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The door opened. Inside, the angel found the weapons of heaven and hell. She put on the armor first; the silver pieces adjusted to fit her body perfectly. Then she grabbed the shield, the sword, and the gun. Thus equipped, she hurried outside to face the enemies who besieged her city.

I looked across the broken city, trying to see who those enemies were, but they were all just a big blur.

“Surely, that is important,” I said to Arina.

She only frowned.

“Are you hiding things from us?” I asked her.

“It is not I who hides things, Leda. Someone else is hiding things from us. We’ve being shown only what they want us to see.”

“The question is, who is they?” I wondered.

“Indeed.” Nero’s voice was dangerous. He didn’t like when things were withheld from him. He didn’t like being manipulated.

I looked across the battlefield. The pale-haired angel clashed with the mystery soldiers. Their movements blurred, and the memory blurred into another.

* * *

I sawmyself in the Lost City. I was inside the small room that had once held the weapons of heaven and hell. An angel stood behind me.

“Osiris,” I said.

“It’s an old magic,” said Osiris—or, rather, Damiel when he’d pretended to be Osiris. “A magic to make you go through the motions of your memory, like you’re in it.”

Right, Damiel had performed a spell to send me into a trance. The memories had been so strong for me there and then in the Lost City that it must have been an easy spell for him to pull off.

I looked down at the big ‘x’ that my past self had scratched in the sand while inside Damiel’s trance. It was accompanied by symbols—letters—from the same language the pale-haired angel had seen on the gold-framed door.

I blinked, and I could see right through Damiel’s disguise, right through the Osiris illusion he’d wrapped himself in.

“How do you even know that she’s the one?” one of the soldiers in the room asked. A soldier who’d been hired by that crazy Pilgrim Valiant.

“The spell doesn’t lie. It showed us the one the Guardians entrusted these memories to,” said Damiel-Osiris.

“What spell?” my past self asked.

“The one I cast the first time you came to the Lost City, the one that unlocked the treasure trove of memories inside that precious little head of yours.”

Another jolt shook me, sending me tumbling into the next memory.

* * *

I collided with Nero.

He caught me, folding his arms around me like a shield. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I assured him with a smile, then looked at Arina.

“Like I said, this beast is hard to drive,” she said. “I’ve tried to sort the memories in order, but it’s a bit like trying to collect water with your hands. Things keep slipping by. This memory came before the last one we watched.”

“I can see that,” I replied.

I saw Damiel in hiding, spying on two of the Guardians’ angels, the pair who’d captured Cadence. Their names were Taron and Giselle. He wore a suit of bright, silver armor. She wore a red, knee-length summer dress and a pair of brown boots. Both had long, beautiful hair that shimmered with an enchanting, eerie kind of magic.

“The Pilgrim Valiant has learned the weapons of heaven and hell are in the Lost City,” Taron said. “He plans to use them to take his revenge on the gods and demons.”

“Valiant will fail,” Giselle said shrilly. “He doesn’t have enough magic—or the right kind of magic—to wield those immortal artifacts.”