by Kit Alloway
Wasn’t it silly of me to think I could come here and not confront Peregrine? she wondered bitterly. We have been circling each other from afar, drawing slowly closer, since the day he killed my parents. We’ve swung around our orbits, but gravity has always been moving us toward the moment our paths would cross.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that Haley had picked a few long blades of grass and was twisting them together. “My family didn’t tell me about the Accordance Conclave,” she said.
Haley nodded as if he’d already known. Maybe he had.
“Now that I look back on it, they must have been hiding things from me for years. Newspapers kept getting lost on their way to us, or a page or two would be missing. Our liaison to the World started having”—she made air quotes with her fingers—“‘computer problems’ and couldn’t print the blogs I was reading. There’s no Internet in the Hidden Kingdom, of course.” She rubbed her eyes. “They must not have wanted me to know that support for staging was gaining so much traction.”
“Why not?” Haley asked.
“Because they knew I’d be obligated to try to stop it.”
Haley ran a blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s … Staging is very dangerous, isn’t it? More dangerous than people know.”
Mirren realized then how much Haley might have seen. She’d brushed his hand while reaching for the butter in the restaurant—or perhaps before that, the time she’d hugged him, the handshake … any contact could have revealed her secrets.
“Mirren,” he said, and he touched her again then, so hesitantly, just his hand on her back. He struggled for a moment before saying, “Everyone has secrets. I don’t … I don’t share what isn’t mine. It’s like … a responsibility.” He blushed prettily and added, “It’s a duty.”
Mirren knew then that gravity had brought her to Haley just as it had brought her to Peregrine. She had arrived alone in a strange land, and she could not believe that by mere chance, she could have met someone who so perfectly understood her responsibilities.
“Thank you,” she said.
Haley shrugged as if to say, Of course.
“No,” she said. “For being my friend.”
And he smiled.
“There’s something about you,” he said, his voice even quieter than usual but his words more certain. “I can’t look away.”
Her heart beat hard, twice. She wanted him to keep looking, yet she felt obligated to say, “You should get as far away from me as you can. It’s entirely possible that Peregrine Borgenicht will have me assassinated as soon as he finds out I’m alive.”
Haley shook his head. He took a deep breath and straightened his back, and Mirren saw that it was hard for him to sit up straight, to take up so much room in the World. “I’ll keep you alive—I mean, I’ll help. If you want, I mean.”
Then he ducked down a little, as if afraid of being such a tall target, and Mirren felt inspired by his tiny act of courage.
“I feel so betrayed,” she admitted. Her voice cracked with tears, but she didn’t care. “Now I have to forget about living my normal, peaceful life, because I have to stop the Lodestone Party from taking power.” She glanced around the park, which was spotted with dandelions she’d never had the chance to smell. “It would be such a shame to die now.”
“We won’t let you die,” Haley promised. “The others will help. They all hate him.”
“I just want…” She reached out to touch Haley’s face and then stopped herself. “I want everything, I suppose.”
She did want everything. She wanted to kill Peregrine and take over the government and go to college and eat sugar and kiss Haley. But somehow her life in the World was already becoming as predetermined as her life in the Hidden Kingdom had been. Gravity, she thought again, with less gratitude this time.
“Come inside,” Haley said. “We’ll find a way.”
“All right.” Mirren climbed to her feet. “But we should come back to this park sometime.”
“Park?” he asked.
“Yeah. This is a park, right?”
He smiled like he was trying not to laugh at her. “It’s an undeveloped lot with a storm drain.”
Mirren burst out laughing. “It is? But it’s so pretty!”
Haley held out his hand, and she took it. As they walked back toward the restaurant, he said, “I’ll take you to a real park.”
“Can we have a picnic?”
“Yes.”
Mirren squeezed his hand, even as she thought, We’d better go soon.
Seven
Feodor’s laboratory—all scorched ashes of roses wallpaper and metal autopsy tables covered with dirty crystals and shattered beakers. Josh sat in the window seat and looked out at the ruins of Warsaw, admiring how the different columns of smoke wove together like strands of silk thread, each its own subtle shade of gray.
“You can see so much more of the sky now that the buildings have been knocked down,” she told Feodor. “They should never have been put up in the first place.”
He laughed, a sharp sound that cut her ears. Josh winced and looked back out the window just in time to see the worsening rain bring down one of the few remaining chimneys. It made a sound like the rush of a creek as it fell.
Josh loved the city. She could sit in the window seat and stare out all day, or wander through the wreckage, admiring the poetry of shattered pottery, the tenderness of one-eyed dollies, the poignancy of discolored photographs. Sometimes she liked to try on stained clothing or broken jewelry that she found, modeling ripped silk stockings and blackened wedding dresses for Feodor.
But the city just as often infuriated her. Each time she tripped on rubble, coughed on the filthy air, felt a wall she was leaning against collapse, she thought, Something must be done about all this.
Leaving the window seat, she went to stand beside Feodor at one of the long tables where he had laid out his experiments. She recognized the circlet and vambrace immediately.
“Show me how these work,” she said, thinking of what their power could do to rebuild the city.
“I already showed you.”
“You showed me, but I want to understand. To know them the way I know you.”
He smiled at her, and when he spoke again, his tone was intimate, so soft that she had to lean forward to hear. “And how do you know me?”
She pressed the side of her leg against his, winding her foot around his shin like a snake. “Completely.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.” He continued to fiddle with the devices, and Josh insinuated herself between him and the table until she stood in the circle of his arms. “I know you better than I know myself.”
“Benefit of hindsight, I suppose,” he murmured, before kissing her lightly. His eyes were so many shades of gray, but each of them glowed with their own light, as if they still carried a bit of the fire that had turned them to smoke.
“Very well,” Feodor said, and he cupped her face in his hands. “I’ll help you understand.…”
He squeezed her head between his palms and began to lift. Josh scrambled to catch hold of his wrists, but her heels were already leaving the floor. A terrible pain spread from the base of her skull down into her neck as Feodor continued to lift her up. She clutched at his wrists, his arms, scratching, digging, then reached for his face, but her arms were too short. When her toes lost contact with the ground, the pain in her neck grew fearsome, the pain of a body’s weight hanging on sinews that simply could not support it.
Feodor’s eyes glowed white. “Now you know,” he said, and he shook her once, up and down, hard.
Her body fell to the floor.
Her head did not.
* * *
Josh actually screamed as she woke up. She had never done that before, but she did it now, and her hands came up around her neck to make sure it was still connected to her head. She tried to run from the nightmare but succeeded only in cracking her cheek on the bedroom wall, because for some
reason she had woken standing on her bed.
I’m going to die, she thought. I’m dying. No, I’m awake. It’s a trick. Where’s my head?
Strangely, it was her head she felt she had lost, not her body. She choked on her own breath, ran into the bathroom to retch, and ending up only coughing into the toilet. The invasive scent of the toilet bowl cleaner nauseated her even more.
She couldn’t calm down. She couldn’t stop touching her throat, her neck, digging with her fingers to make out each tiny vertebra.
Damn you, Feodor. Damn you, damn you, damn you. I should have killed you myself. I should have kept you alive and made you reverse what you did to me. I should bring you back to life and make you fix this.
The door at the other end of the bathroom opened, and Deloise—wearing a matching floral tank top and lace-edged shorts—rushed to Josh’s side.
“What’s wrong? Are you sick? I heard you scream.” She hugged her sister close. “It’s okay, Josh. It’s okay. You just had a bad dream.”
Josh hugged Deloise back, letting some of the hysteria work itself out in the embrace. Slowly, though, her breath did calm, and finally she was able to release her sister and sit back against the vanity.
Deloise poured her a glass of water and sat beside her as Josh drank it. “Want to tell me about it?”
Josh shook her head. She was aware that Deloise was worried about her, that she knew enough about Josh’s nightmares to be rightly concerned, but telling Deloise the details would have felt like deliberately exposing her to a deadly virus.
“Maybe you should go talk to a therapist,” Deloise ventured hesitantly. “I mean, it seems like the nightmares are getting worse instead of better.”
Josh stared into her water glass. She didn’t need a therapist—she needed an exorcist.
“I thought I was dating a therapist,” she joked. Deloise didn’t laugh.
“He’s not a therapist yet, and he’s in even worse shape than you.”
“I know, I know,” Josh said. She would have had a hard time not noticing. “I’ll be all right, Del.”
She spent a few minutes reassuring her sister, then Deloise hugged her again and went back to bed. Josh washed her face and returned to her own room.
She stopped dead in the doorway.
In her blind panic, she had not noticed the walls. Josh, who had never cared much for interior decorating, hadn’t painted or papered or hung posters, so until tonight the walls had been quite blank. But her subconscious—or perhaps Feodor’s subconscious—had thought them too blank, blank canvases, even, and she must have climbed on the mattress in her sleep, and that was why she’d woken standing, because the walls that formed a corner around her bed were covered in writing.
Mostly the writing appeared to be mathematical formulas. Some chemical. A large number of annotated diagrams showing how wires should be arranged, where magnets and crystals should be placed. An astonishingly detailed anatomical diagram of the circulatory system in the right arm.
He did this, she thought.
Six months before, she might have been able to grudgingly recognize E = mc2 as something Einstein had discovered. Tonight she knew it meant that an object’s mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light described how much energy the object could emit.
No, she didn’t know. She remembered.
Because Feodor had known.
She climbed onto the bed on her knees and traced the diagrams with a fingertip. There was the circlet, there was the vambrace. The drawings on the wall showed her how to treat the crystals, how to connect them to the wires, which wires to use, where the magnets should go, the direction of polarization.
Show me how these work. I want to understand.
Well, he had showed her all right.
She glanced at the clock—3:27. There was still time.
Sitting down with a large sketch pad, she transferred the writing on the wall onto paper. She did this almost entirely from memory, only occasionally checking the walls.
Exactly how much of Feodor’s memory she had was unclear to her. She suspected that all of it was in her mind somewhere, but information recall often had to be triggered by a dream or situational necessity. She hadn’t remembered that a Minotaur lived in a labyrinth until she’d needed to know.
Except that … As she copied, she realized that the plans were incomplete. The vambrace and circlet worked by using a signaling network built across the Dream, like cell phones communicating via cell phone towers, but the walls contained no instructions on how to build this network. Without it, the equipment was useless.
Josh felt disappointed and, at the same time, relieved. The vambrace and circlet were incredibly powerful. If she put them on, she’d be able to forget about connecting with the Dream mentally, forget her breathing exercises, forget struggling and fighting. The Dream would open to her like a flower blossoming. The vambrace and circlet would give her exactly the power she had been trying so hard to attain.
But since she didn’t have the complete plans, that was one moral argument she wouldn’t have to have with herself.
She worked until almost seven and then went down to the basement. A search of the numerous half-empty paint cans turned up no white paint, but she did find half a gallon of white primer, which was even better.
As Feodor’s diagrams and formulas vanished beneath the primer like rubble hidden beneath snow, Josh wondered if she should have copied the plans at all. Maybe they were somehow as morally corrupt as Feodor had been, as fundamentally dangerous.…
But she remembered the nightmare from a few nights before, how he had tried to save his little sister and her puppy, how angry he had been when Josh stopped him, and Josh thought of her own sister. If he had loved Bryga the way Josh loved Deloise, there had to have been something good in him, right? He had to have had a good heart beneath all the madness.
Was that even possible?
When the walls were again innocence white, Josh opened the window and turned on a fan, then tiptoed down to Will’s room to sleep. She managed not to wake him up this time as she slipped into bed. His back was turned to her, but she put her arm over his side and tucked her hand inside his. He was endearingly responsive when he slept: If she snuggled up against him, he would hug her close; if she put her hand in his, he would hold it.
But that morning, for some reason, he didn’t. His fingers fell heavy and lax against the back of her hand, and a sense of loneliness washed over her. Lately they were always off doing their own thing—he was in the basement with his laptop and his stalker wall, she was in the attic with her secret projects. She had begun to miss the days after their encounter with Feodor, when the medications kept the nightmares away and they were both too banged up and loopy on painkillers to do anything besides sit on the apartment couch together, watching movies, occasionally either making out or ordering pizza. For a few nights they’d even slept on the pullout couch together, their proximity sanctioned by the celibacy of their injuries and the public nature of the living room, and during the days they’d found time for what they’d never done previously: hanging out. They’d told each other crazy stories and jokes and made fun of television. Will had taught her card games. Josh had taught him knife tricks. She’d thought then that she was so lucky to have him, lucky to be with someone so genuine, who believed she was good enough just as she was, who always looked in her eyes when he said that he loved her.
She’d felt like she could tell him anything then, but the memories had come between them—his and Feodor’s. Now she had a whole new world of secrets she hadn’t shared with him and couldn’t share. He hated Feodor, and if he found out that the man’s memories were living in Josh’s subconscious, she was afraid he might start to hate her.
Or at least break up with her.
Someday we’ll both get over it, she told herself, watching dawn break over Will’s sleeping form. We’ll figure out how to live with it. Someday I’ll be able to tell him about the nightmares without him freaking
out.
Yeah, and he’d take down his stalker wall then, too.
Sure.
Eight
“So,” Will said, “maybe we should talk about what happened yesterday.”
Josh, who was sitting at the kitchen table and sharpening a knife with a whetstone, looked at Will with confusion.
“I mean at the restaurant,” Will clarified.
They were getting ready to meet with Davita, each in his or her own way. Mirren was arranging the tea set and trying to keep Josh from getting metal shavings all over the lace tablecloth. Haley was writing on his steno pad. Will was trying to prepare everyone emotionally. Out of all of them, Will felt he had the hardest job.
“The restaurant?” Josh asked.
“Yes. When Mirren went running out of it.”
Mirren’s face was as composed and distant as it had been the day before, her eyes politely cast toward the floor. After she’d returned from the parking lot with Haley, she’d claimed to have vomited into the bushes outside, blaming all the sugar and refined flour she’d eaten. Will hadn’t believed her for a moment.
Apparently Josh had. “She needed to puke.”
Will sighed. “Right. She needed to puke because Whim had just dropped it on her that your grandfather is the one responsible for killing her parents.”
“Oh, that.” Josh began sharpening her knife again, the blade grating loudly against the stone. “Whim didn’t know that would freak her out.”
“Josh.” Will felt himself quicken with anger, the way he did so often and so easily these days, and he briefly made his hands into fists in an attempt to release the energy. He couldn’t blame Josh for being Josh. “I think Mirren would feel more comfortable if she understood a little more about your relationship with Peregrine. Specifically the part where you aren’t fond of each other.”
“Oh,” Josh said again. “All right.” She spoke to Mirren but didn’t stop sharpening her knife. “I hate my grandfather. Like, a lot. He’s a terrible person, he treated my grandmother like crap, and he tried to get me, Haley, and Will tortured to death last February. I figure that makes you and me allies.” She used a towel to wipe the grit from her blade. “So we’re good?”
