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Sense out of madness.
It was all there, and it was still terrible— and terrible and terrible—but it was quiet now, and it was hers. She was saved.
“What did you do to me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said the girl, worried. “We didn’t know what was wrong with you, so we just made this broad kind of wish in the hope that the magic would know what to do.”
Magic? Wish?
“I know what was wrong with me,” Eliza said, realizing it was true. There was an explanation for the things known and buried, and it was notthat she was an incarnation of the angel Elazael.
Elation and devastation fused to become a new emotion, u
But the Cataclysm was real. She understood it fully now, and this was the devastation.
Her hands went to her head, holding it, and it felt familiar under her fingers— I’m me, Eliza—but on the inside, it, and she, encompassed a vast new territory.
The young man and woman were watching her with furrowed brows, probably wondering if she was crazier now than she’d been before. She wasn’t. She knew this absolutely. Her brain, her body, her wings felt as finely calibrated as one of nature’s perfect creations. A double helix. A galaxy. A honeycomb. Entities so improbable and unca
It didn’t.
It wasn’t that she understood. No one ever could. But… she knew the source.
Of everything.
It was among the things known and no longer buried, all of them part of her now, orderly and intertwined, and it was so beautiful she wanted to worship it, even though she knew it had no consciousness. It would make about as much sense as worshiping the wind. She saw that magic and science were heads and tails of the same bright coin.
And she beheld Time itself laid open before her, unzipped like a strand of DNA. Knowable. Possibly even navigable.
Her mind trembled at the brink of this new vastness. She was saved, she had thought, moments ago. She saw now that she was more than saved. So much more than saved.
“So,” she said, trying not to cry as she fixed her saviors with all the warmth her eyes could bestow. “Who areyou guys?”
67
A SPRAY OF SPARKS
Karou followed Akiva away from the Papal Palace, and they were glamoured, so when she came to him it was clumsy. But only for the first surprised seconds.
She didn’t even mean to do it. Well, it’s not that it was an accident. They didn’t stumble against each other with their faces. It was only that her body didn’t run it by her brain first.
She knew where he was by heat and airflow, and she meant to follow him to the cupola of St. Peter’s. From there, the four of them pla
But a part of Karou was still poised at the edge of that hurled knife, hearing the scream she had almost become. She couldn’t seeAkiva, to reassure herself that he was well, and so she couldn’t catch her breath. They had no victory to celebrate yet except for being alive, and that was all she could bring herself to care about in the moment it took her to catch up to him. They were over the plaza, Michelangelo’s colo
Karou reached for where Akiva’s shoulder might be and got wing instead. A spray of sparks, and he turned into her touch, startled by it, so she careened into him and he caught her against him, and that was all it took.
Magnets collide, and swiftly align.
Her hands found his face, and her lips followed. She was clumsy, showering kisses of thanks on his invisible face. She was overwhelmed, and her lips landed where they would—on his brow, then his cheekbone, then the bridge of his nose—and in the profound relief of the moment she barely registered the sensation of his skin against hers: the heat and texture—at last—of Akiva against her lips.
She dropped one hand to his heart to be sure it hadn’t been some illusion, that he was truly whole and uninjured, and he was, and so her palm, satisfied, joined her other in slipping to where his neck met his jaw to hold his face steady and gauge the location of his lips.
He didn’t wait for her to find them.
A beat of his wings and he surged through the air with such force that she was melded to him more completely even than when they had embraced in the shower, and her face was not against his chest this time, nor her feet planted on the floor.
Her legs twined with his. She smoothed her hands up his neck and into his hair and held his head as she was swept away with him, spiraling.
Finally. Finally, they kissed.
Akiva’s mouth was hungry and sweet and rich and slow and hot, and the kiss was long and deep and every other measure of scope there was except for infinite. It wasn’t that. A kiss must end for another to begin, and it did, and did again.
Kiss gave way to kiss, and in the eyes-closed, all-consuming world of their embrace, Karou had the sensation that each kiss encompassed the last. It was hallucinatory: Kiss within kiss within kiss, going deeper and deeper and sweeter and hotter and headier, and she hoped that Akiva’s equilibrium was guiding them because she’d lost all sense of her own. There was no up or down; there were only mouths, and hips, and hands—
—and nowshe registered the heat and texture of him. The smoothness, the roughness, the realness.
A kiss while flying, invisible, above St. Peter’s Square. It sounded like a fantasy but felt so very, very real.
And then a shared smile was shaping their mouths, and laughter came between them. They were breathless with relief—and with simple oxygen deprivation, too, because who had time to inhale? They rested their foreheads together, and the tips of their noses, and paused to let it all sink in. The kiss, their breath, and all that they’d just done.
Human soldiers patrolled beneath them, wondering at a sudden gust of sparks, and Karou and Akiva spun there in the air, held aloft by magic and languid wingbeats, and held together by a pull they’d felt from the very moment of first meeting, on a battlefield long ago.
Karou touched Akiva’s heart again, reassuring herself. “How did you do that?” she asked quietly, her head still spi
“I don’t know. I never know. It just comes.”
“The knife passed right through you. Did you feel it?” She wished she could see him, but since she couldn’t, she kept a hand on his face and her forehead to his.
She felt his nod, and his breath brushed her lips when he spoke. “I did and didn’t. I can’t explain it. I was there and not there. I saw it hit me and keep going.”
She was silent for a moment, processing this. “Is it true, then, what Jael said? That you’re… invisible to death? I don’t have to worry about you ever dying?”
“I don’t think that’s true.” He traced the contours of her face with his lips, as though he could see her like that. “But you would have resurrected me in any case.”
Is that what would have happened, if Akiva had died? Or would they have lost control of the situation and all been overpowered? Karou didn’t even want to think about it. “Sure,” she said with false lightness. “But let’s not be casual about this body, okay?” She nuzzled him back. “It may be your soul that I love, but I’m pretty keen on its vessel, too.”