by Tosca Lee
“If we were trying to look like them, I think we missed the mark,” I murmur. Luka reaches for my hand and clasps it over his arm.
“Have I told you today that you’re beautiful?” he whispers. “Even with purple hair.”
“Well, you look like a vampire.”
More actors stroll down the street: a peddler with a cart, a cap pulled low over his head, a peasant woman in an apron.
Then it hits me. I can feel them. My pulse ratchets up a notch, so loud in my ears that at first I don’t hear, let alone see, the young couple of tourists who approaches our foursome.
“Can we get a picture with you?” the girl asks. Claudia smiles and turns toward her, arm looped with Piotrek’s. Her scarlet lips glisten in the wan light of a real gas streetlamp, and I blink; with the pink hair and rhinestones raining from her ears, the netting of her veil like myriad tiny windows over the pale skin of her cheeks, she’s dazzling.
I almost persuade the girl to forget the picture, recalling what Luka said about photos and Progeny. But every one of us is masked.
Hiding in plain sight.
“Who are you supposed to be?” the girl says after snapping a selfie with them.
“Run away,” Claudia whispers, before diving into a cartwheel. Piotrek tips his hat toward her just before the girl literally takes off running.
Luka glances at me sidelong.
“How can they keep from attracting attention this way, masked or not?” I hiss. “All a hunter would have to do is look for the freak parade at midnight!”
He shakes his head. “There are pop-up masquerades all over Europe,” he says. “People got tired of expensive clubs, started taking to cemeteries and ruins. See those people headed toward the square?” He points toward a group of costumed partygoers.
I do, and I can’t sense them at all—unlike the actors, who nod in our direction before we’re even within speaking distance. Claudia skips to the peasant man’s side, whispers in his ear. He chuckles, as though she’s told him a joke—and maybe she has. When she turns away, something glints in her hand. She takes Piotrek’s arm and pivots, pulling him around as though they were dancing all the way to the corner.
Two blocks north of the church, the streets are darker, the buildings in various states of repair—one pristinely restored, the plaster of the next one leprously crumbling away. Claudia and Piotrek pause before the beaten-up double door of a more decrepit building—a large residence that seems to extend to the corner, the windows of which are shuttered and painted over with graffiti. With a quick glance around, she fits a key into the lock and lets us in.
She marches swiftly down the hallway ahead of Piotrek, searching the walls. At the corner, she pauses to touch the peeling paint. There, faintly, is the sign that looks like two towers. And then she’s leading us down the hall to the door of an apartment that looks like it ought to be condemned.
“Where are we going?” Luka says finally, his hand tight around my own.
“There is a story that there were once tunnels from St. Mark’s Church to the castle Medvedgrad, where the evil Black Queen threw her lovers from the walls when she was done with them,” Claudia says, eyes glinting. “There are rumored tunnels all over this area, including Visoka Street, where the new president has elected to move her residence.” She smiles mysteriously and opens the door.
I hear it then: the faint pound of bass like a distant heartbeat, as though it might be coming from an apartment one building over.
Or from underground.
We follow her to the cellar, but instead of opening onto a dirty floor, the stair broadens into a tunnel—one hacked out of the original cellar, by the look of it. Electric lights are strung along a ceiling so low that everyone but Claudia has to duck beneath them. I can hear it more distinctly now, the pulse of European trance—coming from somewhere in the distance.
We walk, stooped over, for at least fifty yards until I start to worry that I might seriously have a claustrophobic attack. Just as I’m about to say I want to go back, the tunnel ends at a door. It’s obviously old, bound by iron and guarded by a man in a mask and smart black tuxedo. Without speaking, he fits a key into the lock. The minute he throws the door open on a cavernous underground chamber, we are assaulted by heavy bass. More than that, I actually have to take a step back at the sheer volume of Progeny ahead of us. It hits me like thunder, and I grab for Luka, who steadies me with an arm around the waist.
The man steps aside, head tilted as though he were a butler, but straightens the instant he takes notice of the pendant hanging midway down my chest. At first I think he’s staring at my chest, and have just started to snarl when he steps back and abruptly bows low.
I glance at Luka, who swiftly ushers me through.
“That was weird,” I say, but my words are swallowed by tech-heavy music, the beat interrupting the natural rhythm of my heart as the swarm of bodies begins to jerk, ghoulish beneath a shuttered strobe.
Is it my imagination, or have people turned to stare? One, and then five, and then twenty. They haven’t stopped moving, but the laughter I thought I saw in thrown-back heads gives way to frozen masks swiveled in our direction.
I look around, expecting to see a bar, but there’s no such thing—just a tattoo artist working on a costumed figure reclined in an old barber’s chair in the corner. I get it; the pulse of so many Progeny in one location is more intoxicating than any cocktail, but in none of the usual ways. Goose bumps rise on my arms, climb to my shoulders like an army of ants.
Luka pulls me close, and I imagine, more than hear, him telling me to breathe. But every time I do, I feel as though I’m inhaling the electric pulse in choking particles. Purple lights flash over the chiseled ceiling until I feel like they’re going off behind my eyes. Exposed flesh all around us lights up in glowing tattoos: three claws on the shoulder of a woman, tearing skin down the bare chest of another. The dragon, eating its tail, constricting the neck of another in an ultraviolet choker.
Ahead of us, Claudia has thrown herself into Piotrek’s arms, arching back so far it’s a miracle her wig hasn’t come off. A scaled dragon, invisible until now, dips into her décolleté. She drops her arms back like a blissed-out rag doll as a Mad Hatter in red stockings takes Piotrek by the shoulders.
Luka pulls me toward him, and the beat is undeniable, infectious, far too demanding. The only thing that feels better at all is to move. The lights go out completely, fluorescent lashes, masks, and fingernails glowing in a bobbing frenzy in the pitch-black around us. I hold tight to Luka’s neck. His trench coat is missing. He’s warm, clothing already damp beneath my arm. Tension, fear, and confusion have welled up in me at once, and I feel it all sweating through my pores like a demon that must be exorcised here, now, as the strobe shocks the black cavern back to life.
It does not stop. I cannot stop. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with a Greek comedy mask, a cap with bells falling down over pale, gilded cheeks. He kneels so close to me I fall onto his back. Hands lift me onto a set of shoulders. I flail once and close my eyes. I am floating, a dozen hands grasping my arms, back, and legs. And for the first time since I woke up in the Center, I do not think of danger. I do not think at all. There is only the beat of surrender, and breath and bliss. I open my eyes on a ceiling raining blue light, the strobe flashing like lightning.
Amerie loved rain . . .
And for that one, perfect, ruined moment, she did not worry about the future, and the past was washed away.
I barely feel my feet touch the floor, belatedly realize I have landed on my toes in the boots with the precarious heels that should have crippled me by now. But I feel no pain. There is nothing but this rapid burn of everything I have been carrying with me for far, far too long.
I am alive for the first time since I woke up in the Center’s clinical white room. Perhaps ever.
I don’t know how long I go like that—a half hour, an hour, two.
The Mad Hatter comes to cup my face with a s
mile. She kisses my cheek before melting away. Claudia grabs my hand, pulls me through the thinning press. And then we are rushing into a tunnel, up a stair, and onto the street. Piotrek veers left onto a main thoroughfare, all but abandoned this time of night. There’s an old blue tram rolling toward us. He leaps up onto the outer step, and Claudia has followed suit. They’re out of their minds, I think, even as my foot finds a hold on the second car, my fingers fighting for purchase as if I were a climber on a sheer rock face. I glance back, purple hair in my eyes, to find Luka laughing at the end of the car.
We let go several blocks east and run down the side of the street. Piotrek jumps up onto the post of a chain fence, teeters, then balances like a ballerina. I laugh and then gasp as Claudia leaps for him. He hops at least five feet to the next post just as she lands where he was perched a mere second ago, and then Claudia’s chasing him the better part of a city block from post to post, one long stride at a time.
“He’s crazy.” Luka laughs, and I nod in agreement. But my heart races with them as we run to catch up.
On the very last post, Piotrek jumps into the street—right toward an oncoming car. I scream, too late, as he skirts across the car’s roof, landing on his feet with an audible chuckle. The car screeches to a halt.
“That was you,” Claudia says, her finger pointed at me. And only then do I realize my mental shout for the driver to stop!
By the time we find ourselves back in the city square, the sky is indigo, threatening dawn. That can’t be right.
“I know a place,” Piotrek says, slowing to a walk. We’re at least a mile from the upper city on a narrow side road. He leads us to a tiny restaurant. The windows are dark, a lone light shining from a back room, maybe the kitchen itself. Piotrek slides his mask up, presses his forehead to the window. When nothing happens, Claudia turns to stare intently through the window beside him. A minute later we’re admitted by an older man who welcomes us as though we were expected—even though he’s still in his nightshirt.
By the time we sit down I feel the soreness of my feet. My lower back aches. My ears are still ringing.
I sigh and slump back in my chair as the proprietor comes with coffee, not even caring what Piotrek is apparently ordering for the table.
And then I smile up at the ceiling. A laugh rises from my chest. Claudia removes her mask. She looks spent and sated at once.
Luka groans.
“A night like that could kill a man,” he says. And I doubt he’s feigning his fatigue.
The proprietor’s wife, a plump woman in her sixties, emerges a few minutes later with sugar and a pitcher of thick cream. She’s still in her dressing gown. Piotrek murmurs at her, catches her hand and kisses it. She blushes, and then laughs like a girl.
“I miss surfing in Hvar.” Claudia sighs. “A splinter of the court used to meet near the coast about a year and a half ago. We’d drop clothes on the way to the beach. Swim until dawn. Go surfing in the morning.”
“We surfed?” I say.
“You didn’t. We did,” Claudia says. “You were a miserable surfer.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Pio, didn’t you have to give her mouth-to-mouth at least once?”
“She loved it,” he says, sliding a lazy smile my way.
“Hey. We never saw Tibor,” I say belatedly, a weird languor like fatigue taking over my limbs.
“No. But he saw us,” Claudia says.
“Everyone was costumed. How could he know I was there?”
She leans in, her eyes shining.
“Audra. Everyone knows you were there.”
* * *
Luka and I stagger into Claudia’s flat just before dawn, shed shoes, jewelry, masks. Claudia and Piotrek arrive a short time later, having taken a different route home.
Claudia chatters in incoherent exhaustion before disappearing down the hall, the two cups of espresso she’s just made forgotten on the counter. I swear I hear her bump into the door of the bedroom.
“Good night,” Piotrek says as he retrieves the espresso, a tiny cup in each hand. He pauses just long enough that I think he might say something, but then tilts his head and strides down the hall after Claudia.
I am by now more spent than I can ever remember being. And though I know I will be sore tomorrow, I am, for the first time in weeks—possibly years—at peace.
Luka peels off his jacket, loosens his tie.
He’s obviously exhausted, but I know he is acutely aware of my slightest movement, the breath I have yet to exhale. I have felt his eyes on me all night.
In three strides I’m across the room. My mouth finds his. His arms tighten around my waist.
“I think,” he murmurs, lifting me off my feet, “that you’re going to kill me.”
* * *
We return to court that night. And then the next, and the next. I wake every afternoon to a ringing in my ears, the echo of electronic music still drumming in my veins, and rise in anticipation of the frenetic melee.
We’ve acquired a minor court of our own: namely, a girl named Ana—the Mad Hatter of the first night—and her sibling, Nino, who is half as vocal as Piotrek and twice as crazy. The only two to ever share their faces let alone their names with us. They’ve crashed here with us the last two mornings, collapsing on the living room sofa, only to disappear sometime around noon.
I’ve come, by now, to recognize each of their trademark persuasions: Claudia, with her haughty demands, casting the desire to please her like a spell. Piotrek and his unspoken ability to make anyone feel beautiful. Ana, with a fragility that would make the most feeble old lady leap in front of a truck to save her; and Nino, with his danger. By now I’ve seen more than one policeman hightail it away from him with a glance, including last night after he rode a stolen skateboard down the funicular to the lower city.
“He’s going to die,” Piotrek said, blinking into the darkness—before he shrugged and followed suit.
But it’s Ana who finds the gentle place in my heart. For every way that Claudia is sharp, Ana is soft. For every word Claudia says, there is a mere cant of Ana’s eyes. Polish, like Piotrek, she is a waif of a girl, a sparrow in Cosplay boots with precariously high heels, tremoring like a leaf on a stem.
“Nino’s going to marry me at Christmas,” she says, touching a thin silver ring on her finger. She can’t be more than sixteen. But for all his lunatic ways, Nino is a different man around her. Gentle, near-reverent, as though she were not a kooky girl in striped leggings but a pale Madonna with anime eyes, always yelling for one of us to “look after Ana,” before embarking on his next crazy stunt.
“Are any siblings actual siblings?” I say to Claudia one night.
“A few,” she says. “But blood relations are rare in Utod circles. Most of us are orphans, after all.”
In all this time, Tibor has yet to make himself known. I don’t care. For the first time since I woke up in the Center, I feel that I am home.
* * *
“You know, there are bigger courts,” Claudia says one morning as we eat cold pizza after Luka, more haggard by the night, has already collapsed in bed. She has reclaimed the sofa in the absence of Ana and Nino, and stretches like a cat.
“Bigger than Zagreb?” I say around a mouthful of food.
“Budapest is bigger. So is Moscow. We should go. Court’s moving in a few days, anyway.”
“Moving where?” I say, slightly panicked.
She shrugs. “It changes. There’s a communiqué that goes out every month in the homeless magazine.”
“A print magazine?” I say. She nods. “Isn’t that risky?”
“There’s a code if you know where to look,” Piotrek says, slouched against an armchair on the floor. “The magazine is sold in every Croatian city by the homeless, who keep the profits. Do a good deed, find a safe place. Because we”—he lays a hand on his chest—“are the ultimate homeless.”
“Who puts out the magazine?”
“The Franciscans,�
�� Piotrek says. “Our truest brothers for centuries, which is a scandal when you consider that Erzsebet Bathory—Elizabeth, as you say—was a Protestant. A Calvinist, even. And that the Habsburg king, a Catholic, became Holy Roman Emperor before her death. Tsk tsk.”
“Does the Church know the extent of the Franciscans’ involvement?”
“They are not so involved today, except as helpers.”
“But the monk, Brother Goran, who gave me the key . . .”
“This is the first I have ever heard of a Progeny monk. But who is to say what is happening with those Ivan knew before he died? Who could ever understand Ivan, or those he ran with?”
But I have heard the same said of my mother. And of me.
“The Scions are far more powerful today than the Church,” Piotrek says. “What can a few Franciscans do to them? Yes, a few may be murdered. But even the Scions fear for their souls. The Church is well funded by the rich Dispossessed,” he says, wiggling his brows.
“You won’t get to heaven like this, Pio,” Claudia says.
“I am Utod. My heaven is here,” he says, spreading his arms.
“This isn’t heaven,” Claudia says, sitting up. “And we can’t go from court to court forever. Even Ivan said as much.”
I glance down at my plate, no longer hungry. It’s the first time we’ve talked about Ivan in days. I’ve been all too willing to forget the questions he left behind—including my reason for dying.
Piotrek shrugs. “We can go to Istria for a while, if you like.”
“I don’t want to go to Istria. I want to live,” Claudia says, shrill.
“I’ve actually never felt move alive,” I say honestly.
“You call this living? Scurrying in the dark like rats?”
“I thought you loved court!” I say, feeling strangely betrayed.
“Look at me,” she says. Her hair is askew, her makeup smeared. In her Queen of Bloody Hearts getup, she looks vaguely like a crackhead. “I’m eighteen. I feel forty. Some days I wake up and wish I hadn’t.”
I glance at Piotrek, waiting for him to intervene. Leaning against the armchair, his back is bent like that of an old man.
