“What about your mentors?” Dez asks. “The ones you had before they left Heaven? What about Rafe and Samael—are they still bound?”
“I’ve said too much,” Yael says, standing up. “Just … think about it.”
She heads to her room and closes her door just as a knock at the door startles Dez and Simon on the couch.
“Jet?” Simon whispers hopefully.
Dez looks at him with pity, even as she’d secretly been hoping it was Rafe. She gets up and goes to the door as Simon starts playing the opening notes of Caprice Twenty-Four again.
Through the peephole, Simon’s lovely, mortal girlfriend holds a potted orchid. Dez reaches to open the door, then stops.
“Si, it’s Esther.”
“Tell her I’m sleeping,” Simon says. He doesn’t stop playing.
“Really?” Dez says. “She brought flowers.”
Simon looks at Dez, wearing a remote expression she’s never seen on him before. “Until she’s an angel,” he says, “what’s the point?”
“SO THEN JET SAID,‘IFI was in the mood for a slave, I would have summoned Simon,’” Simon tells Dez on a dark March morning so warm there’s actually slush on the tri as they walk from breakfast to the Vault.
Through the filter of thebarbelo, the sky is its usual filmstock-black, but Dez gets the sense that if she were somehow to pass through it, she would find a cloudless, sunny day on the other side. And this sense—of the near-proximity of brightness, warmth—fills her with yearning to be anywhere but here.
“You’re an angel now,” Dez tells Simon. “Why does he treat you like that?”
Simon laughs. “There’s amassivehierarchy among angels. And for the time being, I’m at the bottom,” he says cheerily. “I know some of the stuff Jet says sounds bad, but they’re inside jokes, which I finally get—”
Dez stops short, grabbing hold of her roommate and yanking him backward—just before he steps on a frag half buried in the melting snow. Her breath catches in her throat as she stares down at the latest monstrosity.
There’s no way to tell how long it’s been there. Its body wears a ratty orange housecoat. It has thin bare frostbitten feet, and an older woman’s cropped silver hair. The neck is twisted at a gruesome angle, its forehead in the mud. But Dez can see its mouth, yawning open in a scream. She shudders.
“Yuck,” Simon says as he steps over the body.
“Hey,” Dez says, still frozen in place. She gestures at the unlucky creature, stunned by her friend’s insensitivity.
“Oh, right.” Simon sighs, taking out a phone from his pocket. “Someone should clean this up.”
“You have a phone now?” Dez says, a rickety sense of envy inside her. What she wouldn’t have given for a phone six months ago. Now she doesn’t even know who she would call.
“Ascension gift from Jet,” Simon tells her, then talks into the phone. “We need a cleanup on aisle tri.”
“How can you be so callous?” Dez asks when Simon hangs up. “This was a person.”
“I was a person once, too. But I’m not anymore, and neither is she. The difference is I’m alive in aeviternity. She’s roadkill.”
Dez shakes her head, her stomach roiling. Simon’s been different recently. Since the night of his ascension, both he and Jet have seemed sharper, darker. Dez can rationalize the change in Jet as the dropping of a friendly façade put on to charm first-years at the start of the school year. That maybe all Jet’s doing now is revealing his true angelic core. But she thought she knew Simon better. She’s tried to be open to the way her roommate is evolving—gallows humor makes sense when you’ve come as close to death as Simon has—but this? She doesn’t even recognize him.
“What’s aeviternity?”
“The state of being an angel. Our lives have a beginning, but theydon’t have an end.” He tries to link arms with Dez, as if to help her step over the frag. “Look, if you want my advice—”
“I didn’t ask for your advice.” She steps away from him.
“You’re here to become an angel,” he says. “You need to start thinking like one. Which means exerting your energy on what matters.” He curls his lip at the frag. “Not lost causes.”
“Rafe doesn’t think they’re lost causes,” Dez says quietly.
“I guarantee you,” Simon says, “Rafe only cares about frags insofar as it benefits Rafe. Once you become a part of the hierarchy, all you can think about is rising in it. You can’t see it yet, but you will.”
