by Tosca Lee
“I say we leave, see the world!” Claudia says.
I glance between them. “You can’t be serious?” I say.
“Of course I’m serious,” Claudia snaps.
“Where shall we go?” Piotrek says with a slight smile.
“São Paulo,” Claudia says. “Madagascar. Egypt.”
“Mother Russia!” Piotrek says in a thick Russian accent.
“China,” Claudia says.
“China takes money.” And passports, I think—a thing Luka inquired about earlier today. In private, I wondered aloud why we needed them at all, given my success at the passport agency.
“You can’t persuade a check-in kiosk or a customs camera,” he said. And I had to give him that.
“Money is easy to get,” Piotrek says. “We are Utod. The world is our orchard.” But his expression is weary.
“Oyster,” I say.
“I don’t like shellfish.”
“So it’s settled. China,” Claudia says. “What will you do about Luka?”
Do I imagine it or do she and Piotrek look at me at once?
“Bring him with me, what else?”
“Suit yourself,” Claudia says after a beat, untangling her legs onto the floor.
A few moments after she has gone down the hallway to collapse into bed, Piotrek rolls his head toward me.
“She gets this way every few months. Wanting to leave like a restless lover.”
“Do you ever? Leave, I mean.”
He shrugs a shoulder, eyes half-lidded. “For days. A week, maybe. At most, two. But we always come back.”
“You don’t want to see the world?”
“Of course. But for as much as we say we want to live, we are far too good at merely existing. And the underground court is that, because it means safety. And so we create our own world, every night. Again and again.” His gaze is distant. He sounds as tired as he looks. “Claudia believes that life is short. She wants to consume it. But you cannot consume life in safety. And in the end, we want safety more, even, than life.”
I think, not for the first time, that maybe this is what it’s like to have a terminal disease. To know that every minute is just one in a limited and dwindling supply and that you’d better squeeze some life in while you still have the choice. No wonder the image of my mother in the rain has never left me since the monastery. The moment is all we’ve ever had.
He rolls to his side, gets up, and then pauses. “But she is right. Perhaps we should go a few days early. Wait for court in the next city.”
“We can’t leave,” I say. “At least not yet. We haven’t gotten our passports.” And the truth is, I no longer care if we get them at all.
“I will contact Jester tomorrow,” Piotrek says, before ambling down the hall.
To my relief, Jester is silent. Claudia sings the next evening as she powders her face, all talk of China forgotten.
25
* * *
Pounding on the door wakes me, impossibly, from sleep. My limbs are leaden, weighted to the bed. I glance at the old digital clock across the room on the dresser: 5:07 P.M.
I push up in a panic, look around me. My clothes are where I left them, a black star of a mask, a riot of blond braids splayed across a hat that sat last night like a sinking ghost ship on top of my head. It’s the outfit I laid out while asleep the morning before. Aside from that single night of closet raiding, I’ve apparently been too exhausted to experience any new sleepwalking adventures . . . at least as far as I know.
I stretch an arm across the bed, find it empty. I never heard Luka rise.
“Audra!” More pounding. Claudia. I untangle myself, trip from bed.
“What?” I say, hoarse. I yank open the door. Claudia stands there in a plain black sweater and pedal pushers, Audrey Hepburn glasses on her head. It’s bizarre, seeing her in something so normal—possibly her weirdest costume yet—until I recall her penchant for watching artists in the park on weekend afternoons.
She holds a phone toward me.
“What’s this?” I take it from her, realizing I never washed the makeup off my face, including the feathered eyelash that clings like a dead spider to the corner of my eye. I peel it off, stick it to the doorjamb, and take the phone from her. Squint at a single line of text:
T says: Bring the talon tonight.
“Who’s this from?” I say, confused.
“Tibor, through Jester.”
I give her a weird look as Luka appears in the hallway. He’s freshly showered, wet hair tucked behind his ear.
“Tibor wants my pendant?” I’ve worn it every night. Have not missed the eyes that stray toward it each time I arrive, the words spoken to cupped ears behind the pounding music. Or the following our predawn wilds have acquired as we spill from the underground well before first light. If they—or any of the faceless others—know who I am, they’ve said nothing about it. Or at least not in front of me.
“No, Audra. You. You’re the talon.”
“Okay.” I glance from her to Luka. Apparently I’m failing to understand something.
“Maybe he’s gotten the passports,” Luka says, though I know he’s really asking a question. “It has been nearly a week.”
In fact, I’ve hardly noticed the passing of the days, which have blended together into one long night at a court that has extended from Visoka Street to the nearby Tuskanac forest.
But Claudia is clearly shaken.
“What are you worried about? You’re friends with him, right?” I say. Made up every night, surrounded by a court full of frenetic Progeny, she’s always appeared more glamorous than life and older than her years. At this moment, however, she looks like a scared eighteen-year-old.
“Not exactly,” she says, looking pale. “I’ve never met him. That I know of.”
“I’m curious to meet him,” I say lightly. After all, Luka and I came here for safety. It can’t hurt to make his acquaintance—the fact that I’ve smuggled non-Progeny contraband into his court notwithstanding.
“Audra,” Claudia says, grabbing me by the arm as Luka excuses himself. Her hand is cold. “Be careful.”
“I will.” I’m always careful. We all are. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I’ve seen him send people away. Or worse, to Nikola for judgment. They don’t come back.”
I think of my own disappearance. Of Katia’s, and Ivan’s. Claudia is used to people leaving her life. And I know that her bitchiness the day I met her in Opatija was nothing deeper than hurt. I kiss her cheek. “I’m not leaving,” I say.
But as she goes out to the kitchen, it’s my turn to be uneasy. Tibor knows me, or of me. These are Progeny, with the same blood I have. And my mother is an underground legend. But Luka is the enemy. Is it possible Tibor knows or suspects what Luka might be—what he was?
The thought works at me until my cavalier attitude about meeting the Prince of Zagreb is all but eaten away.
A few minutes later Luka steps inside the bedroom and quietly closes the door. I drop the clothes in my hand, lean into his chest.
For days, everything has been perfect. Too perfect. From the frenzy of court and my heightened awareness of Luka’s every glance to his weight against me in bed at dawn. One long night of delirium and desire.
Luka’s right; a week is a lot longer than passports should take. Not with a man supposedly on the inside.
Luka touches a kiss to my shoulder, inhales the scent of my neck.
“Don’t come tonight,” I say.
“They’ll notice if I don’t and know you’re protecting me.”
Piotrek, Claudia, and I have been careful to flank Luka each time we enter the underground and in every dash throughout the city with others. Claudia has done this despite her doubts, and I am grateful.
“If I leave to meet him, don’t follow me.”
“Audra—”
“You can’t! And if you see anyone trying to single you out, get away.” When he says nothing, I add, “Pro
mise me.”
“I promise. But only if Piotrek goes with you.”
I nod. I can live with that.
“Trust me when I say I have a whole new appreciation for what it means to be you,” he murmurs.
I let out a slow breath, not wanting to remember.
A half hour ago, I was in the clutches of a heavy sleep and beautiful dream: Luka and I were together in a small flat and it was morning. He was sipping coffee and I was drinking tea, each of us on a laptop. That’s it. A stunningly mundane morning with no threat of death, without looking over our shoulders. We were online, checking news and e-mail, maybe a blog. Something I can’t fathom today, where the burner phone in my pocket becomes a ticking time bomb with each successive use.
I glance toward the rumpled bed, where he held me through the night, curled beneath the covers. The sight of it makes the dream fade more quickly with each passing moment. Especially in this subterranean room; the flat in my dreams was filled with windows.
* * *
By the time we leave, my heart is trilling against my rib cage like a hummingbird’s. I adjust my mask, brush back the chains of a gold hairpiece protruding from my ornate blue wig like chopsticks stuck in a bowl of chop suey.
My kimono offers little defense against the first chill of fall, and I imagine I have difficulty breathing in the wide obi lashed around my middle. Luka takes me by the elbow to keep me from stumbling on the cobbles. He’s dressed all in black, as he has been every night, a long coat brushing the tops of his boots.
“Remember,” he murmurs. “You’re valuable—very valuable—to them.”
I nod, twine gloved fingers with his.
Claudia, ahead of me in an elaborate peacock mask, has been silent all evening. The bustle of her short skirt rides her rump like a beehive before cascading to the ground behind her. In fact, the whisper of her hems behind her clicking heels is all I’ve heard from her since leaving the flat.
She’s said Tibor has been known to send people away. Has she already written me off for a second time? I don’t miss that she’s clinging to Piotrek’s arm as though an invisible hand might snatch him from her side at any moment.
We’ve gone to court by a different route each night. But even without the whispered instructions from the Progeny actor—tonight, a medieval priest—I would know the general direction blind. Can already sense those gathered deep in the hillside of Tuskanac forest from here.
I stare, dumbfounded, the moment we enter.
The court has nearly doubled in size.
But there’s something else. The tenor of these caverns has changed. The electric pulse that buoyed me onto shoulders just last night has coalesced into one heaving drone. The frozen expressions of the masks seem macabre and menacing, the eyes behind them fixed in a single direction: mine.
My first thought is that I should never have brought Luka with me—that I need to get him out.
My second is that it’s too late.
The strobe sputters like an erratic flashbulb. Someone grabs my arm: the Jester, his comedy mask exchanged for the leer of tragedy. I shove him off, but he raises a finger, wags it back and forth. And then the lights black out and his mask transforms into a glowing skull.
Hands seize mine, force them behind my back. I struggle and then stumble as I am dragged through the melee.
I shout for Luka, scream for him to run. But the music drowns me out and there’s the Jester’s finger, fluorescent as his skeletal teeth, wagging in front of me like a metronome.
The temperature cools as I’m hauled into a tunnel, music fading till I can hear the breath of my captor.
“Where are you taking me?” I shout. My voice echoes, the ground is uneven beneath my feet. I wrench around, catch sight of my captor’s mask. A gilded gladiator. The scabbard of the short sword at his hip does not feel like plastic.
He says, roughly near my ear, “Stop fighting. I’m taking you to Tibor.”
I’m escorted through a carved wooden entrance guarded by two centurions, into a strangely lit chamber.
The entire back wall is filled with television screens. They flash with electric blue light and the chaos of the cavern I have just come from. The court, from ten different angles, zooming in on masked faces at intervals. One screen dedicated to the entrance, empty except for the butler. The last shows the tunnel I just came through.
A figure rises from a carved chair to my right. He’s dressed in striped pants, top hat askew on his head. Jet hair hangs on either side of a horned red and black samurai mask past the shoulders of a long topcoat. A cat-o’-nine-tails is coiled at his hip, and, like the gladiator’s sword, it does not look fake. He steps forward as I enter, the most sinister ringmaster I have ever seen.
Tibor.
“And so the prodigal daughter returns.” His voice is as wiry as his frame. He opens his arms and frowns when I make no move. “You do not remember poor Tibor? No, of course you do not.”
But he is not the only one in the room.
“Who’s there?” I demand, looking around us.
Tibor audibly sucks in a breath.
A moment later a shadow emerges from behind the bank of screens. His cloak is far too reminiscent of Luka’s grim reaper the first night, black hood drawn over his head. His mask is utterly white and featureless, only the eyes alive.
“Do you believe me now?” the figure says, before turning toward me.
“Hello, Audra. I am Nikola of Budapest.”
26
* * *
Nikola. The Prince of Budapest.
Inexplicable trembling takes my arms. It doesn’t help that I’ve had no chance to burn the nervous energy building up all evening. Or that there’s something unnatural about his tone, as though his larynx were made of metal.
“What’s this about?” I say. Because I’m pretty sure it isn’t passports.
“Sit,” Tibor says, waving a hand toward the chair. I don’t move.
“How do you like court?” Nikola says, as he takes the empty seat, which only serves to make me feel like I’m somehow being interrogated. Now I see that a small device is set in the round opening of the mask’s mouth, disguising his voice.
“It’s fine, I guess.” But the allure of the anonymity, the freedom I knew here, is already fading with its sense of safety. For the first time in days, I am keenly aware of the key around my neck, practically burning into my skin. Of every unanswered question I managed to set aside and then forget altogether in the masquerade that has been my existence in Zagreb.
“See how it has grown at the whisper of a single name,” Tibor says. “Audra, Audra, Audra!”
“And yet I do not believe you are aware of the implications of your return,” Nikola says.
“I guess not,” I say.
“It was very cruel of you to die,” Tibor says, picking a piece of lint off his pant leg. “I have a personal ritual when we lose one of our own. I hang a small plate etched with the name of the departed on the wall of my hovel. I did this for you as well. But then ten days ago Ivan informed me that my ritual was premature. So I took the plate down”—he mimes the action neatly—“and put it in a special drawer. For later. Little did any of us realize what you had accomplished in the act of your so-called death. At least at first.” He begins to applaud. “Bravo, Audra.”
This is the Prince of the Zagreb underground? The man is a lunatic.
“It wasn’t an act,” I say.
Tibor lays a finger against his masked cheek. “Ah, yes. The memory you shed like a scab. Which begs the question, why? What could be so precious that it must be so protected—even from us?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I say.
Right now I want two things: to find out why Nikola is here, and to get out of here as soon as possible. In fact, I wouldn’t mind accomplishing them in reverse order.
“Ivan was a great fan of yours,” Tibor says lightly. “His faith in you knew no end.”
“So I’ve been told.”
&
nbsp; “And then it got him killed.”
His head snaps toward me. In an instant, he has crossed the space between us and grabbed me by the throat.
“WHERE IS THE DIARY?” he shouts, full force, an inch from my face.
I claw at his hands, grab at his face as he hauls me across the floor.
Nikola is on him within seconds, and sends him hurtling toward the wall. I fall to my knees and then my hands, sucking in air.
“Touch her again and I’ll have you shunned from your own court,” Nikola says quietly.
Tibor spits, the edge of his mask askew, which only makes him appear more deranged. “It won’t matter. Don’t you see? She has killed us all!” And then he begins to chuckle, the sound more than slightly manic.
“What do you want from me?” I rasp.
“Audra,” Nikola says, blocking me from view of Tibor, “we want what you knew. What you forgot. The thing you are protecting . . . it is a weapon. One we need.”
“Sorry. I can’t help you.”
“But you can. And you must,” Nikola says, getting down in front of me.
“I don’t think you understand. It’s gone. Whatever it was, I meant for it to disappear with me and it did!”
He shakes his head. “The Audra I knew was fanatical. A zealot.”
“I think you have me confused with my mother.”
“Oh, no. You would never have done what you did had you not found something of great interest to the Historian.”
“Which means it needs to stay buried!”
“No. Which makes it of greater interest to us.” He leans closer. “Had you stayed dead, your secret would have died with you. But now that the Scions know you are alive, all that has changed.”
“Everything’s changed,” Tibor echoes, leaning against the wall. His eyes gleam. “Perhaps they will kill us all tonight!”
“I can’t help you,” I say, pushing back onto a knee.
Nikola straightens, paces several steps away.
“How is your new sibling—the commoner?” he says.
