They are all out in the fields. Look.

A line of hats, bodies bent industriously over a low-height crop. The wind carried across faint sounds of laughter and conversation. Phew.

Tell me your theory of the Cascade.

We decided it isn’t sentient and I haven’t changed my mind on that, but what if it’s driven by the thoughts of sentient beings?

Raphael angled to catch a draft, creating a slipstream for her to ride. She did so until it whispered out, then rejoined him at his side. Who could have such powerful thoughts?

I know it’s an angelic ghost story, but what about those Ancestors said to Sleep below the Refuge? Immortals so old they were beyond time, immortals who had slept through the rise and fall of civilizations, through the birth of mortals and the creation of vampires. Elena had even heard it whispered that they were a different subspecies, an earlier iteration of angelkind. It could be a reset of sorts.

If so, they do it in Sleep so deep they are invisible to our senses. The sun glittered off Raphael’s wings as he swept right. The idea of a reset . . . We are currently in a time of great turbulence. Already, we’re down to only nine in the Cadre. If it is a reset, to what purpose?

I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Elena dug into her jacket pocket for a couple of plain brown hair clips; her damn short hair kept getting into her eyes. She should’ve listened to Ransom and worn a headband but ugh, they made her think of the torture of junior high.

The sea washed into her mind again as she clipped back the worst offenders. There is another option.

Gee, you’re not sounding scary at all right now.

What if the Ancestors are real and this Cascade is so violent because they are waking?

Elena’s throat dried up. That wouldn’t be good would it?

They are said to be so powerful they built our world. They could as easily destroy it.

Nice cheery ghost story. Thanks Mr. Guild Hunter.

Raphael laughed and they flew on, taking in everything around them and resting when Elena needed it. This was only the first of multiple flights they’d be doing across the country. At no point, however, would they be staying in China. The jet would drop them off at different points through the country. It would then return to pick them up in the air.

If necessary, the two of them would stay nights in the territories that bordered China, those archangels having agreed to the arrangement, but actually being resident in China, even with wildfire rampant in Raphael, was a risk too far.

It was as they were reaching the far point of the day’s quadrant that they overflew a village of silence and stillness. No people in the fields. No dogs excitedly playing with children in the streets. No smoke rising from hearths even though with the sun setting in a blaze of soft reds and lush pinks, the world had become noticeably colder.

Jason marked this ghost village in his reconnaissance map. It was one of the first he discovered. Raphael’s voice was the sea on a bitingly cold day, shards of ice forming on the surface.

She embraced the sensation, accepting who he was and who he was becoming. I want to land, look around. When his expression turned to granite, she said, I’ve already done it multiple times with no ill-effects.

None of those times were in a village devoid of life. Lijuan’s poison may be soaked into every inch of dirt, every square meter of every home. Raphael continued to circle the eerily silent village after making that point.

But Elena wasn’t done. I think there are things going on below that one of us needs to see. Jason’s last surveillance flight over this area was probably a while ago. The spymaster had spies all across China, but they couldn’t see everything.

If we land, we do it together.

Elena’s abdomen clenched. The poison is aimed at archangels, she reminded him, desperate to keep him off the land that had infected one archangel already; Raphael had given her all the dreadful details of how the contagion had turned Favashi into an adjunct of Lijuan. I have strange DNA that—

No, Elena. No give in his tone. We cannot allow Lijuan to dictate to us from beyond Sleep. And if I am vulnerable to her, I must discover it now, before she rises in battle.

Shit. She couldn’t exactly argue with that—because if Lijuan had become immune to wildfire, the entire world was fucking screwed. Let’s do it.

Their boots hit the earth moments later. Dust swirled up around them as Raphael folded back his wings. Elena retracted hers, and the two of them began to walk through the village accompanied by the sound of nothing. No life. Not even a squawking chicken or irritated cricket.

Spotting an open door, Elena knocked. “Hello? I don’t mean you any harm,” she called out in the very basic Mandarin Chinese she’d learned in the weeks before their departure. Mostly greetings and phrases like this one that she’d thought might be needed.

But her nose told her that attempting communication was a vain effort: abandonment had a dull, musty odor it was impossible to mistake. The taste of it coated the back of her throat as thickly as the dust that caked everything in sight.

She walked all the way inside.

Charred pot on the stove. Looks like it was left on until the element burned out.

The table is set in this home, Raphael replied from another part of the street. The food on the plates has petrified under mold.

The two of them checked multiple buildings, even a barn, and a garage where a car sat up on blocks with its bonnet raised, but aside from the unnerving lack of people and animals, there was nothing unusual to see. No mummified bodies, no indications of burials. It was as if the entire village had simply vanished in a single heartbeat.

Taking off in pensive quiet, their boot prints immortalized in the dust until the next wind, they turned to the right. Their flight path would take them over new territory before they met up with the jet. Below them passed more green fields and rural villages. The light was fading but hadn’t yet affected visibility. Which was why unusual motion below caught Elena’s eye.

There’s something odd about those villagers. She couldn’t quite make out the details from their current altitude, so she dropped lower. They’re all moving like old people. No village this big was occupied only by the elderly.

She descended farther . . . and horror curdled her stomach. Shrunken and emaciated faces. Bodies of bone in a skin bag. Shuffling movements, limbs being dragged.

We land. Raphael went down first, Elena right after him.

The shuffling villagers didn’t react at all.

Everyone who wasn’t an archangel reacted to Raphael.

Elena caught the gaze of a nearby woman. Her eyeballs gleamed wet in a hollow bone frame. Pity and a need to render aid overwhelmed the cold bite of fear. “We’re here to help.”

No response.

“Raphael, do you speak the dialect in this region?”

Yes. I lived in China for two decades long ago. But the woman just stared blankly at him before shambling past. She was pushing a small cart, the type of thing on which you might carry vegetables or other goods you were taking to market.

Not far from them, a man banged a hammer up and down on a piece of wood, as if building something. Except he’d been banging at the same piece of wood since they’d landed. It was splintering, the nail long since embedded.

“It is as the courtier reported to my mother—they are going through motions so well learned that they are instinct.” An arctic gaze, the blue a cold chrome. “Nothing but the most primordial part of their minds remain.”

Elena struggled with the ethics of what she was about to say, finally made the choice. “Check, make sure.” She’d asked him to never again invade a mortal mind, but what if these people were trapped and screaming within? The only person who might be able to hear them was an archangel.

“There is nothing there,” Raphael said in a matter of seconds, his expression flat. “Broken sparks of memories that are already fading. No sense of personhood. No awareness of the outside world or of others as living creatures. Even a badly damaged mortal mind has a sense of personality; here, there is only a blank slate. I will see if any others are different.”

They weren’t. Vampire or human, all were empty.

Nausea twisted Elena’s intestines. “If the Cascade had won, I’d be like this, an empty shell with no soul.”

“Such an abomination would’ve never walked the world. I would’ve kept my promise.”

Yes, he would have. Even though it would’ve destroyed him. Elena went to brush her hand over his wing in a silent apology when it struck her. “Archangel.” Cold sweat along her spine, her leg muscles suddenly rigid. “Where are the children?”

Every single one of the shambling skeletons around them was an adult.

29

The young would’ve been too weak to survive such a catastrophic drain on their bodies,” Raphael said with chilling pragmatism. “A small mercy that they died before being turned into mindless shells who would have starved to death.”

Elena had dropped a knife into her palm soon after landing, now clenched her fingers around it. “She has to die, Raphael.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t care how we do it. If we have to cheat, lie, break every rule in the book, the fucking monster has to die.”

“Yes. Today, we must gather as much information as possible.”

Fading light or not, they checked the entire village.

Nothing but more shambling mummies, a number already on the verge of starvation. Crouching beside one particular male who sat propped up in a corner, his head tilted to the side, Elena used the flashlight on her phone to light him up. And stared. “He’s wearing the battle uniform of Lijuan’s army.” Gray with a single red stripe down the left side. “Did he come home to visit at the wrong time, get caught up in a feeding?”

Raphael hunkered down beside her, his wings brushing the dust and dirt on the floor. “Not just a soldier. A captain.” He pointed out the red dots on the collar that she’d missed because of how the uniform fabric had wrinkled over the male’s emaciated body.

“Her captains all disappeared with her.” No one higher-ranking than a lieutenant had been left behind.