The Progeny

by Tosca Lee

  “You know your story sounds a lot like the one Rolan told me,” I say.

  “Listen.” He drops his head, shakes it, as though second-guessing what he’s about to say. “Rolan. Was lying. Because he wants what you knew. Very badly. Acting like your buddy was the only chance he had of getting it. By the way? I don’t know what story he told you, but no Progeny would knowingly keep a photo of another Progeny on their phone. Not in a million years.” He shakes his head. “And right now, the more I tell you, the more dangerous it is for you—and everyone you know.”

  I don’t tell Luka that Rolan never claimed to be a Progeny. Somehow I have a feeling he’ll tell me the same thing Ivan did: There’s no such thing as Watchers.

  “I don’t know anyone,” I say and realize just how true that is. As unsavory as they might be, the introduction of Luka and Rolan in the last few days has increased the grand sum of my dubious social circle to two. Four, if you count the nonexistent Clare and Madge at the Fly Shop, though it doesn’t look like we’ll be socializing much anymore. And I realize now there is no one I trust.

  I wonder if I have ever felt so alone.

  “You did,” he says, biting out the words. “You did know people. You had access to a lot of information from your mother.”

  “What do you know about my mother?”

  “She was a radical. Infamous in Progeny and Scion circles alike. She was determined to find a way to end it. Which made her dangerous. To everyone.”

  My eyes narrow. “You said you didn’t know anything.”

  “I said I didn’t know names. But anyone remotely plugged in knew hers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was at the front of a movement among Progeny who’d rather die than live in secrecy one more generation.”

  “That’s why they’re after me?”

  “They’re after you because you’re alive. But even more because of who you are and what you used to know. Your mom prepared for the day a hunter caught up to her—and protected a lot of people and information in the process. Information you acquired.”

  “You’re full of crap.”

  “Am I? Weren’t you doing the same thing when you had your memory erased? Creating a fail-safe in case that day came? That’s exactly what you did! But you did it better.”

  “On what planet is this better?” I demand. “Whatever she knew, the hunters have it now! So what was the point?”

  “Whatever you learned from her, you found more. You went further. Even before we were friends, you—”

  “We were friends?” And I know I’ve just screwed up my face like I ate something disgusting.

  He leans in through the back door, his eyes dangerous. “Oh yes. Because I got involved in your life, remember?” he hisses. “Yeah, I was that hunter—intent on bringing the big haul back. And you had it. Enough to fill in a slew of blanks. To set me up for life when I turned it all in. And you had no idea how close you were to dying. The daughter of Amerie Szabo. You were the mother lode.”

  Gone, the man who called me Bronco and tried to sell me nonalcoholic cider at the grocery. His expression is feral.

  “Until the day I realized I couldn’t do this. I didn’t want you dead. More than that, I wanted to keep you alive. So the joke’s on me. The ambitious one who got too close instead of just getting it over with and taking whatever you had in that mind of yours. Now that’s gone and you don’t know who you are anymore. Well, neither do I! So here we are. The Historian will know soon—if he doesn’t by now—that you’re alive and I’m a traitor. So who knows. Maybe Rolan was shooting at me after all.”

  “For all I know, I erased my memory to keep it from you.”

  “I’m not the enemy here. Not anymore. Not for a long time.”

  “How am I supposed to believe that?”

  Luka straightens and practically shouts: “Because it’s true! You might not know me anymore, but I still know you, Audra!”

  “I’m so sick of hearing people say that!”

  “Yeah, but I’m the one not lying to you. Did it occur to you that if I wanted to kill you I would have done it before you erased your memory? You trusted me. You still do. Listen to your intuition,” he says, and for a moment it seems like he’s actually pleading with me.

  I shrug. “Sorry. I got nothing. I wish there was some way to prove it.” And a part of me really does mean it.

  He drops his head and walks away, hands on his hips. A minute later, he turns back. “I can prove it. I know things about you you don’t share with others.”

  I wait expectantly.

  “You hate math and don’t know how to cook.”

  I roll my eyes. “You just described three-fourths of the population.”

  “The first guy you had a crush on was some kid in seventh grade.”

  “Every girl has a crush on some kid in seventh grade.”

  His blue gaze fastens on me. “Your parents died in a freak boating accident four years ago. Your dad was an avid fisherman. You studied art for a year and a half at the University of Chicago. You used to take meds for ADHD, which you don’t have. You have a photographic memory. You superimpose shapes on things in your mind when you’re thinking. You never forget a face. Well, I guess you have now, huh?”

  I go very still. For a moment there’s only the occasional whir of a car on the highway.

  He nods toward my arm. “You have a scar on your right elbow where you crashed riding your bicycle. You were fourteen. You call it your salami scar, because you skidded on the pavement and it looked like salami. Still does, a little.”

  I don’t move, except for my eyes, which turn toward my sleeve.

  “There’s another scar on your right shin that looks like a dent, where the bike landed on you, pedal first. You haven’t ridden a bike since. You took martial arts as a kid. Swam in high school. Love eighties music—Devo especially, because you’re basically a nerd. You don’t like makeup. Hate black coffee . . .”

  “Stop,” I whisper.

  “You touch your hair when you’re nervous, used to have a dog named Attila. Your litmus test of a true history geek is whether or not they know Attila the Hun died of a nosebleed. You love mulligatawny but won’t eat soup unless it’s hot enough to scald—”

  “I said stop it!”

  My hands are shaking. But even as I tell myself I could have shared any of these things under the guise of friendship and that he’s conning me, I can’t help the fact that I am desperately clinging to a shard of hope that he’s not. Four days ago, I was considering that I could never be honest with anyone, that no one would ever really know me. That sense of despair only got worse as I listened to Rolan’s entire story about where I came from, what I am. Now there’s a person in front of me who knows it all, better than I do. Or claims to, at least.

  “You said yourself you acted like my friend to find out what I knew. Any so-called friend would know things like that.”

  “I said I got too close and became your friend.”

  “Same thing.”

  “It isn’t to me.”

  “Then prove you’re no longer hunting me. Let me go, and leave.”

  He crouches down in the open door in front of me. “I can’t do that. I promised I’d be here afterward. We made this decision together, remember?”

  “No, I don’t remember!”

  “Maine was a new start for me, too—you’re not the only one who lost that. So if you take off without me, I’ll just follow you. Because I made a promise. And because that’s what stalkers do, I guess.”

  I stare at him for a long moment before glancing down at the leg of my jeans. Without a word I lift up the right hem. And there it is: the scar like a little dent, nestled against my shin.

  Even as my pulse trips, I tell myself anyone could have seen it and made up some story. I remind myself I never said anything in my letter about Luka. But I never did about Clare or Ivan, either.

  Ivan.

  I look around, and then at Luka. “D
o you have a phone?”

  “Yeah . . .” he says cautiously.

  “Give it to me.”

  He hesitates, then pulls the phone from his pocket, unlocks it, and holds it out.

  I dial in the numbers.

  “What are you doing?” he says.

  “You want me to trust you? Trust me for a minute.”

  Ivan picks up on the first ring. “Did you get away?”

  I slide from the backseat, walk out of earshot.

  “Yeah.”

  An audible exhale on the other end. “Did he get anything?”

  “Please, how do I know you?” I say.

  “Did you give him anything?” the voice insists.

  Luka storms over and reaches for the phone. I spin away.

  “No. Because I don’t know anything! I went back to the Center and my records are gone.”

  “What are you doing?” Luka hisses.

  “Who’s with you?” Ivan says.

  “A friend.” I stumble on the word, shoot Luka a warning. He’s glaring, looks ready to rip the phone from my hand.

  “The fact that you’re alive is enough,” Ivan says. “They know you’re hiding something important or you’d never have done this.”

  “They who? The Scions?”

  And then, a faint exhale: “It isn’t . . . it isn’t possible you found it?”

  “Found what?”

  “Where are you now?” he says quickly.

  “Near Chicago,” I say, glancing toward the highway. “Please. Whoever I did this for—I think they’re in trouble. You have to tell them. You have to warn—”

  “Audra, they’re not just after your life.”

  My parents—all of them, ostensibly—are gone. “I know. They’re after the Progeny I knew.”

  “No. No, something much more important.”

  “Than a life? What else is there?”

  “If you found what I think you did, you and anyone close to you is in far worse danger.”

  “Found—what?” Luka is staring at me.

  “You have to get here. We can hide you. If nothing else, at least you’ll be safe for a while.”

  “I can’t come to Croatia! I’ll go to a battered women’s shelter, or—”

  “Audra, get out of the States. Now.”

  “I don’t even have a passport!”

  “You’re Progeny. Get one. I have to get rid of this phone. I’ll leave you a new contact in the next five hours.”

  The line clicks off before I can say anything else.

  I stare at the space between Luka and me for a stunned moment, and then, belatedly, at the phone in my hand.

  Without a word I pull up a browser, type in “University of Chicago” and “library.” Tap on a list of images.

  The Harper Memorial Library comes up.

  And there it is: the cathedral of learning, with its vaulted ceiling and rows of long tables I remember.

  There is an actual place with real records of my existence. If I had an ID with my old name on it, if I weren’t supposedly dead, I would be able to walk in and get my student record, find something about my former life.

  I realize Luka’s watching me. He looks pale.

  “Okay,” I say, more to myself than to him.

  “What was he saying about rediscovering something?” Luka says. He looks ill.

  “He wouldn’t say. Something he thought I found.”

  Luka’s gaze is locked on mine. An instant later he walks to the driver’s side and gets in.

  “He’s right,” he says. “We have to get you out of the country.”

  13

  * * *

  “I can’t just go to Croatia!”

  Back on the two-lane highway in flat Farmville, USA, we might as well be talking about one of Pluto’s moons. I hug my arms around myself against the cold, touch my tongue to the inside of my lip where it got cut.

  “He’s right. You’ll be safe. No one knows how to hide like the Progeny,” Luka says, eyes on the road.

  “There have got to be Progeny here somewhere.”

  “Not like there. If the Historian knows you’re alive, that you faked your death and erased your memory to protect something . . . something important enough that he sent Rolan to get you to rediscover it . . .”

  “So he could kill me and then harvest my memory and give everything to the Historian—I get it.”

  Luka’s jaw twitches, the set of his mouth flat.

  “What does he think I found?”

  Luka’s quiet for a moment before he says, “The diary.”

  “Diary?”

  “That has to be what he meant,” he murmurs. He passes his hand over his face and then pounds the rim of the steering wheel with a curse.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t what we planned!”

  “What diary?” I demand.

  “Bathory’s. People have been searching for it for centuries. I knew Rolan would let you live long enough to find something you remember, but if they’re talking about the diary . . .” He looks shaken, even in the dark. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “So I hear. About this diary?”

  He lets out a slow breath. “It’s the Progeny holy grail. They think it contains proof she was set up so the king and her sons-in-law could take possession of her land. That finding it will end the hunt once and for all. But the Scions believe it’s a detailed account of the girls she tortured and killed. Proof of their reason for being.”

  “So which is it?”

  “Who knows? No one’s ever found it, if it even exists. Years after Bathory’s death, her son Pál believed if he could find his mother’s diary and prove her innocence, the king would be forced to return the property the crown had taken and clear the family name. It was illegal by then to speak Elizabeth Bathory’s name in public. But Pál never found it. The king—by then the Holy Roman Emperor—accused him and his siblings of treason, confiscated the rest of their land . . .”

  “And banished them from Hungary.”

  He nods. “Bathory’s descendants have been searching for the diary ever since. As have the Scions of the Dispossessed.”

  “Could that really end it?”

  “It’s a myth, Audra. Or was until rumor started circulating that your mother was close to finding it. The Historian wants it so badly, he’s put a ten-million-euro bounty on it.”

  “Which is why you didn’t just kill me outright,” I say quietly.

  Luka doesn’t answer.

  “And Ivan thinks I found this diary.”

  “I don’t know. No one could have gotten closer. You have no idea what your mother was to the Progeny. What you were to them before you died.”

  “What was I?”

  “Hope. That the generational curse would be broken. That Progeny could live in the open for the first time in centuries, have families. Die a natural death.”

  I blink into the wind streaming through the broken window.

  “So did I find it or not?”

  “If you had found it, there’s no way you’d have gone in for the procedure. You would’ve ended this if you could. Unless . . .”

  I glance at him as his expression changes, along with his tone. “Unless you found it and it didn’t prove her innocence.”

  “If we were as close as you say, how could you not know whether I found it?”

  “You knew what was at stake. It superseded everything. And I knew that. When I finally told you who I was, you withdrew from the underground to protect them. From me, too, of course. You were spooked, imagining how close you came to having their blood on your hands just because you knew me. You had nightmares about it for months.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You told me. Later, when you decided to trust me again, before you went in for the procedure.”

  “To protect the underground.”

  “Not just that. Can you imagine two years of this? Always looking over your shoulder? Going more and more into hiding? I watched t
he change in you. Toward the end, before you returned to the States, anything having to do with the Scions, the diary, the Progeny was the last thing you wanted to talk about. You were tired of the underground, the hiding. Even of your own gifts—the persuasion, charisma. You would have gotten rid of them if you could, if you didn’t need them to survive. By the time you made up your mind, persuaded your way into the trial at the Center, there was no point in talking about any of it at all. It was going to go away. It was like watching someone prepare to die. When all you do are the most normal things you can. Eat a meal. Watch the sun set . . .”

  I look at him sidelong, his profile illuminated by the gauges on the dash. And even in the darkness, I think he looks haunted.

  “Why did I decide to trust you again?”

  He’s silent for a moment before he says, “You said you missed me. You were tired of being suspicious all the time, with everyone. You wanted one person who really knew you that you could trust, and barring that . . . you didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “Live.”

  Luka’s eyes are hollow. I turn my face toward the shattered windows, welcome the blast. Close my eyes.

  After a few miles, I say, “Why didn’t I leave the information with you, if you were in on the decision and I trusted you as much as you say?” Even as I say it, I see any hope I might have had of a normal life—a life without centuries-old myths and killers and people with strange powers—slipping away from me. Quiet backwoods Maine must have seemed like paradise to me before I gave up my memory. It still does.

  “Who do you think is the first person the Historian would turn to if it came out you weren’t dead as I reported? I took the credit for your accident. You couldn’t leave anything with me. Besides, apparently you did leave something for yourself.”

  “Ivan’s number.”

  “Names would defeat the whole purpose. And any locations you knew are useless because the Progeny move. A single lifeline, though, would be enough, assuming Ivan could stay alive to hold on to it. You knew what you were doing.”

  I hear Clare’s voice again. Trust your decision.

  But it’s hard to trust anyone you don’t know. Especially when that person is you.