The Conspiracy of Us

by Maggie Hall

  “Fitz!” I heard doors opening all over the apartment. Jack stomped back into the room a second later. “I told you to stay outside,” he snapped. “It could have been dangerous.”

  “It could have been dangerous in the hallway, too,” I retorted. “Who did this?”

  “The Order. It’s got to be, hasn’t it?” Jack sat down on the firm gray couch with his head in his hands, stood up, and sat down again. “I should have known. I should have gotten here faster.” His eyes were wild as he seized a pillow and whipped it against the wall.

  I recoiled. “Hey. Stop.” I sat next to him and grabbed him, forcing him to look at me. The muscles in his forearm clenched and unclenched under my own shaking fingers. “Think. Where would they have taken him? Why would they have taken him?”

  The heavy rise and fall of his chest slowly regulated. “I haven’t got a clue where. As to why . . .”

  He cut his eyes to me and I felt like I’d been slapped. Of course.

  “It’s not your fault,” Jack said, pressing his palms over his eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

  “They took Mr. Emerson to get to me.” I raked my hands through my tangled hair. “So, what, they want me to turn myself in? Wouldn’t they have left some kind of ransom note?”

  Jack nodded. “I was just thinking that. Or . . .” He sat up straighter. “That text he sent.”

  He was right. I remembered it word for word. If the worst happens—follow what I’ve left you.

  “He knew someone was after him,” I said. “The text says he left us something. You, I mean. He left you something.”

  “Us.” Jack got up from the couch. Only when I noticed how cold my thigh was did I realize our legs had been touching. “I think it’s pretty obvious now that we’re in this together, whether we like it or not.”

  I took a deep breath, then got off the couch, too.

  Where would you leave a ransom note? It was nowhere obvious. I stalked across the room and flipped through a stack of papers on a modern, dark-wood side table, then studied a bulletin board that had a flyer for a poetry reading and another for a wine tasting, but no note. Next to it was a shelf full of books and vases and picture frames. A little thrill of wrongness stabbed through me, seeing all Mr. Emerson’s things from his apartment in Boston.

  Jack looked under a stack of magazines on the coffee table, then knelt by the dried blood, inspecting the phone.

  I headed toward the kitchen, but stopped short at a shelf. I picked up a small paint-by-number picture of a sunset, with colors that were obviously not meant to fill the spaces. Between the oranges and reds and yellows, splashes of purple and blue and black.

  I ran a finger over the little painting. I’d added those other colors because all the sunsets I saw weren’t just orange. They had dark spots, too, which made the sunsets even more brilliant. Mr. Emerson had loved it, so I’d given it to him when we moved away.

  I swallowed hard. What if we couldn’t find anything? What if I couldn’t help him? Would I turn myself in? They’d kill me. But if I didn’t, would they kill him? I pressed my fist to my mouth.

  “Avery?” Jack’s voice jolted me back to the present, and I realized he’d been talking to me. “Anything?” he said, and I could feel him watching me, wondering what I was doing.

  I shook my head and put the painting back on the shelf. In the kitchen, an empty coffeepot and a clean mug sat on the counter, along with one white bowl on a dish rack. No note, no sign of struggle in here.

  “I’m going to check his office,” Jack called.

  I blew out a deep breath and made one last sweep of the room—and saw something lodged under the coffee table.

  A clock. My heels clicked as I hurried across the room. Its face was cracked, and a bloody streak ran across it.

  “Jack,” I called.

  He came back to the living room. I ran a finger over the hands under the bloody glass. They pointed to almost 6:00.

  “It probably stopped when they—” Jack swallowed, looking at the bloodstain on the floor. “When it broke.” He took the clock and set it on the coffee table.

  “I know. If it was five forty-seven a.m. here, what time would it have been in Lakehaven? What time did he text you?”

  Realization dawned on Jack’s face. He pulled out his phone. “Nine forty-three p.m. Minnesota time.” I could see him doing the calculations in his head. “Just a few minutes before this clock stopped.”

  “If he sent you the text right before this happened,” I said, “whatever he left for you has to be here.”

  “You’re right.” I could hear the renewed hope in his voice, and we pressed on down the hall, doing a quick inventory of everything we saw before we ended up at an office.

  A row of books—history, philosophy, poetry—lined the back of the desk, straight and tidy between their bookends, and just in front of them, three pens sat in a perfect row like soldiers at attention. Also on the desk was a day planner, askew and open to a ripped-out page.

  Mr. Emerson wouldn’t have left his planner like that by accident.

  I went straight to the desk and picked it up. “January thirteenth. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Jack shook his head. I looked at the pages nearby. Dentist appointment. Dinner at 7:30.

  “Maybe he just ripped out a random page, like to leave a note. Which would mean it’d have to be around here somewhere.” He looked down the hall and paused. I understood his hesitation: even though we were searching for clues, going into Mr. Emerson’s bedroom felt like trespassing. I swallowed and headed down the hall anyway—and stopped short in the doorway. The door had been splintered to pieces around the knob.

  Jack’s eyes went big, and he rushed past me into the room. I inspected the door more closely. It didn’t take an expert to tell the door had been locked from the inside and forced open.

  “Look.” Jack was crouched on the ground, holding three photos.

  I hurried across the room, and he handed me a hammered – copper frame with a picture of himself and Mr. Emerson inside, then one of Stellan, of all people. And then . . . a small, folded shot of me.

  “These frames are usually in his living room.” Jack paced the room, methodically scanning a bookshelf, an art deco dresser, and a bedside table.

  “Why does he have a picture of Stellan?” Stellan looked younger and more serious than he did now, and his hair was a lighter blond.

  Jack’s lips pressed into a hard line. “Fitz sometimes works with the Dauphins, too,” he said shortly, and turned away.

  “This one is me,” I said quietly. I was nine. We’d been cooking, and I was half covered in flour.

  I turned the photo of Jack over in my hands, looking for a note, a clue, something. Like on the clock, there was a smear of red across the glass. I wiped it with my thumb and started to stand, but stopped. “Blood,” I said.

  Jack turned from peering through the slatted blinds. “What?”

  “Blood.” I jumped up. “Right there. On the floor.”

  It wasn’t easy to see on the hardwood, but droplets of blood led away from where we were standing. One trail led to the bedroom door. The other led into the closet.

  We rushed into the closet, following the blood to a safe hidden behind a rack of shirts, a streak of blood marring one crisp white sleeve.

  “Do you know the combination?” I said, breathless.

  Jack nodded, and spun the lock as I hovered at his elbow. The safe popped open.

  Inside was a folded piece of paper with a smeared red thumbprint across its front. The planner page. I grabbed it up, opened it, and read:

  Find the three things before anyone else does. Tell no one. My curated collection. Follow from there.

  Then, like it was an afterthought:

  They’re wrong about the mandate.

  CHAPTER 21

  The m
andate?” I said. “Wrong how?”

  Jack leaned over my shoulder, staring at the note. “I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Maybe they didn’t take him just because of me.” The guilt loosened its grip. I turned, pushing past Jack out of the claustrophobic closet. “Maybe it’s more. What could he know about the mandate? Something about the One?”

  Jack followed and took the note. He held it up to the light, twisting it from side to side. “Fitz would have told me if he knew something like that.”

  I perched on the edge of a white ottoman. Just how many secrets did Mr. Emerson have? “What exactly does the mandate say? The whole thing.”

  Jack didn’t take his eyes off the note as he said,

  The rightful One and the girl with the violet eyes.

  The One, who walks through fire and does not burn.

  The girl, born of the twelve.

  Their fates mapped together become the fate of the Circle.

  Through their union, the birthright of the Diadochi is uncovered.

  The riches of Iskander, the power of Zeus, the means to vanquish the greatest enemies.

  The One, when it is his, becomes invincible.

  I drummed my fingers on the ottoman. “Again?” He’d said it so quickly, the words had blurred together, like he’d recited it a thousand times.

  He repeated the mandate, enunciating this time.

  “Wrong about the mandate,” I repeated. “The girl with violet eyes doesn’t seem like it could be wrong. What about the other lines?”

  Jack rubbed the back of his neck. I could tell he was still trying to wrap his mind around anything about the mandate being uncertain. “‘Vanquish the greatest enemies’ seems obvious. We know what the union is.”

  “At least you think you do,” I said. It would be great news for me if that was what was wrong.

  Jack gave me a sideways glance. “As I said, it’s highly likely our interpretation is correct.”

  I slipped out of my shoes and stretched my feet against the cool hardwood. “What the Order cares about is the One, right? They’re trying to kill him right now. What does it say about the One?” I tried to forget I was talking about a person I was supposed to marry. “There’s the ‘walk through fire’ line.”

  “That could mean any number of things,” Jack said, pacing, “but it’s accepted to mean a proverbial trial by fire. The One who is the strongest would be able to make it through difficult times.”

  “We’re supposed to find three things,” I said to myself. “I wonder if it could be clues about the mandate. About the One. And that’s what he thinks they’re wrong about.”

  Jack just shook his head. “If he knew something about who the One was and kept it a secret . . . I just don’t know why he’d do that.”

  I didn’t either. “For now it doesn’t matter what he means by ‘wrong about the mandate,’” I said. “He said to follow what he left. We can think about the mandate stuff if we find anything, but we have to follow his clues first.”

  Jack’s eyes darted to me. I could see the hesitation in them. I knew he really should send me to the Saxons. The longer he didn’t turn me in, the more trouble he’d be in if they found out. But telling them would mean they’d want me there right away and we wouldn’t be able to help Fitz.

  I found the compass points on his tattoo. As Jack stood right now, the north tip of the compass pointed right at me. There was something beautiful about it, but now that I knew what it meant, it seemed sinister, too. With consequences like those in play, could I actually trust him?

  “Do you think the curated collection means the Hagia Sophia? He volunteered there, right?” I said, watching for his reaction.

  Jack tapped his thumb against his lip for a few seconds, and then dropped it and squared his shoulders with a long exhale. “Yes. We should start there.”

  If nothing else, I did believe he was worried about Mr. Emerson and would do anything to help. I’d just have to keep my guard up. I nodded and worked my aching feet back into my shoes.

  Jack had been pacing from the mirrored closet door to the leather armchair sitting on a sheepskin rug, but now he hesitated in front of me. “I understand how you feel, you know. About the mandate. About all this.”

  I looked up. “I’m not even worried about that right now. I just want to help Mr. Emerson.” I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap. “And I don’t think you could possibly know how I feel about it.”

  He offered me his hand to help me up. “For someone in the Circle,” he said, “the union would be a huge honor. For you . . . this isn’t your world.”

  He flicked his eyes to mine, and those old butterflies in my belly gave the slightest flicker of their wings. He let go of my hand.

  I swallowed, then rubbed my face. My fingers came away smeared with mascara, and I realized I’d probably looked like a drowned mess this whole time.

  “I’m going to wash my face before we go,” I said. I needed a second to not think about all this.

  Jack nodded. “I need to borrow a shirt from Fitz anyway,” he said, rolling his shoulders. The shirt from Prada was a little tight, and stretched taut across his shoulders. The butterflies flapped harder, but I shook them off. What was wrong with me? How could I possibly be thinking about how good he looked in a tight shirt right now?

  Jack gestured to the attached bathroom and disappeared back into the closet. I paused at the dresser, where he’d set the picture of him and Mr. Emerson. Mr. Emerson’s eyes sparkled from behind his glasses, and even Jack’s expression was a little less serious than I was used to. They were standing at what appeared to be the base of a snow-covered mountain.

  “How old were you in this picture?” I said. It was so strange that Jack had known Mr. Emerson at the same time I had—it was like we’d been living parallel lives.

  “It was my fourteenth birthday.” Jack’s voice was muffled. “Fitz always said birthdays were the most important holidays, and I could do whatever I wanted if I was with him.”

  Mr. Emerson had said that to me, too. For my ninth birthday, he’d taken me and my mom to see The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie, at this tiny independent theater that served macaroni and cheese while you watched. It was my favorite birthday of all time.

  I stepped into the bathroom but glanced back in time to see Jack’s white button-down shirt hit the floor in the doorway. I stared at it for a second too long, then turned on the sink and splashed cold water on my cheeks.

  “If I’d wanted to lie on the couch and watch television all day, he would have let me,” Jack went on. “But when I turned fourteen, I wanted to climb Mont Blanc.”

  I dried my face and dug my contact drops out of my bag. I put a drop in each of my tired eyes. “That’s in the Alps, right?”

  “The peak of the Alps. He told the Saxons it was a training trip. He said he would have taken his own grandson if he’d had one. It was worth it, even if the sunburn lasted for days.”

  I could see the edge of the picture out the door. Both their noses were bright pink, but Mr. Emerson wore a huge smile.

  Jack walked out of the closet, tugging a clean white V-neck T-shirt over his head, and my fingers paused partway through raking my hair back into a ponytail. Then my gaze found the ridges of muscle above his hip bones and I turned back quickly, concentrating hard on twisting my hair tie.

  Still, out of the corner of my eye, I could see him study me. He pulled a black blazer from the closet, and held up a cream one for me.

  “You should put this on,” he said.

  I looked down at my skimpy dress, and realized that we were very much no longer in a club. “Yeah,” I said, holding out my hand. “Muslim country and all.”

  I could swear he blushed. “It’s pretty progressive here, actually, but it’s just that you’re, you know.” He studied his shoes, but waved a hand in the general direct
ion of my body. “And that dress is . . . and we’re trying not to draw attention . . . and I guess it would be respectful . . . Never mind.”

  He shoved the blazer in my hands.

  The last time I’d seen him anything less than perfectly poised was when he was asking me to prom. Was it possible that invitation hadn’t been entirely fake?

  “Thanks,” I said. I pulled the blazer on and rolled the sleeves so they wouldn’t cover my hands.

  Jack leaned over the sink. It felt weirdly intimate, washing up together. I’d done this at sleepovers, of course, but Jack washed his face differently, less carefully. Like a guy. I tried not to stare at the way he splashed water everywhere, at how he ran wet fingers through his hair, at the drops of water resting on his eyelashes.

  I looked into my own eyes in the mirror again. “Why the eyes? If the Diadochi were his generals, and not relatives, how do the families all have purple eyes?”

  “It is odd, genetically, but the prevailing theory is they were all distantly related to start with, and interbreeding over the years concentrated the gene for the eyes.”

  I handed him a clean towel. Jack scrubbed his hair and it stuck up in all directions. For some reason, right then, I realized why what he’d said about that picture seemed off.

  “Wait. You said Mr. Emerson would have taken his grandson hiking if he had one. But he does,” I said. “His name’s Charlie.”

  Jack stopped still, and slowly lowered the towel. His dark hair hung damply over his forehead. “Did you say Charlie?”

  The famous Charlie Emerson. “He used to tell me stuff about his grandson.” I backtracked to the dresser and picked up the picture. “We were about the same age, and it’s like he wanted us to be friends from afar . . .”

  Like a few years after we moved away, Mr. Emerson’s Charlie update was about how they went on a long hike for Charlie’s fourteenth birthday, and they both got sunburned.