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shield that was crisscrossed with two silver
swords on her forehead marked her as an archangel. She pushed back
her chair and stood up. Her eyes were wide with concern.
    Kara stumbled into the room awkwardly.
Her feet seemed to be made of lead.
    “ I don’t know,” she said
nervously.
    “ I was like this in the
elevator. I just got here. I can’t believe I’m back so soon. I
don’t know why exactly. I scared the operator half to death—well, I
guess technically they’re dead, right? I mean, aren’t they? Aren’t
they like a different type of guardian or entity? I guess that
really doesn’t matter now. You should have seen the way he was
staring at me, like I was a ghost—”
    “ You look like a ghost,”
said Raphael.
    She was still for a moment, as she
studied Kara. Then she stepped out from her table and moved quickly
toward the door to her chamber. She secured the door and made her
way toward Kara.
    She frowned. “Try to calm yourself and
let me have a look at you.”
    Although the archangel tried to hide
the look of alarm on her face, Kara could see the distress in the
archangel’s eyes. Gently, Raphael lifted Kara’s arms and inspected
them. She poked, and prodded, and brushed her fingertips over
Kara’s skin and clothes, until she had inspected every last inch of
her. Finally, she looked up. Her face was grim.
    “ I’ve never seen anything
like this before,” she said.
    “ I can see your essence
flowing around in your body, which we sometimes see in cases of
defective or battered M-Suits, where the skin gets paper-thin. But
this is different; both your body and your essence are translucent.
It’s astonishing and very mysterious.”
    For a second, Kara thought she heard
shouting coming from down the corridor.
    “ I am half here?” she
asked. “I mean, is the rest of me on some other plane or something?
I was thinking maybe something happened before I made the
transition here, like the veil was broken, and part of me is in the
waiting room back on the 8 TH Plane? Or maybe the room
was packed, and now I’m waiting in limbo?”
    Raphael’s face was
serious. “No. When there’s a fracture in the planes, you’d either
be lost in oblivion until the end of time or your legs would be
waiting for you on the 8 Th Plane.”
    The archangel frowned
again as she inspected Kara. “This is something else entirely. This
looks almost like a vega malfunction, as though the metamorphosis
process that builds and sheds temporary bodies hasn’t quite
finished yet. It’s almost as though you’re still transforming, like
your angel essence is still processing—but what it’s processing, I’m not sure.
This is very strange. But that’s just a theory. I’ll have to do
some tests to find out for sure.”
    She saw the look of fear on Kara’s
face and squeezed her shoulder gently. “Don’t worry, Kara. We’ll
find out what this is, I promise.”
    Kara looked into the archangel’s
almond-shaped brown eyes and forced a little smile. “I hope so. I
thought there was nothing worse than being marked.”
    She raised her hands in front of her
eyes and stared at Raphael’s stunning face through them. “But
this…” she paused, “this is a million times worse.”
    “ How do you feel? Are you
in pain of any kind?”
    Kara wanted to say she was suffering a
different kind of pain, a mental one, but she decided against
it.
    “ No. I feel pretty normal,
I feel just like all the other times I came back to Horizon.” She
shrugged. “I know I look different, but I don’t feel any
different.”
    Raphael put her hands on her waist,
puzzled. “What’s the last thing you remember before your transition
here?”
    Disjointed, Kara floundered, doing her
best to recall the moments before her surprise return to Horizon.
She was a little calmer now and felt safe with Raphael.
    She closed her eyes. “I remember
working at the bookstore. I remember a bat dying after it crashed
in the window. Yes. I remember that. Then I