“THE NIGHT YOU WERE MUGGED in Kenya, the day before your thirteenth birthday, I stood in front of the window to Earth in the Morati’s palace and just happened to see you. And then suddenly, inconceivably, your thirteen-year-old self stood in front of me, in Level Two.” Julian shakes his head and looks toward the ceiling. “You were there only for an instant, but I was irrevocably changed, and so were you.”
I remember seeing Julian in my nightmares—nightmares that turned out to be a memory of my brief first visit to Level Two.
“But how can that be?” I fly to my feet, stride across to the window where Julian stands. “I don’t feel like an angel.” If anything, I feel more like a demon.
“I don’t know how or why, but our shadow DNA transferred to each other during the fissure. You have eight percent of my DNA. And the eight percent DNA that you lost?” He puts his hand over his heart. “It’s here. In me.”
Is this why Julian and I have always had this strange, overpowering connection? Because we are literally part of each other? My knees buckle, but Julian catches me before I can faint. He scoops me up in his arms and sets me gently back on the sofa. I tuck my legs underneath me and squeeze my arms across my chest.
“Angels have DNA?”
“Angels don’t have mortal DNA, but we have shadow DNA. A human’s mortal DNA is connected to their immortal shadow DNA. When a human dies, the shadow DNA is what’s left. Some call it a soul. It’s the part of you that moves on.” Julian runs a hand through his artfully disheveled hair. “We exchanged shadow DNA, and it made you stronger. Superhuman.”
My being part angel does explain some mysteries. Why I never got sick as a teen and why I recovered so much more quickly than Neil after our car accident. Why I was able to wean myself off the Lethe drugs in Level Two faster than others, and why I got headaches and felt weak in the brimstone jail. And the incident at Western Bridge, where I thought I repaired a tiny part of it, even though that’s something only angels can do. Maybe I wasn’t hallucinating it. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I ask.
He sits on the opposite side of the sofa, like he doesn’t dare to touch me. “I should have. I guess I had this foolish notion that you could love me for me.” He looks at me slightly askew, his features soft and vulnerable. My heart leaps with yearning, but I don’t trust it. Because as much as I want to believe Julian is essentially good, if a bit misguided, he is Morati, after all.
And that makes me eight percent Morati. Eight percent evil.
“The Morati haven’t killed me. What do they want?” I ask.
“If I knew . . .” His pupils flick away just for a second, but that tiny movement reveals everything. He might have told me about my hybrid nature, but he’s still hiding things from me for my own good.
“Never mind.” I hastily untangle the braid Julian put in my hair and smooth the crinkled strands between my shaking fingers.
“I’m on your side. I always will be,” he says.
I can’t stand to look at him anymore. “One hundred percent on my side? Or only eight percent?”
“Felicia!”
“See you tomorrow, Julian.” I speed for the door.
“The Morati are dangerous,” he warns as I leave. As if I needed to be reminded. I slam the door on my way out.
Libby’s office is empty. Neil must be at sound check already. Yesterday’s concert went well, if you judge by the crowd’s reaction.
I rush over to Assembly Hill, burning with even more secrets that I won’t tell Neil. That I’m part Morati. That every time he looks at me, he’s looking his greatest enemy in the face. That I’m evil, and somehow I’ve always known it. I have to push through the crowd to get to the front. It’s later than I thought, and people are restless for the music to start.
Keegan is new onstage, his small frame dwarfed by an enormous drum set. He grips his drumsticks with such force that his knuckles are white. Neil probably put him up here to build up his confidence, but the panic in Keegan’s eyes tells me it’s going to backfire. I don’t protest. It might humiliate him even more to kick him out at this point.
Libby waits behind my piano bench. Neil plays the opening notes of a song, and I slide into place, running my fingertips over the keys. I steady myself and turn my head to take in our audience. It’s like viewing a giant, undulating patchwork quilt, with all the career groups sticking together in vast swatches of color. There’s a tiny speck of red right up at the front—the superfans that Neil has recruited to be healers—and black around the edges of the crowd, where the security team stands just in case.
Normally when you play with a drummer, the drummer sets the tempo for the rest of the band. But Keegan is inexperienced, so he follows the beat put down by Moby on the bass. Keegan is a fraction of a second off, playing rolls on the snare drum that lag behind the rest of us. The music feels heavy, like playing in a sea of molasses.
Moby tries to adjust for Keegan’s ineptitude by slowing to his speed, but Keegan gets frustrated and bangs on the high hat, snare, and bass drum willy-nilly. A pressure builds in my head every time he hits the cymbals, which is at least every four beats. I throttle my floor pedal, and my teeth grind together as I pound out the notes. Libby’s hand on my back digs into my spine, and the energy she pumps into me congeals and clogs in my veins.
Dark thoughts gather at the base of my skull. I want to scream at Keegan to stop his god-awful racket. I want to rage at Neil for misjudging putting Keegan onstage as a kindness. I want Libby to back off, to stop breathing down my neck. The darkness presses up against the energy within me, pushing it slowly down the length of my arms.
Keegan kicks over the cymbal, and it lands with a crash between Moby and Neil. The dark energy surges into my fingertips and into my piano keys. Libby backs away from me, and Moby and Neil stop playing. I continue like a woman possessed, and the music hovers over the crowd like a black cloud. The purple spirit trappers punch the yellow demon hunters, and the white guardian angels hurl insults at the green caretakers.
My hands are jerked off the keys, and the music stops on a high, keening note that echoes over Assembly Hill. The crowd stands frozen in place, their mouths gaping open as they stare up at me. I’m a public menace, and now everyone knows it.
Neil lets go of my arms, and they drop to my thighs. Keegan huddles behind his drum set, and Moby tries to coax him out.
Libby directs Neil to play a ballad, something to calm the crowd. “What were you thinking?” she whispers harshly into my ear.
Neil begins to sing, his rich, warm voice soaring over the crowd, filling their ears with promises of safety, love, and happiness. I can almost believe the message is for me. But it’s not, and it never will be.
I bolt, tripping over my bench as I go. Without looking back at the stage, I run.
Sometime later there’s a soft knock on my door. I lie facedown on my bed. My foot throbs to the rhythm of the memory globe underneath the bed.
The door creaks open.
“There’s glass in your foot,” Neil says. I stepped on a shard of his picture frame when I tore off my shoes and threw them at the wall. I thought I’d cleaned up all the pieces when I’d hung the photo of him back up, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job of it.
“Don’t I deserve the pain?” I mumble into my bedspread. “Isn’t it clear enough now that I’m a horrible person?”
“You didn’t mean to agitate the crowd like that.” The bed shifts as Neil sits down. He takes my foot into his lap and extracts the shard. The throbbing recedes into a dull ache. Did I mean it, though? Deep down? Because if I didn’t, why did it happen?
I turn over onto my side to face Neil. He recoils with a gasp. “What happened to your eyes?” he asks.
I’m sure my eyes are puffy and red, but do I really look that bad? “I’m sorry,” I moan. I’ve been saying that a lot lately.
“It’s okay. We calmed everyone down. But, Felicia . . .” He pauses. “We took a vote, and you’re out of the band. I mean, for the time being. Maybe once things have settled down, in a few weeks, Libby will reconsider.”
As if the fallout from tonight’s concert weren’t bad enough already, now I’ve lost my last real link to Neil. We don’t room together, we don’t train together, and now we won’t play music together. I’ll never see him. He’s slipping away, and there’s nothing I can do. I want to ask him if he voted in favor of me, but I’m too scared of the answer. At least he hasn’t broken up with me, but can that be far behind?
I reach out my hand to him, but he backs away. “Keegan’s waiting for me. He needs more practice, so I gotta go. But I’ll pick you up for class tomorrow?” He gives me a half wave and scrambles out the door, like he’s afraid of me. Like he knows what is festering inside me.
I turn, and twin black smudges shimmer up at me from the bedspread. It looks like makeup. I materialize a mirror, and it’s immediately clear why Neil freaked out. My eyes are painted with black eye shadow nearly up to my eyebrows, and my eyelashes are coated with heavy mascara. I don’t know how it got there, but I want it gone.
Frantically I wipe at the eye shadow with the edge of my sheet, but no matter how much I rub, I only succeed in dirtying my sheet. The eye shadow doesn’t come off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the Morati—a permanent reminder written on my eyelids that my soul is stained with black.