On my part, my mind had grown almost as calcified as Sanctuary had seemed. My spirit felt like the thinnest of bone china: fragile and translucent. Already cracking and ready to break entirely at the slightest disruption. I had no energy to sing in my mind, or create memories to share with him. When Gavriel dipped into my thoughts, it was as if he were calling from one shore to the other across a vast ocean. Communication was impossible.
I know you can’t speak, Feather,he said into my mind.But I hope you can still hear me. Rafe spoke to me, shared something with me, before we left. Before he… flew away.
I was glad he stopped there. I was barely holding myself together, and hearing even a thought that Rumple was dead, unmade, would break me completely.
He believes the void is what may save you. He says it was what kept him alive, in the Abyss. And I think he’s right. I can sense those currents moving through you, small wisps of the void breathing energy into the shadows that lie under your skin. It’s keeping your body alive.
He laughed, and the sound almost made my heart thump. I concentrated on feeling what he had mentioned, though my thinking was growing hazier by the hour. Was the Abyss sustaining me somehow? Perversely, I liked thinking it could be true. That I was doing the angelic equivalent of growing gills and breathing water.
No, that I was like one of those microscopic beasties, the ones that looked like they had butts for faces, and baby shrimp arms for legs. Tardigrades. They could survive in space, in a complete vacuum, being beaten on by x-rays, starved, dumped in toxic goo, digested by an entire high school football team on chili dog night, frozen, anything. Yeah, I was a Feather-shapedtardigrade, in suspended animation, breathing the void like the unkillable bad-ash I had always been.
I’m grateful to the void,Gavriel sent, echoing my own thoughts. Well, echoing the boring parts of my thoughts. I really wished I could move my lips and impress him with my scientific knowledge and stunning metaphors.Grateful to it for keeping you alive.
He started singing again, and I made a fuzzy mental note to teach him some more peppy tunes. I didn’t think the emo songs he was on now were exactly the sort of jaunty numbers that would see us back to my other mates.
What does it say about me that after a lifetime of fighting the Abyss, doing everything I could to eradicate it, and swing the balance to the light… I would be grateful to it now? Have I lost my direction?I could sense he meant that question in more than one way.Perhaps that is why I fly and fly with no direction or guidance. If the Singer of All Songs had blessed me on this journey, in these thoughts, wouldn’t She have sentsomethingto guide me home?
Has She forsaken us?
I wanted to tell him to cheer the fudge up. I could feel the weight of his fears and doubts pulling him down, away from the path that I knew led to my other two mates. The closer we got to them, the more I felt the residue of the silver line that was strung like fragments of spider silk across the void. But I was stone in his arms, weighing him down as well. And his angst was infectious.
I could feel him losing hope. Following logic down a path that led to nowhere good.
I couldn’t help in any other way, but I was good at impossible things. And if the only thing I had left that I could do was hope, then I would hope with all my remaining strength, while he flew.So I let my mind narrow down to a pinprick of energy. One small, glittering scrap of light, of faith. And I believed.
I believed in Gavriel’s strength. I believed the Singer of All Songs had Her eye on us. I believed that we would make it home.
My tiny pinprick soul clicked its glittering shoes together three times, clapped its tired hands at the endless void, and said a hopefulchoo-choounder its breath.
I believed, because I could never accept thatthiswas the way the story ended.
And then, at some point, somewhere in the void, I slipped back into the numb dream state I’d been in before in Sanctuary, after I’d made love with Rumple for the first time. I was particles again, and there was no pain, so that was good.
It had to be good, right? Not being hurt anymore. Not feeling anything at all.
Then I felt my eyes close, and knew itwasn’tgood. It wasn’t good at all.
It really was the end.
Chapter 34
Sunny
The Celestial Realm had a thousand places to pray, some that looked like mansions, some like fields. The one right outside the sickroom’s door was in the shape of an enormous harp, with a golden bead curtain at the entrance to simulate harp strings. It was ostentatious. Ridiculous. So over the top and shiny, that it made you wince for the architect and their parents.
Feather would have loved it.
Would love it,I reminded myself. Just because the narrow blue pathway that connected Sanctuary to this realm—what Imriel had explained was the bridge, though during my journey here it had seemed more like a rope hanging over a bottomless gorge—had blinked out of existence three weeks before, like it had been cut, didn’t mean she wasn’t still alive.
It just meant she would need to do something crazy to get here. Build her own highway out of glitter across the void. Figure out how to turn the frustration of denied orgasms into a navigation system. Rig up one of her sheets and sing solar wind into it to sail here.
If anyone could do it, she could. I believed, I prayed. Promised. Lied.I believe.
The sounds of musical breezes behind me—the kind only the First Children made when they traveled—had me scrambling off my hands and knees and to my feet, fear racing through my veins. It was Imriel flying toward me, at top speed.
My eyes darted to the nearby healing room where one of Truth’s friends, Patience, was taking her shift caring for Mikhail. After Precious had shown us how she could share energy with Mikhail, keeping him in a sort of stasis, I’d suggested that the other younger Protectors, who Mikhail had carved from his own flesh, could do the same. They had all jumped at the chance to funnel their energy into the Maker, paying their spiritual father back in a small way for his sacrifice. They’d formed a line that stretched around the healing room, and the energy they’d collectively donated was probably why Mikhail and Righteous were still… well, alive-ish, anyway.
Truth stepped out of the room and waved when he saw I was looking his way. He seemed exhausted, but his spirits were high. “They’re the same,” he announced as he headed for the extra healing room we’d put in place for the caregivers and donors.
