I land as lightly as I left the ground, though I stumble as my feet reconnect with the stone. Ryan stares at me in silence, his eyes reproachful at the reminder of the chasm that lies between us.
I voice the thought I’ve been carrying around inside me. ‘We can’t stay here. I make everything around me a target; enough has been done to this city, to its people. The demons are gone for now. Michael, Gabriel and the others must have drawn them away somehow, long enough for us to leave here. So if you really want to do this, if you want to try and carve out some time for us, pull off one last “joint mission”? We’ve got to get ready to go. It’s almost light.’
‘How?’ he asks. ‘We can’t just walk out of here. They’ll see us. There’s nowhere safe in the world when they can destroy something without even touching it.’
He shudders. I take his face in my hands, letting the warmth bleed from my skin into his, hoping he will mistake it for confidence.
‘We can,’ I whisper. ‘We have an advantage they do not possess. We have the ability to think like mortals and act like mortals in this mortal world. It’s something none of them — angel or demon — has ever really “stooped” to do; at least not in the way I’ve been forced to. They persist in treating you like unthinking cattle when you’ve demonstrated, over and over, that you are capable of rationalising the mind of God. You are miraculous.’
I lean my forehead against his and he closes his eyes at the warming touch.
‘When it grows light and the tourists begin to spill out into the streets,’ I murmur, ‘we’ll move. Everyone loves a catastrophe. The Piazza is already crawling with people. And more will come. A tide of humanity is going to flow up this staircase today. The Galleria has become a tomb for the dead still inside, and this roof provides the best view of it. The reporters and thrill-seekers and ghouls will flock here. When the first sightseers begin to leave, we’ll leave, too, hidden among them.’
Ryan pulls away from me, his laughter disbelieving. ‘And I’m asking you again, how?’ He backs away up several more stairs so that he’s staring down on me from above. ‘Have you looked at yourself lately? You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. You’re electric. And you’ve got as much chance of slipping out of here unnoticed as, as …’
I see his eyes grow round, see him fall backwards in genuine fear, as I do what K’el, what Nuriel, what even Gudrun reminded me was possible.
I shape-shift.
Permutations, combinations — they should flow seamlessly, one from another. But I’m rusty, still fighting the feeling I could fly apart at any second. So it seems to take a lifetime to finetune and discard, add and subtract, borrow and enhance, drawing on shattered memories, old abilities, forgotten powers, until I’m satisfied with the eyes, the nose, face shape, hair colour, height, the works.
And while I do all of it, Ryan’s face reflects his own fascination, and nausea.
When I’m finally done, I’m an equation, I suppose. A strange amalgam.
I look sixteen, maybe seventeen at most, because it’s the way I’m feeling inside: so strangely confused and vulnerable and unformed.
What I remember distinctly? Is being young, and so in love with Luc that I couldn’t see beyond that. Then whole human years, whole human lives, must have intervened between the creature I was then — the creature who fell — and the thing I am now. But all I can clearly remember out of all that lost time — years that could have happened to someone else — are recent memories. Like waking as a battered wife called Ezra, with blood caking my face, a hairline fracture in one eye socket.
So in honour of Ezra, I’ve given myself her sun-kissed skin. And I have gifted myself Lucy’s green eyes because I’d look every morning into the cracked mirror in her stinking apartment and wish I was somewhere else. I have Susannah’s dusting of freckles across the bridge of her long, narrow nose. And I have her dimples, one beneath the apple of each cheek so that when I smile, I appear open-faced, uncomplicated and friendly, the exact opposite of Susannah’s nightmare of a mother, who made her life a kind of hell. I have Carmen’s wild, black, curly hair and I’m wearing it bound back in the kind of low ponytail that her nemesis, Tiffany, used to favour. I have Lela’s fine bones, elegant wrists and ankles. But I have Irina’s heart-shaped face and long, tapered fingers, her long limbs and her height, because I would miss seeing the world from her vantage point, miss being able to place my head on Ryan’s shoulder without having to strain to do it.
But there’s something of my own strong build and features in this new persona I’ve created: an in-joke for an audience of one. Irina looked breakable, which is something I will never, ever be, or permit myself to seem.
I could pass as a citizen of almost anywhere; I’m both anonymous and unique, interesting to gaze on, but just shy of true beauty. I’m a deliberate collection of quirks.
‘Who the hell are you supposed to be?’ Ryan says, staring into my face.
‘Close your mouth,’ I tell him, laughing softly. ‘What do you think?’
I do a little twirl on the spot, resting my hand high upon the curve of my left hip, the way Irina would.
I’m wearing ordinary-looking clothes: a black, hooded goose-down jacket over a heavy, black, rollneck sweater, skinny, dark grey jeans and soft, sand-coloured, flat-soled boots that end just below the knee. They’re all fake, of course, all props, shifted out of the very energy of which I’m made. Here because I need them.
Ryan blinks several times as he studies me. ‘This isn’t funny — I don’t know you like this,’ he says finally.
I frown as I drift slowly up the stairs towards him. ‘Look closer. You recognised me inside Carmen, inside Lela, in Irina, when you shouldn’t have been able to. I’m the same person I always was. It’s just a shell. I’m still here,’ I insist. ‘You know me.’
I sit down beside him, but he shifts away, as if horrified by what I’ve done.
‘What else are you people capable of?’ he breathes. ‘Every time I think I’ve come to terms with what you are, what you can do, you freak me out all over again. I just got you back, damn it! I just got you back and you go and do this.’
‘They won’t be looking for someone wearing this face or form,’ I say sharply. ‘It’ll keep us alive.’
Ryan’s eyes flash. ‘That may be. But you’re still glowing. They’re gonna see that, right? If you could, uh, dial down the whole shining thing, well then, maybe it would work.’ He flicks the fingers of one hand at the gleaming surface of my skin.
I freeze, astonished that I could have forgotten such a fundamental detail.
‘What would I do without you?’ I murmur, staring down at my luminous hands.
When I was Carmen, I’d only ever glowed very faintly in the dark, when there were no other sources of light around. In the daylight, I’d looked like everyone else. But I can’t afford to do even that now — glow in the dark — not when the stakes are so high and any tiny slip up could get us killed. Ryan’s right: I need to ‘dial down the whole shining thing’ altogether. But can I do it?
I bend my will inwards, the way I’ve relearnt to do, imagine locking the light away inside me, the way my soul was anchored deep inside the human vessels the Eight procured for me over centuries. Ryan gasps as the glow that surrounds me begins to dull and fade until I’m indistinguishable from the darkness inside the tower. I hold the light cupped inside, buried so far down that only I could know it’s there.
‘What do you think?’ I ask again softly, my voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. ‘Dialled down enough for you?’
Ryan is silent for a long time. His eyes appear blind as they struggle to pinpoint me. I realise suddenly that he can’t see me at all.