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Luce burst out laughing

"Will this hold you over?" he asked

Luce snuggled up to hirow pink, then gold, then baby blue as the sun crested the peaks and valleys in the distance The light cast strange shadows in the crevices of the mountain At first she assumed at least some of them were Announcers, but then realized no--they were siht

Luce realized it had been days since she’d seen an Announcer

Strange For weeks,before her aze without seeing one wobbling darkly in a corner, beckoning her Now they seemed to have disappeared

"Daniel, what happened to the Announcers?" He leaned back against the ledge and exhaled deeply before saying, "They are with Lucifer and the host of Heaven They, too, are part of the Fall"

"What?"

"This has never happened before The Announcers belong to history They are the shadows of significant events They were generated by the Fall and so when Lucifer set this game into motion, they were drawn back there"

Luce tried to picture it: a reat dark orb, their tendrils licking the surface of oblivion like sunspots

"That’s e had to fly here instead of stepping through," she said

He nodded and bit into a Pringle,around mortals than a need to consume food

"The shadows disappeared within ht now--these nine days since Lucifer’s gambit--this is a limbo time It’s come unmoored from the rest of history, and if we fail, it will cease to be entirely"

"Where exactly is that? I mean, the Fall"

"Another dimension, no place that I could describe

We were closer to it where I caught you, after you separated from Lucifer, but ere still very far away"

"I never thought I’d say this, but"--she watched the stillness of the everyday shadows on the mountain--"I miss them The Announcers were my link to my past" Daniel took her hand and looked deep into her eyes

"The past is important for all the inforet lost in it You’ve got to learn to keep the knowledge of the past with you as you pursue the present"

"But now that they’re gone--"

"Now that they’re gone, you can do it on your own" She shook her head "How?"

"Let’s see," he said "Do you see that river near the horizon?" He pointed at the barest whisper of blue snak-ing through the flat plain on the desert floor It was about as far away as Luce’s eyes could see

"Yes, I think I see it"

"I’ve lived near here at several different stretches across tio, I had a camel I named Oded He was just about the laziest creature ever to walk the Earth He would pass out when I was in theit to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle But when I first met you in that lifetime--"

"Oded broke into a run," Luce said without thinking

"I screa to trample me You said you’d never seen him move like that"

"Yeah, well," Daniel said "He liked you" They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce’s jaw dropped "I did it!" she cried out "It was just there, in my memory, a part of !"

It was miraculous All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each ti their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel

No She was finding her way to theate had been left open after Luce’s quest through the Announcers Those ypt Nowavailable

She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was--and she wasn’t just Luce Price froirl she’d ever been, an aamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love

She was Lucinda

"Quick," she said to Daniel "Can we do another?"

"Okay, how about another desert life? You were living in the Serengeti when I found you Tall and gangly and the fastest runner in your village I was passing through one day, on ht at the closest spring All the other men were very distrustful of me, but--"

"But my father paid you three zebra skins for the knife you had in your satchel!"

Daniel grinned "He drove a hard bargain"

"This is a," she said, nearly breathless How much more did she have in her that she didn’t know about? How far back could she go? She pivoted to face hi in so that their foreheads were al about our pasts?"