Page 98 of White Lights
“By who?” Dez demands.
He smiles. “The powers that be go by many names,” Rafe says. “Right now, what matters is they believe in your future here—”
“Forget my future. My brother is—”
“Dead. Yes. No escaping it.” Rafe nods. “But if you hadn’t made Mo’s film, someone else here would have.” He cups her face with his palm. “Aren’t you glad it was you?”
She looks into his eyes, distrusting the tenderness she finds in them. The things she needs to know are too big for her to handle inher state of grief. They’re too big to ask of Rafe, whom she can’t count on for more than a few seconds at a time.
Any moment now, he could turn on a dime.
“Ask me,” he whispers, like he’s reading her mind.
She shakes her head. “When you draw me in like this, you always push me away … I can’t take it tonight.”
“It’s all connected, Dez. Don’t you see? This attraction between us. The way I behave. Why you want me so much even when I infuriate you.” He touches her cheek. “You want answers. But deep inside you already know.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You do,” he says. “What we’re really doing here. What we … are. Think about everything you’ve never understood about this place.”
Dez’s mind flashes to the coupling ritual her first day here, how something seemed to guide her skis. Or when they all went to Villains and the last-years swung up the wire of the ski lift, defying death. She sees Eri not appearing in the mirror behind the bar. And the body she watched fall from the sky, how it looked like it was already dead.
“Are we dead?” she asks.
“No.” Rafe shakes his head. “But—”
“There’s abut?”
“I can’t say we’re technically living either. At least not in the way you’re accustomed to.”
A flat and miserable fear falls over Dez like a shadow.
“Do you remember the lightning bolt we flew through on our way here that first night?”
Dez nods. Of course she does. It had terrified her, striking the jet high in the sky.
“It wasn’t lightning,” Rafe says.
“You called it thebarbelo?”
“The supreme limit. It’s a filter over reality, designed by Dr. Ezekiel. Once we crossed it, we entered a concealed realm.”
“Concealed from what?”
“From law enforcement, for one thing. From the mortal gaze in general.”
“And from the sun?” Dez guesses. “That’s why it’s always night here. Because of thebarbelo?”
He nods. “The sun is collateral damage for the other protections thebarbelooffers.”
“What other protections?” Dez presses.
He looks at her and says the next part like it’s nothing: “From death. While you’re inside its boundaries, thebarbelodoesn’t let first-years die.”
Dez takes a moment with this information. It doesn’t sit right. “But Alice … Charles—”
“I know,” Rafe says, nodding as if he expected this. “Moriah will explain what happened there in a moment.”
