THE BELLS RING, marking the start of a new day. I untangle myself from Neil’s sheets and lean over him to stroke his cheek. His eyelashes flutter, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He smiles and then says, “You were right. It is nicer to wake up next to you.”
I laugh and snuggle back in next to him. “I could stay here all day.” Especially considering I don’t want to yet face any of the fallout from last night.
“Stay as long as you want.” He sits up, the sheet sliding down to reveal his bare chest, and gives me a searching look.
“Are you sure? You’re really okay with us sharing a room?”
Neil blushes, but he doesn’t bow his head. “Yeah, I think I am. Level Three is different from what I was taught to expect from the afterlife. I didn’t know the rules of this place, and I automatically assumed that the rules I learned on Earth carried over. But they don’t. I get that now.”
This is a giant step for Neil, especially after yesterday, when we basically broke up. “What changed your mind?”
“Seeing you fight down there, I remembered why I fell in love with you in the first place. You’ve always been strong. But you don’t realize it sometimes.”
“Strong?”
“You are who you are, and you don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.” He turns his head away. “Not like me.”
I catch his chin so that he has to look at me again. “No regrets,” I say. “But no more secrets either, okay?”
He nods. “No more secrets.”
That means I have to tell him about my Morati DNA. I don’t really know how to say it after all this time, so I start casually. “So guess what I found out?”
“What?”
“Since my thirteenth birthday I’ve been eight percent angel.”
Neil sits up straighter. “How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, but Julian said it happened when the fissure opened between Level Two and Earth.”
“And you believe him?”
“He doesn’t lie all the time.” I scoot over to sit next to him against the headboard.
Neil shakes his head as if it’s too much to take in. “Amazing! I mean, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Well . . .” I hesitate. Neil might hate me when I tell him the truth. “Not really. Because I’m eight percent Morati, I think it gives me a tendency to become obsessed. You told me yesterday you thought something was off about me.” I lower my head so that my hair falls over my eyes.
Neil puts his arm around me and pulls me to him. “No. Some of the Morati chose to rebel, like Mira and Eli. And even Julian. They fought against evil. And so do you.”
I’d like to think I wouldn’t be drawn into the Morati’s schemes again. I still feel their presence here, but I can’t be sure if it’s only Julian or if there are more, lying low, waiting for another chance to ascend to the next level somehow.
“That reminds me. I have a present for you,” Neil says.
“One of my birthday presents?”
“No.” He takes my wrist and unties the chain that still holds the obol, letting the charm slide off and fall onto the bed. “This skep here, it’s a part of another story.”
I rub my wrist, glad to have the charm and its destructive power gone. But I still don’t know how Neil managed to obtain something on Earth that originated in the heavens. “Can I ask where you got the skep?”
“I found it on my desk at home,” Neil says. “With a typewritten note that said ‘Felicia might like this.’ I thought one of my parents left it there. But now that I know what it really is, that doesn’t seem very likely.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
Neil hands me a small white box. “Open it.”
I remove the lid and poke around under the cotton inside until I uncover a charm in the shape of the infinity symbol.
“This is the start of our new story.” Neil threads the charm onto the chain. “And we’ll write it as we go. No promises that can be broken, just infinite possibilities.”
“I love it. Thank you.”
We stay like this for several minutes, letting everything sink in. There’s so much uncertainty right now. The one thing I can be sure of is that Neil is squarely on my side. But if Neil and I should break up someday, we break up. It won’t be the end of the universe. My afterlife will go on.
Then Neil lifts the sheet, a seductive glint in his eye. “How shall we start chapter one?”
“I might have a few suggestions,” I say, pouncing on him. He throws the sheet over our heads, and for the first time we join together without a single reservation.
Two days later, when we finally emerge from Neil’s room and venture outside onto the green, we discover a new, more peaceful Level Three. Julian has rebuilt both bridges, so full classes can resume. Julian’s next task will be to try to repair the files in the records room, so we can find any Morati who may be flying under the radar, but he needs to regain his strength first.
Furukama is fine after his shock of being mind stunned by four of his trainees—Autumn, Cash, Ira, and Ian—in his office. Brady tells us that it was Cash who knocked him out on his way back from finding Nate. Furukama and the career council reprimand Nate and Keegan for throwing Emilia and the twins into the pit when they could have been interrogated. Keegan claims he did it as payback for Kiara’s murder.
I fill in Furukama on everything that happened with Autumn and Cash—even that I had a part in the explosions by viewing Cash’s memory globe gifts instead of turning them in. Maybe in part because I know about his reinvention and he wants me to keep his secret, Furukama lets me off lightly—he dismisses me from seraphim guard training. But he also hugs me, so on the whole I think he’s grateful for my contribution to exposing the Morati.
If Furukama, the security team, and most of Level Three are surprised that Autumn was working with the Morati, Nate is not. “I always knew there was something off about her,” he boasts to whoever will listen. I remake my former room into a shrine of sorts for her, though. In the end she was my friend, and she sacrificed herself so that I could live. Despite everything else she did, I honor her for that.
The weeks fly by, and soon Ascension Day is upon us.
As I make my way to Assembly Hill, I run into Julian. Since he repaired the bridges, he is being celebrated as a hero, and Libby allowed him to join the muse program with us as a reward. We haven’t had the chance to talk, because his entourage usually surrounds him, but today he is alone in front of the rebuilt Muse Collection Library.
“So it all worked out for you, didn’t it?” I ask him. “You’ve been found innocent of the bombings, you’re popular with the people, and you’re going back to Earth as a muse. You got everything you ever wanted.”
He reaches out and lightly grazes my cheek with his knuckles. “Not everything,” he says sadly.
I deflect the emotionally charged moment by asking a question that’s been tumbling around in my mind. “How did Cash know that, as a hybrid, I could open portals?”
“I’ll show you,” Julian says. “Even though this memory doesn’t paint me in the best light. Okay?”
When I nod, he materializes the eggplant sofa right out here on the lawn. We sit down together, like old times, and we connect our palms.
Julian drives the stolen police car, pumping the gas pedal. He’s on the lookout for Neil’s car, because Cash has ordered him to hit it head-on and take Felicia’s life. Julian doesn’t know why vehicular homicide is not considered murder, but it isn’t. In any case, Julian doesn’t want to go through with it. He has a plan. He’ll have to crash into them, or Cash will become suspicious, but he can do it so that Felicia has a maximum chance of survival.
Julian turns on the sirens as a warning. He switches lanes as he rounds the bend, and Neil’s car speeds straight toward him. At the last second he swerves, but Neil swerves too and the cars collide, metal grinding and glass shattering. As they spin together, Julian locks eyes with Felicia.
The cars screech to a halt in the middle of the road. Julian exits the police car from the passenger side and rushes over just before a second police car comes barreling at Felicia, who is still trapped in the wreckage. He recognizes the driver, Octavia. Cash must have sent a backup Morati assassin. Felicia throws her arm out in front of her face in a protective gesture, through the broken window, a metal charm glinting in her palm. A blast of light flies out of her fingers. It steamrolls toward the oncoming car, flattening grass and shrubbery alongside the road before it entirely encompasses the car and zaps it into oblivion.
Julian stops in his tracks, utterly stunned and terrified. Somehow Felicia made an entire car and its driver disappear. It’s impossible, and yet he witnessed it with his own eyes.
Julian approaches Felicia with caution, dialing 911 on his cell phone.
“Nine one one. State your emergency,” the dispatch says calmly.
“There’s been a car accident. Two people are hurt.”
“Where are you? Why are there sirens?”
“I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s the old country road off Route 4. Hurry!”
He hangs up. “Are you hurt?” he asks Felicia, his whole being on high alert.
She stares straight ahead, like she’s in shock. “I—I can’t get out.” Her long hair is stuck in the twisted frame of the car. “Please help Neil!”
Julian rips Felicia’s door off the hinges and throws it to the pavement. He leans over her and gently extracts an unconscious Neil from his seat belt, keeping Neil’s neck straight as he pulls him over Felicia and lays him in a patch of grass. Julian administers CPR and makes sure Neil is breathing normally before he turns to Felicia in anguish.
“I have to go before the ambulance arrives.” He kisses her on the forehead and wipes a tear from her cheek. “I’m so, so sorry. I hope you can forgive me someday.”
Felicia doesn’t say anything, and Julian knows he doesn’t deserve an answer anyway. He’s a coward, and he proves it by racing off across the field as fast as his feet can carry him.
We exit the memory, and Julian flinches like I might punch him.
“I made a car disappear?” I ask incredulously.
“That’s why Cash didn’t want you to have that memory. He was scared of you. He theorized that as a hybrid you might be able to destroy angels. He thought if you knew, you would eventually use your power against him and the other Morati.”
“Why didn’t you show me this before?” I ask.
“Honestly? Because I thought you would smite me, first chance you got.”
“You think I have it in me to smite you?”
“You look like you want to smite me right now.”
I laugh. “I do a little.”
“Told you.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “But the water from the Styx wasn’t involved in the car crash. I thought the three main ingredients were a hybrid, the Styx, and an obol.”
“Cash said you probably blacked out when you were thrown from the car and maybe partially crossed over, which would mean going through the Styx.”
“Okay, but how did Cash go from theorizing that I could kill Morati to theorizing that I could open portals?”
Julian wipes his hands on his jeans. “Later, once you were already in Level Two, Cash found Octavia, the assassin he thought you destroyed. She was hiding out in a hive, afraid that Cash would punish her for her failure. That’s when he knew that what you actually did was open an unstable portal to a higher level. But he didn’t tell me that until recently.”
“But you’re a hybrid too. Can’t you open portals? Why didn’t Cash just use you instead of setting up this elaborate scheme with me?”
“I can open them, but only to lower levels. We’re linked, and so our powers are balanced out that way. I bet you can open them only to higher levels.”
It’s not a theory I want to test out anytime soon, that’s for sure.
Back in Level Two, when I relived the memory of my supposed death, the shock of Julian’s betrayal left a deep scar in my psyche. But now I understand that he was manipulated as much as Autumn and I were. That doesn’t make it right, but it gives me a reason to forgive. “After the crash you stayed to make sure I was okay. You helped Neil. That counts for something.”
“I ran away. I left you there.” He groans and punches the arm of the sofa with his fist. “If I had stood my ground right then and there against the Morati, if I had stayed and protected you every day of your life, maybe you’d still be alive.”
So many maybes. So many ways for things to have gone differently. So many versions of the story that will never be told.
I touch his arm, and his fist relaxes.
“It’s okay. We’ll be fine.” I can’t be sure whether he’s finally telling me the whole truth or merely his understanding of the truth, but in the end I don’t care. I can accept Julian for who he is, bad and good and everything crazy in between. “Friends?” I ask. It’s the most that I can offer.
“Friends,” he says.
Julian and I walk together to Assembly Hill, where a crowd has already gathered. There’s an air of celebration as Area Two prepares to send off the twelve chosen candidates for the seraphim guard, including Brady and Moby. Over in Area Three they are bidding farewell to the retiring Careers and the people older than sixty-five, who get an automatic pass to Level Four.
There’s a barrier put up between the ascension site, where the graduates stand, and the rest of us. I join Neil in the front row. Brady comes up and hugs me. “Bye, Twitchy,” Brady says. “I don’t know where in creation I’m going, but I reckon it’ll be exciting.”
“Aww! I’ll miss you,” I tell him, “but I won’t miss that nickname.” We both laugh.
The portal opens. It’s a door leading to a staircase, one that looks more like it goes up to a dusty attic than the heavens. Furukama and Libby stand to the side and bow to each graduate as they ascend. Both Moby and Brady turn and wave at us as they pass through, and my eyes fill with happy tears.
The last graduate walks through the portal, and it closes behind her. Libby throws her arms up, and confetti and glitter rain from the sky. She twirls and twirls, laughing, until she bumps into Neil and me. I’ve never seen her so unburdened. She winks at us. “I used to be fun, you know,” she says.
She continues dancing through the crowd, and all at once I imagine I see my mother the way my dad used to see her. I wait for the sting of rejection to pierce my heart like it usually does when I think of her sending me away, but it doesn’t come. And that’s when I realize I’ve finally forgiven her.
After the ceremony Neil and I go to the Forgetting Tree.
I’ve thought about this moment a lot over the past few weeks. If memories make you who you are, then the Morati killed a version of me by stealing them. I’ll never know how I actually died. I’ll never know if Neil and I stayed together on Earth or not. I may never know the fates of my family and friends. But maybe my best memories are just waiting for me to make them. Whatever is in store for me, I can’t stop it. I’ll take the days of my afterlife as they come.
I materialize a scrap of paper and a pen and then write “My stolen memories” on it. Neil stands close by as I pin the paper to the tree. And then he takes hold of my hand.
Now I understand what letting go means. It means not allowing anyone else to define you, and that includes past versions of yourself. It’s not about throwing away keepsakes, or distancing yourself from the people who matter, but about accepting that you’re a person who’s going to make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay. Mistakes don’t define you. It’s what you learn from them that does.
We don’t erase the past. Our triumphs, our failures, our loves, our betrayals—they all provide the clarifying context that makes life more meaningful. Without our roots we might be carried off by the first wayward wind.