Page 145 of White Lights
“We’re artists, Dez. Everyone else is wasting their time. I saved your life, so what?”
“You shouldn’t have. I wish I was dead.”
“Come on, you get off on this place. You want to be an angel.”
“You feel no guilt for what you did,” Dez says, astonished.
“Why should I? Your brother’s in a better place. He wasn’t destined for greatness. But you and me? You know we’re the dream team.”
“You’re an actual monster,” she says, backing away from him, sickened by him. “Youkilledmy brother.”
“Youkilled your brother,” he says. “I was only trying to save your life.”
“You choose your words so carefully,” she whispers. “But you only say a fraction of the truth. And everything you don’t say is so much worse than I could ever guess. The lies by omission are so much crueler.”
“You’re mad, I get it. But to continue to grieve your brother with this level of fixation is to misunderstand the whole system. The difference between us, Dez, is that I’m not afraid of death.”
“I think the difference between us is that I’m not afraid of love.”
He smiles. Nods. “Ouch.”
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” Dez says, turning away from Rafe, running back toward the bar.
“But I have a feeling you will,” Rafe calls after her, into the night.
DEZ IS AT THE VAULTearly the next morning. She hasn’t slept or talked to anyone since Rafe shattered her with the truth. She’s sick over his solipsistic darkness. She can’t believe she was beginning to think she could trust him. He’s never cared about her, only about what she could give him.
Fuck Rafe. Fuck this school, this breeding ground for dark angels. Fuck ascension and the White Lights. Dez wants no part of Acheron anymore. She’ll never make another film for them again. She’d rather go to Sheol than be complicit in a system that exalts someone like Rafe. A system that prioritizes death over life, humanity, love.
This wasn’t worth her brother’s life. If only she’d known when she made the choice to stay.
She misses Mo so much she can barely move. Her grief is deep, an aching canyon. She misses Death Valley, too. Her house. Her mom. Silas. The person Dez was there and the person she dreamed of becoming. Now she’s trapped in this unnatural place, somewhere between a mortal and an angel. She has no way of leaving campus.
Cut off from everything she used to know, Dez feels her real lifeebbing away. She fears the story Rafe told her last night will start to become her truth.
He said he saved her. He said she was supposed to die the night Mo came into the Dairy Barn. And he swooped in and fixed things by casting Jet in the scene.
All her life, people in power—in government, school, and religion—have gaslit her like this:We know more than you do. Doubt yourself and put your faith in us.
She knows what really happened at the Dairy Barn. She remembers the real moment when shedidthink she was going to die, when Jet pulled the gun on her by the cash register. It was right before she grabbed the deep fryer, intending to throw it, to save herself and her brother.
She remembers what went through her mind.
Enough.
It wasn’t what she expected to think, facing death at twenty-four. But she was thinking of Asher, of the day they’d spent together on the pier. She was thinking of the moment they said goodbye in the parking lot of the bar. Asher’s thumb against her wrist.
Pulse pulsepluse pulse.
She remembered how he’d looked at her, and how she’d looked at him back. They saw each other. So simple, yet so rare. To get to have that feeling of being truly seen just once in her life? Dez thought at the time it was enough.
She doesn’t feel that way now. If nothing else, these months at Acheron have opened Dez’s heart to the point where she can ask for more. She knows if she were to get a Life Review right now, that moment in the parking lot with Asher would be censored. Because for Dez, that scene no longer signalsenough.
It begs formore.
Stop thinking of it as a scene, she tells herself.It happened to you. It was real.
The kind of real that would tempt anyone with a soul to stay alive, to …kill death. And what would be so wrong with that? Can the evil that Moriah warned them about possibly be worse than Rafe’s evil? Is killing death actually bad for humanity—or is it just bad for Acheron?
