ALSO BY JACLYN DOLAMORE
Dark Metropolis
Copyright © 2015 by Jaclyn Dolamore
Cover illustration by Shane Rebenschied
Cover design by Maria Elias
Cover photographs © 2015 Shutterstock
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4231-9538-2
Visit www.hyperionteens.com
Contents
Title Page
Also by Jaclyn Dolamore
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Fifty
Fifty-one
Fifty-two
Fifty-three
Fifty-four
Fifty-five
Fifty-six
Fifty-seven
Fifty-eight
Fifty-nine
Sixty
Sixty-one
Sixty-two
Sixty-three
Sixty-four
Sixty-five
Sixty-six
Sixty-seven
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To Kathy Dolamore Gould, all-around fun and supportive aunt who listened to me ramble on about my stories when I was just a wee thing
Marlis Horn came from a long line of unpleasant women. They were known for being too smart for their own good and for lacking feminine delicacy and sentimentality. Marlis was quite proud of this heritage.
But the opera was what always undid her. She didn’t care for the raucous jazz other girls enjoyed, but the acoustics in the Theatre Urobrun were so magnificent. Music seemed to come from every corner and fill her soul with stories of love and bravery, death and revenge.
She clutched her opera gloves together as the hero, Siegfried, perished, stabbed from behind. The heroine, Kriemhild, curled over Siegfried’s body, singing of her despair in a powerful soprano, her hair tumbling across the front of her dress in long, fair braids. The stage lights were upon her so that she seemed to glow in her white dress, but her eyes were dark. So dark, so angry—so powerful. She would avenge his death.
If something terrible ever happened, I would be like Kriemhild, Marlis thought. I would take action.
She had seen this opera three times before, but it had never seemed as real as it did tonight. She couldn’t shake the feeling something was about to happen. All her life, Marlis had sometimes heard odd, ominous music at night, but today it had happened even in the middle of breakfast. She always felt it meant something, but she had long since stopped telling Papa when she heard it; he dismissed it as the result of an overactive imagination, and gave her that awful medicine that made her feel stupid.
Marlis wasn’t a child anymore. She would not risk anyone knowing that her mind veered into strange places. The world was already too quick to dismiss an ambitious girl as crazy.
“Look, Paul’s across the way.” Ida brought Marlis back to the real world, and for once Marlis was almost glad for it. Usually she just put up with her. Being the daughter of the Chancellor unfortunately meant spending a lot of time paired with the daughter of Vice Chancellor Walther. Ida enjoyed the opera merely as a social event, and all night she’d been peering at other audience members through her opera glasses, sometimes waving or stepping out to talk to someone.
“Yes, I see him,” Marlis said.
“He’s cute, isn’t he?” Ida replied, the glasses still held to her nose. “I hear he’s getting really good at tennis. Have you ever played with him?”
“I haven’t,” Marlis whispered. “But maybe you should pay attention. It’s almost over.”
“Thank goodness.” Ida settled back into her chair. “What’s going on again?”
“Shh.” Marlis started to lift one finger to shush Ida, but she saw Papa’s attention slide her way. Papa had suggested lately that she ought to be friendlier with other girls. Boys, too, for that matter. He admired her focus, but said anyone who aspired to politics ought to be good at making friends.
Marlis expected no one told Kriemhild to make friends. Not even God can hide you from my vengeance, she sang, and in the next cycle of the opera, to be performed later in the season, she would stop at nothing—setting fire to the palace and striking down the man who murdered Siegfried with Siegfried’s own sword.
If only I lived in the days of warrior queens and Papa was the king instead of the Chancellor. I’d learn to fight, and everyone would love me for fending off barbarians.
As the curtain closed on Siegfried’s funeral pyre, Ida stretched. “I’m going to find Paul and say hi. Do you want to come with me?”
“I’m not interested in Paul.”
“I never said you had to be interested! Maybe we could just play doubles with him and Heini sometime.”
Papa gave her a pointed look.
“I guess,” Marlis relented.
The house lights had come on, so the opera house had lost a little of its gilded mystery. The curtain was down, the room filled with the din of cheerful upper-class voices. Marlis threw her white fur wrap around her shoulders.
Papa’s senior adviser, Volland, shoved aside the curtain to their box. His lean face was white, his necktie not quite straight.
“What are you doing here, Volland?” Papa frowned. “I thought you were going to get some sleep tonight.”
“Mr. Chancellor, sir, something’s happened. You need to leave at once.”
Marlis felt as if she’d swallowed stones. The unsettling feeling inside her all day suddenly found its direction. She didn’t know yet what had happened—but she already understood it was bad.
“Is everything all right?” Mrs. Walther clutched at her jewels.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Vice Chancellor Walther said, putting an arm around her.
Down in the gallery, a man underdressed for the theater was running up the main aisle shouting something. The crowds that had been clearing out leisurely suddenly began to rush. Volland waved his hands at the Walthers, getting them moving. Additional guards were waiting to usher their party out.
“It’s the Valkenraths, sir,” Volland said, as they hurried down the back stairs. “The rebels have been gathering around Roderick Valkenrath’s house, and…the workers ar
e escaping.”
“What?” Papa thundered. “How could this be? Where are the Valkenraths, then?”
“No one’s seen them. But we’ve only just gotten word of this.”
“I can’t imagine they’d betray us,” said Vice Chancellor Walther, who was a friend of Gerik Valkenrath. Mrs. Walther whimpered softly—she was certainly full of feminine delicacy and sentimentality, her diamond earrings sparkling through her soft blond waves. Ida shot Marlis a panicked expression.
“Put the army on full alert,” Papa said. “We need to get this under control at once.”
Marlis couldn’t remember when she’d last seen so many guards, especially with all branches of government stretched so thin. The Walthers climbed into one car in the motorcade, while she and Papa climbed in the second with Volland. Marlis managed not to show any panic outwardly. She wasn’t sure she even felt panic yet.
Since she was a child, the city had been using magic to bring back the dead to work in secret underground. The government had kept them concealed for eight years now. Who was to blame for this breach, Marlis wondered.
Freddy was the key to all of this, the only one with the power to bring the dead back to life. But he was only seventeen. If he had revealed the secret—well, the Valkenraths were his guardians, and she wondered if they hadn’t driven him into it.
She didn’t like either one of them. When she was a girl, Gerik used to pull a quarter out of her ear and tell her to smile more. As for Roderick, she could appreciate his cool demeanor, but she didn’t trust it one bit. But Papa did. He’d known them both since they were in school together.
“How…did you find out about this?” Papa asked Volland, putting an arm around Marlis. He was a little breathless from rushing down the stairs.
“The police received several calls about a commotion in the neighborhood. The neighbors thought maybe the rebels were staging a protest at Roderick’s house, but when the officers responded, they discovered people in work suits, looking confused. At this point, they contacted the guard.”
The city police didn’t know about the underground workers. Only her father’s private guard was aware of them.
“Has anyone accounted for Freddy?” Papa asked.
“He’s missing, too.”
“I worry he might have something to do with this. He’s of the age when boys do foolish things.” He looked at Marlis. “You just saw Freddy at the Stanglers’ tea. Did he seem any different than usual?”
“He has seemed different lately.” Marlis kept looking out the car window. It didn’t seem possible that at this very moment, the revived dead were sharing the same fresh night air as they were. Here along the Wahlenstrasse, the streetlamps cast their glow on broad empty sidewalks. “But that’s no surprise—you let him go out at night with a girl. I imagine it was quite a shock to his system.”
“That was very controlled,” Papa said. “Gerik was with them at all times.”
The only girls Freddy was normally permitted to see were Marlis and Ida and the other daughters of top officials. But magic ran in family lines. Eventually they would need someone else who could revive the dead, so Freddy must have children, and it certainly wouldn’t be with the daughters of top officials.
“But the girl is a peasant from Irminau,” Marlis said. “Maybe she’s with the rebellion.”
“She’s a rustic?” Papa snapped. “Gerik should have told me.”
“Papa, you know how Gerik is with women. Can’t you just imagine him winking at Freddy and saying, ‘Go on, I won’t tell’?” She shot a look to Volland. He agreed with her about Gerik.
“I’m afraid I can imagine it.” Volland grimaced.
“Gerik wouldn’t endanger the entire city!” Papa said.
A handful of people ran down the sidewalk, dressed in black. Everyone in the car glanced at them. Rebels, Marlis thought. Not the workers, who would be in uniforms. She didn’t see weapons in their hands, and the guards outnumbered them for now. But her eyes tracked them until they were out of sight.
“Gerik might very well have been with them. But even with a chaperone, some women have a way of getting a point across,” Volland said.
“It wouldn’t be hard to convince Freddy that we’re his enemies,” Marlis said. “You’ve kept him like a prisoner.”
Papa’s eyes were fixed on the lights of the guard car in front of them. “Well, we will get this situation in hand.”
The guard car hit the brakes, and now their car stopped too, pitching all their heads forward. “What now?” Volland said.
There was shouting ahead. A flashlight beam swept by, but Marlis couldn’t see much. She had to fight an urge to open the car door and run into the street—she hated being trapped like this, even behind bulletproof glass.
A reddish glow rose in the distance, as if something had been set on fire. The car had stopped next to one of the city’s parks. Expensive apartments with small balconies overlooked the rosebushes. Even at night, such a place looked welcoming—but she saw more rough-looking people running past the car.
And then—the world shattered.
A light as bright as the sun blinded her. A wave of force rumbled the ground. Papa’s arms clutched her tight. A tower of fire and smoke shot toward the sky ahead, burning hot, dying back quickly. Her mind scrambled to make sense of this—was it a bomb? The word “bomb” sounded odd in her mind, like she scarcely remembered what it meant.
She could hardly breathe, Papa was holding her so tightly. Or was it just that she had forgotten how to breathe? She pressed her face to his jacket, shutting her eyes. His body was warm and solid, the only thing that felt safe.
Marlis felt every nerve in her body, every finger and toe. Her thoughts didn’t venture into fears or hopes. She could only think of facts, as if she were studying sentence structure or photosynthesis. I might die now. That was just a fact.
I can’t be afraid to die. Mama has already done it. She tried to think of it like jumping across a chasm, with her mother holding out her hands on the other side to catch her.
“It went off up there—” Volland had unbuckled his seat belt. “I can’t see—”
Marlis loosened her grip on Papa. Another fire burned now, closer ahead.
Someone struck the back window of the car with a rock. The glass held.
“Reinforcements,” Papa said, seeing uniformed men run by with rifles at the ready. “They’ll see us home. We’ll be all right.”
Marlis watched as a guard shot a man in the street. She couldn’t yet absorb that she was in the middle of gunfire and angry shouting voices, just a few blocks from home. The motorcade was trying to turn around. Their driver reversed a little, then cut the wheel far left, going slowly to avoid the pack of guards, but one of the guards motioned for the car to keep moving forward instead.
A head slumped sideways onto the window. Volland jumped. The face slid away, unconscious. The man could have been a younger version of Volland himself—thin, scholarly looking, light-brown hair.
In another moment, the car was moving forward again, bringing into view the crumpled, burning chassis of an identical vehicle. “That’s the Walthers’ car,” Papa said, jerking forward in his seat to see better. “The bomb…”
Their driver jerked the wheel to avoid a piece of the bumper. Marlis couldn’t see bodies through the flames. But they had to be there. They hadn’t lived. No one would have lived through that explosion. Ida might have burned to death, or maybe the bomb tore her up first.
Marlis twisted the ribbons fastening her wrap around her shoulders. She looked the other way. The bodies of rebels littered the sidewalk like fallen toys. Guards on the street signaled all clear and waved them through.
“The rebels—” Papa was trembling. He punched the seat ahead of him, his face flushed, his eyes bulging with rage.
“Papa, please. Your heart.”
“Damn my heart,” he retorted. “Damn me for letting this happen.”
They did not go home that night. T
he Chancellery had the thickest walls in the city, with bunkers a few stories below the ground floor. Papa and his ministers could meet there, keeping the wives and children safe beneath their feet. Papa saw her safely down the stairs to windowless bedrooms dressed with old imperial furnishings, fringed floor rugs, and paintings of tall ships. The Chancellery itself had been renovated on the surface, but the building was over two hundred years old, and the decor down here must be at least seventy.
“You’re safe now,” Papa said. “Try to get some sleep.”
She scoffed. “Sleep? I want to know what’s going on.”
“You’ll hear as soon as we get a clear picture. Stay with Mrs. Wachter.”
A few of the women were in the gloomy sitting room. Wilhelmina Wachter, wife of General Wachter; Ada Rasp, wife of the domestic affairs minister, who was playing jarring idle notes on the piano in the corner; Mauritza Baum, wife of the head of the Chancellor’s guard, and her little boy, who was sleeping on her lap. Marlis saw them, but she also saw the empty space that would have belonged to Ida and Mrs. Walther. Ida’s face, melted beyond recognition. Ida’s lace and blue silk gown, charred to nothing.
Marlis kept thinking of the bomb, the guards, the fallen bodies of the rebels, but it seemed as abstract as Mrs. Rasp’s tuneless fiddling on the piano. Part of her felt that Ida was still in the opera box, waving at Paul.
Wilhelmina rose, her dress rustling. She hadn’t been at the opera, but she looked like she’d come from a dinner party, in dark green silk. “Are you all right, Marlis?” Wilhelmina, while too distant to be considered a surrogate mother, was still the closest thing Marlis had since her own mother’s death. She admired Wilhelmina, and Wilhelmina was both kind and candid with her.
“What will happen now?” Marlis asked, and then bit her lip. That voice was too scared to belong to her. “I mean, we know so little. I hate not knowing. Is it all over, if the workers have gotten out?”
“Something is certainly over,” Wilhelmina said. “And I can tell you the workers are out. I saw them on the streets around Roderick Valkenrath’s house, and the rebels are popping up everywhere.”
Mrs. Rasp let out a shuddering cry. “My god, how long before they overpower us even here? If they think we used magic to force people into slavery, it’ll be like the Revolution all over again. They’ll be hanging us in the square.”
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