The owner adjusts his posture, clearing his throat at my talk of leading an entire medical team in Altia’s second largest city. If you’re employed young in more difficult Influential fields—like medicine—people assume you must be more knowledgeable.
And the more knowledgeable you are, the more prestigious.
“Of course. Of course.” The owner rotates to the disgusted bellhop. “Tell the concierge to find his wife’s fur coat and hail Purple Coach for the physician.”
“No fykking way he’s a doctor.”
It’s the only truth.
“Zimmer,” the owner sneers.
“If he’s a doctor, why is his wife’s face bruised? And when did Influentials start dyeing their hair colors of a fruit tart?”
I only react when the owner questions me and repeats Zimmer’s accusations. I let him finish, angle my body, and gesture to Franny. Her cinched brows nearly offer her confusion to the owner on a gold platter.
Great.
“Lambkin,” I say the highest-regarded endearment as sweetly as I can, but my trite tone catches the second syllable.
Franny approaches until my arm slips around her tense shoulders, only my wool coat touching her robe. I whisper against her hair, “Act as though you love me.”
Her stomach flips, but she tentatively hugs onto my side and stiffly rests her cheek against my arm. Terrible acting. I’d think she never loved anyone in her life.
At least she chose to try.
I attempt to soften my agitated gaze onto Franny. “My wife is a Fast-Tracker. I know it’s uncommon for an Influential and an FT to be married, but she’ll live to see twenty-eight. We have eleven more years together.” The Fast-Tracker cutoff is twenty-nine years.
I have trouble forcing a smile at the owner. So I don’t.
Before he speaks, I add, “Now I have ten minutes.”
Please believe me.
The owner glances between us. “I’ll tell the concierge myself to find your fur coat. I apologize for the … disturbance.” He spins on his heels and glares at the bellhop.
Zimmer gapes. “But—”
“Out, now.” He snags Zimmer by the collar, dragging him through the door. It slams shut and the three of us exhale all together.
Franny immediately distances herself from me, her legs and arms shaking in shock and fright—she still has no idea that we’re linked.
Mykal rakes his callused hands through his hair. If I shut my eyes, I can better feel the blond strands slip through mine.
He cuts the tension. “Why am I everyone’s damned brother?”
I blow out a hot breath through my nose. I didn’t want to draw attention to you, Mykal. I should have more belief in him. The same amount that he holds for me.
Franny dazedly wanders left, then right, then nowhere at all. “You have to tell me…”
Mykal and I exchange a look, knowing what must come next. He nods to me, handing me the wheel and the pedals and telling me to drive—when I’ve never driven at all.
This is a story we’ve never given to anyone else.
Quickly, without pause, without stop—I tell Franny that we’re linked together. I’m worried. Truly worried. That she’ll bolt outside, away from us, at any second. She stares haunted at the rug but listens intently.
I tell Franny how it first happened to me.
To us.
I was just fifteen. I’d been crossing the Free Lands and I knew, as my deathday approached, I’d die in the deserted landscape of snow. I believed that I’d fall beneath ice, but as I trekked forward, I never fell. Never plunged into subzero waters.
I went to sleep, expecting never to wake up again, and when I did—I thought, at first, I was suffocating. The cold became colder. The air more brittle. I gasped and clutched my throat, but I also thought I was standing—in deeper snow. I could feel it up to my knees.
I stood.
Snow stopped at my ankles.
As my pulse calmed, I paid closer attention to my senses. Warmth from a fire bathed my cheeks. I hadn’t started one that morning or that night. I thought surely I’d die. So there was no need.
I believed, then, that I was going mad. It was the first day of many that I’d question my sanity. My limbs would quiver in cold when I’d crouch over my own fire. I’d think I sneezed when I didn’t. I could feel water slipping through the back of my throat when I never drank.
I was angry for no reason at all.
Happy when I had many more causes to be sad.
I’d lost half my weight, more of my muscle. Ribs visible, even without inhaling.
The Free Lands are harsh and unforgiving. Only Hinterlanders willingly choose to roam the barren ice, so in the days that I hiked onward, my soles almost turned black with frostbite. A reddish rash puckered on my exposed skin and ice crystallized in the creases of my eyes. Until I could no longer close them.
Food was scarce.
Fishing would have served me well, but I leaned on the side of caution. I wasn’t Maranilan with knowledge of fish and ice fissures. I feared plunging through a crack and perishing in the freezing depths. I had no more understanding of when I’d die, but I tried to remember that the next day would be one day more than I ever thought I’d live.
As I walked on, two winter vultures circled me. The rarest sight due to the lilac smoke clouding the sky. An omen of misery. Hunger should’ve been clawing me for weeks. Screaming at me to eat.
But fullness stuffed me throughout the day. Some moments, I savored the rich meat on my tongue. I thought I was chewing roasted hare.
In actuality, I was chewing nothing at all.
It was only when my body, physically, could no longer move that I realized I was starving to death. Despite being satiated inside, despite licking grease off my lips—I was starving.
I’d learn later that Mykal was overeating, trying to compensate the insatiable hunger that I kept supplying.
I survived by killing the two vultures and eating them.
The next day, I’d find a single snowshoe hare.
As I saw the winter wood in the distance, as I stumbled toward the snow-canopied greenery, I collapsed to my knees.
In Yamafort, I was adopted into wealth and luxury.
In Vorkter, I met pain and suffering.
When I crossed the Free Lands, I hugged death, truly, for the first time. Whatever bristled inside of me—a soul, a life force—it slowly began to fade away.
My eyes cast ahead. To a sky I couldn’t see. I watched a haze of purple smoke. I saw how it thickened toward the nearest city, Bartholo, like an arrow pointing to Altia’s border. A direction I’d been following for weeks.
I was close.
Then I looked right. Pale, gray smoke plumed from the winter wood. Billowing above the trees.
Then I looked down. At the white snow beneath my withered frame. Where I could curl up and die.
Three choices.
Three paths.
Only one pulled me with such force and ferocity, granting me immeasurable strength. I rose. The gods have never been to my aid. Not once. I didn’t believe they existed, not even then. Not even today, but deep in my core, something propelled me forward.
And I walked.
I staggered toward the gray smoke. I made it to the tree line. I held on to rough trunks for support. My legs shrieked in pain, but I moved. I made it halfway when someone rushed toward me. Sweeping through the winter wood like they knew where every tree rested. Where every rock was nestled beneath the snow.
Cloaked in animal furs. Mykal ran to me.
I picked up my pace. To meet him.
We found each other in the winter wood.
He threw his arms around me like I’d been his long-lost friend. I hugged him like I was meeting my soul again. There are some moments and some feelings that I can’t even explain. I’m a young man of medicine and science and logic, but the sentiments I wield for Mykal transcend all three.
He let me recover in his ramshackle hut for the next few months. I
thawed my frosted bones over a fire and we exchanged information about each other.
Understanding then that we’d been sensing each other for a long while. My life suddenly had clarity and blinding focus.
Mykal is a Babe. He was supposed to die at eight. When he dodged his deathday, he left Grenpale before anyone would notice that he still lived. And then he survived the next eight years alone.
The day I dodged my deathday, at fifteen, was the very day we became linked.
This explains why we suddenly feel Franny now. Why we have this inextricable connection that we can’t shake. We’ve all experienced something unimaginable.
We’re alive when we shouldn’t be.
When I finish my story, I avoid all mentions of Vorkter. I still need her to trust me, and if she hates thieves, she’ll most likely despise prisoners.
I wait.
And in this moment a single realization thrashes at me.
She can walk away from us. Franny can choose to leave us behind. It’ll be hard for her to pass as an Influential. Yet, I want her to enroll in StarDust with us. I don’t want to feel someone miles away and yearn for them to be at my side.
This choice, this road, this course for Franny—it never existed when I met Mykal in the Free Lands.
He was alone. I was near death.
Survival, together, felt right.
In the city, she has many more choices than we started with—ones that she can make. Ones that don’t involve us.
I inhale a shallow breath. I’m afraid.
As I concentrate on Franny, all I feel is ambiguity. Vagueness like dense lilac smoke. Clouding our only sun. Our only sky.
SEVEN
Franny
My life is in my hands.
And for the first time, I don’t know what to do with it. After exiting the Catherina Hotel and arriving at Mykal and Court’s flat, they spent the rest of the day explaining linking and their future plans.
Mind spinning and body still aching, I had little to add or to say. I told them I needed to think.
At ten o’night, I fixed an abandoned Purple Coach that I spotted only a few blocks from their building of flats. The driver must’ve been eight or nine, forgetting how to jump-start the cold battery.
As the engine grows hot, I sit behind the wheel and instinctively reach for the heaters to warm my palms. I retract slowly, forgetting that the most lavish leather gloves protect my skin. I splay my fingers and examine the rich material.
My eyes well at a memory of my young mother—as she slipped the prettiest maroon shawl onto my arms, frill made of black feathers. The fabric smelled of Blur 32 perfume, and at six, I twirled and wrapped my body up in the garment.
She spent her Final Deliverance check on that tiny shawl. Just for me.
Her smile lit the room more than the waxy candles. As we cuddled for warmth on our creaky bed, I whispered into her ear, “When will I see you again?”
She would die in three days.
My mom stroked my black hair. Candlelight flickering against the walls, her eyes sparkled. “When you’ve grown to be a young woman. With arms as strong as your heart and legs that go wherever you choose to go.” Her fingers brushed my cheek. “When you reach seventeen years, you’ll die happily and peacefully. I’ll wait for you with the gods.”
I breathed out a short breath, confusion widening my brown eyes. “But what will I do until then?”
She smiled as bright and lovely as the smile she wore on her deathbed. “You will live, Franny. You will live hard…” She cupped my face. “Fast.” She rested her forehead on mine. “And full.”
My mom wouldn’t want me to cry over her memory, but tears scald my cheeks. I cry more than I like and I aggressively rub at my snotty nose with my hand.
“I shouldn’t be alive,” I mutter to myself. I should be with her and the gods. I lick my cracked lips, a lump lodged like a hollow pit in my throat. Yet here I am. I think about what she’d tell me if she knew—if she knew we’d have to wait longer to see each other again.
Maybe she’d want me to try to meet her and the gods. To force my death if I can.
But I hear her words ring true in my head. You will live, Franny.
I nod tearfully. “I will live,” I whisper. She’d want me to grab hold of the extra time I’ve been given.
I delicately rub my tear-streaked cheeks along the black fur of my new coat. Soft. The most expensive garment I’ve ever worn. I hug the coat the way I hugged that feathered maroon shawl, the fur snug around my frame.
Can they feel this and my tears?
I freeze and blink and then shake my unsettled thought away. Focusing solely on my new coat.
Court said that the hotel management wanted to please us, so when the concierge arrived, announcing they’d lost my dry cleaning, they offered this luxurious coat and gloves as an apology and replacement.
After traveling to the flat, Mykal lent me a pair of gray slacks, too baggy but I secured them with his belt, and I wear one of Court’s long-sleeved black shirts too.
Dressed more warmly than usual, I need nothing else from them to survive on my own.
I squeeze the steering wheel. Torchlight illuminates the snowy street in glowing patches. I constantly glance to the right. At the building of flats where Mykal and Court remain. And then straight ahead, to the road.
I let out a tight breath. The car rumbles and sputters.
I can drive anywhere. I can take off alone.
“What now?” I whisper in the quiet of the night. Inside this tin can of a car, gray fabric torn on each seat, cigar butts and ash collected in the middle console.
Accept that you’ve dodged your deathday. I have. My gloved finger skims the hollow of my throat where Court bled. My skin burns because I feel Court’s wound.
I believe we’re linked like I believe we’ve all dodged our deathdays—because I can sense their lies.
Each one that Court spouted at the bellhop twisted my stomach in a vicious knot. Staying with them seems less irrational if I can weed out their falsehoods.
I frown deeply, lifting the fur coat to my lips. They laid out their plans for me.
The grand, delusional ones.
In less than two months, they’ll attend the enrollment for StarDust. Where only five people will be hired for some mission. I’d heard mutterings about it in Bartholo for the past couple of years, but I never listened closely. It’s always been an Influential matter.
Still is.
I have two choices.
To go with them to StarDust.
To go out on my own.
I inspect the fur, my leather gloves—then I sniff the coat lining, honeysuckle scented.
Blur 32 perfume.
I take a deeper whiff, the fragrance most popular among young Influential women. I haven’t smelled this scent since I was six.
Another strong whiff.
And then a cough tickles my throat.
I cringe and hack hoarsely into my arm. This must be the link. One of them—either Mykal or Court—smelled the honeysuckle because I did.
They said I can heighten the link by concentrating on them. Mykal told me, “At times, the link will be growing faint and other times, strong, but it won’t ever be disappearing.” But I try not to focus on them now.
I don’t want to heighten their sense of disgust toward a perfume I’ve loved. And when I make my decision, I want to be clear that it’s my own. Not swayed by our link.
I shut my eyes, realities crashing against me. I remember Court’s grave voice when he said, “You will never know the day you will die.” I’ll never be able to prepare for my death. It will just happen. Suddenly.
Tragically.
The air vent crackles—I flinch backward, heart lurching. Could the car blow up in a gust of flames?
I shrink.
Could the windows abruptly shatter and pierce me?
I go rigid.
Anything—anything in the whole world could kill me, at any second,
any moment.
Don’t think.
If I block it out, if I believe I’m to die at … a hundred and thirteen, then I’ll never be frightened by anything. “A hundred thirteen, a hundred thirteen,” I mutter beneath my breath, eyes wide open. “Drive.” I growl out the word. “Drive!”
I place my foot on the pedal, but I hesitate.
I have no true direction. I could head to another country, but I can no longer work at the job I loved. I can’t be a Fast-Tracker who shuttles people for Purple Coach. Not as I continue to grow older. They’ll discover that I dodged my deathday.
And I asked Court and Mykal what would happen if someone found out.
“The worst,” Mykal said.
They never specified what the worst could be, but I sensed their dread seeping into my veins like hot tar.
I wish I could drive toward villages of people who are just like us. “There could be others,” I theorized. “What about finding answers about why we dodged our deathdays? Maybe these other people have all of them.”
They reacted like I missed an entire lifetime of theirs. One that concluded without hope.
“There’s just us.” Court stopped my rant. “Mykal and me. Now you.”
“We won’t be finding some special person with all the answers, Franny,” Mykal chimed in. “We have to rely on ourselves.”
I didn’t ask whether they were sure. Their emotions were like hardened cement.
Court explained, “If there were others, we’d sense them. We’re linked because we dodged our deathdays.” He said that he sensed Mykal a country away when they first linked, so proximity wasn’t a factor.
There aren’t any more of us, I realized.
We’re it.
I suggested retesting ourselves. The dates could be wrong. They said they’d done just that with Death Readers in private and in secrecy. Their deathdays were the same ones that they dodged.
“We’re not wandering aimlessly again to reach dead ends and more questions,” Court told me. “That’s not how I plan to spend my life.”
It echoes inside of me.
That’s not how I plan to spend my life.
You will live, Franny.
My life has always been dictated by how much time I have left. My career, my friends, my interests.
The Raging Ones Page 7
