Sovereign Hope

by Frankie Rose

Morning was announced by Agatha thrusting orange juice under my nose. The acidic tang made my nose wrinkle.

  “What…?” I muttered, confused, pushing the glass away. Sleep hadn’t come easily after our foray into 1860. After all the things that transpired, it was the look on Daniel’s face as Jamie raced by that haunted me the most. Even now it was emblazoned behind my eyelids. He’d looked like a hollow shell of a person, a person who had lost everything. There was the rest of it, too. Aldan’s revelation that my hallucinations were really premonitions or visions of some kind, and of course, Kayden. But that all seemed terribly unimportant compared to the look of abject pain that had been evident in Daniel’s eyes.

  “Vitamin C,” Agatha said. “Drink.” She placed the glass down on the coffee table and then sat herself down at her desk, ready for a day of…whatever it was Agatha was always doing on the computer.

  He was nowhere to be seen, and that was all for the best. I was too distracted, trying to unravel the confused emotions that had gotten all tangled together over the past few days, to deal with any new Daniel-related run-ins. It was clear he hadn’t really expected to see Jamie, so why bother going back there at all? And why take me along for the ride, if you’re only going to get mad at me?

  He looked appalled that I’d seen him collapse in the street outside the British Museum. Horrified that I was staring right at him as he obviously struggled to reconstruct himself back into some cold, hard shell of a person. There had been no hiding the devastation on his face, or the tremor in his hands. His words, ‘No, of course I don’t want to go after him!’ had been so completely incredulous that I found myself wondering if the suggestion was somehow really insensitive. But no, if I had a brother or a sister and they died, I’d want to follow them no matter the cost, even if they were just a fleeting facsimile. A ghost.

  And I still couldn’t figure out why Daniel wanted to go dancing, of all things. Touching me clearly made him uncomfortable, like when he helped steady me at the clearing by Aldan’s house, or when he snatched his hands back as we went in or out of Aldan’s mind. That kind of dancing, proper dancing, had required him to hold me to him, to guide me and sweep me along in the movement of his body.

  I shivered. Falling into his arms, feeling him closer than he’d ever been before, his legs against mine, his arms locked tightly around me, was something I couldn’t afford to think about. It was too dangerous.

  Instead, I focused on something I knew would irritate the crap out of me: that inexorable, emotionless expression I’d grown to resent so much. After our run-in with Jamie, it was very clear Daniel was capable of true emotion, which led me to believe there was a lot going on beneath his closely guarded exterior. So why did he have to shut me out?

  A headache, the normal, run-of-the-mill kind, began beating at my temples. Aware of Agatha’s sharp eyes, I knocked back the orange juice and heaved myself to my feet. “I’m not sleeping out here anymore. At least in my room I don’t get force-fed vitamins.”

  Agatha grunted and screwed up her face. “Good. Your morning hair makes you look frightful. And you should be grateful, anyway. I’m trying to make you strong and healthy. I spoke to Aldan earlier, and he said—”

  “I don’t care what he said. If it has anything to do with visions, eternal damnation, or grudge matches between Daniel and other random, cute guys, I’m officially not interested.”

  “Cute guys, huh?” Agatha laughed. “Aldan didn’t mention anything about cute guys.” Her eyes glittered, holding an unknown edge to them that I couldn’t decipher.

  “Yeah. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Of course Aldan wouldn’t mention that Daniel got into a fight with some messenger from the Quorum. Unexpected brawling isn’t exactly out of the ordinary for you guys. Just the visions and the whole, oh, by the way, I think your mother is probably in hell bit, right?”

  “You saw a messenger?” Agatha had completely bypassed the sarcasm in my voice. She had blanched and was staring at me.

  “Some guy called Kayden. It was pretty clear he and Daniel have some sort of a history.”

  Agatha frowned. “You could say that. They’ve been fighting for the last fifty years.”

  Fifty years? Okay, so I wasn’t even surprised that Kayden wasn’t my age after all. He was too flawless to be normal. “Any chance you’re going to tell me why they’ve been fighting for the last fifty years?”

  Agatha’s expression, for once, was enigmatic.

  “You know what?” I sighed. “Don’t worry about it. I already know the drill. None of my business. Daniel’s story, etc. Pretend I didn’t even ask. What I do want to know is why you seem so shocked that a messenger guy showed up, and not that Aldan suspects my hallucinations are visions?” It did seem odd, primarily because it was pretty big news. How come she wasn’t exhaustively questioning me about my episodes again, now knowing that there could be so much more to the things I’d seen? Agatha shrugged, rifling through papers.

  “I am shocked. Aldan went on and on about the whole thing for hours this morning, though. Kind of took the punch out of the news. Sorry.” She raised her palms in a what-can-you-do? gesture. “On the other hand, I’m surprised about Kayden exactly because Aldan didn’t mention it. The Quorum only sends out a messenger if there’s an urgent, life-threatening reason. And they would never have let you see him unless it was really important. Aldan mustn’t want to tell me something.” Her lips pursed into a troubled pout.

  “Kayden didn’t talk to Aldan. He came to see Daniel,” I told her, wanting to ease her mind. Agatha’s silence was sonorous.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh?” Getting a reaction out of these people was like getting blood from a stone. They could make even the smallest words sound cryptic. Agatha opened her mouth but I held up my hand. “Never mind. I’m going for a shower.”

 

  ******

  I was clean and dressed by the time Daniel strolled through the entrance to the hangar. He wore a purple t-shirt with a tiny rip at the neck, exposing a flash of his collarbone, and his jeans were filthy with mud and red dust. His hair curled around his ears again, the way it did when he was hot or it got wet. It was weird, the things I thought about when I was around him. Right then it was, I wonder how often he gets that cut? The altercation he’d had with Kayden hadn’t left a mark on him, and for the first time I realized there was nothing wrong with my hands, either. No cuts or scrapes at all. I knew it wasn’t real, that everything had been staged inside Aldan’s head, but I still couldn’t separate that knowledge from how absolute it had all felt.

  When he saw me, Daniel cupped his hand to the back of his neck in a way that looked almost self-conscious, and then pinned it to his side again. I’d assumed he was sulking in his bedroom all morning, but he clearly hadn’t been. I let the book I was reading drop into my lap and scowled. “You’ve been outside?”

  Why, all of a sudden, did it feel like a betrayal that he’d gone somewhere without me? Yes, he’d sat watch outside the hangar after the stunt he’d pulled with Elliot, and yes, we’d spent a really perplexing day together yesterday, but he was still hardly ever at the hangar. He was out doing things alone most of the time.

  He gave me a bone-weary look. “Yeah. Is that a problem?”

  I was about to try and come up with something caustic to say but Agatha leapt to her feet and marched across the hangar towards Daniel. She moved so fast a gust of air rushed passed my head as she swept by in a blur.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Kayden?” she hissed, grabbing hold of his wrist in an attempt to pull him aside. Daniel shot me an accusatory glance, like it was me who had betrayed him, and pulled a face.

  “Because there was no point.”

  “There’s always a point where the Quorum’s concerned. What did he want? Was it about Elliot and Tobin?”

  “No. I would have told you if it was. It was… personal.”

  Tension worked its way into every line of Agatha’s body. Her hand had
turned white with the pressure she was exerting onto Daniel’s wrist. “Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn’t—”

  “Yes! I’m one hundred percent sure. Like I said, it was personal. It was about me and…” Daniel faltered. He was fixed on Agatha’s face, but he didn’t really seem to be seeing her. It was like he was staring hard at her in order to avoid looking elsewhere in the room. A muscle ticked at his jaw, and he gave Agatha a loaded look. “Okay?” he said.

  Agatha looked so absurdly small next to Daniel with her long, chestnut hair trailing down her back. Her body hadn’t lost its rigidity, but she said, “Okay.”

  My mom had worn Daniel’s meaningful look before, when she wanted to talk to her friends about something she thought I was too young to hear. It was a look that spoke volumes clearly not meant for my ears. It was infuriating.

  “Hey, guys. You can stop with the signaling. I’m going to see Aldan. You two can have your secret little conversation in private, okay?”

  “Farley, wait!” Agatha called, but I’d already made it to the corridor. I was tired of being excluded from conversations that impacted on my life as much as theirs. What gave them the right the drag me out of my world and hold me hostage in an underground bunker and then not share anything with me? What made it okay for them to demand I put my whole life on hold, for them to tell me I was special or cursed or doomed depending on which day of the week it was, and then not respect me enough to think I could handle the rest?

  Whatever their reasoning, it was wrong. Yet I knew, with a sinking certainty, as I stomped towards Aldan’s room, that I could have handled the situation better myself. After all, when you wanted to demonstrate your adulthood, the last thing you did was storm off like a little child.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Confessions