by Amanda Foody
“Sorina, you never would’ve been able to create your illusions without me. Look at Tree. He’s barely sentient. He’s dangerous and violent. That was the extent of your powers before. I was the one who helped your powers grow. Without me, you wouldn’t have had any of them. I’ve been training you for this since I found you.”
“How can I believe anything you say?” I ask. “You could’ve altered all of my memories. Did you actually save me from slavers,
or is that just a story you made up to guilt me into working with you?”
He ignores the question and gestures behind him, to the commotion happening outside the tent. “After the Up-Mountains fall and the Down-Mountains are free, you can always recreate your friends. They’re only imaginary, after all. They’re not real.”
I squeeze my hands into fists. How can he say that? He attended both Blister’s and Venera’s funerals. He sent them presents on their birthdays. Asked me how they were doing with school. Watched their performances.
But it was all for show. All so that he could kill them in the end.
Nausea falls over me, and I cup a hand over my stomach. I should’ve seen the truth. I should’ve seen this side of my father. All those years, I thought he wouldn’t share the responsibility of Gomorrah’s proprietorship with me because I was too young, too stupid. But really, he didn’t want me close to the truth. Had I simply stepped outside the Freak Show tent, ventured more than a few times to the Downhill, I could have learned the truth on my own.
This is my fault.
“You’ve been plotting to kill them from the beginning,” I say. “I’ve just been a tool for you. Not a daughter, not your heir. Just a tool you could use to start a war.”
“No. Never,” he says, almost like he means it.
But I don’t believe him. Not anymore.
“Let me go.”
“Don’t leave. We’re so close.” He squeezes me tighter until my arm hurts. “It would’ve been easier to make you forget them altogether, to save you the pain.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because, as I’ve found out, I cannot use mind-work on your illusions, just as Kahina cannot see them in her fortune-work. It ends up messy, imprecise.”
Then it’s over. Nicoleta knows the truth. He won’t be able to make her forget.
Unless he kills her.
He reaches toward me and unties my mask. It drifts to the floor.
“The pain of losing a loved one... Wouldn’t you rather forget? I could do that...simply wipe them all from your mind, the way I first did when you created Luca. You could start over. Start fresh—”
“I’m not going to forget them,” I hiss. I try to squirm out of his grip. “I don’t want to.”
“Why waste the opportunity for relief? I would’ve been grateful for such relief after my mother died or when my uncle was killed where he stood by a religious zealot. If only I could ease my own mind the way I can ease yours.”
Villiam leans down to my forehead, as if to kiss me, and I instantly cover it with my hands.
“I don’t want to force you, my dear,” he says, through gritted teeth. He grabs my other arm, as well, and yanks both away. In the process, he drops his crutches and, wincing, puts pressure on his broken leg. He presses his thumb against my brow bone.
When he touches my skin, a pain stabs through my head, as if Villiam has clawed his way into my brain. I shake. I should run. I should get out of here. But my legs won’t move, as if the pain is rooting me to where I stand. He lets go of me, now that I can no longer flee. I raise one shaking hand to cover my forehead where he touched me, where the pain still lingers.
“Exander is evil,” he says. “You know what he thinks of us? That we’re scum. He’d burn all of Gomorrah and our people’s homes in a heartbeat. With him alive, the deaths of your other illusions will be meaningless. The Alliance will survive. Yet you’d let him live.”
“I’d let Luca live,” I say.
“Luca isn’t a real person. He’s a figment of your imagination, one you and I brought to life.”
“I won’t let you hurt him,” I say again.
I press past the pain in my mind to search for some kind of illusion, anything, even the moth. Something I can use to escape. But it’s hard to concentrate beyond the pain, beyond the shrieking outside, beyond the smell of Villiam’s cologne. It’s hard to delve deep enough in my mind to escape the reality in front of me.
He lifts my chin up, forcing me to look at him. “I can make you forget this whole conversation. I can make you forget anything. You only need to move your hands.”
Agatha told me that there is magic in a kiss. That must be what Villiam needs to dig into my mind properly—a kiss, on my forehead. I’d always thought it was meant for comfort. For love.
He rips my hands away from my forehead and kisses me. The pain in my head increases tenfold, and I scream as he splits my mind in two. I see flashes of my memories, as if I’m caught in a dream. I see the night of Gill’s death and my argument with him about working with Jiafu. I see Jiafu’s blood spill to the ground when the official stabbed him in the throat. I see Luca’s head rolling at my feet. I see the apothecary where Luca told me he suspected Hellfire could kill him. I see the charms he kept in his vest, the charms crushed on the ground outside the Menagerie.
The pain squirms around my thoughts like a worm. It reaches my row of Trunks, then it slithers to the farthest one: Luca’s. It yanks the Trunk open.
Luca appears beside me. He groans as he fights to move, but, like me, Villiam has him frozen. He presses his thumb to Luca’s forehead. “It does not take precision to break someone,” Villiam murmurs.
“Get. Out. Of. My. Mind,” he snarls at Villiam, his dark eyes almost black with rage.
“It won’t last long.”
Another scream. Luca falls to his knees.
“Don’t touch him,” I beg. “Please. Please.”
“This wouldn’t hurt so much if you had only listened to me, Sorina. If you hadn’t gone looking for answers yourself and lied to me. You never would’ve met him to begin with. Nicoleta tried to warn you. So did Venera. If you hadn’t met him...this mess would never have happened.”
Villiam leans down and kisses Luca’s forehead.
Luca screams.
The pain in my mind lessens. Slightly. With Villiam focusing so much energy on Luca, I now have more room to breathe. I don’t dare move an inch to clue Villiam in to this but instead frantically search through my mind for some kind of an illusion. I settle on hornets.
We hear the buzzing first.
Then they appear, one by one, as if sprouting from the earth. They circle the air around me and Villiam, so loud they drown out the noise of everything but Luca’s screams.
“I can see through your tricks, Sorina,” Villiam says. “You can’t actually hurt me.”
Still, I order the fake hornets to attack Villiam. Whether or not he knows they aren’t real won’t stop him from feeling the pain of their stings.
Villiam grunts, but his concentration must not waver, as Luca doesn’t stop screaming. However, the pain in my own head lessens. Sweat rolls down the side of my face, and I lift my hand to wipe it away.
My mind eases open to me like a sigh, and I search around it as if I’m crawling and reaching for things in the dark. I find a Trunk—I’m in too much pain to identify whose it is. Hopefully it’s Tree, who could stampede over Villiam just like he did to Agni. This time, I’ll be ready for the sound of bones crunching. I’ll be ready to watch my justice carried out.
But if it isn’t Tree, who is seven feet tall and capable of protecting himself, then whichever illusion it really is could be in danger. How could Unu and Du save Luca? By slapping Villiam across the face?
But it’s the only shot I have.
&
nbsp; I open the Trunk, and the Strings slip out like a rope dropping off a cliff. They run and run and run until a silhouette appears beside me in the darkness, one with sharp hair curling on his head.
Crown.
His face hardens as he examines the scene before him, of Luca screaming, of me sweating and trembling on the ground. I curse. It could’ve been anyone other than Crown. Crown has been weak after Blister’s death, and this...this could kill him.
Crown, however, doesn’t hesitate. Not for a moment.
He takes off the glove on his right hand and drops it to the ground, exposing the razor-sharp fingernails beneath.
And he stabs his arm straight through Villiam’s heart.
Villiam, Crown and I each let out a cry—Villiam’s of agony, Crown’s of anguish and mine of horror. Luca collapses, gasping for breath. The hold on me breaks, and I immediately rush to Luca’s side. I place his head in my lap.
“Are you all right?” I ask. “Please, please be all right.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, and he doesn’t speak for almost a minute. Just when I am certain he is gone, he manages, “I’m fine. Just a migraine.”
“Thank goodness,” I say, over and over. I kiss his cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
He takes a deep breath, but his expression remains rigid. “I know.”
Crown pulls his arm out from Villiam’s chest, and my father falls face-first into the grass. His usually clean shirt is stained a deep scarlet. Even knowing everything he’s done, all the hurt he’s caused me, I still cry out. Another member of my family is dead.
“You killed my little boy.” Tears spill from Crown’s eyes. He grabs his glove off the ground and covers his blood-soaked hand. “Evil, evil man.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I help Luca to his feet, but he’s so weak that he needs to lean on me for support. Not that I have much to give him. I’m so shaky from crying that I can barely stand myself. Like mine, his hair is stringy with sweat, and his whole body feels hot to the touch. “Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask him.
He winces. “I’m fine.”
“What do we do with him?” I ask, nodding toward Villiam’s body, which I refuse to look at. Several hours ago, he was my father. Now he’s a killer. It’s going to take me more than a few minutes to be able to process that. For now, I can only feel as though I’ve lost someone else I loved. Someone who betrayed me.
How much of my love was genuine and not the result of his manipulation?
How much was his?
“Move him to his caravan,” Crown snarls. “Then leave him for someone else to find.”
I startle at Crown’s tone. He so rarely says anything hurtful; his words are almost always full of kindness and encouragement. The harsh look on his face, the blood on his arm—this is a Crown I don’t recognize.
The Crown after Blister’s death.
“We’ll walk back to Kahina’s caravan,” I say. “She’s probably worried sick.” And I have no desire to stay here, with my father dead on our floor.
“You can summon Nicoleta,” Crown says, “if you don’t want to move him yourself.”
I examine my father’s body. “No. I should do it.” I can’t keep allowing Nicoleta to deal with all of my problems for me. And he was my father, not hers.
While Luca rests against the table, Crown and I pick Villiam up. I grab him under the arms, and Crown grabs his feet. I cringe. I have no desire to touch him or to be within five hundred feet of him. But we can’t leave him here. So I cast my moth illusion, and we carry him arduously to his caravan. We lay him on the floor by his bookcase.
Afterward, I dunk my hands in the water basin in our tent to wash away the smell of his cologne. I wipe the snot and sweat from my face, and Crown comfortingly rubs my back.
“It’s okay,” he says.
“I can’t believe it,” I say. “I can’t believe he did this to me. To us.”
Crown, Luca and I walk down the path to Kahina’s caravan, and I continue to cloak us in the illusion of moths. This is a strictly residential neighborhood, made up primarily of schools, homes and orphan tents. I picture Zhihao, Jiafu’s younger brother, and how he will cope with the news of Jiafu’s death.
Those who aren’t fighting by Skull Gate are packing and hiding in their caravans, as if prepared to leave at any moment. Several caravans are missing from their usual spots—perhaps they’ve already left. The usual smells of kettle corn and bonfires are gone. Everything smells of the smoke still smoldering over Skull Gate.
I bang on Kahina’s door until my fist hurts. She opens it and pulls me into a hug. “Sweetbug, sweetbug,” she says. “I was so worried. What’s happened to you?” She eyes the blood on Crown’s arm.
Kahina helps us inside the caravan, and I immediately collapse on her cushions. The other Trunks in my mind fly open, unable to be contained a second longer, and suddenly Kahina’s caravan is quite full with her, me, Luca, Crown, Nicoleta, Hawk, Tree and Unu and Du...as well as Kahina’s many potted plants.
“What happened?” Nicoleta asks. “Crown, your arm, are you hurt?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” he says softly.
All eyes turn to me to tell the story. I take a deep breath, slide my hand into Luca’s for support and begin.
I have to stop several times to cry, or to hear the way my words hang in the air—to hear the truth in them. Villiam, my father, killed the illusions, and he’s been planning to since the moment that I created them. The entire time I’d been paranoid about the killer watching us, I’d been right. He had been watching us. For much longer than I imagined.
And the worst part is to remember him at Blister’s and Venera’s funerals, helping us dig the graves. And how he comforted me after every single death. I was so naïve. And he...he’d been so cruel tonight. I’d never heard such harsh words escape him. I trusted him. I considered him my family. And that’s how he thought of me all this time. Not as a daughter but merely a tool.
But, still, I’m not sure about that. I don’t think I ever will be.
“All that matters is that we’re safe now,” I say.
“You killed him?” Unu asks Crown. “You killed the proprietor?”
“What was it like?” Du asks.
Nicoleta hushes them as Crown pales. “It’s rude to bring up things like that.”
“That man got what he deserved,” Crown says. “That’s all I have to say about it.”
And yet, I grieve for him. I grieve for the man I always thought of as my father.
“And, Luca,” Kahina says, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “A bit nauseous. Agni used charms to make me pass out. And my head hurts, of course, but that will pass.”
“Is there anything I can get for you?” she asks.
“Do you have any gin?”
She clicks her tongue. “Afraid not.”
“But there’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” Nicoleta says. “If each of us are tied to some...person, why not simply kill us anywhere? Why bring us all the way north, into the middle of a war? Villiam could’ve carried out his plans in the Down-Mountains, anywhere.”
“Because Sorina is a charm-worker, obviously,” Luca says. We wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t, as if that explanation is sufficient.
“I’m still not sure I understand you,” Nicoleta says with a hint of annoyance.
“Charms only work in close proximity. I had protective charms, but they only worked if I wore them. If one of you—us—are killed, it doesn’t mean anything unless we’re close enough to the person to whom we’re tied.”
You. Us. I’m reminded once more that Luca is one of the illusions, another person I made up. Which means that everything he remembers about h
is life before Gomorrah is a lie. He never had a life before Gomorrah.
I squeeze his hand. He doesn’t squeeze back.
“So are we going to leave now?” Hawk asks. “Gomorrah will go back south?”
“Who’s going to be proprietor now?” Unu asks.
“Luca could do it,” Du says. “Luca’s a genius, aren’t you, Luca?”
I am almost hurt that Du didn’t say anything about me. I was Villiam’s protégée. I’ve been training to become the proprietor for a long time, but no one had expected it to happen so soon.
But I cannot imagine myself succeeding Villiam. Not after everything he’s done. I don’t want anything to do with him or the Gomorrah family.
I wouldn’t make a good proprietor, anyway.
The corner of Luca’s lips twitch into a smile. “As if Gomorrah would want an Up-Mountainer to be their proprietor.”
“Then what about Nicoleta?” Hawk says. She tugs on Nicoleta’s sleeve. Though Nicoleta also resembles Luca’s people, she is hardly the only one in Gomorrah to do so, and she is from the Festival. People know her. People respect her. “You could be the proprietor. You’d keep everything very...organized.”
She laughs. “I could hardly—”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I say. “I think that’s perfect.”
Nicoleta watches me with apprehension, and I can almost see the questions floating around in her mind. Would Gomorrah take to a proprietor who isn’t a real person? But then a determined glint shines in her eyes, and she smiles.
* * *
I sit at Villiam’s table, holding an insect vial that Villiam must’ve intended to give me. It’s an oyster spider—not technically an insect but interesting nonetheless. Its eggs look like pearls, and it buries them in the sand near areas of salt water. I’m alone inside the caravan, debating about whether to keep the exotic gift from such a hateful man.
Outside, Gomorrah is burying Villiam’s body. Rumor has it that an Up-Mountain official murdered him.
