I stood up so abruptly the chair skidded on the quartz. “I know my score.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I do.”
“May I know your plans?”
“Live each day as though it were my last because one of them eventually will be.” I strolled toward her, stopped to twist a fig from its branch, then chomped into it. Impeccably ripe. I was tempted to spit it out. Instead, I swallowed.
“Celeste . . .” She leveled her wary eyes on mine.
I sensed she wanted to tell me not to waste my angel-given gift. In the end, she tacked no extra words on to my name.
“Farewell, Ophan.”
Before leaving, I strode through the curved, sliding glass doors of the Ranking Room and hopped onto a seat at the long bar that belted the circular room. I pressed my dry palm into the glass panel until the holo-ranker whirred to life, then sketched Muriel Moreau over the cool glass. Her face appeared in three-dimension, so incredibly realistic it felt like she was sitting across from me. Her lips flexed then straightened, and her luminous navy eyes met mine, sending waves of tenderness lapping over me.
I scrolled through her profile until I caught sight of her rank. Only then, did I release the breath I’d inhaled back in the cafeteria: 7.
From a celestial standpoint, it was an incredible score. Her soul, once harvested, would be brought to Elysium and given the choice between remaining there forever or returning to Earth inside a new body for another lifetime. In my opinion, though, her soul was faultless and deserved not even a single digit, but I’d come to learn my views of right and wrong differed greatly from the ishim’s.
I craned my neck toward the sky beyond the domed glass with its fake streaks of orange and pink. Elysium didn’t deserve someone like Mimi.
She probably wouldn’t stay. Not once she realized Jarod and Leigh weren’t there. I wished I could somehow prepare her for the disappointment, but we weren’t allowed to speak of Elysium with humans. And although they believed me reckless and undeserving, I shockingly respected this law.
I returned my gaze to the single digit floating below a face I’d come to know better than my own, and my pulse shuddered in my ears, blowing away all other sounds. One day soon that face would no longer exist. This profile would vanish. The woman I’d come to love would be gone.
Ears still ringing, I checked what had cost Mimi seven points: patricide.
My leg stopped bouncing. My blood stopped pumping. Mimi had killed her father?
For a moment, I sat there stunned, and then every sound in the circular room crescendoed, overriding the silence. If she’d killed him, then he’d merited it. I’d never pried into her life, the same way she’d never pried into mine. Even though our pasts had shaped our personalities, neither of us had permitted it to shape our relationship. I respected her enough to keep abiding by our unspoken agreement and let the story of her sin fade into the ether along with her body.
Warily, I pressed my palm into the glass panel, signing on to Mimi so that no fletching disturbed her from here on out. Once the words ASSIGNED TO CELESTE FROM GUILD 24 appeared in big block letters over her flickering portrait, I shut the holo-ranker off and left the guild, once and for all.
4
“And then what happened?” I asked, hands slotted beneath my pillow.
For the past two days, Muriel had been regaling me with stories about her past. I’d heard some of them already, but not this one. As we laid on her king-size bed, the clock on her nightstand displaying the time in glowing red letters—4 a.m.—her cold fingers slid through my hair. Since yesterday, she hadn’t gotten up. She blamed her lethargy on her lack of sleep, and yes, we hadn’t been sleeping much, or at least I hadn’t. She’d actually been dozing off a lot, sometimes in the middle of our conversations.
Selfishly, I wanted to keep her awake. I wanted to stack as many moments as I could with her so I could reach for them in the coming months. Having gone through heartbreak already, I knew that first year would be the hardest.
“So what did Pierre do?”
Her lips, so very pale without lipstick, curved wistfully. “He took me to a shooting range. Taught me how to handle everything from guns to rifles.”
I rolled my eyes. “How romantic.”
She turned her head and opened her eyes. “It saved me, Celeste.”
“Saved you?”
Her hand stilled in my long chestnut hair. “From my father.”
My molars jammed together. I’d promised not to meddle, but the question slid out. “How did he hurt you?”
“How only men who lack self-control and morals can.”
I’d never picked anyone higher than a forty, but I was no stranger to sin. Just because I didn’t pick the truly high rankers didn’t mean I hadn’t scoured their profiles and the crimes they’d committed to earn their scores. Atrocious crimes. Irredeemable. Which was the true reason I’d stayed away, not judging them deserving. They were monsters, more terrible than the ones that populated Ophan Pippa’s stories.
My mind went to Naya then. I thought about how one day she’d have to deal with these sinners, decide whether they deserved a second chance and whether she’d be the one to give it to them. Usually, the dangerous ones, especially the men, were left to the male fletchings, but some girls took them on. Leigh had.
Except Jarod wasn’t all that terrible, having earned his triple-digit score because of a mistake committed by the man who’d inspired my purchase of the neon pig with wings.
“Is your father still alive?”
“Non, ma chérie.”
“How did he . . . pass?”
“Painlessly. Unfortunately.” Her attention drifted to the pearl-gray ceiling. “My aim was too good.”
“I’m so sorry, Mimi.”
“Whatever for?”
“That you suffered at the hand of someone supposed to love you.”
“Hmm.” She slid her hand over the soft duvet. “I’m not. If he’d been kind, I wouldn’t have met Pierre. If I hadn’t met Pierre, I wouldn’t have learned how to shoot. And if I hadn’t learned how to handle a gun, Isaac Adler would never have hired me, and I wouldn’t have gotten to raise Jarod and then you.” She ran a knuckle across my cheek. “I believe everything happens for a reason. Even the terrible things.” Mimi mistook my silence for lack of understanding, because she added, “What doesn’t destroy you will reshape you. Remember this, Celeste. Remember that the same fire that transforms sand into glass can turn logs into ash.”
Unless it was angel-fire. Angel-fire transformed something into nothing. It cremated wings and destroyed souls.
I rolled onto my back. “I don’t like fire.”
“A life without fire would be cold and dreary, ma chérie.” She traced one of the purple arcs rimming my eyes. “Now, get some sleep, and in the morning, we can make crêpes so that I can demonstrate the wonders of fire. Unless you’d rather eat raw batter.”
I side-eyed her, matching her wan smile with one of my own. “Can you tell me more about Pierre? What happened to him?”
“He was part of the foreign legions.”
“And?”