The past might have been unfathomable to her before, but she could feel it pressing up against the dark surfaces, waiting to break into the light. She closed her eyes and cupped her hands together. There, in the darkness, her heart pounding, she willed them to come out. She called on those coldest, darkest things, asking them to deliver her past, to illuminate her and Daniel's story. She called on them to solve the mystery of who he was and why he had chosen her.
Even if the truth broke her heart.
A rich, feminine laugh rang out in the forest. A laugh so clear and full, it felt as if it were surrounding Luce, bouncing o the branches in the trees. She tried to trace its origin, but there were so many shadows gathered--Luce didn't know how to pinpoint the source. And then she felt her blood go cold.
The laughter was hers.
Or had once been hers, back when she was a child. Before Daniel, before Sword & Cross, before Trevor ... before a life full of secrets and lies and so many unanswerable questions. Before she'd ever seen an angel. It was too innocent a laugh, too carefree to belong to her anymore.
A breath of wind swirled in the branches overhead, and a scattering of brown redwood needles broke o and showered to the ground. They pattered like raindrops as they joined a thousand predecessors on the mulchy forest oor. Among them was one large frond.
Thick and feathery, fully intact, it drifted slowly down somehow outside the power of gravity. It was black instead of brown. And instead of falling to the ground, it drifted lightly onto Luce's outstretched palm.
Not a frond, but an Announcer. As she leaned down to examine it more closely, she heard the laughter again. Somewhere inside, another Luce was laughing.
Gently, Luce gave the Announcer's prickly edges a pull. It was more pliant than she expected, but cold as ice and tacky against her ngers. It grew larger at the lightest touch. When it had grown to about a square foot, Luce released it from her grip and was pleased to watch it hover at eye level in front of her. She made a special e ort to focus--on hearing, on tuning out the world around her.
Nothing at rst, and then--
One more rising laugh sang out from within the shadow. Then the veil of blackness shredded and an image inside became clear.
This time, Daniel was the rst one to come into view.
Even through the Announcer's screen, it was heaven to see him. His hair was a couple of inches longer than he wore it now. And he was tan--his shoulders and the bridge of his nose were both a deep, golden brown. He wore trim navy swim trunks, snug around his hips, the kind she'd seen in family pictures from the seventies. He made them look so good.
Behind Daniel was the verdant edge of a thick, dense rain forest, lush green but bright with berries and white owers that Luce had never seen before. He stood at the lip of a short but dramatic cli , which looked down at a sparkling pool of water. But Daniel kept glancing up, toward the sky.
That laugh again. And then Luce's own voice, broken apart by giggles. "Hurry up and get down here!"
Luce leaned forward, closer to the window of the Announcer, and saw her former self treading water in a yellow halter-top bikini. Her long hair danced around her, oating on the water's surface like a deep black halo. Daniel kept an eye on her but was also still glancing overhead. The muscles on his chest were tensing up. Luce had a bad feeling she already knew why.
The sky was lling with Announcers, like a ock of enormous black crows, a cloud so thick they blocked the sun. The long-ago Luce in the water noticed nothing, saw nothing. But watching all those Announcers it and gather in the humid air of that rain forest, in an image made by an Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy. Announcer, had the Luce in the forest feeling suddenly dizzy.
"You make me wait forever," long-ago Luce called up to Daniel. "Pretty soon I'm going to freeze."
Daniel tore his eyes away from the sky, looking down at her with a broken expression. His lip was trembling and his face was ghostly white. "You won't freeze," he told her. Were those tears Daniel was wiping away? He closed his eyes and