There.She never thought it would feel so good to hold a disembodied eyeball. The eye that was already in slow, Soma time with her. The rest of the world stays frozen as she closes her eyes and extracts it from Rafe’s grip.
She clasps it in her hand and exhales.
Her body is still so close to Rafe’s, and she still has to get around him without tripping him back into time. She’s got to get out of here. But before she goes, she looks once more into the angel’s azurite eyes.
So many nights she spent with him. So much pleasure and comfort she had taken in his arms.
All a lie, if not in his words, in his body and his soul. A lie in the language of his mouth on hers.
She hates him. And she can see in this still-life version’s eyes that he hates her, too. That if he could, he’d doanythingto stop her.
She won’t let him.
She slips under his raised arm, finding herself eye level with his crotch. How she used to yearn for him. Even now she can’t help the heat that flushes her cheeks.
But she moves around him, stepping free. She leaves him there, frozen, ever about to break down her door.
She thunders down the stairs, passing Yael on the way, who is also frozen, midstep on the landing.
How strange to be the only thing in motion. She can do whatever she wants.
She rushes outside and enters the dark and eerie labyrinth. All around her, she feels the warm reaches of the ancient pomegranate trees, taken from the Garden long ago, at the height of a cosmic war.
It’s not her war. Tonight, Dez is her own army, on a single mission.
Urgency illuminates her instinctive memory of the route she took once with Rafe. Left, right, left, right, left, right.
Finally, on the other side of the labyrinth, she takes an endless flight of stairs down to a stone landing strip carved into the mountains, where fifty dark jets gleam. All of them look the same. At first, she’s discouraged. Why do they need all these planes anyway, if all of them can fly on their own? How will she ever find which one isJet’s? Then she remembers the panel outside Rafe’s plane. He must have let it scan his eyes to open the door. He powered the whole plane that way.
Dez runs to plane after plane, holding up Jet’s eye. Nothing happens. The access panels stay black, unchanged. Fear billows inside her. She has no idea what she’s doing, if this will even work. Worse, she has no plan B.
Her confidence ebbs as she reaches the last row, the final plane. Dez thrusts the eye to the control panel—
And the panel makes a hopeful sound. But nothing opens; nothing ignites or whirs into action.
She tries the eye again, this time holding it in the center of the panel.
Nothing.
On the edge of panic, Dez moves the angel’s disembodied eye in a circle, rolls it roughly against the panel’s glass.
And the jet bridge swings out.
“Fucking last plane,” she breathes as she bounds up the stairs and onto the jet.
DEZ LOCATES THE GLOSSY BLACKpanel to the left of the jet’s navigation screen. She raises Jet’s eye before it.
Welcome, Jet,it reads in the font style of old Bibles.Where are you flying today?
“Point Mugu Beach,” Dez says as calmly as she can.
I see a zone at the Chumash Trailhead that can accommodate our landing,reads the text on the screen.Would you like to set course for Chumash Trailhead in Malibu?
“Yes,” Dez says, and swallows, relieved at least someone’s thinking about how to land this plane. She’s been too focused on how to find Asher, how to save his life.
Please take a seat,the screen says.
Dez looks toward the four captain’s chairs. She remembers where Rafe sat and flew the plane when he brought her to Acheron. Keeping both hands in the air, Dez sits carefully in the corresponding chair, facing the navigation system.
