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just before Luce dove headfirst into the beckoning darkness.
    TWO

    TWO
    HEAVEN SENT
    MOSCOW • OCTOBER 15, 1941
    “Łucinda!” Daniel shouted again, but too late: In that instant she was gone. He had only just emerged into the bleak, snow-swept landscape.
    He’d felt a ash of light behind him and the heat of a blaze nearby, but al he could see was Luce. He rushed toward her on the darkened street corner. She looked tiny in someone else’s threadbare coat. She looked scared. He’d watched her open up a shadow and then—
    “No!”
    A rocket smashed into a building behind him. The ground quaked, the street bucked and split, and a shower of glass and steel and concrete gathered up in the air and then rained down.
    After that, the street went deadly quiet. But Daniel barely noticed. He just stood in disbelief among the debris.
    “She’s going further back,” he mut ered, brushing the dust from his shoulders.
    “She’s going further back,” someone said.
    That voice. His voice. An echo?
    No, too close for an echo. Too clear to have come from inside his head.
    “Who said that?” He dashed past a tangled mess of scaf olding to where Luce had been.
    Two gasps.
    Daniel was facing himself. Only not quite himself—an earlier version of himself, a slightly less cynical version of himself. But from when?
    Where was he?
    “Don’t touch!” Cam shouted at both of them. He was dressed in an o cer’s fatigues, combat boots, and a bulky black coat. At the sight of Daniel, his eyes blazed.
    Unwit ingly, both Daniels had drawn closer, stepping around one another in a cautious circle in the snow. Now they reared back.
    “Stay away from me,” the older one warned the newer. “It’s dangerous.”
    “I know that,” Daniel barked. “Don’t you think I know that?” Just being this close made his stomach lurch. “I was here before. I am you.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I’m—” Daniel looked around, trying to get his bearings. After thousands of years of living, of loving Luce and losing her, the tissue of his memories had grown ragged. Repetition made the past hard to recal . But this place wasn’t so long ago, this place he remembered—
    Desolate city. Snow on the streets. Fire in the sky.
    It could have been one of a hundred wars.
    But there—
    The place on the street where the snow had melted. The dark crater in the sea of white. Daniel sank to his knees and reached for the ring of black ash stained on the ground. He closed his eyes. And he remembered the precise way she had died in his arms.
    Moscow. 1941.
    So this was what she was doing—tunneling into her past lives. Hoping to understand.
    The thing was, there was no rhyme or reason to her deaths. More than anyone, Daniel knew that.
    But there were certain lifetimes when he’d tried to shed some light for her, hoping it would change things. Sometimes he’d hoped to keep her alive longer, though that never real y worked. Sometimes—like this time during the siege of Moscow—he’d chosen to send her on her way more quickly. To spare her. So that his kiss could be the last thing she felt in that lifetime.
    And those were the lifetimes that cast the longest shadows across the eons. Those were the lifetimes that stood out and drew Luce like lings to a magnet as she stumbled through the Announcers. Those lives when he’d revealed to her what she needed to know, even though knowing it would destroy her.
    Like her death in Moscow. He remembered it keenly and felt foolish. The daring words he’d whispered, the deep kiss he’d given her. The blissful realization on her face as she died. It had changed nothing. Her end was exactly the same as always.
    And Daniel was exactly the same afterward, too: Bleak. Black. Empty. Gut ed. Inconsolable.
    Gabbe stepped forward to kick snow over the ring of ash where Luschka had died. Her featherlight wings glowed in the night and a shimmering aura surrounded her body as she hunched over in the snow. She was crying.
    The