to her sketchpad, Suyin motioned her head toward the opposite sofa. “Sit, Andromeda,” she said in the same aged dialect she’d used earlier. “Tell me what you do here.”
Andromeda saw no reason to lie.
Pencil motionless on her sketchpad, Suyin looked at her with sad eyes once she was done. “My aunt will not allow you to leave.”
“I know.” It was no longer Lijuan she saw when she looked at Suyin. The other woman’s own spirit was too bright and too gentle both. “Have you been imprisoned here all this time?” It must’ve felt like living death to an angel who, according to the histories Andromeda had read, had loved to fly the world.
“I was given the choice to Sleep or to die. And in this, I was . . . lucky, for others who helped build this citadel and thus knew its secrets, were all executed.” Sorrow in every part of her as she flipped a page and began to sketch again. “I chose to Sleep, but I wake every few hundred years to see if this prison I built has fallen and I can fly to freedom.” The quiet horror of her pain made Andromeda’s eyes sting. “Yet each time I wake, my aunt is more powerful, more a nightmare.”
Andromeda wanted to trust this woman who appeared to be a fellow captive, but she couldn’t. Not so quickly. Yet she risked asking, “Did you ever try to escape?”
Setting aside her sketchpad, Suyin rose to her feet and turned. Andromeda cried out, one trembling hand rising to her mouth. Suyin was missing most of the lower half of one wing, the exposed muscle and tendon of the bottom edge hot and red.
“I tried to escape the first time I woke,” Suyin said after sitting back down, the faint breathlessness in her voice the only indication of what must be agonizing pain.
She nodded to the crossed swords mounted on the wall behind Andromeda. “The blades used to clip my wings each time I wake.”
Andromeda couldn’t imagine the endless horror. “How are you sane?” she whispered.
“I do not know myself.” Suyin’s fine-boned hand moved over the paper in confident strokes. “Perhaps because I was old enough before my imprisonment that I understand time passes like an inexorable river, bringing change with it.”
Wise, sad eyes met Andromeda’s once more and for an instant, her skin prickled with a dizzying sense of déjà vu. As if she was facing Lijuan again, only this Lijuan was who the archangel should have become.
“I have heard whispers of a change called the Cascade,” Suyin said. “Is this true?”
There was no reason to hide the knowledge. “It’s said to be a time when the archangels grow so viciously in power that the consequences could shatter the foundations of the world.”
And the archangels were not who they should be, and bodies rotted in the streets and blood rained from the skies as empires burned.
Nothing could ever soften the grim impact of those words, the first specific mention of a previous Cascade that Jessamy had discovered in the Archives. “A small number of ordinary angels have also been affected.”
Illium was the most dramatic example. All the older immortals had begun to notice the violent acceleration of the blue-winged angel’s development. There were rumors that he might break away from Raphael’s Seven and seek to rule a territory, but those who believed that had forgotten Dmitri. The vampire was one of the most powerful in the world and he chose to be Raphael’s second.
“If the world is on the brink of catastrophic change,” Suyin said softly, “then, perhaps the next time I wake I will be free . . . and the world will be a ruin. One nightmare to another.”
* * *
Naasir ran under the moon after his latest truck ran out of fuel, his skin covered by a fine layer of sweat and his muscles straining, but he was still too far from Lijuan’s citadel. Be smart, he thought to Andromeda. Be sneaky. I’m coming.
12
Andromeda woke knowing there was only one feasible course of action.
Bathing, she braided her hair while it was still wet. It was the only way to control it since she didn’t have access to the modern tools that had made life so much easier of late. Before that, she’d simply made it a habit to wear her hair in a tight bun. Jessamy had commented on the hairstyle that didn’t suit her youth, but Andromeda had shrugged and said it was convenient.