by Lauren Kate
Sophia Bliss—the school librarian who had only ever served as secretary on the Zhsmaelim board—was now the highest-ranking official among the Elders. There were just twelve of them left. And nine could not be trusted.
So that left the three of them here today in their enormous pastel hats, placing phony bets at the track. And waiting. It was pathetic, the depths to which they’d sunk.
A race came to its end. A staticky loudspeaker announced the winners and the odds for the next race. Well-heeled people and drunks all around them cheered or slumped lower in their seats.
And a girl, about nineteen, with a white-blond ponytail, brown trench coat, and thick, dark sunglasses, walked slowly up the aluminum steps toward the Elders.
Sophia stiffened. Why would she be here?
It was next to impossible to tell which direction the girl was looking in, and Sophia was trying hard not to stare. Not that it would matter; the girl wouldn’t be able to see her. She was blind. But then—
The Outcast nodded once at Sophia. Oh yes—these fools could see the burning of a person’s soul. It was dim, but Sophia’s life force must still have been visible.
The girl took a seat in the empty row in front of the Elders, facing the track and flipping though a five-dollar tip sheet her blind eyes wouldn’t be able to read.
“Hello.” The Outcast’s voice was a monotone. She didn’t turn around.
“I really don’t know why you’re here,” Miss Sophia said. It was a damp November day in Kentucky, but a sheen of sweat had broken out across her forehead. “Our collaboration ended when your cohorts failed to retrieve the girl. No amount of bitter blabber from the one who calls himself Phillip will change our minds.” Sophia leaned forward, closer to the girl, and wrinkled her nose. “Everyone knows the Outcasts aren’t to be trusted—”
“We are not here on business with you,” the Outcast said, staring straight ahead. “You were but a vessel to get us closer to Lucinda. We remain uninterested in ‘collaborating’ with you.”
“No one cares about your organization these days.” Footsteps on the bleachers.
The boy was tall and slender, with a shaven head and a trench coat to match the girl’s. His sunglasses were the cheap plastic variety found near the batteries at the drugstore.
Phillip slid onto the bleacher right next to Lyrica Crisp. Like the Outcast girl, he didn’t turn to face them when he spoke.
“I’m not surprised to find you here, Sophia.” He lowered his sunglasses on his nose, revealing two empty white eyes. “Just disappointed that you didn’t feel you could tell me that you’d been invited as well.”
Lyrica gasped at the horrible white expanses behind his glasses. Even Vivina lost her cool and reared back. Sophia boiled inside.
The Outcast girl raised a golden card—the same invitation Sophia had received—scissored between her fingers. “We received this.” Only, this one looked like it had been written in Braille. Sophia reached for it to make sure, but with a quick movement, the invitation disappeared back inside the girl’s trench coat.
“Look, you little punks. I branded your starshots with the emblem of the Elders. You work for me—”
“Correction,” Phillip said. “The Outcasts work for no one but themselves.”
Sophia watched him crane his neck slightly, pretending to follow a horse around the track. She’d always thought it was eerie, the way they gave off the impression that they could see. When everyone knew he’d struck the lot of them blind with the flick of a finger.
“Shame you did such a poor job capturing her.” Sophia felt her voice rise higher than she knew it should, drawing the eyes of an older couple crossing the grandstand. “We were supposed to work together,” she hissed, “to hunt her down, and—and you failed.”
“It would not have mattered one way or another.”
“Come again?”
“She would still be lost in time. It was always her destiny. And the Elders would still be hanging on by a thread. That is yours.”
She wanted to lunge at him, wanted to strangle him until those great white eyes bulged from their sockets. Her dagger felt like it was burning a hole through the calfskin handbag on her lap. If only it had been a starshot. Sophia was rising from the bleacher when the voice came from behind them.
“Please be seated,” it boomed. “This meeting is now called to order.”
The voice. She knew at once whose it was. Calm and authoritative. Utterly humbling. It made the bleachers quake.
The nearby mortals noticed nothing, but a flush of heat rose on the back of Sophia’s neck. It trickled through her body, numbing her. This was no ordinary fear. This was a crippling, stomach-souring terror. Did she dare to turn around?
The subtlest peek from the corner of her eye revealed a man in a tailored black suit. His dark hair was clipped short under his black hat. The face, kind and attractive, was not particularly memorable. Clean-shaven, straight-nosed, with brown eyes that felt familiar. Yet Miss Sophia had never seen him before. And still she knew who he was, knew it in the marrow of her bones.
“Where is Cam?” the voice behind them asked. “He was sent an invitation.”
“Probably playing God inside the Announcers. Like the rest of them,” Lyrica blurted out. Sophia swatted her.
“Playing God, did you say?”
Sophia searched for the words that would fix a gaffe like that. “Several of the others followed Lucinda backward into time,” she said eventually. “Including two Nephilim. We aren’t sure how many others.”
“Dare I ask,” the voice said, suddenly ice-cold, “why none of you elected to go after her?”
Sophia fought to swallow, to breathe. Her most intuitive movements were stunted by panic. “We can’t exactly, well … We don’t yet have the capabilities to—”
The Outcast girl cut her off. “The Outcasts are in the process of—”
“Silence,” the voice commanded. “Spare me your excuses. They no longer matter, as you no longer matter.”
For a long time, their group was quiet. It was terrifying not to know how to please him. When he finally spoke, his voice was softer, but no less lethal. “Too much at stake. I can’t leave anything else to chance.”
A pause.
Then, softly, he said, “The time has come for me to take matters into my own hands.”
Sophia bit her gasp in two to hide her horror. But she could not stop her body’s tremors. His direct involvement? Truly, it was the most terrifying prospect. She could not imagine working with him to—
“The rest of you will stay out of this,” he said. “That is all.”
“But—” It was an accident, but the word escaped Sophia’s lips. She could not take it back. But all her decades of labor. All her plans. Her plans!
What came next was a long, earth-shattering roar.
It reverberated up through the bleachers, seeming to travel around the entire racetrack in a splinter of a second.
Sophia cringed. The noise seemed almost to crash into her, through her skin and down to her deepest core. She felt as if her heart was being drummed to pieces.
Lyrica and Vivina both pressed against her, eyes clamped shut. Even the Outcasts trembled.
Just when Sophia thought the sound of it would never cease, that it would be the death of her at last, his roar gave way to absolute pin-drop silence.
For a moment.
Enough time to look around and see that the other people at the racetrack had not heard anything at all.
In her ear he whispered, “Your time on this endeavor is up. Do not dare to get in my way.”
Down below, another shot rang out. The broad gate banged open once again. Only this time, the pounding of horses’ hooves against the dirt sounded like practically nothing, like the lightest rainfall falling on a canopy of trees.
Before the racehorses had crossed the starting line, the figure behind them had vanished, leaving only the mark of coal-black hoofprints singed into the planks of the grandsta
nd.
ONE
UNDER FIRE
MOSCOW • OCTOBER 15, 1941
Lucinda!
The voices reached her in the murky darkness.
Come back!
Wait!
She ignored them, pressing further. Echoes of her name bounced off the shadowy walls of the Announcer, sending licks of heat rippling across her skin. Was that Daniel’s voice or Cam’s? Arriane’s or Gabbe’s? Was it Roland pleading that she come back now, or was that Miles?
The calls grew harder to discern, until Luce couldn’t tell them apart at all: good or evil. Enemy or friend. They should have been easier to separate, but nothing was easy anymore. Everything that had once been black and white now blended into gray.
Of course, both sides agreed on one thing: Everyone wanted to pull her out of the Announcer. For her protection, they would claim.
No, thanks.
Not now.
Not after they’d wrecked her parents’ backyard, made it into another one of their dusty battlefields. She couldn’t think about her parents’ faces without wanting to turn back—not like she’d even know how to turn back inside an Announcer, anyway. Besides, it was too late. Cam had tried to kill her. Or what he thought was her. And Miles had saved her, but even that wasn’t simple. He’d only been able to throw her reflection because he cared about her too much.
And Daniel? Did he care enough? She couldn’t tell.
In the end, when the Outcast had approached her, Daniel and the others had stared at Luce like she was the one who owed them something.
You are our entrance into Heaven, the Outcast had told her. The price. What had that meant? Until a couple of weeks ago she hadn’t even known the Outcasts existed. And yet, they wanted something from her—badly enough to battle Daniel for it. It must have had to do with the curse, the one that kept Luce reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. But what did they think Luce could do?
Was the answer buried somewhere here?
Her stomach lurched as she tumbled senselessly through the cold shadow, deep inside the chasm of the dark Announcer.
Luce—
The voices began to fade and grow dimmer. Soon they were barely whispers. Almost like they had given up. Until—
They started to grow louder again. Louder and clearer.
Luce—
No. She clamped her eyes shut to try to block them out.
Lucinda—
Lucy—
Lucia—
Luschka—
She was cold and she was tired and she didn’t want to hear them. For once, she wanted to be left alone.
Luschka! Luschka! Luschka!
Her feet hit something with a thwump.
Something very, very cold.
She was standing on solid ground. She knew she wasn’t tumbling anymore, though she couldn’t see anything in front of her except for the blanket of blackness. Then she looked down at her Converse sneakers.
And gulped.
They were planted in a blanket of snow that reached midway up her calves. The dank coolness that she was used to—the shadowy tunnel she’d been traveling through, out of her backyard, into the past—was giving way to something else. Something blustery and absolutely frigid.
The first time Luce had stepped through an Announcer—from her Shoreline dorm room to Las Vegas—she’d been with her friends Shelby and Miles. At the end of the passage they’d met a barrier: a dark, shadowy curtain between them and the city. Because Miles was the only one who’d read the texts on stepping through, he’d started swiping the Announcer with a circular motion until the murky black shadow flaked away. Luce hadn’t known until now that he’d been troubleshooting.
This time, there was no barrier. Maybe because she was traveling alone, through an Announcer summoned of her own fierce will. But the way out was so easy. Almost too easy. The veil of blackness simply parted.
A blast of cold tore into her, making her knees lock with the chill. Her ribs stiffened and her eyes teared in the sharp, sudden wind.
Where was she?
Luce already regretted her panicked jump through time. Yes, she needed an escape, and yes, she wanted to trace her past, to save her former selves from all the pain, to understand what kind of love she’d had with Daniel all those other times. To feel it instead of being told about it. To understand—and then fix—whatever curse had been inflicted on Daniel and her.
But not like this. Frozen, alone, and completely unprepared for wherever, whenever she was.
She could see a snowy street in front of her, a steel-gray sky above white buildings. She could hear something rumbling in the distance. But she didn’t want to think about what any of it meant.
“Wait,” she whispered to the Announcer.
The shadow drifted hazily a foot or so beyond her fingertips. She tried to grasp it, but the Announcer eluded her, flicking farther away. She leaped for it, and caught a tiny damp piece of it between her fingers—
But then, in an instant, the Announcer shattered into soft black fragments on the snow. They faded, then were gone.
“Great,” she muttered. “Now what?”
In the distance, the narrow road curved left to meet a shadowy intersection. The sidewalks were piled high with shoveled snow, which had been packed against two long banks of white stone buildings. They were striking, unlike anything Luce had ever seen, a few stories tall, with their entire façades carved into rows of bright white arches and elaborate columns.
All the windows were dark. Luce got the sense that the whole city might be dark. The only light came from a single gas streetlamp. If there was any moon, it was hidden by a thick blanket of cloud. Again something rumbled in the sky. Thunder?
Luce hugged her arms around her chest. She was freezing.
“Luschka!”
A woman’s voice. Hoarse and raspy, like someone who’d spent her whole life barking orders. But the voice was trembling, too.
“Luschka, you idiot. Where are you?”
She sounded closer now. Was she talking to Luce? There was something else about that voice, something strange that Luce couldn’t quite put into words.
When a figure came hobbling around the snowy street corner, Luce stared at the woman, trying to place her. She was very short and a little hunched over, maybe in her late sixties. Her bulky clothes seemed too big for her body. Her hair was tucked under a thick black scarf. When she saw Luce, her face scrunched into a complicated grimace.
“Where have you been?”
Luce looked around. She was the only other person on the street. The old woman was speaking to her.
“Right here,” she heard herself say.
In Russian.
She clapped a hand over her mouth. So that was what had seemed so bizarre about the old woman’s voice: She was speaking a language Luce had never learned. And yet, not only did Luce understand every word, but she could speak it back.
“I could kill you,” the woman said, breathing heavily as she rushed toward Luce and threw her arms around her.
For such a frail-looking woman, her embrace was strong. The warmth of another body pressing into Luce after so much intense cold made her almost want to cry. She hugged back hard.
“Grandma?” she whispered, her lips close to the woman’s ear, somehow knowing that was who the woman was.
“Of all the nights I get off work to find you gone,” the woman said. “Now you’re skipping around in the middle of the street like a lunatic? Did you even go to work today? Where is your sister?”
There was the rumbling in the sky again. It sounded like a bad storm moving closer. Moving fast. Luce shivered and shook her head. She didn’t know.
“Aha,” the woman said. “Not so carefree now.” She squinted at Luce, then pushed her away to get a closer look. “My God, what are you wearing?”
Luce fidgeted as her past life’s grandmother gaped at her jeans and ran her knobby fingers over the buttons of Luce’s flannel shirt. She grabbed Luce’s short, tangled pony
tail. “Sometimes I think you are as crazy as your father, may he rest in peace.”
“I just—” Luce’s teeth were chattering. “I didn’t know it was going to be so cold.”
The woman spat on the snow to show her disapproval. She peeled off her overcoat. “Take this before you catch your death.” She bundled the coat roughly around Luce, whose fingers were half frozen as she struggled to button it. Then her grandmother untied the scarf from her neck and wrapped it around Luce’s head.
A great boom in the sky startled both of them. Now Luce knew it wasn’t thunder. “What is that?” she whispered.
The old woman stared at her. “The war,” she muttered. “Did you lose your wits along with your clothes? Come now. We must go.”
As they waded down the snowy street, over the rough cobbles and the tram tracks set into them, Luce realized that the city wasn’t empty after all. Few cars were parked along the road, but occasionally, down the darkened side streets, she heard the whinnies of carriage horses waiting for orders, their frosty breaths clotting the air. Silhouetted bodies scampered across rooftops. Down an alley, a man in a torn overcoat helped three small children through the hatched doors of a basement.
At the end of the narrow street, the road opened onto a broad, tree-lined avenue with a wide view of the city. The only cars parked here were military vehicles. They looked old-fashioned, almost absurd, like relics in a war museum: soft-top jeeps with giant fenders, bone-thin steering wheels, and the Soviet hammer and sickle painted onto the doors. But aside from Luce and her grandmother, there were no people on this street. Everything—except for the awful rumbling in the sky—was ghostly, eerily quiet.
In the distance, she could see a river, and far across it, a great building. Even in the darkness, she could make out its elaborate tiered spires and ornate onion-shaped domes, which seemed familiar and mythic at the same time. It took a moment to sink in—and then fear shot through Luce.
She was in Moscow.
