“What happens if they find you?”
“They’ll drag me back to the heavens for judgment. After the trial, they’ll unmake me for my insolence,” said Kamiel. “They’ll cut my wings, gouge my eyes from their sockets, and cast them into the hellfire.”
Tate swallowed thickly. The air conditioner latched to her bedroom window rattled to life, and both of them—girl and seraph—startled at the sound. “Is there a way for you to escape them?”
“There is a place. A nameless dimension at the distant reaches of the universe, where even the seraphs dare not go because it’s so far from the eye of God that our prayers and praises can’t reach Him. I’ll be alone there, but I’ll be safe.”
“If that’s where you’re trying to go, then how did you end up here?”
“There’s a portal,” said Kamiel, and the eyes embedded in her palms peered up to look at Tate, and when they did, they triggered a vision, like the trappings of a dream, and Tate caught a glimpse of a glen in the heart of a dense forest. In the middle of that glen, an iron staircase twisted up into the thick of the canopy above. “It’s not far from this very place.”
“This isOhio,” said Tate.
“Yes, I know. But the coordinates can’t be mistaken.”
“What are they?”
The seraph frowned for a beat, then offered a string of numbers.
Tate picked up her phone, entered them into the satellite-navigation app she sometimes used on hikes. The coordinates marked a place in a remote forest in the middle of Ohio, miles from the nearest highway or town. “Seems like an odd place to find a portal to another world.”
“But thereisa portal there. I know it. I read the star maps before my fall.”
Tate set her phone on the bathroom countertop, her thoughts scrambling. “You’re wounded. You’ll need at least a night’s rest before you continue your journey.”
To this, Kamiel said nothing. The angel merely gazed at her with all of the eyes that were visible. And the angel smiled, brushed the back of her hand against Tate’s cheek with something not unlike fondness, as though they were far from strangers. Tate didn’t shrink away. She felt it, too, a keen familiarity that bound them together, like a taut thread tied around both their sternums, drawing them toward each other.
The seraph shifted closer and the eyes embedded in her palms blinked, their pupils pulsing.
That night, the two girls slept together on Tate’s twin-size mattress. Kamiel explained to Tate that the closest approximation to her gender on earth was nonbinary, thoughamong the ranks of seraphs there were no fewer than seven thousand genders, some of which could be combined with others to form entirely new and specific identities.
When Tate inquired about what pronouns she should use to refer to the seraph, Kamiel merely bemoaned the limitations of English pronouns with a grim frown and a shake of her head. “Others are less rigid.”
“But in English?”
Kamiel paused to think about this for a moment. “What are yours?”
“She.”
“Then ‘she’ is fine for me too,” said Kamiel decidedly, and Tate found this rather cute. “But that might change.Imight change, as I have done once before.”
“Let me know when that happens?”
Kamiel nodded, smiled, then shut her many eyes and went to sleep. As the seraph dreamed, so too did Tate. In fact, they each walked in and out of the other’s dreams and nightmares. Tate shared with the seraph memories of her childhood and high school years, even revealing the dark moments she’d spent at her mother’s deathbed. In turn, Kamiel imparted visions of the cosmos and many of its secrets, the stark multiplicity of the universe, and the fragile threads that bind reality itself. In those dreams Tate saw her dead mother come back to life, wading with Kamiel through a sea of pale blue water. Overhead, a cathedral sky, spangled with stars.
In the morning, Tate woke feeling heavy, as if she’d lostyears to sleep. But her fatigue was eclipsed by the new certainty thatthiswas what she’d spent years waiting for. All her life she’d been searching for an escape. She knew that she’d been called to something more, and as she lie in bed, with Kamiel sleeping soundly beside her—her face nuzzled into her shoulder, a smile on her lips, all her eyelids fluttering—Tate was certain that the seraph was it.
She had to save Kamiel. She was born to.
When the seraph stirred and woke a few minutes later, Tate slipped out of bed and prepared her a breakfast of Pop-Tarts, scrambled eggs, and burnt blueberry muffins. Tate (who wasn’t much of a cook) tried her best to focus on making the muffins, but quickly became distracted watching Kamiel while they baked. She was just so...beautiful, not in spite of her peculiarities but because of them. In that moment, Tate would’ve been content to stare into her eyes forever, would’ve happily surrendered her entire life just to lose herself to the vastness of Kamiel’s dreams, so long as it meant they could remain together.
Kamiel first learned to laugh between bites of that breakfast feast, as Tate burned not one but two batches of muffins. What was first a sheepish smile—more coy than anything else—erupted into a roaring belly laugh as Tate withdrew the second, badly blackened tray from the oven. And at the sound of her laughter, Tate’s heart felt like a little finch, fluttering behind the cage of her ribs, anxious to fly free. For the first time since her mom’s death, she realized that she was feeling... happy.
And that frightened her.
That evening, Tate took Kamiel along to her shift at the gas station, for fear of what would become of the seraph if she left her alone in the apartment, with nothing but the TV to entertain her. It wasn’t an easy thing, preparing a seraph for the human world.
First, there was the matter of her eyes, and the sheer number of them. Kamiel had grown quite attached to the Prince T-shirt (admitting that purple was her favorite of the limited selection of colors detectable to the human eye), so Tate allowed her to keep it, with the addition of a long-sleeved turtleneck worn underneath to disguise the eyes on her neck and forearms. She offered the seraph a pair of sweatpants that were fleece-lined and baggy enough to comfortably accommodate the eyes on her thighs and calves.
