Page 114 of White Lights
“You are safe. You’re not drowning.”
“Do you know how many films I’m supposed to make every single day?”
“Nine.”
“And I’m lucky if I finishone. I need a Soma. I need fifteen hundred Somas.”
Rafe shakes his head. “You just need to focus.”
“I need to go back down there. I need to prove to myself I can get out on my own. If you’re too busy to help me, I can ask Yael—”
Rafe’s face darkens, casting a chill over the frozen air. “I’myour mentor. No one else.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, surprised by his intensity. “I didn’t realize it was a big deal.”
Worry twists inside her. Rafe has so much power over her. She doesn’t want to lose him, to put any more distance between them. When he comes to her at night, she comes alive. And while it’s maddening that he can’t fuck her, won’t even let her touch him below the belt, the pleasure he brings her is the best thing Dez has going here.
“Iam your mentor,” he says again. “If you insist on going back beneath the Vault, no one’s taking you there but me.”
“Thank you, Rafe,” Dez says.
A sudden sick feeling slides over her. She looks at Rafe and senses … danger. A dark premonition.
Something bad is coming.
“Look out!” she shouts, grabbing Rafe by his coat collar and yanking him—
Just as a body slams hard into the snow, barely missing Rafe’s head.
Pink mist rises from a frag. This one’s face up, his jaw twisted, features obscured by hideous, festering cuts and bruises. He wears a woman’s nightgown. Broad male forearms give way to the hands of a child. The sight of him is so sickening, so wrong, Dez sees stars.
She tries to remind herself he’s just a soul in a grotesque body who didn’t get to enter the White Light. It’s not his fault.
Rafe isn’t even looking at the frag. He’s looking at her. “How did you know he was coming? You didn’t even look up. Yet you sensed him. How?”
“I don’t know. I got a feeling. That he was going to hurt you. Fall on you, I mean.”
Then she hears a groan that sounds like it’s coming from the bowels of the earth. It’s coming from the creature’s lips.
“What was that?” Dez whispers.
“It’s not dead.” Now Rafe kneels beside the body, his eyes running over its disparate parts.
“How is that possible?” Dez asks. “That fall would kill anything.”
“Mortals tend toward life,” Rafe says, “until we leave them with no other choice. The passage to death has always been seamless. But recently, there are gaps. Holes. Making souls feel as if thereisa choice: To die or … not to die.”
“What do we do with him?” Dez says, feeling sick. “How do we help?”
“Leave it to us.” A voice startles Dez, coming from behind her. She turns to see a gas-masked member of the Maintenance Crew, a body bag draped over the arm of his hazmat suit.
Dez reaches a hand toward the frag. “He isn’t dead—”
“We’ll handle it from here,” the maintenance man says, and gets to work.
But Dez knows his moans will haunt her nightmares for months. There’s life inside this creature, a soul in deep unrest.
Inside Dez’s Lens, she and Rafe stand on the subtly glowing platform. She eyes the cracked, darkened space between her platform and the base of the dome.
