by Wren Weston
She hadn’t, as it turned out. Lila had been with her when she stopped breathing. She jumped up by her side, completely powerless and frantic to help her friend. Pax had run in after Lila began screaming. Only a toddler, he’d cried because he did not understand and cried more because he didn’t know what to do or how to help. He claimed he didn’t remember it, but Lila had to wonder.
Why on earth had the boy become so obsessed with being a doctor if not for that? She’d done that to him, and she didn’t know if it was a good thing.
Chef had run into the room a moment later and shooed them out. She had only left the room for a second, just for a cup of coffee.
Perhaps Holly had known somehow, even though she’d been asleep for days. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted her mother to see her last gasping breaths.
And she’d gasped, terrifyingly so.
“I remember Chef telling me that if you’ve tried everything, even if you fail, you’re not left torturing yourself with what-ifs. It stuck with me. I wanted a way for everyone to feel like that. Tragedy sucks enough without spending the rest of your days bitter and angry because you might have saved someone you cared about, if only you’d had more money, if only you’d had a better doctor, if only, if only, if only…”
“So your mother gave you Our Lady of Light.”
“It was my fourteenth birthday present. She even told me it was a test. To show her, the family, and myself what I could do if I became chairwoman someday. We’d never even been involved with hospitals before. The insufferable woman gave me the one thing that I couldn’t say no to, all because she thought it might tempt me to take up the whitecoat. She’s not evil, Tristan. She’s just manipulative in the coldest, most infuriating ways possible.”
“You passed her test, then, and got what you wanted from the process. From what I hear, the hospital is profitable. Zoe was treated for free when he broke his ankle.”
“It’s not the hospital that’s profitable. We make our profits from the businesses around the hospital, from the drugs Grace Medical tests there, for overcharging the highborn. My mother was pleased when I asked for all the land two blocks around Our Lady of Light. She thought I was already getting a taste.”
“The Randolphs owned those blocks?”
“Not back then. Not all of it. But my mother is very fond of acquiring land.”
“Quite a stroke of inspiration for a teenager.”
“It wasn’t my idea. A few of my advisors came up the plan, Randolphs both of them, obviously. I thought they were crazy at first, but the numbers looked solid, and I wanted it to work so badly. I didn’t care so much if it failed, either. I thought perhaps my mother would leave me alone if I failed spectacularly. She lent me the money to buy the blocks and set up what I needed. We bought a couple of lowborn apartment complexes and changed them to micro-leases for long-term patients and their families, leases that didn’t gouge them senseless. We bought two more apartment complexes just for medical staff, to give them a place to live near the hospital at a fair price. Then I built other things, restaurants in different price ranges, a gym, a grocery store, a movie theater, a toy store, florists—everything patients and their exhausted families could want and everything my staff could want. It worked.”
“Then Holly’s death paved the way for a lot of good in the world, especially if other families adopt the model in other cities.”
“Maybe.” Lila shrugged, remembering how Holly’s hair used to smell before she fell ill, like roses, and how it had smelled after, like damp. “I’d trade it all away for her.”
“You miss her.”
“Alex always understood the frustrations of being a highborn, but Holly always understood me.”
“And now, Alex is in a holding cell in Bullstow.”
“I had a footman bail her out this morning,” Lila said, shifting in the driver’s seat. “You’re angry at me for that, aren’t you?”
“Not if she hit you. If she did that, she deserves what she got.” He pulled one of her gloved hands from the steering wheel and intertwined their fingers.
“I’m trying to drive,” she muttered, pulling away.
“Trying is a good word for it. You don’t have to speed to every red light in the city, you know. It’ll still be red when you get there.”
The pair didn’t speak for the rest of the trip. Lila was glad for it, for her thoughts were consumed with two laughing children running through the grounds of the Randolph compound.
She soon pulled into the parking lot near the oracle’s sign, sliding into a spot between a sports car and a beat-up pickup truck. They hiked past the sign, emerging at the dock. Lila noticed the same couple from the day before, holding hands, toes skimming the lake.
Luckily, the rower had just tied off his boat, and the group hopped inside.
When they entered the main room of the temple, it was already crowded with people muttering meditations or sipping water on the couches. A few parents even held babies tight to their chests.
One of the lilac-robed women approached the pair and bowed to Lila. “The oracle said to keep an eye out for you this morning. She’ll only be a few moments.”
A man nearby frowned at the exchange. At least she didn’t have a Randolph coat of arms stitched onto her shirt this time.
Tristan sat on one of the couches and patted a seat beside him. Lila sat, worried he’d be inspired by the couple on the dock. Highborns never held hands in public or displayed affection outside of the bedroom. Only workborns staked a claim to one another so publicly.
But she and Tristan were just friends, weren’t they?
Tristan sank back into the couch and closed his eyes. “I’m going in with you. I helped.”
“No.”
“I’ll blow something up if—”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“Too soon?” he asked, opening one eye.
Moments later a woman with a round belly emerged from the back of the room, waddling toward the front of the temple.
Another pregnancy blessed by the oracle. Lila wondered how many times a day the woman rubbed fat, baby-filled bellies.
She and Tristan dodged the pregnant woman and descended into the quiet fishbowl.
The oracle sat upon her couch and raised an eyebrow at Tristan’s presence. “You brought a friend.”
“He’s like static. Whenever I try to peel him away, he shocks me.”
“You trust him.”
“He helps me sometimes,” Lila said, refusing to sit.
Tristan had no such reservations. He plopped down on the couch beside the oracle and crossed one ankle over his knee. “She trusts me, or she never would have told me half the things she has. She just has problems admitting it.”
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps no matter what the oracle had told her the day before, she did trust Tristan. Or at least, Lila trusted him far more than she trusted the oracle. The woman’s mother had made a prediction that had already proved to be untrue. Since she’d been cut, the chance of Lila becoming pregnant was practically negligible. She would never become a whitecoat or a silvercoat either, especially with her father conspiring to make her contract more permanent, so long as she finished the job with the oracles.
If she finished the job.
“Hmmm… The girl is thinking so loudly I can see it cross her face. What do you suppose she’s thinking about?”
“Something dangerous, I presume,” Tristan answered. “It usually is.”
“I trust him enough,” Lila muttered, just to shut the pair up. “He knows what I know, anyway, so it’s pointless to send him out.”
Tristan grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I knew it.”
Lila barely stilled her jaw. She’d always found it difficult not to smile whenever Tristan smiled at her. He had one of those grins that men sometimes had, the ones you could
n’t help but return.
She turned her gaze on the oracle. “By the way, on behalf of every militia member in the country, we are thrilled to chase our tails for the pleasure of the oracles.”
The oracle gestured for Lila to sit.
Lila crossed her arms over chest, still refusing.
“What do you know so that I can fill in the gaps?” the oracle said soothingly.
Lila was not soothed. “I know that future oracles are being kidnapped and placed in new homes to dodge their duty.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I can add, then.”
“The why, perhaps? Why are you doing this to your daughters?”
“Why does a prime give up her duty to become a blackcoat? Because you don’t want to become prime?”
“Obviously.”
“Then why can’t our daughters do the same?”
“This isn’t a case of firstborn dibs. If even half of what you said yesterday was true, then you’re chosen by the gods.”
“You were chosen by birth as well.”
“I don’t mean birth. I mean because of your disease.”
The oracle winced at the term. “So not only would you have our daughters marked by seizures that drugs can barely control and visions of pain and death they should never be privy to, you’d take away their future as well?”
“It’s not mine to take away. It’s the gods’.”
“So now you’ve become a believer?” the oracle said, cocking her head to the side.
“I’m playing devil’s advocate.”
“How nice that you have that luxury. I don’t, and neither do our daughters. I want to change this life that we’ve been born into, and I’m not the only one among us who does. As you pointed out so elegantly yesterday, a great deal of what an oracle does has nothing to do with our gifts. My own sister hasn’t the gift, but she’s excellent at the rest of it. Far better than me, in fact.”
Lila held her tongue, unsure how to proceed.
“Nothing is lost. The missing girls still pass on their visions. We talk and try to figure out what they mean, and at the end of the day, that girl can go back to being a child until she’s old enough to decide for herself. Perhaps she’ll become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a soldier, or maybe even the oracle she was meant to be. Would you not give other girls the same opportunity you had to choose?”
“That’s not even the point.”
“I think it’s the only point. Some girls wish to be an oracle with all their hearts. We keep those girls close. Others have seizures in public and get captured on film, or someone outside of our purview gains knowledge of their medical records. The press marks them as future oracles and shows them to the world before our lawyers can stop it. We have a chance to save the rest, and it’s a rather small percentage.”
“Girls like Valerie and Vivian?”
The oracle nodded. “I knew those men would take them and love them like their own children. The hardest part was changing the girls’ government records.”
“Well, you missed a spot.” The words were out of Lila’s mouth before she realized she’d said them. She should have been pissed that they’d altered government files. She shouldn’t be offering tips.
The oracle barely contained her grin.
“How long do you think you can keep doing this before someone finds out?”
“I don’t know, and I really don’t care. We’ll do it for as long as we can. We’re tired of our girls running away at eighteen, never to be seen again because they don’t want this life. We want them safe, and we want them to have a proper childhood. They can learn how to be oracles when they’re older if they chose this path.”
“You used Mr. Nottingham as bait. You dangled him in front of me so that I’d follow him and find the girls.”
“I didn’t use him as bait. He got scared when he saw your blackcoat. I told him not to worry, but he thought you’d come for the girls. He’s not some criminal. He’s a believer and a scared, overprotective father.”
“What’s my role in all this?”
“I had a vision, clearer than the first. I know now that I can trust you, and that I can rely on you. I was right to say you were intertwined with the oracles. I just didn’t understand how intertwined. The oracles need someone we can trust now.”
“Why?”
“Among other reasons, the militia intervened in one of our kidnappings in La Verde. The girl’s birth parents are still under suspicion. Our lawyers will handle that end of it, but getting Rebecca back is proving more difficult. Your father put her into a foster home. I want you to retrieve her.”
“You want me to waltz into that girl’s foster home and kidnap her?”
“No. Her face has been splashed all over the news in La Verde. She’ll never have a chance at what Valerie and Vivian have, but the least we can do is get her back with her parents. All I’m asking is that you convince your father to return the girl.”
“That’s not all, though, is it?”
“Ideally, he’d also drop his fixation with the oracles.”
“You want me to go against the prime minister’s direct orders?”
“He’s your father.”
“When he’s hired me to do a job, he’s the prime minister.”
“I’m asking you to do what you’ve already decided. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you hadn’t.” The oracle opened a folder on the table. “That’s not all I’m asking of you.”
“Wonderful. Should I start taking notes, or will you just hand me a list when you’re done talking?”
The oracle ignored Lila’s tone and passed the folder to Tristan. “The larger problem is that someone else has been stealing our girls. Two have gone missing in the last week, both around New Bristol, and we’ve had nothing to do with it. Obviously we can’t go to Bullstow with this information. My purplecoats are looking everywhere, but so far, they’ve turned up nothing, and the gods are silent. This is everything we have on the girls’ cases.”
Lila averted her gaze. She’d almost feel sorry for the kidnappers if the purplecoats got hold of them. The oracles’ security forces carried tranqs and guns loaded with bullets, and they had the immunity to do as they wished with those they caught.
Tristan flipped through the militia reports. “I’ll look for them if she won’t.”
Lila snatched the folder from his hand.
“We can pay,” the oracle said.
“I’m sure you can.” Lila climbed upstairs, nearly leaving Tristan behind for the second time that day.
Chapter 14
Lila reclined on Tristan’s couch and worked her way through the list of Natalie’s associates, her laptop warming her thighs. From time to time, she peeked at Tristan, who sat on the other end of the couch. He had been gone for the first four hours after she arrived, flitting in and out of the building, checking on the shop and Maria, then holding a couple of meetings downstairs. Now he seemed to have settled in, scrolling through a long list of messages from his spy network and inputting them into a spreadsheet on his laptop.
Even Tristan had tedious paperwork.
He’d been at it for over two hours already. Lila could have written a program in less than fifteen minutes that would have done the job for him, but she’d liked watching him go through the process. The way he cocked his head, considering the more interesting messages, the way he sighed occasionally at a particularly useless spy, the way he bit off a chuckle at something funny and turned his head, hoping he hadn’t disturbed her.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him stifle yet another laugh and check her face again. She tensed as his eyes snaked across her body to focus on other things, and she longed to turn her head and watch him as he watched her.
How could he study her so completely and not even kiss her? How could he watch her with such intensity and
not bed her? How could he call them friends?
More to the point, why hadn’t she taken him? Perhaps she just needed to get him out of her system. Despite what Tristan claimed, they’d never had a friendship, and their peace was already ruined.
She had work, though, and work was far more important than satisfying her libido.
Tristan blushed suddenly, then turned back to his palm.
Had he been thinking about her? About sex?
Perhaps he hadn’t been thinking about her at all. Perhaps he had been thinking about another woman. One smarter, funnier, with more daring eyes. Or perhaps he’d just recalled the punch line to a naughty joke.
Or maybe he’d been thinking about steak.
You never knew with men.
Lila leaned back deeper into the couch, so hard her shoulders blew past comfort into pain. She’d officially lost all willpower with Tristan. His smile had talked her into staying at the shop, rather than the security office. She should have been there, working her way through the list and her militia paperwork. At least there hadn’t been much of the latter to finish. She’d blown through it all in an hour and a half.
That didn’t change the fact that she should have worked somewhere else, though.
It didn’t change the fact that she hadn’t seen Tristan the day before, and she’d barely gotten to see him after visiting the oracle.
Gods, she missed him when he wasn’t around, no matter what the oracle said he might do. Despite the fact that she should take another lover.
Tristan closed his laptop and turned his head toward her, clearing his throat. “It’s getting close to dinner. I’ll get us something to eat.”
“You might be done, but I’m not. Stop rubbing it in.”
“You’re never done.” He set his laptop on the coffee table, stood, and stretched his arms into the air like a cat. His shirt rode up, exposing his flat belly and the ridge at his hips. She had an urge to grab him, to pull him toward her, to lick it.
