by Maggie Hall
When the Dauphins learned that Luc had let fugitives into their country, they might not be happy, but Luc was good at doing things without his parents knowing, and we hoped to be hiding somewhere in Paris by the time they found out. Ideally we’d stay there long enough to regroup and learn more about the cure from our scientists.
Our scientists who, Elodie had reluctantly admitted, were Order. There had been a moment of renewed tension when we realized the Order had had our secrets all along, but Jack of all people had urged us to keep an open mind, and even to agree to meet with them and see what they could do for us.
I had so many questions, and most of them started with why. Why did Fitz go to so much trouble for the kid of a fellow Order member? Why weave the threads of my life together with Jack’s, and Stellan’s, and even Elodie’s?
If they cared enough to help hide me for years, why didn’t the Order save my mom?
The thought made my chest feel tight again.
Jack was on the phone with Rocco, going over the plan we’d made last night. Our first instinct had been to go to the Saxons’ and break Fitz out ourselves, but Elodie had talked us out of it. So we’d been in touch with Rocco. As we’d suspected, the entire focus of the Saxon household right now was on Cole’s death. We hoped this meant Fitz would not be high on their list of priorities. Rocco would be breaking Fitz out and smuggling him to Paris. It seemed too simple, but in this case, simple was probably best.
I glanced up when Stellan emerged from his room. His eyes found me immediately, and his step stuttered. It made my pulse stumble, too. Not because I was nervous about seeing him, but because I really didn’t want it to be awkward.
He glanced at Jack, then strolled across the room to survey the food on the table behind me. “Morning,” he said evenly, one eye on Elodie, who was sitting on the couch nearby, texting. “Did you have a good night?”
I watched him. “Fine. You?”
“Not bad.” He glanced up from the bread he’d just put on his plate, and a smile pulled at his lips. He reached out a thumb to graze the spot on my collarbone that I must not have covered as well as I thought. “Oops,” he whispered, but there was no remorse behind it at all.
I took a quick look to make sure Jack’s back was still turned. “If you did it on purpose, that’s obnoxious,” I whispered. He held up his hands to proclaim his innocence.
The tension left my shoulders. We were going to be okay. Which was good, because it was nothing. I was attracted to Stellan, and I had been for a long time—I could no longer deny that. The feeling was obviously mutual. And in times of extreme stress, it seemed to boil over. Which was fine. It wouldn’t be a big deal.
He sat down next to me and bit into a slice of cucumber. “Can I use your phone?” He couldn’t find his. Mariam thought she remembered seeing it in the van, but apparently it had been lost between some cushions, or maybe it had fallen out when we’d stopped at the doctor’s office last night. I handed him my phone and walked away to give him privacy while he talked to Anya. I couldn’t help but watch him, though. Talking to her was the only time I ever saw him smile in a way I knew for sure wasn’t fake.
• • •
A couple of hours later, we got out of the van on the tarmac of a private airport near Alexandria. We all hugged Mariam good-bye and sent her off to her family with enough money for them to live on for a year.
As we climbed the steps into the plane, ready to head back to the place closest to home for all of us, I asked Stellan, “So if you left, where would you go? Does Anya want to live at the beach or in the mountains? Or maybe a big city?”
I said it jokingly, but he didn’t smile. He drummed his fingers on the railing. “It seems like to stay away from them, you always have to keep moving.”
He was right. Even if we were no longer wanted criminals, the Circle doesn’t let you leave. It wouldn’t be easy. And that meant learning not to call any one place home. “Yeah. That’s what my mom thought, too.”
I fell into a seat. Stellan sat across the aisle.
“What about you? Would you think about leaving again?” he said. It sounded casual, but I could tell he’d been thinking about it as much as I had.
I looked out the window at Jack and Elodie, who were still on the tarmac talking to the pilot. “I don’t know. If the scientists can’t do anything with the virus and the cure, I guess it might come down to killing myself or hiding for the rest of my life. Hiding doesn’t sound so bad when you think of it that way.”
I saw Stellan wince a little at that. “Would you would want to leave, though?”
I remembered that night at a bar in Cannes again. You want to be wanted, he’d said. He’d been right. You want control. Right about that, too.
I remembered further back: washing my hands in the sink at Prada. Blood on my hands, the first time of many. “I don’t think it matters anymore what I want.”
“It’s not the only thing that matters, but it’ll always matter. It’s your life.”
Was that really even true anymore? “Would you want to leave if what you wanted was all that mattered? If you didn’t have to think about things like safety and duty?”
Stellan thumbed open an air-conditioning vent by his seat. “My father . . .” he said. I tensed. Stories of family were seldom good with this group. “He made the best gingerbread. Families in our neighborhood actually bought it from him around the holidays.”
“Gingerbread?” I said incredulously.
“Gingerbread.” Stellan settled back, crossing one ankle over the opposite knee. “He did all the cooking and cleaning and sewing, and taught me.”
“You sew?”
“What, you don’t?” He smirked, but then he turned to look out the window. “That’s what I want, eventually. What I used to have with my family. That’s what—”
“That’s what aches,” I said quietly. Toska. The ache. That dull sense that something’s missing.
“Yes.”
Outside, Jack and Elodie started up the steps. “Gingerbread and sewing,” I said. “So what you’re telling me is that you want to be somebody’s grandma.”
“Luc’s grandmother carries a tiny dog and a flask of scotch everywhere she goes. I think I could handle that.”
Jack and Elodie came down the aisle and settled into seats nearby and told us what they’d just heard. Rocco had found out where Fitz was. It looked like this was actually going to work. Suddenly, I felt nervous again.
As the plane took off, I checked the news. Lots of countries were working to calm the panic, and it was obvious which news outlets were Circle-controlled by the kinds of headlines they had up. Non-Circle outlets weren’t interested in being reasonable. The whole Internet seemed to be sharing some article speculating that the virus was actually the result of government testing, a disease that had reacted with GMO foods to become deadly or something like that. It linked to another article about how vaccines were designed to make us susceptible to it, and a million other conspiracy theories, most still not as crazy as the truth.
We thought it might start World War Three if the Circle took sides between us and the Saxons. Turned out the only side being taken was against us, but there was plenty of chaos anyway.
I put my phone away and watched a movie in French with subtitles I didn’t actually pay attention to. Jack and Stellan both stared out the windows of the plane. Maybe everyone else was more nervous than I realized, too, because we all jumped when Jack’s phone rang halfway through the flight.
Rocco had broken Fitz out. Fitz was on his way to Paris safely.
It was done.
• • •
There was no angry Dauphin welcoming party at the airport. No one had noticed the plane missing, Luc said, and we should be fine as long as we disappeared now.
Disappearing was the plan. Fitz had made it to Paris before we did. Someone in the O
rder owned a boat that did dinner cruises on the Seine, and if we met there, we could be certain no one would see us.
Our cab pulled up at the bridge where the boat was docked. The four of us made our way down the stone steps to the river’s edge, which would usually be full of picnickers and joggers and glamorous women smoking cigarettes on their lunch break, but now was eerily quiet.
We found the right boat, and the door at the top of a carpeted gangplank swung open.
I froze in place. Fitz was thin, and his eyes looked sunken behind his glasses, but the smile that lit his face was exactly the same as I remembered.
I hadn’t really cried since just after my mom died. I hadn’t let myself. But as Fitz came down the ramp and pulled me into a hug, I burst into tears.
CHAPTER 18
The boat was long and thin, with an upper and a lower deck, both set with long strings of dinner tables. For now, we were the only people here. The rest of the Order would meet us shortly.
Elodie found me tissues and water, but I was still sniffling as I hung back and watched Fitz. He and Elodie talked Order business. He hugged Jack and murmured a few things, and Jack glanced at me and smiled.
Then Fitz clapped Stellan on the back and asked about his sister. Stellan was cordial, but I could tell he was still feeling guarded. As glad as I was to see Fitz, I understood. I’d built Fitz up as this mythical faux-grandfather for years. I remembered the last time I’d seen him. Mr. Emerson, our jolly next-door neighbor. He’d helped us pack up our moving van in Boston. And then he’d hugged us good-bye—and for years after that, he was in my life only via postcards, letters, and the occasional phone call. I should have known this person who cared enough to stay in touch all these years wasn’t just a random neighbor.
There was part of me that, now that we had an adult we actually trusted again, wanted to throw everything at his feet and beg him to tell us what to do. The other part felt like nothing I’d ever known was quite real, and I should be cautious.
The five of us made our way to a table on the lower deck.
“My brave girl,” Fitz said, with a hand on my shoulder. Back home, Fitz didn’t have any kind of accent that I remembered, but now his voice was lilting, light. An Irish accent, maybe? Yet another thing to ask. Yet another piece of the puzzle. “I’m so sorry, love. Your mother—”
He took off his glasses and wiped his tired eyes with the back of his hand. He’d arrived in Paris a couple of hours before us, and had had time to clean up and get settled, but he still looked rough, with a dark bruise across one cheek and his glasses taped together at the hinge. I thought of Lydia and Cole in Egypt, and how they’d gotten there. I didn’t want to think of the injuries on Fitz I couldn’t see.
“My brave kids. I’ve wondered so many times whether all of you would be friends if your worlds collided.” There, again, was that uncomfortable tug on my stomach, of just how much our lives had been steered to get us here, not just by Fitz, but by my mom, the Circle, the Order. I suddenly felt close to tears again. I didn’t exactly feel upset—just confused. Overwhelmed. Guilty—again—for feeling anything but what I should feel, which was relief that we were all here and remorse that my mom wasn’t.
Jack answered a call and warned us to be careful—apparently the Saxons had gotten word of the Dauphins’ plane’s movements and knew we were in Paris. They were stationing Rocco and some others here to try to find us, but they had no more intel than that. They didn’t seem to know yet that Fitz was gone.
We asked Fitz about Rocco’s breaking him out of the Saxons’, and he told us that story, along with an abbreviated version of what had happened since he’d been imprisoned. He’d tried to break out on his own twice early on, he said—he’d been at the Saxons’ before, and knew a little about the inner workings of the house because my mother had been an Order plant at the Saxons’ for years.
I gripped the table, and Fitz turned to me. “I have much to tell you about your mother, Avery.” He glanced around the table. “In fact—”
He cut off when the boat’s door swung open and half a dozen people came inside. I took a last swipe at my eyes with a tissue and stood to greet the Order.
Each member of the small group gave Fitz a hug, then shook hands with us and found a seat at the table. Most of them were adults, but a couple of girls were just slightly older than us. One of them, with sleek dark hair and a gold stud in her nose, looked familiar.
“Were you at the Rajeshes’?” I said.
She nodded. I recognized her now, in the same heavy dark eyeliner she’d put on me while Lydia and I were getting ready for the dinner where I’d met Dev Rajesh for the first—and only—time.
“I have been assigned to the Rajesh home for years,” she said. Her voice was quiet but confident, with a soft accent. “After recent developments, I got a new assignment. I have been speaking with you on the phone about the experiments. My name is Nisha.”
This was Nisha, who had been experimenting on our blood for weeks? I could barely choke out a hello. Elodie sat next to her and took out a list of questions she’d come up with on the flight. I settled back into my chair. Fitz stood behind his seat on one side of me, and Stellan sat at the other. He’d been observing silently since the Order came in.
“Will any more of the group be joining us?” Jack asked, taking his own place across from me.
The Order members looked at one another. Fitz cleared his throat. “That’s one of the things we need to tell you about our organization. There is still one of us in every Circle home. Some of them are here today, but some are at their assignments. Other than that . . .” Fitz paused. “The people in front of you are actually all that’s left of the Order.”
Some of the meager group gave small nods.
Jack shook his head like he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “The people in this room . . . plus a few others hiding in Circle households, doing nearly nothing?” he asked. “You mean to tell us that’s the entire Order?”
“We used to be more,” Fitz said. “There was a clash with the Circle a few decades ago that decimated our ranks, and we haven’t recovered.”
Half the questions I wanted to ask immediately went out the window. I saw now exactly why they hadn’t mobilized to rescue my mom. They were barely staying afloat as it was.
Fitz took a seat. “I know that’s surprising, but just because we don’t have numbers doesn’t mean we don’t have insight. And I know you have much to report.”
He introduced us to the Order members and gave a brief rundown of how he knew us, and what we were to the Circle. “And this is Avery.” He looked down at me. “Sweetheart, I’ve thought for a long time about how I might tell you this.”
A kernel of worry took root in my gut. Did I not already know all the secrets there were to know?
“This is not the ideal way to do it,” he went on, “but I believe this is important for everyone here to know. Some of you will remember Claire. Avery is Claire’s daughter.” All around the table, people sat up straighter, shooting alarmed glances at me. “Which means,” Fitz continued, “that she’s my granddaughter.”
I couldn’t possibly have heard right. “Your what?”
“Your what?” Elodie echoed.
Fitz nodded at her. “You never knew Claire. I didn’t want anyone here to make the connection.”
Across the table, Jack looked nearly as shell-shocked as I felt.
“How—” The boat was barely moving, but the chair under me felt unstable. I pressed my palms to the tabletop. “What?”
“I’ll tell you everything. I promise.” Fitz sat and squeezed my hand where it rested on the table. “I just couldn’t keep it a secret any longer.”
I tried to pay attention to the Order members around the table introducing themselves, but I couldn’t think about anything but that word. Granddaughter.
It can’t be true, I wanted
to say, but of course it could. It explained everything. Why Fitz would have cared about us—and why he went to so much trouble to learn about the mandate. Why my mother trusted him.
I glanced over at him. Now that I knew . . . he had my mom’s eyes. Clear and bright and green. I hadn’t noticed when I was a kid. I hadn’t noticed so much. Now that I knew, it was even harder to stop the flood of memories. Some were nice: movie nights and holidays, how we ate Sunday brunch together every weekend and my mom would read us our horoscopes from the newspaper. Some were strange. I remembered a conversation I’d overheard one night, when my mom had asked Fitz whether he thought I should be home-schooled. I remembered the day we left Boston—it was the only time we moved that my mom cried. She tried to hide it, but I heard her after she thought I was asleep that night in the hotel. Because she hadn’t just been leaving behind a friendly neighbor. She’d been leaving the only family she had, probably because something had just happened that had made them decide it was no longer safe to stay. She was terrified and didn’t know whether she’d ever see him again.
A foot touched mine under the table, and I blinked back to the present. Stellan raised his eyebrows in a silent question. I nodded. I’m fine.
The boat had started moving, and we were cruising slowly around the back side of Notre-Dame. I tried my best to tune back in to the conversation.
“We’re not surprised to see this turmoil happening,” a middle-aged woman with close-cropped black hair I’d vaguely heard introduce herself as Hanna was saying. “Every one of the Circle’s messes in the past centuries has been for a reason. Yes, the wars do tend to be over some petty infighting, but they also have a purpose: to change the power structure of the world to the Circle’s advantage. After World War Two, the United Nations was formed. It was an obvious way for the Circle to give themselves very public power while looking like it was for the good of the world.”
