Final Fall

by Heather W. Petty

  She recovered from my barb quickly, but not fast enough to make me think it had all been a ploy. “Then maybe we’ll leave you behind.”

  I didn’t react to the threat. I couldn’t allow myself to show my true fear at her words. But she knew.

  “No witty comeback? Does that mean you’re ready to play nice?”

  I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t look away. But my insides felt like they were boiling.

  “Don’t forget that I’m their aunt now. I’m their legal guardian, so unless you’re ready to follow through on all your threats, we’re stuck with each other from now on. You’ll get used to the idea eventually.” She studied my face. “Or not. Either way, you’ll follow me until one of us dies.”

  I forced a grin, which was apparently not the reaction Alice expected. “Be careful what you wish for, Auntie.”

  Chapter 7

  My brothers fell asleep rather readily, leaving me awake with three posted guards that night. They prowled the barn and did random checks for my location. If I didn’t respond, every corner of the cell would be lit up with flashlights. I thought at first that I’d just pissed Alice off, but then I remembered about her “date.”

  And that we were leaving soon.

  And what she’d said a few days ago: Do you think this is a coincidence? Now, of all times?

  She was worried because she was planning something. It was the only possibility that made sense. And tonight she was meeting with someone important. I had to find out who it was, which meant I had to be believably asleep the next time the guards checked.

  I quickly tiptoed my way through the maze of my brothers’ sleeping bags and to my cot, then assumed the most careless sleep position I could think of. I waited, and to distract myself, I thought through what I knew already and tried to decipher Alice’s plans.

  Alice wanted to be my mum, I knew that for sure. Only not the Emily Moriarty I’d known. She wanted to be Emily Ferris, the woman my mum was before she’d met my father. She wanted to be a mastermind, and to pull jobs, she wanted me on her team. But I didn’t know what she wanted me to do. Not really. She thought she could control me with access to my brothers, but she had to know by now that I would always be looking for a way to escape her, to destroy her plans. Did she really think she could use me as. . . what had Trent called me? Her sword?

  No. But what, then? What would a con artist want with an underage, hostile student who hadn’t even taken her A levels yet?

  I was interrupted from my thoughts by the sweep of light across my face. I groaned and turned over in what I hoped was a believably sleepy way.

  I saw the light flash around me and then heard a hoarse whisper. “Oy! You awake in there?” I focused on regulating my breathing, exhaling just enough to make my inhales seem as natural as possible. Lucas—I was pretty sure it was Lucas—called out quietly twice more within the next half hour, and when I didn’t stir, he gave up and the light went away.

  “Sleeping. Which of you’s going out? They’ll need an extra at the gate.”

  I didn’t wait to hear who it’d be. I was up and moving while Lucas was still walking away from my cell, and used the alcove escape route to climb up in the rafters before he turned off his flashlight. And then it was completely dark. I grinned. Four months ago, I’d have been frozen on a single wobbling rafter, afraid to move. But Trent had taught me well. I gave my eyes a few seconds to adjust, then moved toward the center support beam to make sure none of the rafters squeaked under my steps.

  It felt like a marathon of careful movements before I could climb back down. I dropped into the dirt right by the barn door, pulled my hands into my sleeves, and pulled my hair down over my face to wait in the dark corner for the guard to leave. I held the door before it could shut behind him, then slipped out, timing my steps with his gait so he wouldn’t hear me. From there I worked my way to the garden. There were more guards than usual, roaming the grounds, which only made me more suspicious.

  Almost ten minutes passed before I spotted a gap in their shifting pattern of walking the property—one that hadn’t been there when I first hid among the vegetables in the garden. I didn’t take the time to think too much of it, but I was careful when I rounded the house. I ducked below windows and stayed out of the glow that emanated from them. But I didn’t stray too far, and when I came to the other side of the kitchen area, I heard voices. They were faint at first but steady. I passed some kind of mudroom that extended off the house and then ducked under a frosted window, most likely the restroom. The voices got louder. Loud enough to hear if I stood just to the side of the big bay window that gave me a view into the sitting room.

  “And who will pay our expenses to the States?” asked a man. His voice was deep and tonal, like the lowest voice in a barbershop quartet.

  Alice spoke next. “Your expenses will be covered, but only for travel. We’ll plan a job within the first month, however, so money shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “I’ll need some papers to fool my mom.” This voice I thought I recognized, but it was impossible. So I moved closer to the window and closed my eyes to focus my hearing. It just couldn’t be her.

  “Something along the lines of a school trip?”

  “That’ll work. Make it something I won with my grades, and she’ll force me to go.” Lily. It was Lily Patel, here in Piddinghoe. And she was planning to go with Alice to the States?

  I peeked around the frame of the window, still in disbelief, but there she was, sitting on some kind of stool near the hearth. There were maybe four or five others—at least three men and another woman—but I studied her, as if she were an Imaginary like Lock, thinking that if I looked at her long enough, she’d fade away like he always had. But she stayed there in Alice’s sitting room, as real as all the others. I could even see the black ribbon holding her father’s cross pendant disappearing under her collar and a brand-new handbag leaning up against her crossed ankles.

  Of course it was Lily. She wanted so much to revive Sorte Juntos. She was desperate to keep a connection to her father through some ridiculous idea of legacy. And Alice had been the one with the burner phone that night in the park, spying on Lily during her drunken rantings against her mother. Alice had seen it all and had made Lily her mark.

  I closed my eyes, wondering just how deep Alice had her hooks into Lily and berating myself for how slow I’d been to see it. And when I opened them, I was staring right into Lily’s eyes.

  I shrank back into the shadows, but it was too late. I knew she’d seen me and could so easily point me out, without ever knowing the mess she was throwing me into. So I stayed still for a few seconds, and when it didn’t seem like any kind of alarm had been raised, I peered back through the window. Lily only gave me a side glance this time, and she kept her head mostly facing forward so Alice and the others wouldn’t notice.

  She was way more clever than I gave her credit for, which she proved again when she dropped her hand down by her side and started to form letters with her fingers. First an L, then an O, then another O. I waited for another side glance and then nodded and snuck back toward the frosted-glass window.

  A sound somewhere up ahead made me retreat away from the house into a nearby hedge. I watched as a figure in black walked by, taking almost my exact path along the house. He seemed familiar, but it wasn’t until he reached the bathroom window that he faced me. And then the window opened, letting a brighter light out that shone full on his face.

  Stan. He ducked and pressed his shoulders up against the siding of the house to slide by underneath. I waited where I was until he was past the mudroom and heading toward the sitting room window. Part of me wanted to follow him and see what he was doing, but Lily’s face had already appeared in the bathroom window. I couldn’t have her call my name and alert him that I was there.

  I checked to make sure Stan’s back was still to me, then ran for the house. At practically the same time, I asked, “How are you here?” and Lily asked, “When did you get here?” />
  “Me first,” Lily said. “When did you get here and why are you hiding outside?”

  I shushed her and moved closer before I whispered, “What did Alice tell you about me?”

  “She lied. She said you had changed schools to get away from the rumors and gossip. I knew that wasn’t true.”

  “It isn’t.” I stopped to listen for approaching steps, and when there weren’t any, I leaned back against the house.

  “Why are you hiding out here? Where have you been?”

  I sighed. “I need your help.”

  When she didn’t respond, I said, “I don’t have time to tell you everything now, but I’m coming back to London soon. I’m going to take down my father and all his men, but I’ll need your help to do it.” I glanced up, expecting to see a little bit of glee from her at the prospect of doing anything that would damage my father, but she seemed stoic. “Will you help me?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and when I looked back, I was surprised to see how dark Lily’s expression had grown. “He dies first.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my condition. I don’t want your father to be taken down. I want him to die, and I want him to die before anything else happens.”

  “I want him dead more than you do, but it might be easier to get to him if his men are all out of the way.”

  “No,” she said, her voice cracking in what sounded more like pain than anger to me. “Every day that he breathes is a day he stole from my father and I can’t have that. Not one more day. I can’t bear it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept quiet and looked away to let her dry her tears in private, but I could hear them in her voice.

  “He dies first and I’ll help you in any way you want.”

  I nodded my promise and, for just a moment, wondered at how small it felt to make such a giant vow. I’d just promised to kill my own father the way some might agree to meet up for ice cream after class. It was such a certainty to me that he would die. In my mind, he was already dead. It was just the chore of actually killing him that was still left to do. And I would do it with every pleasure.

  “You can help me first with information,” I said. But then we both heard voices growing louder, coming down the hall, and I kept quiet until they passed. “Quickly, tell me what she’s planning.”

  Lily smiled widely. “It’s brilliant. She’s taking Sorte Juntos to America. We’ll be there for three months, and I’ll be the locksmith just like my dad.”

  “And you’re leaving soon?”

  “She leaves in four days and I’m to join them in a month.”

  I frowned.

  “But you know all this, Mori. You’re supposed to be part of it.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not. She’s only keeping me here by using my brothers as leverage.”

  “Alice? But she’s your aunt.”

  “I don’t have time to explain. But you shouldn’t make any plans, Lily. If I’m to escape, I’ll have to stop her from leaving as well, which means. . .”

  Her smile dropped. “No Sorte Juntos in America.”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  She sighed. “It’s the only way?”

  I nodded. “If she takes me with her to America, I’ll never be able to reach my father. It has to be now.”

  “Priorities,” she said.

  I heard faint footsteps in the dark and thought Stan might be coming back. “I have to go. I’ll find you as soon as I reach London.”

  “Right. And you owe me a bank heist.”

  I grinned. “We’ll have to see about that.”

  Chapter 8

  I made it back to the garden with ease. Alice’s new team members were leaving the farm, and half the guards were leaving with them. I knew this was the ideal time to go back to my cell. I had this perfect window to sneak in when I was almost guaranteed a clear path. I could make it back to my cot with no one knowing I’d left. And my brothers were there. I could wake them to play midnight games. . . just in case.

  Just in case? Pretend Lock asked.

  I tried to ignore him, but, as in reality, my Lock was never one to mind someone else’s feelings about anything.

  In case your plans go wrong? In case you can’t find a way to get them away from her?

  I felt a shiver run through me and turned my head away, so he couldn’t see my expression. But it didn’t help. He was sitting in front of me no matter where I looked.

  In case your only way to escape is to leave them behind?

  “No.”

  I hadn’t meant to say the word aloud, nor had I meant a silly re-creation of Sherlock Holmes to bring me to tears, but when I opened my eyes again, I couldn’t see him through the blur. And when I blinked, he was gone. Pretend Lock never stayed to pick up the pieces. Even in my weakened state of barn-induced madness, I couldn’t allow myself to be comforted by my own delusion.

  Or maybe I was stalling, still unwilling to give up my freedom for the chance to play hangman or noughts and crosses by flashlight in the dirt of my cell. The idea of willingly putting myself back into that horrible, mind-deadening space was more than I could bear. Not yet. My thoughts were too large to fit in that building. They screamed inside my head in a constant refrain, despite how hard I tried to push them down. I played games to quash my thoughts. I repeated silly quotes from silly authors who spent their days making up silly stories when they could have been doing something real, something important.

  Sadie would’ve stopped being my friend if she’d ever heard me say that.

  Sadie. God, how I wished I could stop thinking about Sadie. Stop seeing her wide eyes in that drawing and my father’s hand around her throat.

  I’d thought promising to kill my father was small—a nothing. That was easy to think when I was making promises to Lily, but it was so large in my mind every day. He was large, his death was large, and perhaps my true reasons to end his life should have been just as large. But they weren’t.

  What are your reasons? Imaginary Lock was back, sitting among the aubergines, their deep purple a fitting color for his dirt throne. He was reading a book, and couldn’t even bother to look up from the text to get my answer.

  Not that the answer was particularly compelling. When I thought of all the reasons why my father should die, I could only think of Sadie, who brought a pie, and my brothers, who knew every hiding place in our home to escape him, and Lily’s father, who drank beer from black cans—all of them resided in a constant spinning mass within a jar labeled reasons in my mind.

  Imaginary Lock looked up from his book. A pie. A can of beer. Those are your real reasons?

  No, I answered him. But they are enough.

  The last set of car taillights disappeared down the road outside the farm, and I watched Alice stride through the grass back to her house with a giant smile that I wanted to claw from her mouth.

  Will you kill her as well? Lock asked, turning the page of his book.

  A fair question. I’d let myself trust Alice. I thought surely we’d found the one person in all the earth who wouldn’t lay a finger on us. I trusted her with the only people who meant anything to me.. . .

  Except for Sherlock. I closed my eyes to make him go away, and when I opened them, his aubergine throne was empty. But that didn’t chase him from my thoughts. No matter how I tried, nothing I did could get him out of my head, and I hated him for that. I hated time. Because that was the real culprit. Nearly five months locked in a cage with nothing but time and no distraction.

  Alone with my thoughts, I couldn’t repel them like I wanted. I couldn’t lock them in a room and ignore the knocking, because there was nothing to drown out the sounds. Just me. So I sat among the plants I’d toddled through when I was small, and I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the night—the sounds of the farm that used to be my mum’s sanctuary.

  The ideas of sanctuary and my mum didn’t go together well. And that thought felt traitorous, as did almost all thoughts of m
y mum in this place. I wanted to love her, to remember only the woman who showed me how to flip a coin across my fingers and who ferociously danced aikido katas with her sword. But all that I knew about her was ruined now. Her sword was no longer part of her graceful, dangerous movements; it was a weapon that tore through the flesh of her best friends. Her coin was no longer a childish trinket; it was a symbol of her past crimes. Even that house she bought with the spoils of her heists was tainted—it held memories of the bloodied faces of her children, of an old, battered woman bleeding to death on the carpet.

  My mum’s secrets even ruined my happiest childhood memory. This farm was supposed to be a safe space—this garden a testament to what real love looked like. She was everywhere here, and there were nights that I could’ve escaped my prison but didn’t because I wasn’t ready to face her and all the things she could’ve done to help us before she died.

  She could have brought us all here. She could have taken her money from her stash with Alice and helped us all to escape my father. When she knew she was sick, we could have run. Why had she left us there? With him? Why, when she knew who he was?

  I knew the answers. Of course I did. I just hadn’t wanted to admit them to myself, because I knew I would hate her after. And then even she herself would be ruined. So I pretended that I didn’t know she was a monster. That only a monster could be loved by the horror show that was my father. Only a monster loves one in return. She didn’t help us escape because she loved him. Or she didn’t want to die alone. Did it matter which? We weren’t enough for her. She needed him more than she cared about what would happen to us when she was gone.

  Or maybe she’d known this farm wasn’t the escape I wanted to believe it was. That thought made me feel better. If I could believe my idyllic, pastoral memories of this garden and Alice’s parents were just a distraction from the farm’s dark underbelly—the darkness that locked Alice in a cage and turned her into a fraud, a thief, and a killer—then I could forgive my mum for not leaving us here. I could sit in that tainted garden and listen to the night in a place that was no one’s sanctuary.