once have been.

  Now they were flanked by two long rows of flying buttresses, which would once have held up the now-crumbling stone walls of the long nave of the church. The arched buttresses were black with moss and weren’t nearly as tall as the spires of the façade. Their slanted stone tops broke through the surface of the water—which made them perfect benches for the group of twenty-odd Outcasts presently surrounding Luce and Daniel.

  When Luce recognized them—a field of tan trench coats, pale skin, dead eyes—she stifled a gasp.

  “Hello,” one said.

  It wasn’t Phil, the smarmy Outcast who’d posed as Shelby’s boyfriend, then led a battle against the angels in Luce’s parents’ backyard. She didn’t see his face among the Outcasts, just a troop of blank and listless creatures she didn’t recognize and didn’t care to get to know.

  Fallen angels who couldn’t make up their minds, the Outcasts were in some ways the opposite of Daniel, who refused to take any side but Luce’s. Shunned by Heaven for their indecisiveness, struck blind by Hell to everything but the dimmest glow of souls, the Outcasts made a sickening assembly. They were staring at Luce the way they had the last time, through ghastly, vacant eyes that could not see her body yet sensed something in her soul that said she was “the price.”

  Luce felt exposed, trapped. The Outcasts’ leers made the water colder. Daniel swam nearer, and she felt the brush of something smooth against her back. He had unfurled his wings in the water.

  “You would be ill-advised to attempt escape,” an Outcast behind Luce droned, as if sensing the stirring of Daniel’s wings under the water. “One glance behind you should convince you of our superior numbers, and it only takes one of these.” He parted his trench coat to reveal a sheath of silver starshots.

  The Outcasts had them surrounded, perched on the stone remains of a sunken Venetian island. They looked haughty, seedy, with their trench coats knotted at their waists, concealing their dirty, toilet paper–thin wings. Luce remembered from the battle in her parents’ backyard that the female Outcasts were just as callous and remorseless as the males. That had been only a few days earlier, but it felt like years had passed.

  “But if you’d prefer to test us …” Lazily, the Outcast nocked an arrow, and Daniel could not completely mask his shudder.

  “Silence.” One of the Outcasts rose to stand on the buttress. He was not wearing a trench coat, but a long gray robe, and Luce gasped when he pulled back the hood and exposed his pallid face. He was the pale chanting man from the cathedral. He’d been watching her the whole time, hearing everything she said to the priest. He must have followed her here. His colorless lips curled into a smile.

  “So,” he growled. “She has found her halo.”

  “This is no business of yours,” Daniel shouted, but Luce could hear the desperation in his voice. She still didn’t know why, but the Outcasts were intent on making Luce their business. They believed she held some sway in their redemption, their return to Heaven, but their logic eluded her now just as much as it had in her parents’ backyard.

  “Do not insult us with your lies,” the robed Outcast boomed. “We know what you seek, and you know our mission is to stop you.”

  “You’re not thinking clearly,” Daniel said. “You’re not seeing this for what it is. Even you cannot want—”

  “Lucifer to rewrite history?” The Outcast’s white eyes bored into the space between him and Luce. “Oh yes, in fact, we would like that very much.”

  “How can you say that? Everything—the world, our very selves as we know them now—will be annihilated. The entire universe, all consciousness, gone.”

  “Do you really think our lives these last seven thousand years are something worth preserving?” The leader’s eyes narrowed. “Better to wipe us out. Better to erase this blind existence before we begin to fade. Next time …” Again he trained his sightless eyes in Luce’s direction. She watched them swivel in their sockets, zeroing in on her soul. And it burned. “Next time we will not incur Heaven’s wrath in such a senseless way. We will be welcomed back by the Throne. We will play our cards more wisely.” His blind gaze lingered on Luce’s soul. He smiled. “Next time we will have … help.”

  “You’ll have nothing, just as you do now. Step aside, Outcast. This war is bigger than you.”

  The robed Outcast fingered a starshot and smiled. “It would be so very easy to kill you now.”

  “A host of angels is already fighting for Lucinda. We will stop Lucifer, and when we do and there is time to deal with pettiness like yourselves, the Outcasts will regret this moment, along with everything you’ve done since the Fall.”

  “In the next go-round, the Outcasts will make the girl our focus from the beginning. We will charm her, as you have done. We will make her believe every word we say, as you have done. We have studied your ways. We know what to do.”

  “Fools!” Daniel shouted. “You think you’ll be any smarter or more valiant next time? You think you’ll remember this moment, this conversation, this brilliant plan at all? You’ll do nothing but make the same mistakes you made this time. We all will. Only Lucifer will remember his previous errors. And his pursuits serve only his base desires. Surely you recall what his soul looks like,” Daniel said pointedly, “even if you see nothing else.”

  The Outcasts rose on their rotting perches.

  “I remember,” Luce heard an Outcast behind her say faintly.

  “Lucifer was the brightest angel of all,” another called, full of nostalgia. “So beautiful, it blinded us.”

  They were sensitive, Luce realized, about their deformity.

  “Cease your equivocation!” A louder voice called over them. The robed Outcast, this scene’s leader. “The Outcasts will see again in the next go-round. Vision will lead to wisdom, and wisdom back through the Gates of Heaven. We will be attractive to the Price. She will guide us.”

  Luce shivered against Daniel.

  “Maybe we can all get a second chance at redemption.” Daniel appealed to them. “If we are able to stop Lucifer … there’s no reason your kind could not also—”

  “No!” The robed Outcast lunged at Daniel from his buttress, his dreary, beat-up wings spreading wide with a crackle like a snapping twig.

  Daniel’s wings loosened around Luce’s waist and the halo was thrust back into her hands as he rose out of the water in self-defense. The robed leader was no match for Daniel, who shot up and threw a right cross.

  The Outcast flew backward twenty feet, skimming the water like a stone. He righted himself and returned to his perch on the buttress. With a wave of his pale hand, he cued the rest of his group to rise in a circle in the air.

  “You know who she is!” Daniel shouted. “You know what this means for all of us. For once in your existence, do something brave instead of craven.”

  “How?” the Outcast challenged him. Water streamed from the hem of his robes.

  Daniel was breathing hard, eyeing Luce and the golden halo gleaming through the water. His violet eyes looked panicked for a moment—and then he did the last thing Luce would ever have expected.

  He looked the robed Outcast deep in his dead white eyes, extended his hand palm up, and said, “Join us.”

  The Outcast laughed darkly for a long time.

  Daniel did not flinch.

  “The Outcasts work for no one but themselves.”

  “You’ve made that clear. No one is asking you to indenture yourselves. But do not work against the only cause that is right. Seize this chance to save everyone, including yourselves. Join us in the fight against Lucifer.”

  “It is a trick!” one of the Outcast girls shouted.

  “He seeks to deceive you in order to gain his freedom.”

  “Take the girl!”

  Luce gazed in horror at the robed Outcast hovering over her. He drew nearer, his eyes widening hungrily, his white hands trembling as they reached for her. Closer. Closer. She screamed—

  But no one heard it, because at that moment, the world rippled. The air and light and every particle in the atmosphere seemed to double and split, then folded in on themselves with a crack of thunder.

  It was happening again.

  Through the thicket of tan trench coats and dirty wings, the sky had turned a dim and smoggy gray, like it had been the last time in the Sword & Cross library, when everything had begun to tremble. Another timequake. Lucifer drawing near.