“No.” Luce swallowed hard. “I didn’t know that.” His round brown eyes fixed on hers. “You must be new to Venice,” he said. “Eventually, everything here crumbles into the sea. It isn’t so bad, really. How else would we become so skilled at reproductions?” He glanced up at the angel, ran his long brown fingers across the marble plinth. “This one was created on commission for only fifty thousand lire. Isn’t it remarkable?” It wasn’t remarkable; it was awful. The real halo had sunk into the sea? They would never find it now; they would never learn the true location of the Fall; they would never be able to stop Lucifer from destroying them. They’d only just begun this journey and already it seemed that all was lost.
Luce stumbled backward, barely finding the breath to thank the priest. Feeling heavy and unbalanced, she nearly tripped over the pale supplicant, who scowled at her as she walked quickly to the door.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, she broke into a run. Daniel caught her by the elbow at the fountain.
“What happened?”
Her face must have given everything away. She relayed the story to him, growing more despondent with each word. By the time she got to the way the priest had bragged about the bargain reproduction, a tear was sliding down her cheek.
“You’re sure he called the cathedral la Chiesa dei Miracolis Piccolos?” Daniel said, spinning around to look across the piazza. “On the Island of the Seals?”
“I’m sure, Daniel, it’s gone. It’s buried under the ocean—”
“And we are going to find it.”
“What? How?”
He had already grabbed her by the hand and, with one sideways glance back through the doors of the church, started to jog across the square.
“Daniel—”
“You know how to swim.”
“That isn’t funny.”
“No, it isn’t.” He stopped running and turned to look at her, held her chin in his palm. Her heart was racing but his eyes on hers made everything slow down.
“It’s not ideal, but if this is the only way to get the artifact, it’s the way we’re going to get the artifact. Nothing can stop us. You know that. Nothing can be allowed to stop us.”
Moments later, they were back in the gondola, Daniel rowing them out to sea—powering them like an en-gine with each stroke of his oar. They sped past every other gondola in the canal, making hairpin turns around low bridges and the jutting corners of buildings, splashing water on alarmed faces in neighboring gondolas.
“I know this island,” Daniel said, not even winded.
“It used to lie halfway between Saint Mark’s and La Giudecca. But there’s nowhere to dock the boat nearby.
We’ll have to leave the gondola. We’ll have to jump ship and swim.”
Luce glanced over the side of the gondola into the cloudy green water moving fast below her. Lack of swim-suit. Hypothermia. Italian Loch Ness monsters in unseen depths of sludge. The gondola bench was freezing under her and the water smelled like mud laced with sewage.
All this flashed through Luce’s mind, but when she locked on Daniel’s eyes, it quieted her fear.
He needed her. She was at his side, no questions asked.
“Okay.”
When they reached the open channel where the canals emptied out into space between the islands’ edges, it was tourist chaos: The water teemed with vaporetti shut-tling tourists hauling roller bags toward hotels; motor-boats chartered by rich, elegant travelers; and bright aerodynamic kayaks carrying American backpackers wearing wraparound sunglasses. Gondolas and barges and police boats all crisscrossed the water at high speeds, barely avoiding one another.
Daniel maneuvered effortlessly, pointing into the distance. “See the towers?”
Luce stared out over the multicolored boats. The horizon was a faint line where the blue-gray of the sky touched the darker blue-gray of the water. “No.”
“Focus, Luce.”
After a few moments, two small greenish towers—farther away than she imagined she could ever see without a telescope—came into view. “Oh. There.”
“That’s all that remains of the church.” Daniel’s paddling speed increased as the number of boats around them decreased. The water grew choppier, deepened to a dark evergreen color, began to smell more like the sea than the oddly appealing filth of Venice. Luce’s hair whipped in the wind, which felt colder the farther from land they got. “We’ll have to hope that our halo has not been pilfered by excavation teams of scuba divers.”
After Luce had climbed back into the gondola, Daniel had asked her to wait for him for just a moment. He’d disappeared down a narrow alley and reappeared what seemed like seconds later with a small pink plastic bag.
When he tossed it to her now, Luce pulled out a pair of goggles. They looked stupidly expensive and not very functionaclass="underline" mauve and black with fashionable angel wings at the edges of the lenses. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d swum with goggles, but as she looked out at the black-shadowed water, Luce was glad to have them to tug down over her eyes.
“Goggles but no bathing suit?” she asked.
Daniel blushed. “I guess that was stupid. But I was in a hurry, only thinking about what you would need to get the halo.” He drove the paddle back into the water, pro-pelling them more quickly than a speedboat. “You can swim in your underwear, right?”
Now Luce blushed. Under normal circumstances, the question might have seemed thrilling, something they both would have giggled at. Not these nine days. She nodded. Eight days now. Daniel was deadly serious. Luce just swallowed hard and said, “Of course.” The pair of green-gray spires grew larger, more detailed, and then they were upon them. They were tall and conical, made of rusted slats of copper. They looked like they had once been capped by small teardrop-shaped copper flags, sculpted to look like they were rippling in the wind, but one flag was pocked with weathered holes, and the other had broken off completely from its pole.
In the open water, the spires’ protrusion was bizarre, suggesting a cavernous cathedral of the deep. Luce wondered how long ago the church had sunk, how deep it sat below.
The thought of diving down there in ridiculous goggles and mom-bought underwear made her shudder.
“This church must be huge,” she said. She meant I don’t think I can do this. I can’t breathe underwater. How are we going to find one small halo sunk in the middle of the sea?
“I can take you down as far as the chapel itself, but only that far. So long as you hold on to my hand.” Daniel extended a warm hand to help Luce stand up in the gondola. “Breathing will not be a problem. But the church will still be sanctified, which means I’ll need you to find the halo and bring it out to me.”
Daniel yanked his T-shirt off over his head, dropping it to the bench of the gondola. He stepped out of his pants quickly, perfectly balanced in the boat, then kicked off his tennis shoes. Luce watched, feeling something stir inside her until she realized she was supposed to be strip-ping down, too. She kicked off her boots, tugged off her socks, stepped out of her jeans as modestly as she could.
Daniel held her hand to help her balance; he was watching her but not the way she would have expected. He was worried about her, the goose bumps rising on her skin. He rubbed her arms when she slipped off her sweater and stood freezing in her sensible underwear in the gondola in the middle of the Venetian lagoon.