“Nothing.” Daniel tried to stand up, but he was so dizzy he quickly lay down again. Cleaving—especially dragging his past body into another life—had made him sick. He fought his past from inside, slamming up against the edges, bruising his soul on bones and skin. He knew the Nephilim could sense that something unmentionable had happened to him. “Go home, trespassers. Whose Announcer did you use to get here? Do you know how much trouble you could get yourselves in?”
All of a sudden, something silver gleamed under his nose.
“Take us to Luce.” Miles was pointing a starshot at Daniel’s neck. The brim of his baseball cap hid his eyes, but his mouth was screwed in a nervous grimace.
Daniel was dumbstruck. “You—you have a starshot.”
“Miles!” Shelby whispered fiercely. “What are you doing with that thing?”
The dull tip of the arrow quaked. Miles was clearly nervous. “You left it in the yard after the Outcasts left,” he said to Daniel. “Cam grabbed one, and in the chaos, no one noticed when I picked up this one. You took off after Luce. And we took off after you.” He turned to Shelby. “I thought we might need it. Self-defense.”
“Don’t you dare kill him,” Shelby said to Miles. “You’re an idiot.”
“No,” Daniel said, very slowly sitting up. “It’s okay.”
His mind was spinning. What were the odds? He had only seen this done once before. Daniel was no expert at cleaving. But his past writhed inside him—he couldn’t go on like this. There was only one solution. Miles was holding it in his hands.
But how could he get the boy to attack him without explaining everything? And could he trust the Nephilim?
Daniel edged backward until his shoulders were against the tree trunk. He slid up it, holding both empty hands wide, showing Miles there was nothing to be afraid of. “You took fencing?”
“What?” Miles looked bewildered.
“At Shoreline. Did you take a fencing class or not?”
“We all did. It was kind of pointless and I wasn’t all that good, but—”
That was all Daniel needed to hear. “En garde!” he shouted, drawing out his concealed starshot like a sword.
Miles’s eyes grew wide. In an instant he’d raised his arrow as well.
“Oh, crap,” Shelby said, scurrying out of the way. “You guys, seriously. Stop!”
The starshots were shorter than fencing foils but a few inches longer than normal arrows. They were featherlight but as hard as diamonds, and if Daniel and Miles were very, very careful, the two of them might make it out of this alive. Somehow, with Miles’s help, Daniel might cleave free of his past.
He sliced through the air with his starshot, advancing a few steps toward the Nephilim.
Miles responded, fighting off Daniel’s blow, his arrow glancing hard toward the right. When the starshots clashed, they did not make the tinny clanks that fencing foils made. They made a deep, echoing whooomp that reverberated off the mountains and shook the ground under their feet.
“Your fencing lesson wasn’t pointless,” Daniel said as his arrow crisscrossed with Miles’s in the air. “It was to prepare for a moment like this.”
“A moment”—Miles grunted as he lunged forward, sweeping his starshot up until it slid against Daniel’s in the air—“like what?”
Their arms strained. The starshots made a frozen X in the air.
“I need you to release me from an earlier incarnation that I’ve cloven to my soul,” Daniel said simply.
“What the…,” Shelby murmured from the sidelines.
Confusion flashed across Miles’s face, and his arm faltered. His blade fell away, and his starshot clattered to the ground. He gasped and fumbled for it, looking back at Daniel, terrified.
“I’m not coming after you,” Daniel said. “I need you to come after me.” He managed a competitive smirk. “Come on. You know you want to. You’ve wanted to for a long time.”
Miles charged, holding the starshot like an arrow instead of a sword. Daniel was ready for him, dipping to one side just in time and spinning around to clash his starshot against Miles’s.
They were locked in each other’s grip: Daniel with his starshot pointing past Miles’s shoulder, using his strength to hold the Nephilim boy back, and Miles with his starshot inches away from Daniel’s heart.
“Are you going to help me?” Daniel demanded.
“What’s in it for us?” Miles asked.
Daniel had to think about this for a moment. “Luce’s happiness,” he said at last.
Miles didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no.
“Now”—Daniel’s voice faltered as he gave the instructions—“very carefully, drag your blade in a straight line down the center of my chest. Do not pierce the skin or you will kill me.”
Miles was sweating. His face was white. He glanced over at Shelby.
“Do it, Miles,” she whispered.
The starshot trembled. Everything was in this boy’s hands. The blunt end of the starshot touched Daniel’s skin and traveled down.
“Omigod.” Shelby’s lips curled up in horror. “He’s molting.”
Daniel could feel it, like a layer of skin was lifting off his bones. His past self’s body was slowly cleaving from his own. The venom of separation coursed through him, threading deep into the fibers of his wings. The pain was so raw it was nauseating, roiling deep inside him with great tidal swells. His vision clouded; ringing filled his ears. The starshot in his hand tumbled to the ground. Then, all at once, he felt a great shove and a sharp, cold breath of air. There was a long grunt and two thuds, and then—
His vision cleared. The ringing ceased. He felt lightness, simplicity.
Free.
Miles lay on the ground below him, chest heaving. The starshot in Daniel’s hand had disappeared. Daniel spun around to find a specter of his past self standing behind him, his skin gray and his body wraithlike, his eyes and teeth coal-black, the starshot grasped in his hand. His profile wobbled in the hot wind, like the picture on a shorted-out television.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said, reaching forward and clutching his past self at the base of his wings. When Daniel lifted the shadow of himself off the ground, his body felt scant and insufficient. His fingers found the graying portal of the Announcer through which both Daniels had traveled just before it fell apart. “Your day will come,” he said.
Then he pitched his past self back into the Announcer.
He watched the void fading in the hot sun. The body made a drawn-out whistling sound as it tumbled into time, as if it were falling off a cliff. The Announcer split into infinitesimal traces, and was gone.
“What the hell just happened?” Shelby asked, helping Miles to his feet.
The Nephilim was ghostly white, gaping down at his hands, flipping them over and examining them as if he’d never seen them before.
Daniel turned to Miles. “Thank you.”
The Nephilim boy’s blue eyes looked eager and terrified at the same time, as if he wanted to pump every detail out of Daniel about what had just happened but didn’t want to show his excitement. Shelby was speechless, which was an unprecedented event.
Daniel had despised Miles until then. He’d been annoyed by Shelby, who’d practically led the Outcasts straight toward Luce. But at that moment, under the olive tree, he could see why Luce had befriended both of them. And he was glad.
A horn whined in the distance. Miles and Shelby jumped.
It was a shofar, a sacred ram’s horn that made a long, nasal note—often used to announce religious services and festivals. Until then Daniel hadn’t looked around enough to realize where they were.
The three of them stood under the mottled shade of the olive tree at the crest of a low hill. In front of them, the hill sloped down to a wide, flat valley, tawny with the tall native grasses that had never been cut by man. In the middle of the valley was a narrow strip of green, where wildflowers grew alongside a narrow river.