I look at him sideways. “Hold on. You all have arranged marriages based on political alliances? What is this, the fifteen hundreds?” Although I don’t know why I bothered saying that, considering everything at this school is like the 1500s. “And marriage is one thing, dating is another.”
“Not really. Not when you consider the number of secrets we keep and the things we can glean from one another through nonverbal communication. Getting close to someone emotionally and having it end badly could mean a breach of all kinds of information.”
“You mean like all the information I’m leaking to you right now,” I say.
“Not exactly,” Ash replies. “You don’t know Bear secrets. You can’t even be sure who you are.”
“Fair point. So you guys don’t date until you’re ready to get married?” I’m having trouble swallowing this one.
He smirks. “I didn’t say that. I just said we don’t get attached to each other. Nothing serious.”
I want to tell him that’s crazy, but given my own dating history, I don’t have a leg to stand on. “So then has your Family already picked someone out for you?” I say jokingly, but he doesn’t smile in return.
“Layla and I are also the firstborn of the leaders in our Family.” From the expression on his face, it’s obvious he has mixed feelings about that. “The alliances Lay and I make here will definitely influence my Family’s decision. But yes, they have been narrowing down the possibilities ever since we were kids. Being the firstborn has its benefits, but also its obligations.”
No wonder Brendan and the other guys give Layla such a hard time. If she’s also in line to lead her Family, it’s less that she’s an outcast and more that she’s a rival. “Are they trying to match you with another firstborn?” I ask.
“No. Never. Firstborns are required to stay with their Families. We tend to marry someone with good skills and a lesser station in another Family who is willing to join ours and relinquish theirs. Both Families benefit from the improved relationship.”
My eyebrows push together. “Give up your Family? Why would anyone ever do that? And how could giving up your Family even be enforced?”
“With penalty of death,” he says, and I lean back.
“You kill people for not having perfect loyalty to their new Family?” The astonishment in my voice is obvious. “What if you wanted to marry someone who isn’t Strategia?”
“Unless that person is previously approved by your Family, it’s forbidden. And if you go ahead and do it anyway, then…the penalty is death.”
Did I just find out that the only people I can marry are either in this school or need to be approved by some Strategia in Europe I don’t even know? This isn’t happening. “What if someone wants to stop being a Strategia?”
He looks at me in almost a compassionate way. “Also forbidden.”
I can’t think of a single thing to say that doesn’t involve panic. All this time I’ve been thinking that this was something I could walk away from, that I would have a choice. After I dodged a bullet this morning, I thought that if I just learned enough to blend in and stayed quiet, I would make it out of this school and never come back.
“Here, let me show you some kicks before I have to leave,” Ash says, and by the look on his face I can tell that I’m not hiding my emotions at all.
THERE’S A FAINT clicking noise. I pull the blankets up over my shoulder and bury my head in the pillow. Drip. Drip. Drip. It’s as if someone forgot to turn off a faucet somewhere in the distance.
* * *
I yawn under my thick comforter and rub at my eyes. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time last night, and all I want to do is roll over and burrow farther under my comforter. But the light is already peeking through the edges of the heavy curtain and I want to talk to Layla about that horrible assembly before we have to go to class.
The books Layla gave me are with me in the bed, where I passed out reading them. I stretch and wince. My muscles are sore from all the sparring exercises Ash and I did.
I toss off the covers and swing my legs out. When my feet hit the cold stone, there’s something gritty under my toes, and I yank them back up. Something’s wrong. There’s never dirt on the floor; they keep this place spotless. I kneel on my bed, my mind racing through every terrible thing that could possibly be on that stone, and I pull back the curtains, letting the morning light spill in.
When I look back at the floor, I start to scream but stop myself so fast it sounds like a strangled yelp. Next to my bed, written in dark brown smears, are two words: Sarete ridotti.
Italian. My mom and Aunt Jo spoke in Italian when I was little. Aunt Jo still does sometimes. I’m not amazing with it, but I can translate this: “You will be reduced” or possibly “You will be eliminated”?
I immediately look at my bedroom door. The lock’s no longer in place. My adrenaline spikes and I run to get Layla. I knock on her door and vigorously brush off the bottom of my feet.
Within two seconds she unlatches her door. She takes note of my spooked expression. “What happened?”
“I don’t…Come here,” I say, leading her back to my room.
She walks in, freezes as though someone pressed a pause button, and then resumes her fast pace. She kneels down on my floor and sniffs at the brown smears and scattered droplets. “That’s…blood,” she says, confirming what I already suspected.
I immediately think of Charles and Ash and the whole traumatic bloody scene in the dining hall yesterday. I swallow. “I can’t imagine that anyone is walking around carrying blood to write a message in,” I say mostly to myself.
“No,” Layla confirms. “It’s highly unlikely.”
“Which means someone must have cut themselves in my room?” I shudder, immediately pulling up a mental image. “So creepy. Who would do that?”
Layla shakes her head. “Someone who was going out of their way to scare you, that’s who. And someone cocky. It took time to write this while you slept, as opposed to slipping in with a message that had already been written out and just placing it on the floor.”
The thought that someone was in my bedroom, bleeding a warning onto my floor while I slept through the whole thing, makes me want to march right back to Blackwood’s office and demand to leave again. If she hadn’t threatened me with that dungeon, I would head there in my nightgown, etiquette be damned.
“The worst part is, I vaguely remember hearing something,” I admit to Layla. “Although what would I have done if I had woken up and found someone here? Fought them?”
She looks up at me. “I can’t imagine that would have gone well for you. And whoever it was probably had something sharp with them.”
“Brendan or Nyx?” I ask.
“It’s possible,” she says. “They have every reason to be angry with you after the way things ended with Charles yesterday. Even though he was a newish addition to their group, Nyx was dating him and Brendan fully accepted him as part of their unit. That alliance was a bond. They would do almost anything to protect and defend each other.”
I nod and find myself wondering if Layla and Ash might ever feel that way about me. “What about Aarya? Given the unpredictable factor?” I ask.
Layla exhales audibly. “This is her kind of game, but it’s clear that the letters were formed by someone who is right-handed, and Aarya’s left-handed. Granted, she could have written them with her right hand to confuse things, but she, unlike most people, typically likes to take credit for her threats. And the width of the stroke is bigger than her pointer finger. It’s either someone with larger hands than hers, or she used her thumb. Or there was more than one person—Felix, for instance. But all things considered, I would say that Brendan is more likely.”
I blink at her. Her brain is amazing.
“We need to clean this up,” she says. “Pippa is going to be here any minute.
”
My eyes widen. “Clean it up? Don’t we need to tell—”
“No,” Layla says forcefully, and takes the washcloth off my dresser. She dips it in the basin and starts scrubbing up the blood. “If we bring Blackwood into this, we will get hit with retaliation twice as hard. It’s just not how we do things here.”
“But how do we explain that much blood on the—” I whisper, and Layla hushes me. The latch on the main door rattles.
With lightning speed, Layla grabs my empty water glass, wraps the cloth around it, and uses a book from my bedside table to crush it.
In the next second she somehow scatters the glass without making a sound, motioning for me to join her on the floor. Then she picks up a shard and grabs my hand. My eyes widen. She nicks me on the palm and I wince but refrain from yelping.
Pippa knocks lightly and comes into my room. Her eyes widen at the sight of the blood dripping down my palm onto the floor. But I have to hand it to Layla: there is nothing all that out of the ordinary about a sleepy girl who knocked over her water glass and then cut herself trying to clean it up.
“THE MORE YOU learn in deception class, the less you will have to learn in others,” Professor Gupta says from the end of the antique conference table. He’s a short elderly man I might take as unassuming if it weren’t for the fact that he’s teaching deception and could come off that way intentionally.
Gupta, I think. Sanskrit originally. And a common name in India meaning “protected.”
The two torches on the walls make the small room dance with shadows. It looks more like an office where medieval war strategists would plot an invasion than like any classroom I’ve ever been in. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, and ornate wooden arches bracket the ceiling.
I sneak a glance at Brendan, wondering if he was responsible for the blood in my room this morning, and check his hands for any stray cuts. But I can’t see anything from here. And of course there’s always Matteo. The message was written in Italian. Only he’s not in this class for me to scrutinize.
I catch Ash looking at me from across the table and remember everything he read in my body language yesterday. I immediately relax my face and shift my gaze.
“Some of you will mistakenly believe that your fighting skills are what will help you most when you’re out in the world.” Gupta looks around the table. “But I assure you that your fighting skills will only get you one one-hundredth of the information that a mastery of deception will. Also, the more effort you put into concealing your intentions and reading others, the better prepared you’ll be when you actually get to the fight. Now, the opposite is also true: deception can get you into situations that you can’t back out of.”
I swear the teachers, Conner, and Blackwood have figured out a way to subtly weave manipulative strategies throughout all the classes. And what’s more, I feel like they’re secretly directed at me and my shortcomings. But maybe everyone feels that way.
“In 415 BCE, the Athenian statesman Alcibiades was convinced that conquering Sicily would win the Peloponnesian War. The prudent general Nicias considered the idea rash and chose to deal with it by telling him a lie. He greatly overestimated how many men would be required, thinking it would dissuade Alcibiades. But the lie backfired. The Athenians took Nicias’s word and sent nearly the entire army to Sicily, when a guerrilla tactic would probably have been far more effective. Nearly everybody died. The only survivors were the deserters, and not surprisingly Alcibiades was among them. Many blame Alcibiades for his arrogance, but Nicias was just as much at fault. He didn’t take into account the personality of the man he was lying to, nor did he predict how his lie would be received, both of which were more important factors than the lie itself. Had Nicias conquered Sicily, his bluff would likely have been forgotten or gone undetected, but his lie was sloppy, and despite his good intentions it makes him responsible for thousands of needless deaths.” Gupta pauses to look at all of our faces before his eyes fall on someone. “Felix, come up to the front, please.”
Felix stands and makes his way to the end of the table.
“I would like you to tell the class two truths and a lie. Keep them short. I don’t want you making it easy on them by giving too many details. And try your best to conceal your lie.”
Felix takes a deep breath. “I’ve broken seven bones, eight if I count my nose twice. I would prefer to be hot rather than to be cold. And I can hold my breath underwater for nine minutes and thirteen seconds.” I study him for any of the lying tells I’ve been reading about. But he doesn’t make any hand movements or weird facial expressions that I can detect, and his voice sounds steady and normal to me.
“Now, which was the lie?” Gupta asks. “Jaya?”
Jaya’s eyes are narrowed, like she’s concentrating too hard. “The first one?”
“I know you’re not confident in your answer by the way your pitch raised at the end of your sentence. You sounded like you were asking a question instead of giving an answer,” Gupta says, and I feel some relief that Felix’s lie wasn’t so easy to detect that everyone but me spotted it.
“Does anyone disagree with Jaya’s assessment?” Gupta continues.
The room falls silent for a beat.
Just when I think no one is going to answer, Ash says, “The lie was his second statement.”
Gupta smiles. “Explain, please, Ashai.”
“His nose had a tiny twitch, as though it were itchy. And when you lie, blood flows toward your nose, away from your cheeks. People touch their noses more often when they’re lying than when they’re not,” Ash says. “And his right shoulder ever so slightly lifted. One-sided shrugs are common nervous tells.”
It’s clear that Ash is in his element here.
“Correct,” Gupta says. “And additionally, there was a linguistic cue, which we’ll be studying more closely over the next couple of months. He said ‘I would prefer’ as opposed to ‘I prefer.’ The use of would is considered hypothetical, as opposed to a statement of truth. You may sit down, Felix. Jaya, you’re on deck.”
She stands and makes her way to the front of the room. “I accidentally burned my finger on a candle two weeks ago and the burn resembled a star. I can’t stand the smell of blood. I did not finish my breakfast this morning.”
“Which was the lie, Brendan?” Gupta asks.
“The third one,” he says, and Gupta nods for him to go on. “She overemphasized her last statement, making it louder than the other two, pushing us to believe it.”
I actually did notice that. This class is kinda fun.
“Good. Anyone see anything else?” Gupta asks.
“She also briefly rubbed her fingers together when she finished,” Ash says, “a soothing motion to make herself feel better about the lie. And she spoke faster during her last statement than the others, like she was trying to rush through it.”
Holy crap, Ash is good at this. An image of him flirting with me last night flashes into my thoughts and I groan in my head. This is so like me, to be attracted to the most complicated person in the room—the one I promised myself I wouldn’t like and who I’m positive will only make my life more problematic. If Emily were here, she’d be rolling her eyes hard right now, telling me to stop being such a wimp and just go for it. And I would probably tell her that everything was fine and that I didn’t care that much, but we would both know I didn’t mean it.
Gupta gives Ash a look of confirmation. “There was also a linguistic cue in Jaya’s lie. Did anyone detect it? In her second, truthful statement, she used a contraction, the way most of us do in casual speech. But in her third, untruthful statement, she said ‘did not’ when she might have said ‘didn’t,’ reinforcing the overemphasized nature of her lie, which Brendan spotted. Okay, Brendan, you’re up.”
Brendan stands. He doesn’t wait for Gupta to say go, which isn’t surprising.
&nb
sp; He rolls his shoulders back and takes a breath. “I like November. But since I was a child, October’s been my favorite month. And I find the long nights in December peaceful.”
Oh, come on. And he doesn’t even glance at me. So sneaky.
“Anyone?” Gupta asks.
“The first one,” Felix says without missing a beat. “He said he ‘likes’ November but revealed a microexpression of disgust, pulling just one corner of his mouth back, making his words and his emotion incongruent.”
Disgust, huh? Brendan shoots me a smile that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“I’m disappointed in you, Brendan. You’re usually better than letting a microexpression trip you up,” Gupta says. “This pitiful display makes me nostalgic for the students of twenty-five years ago. Do you know that one girl went an entire year without anyone being able to detect her lies?”
Brendan rolls his eyes, like “Here we go again with the bragging about past students” thing.
However, it’s interesting to me that this is the second time someone’s specifically pointed out a record set twenty-five years ago. I can’t help but wonder if this was the same girl Blackwood claimed won all those midnight challenges.
“If confronted with the average person, you all will dance circles around them. But what about when you’re in a situation with another Strategia? At the rate you’re going, you might as well just tell one another the truth and save yourselves the hassle.” Gupta sighs. “Ashai, please come up here and make me feel better about my purpose as a teacher.”
Ash makes his way to the front of the class, appearing perfectly confident. His eyes sweep across the room and he smiles. “I like being surprised, even when the consequence is me being outmaneuvered.”
Hmmm. I would guess that he does like surprises, but nothing about Ash makes me think he likes to be outmaneuvered.
“I’m better at cards than Layla is.”
Something about his voice reminds me of when he’s trying to charm me. But I can’t imagine that Layla would be better at cards, considering his ability to read tells. Although I wouldn’t put it past Ash to lie about the one thing we’re all sure is true.
Killing November Page 21
