by Ally Carter
That has to be enough.
I lie atop the covers and watch him. When he shudders and mumbles something in his sleep, I get up and feel his pulse. Faint but still there. At least his fever seems to have broken. There’s no blood coming through his bandages and staining his white T-shirt. My brother is alive. For now. And I know it’s up to me to keep him that way.
But that’s just the start of the things I have to do.
The connecting door is slightly ajar. There’s silence on the other side. Dominic is in one bed, sleeping. But I know that with the slightest noise, even the smallest disturbance, he’ll bolt awake, alert and alarmed, so I move slowly to where Alexei sits in an overstuffed chair that’s pointed toward the window. The curtains are open just a crack, and the light from the parking lot slashes across his face, an eerie yellow glow. He’s supposed to be keeping watch, I know, but I don’t wake him. He needs his rest.
And I need the keys.
They’re on the tiny table between the two beds. I pick them up gently, close the door behind me when I go.
Outside, I pull on my cardigan, not looking back. I just keep walking to the Buick. Only Jamie’s voice can stop me.
“Don’t do it, Gracie.”
He’s not yelling, but the words are too loud in the still night air. Dominic or Alexei will hear him.
“Do what?” I ask, turning back.
Jamie gives a weary laugh. “Do you really think I don’t know where we are? We’re five miles away, Gracie. I’d know it blindfolded.”
He coughs then, doubles over. His color is better, but he is so far from well that I step toward him, half-afraid that I might need to catch him before he hits the ground.
Jamie holds out a hand, stopping me.
“I’m fine.”
He is so not fine.
“Go to bed, Jamie.”
“Okay.” My brother gives me a smile. “When you do.”
“I can’t sleep,” I say.
“Then neither can I.”
“Jamie, you’re …”
“You can say it, you know. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m not ashamed of that.”
He’s right, but that’s not the point.
“You need to rest, Jamie. You need to get better.”
“I need to keep my kid sister alive, is what I need to do. Even if she’s dead set against it.”
I wish he were joking, but he’s not. I wish he were wrong, but Jamie is never wrong. Ever.
“I just …”
The town is a few miles away, and I glance in that direction, unsure of what I’ll see.
“I know, Gracie.” Jamie’s voice is soft and understanding. He’s maybe the only person in the world who has some idea why I’m out here in the dark, what has called me to this place.
“I need to see it,” I say.
“Okay,” Jamie says, no longer fighting. “Tomorrow we’ll tell Dominic we need to make a pit stop. He won’t like it, but—”
“Tonight,” I say. “Alone. I need to see it alone.”
But Jamie’s already shaking his head. “Alone isn’t an option.”
“No.” I’m not shouting, but I want to. “You saw it after, didn’t you? Well, not me. I was …”
Tied up. Locked up. Dying.
Jamie doesn’t need me to say any more. When my brother walks closer, every step is a struggle. He’s going on steam and sheer force of will. He should be in a hospital. At the very least a rehab center or that motel bed. But he’s not going back. Not without me. He just drags himself to the Buick and reaches for the door.
“You drive.”
It’s been almost five years since we moved here, since Dad surprised our mom with a little white house in town. Since they sat Jamie and me down and explained that Fort Sill would be Dad’s last post, our last stop. But it wasn’t the end, our parents told us. No. It was the beginning.
But of what we had no idea at the time.
“It’s up here,” Jamie tells me. I turn the Buick off the highway and onto a street that is bathed in the yellow glow of streetlights. They’re so different from the gaslights of Adria; their light doesn’t flicker. The fire inside them doesn’t burn. Everything around me feels too foreign, too new. The town is small, even by US standards, and it feels like we’re a world away from Embassy Row.
It’s the dead of night, but morning comes early in an Army town, and I know the streets won’t stay empty for long. A few lights shine inside the cute little shops on Main Street, but there is one shop that stands in darkness—like a string of Christmas lights with one blown bulb, a solitary dark spot, fading into the night.
That is where I park. And sit. And stare.
“We don’t have to get out,” Jamie tells me.
I turn off the Buick. “Yes. I do.”
I honestly don’t know what I expected to see. It’s been three years, after all. “It’s still …” I start, easing closer to the brick walls, a burned-out shell of what used to be one woman’s dream.
“Dad never sold it,” Jamie says. “He hired a crew to come in and clean it up, remove the debris and make it safe if kids should wander in or something. But yeah. It’s still the same. I think he … I think he was afraid to change anything without her permission, you know? It’s still hers. In his mind, it will always be hers.”
I remember the first time our mother ever brought us here. She made us stand across the street with our eyes closed until she yelled, “Ta-da!” Then we opened them to find her standing in front of an old hardware store, her arms thrown out as if she was showing us a palace.
A palace …
Suddenly, I’m shaking. My blood is pounding too hard in my veins. Jamie is no longer beside me, and I’m alone on the street, looking through the window at the smoke that fills the shop. I’m screaming out my mother’s name, watching a man I’ve never seen lay her body on the wooden floor.
Cases line the walls, full of old clocks and crystal vases, dolls and watches and books—so many books. And when the man sees me, I yell. I scream. A bag lies at my feet. Shiny metal peeks out from the depths, and I reach for the gun. I reach for the gun, and—
“Gracie. Gracie!”
Jamie is squeezing me, holding me tight.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” His fingers are in my hair, pushing my face toward his broad shoulder, muffling my screams.
The flames are gone and the night is clear, but I swear that I can still smell the smoke. It hasn’t been three years. It isn’t over. A part of me wants to lunge through the place where the door used to hang, run back through time to that night, to stop the stupid girl I was. But it’s too late.
Inside, the wide wooden floorboards are sturdy but covered in dust. The roof is still standing, and the old tin tiles on the ceiling are now charred and stained with soot. Mom loved those tiles. She spent hours sanding and scraping and painting them to shiny white perfection. But nothing about our family will ever be perfect again.
“Every now and then Dad talks about selling it, but …”
I get it, even if Jamie can’t put it into words. There are some books you can never get rid of, even if you don’t like the ending.
It’s not a shop anymore; it’s a grave. There is nothing alive within it, and it can’t hurt me. I know this, but when I close my eyes, I hear the crackling of the fire, the shattering of the glass.
I shake and I want to scream, but most of all I want to wake up in my old bed and find that the past three years were nothing but a very bad dream.
I don’t realize I’m shaking again until I feel Jamie’s hands on my arms.
“We don’t have to do this, Gracie. Whatever test you think you’ve got to pass, you don’t.”
I do. But I can’t say so. I just pull away from Jamie’s grasp and steady my pounding pulse, take a deep breath. And soon I’m standing where the stairs used to be. The second-story balcony is breaking free, crashing down and taking Dominic’s perfect face with it.
That’s one way the Scarred Man and I
are different. It takes more than a glance to see the way that this place changed me.
“Grace?” Jamie is beside me, here to stop me from doing something stupid.
He’s three years too late.
“Gracie, come—”
But I don’t care what Jamie has to say. There’s a brick at my feet, and I pick it up and hurl it as hard as I can through one of the remaining pieces of glass. It shatters and falls to the floor, and I just pick up something else and lash out again. And again.
And again.
Jamie doesn’t try to stop me. Maybe he knows he’s too weak now. Or maybe he was never strong enough to hold back the wave of emotion that is crashing through me.
One of the interior walls is half-collapsed, but I kick at the part that still stands. Over and over I pound and I pummel until the bricks move. The wall shifts, and soon it’s crumbling, just like me.
“Gracie, stop!”
His arms are around my waist, pulling me away from the bricks that are crashing to the floor like an avalanche that’s been held back for too long. Dust swarms around us. The old wooden floor creaks. And, suddenly, I wonder how long and how hard I’d have to kick to make the wall around Valancia come tumbling down. I’m half-tempted to try it.
“Are you okay?” Jamie holds me at arm’s length and looks me up and down. Poor Jamie. When will he learn that I only get hurt on the inside?
When he sees that I’m as whole as I was when I started, he tips up my chin and makes me look him in the eye. “Feel better?” he tries to tease.
But Jamie wouldn’t smile at my answer, so I don’t give it.
I just try to ease away, but in a flash Jamie’s arms are around me, jerking me back, and he’s screaming “Look out!” as I realize that the heavy bricks have crashed through the weather-beaten boards, disappearing into some unknown below.
For a moment, my brother and I just stare at the massive black hole that has opened up before us.
“I didn’t know it had a basement,” I say.
Jamie shakes his head, a hint of fear in his eyes. “It didn’t.”
I shouldn’t be surprised. My life has become a never-ending spiral of dusty, secret rooms and even darker secrets. We’re thousands of miles from Adria, but this shadowy space is connected, I can feel it, like maybe I might drop into that dark hole and start walking and, in a year or so, emerge somewhere behind the wall.
“Do you have your flashlight?” Jamie asks, proving he’s one of the few people on earth who really know me, because of course I have it. I hand it to him, and he kneels slowly to the dusty floor.
He’s nowhere near recovered, but adrenaline is the most powerful medicine there is, and right now he’s not feeling any pain. He has more energy than he’s had in weeks as he leans over the broken boards and shines my small, bright flashlight into the space below.
“I’m going down,” I say.
“Gracie—”
Jamie wants to tell me to stop, to slow down, to be careful, but as soon as he looks up he realizes he really should just save his breath.
“I’ll lower you down.”
“No,” I say, but I can’t tell him he’s too weak. “There’s a desk. I can just …”
In a flash, I’m on the ground next to Jamie and dropping into the darkness below.
The desk I land on is solid; it doesn’t even shimmy when I touch down.
“Light?” I hold out my hands, and Jamie lets the flashlight drop.
He doesn’t try to join me, and I’m glad. I don’t have the strength to tell him just how fleeting his own strength is. At least Jamie is smart enough to know it.
So I stand alone in the darkness once again. The beam of light is small but startlingly bright as I shine it upon walls covered in maps of Europe and Asia and the Middle East. There’s a globe on the end of the desk, piles of notebooks; Post-it notes cover the walls. And on every piece of paper there’s a handwriting that I haven’t seen in years.
My mother’s lipstick stains the rim of the cup by my feet, but the coffee has long since grown cold and evaporated away.
If not for a thick layer of dust, the room would look like she just popped out to take a call or help a customer. Maybe she’s gone to pick me up from school and will return at any minute. Maybe she’s been down here this whole time, just waiting for me to come back.
“Gracie.” Jamie’s voice breaks through my mind. “What’s that?”
I turn and follow his finger, directing the light at the wall farthest from the desk. I have to hop down off the old metal desk, push aside a dusty chair, but soon I’m standing in front of something like I’ve only seen in movies.
From a distance, it looked almost like wallpaper—maybe a mural of some kind. But the closer I get, the clearer the images become, and I can tell it’s really more of a collage.
Newspaper articles are pasted over magazine pictures that cover maps and photocopies of what must be ancient books.
There are more Post-its and calendars. The dates go back hundreds of years.
Ms. Chancellor told me that my mom was responsible for antiquities, lost artifacts that were relevant to Adria and the Society. But one glance at this wall, and I know it was so much more than that. She wasn’t looking for something. She was looking for someone. And now she’s dead because, in a way, she found her.
“Gracie, what is all that?”
“It’s the inside of Mom’s head,” I say without even having to think about the answer. Really, the most amazing thing is that I haven’t already made a dozen walls just like it.
“What?” Jamie calls.
“Amelia.” I turn and glance up at my brother. “It’s how she figured out what became of Amelia.”
Jamie doesn’t believe the story. Not really, I can tell. And I can’t blame him. I spent my summer sneaking through the tunnels beneath Valancia—I’ve seen the inside of the Society and heard their tales, witnessed their power. And even I can’t really believe what is, by all accounts, unbelievable.
But you don’t send assassins after things that are make-believe.
Two hundred years ago, there was a palace coup and, in the chaos, a baby was smuggled free. The Society hid her among their own. She was raised in secret. Protected. Safe. And, eventually, she grew up, and her bloodline survived.
Until someone started trying to kill us.
I ease even closer, shine the light up and down, sweeping across my mother’s old obsession.
Maps. Articles. Notes. And in the center of it all, a picture.
My mother looks so young. Her hair is long and her skin is tanned, and she’s smiling as if the future would hold nothing but more good days. Two dark-haired girls flank her on either side. One is famous now, the mother of Adria’s future king. And one is a stranger.
“Who is it?” Jamie asks.
“It’s mom and Princess Ann and … is that Alexei’s mother?” I ask. Carefully, I pull the picture off the wall. Then I climb back onto the desk, reach up, and hand the photo to my brother.
“Yeah, that’s her,” he says. “I remember her. Barely. She and Mom used to get together and tell me and Alexei to go play.”
I’ve always known that Alexei had a mother, of course, but for years she was never mentioned, never seen.
“What was she like?” I ask, as if that is the great mystery here.
“I don’t know,” Jamie says, pondering. “She was—”
“Gone,” a hard voice says from behind him. Soon, Alexei is down on the dusty desk beside me. “She was gone,” he says, as if that’s all that matters. And I guess, to him, it is.
I’m not surprised when Dominic appears over Jamie’s shoulder.
The sun must be rising, because a gentle golden glow has begun to fill the room. It’s easy to see the hurt on the Scarred Man’s face.
“I never knew this was down here,” he says. “I came and … She didn’t tell me. I never knew.”
I turn and let the light sweep into the corners, and that’s when
I see a box sitting on a high shelf. About the size of a shoe box, it’s covered with dust and cobwebs, but I can tell the wood is gorgeous. There seem to be a bunch of different kinds all melded together in an intricate pattern. When I reach for it, I hear my mother’s voice.
“See this, Gracie? It was Grandma’s. And before her, it was Great-Grandma’s, and so on and so on for a very long time. And someday, sweetheart, it’s going to be yours.”
My finger traces through the dust and through the years.
“How do you open it?”
My mother laughs. Smiles. “You’ll open it when you’re ready.”
“Are you ready?” Alexei’s voice cuts through the fog and pulls me from the dream.
“What?” I ask.
“Are you ready?” he asks again.
“Alexei, if our moms were working together … if your mom was part of this, then maybe—”
“Maybe Karina’s dead? Or maybe she just left me? Which one of those is supposed to make me feel better?”
There are some questions that even I know better than to try to answer.
The light that fills the shop overhead is brighter, and I can hear Dominic return to himself as he says, “We can’t stay here. It’s someplace they might expect to find you. We can’t stay.”
“But—”
“Take it down,” Dominic orders. “Take it all down. We’ll bring it with us. We cannot let it be found.”
Obsession.
That’s the word Ms. Chancellor and Prime Minister Petrovic used when Alexei and I overheard them in the tunnels. I never really understood what they meant until now, as I stand surrounded by my mother’s work.
Her obsession.
Three years have passed, but this room is like a wound, and Alexei and I peel away the layers of it piece by piece, shoving them into boxes and bags, preparing to carry my mother’s obsession away.
When the last wall is empty, Dominic reaches down and Alexei boosts me up. The last thing he gives me is the ornate box. I don’t care about the dust and the cobwebs—I hold it close to my chest and I walk, almost crying, to the car.
