The first few moments take her breath away. She feels a deep exhilaration, less in her body than in her soul. Like the jump has rooted her, for the first time in her life, completely in her soul.
Is this what dying feels like? This great and whooshing wonder? This mix of letting go and not being able to hold on?
“Time to slow your roll.”
Rafe’s voice, the distant echo of it, snaps Dez back to reality. Such as it is. She isn’t dying; she’s just plummeting—faster and farther than she meant to.
Her body seizes up in panic.
“How?” she shouts.
“Like anything else,” he calls, his voice growing fainter. “Decide you’re going to do it, then do it.”
Dez thrusts out her arms and legs, making herself as large as she can. But she’s not going to luck into snagging one of the halos like this. She needs to choose one, set her sights on it, seize it with both hands.
Her eyes find a glowing band below her. She tumbles toward it, closing in, reaching her arms out farther, until—
The halo’s in her hand. Scalding hot and tingling, like it’s filled with fire from the creation of the universe. She lightens her grip on the halo as her body swings to stillness. She looks up and sees Rafe moving toward her with an ease she doesn’t comprehend.
“Grab another halo,” he says as he reaches her.
“Ouch,” Dez gasps. “It doesn’t seem fair that you can fly down here while some of us have to climb.”
“Someday we’ll fly together,” he says. Their gazes catch, and she gets that breathless feeling she gets when they’re alone in her bed. But she can’t fuck around right now. She needs to learn to get out of here on her own.
She finds another halo and takes it lightly in her hand. Then another. Her mind builds an invisible rope of halos all the way back where she needs to go.
“At first,” Rafe says, “like with your Lens, you’ll probably need to gently tug each halo as you climb. But with practice, you can learn to do it with your mind.”
Dez is listening. Focusing on Rafe’s instructions … right up until the moment that she’s not listening at all. Because right there, inside the halo in Rafe’s hand—the one he’s using as an example of how this process works—radiates a life that Dez can see.
Someone she recognizes instantly.
The scene is shrunk down and at an awkward angle, so at first, it’s hard to see. Dez isn’t sure—and then she’ssosure.
It’s Asher. On the half-pipe in Ventura. Ocean breeze rippling his shirt. Asher’s life is in Rafe’s hand.
Dez feels a searing pain in her hand as the halo she’s holding slips loose from her fingers. She doesn’t mean to, doesn’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late. When she drops, it’s faster than she’s ever dropped before.
“Dez!” Rafe shouts, his voice already light-years away.
She plummets. She has absolutely no ability to slow or stop herself.
It seems like years before Rafe catches her. In his arms again, she gasps for breath. He holds her fast, one arm curved around her waist, one arm linked through a halo. But it’s a different halo. A stranger’s halo.
Asher’s is gone, lost in a sea of scalding stars.
“I can’t believe you made me catch you again,” Rafe says, but like he isn’t mad, like he’s almost pleased he had to catch her.
Dez is shaking as she wraps her limp limbs around Rafe’s body.
“What happened?” he asks.
Her eyes search above for the halo he’d just been holding. What are the odds that out of all the halos in the world, he seized that one? But Dez will never tell Rafe who she saw in the halo. He seemed jealous months ago when he asked her about casting Asher in her film. She can’t imagine how he’d react if he knew of the pull Asher still had over her.
Much less that for the past two months, ever since she learned the truth about Acheron, Dez has found herself feeling routinely lost. So she started glimpsing at Asher’s life in the Vault, a reminder of her life before. She taught herself how to let her emotions override the system, let her mind practically cook with wanting to see him. She studies his Lifeline. And it soothes her.
“You thought of your brother,” Rafe says. “Didn’t you?”
