“It could be a lie that he’s in the race?”
“No, I know that part is true. I’ve seen him myself. No, the part that he’s dead—”
“Don’t get your hopes up. People die in this race, Astrid. It’s why I hate it so much. And he’s just eleven years old! And he’s not strong like you. He’s fragile—”
“You just said he was fine—”
“Fine for an eleven-year-old! But even you couldn’t have survived this race at that age.” Without warning, he throws the china cup in his hand against the window, sending shards flying and a wet streak of tea running to the floor. “This race . . . Fools like you keep entering it year after year, seduced by the Enchanteds into believing it’s an opportunity. What kind of opportunity leaves a dozen or more Outsiders dead? It’s just one more way for them to torture us.” He eyes the dish with the other two eggs, and I pick it up and pull it into my lap, to make sure it’s not the next thing to hit the windows. “Believe me,” he says, “if our little brother entered this race, there’s a good chance he’s already dead.”
He paces away from me to the back of the car, hopefully to calm down, and I take the chance to wipe my tears and stop shaking. I glance at the paper he left on the table. It’s not typed, but written out by hand, and something strange runs through me—a shiver of recognition—when I see the handwriting. I put another egg in my mouth—I’m kind of sick to my stomach, but I don’t know when I’ll have fresh eggs again—and I pick it up to read it. “What is this?” I ask when I’ve swallowed most of the egg.
He throws a glance in my direction. “What does it look like?”
My eyes move over the words Outsider Liberation Army and Manifesto. “Wait. Are you in the OLA?”
“You could say that.” He finds another cup, fills it from an electric carafe near the refrigerator where he retrieved the eggs, and hesitates. “I can’t remember if you drink tea.”
I nod. The roof of my mouth tingles with all the questions I want to blurt out: How long have we been separated? When was the last time you saw me? What are you doing in the OLA, and how is it you have control of this train?
But the only questions I should be wasting my time and breath asking are questions that could help me. Questions that would give me an advantage in the race. I raise my chin and ask, “What can you tell me about me? About my life before the race?”
“Slow down,” he says. He opens a drawer and pulls out a second china cup. The train lists heavily onto its side as we navigate a sharp turn, and hot water splashes onto the floor as he pours from the carafe. “I’m not sure how much I want to tell you. Remember, I strongly disapprove of this race.”
“So you’d prefer to watch your sister struggle until she dies?”
“I’d prefer to watch my sister quit this choreographed cruelty they call the Race of Oblivion and join the cause of the Outsider Liberation Army.” He places the cup on the table in front of me. The train straightens out of its turn and a bit of water sloshes over the side and wets the white tablecloth. “I’m not just some foot soldier in the ranks of the OLA, Astrid. I’m its leader. This is where you belong, fighting for the rights of Outsiders beside your brother.”
“Its leader? How old are you? Twenty?”
“I’m nineteen.”
I’m having trouble reconciling the fact that this man—this manipulative stranger who forced me to risk my life in a Hearts and Hands match before he would even agree to take me to the next checkpoint—is my brother. I don’t like it, but I believe it. This claim of being the leader of the OLA is another matter altogether. A million questions prickle at the back of my throat, but I hold them in and remind myself that my priority is winning the race. “Maybe you want me beside you,” I say. “Or maybe you’re just trying to sabotage my chance to win. You might be my brother, you might even be part of the OLA. But that doesn’t mean you’re rooting for me. Maybe you have a bet on someone else. I’d say this train looks more like it belongs to a gambler than to a general in a rebel army.”
“Ah, but it’s not that kind of army.”
Behind me, the door to the train car opens. I spin around, feeling suddenly vulnerable in this dark train in the middle of the night. The girl I fought outside the train walks in with the engineer. Their hands are entwined.
“I couldn’t give you any names until I trusted you,” says Jayden. “Astrid, this is my engineer, Rafaela, and my second in command, Wendy.”
“Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing,” Wendy says. She pouts at me. “You don’t believe we’re the OLA? Haven’t you ever heard of us?”
“Why are you up in the middle of the night?” I ask her.
“I’m here for your mission, same as you.” She lifts the last egg from the dish and takes a small bite. Her words make my eyes shoot to Jayden’s face. He’s smiling, too, the way you smile when you’ve got your prey where you want them. My stomach flips like a fish out of water, and I turn back to Wendy.
“What mission?”
“Wait. Have you heard of us or not?”
It feels like Wendy’s ego is at stake here. A mist of insecurity clings to her, and frankly, the reputation of an underground organization feels like the wrong thing to depend on for personal affirmation. I glance at Jayden again and then at Rafaela, who is ignoring this entire exchange in order to serve herself a cup of tea.
“I have. But . . . I guess I assumed the OLA was run by a weathered old fanatic—”
“Not a weathered young fanatic?” Rafaela asks, without looking up from her teacup. Wendy laughs, which only ratchets up my discomfort.
I glance from one face to the next. These three are not what I expected from an underground organization fighting for equality for Outsiders. I’m not sure what I expected instead—bandits with the bottom half of their faces covered, I guess. The OLA is famous for blowing up railroad tracks and bridges, and destroying monuments to Enchanted heroes. And they always leave behind their leaflets—manifestos on the rights of Outsiders.
Jayden is glancing out the window again, pretending he’s distracted, so I come to stand beside him. “What mission?” I repeat, keeping my voice low. “I need to continue this race. I don’t have time for anything else.”
“But you do have time. You can’t collect the next clue until dawn. There’s plenty of time before then.”
Wendy and Rafaela take seats at an empty table. Their hands entwined again, Wendy drops her head onto Rafaela’s shoulder. They watch me and Jayden as if they’re watching a play.
“Enjoying yourselves?” I spit. I’m tired of being stared at like a trained dog. Between the Hearts and Hands match and this, I’ve had enough.
Wendy’s head snaps upright and her eyes widen. Her mouth opens like she’s got something to say, but nothing comes out. “You better give us some privacy,” Jayden says.
There’s a loud, exhaled humph, but otherwise, they leave without a word.
“First,” Jayden says once the door closes behind them, “you won’t be manipulated to do anything you don’t choose to do. You won’t be forced. If at any time you want to walk away, just say the word.”
“That’s easy enough. I want—”
“Hear me out!” Jayden scowls at me. He has a shorter fuse than I’d realized. “Let me tell you what I need you to do. Sit down,” he says, and I do exactly that, as if some instinct inside me remembers him being my bossy older brother. “Tell me what you know of the Village of Falling Leaf.”
“I know that the last clue said to come to this village at dawn. Something about the color of the village door will tell me where to go next.”
“Is that all you know? Well, then let me tell you why the Enchanteds want to send racers to the gate of Falling Leaf at dawn. The village is surrounded by an ancient wood, one of the favorite habitats of the sharp-eyed boar. And if you don’t know about the sharp-eyed boar, let me tell you this: they’re quite fast and they can be vicious, but more importantly, they’re nocturnal, these boars—that’s why t
hey call them sharp-eyed—and right now they’re in season. They’re so elusive, they’re a celebrated prize for hunters, who gather in the wood outside the gate of Falling Leaf, and just before the sun rises, they will shoot at anything that moves.” He pauses, and his eyes fall on my face, and for a moment I think I see compassion in them. “You’re afraid.”
“Of course I’m afraid.” I turn away from him, because it’s miserable to think of him reading me like that, even without the aid of Cientia. Is this what it means to have a sibling? To be an open book? Well, I don’t want my book lying open, not to Jayden or anyone, so I turn my attention to the landscape outside the window. We’re moving quickly, trees flying by, but up ahead I see the slope of a hill and, clinging to that slope, the outline of a village wall. “That’s it,” says Jayden. “That’s Falling Leaf. And that’s the wood where racers will shortly be shot to death before the sun comes up, if they’re not torn to shreds by wild boars first.”
“I can’t figure you out,” I say. “You offered me a ride if I could beat Orsino. You apparently have some sort of mission you want me to do here. Now you talk like only a fool would go out there. Like you’re trying to talk me out of it.”
“I know you won’t be talked out of it. I only want you to see how thoroughly you are being manipulated.”
“By the Enchanteds, or by you?”
This question catches him by surprise. I can tell by the way his head snaps in my direction, by the way he tries to impale me with his gaze. “I need a favor here in Falling Leaf,” he admits. He folds his arms across his chest and leans against the glass. Something warm rises in him, a yearning to be understood. “One that can only be done at night by someone with strong Cientia. I want you to understand . . . approaching the gate of Falling Leaf would be dangerous for anyone who didn’t have Cientia as strong as Orsino. That was the reason I insisted on the match. But let me be clear—I am not trying to manipulate you. If I could have this any way I wanted, you would be the person to run this mission, and then you would turn around and come back to this train, drop out of the race, and join the OLA.” He takes a step toward me and leans in, and it takes all my effort not to take a step back. He might know me, but to me he is still a stranger. “You’re halfway to safety already, Astrid. You’ve escaped that awful house. And Papa would understand. We could send him money from time to time. I know he would forgive you.”
There is a particular sort of guilt in knowing something important that someone else doesn’t know. That’s the sensation I get when he mentions our father, and I realize that the truth of his death is like a secret, a painful truth that is not yet true to Jayden. It’s the complete opposite of the sensation I get when the words escaped that awful house casually drip from Jayden’s mouth, as coolly as he might say, Your hair is dirty or Your legs are thin, or any other obvious truth.
He reads my face. “You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
Whatever softness had taken hold of him earlier, he shrugs off. The man who reminded me of a snake in the grass returns. “Do this mission, and return to this train instead of continuing in the race, and I promise to tell you about that awful house, and everything else about your past that you’ve forgotten.”
Twenty-Four
From the compartment where I slept, I retrieve my coat and my bag—both taken from women who are now dead. I’ve agreed to do as Jayden asks—to complete this mission, even to return to the train afterward—though the truth is I’ve yet to decide if I’ll do either of those things. I’m tempted, of course. Jayden’s words about that awful house echo in my head like the words of a riddle, written in a code I cannot crack.
To be honest, I won’t know what I’m going to do until I see the color of the village gate at dawn.
Though I expect to find Wendy and Rafaela back in the dining car when I return, I find Jayden alone. He’s leaning over a silver tray on the table, his hair curtaining off his eyes, a straw held to his nose. As I come closer, I notice several thin lines of black powder.
“Revelry?”
Jayden snorts a line and shakes his head. “Don’t worry about me, little sis. I’ve got it under control. I do a little bit of Oblivion, and then a little bit of Revelry, Oblivion’s perfect antidote. When you’ve seen the horrors I’ve seen, you’ll use them too.”
“You don’t think I’ve seen horrors?”
He looks up, and I flinch when I see that look I saw on Darius, the look that tells me he’s remembering me, from a time that I’ve forgotten. “I know you’ve seen more than most people. That’s for sure,” he says.
He bends his head again over the Revelry, and I can see the skin of his back at the base of his neck. For the first time since I realized that this person is really who he claims to be—my brother, but also the leader of the Outsider Liberation Army—I wonder how those two things might be connected. What nightmares did Jayden live through that led him to the OLA, and have I lived through those nightmares, too? I think of the lash marks on my back and wonder if Jayden has them. The sliver of skin above his collar is too narrow to give him away.
While we’re alone, Jayden goes over the mission with me. He tells me that I should hike beyond the gate, following the village wall, until I come to a few buildings built of rough-hewn logs. “Falling Leaf is a lumber town, and these buildings are dormitories. One houses Outsider labor—you’ll know it because it has no windows. The other, built to be much more comfortable, is a dormitory where the taskmasters live. I need you to enter that building, but don’t get caught. These taskmasters have already killed five Outsiders in the past week—”
“Killed? Killed how?”
Jayden scowls at me. I guess I’ve asked a stupid question. “With an inhumanly strong dose of Projectura, that’s how. These people are torturers, Astrid. Have you heard nothing I’ve said?”
The potato-like face of the taskmaster at the farm springs to my mind. Could she kill someone with Projectura? Could I? “No. I mean yes, I have. I’m listening.”
Jayden hands me a silver briefcase and instructs me to leave it inside, in the center of the building, if possible, on the ground floor. Before I can ask, he adds, “It’s a device for transmitting voices. The OLA will use it to record intelligence that can be used to prove what’s being done to the Outsider laborers here, to expose these taskmasters as the murderers they are. So hide it well. Under a chair is good, in a place where it looks like they gather.”
The train comes to an abrupt halt, and Jayden gets to his feet. “Aren’t we going into the station?” I ask. Beyond the glass of the windows, the night is thick and black. The intermittent moonlight, filtered through wisps of silver clouds, reveals nothing but dense forest.
“The station is within the village walls,” Jayden says. “It makes more sense for you to jump down here. The gate isn’t far. It’s just up from the river. You’ll find it.” The door at the end of the dining car opens and Rafaela appears.
She steps in front of me and uses something resembling a wrench to open the door to the outside. It swings open, and the three of us stand peering out into the night. I notice a soft breeze, the rhythm of crickets, a low gurgle of running water, and far away, a gunshot.
“Keep your senses tuned for hunters,” Jayden says, “and your eyes open for boar. Once you’ve completed the mission, meet me at the village gate at dawn, and I’ll lead you back to the train.”
I must look pretty scared, because Rafaela says, “Hey now,” in that low, drawn-out way people do when they mean to comfort someone. “I heard how you handled Orsino. You can handle this.” I nod and try to smile a bit, to show I appreciate her saying that. When neither of them says anything else, I pull on the coat, shrug my bag onto my good shoulder, and jump down from the safety of the train into the danger of the unknown.
The turf along the tracks is soft, littered with the earliest leaves of the fall. But autumn is still young, and most of the leaves are still green and clinging to the trees, making
it hard to see, which I hope works to my advantage. It’s cool outside but not cold, here in the more temperate north, and I stride off, letting the slim shafts of moonlight light my way. I see little and I hear even less, but it isn’t long before I find a path, which helps quiet my heart and invigorate my hope.
I have at least an hour before dawn. I promise myself that if I find the gate quickly, I’ll make my way to the dormitories and consider Jayden’s mission. But I also remind myself that I owe nothing to anybody. “Your only obligation is to yourself and to the race,” I whisper in an attempt to feel less alone, but then my senses flare, and I wish I had kept quiet.
Someone is ahead of me on the path. Not someone I can see, or even someone I can hear, but someone I can feel. Anticipation . . . the feeling right before you pull the ribbon from a gift.
The person on the path is a hunter.
I slow, not sure if my best plan is to stay on the trail or slip into the trees. The latter is more likely to get me confused with a boar and shot, so I slow my steps and stay behind. Sound comes from my left, but before I hear it I feel it—fear and confusion, and the overwhelming desire to be somewhere else.
This person is clearly a racer.
I continue on the path, and though I see no one, I feel the emotions of the hunter on my right and then behind me. Either one hunter is circling, or there are more than one. This second option is unnerving, to say the least. I could be walking right into a trap laid for a boar, and I could be shot before they recognize I’m not the prey they were hoping for. So I halt and squat down, and off to my left again I feel the racer.
Then I hear him hurrying, kicking up leaf litter behind him. And then I see him—black hair and thin legs and a back bent over as he runs.
Marlon?
I tell myself it’s hard to see. I tell myself the moonlight is tricky and unreliable, and a person with brown hair or red hair or even dirty blond hair might look like Marlon in the dark. But none of that matters. All that matters is that hope has flashed across my mind like a flash of lightning in the dark, and I have to follow him.
Crown of Oblivion Page 19
