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  Aodhan’s mama and papa didn’t seem to understand that. They were nice, but they thought Aodhan was like his sister Imalia, who was already a grown-up. If they’d been his parents, Illium would’ve been mad at them for not knowing him, but Aodhan never got mad. He just said, “Eh-ma knows me. You know me. Teacher knows me. I don’t need a lot of people to know me.”

  So because Illium knew him, he closed his eyes against the sunlight and began to talk about his training, including the new moves Raphael had taught him. “I’ll teach you,” he promised his friend. Aodhan was good at physical things, but he only did them because Illium did, so they could play battle games together.

  Mostly, he liked making art.

  “Thanks,” Aodhan said, speaking at last. “You were tired.”

  “Raphael is a tough teacher.” Illium loved that the archangel didn’t baby him—he wasn’t dumb, he knew that Raphael didn’t treat him like a warrior. Because he wasn’t a warrior. You didn’t just decide you were one. You had to become one. Other warriors had to evaluate your skills and decide you were worth the title. “One day, I’m going to be in his seniorest squadron.”

  “That’s not a word,” Aodhan said, but Illium could tell he was smiling. “Seniorest.”

  “Who says?”

  When Aodhan laughed, Illium opened his eyes—to see the butterflies take flight in tiny bursts of colors. Slumping back into the flowers and grasses with Illium, their fingers just touching, Aodhan sighed. “I was trying to show my art to this artist Eh-ma said I might like to talk to—she even gave me an introduction letter.”

  “Was he horrible about your art?” He didn’t think his mother would’ve suggested a person like that, but her art friends could be strange. In their own worlds, but not like his mother. Different. And a few of them were plain odd or rude. They said things that weren’t polite and thought it was all right because they were great artists.

  Illium spoke his final thought out loud to Aodhan. “You know that’s not right,” he added. “My mother is the greatest artist of all and she’s kind.” That wasn’t only Illium’s opinion, either—people across the Refuge, even archangels like Uram and Lijuan, they called her art a “gift to angelkind.” “Don’t pay attention to the ones who think they’re so important they can be mean.”

  “It’s not that,” Aodhan answered. “I don’t mind being told I’m not that good or could improve—I want to learn, want to get better.”

  Illium broke off a grass stalk, chewed on it. “Yeah, that’s how I feel when I mess up in training and get shown what I did wrong.”

  Aodhan stirred up into a seated position, pulling his knees to his chest. His skin glimmered in the sun. Not with sweat. With the sparkle that was buried in his skin. That was why Illium, inspired by Naasir, had begun to call him Sparkle a long time ago. He only did it in fun, and he knew when Aodhan would laugh—and when it wouldn’t be right to use it. Like today.

  “Adi?” he said, using the old baby name he’d used back when they didn’t even go to school.

  Aodhan shifted again, flopping down onto his stomach this time. It disturbed the butterflies once more. The big green one fluttered over him in irritation before landing on his hair. “He barely paid attention to my art,” Aodhan said, his voice gritty. “He kept staring at me.”

  “A lot of people stare at you.” It was a fact of life.

  “Not this way. He kept saying how he’d heard I was beautiful, but that I was ‘simply astonishing’ in the flesh, and he couldn’t wait to capture ‘my essence’ on canvas. On and on.” Aodhan was ripping out hunks of grass as he spoke. “It was like he didn’t even see me as a person. Just the outside! Just the shine! He ignored my art, Blue. Ignored it like it was nothing.”

  Illium frowned. “I don’t know how anyone can ignore your art.”

  Aodhan’s work was really good and even if Illium was a young angel, art was a topic he knew better than many adults. Growing up with his mother allowed for nothing else. Their home was filled with art, artists came and went on a near-daily basis, and his mother talked about art like warriors talked about battle tactics.

  As if it was her air.

  Illium wasn’t that interested in art for himself, but he loved how happy it made her, so he listened. And now, he listened because it made Aodhan happy, too. Just like they listened to him talk about swords and hand-to-hand combat, and flight squadron war tactics.

  You listened to the people you loved. That was how it was.

  “Well, he did,” Aodhan muttered, pulling apart the strands of grass. “He didn’t see anything but the sparkle and the shine.” Reaching up, he pulled at his own hair. “Sometimes, I wish I could rip off my hair, peel off my skin, tear out my feathers, and just be a normal angel!”

  “Don’t say things like that! You’re you. I like you.”

  “I want to be normal!” Aodhan’s fingers worked on the strands of grass. “So people won’t be distracted by me. So people will see the art I create, the things I make!”

  “They will,” Illium said, then used his strongest weapon. “Mother sees you, and she’s the best artist of all.”

  Aodhan was quiet for a little while. “She’s different. She’s better than everyone else.”

  “I know. But Raphael sees you, too—and not because you’re pretty.”

  Aodhan glared at him for using that word.

  Illium grinned. “I’m prettier.”

  A tiny twitch of his friend’s lips. “Ha-ha.” But he wasn’t scowling so hard now. “Raphael did say I have good grace in the air.”

  “Yeah, and the trainer said we could always stain your wings and hair another color so you wouldn’t stand out in battle.” It had been during a strategy discussion after their flight tactics session—they were only short lessons, since they were so young, but Illium took it seriously and the trainer rewarded him by teaching him extra things.

  He knew Aodhan had only joined the class to keep him company, but his friend wasn’t bad at warrior skills. Illium was only ahead of him because he spent so much more of his time on it.

  “He said the same about your wings,” Aodhan murmured.

  “Uh-huh, and even about Rufi.” Their fellow trainee had wings of orangey yellow that made her look like a tropical bird—like the one Illium had seen in a drawing in a book in the Library.

  Aodhan nodded again. “They treat me normal.” His voice wasn’t so angry anymore. “Not like I’m a thing they want to put on a shelf or make art about.”

  Illium hated that anyone had made his friend feel that way, but he also knew Aodhan would have to deal with this for the rest of his life. He hadn’t been meant to be listening, but he’d heard their teacher talking to his mother about Aodhan, her kind voice full of worry.

  “If he was another kind of child,” Jessamy had said, “I’d worry he’d become spoiled. But Aodhan is so private that I’m increasingly concerned the attention will drive him more and more inward.”

  Illium’s mother had been like before-times that day, her eyes clear and her mind in the here. “Aodhan doesn’t need many anchors to steady him in life,” she’d said. “As long as he has two or three strong lines, he will be content.”

  “That’s good to hear, Lady Sharine. You probably know him best, even more than his parents.”

  “The trouble,” Illium’s mother had added, “will come with those who can’t see beneath the unique beauty of his outer skin. They will hurt him—and so we must focus on teaching him that their blindness takes nothing away from his light and his gifts.”

  Illium had thought a lot about that. Often, he had too many thoughts in his head and couldn’t sit still, but that day, he’d gone off to a favorite spot and really thought about just that one thing—and he’d come to a conclusion.

  Today, he spoke that conclusion aloud: “There are stupid people in the world—but them being dumbos doe
sn’t change that you’re my friend, or that you’re an artist, or anything else about you.” He was pretty sure that was what his mother had meant. “You have to learn to ignore the stupids.”

  Then he added a thing he’d thought up on his own. “Those people are still going to be stupid tomorrow, but you’re going to be getting better and better in your art and in your warrior training—until one day, you’ll be in an archangel’s court”—with Illium, because the two of them were always going to be friends—“and they’ll still be here, being stupid in stupid world.”

  Aodhan snorted out a small laugh . . . that grew and grew and grew. Illium grinned. Nobody else could make Aodhan laugh that way, and it was one of his favorite things in the whole world when it happened.

  When he stopped laughing at last, Aodhan held out the strands of grass with which he’d been fussing. He’d woven the strands into a perfect star. Illium stared at it, turning it this way and that, fascinated by the intricate work. “Can you do other shapes?”

  “What do you want?” Aodhan pulled out more grass. “Stupids in stupid world.” He laughed again. “Yes, they are. They’re not my people. I don’t care about them.” Then he began to weave again without waiting for Illium to choose a shape.

  Illium didn’t mind. He was just happy that Aodhan was smiling again, his shoulders no longer weighed down and his wings no longer limp. They arched against the sky as he lay on his stomach, shards of light falling off them to hit Illium’s face in a shower of stars.

  23

  Today

  Illium rubbed at his wrist, but he couldn’t rub away the feel of Aodhan’s hand. The memory of the contact burned, ice against the fire of his skin. He knew his response had been graceless; he just hadn’t been ready and the anger that had been simmering inside him ever since that night in the Enclave—the night it all began to go wrong—had burst out.

  So go, be free, Aodhan.

  Shit, shit, shit! Why had he said that? He hadn’t meant it. Not in the way he’d made it sound. He didn’t want to cut bonds with his best friend, had never wanted that. And it wasn’t why Raphael had sent him here. He’d been sent to support Aodhan, not to make life difficult for him.

  Shooting high into the sky, he allowed himself a scream, then dove back down toward Aodhan.

  His friend scowled when he made a high-speed landing. “Trying to turn yourself into paste?”

  “If I was, I’d be paste,” Illium said lightly, his heart thudding. “I’m no turtle. Want me to showcase my precision turns?”

  Returning to his survey of the area, Aodhan said nothing.

  “Sorry about earlier,” Illium said, because he’d never had a problem apologizing when he’d got it wrong. “You startled me.” That was as far as he could go.

  Aodhan shot him an unreadable glance before returning to his task.

  Before, when they’d argued and Aodhan got like this, Illium knew to leave him alone for a few hours. Aodhan wasn’t built for quick changes of mood like Illium; he needed that quiet time to work out things in his own head. Then he’d either accept Illium’s apology—if Illium was the one who’d screwed up—or he’d apologize himself. And they’d be over it.

  It had never taken longer than half a day at most.

  But things weren’t like how they’d always been. Their relationship had altered—no, Aodhan had altered—to the point that Illium couldn’t predict his reaction to any given situation. And right now, it wasn’t only about their relationship. “What are you searching for?”

  “Anything,” Aodhan said. “If we put aside the nexus—”

  “Because of its age?”

  “Exactly. It wasn’t constructed during Lijuan’s age of madness, and Xan’s team found no evidence it had been in recent use.”

  Illium nodded as a crisp morning wind brushed over their bodies like an affectionate pet, the world in front of them shaded in that cool color between gray and yellow that only exists in the moments when the sun has just begun to emerge.

  “Once we take the nexus out of the equation,” Aodhan said, “so far all we’ve found are the odd starving reborn, bursts of trapped fog, and the toxic patches, but we know that Lijuan must’ve left more behind. She was arrogant but she was also intelligent. She didn’t hold on to her territory for millennia through blind luck.”

  Folding his arms, the pale dawn sunlight welcome on his bare skin, Illium scowled. “I don’t know. She was a raving lunatic by the end even if she fooled most people into believing otherwise. She was greedy for power and certain that she could hold on to it. My opinion? Her Evilness didn’t have a backup plan.”

  Lijuan had once been a respected archangel—Illium could accept that. He’d seen her from a distance more than once as a youth, witnessed how Raphael, Elijah, even Michaela interacted with her. As they would with a senior whose life and experience they held in value. But that Lijuan had begun to vanish long before her public descent into power hunger and madness.

  It was Jason who’d said the latter to Illium, after the spymaster returned home following a postwar survey of China. Illium had ended up beside Jason while Dmitri, Venom, and Raphael looked over a map on which Jason had marked points of interest in Lijuan’s former territory.

  New York’s damaged buildings spread out below them in a broken carpet of light, Illium had said, “How long do you think she was on this track? Lijuan, I mean. Her madness. Her fever for power.”

  “Centuries.” No hesitation in Jason’s response, the pure black of his wings motionless and the curves of his facial tattoo standing out against skin that had lost some of its warm brown tones over the cooler months.

  “The Cascade might have accelerated her descent,” Jason had explained, “but the more I look, the more I uncover of her belief in herself as a goddess. Prior to Caliane’s waking, she’d already begun to believe herself not just the most senior member of the Cadre, but the most powerful archangel of all time.”

  Jason had paused, taking time to put his thoughts in exactly the right order. The spymaster didn’t waste words, but that wasn’t to say he didn’t have important things to say. Quite the opposite. When Jason spoke, Illium listened.

  “If you look at the pattern of her senior recruits over the past half millennia,” Jason had told him, “they were all . . . damaged in ways that made them easy to manipulate. They wanted a path, a being in whom to believe—she used that need to feed her ego while turning them into zealous acolytes no longer capable of independent thought.

  “The temples built to her, they didn’t emerge in the century past, or even in the past half millennia. Lijuan allowed her people to worship her long before that—such a desire strikes often in mortals, but most archangels don’t nurture it. Even Michaela nixed mortal plans for a temple to her—not ones to her beauty as exist now, but to her as a goddess.”

  “You’ve surprised me with that one, Jason.” Michaela’s vanity was legend. “But then, she turned out a surprise all the way around, didn’t she?” The former Queen of Constantinople had fought with selfless courage in the war, even though she’d recently borne a child, could’ve been excused for taking a back seat.

  “Archangels,” Jason had murmured that night, “have as many facets as a gemstone cut by a master artisan.”

  “One of Lijuan’s was her comfort at being worshipped.”

  “More than comfort, Illium. She wanted her people to view her as an omnipotent force. You could term that mere arrogance, but there were signs of a disturbed mind even then—such as the fact she collected unique pairs of angelic wings.”

  “Yes, Ellie told me.” Illium’s skin had chilled at the memory. “She pinned dead angels up like butterflies.” Elena had warned him to never put himself in a vulnerable position with Lijuan. She’ll take you, Bluebell, pin you up on her creepy board.

  Tonight, Illium reminded Aodhan of that—and of her other madnesses. “She thought
the reborn were life.”

  Aodhan stood unmoving, but the wind couldn’t stop itself from riffling his hair, the elements entranced by his beauty. A single butterfly as pale as snow landed softly on his shoulder. “Just because she was mad doesn’t mean she wasn’t also cunning and smart. She might be dead, but there’s a prickling in the air, a sinister energy that whispers at the back of my neck.”

  Illium wanted to scoff, but fact was that Aodhan had always had an eerie instinct about such things. As if he was attuned to strands of time and life the rest of them couldn’t access.

  No, that wasn’t right. Aodhan had always had an affinity for the natural elements of life, but it was only after his captivity that he’d become sensitized to the darker rivers of existence. Prior to that, he’d attracted butterflies until he turned into living art, laughed at the diminutive birds who perched on his shoulders, and been embarrassed by how much he loved his tiny familiars.

  Though the butterflies and birds had never left him, he’d left them for a long time.

  Pain slicing at him at the thought of those silent years, Illium turned to look in the other direction. “I’ll keep watch this way so you can focus on that side.”

  “I can do it alone.” It was a comment as sharp as the edge of Illium’s sword.

  “I know, but I’m here to be your backup.” Words he’d never before had to say aloud; it had always been understood between them that one would watch the back of the other, that they’d pick each other up if they fell, that they’d stand as a united wall against all threats.

  Only once had Illium failed . . . but it had been a spectacular failure that led to Aodhan’s devastation. Illium’s gut still churned when he thought about that day, about their stupid fight, about what had happened in the aftermath. And about the silence that had followed. Aodhan’s silence.