Shadow Fall

by Audrey Grey

  I shiver from the cold as I enfold my limbs around his skeletal torso, his sharp-edged spine jutting painfully into my sternum. My fingers strum across the deep chasms between each rib, and I realize now just how emaciated he really is.

  He begins to breathe hard and fast, his ribs rising and falling; the wild, erratic beating of his heart feels like a desperate animal trying to escape its cage. “Don’t,” he moans. “Don’t hurt her.”

  I can’t tell if it’s helping, but the Biotechs must think so because they close the lid. His body softens and warms. His breathing stabilizes, his heartbeat now strong and regular under my fingertips. And maybe it’s the slow hum of the machine, or the steady lull of his breathing, but I find myself drifting off . . .

  This time I awaken in my room. I’m warm, deliciously so, buried beneath a mountain of covers. Bramble rests on the other pillow with a note from Brogue: I thought he might cheer you up. It’s still dark, the silly painted stars shining down on me, and for a moment I swear I can feel their warmth on my skin. That reminds me that my skin is no longer my skin.

  I realize I forgot to ask what I would look like afterward. Now, it takes all my nerve to lift out of bed, my sleek new abdominal muscles tightening with each step as I pad to the mirror.

  Sensing motion, the mirror luminesces, imparting a faint golden glow. The girl from the day before is gone. In her place stands Everly March, a healthy, porcelain-skinned creature who looks as if she’s just come back from summering somewhere bright and airy.

  She’s willowy, tall and fair, with perky breasts, high cheekbones on a heart-shaped face, a thick shock of dark red hair cascading past her shoulders—the perfect shade to compliment her skin—and an exquisitely-shaped nose. She wears green, a color that used to make me look sickly, like it was made for her. A Bronze phoenix curves her supple neck.

  She is everything I wasn’t.

  She is everything I was supposed to be.

  I’m pretty sure I hate her.

  I lift a hand, massage my face, just to make sure it’s still me. I raise my arms, now long and toned, and turn side to side. I stand inches from the mirror and make silly faces.

  My hair, a rich, impossible red that somehow looks both natural and glamorous, captures the light, and the effect is indescribable. Except for my eyes, which are still the same hazel color, and a smattering of stubborn freckles that Flame must have kept, there’s no trace of Maia Graystone left.

  I am Nicolai’s creation now, a creation with one singular objective: Revenge.

  Breakfast comes early. I sit at the table with Bramble chirping in my lap and examine my new clothes. Gray-cropped riding pants; rich chestnut-colored leather riding boots; and a stiff, high-collared pale-green tunic that itches my neck. I pick at the cumbersome bra my new body demands. My mother once said a woman’s form could be used as a weapon against men, but, so far, having cleavage is more irritating than lethal.

  My bulky assets are forgotten as Brogue graces my plate with the mysterious egg-like concoction from before. I scarf it down. Flame and Brogue, who are sitting at as far apart as possible, quietly study me.

  Brogue looks at me sideways and frowns. “Wasn’t her hair supposed to be blond?”

  “Yeah,” Flame says, “but I like her better like this.”

  “And how does Nicolai feel about that?”

  Flame pokes at the rubbery yellow mound in front of her. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  I shovel another forkful of mystery into my mouth. I am ignoring them both. My stomach growls, and I tap the fork against my empty plate, causing Bramble to stir in my lap.

  Brogue grins. “More?”

  I nod, and he heaps more sticky yellow clumps in front of me.

  “The transformation made her hungry,” Flame says, in case he thought it was because I actually liked his food. She’s sparkly in a rose-gold jumpsuit cinched together by a red leather belt and thin red cloak that matches her lipstick and hair.

  Brogue winks at me. “Well, there’s more where that came from.”

  “No,” Flame says. “We need to test her.”

  Brogue and I share a conspiratorial look. I bite my lip. For the first time since I got here, I feel a connection to someone. It feels good. Really good. To have a friend, even if it is a Merc.

  Brogue lifts the pan to deposit even more food on my plate. “She’s been through hell. Let the girl e—”

  “No.” Flame’s hand darts out and bats the pan from Brogue’s hand.

  Brogue’s face goes still. The hand that held the pan is still open. He hasn’t moved a muscle, his eyes nailed to Flame, who doesn’t seem to notice or care. The vein in his temple throbs.

  Flame stands and dumps the pan into the trash. “We have to test her. Make sure there are no kinks.” She turns back around and challenges Brogue with an intense stare. “Now go prepare for the physical tests.”

  Frowning—I’m guessing he’s not used to taking orders from people, especially a spritely, tart-tongued, red-haired Fienian Rebel—Brogue rises, his chair squealing across the tile, and stalks off.

  “Kinks?” I say, reluctantly pushing away my plate. “What kind—?”

  “Name?” Flame barks.

  “Everly March.” My brain fires without hesitation.

  “House March’s sigil?”

  “The golden Lyre.”

  “Parents’ names?”

  “Lady Olivia and Lord Statham March, previously Baroness and Baron of Brandywine Estates—before our Color was stripped.”

  “Which one did you love more?”

  I pause. “My father.” I see him, or what he is supposed to look like. Medium-blond hair, soft-gray eyes, a youngish face, cigar delicately perched between his beautiful white teeth. My chest threatens to burst with his love and my love for him . . . this stranger—my father.

  “How and when did they die?”

  “Fire. Two months ago.” My throat clenches, and for a second I taste ash and soot. It clings to my mouth, coats my throat, burns my lungs until I feel like I’m suffocating.

  A crushing headache splits my skull. Something . . . on the tip of my tongue, a memory. A horrible memory. Thousands of phantasmal needles prickle my skin. I look down to see flames melting my flesh, peeling it off my bones.

  I scream.

  “Everly!” Flame shouts, as Bramble hops from my lap and scuttles across the floor.

  My new name brings me back. I take a deep breath, hold the air in until my head swims and the memory is gone. “What was that?”

  “A phantom memory.” She fidgets, entwining her thumbs as she stares at the table. “The traumatic memories are the hardest to filter. Sometimes the extractor picks up a few. They should fade.”

  “But that means . . .” My mouth hangs open. I thought Nicolai had created me. But what I just experienced was real. The fear. The pain.

  The horror.

  “Is there . . . Was there a real Everly March?”

  Flame tweaks the spikes on her eyebrows. “We are off track.”

  My heart drops. “How did she die? The fire? She burned to death with her parents? Was it an accident?” My chair scrapes as I stand. “Nicolai!” My hands flutter to my cheeks. I’m wearing another girl’s face. A dead girl’s face. “Nicolai!”

  Flame crosses her arms and kicks her leg onto the table, her face cross, as if she’s being forced to endure a child’s tantrum. “Let me know when you’re done.”

  My leg itches to kick the table. Better yet, Flame’s chair, send her flying to the floor. That might make her smug look disappear, though I seriously doubt it.

  I smother my rage—something that would have been impossible before my reconstruction—and fight words through my dead girl’s smile. “Done.”

  She narrows her eyes. “Sure?”

  “Positive.” My breath hisses through clenched teeth as I sit.

  She continues as if nothing’s happened. “Siblings?”

  “No.”

  “Virgin?”r />
  “Yes.”

  Flame lobs questions at me like weapons, and I fire back. My mouth responds, and as soon as it does, the memories are there, fleeting but salient technicolored pictures that, put together in sequence, almost make a life.

  Flame mercilessly continues trying to stump me. “Favorite color? Favorite season?”

  “Green. Summer.”

  “First kiss?”

  “Lord Bradley, a Gold from House Royce and my best friend’s brother, beneath the apple tree, the crooked one—”

  Her voice changes intensity, becoming suddenly empathetic. “What is the pit?”

  “It’s . . .” For a split second my heart skips a beat, but then it steadies. My mind goes blank. “I don’t know.”

  “Who is Maia Graystone?”

  Me! my brain screams. An image of the frizzy-haired, freckled girl pops into my head. Me! Still, I open my mouth to say it, to scream it, but it’s like my tongue is twisted into knots.

  “What is your opinion of Emperor Laevus?” Flame leans slightly forward, just enough that I decide my response is important.

  “He is our savior, the one man we should all be grateful to. Without him and his tireless dedication, humankind would perish.” It’s scary how convincing my voice is.

  She doesn’t blink as her gaze burns into mine. “What will you do when you meet him?”

  I know my answer before I say it, and my blood runs cold. “Ram a knife into his skull. The best entries are at the base of the skull and the eye sockets. But a sharp knife will penetrate the temples just as easily, and a long blade can slip beneath the jaw and reach the brain.”

  “Good.” The tension melts from Flame’s face. I wonder what would have happened had I answered wrong. “The reconstruction seems successful. We will know soon enough.”

  “And Riser?” It’s the first time since I awoke that I’ve allowed myself to think about him. I cringe at the awkward memory of my body folded over his. If I was still Maia, I would turn bright red and splotchy and it would take several minutes for me to recover. But with a cold shrug, the emotion fades.

  I smile; I am going to like being Everly March very much.

  Flame’s face rearranges into an unreadable mask. “That does not concern you.” She clears her throat. “It’s likely his reconstruction was irrevocably corrupted. We won’t know how much until he wakes up.”

  “If he wakes up, you mean?”

  For the first time since we sat down, she blinks.

  After breakfast I take a longer test, where I answer what seems like a zillion questions about Everly March.

  On the surface she’s exactly what everyone expects. Demure. Compliant. Well educated. She loves horses and silken gowns and expensive gold jewelry. She can play Symphony No. 9 in D minor and sing in high octave. She was devastated by the loss of her parents.

  It seems we have something in common, after all.

  But past the shiny façade she is something more. Cold, calculated. Whip-smart. Singularly determined. Everly March would have been someone Ripper and Rafe would have steered clear of.

  I pass the test with flying colors. Before I can go, Flame inundates me with warnings for the first forty-eight hours post reconstruction.

  No sleeping—I could slip into an irrevocable coma. Expect painful memories from my past to pop up—fighting them only makes them worse—and an enhanced emotional state. Drink twice the normal amount of water. Expect an insatiable appetite, crushing headaches, hallucinations, and moments of delirium. Itching is normal, but tingling in the lips or fingers should be reported immediately, along with strange smells and problems with my vision. I get the feeling if this happens, I’m screwed.

  Flame ticks off my rough post-reconstruction itinerary. More tests, including Sims, and not the kind you can buy black market. The real kind. The fry-your-brain-if-you’re-not-careful kind.

  I shrug her off, nearly skipping to the elevator. I expect Brogue to be in the basement, but my heart drops when I see him warming up in the room at the end of the hall. Just one look at the thick white padding covering the walls of my mother’s old training room and my knees go weak.

  I hesitate; bad memories cling to this place. Memories I would rather not dredge up.

  But Brogue is smiling at me. Beckoning me to join him. And Brogue isn’t my mother. He wouldn’t hurt me. So I return his smile and enter.

  Brogue’s feet sledgehammer the ground as he charges me. My smile dies. His face is deathly calm. I’m too dumfounded to do anything—

  Last second before he crashes into me, my body reacts seemingly of its own accord. I sidestep, stick out a foot, and ram my palm into the small of his back.

  I think his head is going to slam into the wall, but he rolls sideways to offset his momentum, his shoulder taking the brunt of the force.

  My mother’s voice finds me. Faster! Raise your foil. Aim it at my heart.

  Grunting, Brogue runs at me again, thick arms flailing at my head like he means to cleave it from my neck. This time I duck beneath his arms, snake behind him, cinch my arms around his muscly, perspiration-soaked back, and stomp my foot into the soft part of his knee.

  He crumples to the ground, and I straddle his barrel chest, digging my knees into his ribs. My raised fists cast shadows across his flushed face.

  Brogue grunts under my weight, the taunting grin he’s been wearing replaced by a grudging look of respect. “So, the little alley-cat and her sidekick know their stuff.”

  It takes a moment to catch my breath, my new abdominal muscles quivering gloriously beneath my shirt. “This was a test?”

  “Something like that.”

  I back off him, arms in a defensive position in case he comes at me again. I feel utterly betrayed. “You could have warned me.”

  Springing to his feet, Brogue rolls up his right sleeve. The Mercenary hangman’s noose inks down his shoulder, along with the Merc motto, a string of words written in Latin. “Parati ad omnia,” he reads. “Know what that means, girl?”

  “Don’t mess with me?” I half-joke.

  “Be ready for everything.”

  “Well, I don’t even know if I can do that again—”

  Before I can finish my sentence, Brogue has his arm raised and is swinging a round wooden stick at my head. He must have been hiding it. I cry out as I duck, and the stick just clips my hair.

  “I thought we were done!” I hiss, sucking air.

  Oblivious to my panic, my body springs sideways, pivoting and sweeping out a leg. My foot catches Brogue’s boot, tripping him.

  He recovers easily. With a roguish grin, he winks, taps the words on his shoulder, and swings the stick at my face like he’s trying to crack a watermelon.

  I drop just in time. The stick hits the wall instead and ricochets off the padding, the edge striking just below my right eye. I feel blood begin to ribbon down my cheek.

  I see my mother standing over me, slender in her white fencing uniform, visor down so that I cannot see her eyes. One arm is folded behind her back. Are you going to cry over a little blood? Get up!

  It becomes a dangerous dance. Our labored breathing the chorus, our grunts and pounding hearts the tempo. Brogue swings and stabs and slices with the stick, and I evade him. Sometimes I move with ease, as if our movements are choreographed. But mostly I thrash and flail and buck like a wounded animal trying to throw off a much larger predator.

  I learn that I know things. Where to kick the thigh to shock the femoral artery and cause unconsciousness. How to hook my legs around a man to hold him while I use the blade of my forearm to strangle his carotid artery. How to shape my hand into a rough spear that can easily slip past the chin and strike the throat.

  Sweat drips from our bodies and puddles on the mat. Every muscle coils, every neuron fires, every tendon tightens. The potent, tangy smell of adrenaline and perspiration fill the room.

  My body is no longer mine to claim but an efficient, well-oiled machine controlled by a different, more powe
rful master.

  Survival.

  Finally, I collapse in a hot, boneless heap. Brogue smashes his boot into my chest, crushing me to the floor. The air flees my lungs. My cheek aches where the splintered end of his stick gouges, twisting mercilessly. “Girl,” Brogue says in a voice as rough as sandpaper, “you make a pretty corpse.”

  The tip of my mother’s foil presses into the soft area of my throat. She lifts her visor so that I can see the disappointment in her eyes. Weak, she is saying. Weak and slow. I am crying. I am seven.

  It’s almost as if I can hear something inside me break. Without thinking, I hook his boot with my right arm and twist, rolling end over end like a log. Rather than let me dislocate his knee, Brogue rolls with me, falling as he does. Once more I am straddling him, my knees smashing each of his sinewy biceps so that his arms are pinioned.

  I am no longer tired; I am enraged.

  Blinking away my mother’s face, I lean down, close enough that his warm, tar-laced breath ripples over my face. “My name is Everly. Everly March. Not Digger Girl. Not maggot or worm or Pit Leech. And certainly not girl.” I make sure and jam my knees into his muscle and bone as I push to a stand. His eyes bulge with pain. “And from now on it’s Lady March to you, Merc.”

  It’s the first lesson since becoming Lady March. We are not friends. None of these people will ever be my friends.

  Chapter Eleven

  Brogue rises a bit slower this time. He’s tiring, but so am I. We’ve been doing this for hours, and every bit of my flesh screams in agony; I’ve lost count of the times I’ve hit the mat.

  The Merc’s eyes have a hard glint to them. “Give up yet?”

  I’m too winded to reply, so I simply shake my head, even though Maia’s begging me to stop. But I can’t.

  I can’t.

  The stick clanks to the floor. Twirling ominously in his left hand is a short, fat blade, the sharp edge twinkling. A wave of fear and adrenaline surges through my body. My eyes rivet to the shiny steel. Nothing else exists. The walls seem to shrink, disappear.