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“Sorry.” I threw Fireswift’s wife an apologetic look.

She laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Xerxes tends to get that reaction from people.” Her eyes twinkled as she added, “Our magic was found to be compatible, so the Legion ordered us to marry.” She didn’t look bothered by her fate. “You know, Colonel, I’ve never heard an angel apologize.”

“Not even your husband?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

“He’s not an angel to me,” she said solemnly. “He’s just a man.”

I couldn’t imagine that, Colonel Fireswift as just a man. I couldn’t imagine him as anything other than the humorless, hardass angel that I’d known for the past two years. Well, no, that wasn’t entirely true. I had caught glimpses, here and there, of something else. Like when his daughter had died. The memory made me feel freshly sympathetic toward the woman in front of me.

“I was there when your daughter died,” I said to her. “She fought so bravely. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Her eyes were wide, trembling. “Thank you.” She cleared her throat, steadying herself. “There’s that sorry again. That’s twice in two minutes, Colonel Pandora.”

“She’s still learning,” Cadence told her.

“But you passed Xerxes’s angel test,” Lieutenant Jones said to me.

“I do better on tests than in real life.”

She looked at me, really looked at me, like she was analyzing me. Then she declared, “You’re exactly as Xerxes describes.”

“That bad?”

“That good. Of course, he rants about your disregard for rules and regulations, your dirty fighting, your snide remarks. But reading between the lines—and hearing about you from my son Jace—I always pictured you to be a good, wholesome person who would go to any length to protect those she loved, no matter the consequences.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that basically sums me up. I’m not exactly the model angel.”

“You know the rules. You understand the etiquette.”

“And in the end, you don’t give a damn about those rules or etiquette,” Captain Singh chuckled.

“You talked to your sister, did you?” I asked her.

“Selena also had her fair share of rants about you, Colonel. Personally, I thought she needed to chill out. She and I were always at odds on the topic of doing the right thing—and what that even meant.” She shrugged. “We did not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. We quarreled often. But in the end, she was still my sister, and I loved her.”

“I know how that feels,” I told her. “And I’m sorry for your loss as well.”

The two of them had lost someone they loved during the same battle—and to the same poison.

“Selena died a hero, serving the Legion and protecting the Earth.” Captain Singh looked at Lieutenant Jones. “They both did.”

The two women nodded, unshed tears glistening in their eyes.

They needed a distraction from their pain, and Cadence delivered. “Let’s develop our strategy to boost the Legion’s recruitment numbers and make the First Angel’s wishes a reality.”

“Right,” I agreed. “I already have Dr. Harding working on how to increase the survival rate in people who drink the Nectar.”

“Do you think that’s possible?” Captain Singh asked.

“I don’t know, but we have to try. The best way to increase the Legion’s numbers is to ensure more people survive the initiation ceremony—and every promotion ceremony after it. That will also convince more people to join our ranks. Think about it. The high risk of death puts off a lot of prospective initiates. Besides the children of angels, our initiates mainly consist of the desperate: those desperate for help, desperate for magic, or desperate for power. How do we convince people to join who just want to keep the world safe?”

No one answered. If there had been an easy answer, an angel at the Legion would have thought of it already. Or would they have truly come to an answer? Nyx had given me this task because she thought I was uniquely suited for it, given that I acted as much human as I did angel. Or even more human than angel, actually.

Maybe the problem was that none of those angels could think like a human anymore. It had been too long since they’d been human, assuming they’d ever been human at all, as it often was with the children of angels.

If that was the problem, then I just had to think like a human. What did humans want?

I opened up the question to the group. “Why don’t many humans want to join the Legion of Angels?”