by L. J. Hatton
“I’d never let anything happen to you,” I said. “But this is for Nim and Vesper. It’s for our—It’s for Magnus.”
Klok snapped the shutters over his screen, refusing to talk to me.
“Penn, think about it,” Jermay said. “This guy knows you. He’s studied you. He knows you want your sisters back, so he just happens to pop up with the name of one of the wardens you’re looking for. It’s a carrot, and you’re biting.”
“I know that!”
“But you’re still thinking about going?” Winnie asked.
“No. I’ve decided to go.”
Nye liked theatrics, but this was out there even for him. If he was trying to score points with his bosses, he wouldn’t have helped us. He wouldn’t risk me saying no just to prove he could get me to turn myself in. He knew I could let the truth about his mechanical hands slip in front of the wrong people, and then he’d be out of a job, maybe even in a cell for the deception. And given how the rest of his fellow wardens felt about him, that cell would be a pit deep in Death Valley where his enhancements would be useless.
Klok tugged on my sleeve and handed me a piece of paper, determined not to speak to me by his regular means.
“PLEASE DON’T GO” was written in bold block letters.
“Sisters protect sisters,” I told him. “Don’t you understand? They’re all I’ve got left.”
He took his paper back and wrote: “I thought you had me.”
CHAPTER 25
Ladies and gentlemen, please hold your applause while our heroine readies herself for the performance of a lifetime! Possibly the last performance in her lifetime. Our human chameleon will put her assimilation skills to the test in an attempt to blend in with the most dangerous of beasts: the mundane Commission pledge!
The announcer in my head had been narrating my moves since I left Klok and the others with orders to leave the train for parts unknown so that I couldn’t find them if things went wrong. I didn’t want to have to turn on my friends the way Evie was forced to reveal the location of the Hollow. They had to avoid Cyril’s house at all costs, since it was the only address I’d know. Then I’d get myself to the public library that evening if I was able. The Commission couldn’t risk a raid downtown, and if I didn’t show, the others were to run and not look back. Maybe they’d be able to find Winnie’s family and join back up with Birdie and Anise.
Jermay and Birch refused to speak to me, but Klok had tried a last-ditch effort to make me see his side of things. He slid a piece of train stationery under the door before I went to bed our final night on board. On it was a crude drawing of me with my arms, legs, and head detached from the trunk of my body. A very detailed bone saw took up half the page. I guess he thought Nye would slice me apart if given the chance, but I knew better. Whatever he wanted from me, he needed me alive to get it.
Now I stood on the sidewalk beneath a bronze ankh, studying people on their way in and out of the Commission building. Winnie had spent our last hours aboard the Zephyr helping me pull off “normal,” and for the first time in my life, I looked like a regular sixteen-year-old girl. No costumes and no cast-offs. Just braided hair, a plain T-shirt, some jeans, and a secondhand backpack to give the impression that I’d actually carried books to a school at some point in my life. All I had to do was pick up a few normal mannerisms, and I’d be fine.
Despite the fact that I had to learn to be normal around people.
I walked into the lobby and didn’t die on the spot. No cages slammed down to trap me inside, and no alarms went off. It was already going better than I’d expected.
“Welcome Visitors,” read a sign on the inside, which was when it actually hit me that I’d walked into a Commission facility on my own. No collar. No one to blame but myself and my singular focus.
The room was packed with people, most of them my age. The upcoming anniversary of the Great Illusion probably had something to do with it, but seeing so many so eager to take up the Commission mantle made my stomach drop. I didn’t know propaganda was that effective. Did any of them really know what they were vying for, or were they all like Nagendra and full of naïve hope that they might one day save the world?
Tables had been set up in a horseshoe, each with a pair of balloons tied to the corners, framing a helpful-looking individual in a black polo shirt. A giant balloon helix stood in the center, anchored to the ceiling with fishing line.
I approached the table marked “Information,” which was something I definitely needed more of, and got in line.
What was I doing? What if they had a machine that did what Nola could do, and they could screen for touched people? I glanced back at the entrance with its metal detectors that could have been something else entirely.
Worse, what if they’d raided the safe house and grabbed Nola?
If they had Nola, then they had Dev, Wren, and Birdie, too, and this time getting Birdie caught was my fault because I was the one who sent her away.
And what was I thinking, taking Nye at his word? He was the one who had threatened to throw Birdie off the Center—was that an act, too? He’d told me Warden Dodge’s name—so what? That didn’t mean he had any intention of helping me get to Nim. What if this really was all a trick? What if getting me to turn myself in was the only way he could keep me?
“Enough!” I scolded myself. I refused to cause my own defeat. I could do this. This was nothing but another part to play.
“Scholarship or intern?”
“Huh?” I glanced over my shoulder at the guy speaking.
“Scholarship or intern position? What are you here for?” he asked.
“Oh. I’m not really . . . I’m . . . um . . . meeting someone?” That wasn’t supposed to be a question. I was supposed to blend in, and blending-in people knew why they were in a place.
“You’re lucky,” the guy said. He hadn’t noticed my nerves. “Personal recommendations are like getting the golden ticket. Could you imagine working here?”
“No,” I said, and I stepped up to the desk, thankful it was my turn.
“How can I help you this morning?” asked Information Woman. She was dressed all in green, which stood out from her more sedate surroundings.
“I need to find Warden Nye’s office,” I whispered.
“What’s that, hon?” she asked. “You’re going to have to speak up a bit.”
“Warden—” I cleared my throat to keep any of my stage voices from overrunning my regular one. “Warden Nye’s office, please.”
“Oh! You must be his niece! I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever show up. The rest of our candidates have been here all week, but I guess your uncle made special arrangements.”
Niece? Uncle?
“Your uncle’s got you a name badge, and he said to send you right on back when you got here so he can talk to you before the presentation.”
She held out a lanyard containing an ID card with the name Ellie on it—along with a picture of me that Nye must have taken through the security cameras while I was on the Center. It wasn’t one I’d ever posed for, and my hair was long, rather than the boyish cut I’d worn for most of my life.
“Such a tragedy what happened at his last post, isn’t it?” The woman dropped her voice. “I suppose you know the details of how he lost it.”
Sure I did, but I was betting she didn’t. She was fishing, and I wasn’t so new at this game that I’d be conned into giving her a nibble. Nye had to have a cover story for how he’d ended up with such a sudden assignment to the office building; the last thing either of us needed was me poking holes in it because some busybody wanted to gossip about her new boss.
“I guess that’s the price you pay for trying to push the envelope; sometimes it blows up in your face,” she continued once she accepted that I wasn’t going to answer her. “And if he hadn’t lost his last position, we wouldn’t have been able to snag him for this one. It worked out so well for you, having him here to speak up on your behalf.”
This had t
o be the disagreeable Gladys that Nye had warned me about. I tried pulling the lanyard away, but she wouldn’t let go. “I’m sure a warden’s recommendation on your college applications will make some heads turn. Even if he is your uncle and likely to be biased.”
“You have no idea.” I jerked back hard enough to free the lanyard, but I ended up colliding with the guy behind me. “Sorry,” I grumbled. “Which way was his office, again?”
She hadn’t told me, but I hoped a nudge would make her cooperate and stop trying to make me feel guilty for nepotism that didn’t actually apply to me.
“Right down that hall,” Gladys said. “You’d best hurry. The tours will start shortly, and everyone’s supposed to attend.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Good luck, honey. Not that you’ll need it . . .”
I hurried down a long industrial hall in a part of the building that looked like someone had painted everything with primer and then gave up before it came time to add color. Even the carpet was in shades of camel and putty. The only break in the monotony came from evenly spaced portraits of the Commission hierarchy. Local wardens on one wall, international representatives on the other. All of them smiling dead picture-day smiles, and staring blankly with cold, empty eyes. I passed Nye’s portrait first. Althea Dodge’s potato face was near the end, puffy-cheeked and balded by the way her cap sat on her head.
I looked away. Even her portrait creeped me out.
A lone door waited at the end of the hallway. I paused with my hand against it, steeling myself for what lay behind. When I was a child, it was exactly this sort of building where I’d seen death for the first time. There’d been no halls or doors to prevent me from watching the fallen’s eyes go dark. Now the Commission kept things like that hidden away so the new recruits wouldn’t get scared off before they’d been indoctrinated.
I expected whatever lay on the other side of the door to shake my resolve. I thought I’d open it and see such horrors that I couldn’t reconcile ignoring them, even for the chance at saving my sister. But the only thing on the other side of the door was an office.
Cubicles. Rolling chairs. The smell of stale coffee and day-old pastries. Men and women laughing beside the water cooler while others took phone calls and typed memos on virtual keyboards. A level above the divider cubes was a ring of private offices with glass doors accessible by stairs.
This was the Commission?
“Are you supposed to be here?” asked a shockingly sweet-voiced woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “The bullpen’s off-limits without clearance. Let me guess—you’re a scholarship applicant, and you turned left instead of right coming out of the bathroom. I did the same thing when I was in your shoes.”
None of the skin-crawling “little brother/little sister” nonsense favored by silvers at the Center, just polite, helpful conversation. She assured me that working off the scholarship was a breeze. Five years went by in a snap, and it was shorter than that if I worked summers while in school. Besides, I’d probably love it so much I’d want to stay forever, because that’s what happened to her.
No wonder they could fool so many people into service. They paid for school, and with the exception of Gladys, these people were cordial and unthreatening. Her Casual-Friday shirt and flats were a far cry from the hyper-regimented pseudo-military I was used to.
“The trick is to check the portraits.” She hadn’t noticed that she was talking my ears off and that I’d stopped listening. “They all face toward the public area, so if they’re looking at you, you’re headed into restricted space.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said. “I’m actually looking for Warden Nye’s office. He’s . . . er . . . my uncle.” I held up my badge by the lanyard as though “warden’s niece” was stamped across my face to legitimize the claim.
“Oh! That’s different! We love seeing family around here! Up the stairs and to the right. His is the one with windows so new that they haven’t scraped the bar-code stickers off of them yet. We’re in the middle of renovations, and the suits always get first dibs. Don’t tell him I said that.”
She winked and went on her way without ever giving me a name.
I passed a mailroom runner with a cart and a couple of other random friendly office drones on my way to the stairs, bringing the day’s Commission interactions to four too many. Five, if you included the front-desk grouch. No one recognized me, which let the air out of my assumption that my face or my father’s would be featured on a “Ten Most Wanted” poster that everyone had been forced to memorize. People here hardly saw me, much less questioned my identity.
Maybe Warden Nye really had a teenaged niece whose identity he’d stolen for the day, and they were used to hearing him mention her.
At least I hoped the charade wouldn’t last for more than a day. I’d proven I was willing to do anything to save Nim, even walk into Commission central. What else could he expect of me?
Nye was working at his desk; when I knocked, he waved me in without stopping.
“What’s this?” I slapped the lanyard down on top of the papers he was signing. The end of his name scrolled across the plastic in beads of ink.
“An identification badge,” he said, and moved it aside so he could fix his name. Every signature was identical, without a deviant slash or dot. That kind of precision wasn’t possible with human hands. “All prospects are required to be vetted before entry.”
“I’m talking about the name on it! Ellie! Your niece, Ellie!”
“I’m new here, and no one’s familiar with my family. Being my niece reduces the chance of questions. Ellie is a diminutive of Penelope, which I thought you’d appreciate, but if you’d like to see what happens when your full name is entered into the system, by all means go to the front desk and ask Gladys for a reprint.”
“Oh.”
“To put it mildly,” he said.
She’d type in my name, the alarms would sound, the armed guards would come, and then I’d have to do something drastic that would only convince the next generation of people like him that people like me were too dangerous to be allowed to live out in the open.
“Even without your shockingly large file, I’d steer clear of Gladys. She thinks you’re here to take the nonexistent slot belonging to her son.” That sounded about right. Everyone in the Commission found a reason to hate me, eventually. “There’s something off-putting about that boy. He’s not setting foot in this building so long as I can help it, which will hopefully not be very long.”
“I share the feeling. I shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“But you are, and that tells me enough. You’re serious about getting what you want, and so am I.”
“And what is that exactly?” I asked nervously.
I should have hidden Xerxes in my backpack or worn Bijou as a necklace so I wouldn’t have been alone in enemy territory. But I couldn’t risk it. Klok had insisted on debugging both golems in case Nye had done more to their programming than slip in a few lines of tracking code.
Nye put down his pen and pointed to a chair. I took a seat, and he stayed in his. With the desk between us, there was less of a chance that the Celestine would come out and cause trouble.
“Many years ago—more than you’ve been alive, in fact—I was one of those eagerly idealistic individuals filling the foyer and the bullpen out there. The group I joined had a purpose. We were going to save humanity, if given the chance, and if our services were never required, then that was even better.”
“Are you trying to recruit me?” I asked. “Because that’s not going to end well.”
“You haven’t seen what I’m offering as a signing bonus. It might change your mind,” he said, smirking again. “I joined the Commission during the Great Illusion, while the Medusae were still in the sky and we were still unsure as to their intent. We were a hastily assembled group of science geeks, all tripping over ourselves to collect as many samples as possible to figure out a way to repel what we thought was
going to be an invasion.”
“But it wasn’t, and they left, and get on with it because everyone knows this and I don’t want to spend the next twenty-four years in this room while you recount the incursion that never was and Gladys plots ways for her weirdo son to take my place in a program I have no intention of joining.”
This was the kind of speech a person would write down and practice, filled with long, rambling pauses to help them gather their nerve, and if what Nye wanted to ask me was enough to make him nervous, then I was skipping second thoughts and going straight to full 180 turn.
“When the first gifted girls were born, a schism formed within the Commission. We collected the first ones for study because the sitting wardens of the day thought they were a threat, maybe even contagious. Our initial findings convinced our superiors that those girls were irrevocably tied to the Medusae in a way that would allow them to be used as weapons against us if we didn’t weaponize them first. Once we discovered people like your father who had been wildly altered as adults, a decision was made to expand the parameters of our mission. That decision was the catalyst for the rift. The last two and a half decades have only convinced them that they were right to fear anyone displaying evidence of a touch.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Says the girl who just burned down a hotel without a match.”
I felt myself wither. I’d lost count of the number of times I’d called myself a monster lately, and if I felt that way about myself, then I couldn’t expect anyone else to feel differently.
“Were there any—”
I couldn’t finish the question.
“Casualties at the hotel?” Nye asked.
I nodded.
“Two went to the ER with smoke inhalation, and one to the ICU from the combination of a panic attack and a bad heart. No fatalities.”
“Did they figure out what caused it?”
“It was an electrical fire in a building from the turn of the last century. No one looked beyond the burn pattern on the faceplates. They’ve blamed a power surge. I’d say it’s a fair assessment of what happened.”
