“I—” She purses her mouth, words failing. She shakes her head.
“Here,” Nikolai says. And he hands her the glass of water.
She raises it to her lips.
57
NATASHA
Nikolai’s eyes are gray and serious. My throat is tight. We watch each other over the glass as I tip it to meet my mouth.
“Stop!”
The glass slips and shatters on the stone. Ella bursts from the snarl of plants not three feet from me. Nikolai and I lurch backward and leap to our feet.
“You didn’t drink?” Ella says. She doesn’t look at Nikolai. She doesn’t even seem to see him. “Tell me you didn’t drink.”
Her sleeve is torn to her elbow, her siren exposed. Blood beads her skin. Her nails are stained pink.
“Ella,” I say, “what’s going on?”
“Tell me you didn’t drink!”
Why is she yelling? I can feel my heart beating in my throat. Nothing makes sense.
“Natasha!” she says.
Dazed, I shake my head. No, I didn’t drink.
The conservatory door slams open. Andrei thunders in. He turns wildly from us to the glass to Nikolai’s stricken expression.
When I look at Nikolai, he stares at the shattered glass on the ground. The soggy mint leaves and crushed fruit.
“I heard something smash,” Andrei says. “What’s going on?”
But Ella’s still looking at me, pleading, almost, and I don’t get it. Nothing has made sense since Sofie and Ness died.
“How did you get in here?” Nikolai says. His voice is sharp, accusatory—scared. It makes me flinch. Ella doesn’t even look in his direction. She’s still staring at me.
Andrei takes a step toward Ella, but something he sees makes him reel back like he’s been punched. “You.” He’s staring at her wrist, bloodstained and ink-marked. “It’s you.”
Her eyes are wide. Then they find mine. She whispers one word, the way you would speak a prayer to the sea.
“Help.”
What is going on?
I’ve spent my whole life fleeing danger, running toward the place most secure. Guarding my heart, my body, my safety, my survival.
Blood rushes in my ears. I don’t know why Ella is here. I don’t know what Andrei means when he says It’s you. But I know the way he’s looking at her, reaching for her. Like he’s going to hurt her.
I grab Ella’s hand and we move.
Andrei is fast but we’re faster. We scramble past him and through the conservatory door. My heart leaps in my throat when Nikolai yells my name.
We tear through the snowy garden. Ella tries to tug me in the direction of the door, but I pull her the other way. I drop to my knees in the frost where a long, rectangular fountain spills over into a grate along the edge of the path. I lace my fingers through it and tug until the grate comes free. The opening is almost too narrow. Too narrow for Andrei, at least.
I slide through the gap and splash into the tunnel beneath. The water laps my knees.
A moment later, Ella lands beside me, spraying me with water, mud, and snow. When she looks at me, her eyes are wild, gleaming in the darkness.
Who are you?
Am I making a terrible mistake?
My hand swallows hers.
We run.
58
ELLA
I follow Natasha blindly through the black passageways. My breathing is shallow and sharp. I get the sense that we’re running downhill, deeper underground. Soon, the water laps my waist. It struggles against every step I take.
The sound of rushing water and sea grows louder. The passage ends at a grate overlooking a canal. Water spills out at our ankles.
Natasha squeezes through the bars of the grate. I turn myself sideways and slip out after her. Natasha’s hand appears above me. I take it. She hauls me onto the edge of a street. I recognize it. We’re a few blocks south of the palace.
Rain falls. It’s only a drizzle, but the melting snow has the canals teeming. Overhead, clouds disguise the stars. I shiver. My feet are well past numb.
Now that we’ve stopped, Natasha drops my hand. “Want to explain what happened in there?” she hisses.
I wince. Before I can say anything, I hear a clatter, like a cart tipping over a few streets away.
“Come on,” Natasha says. “We need to keep moving.”
Maybe we’ll keeping moving forever. Then I won’t have to explain what I just tried to do.
She sloshes through the puddled street, keeping a step ahead of me. The rain darkens her hair to rusted bronze, painting strands of it against the back of her neck. What’s going on inside her head? Does she realize I was trying to poison Nikolai? I don’t think she’d be helping me if she knew.
I don’t ask questions as we wind through the streets. I know we’re heading south, but once we pass Eel Shore, I don’t recognize anything. The buildings cram together. A few shadowy figures slog through the water with hunched shoulders.
Natasha leads me down a dark, slanting street, penned on either side by crooked buildings. The alley ends on a canal that’s trying its best to make this stretch of street its own. The water rises to my knees. I’m too numb to care.
She grabs me by the shoulder as though I might run—and really, I might—and says, “Here. Talk.”
“Do you know this place?”
“No,” Natasha says. “This is a shitty street. One of many in Southtown. This is where we stay until you tell me—” She pauses. There are too many things to tell. “Until you tell me who you are.”
I tug at my hair, heavy with water.
I’m so aware of her hand on my shoulder. I take a half-step forward, and when she doesn’t retreat, I move closer.
“You know me,” I say softly. I want it to be true. So badly. I don’t want to explain everything to her. I just want her to know. Who I am. What I did.
Natasha’s back hits the wall of the alley. She sinks to the ground and curls her legs to her stomach. She’s trembling, afraid. It’s my fault. Seas. I’d do anything to make her feel safe again.
I drop to the ground in front of her.
Natasha leans her head against her knees and shuts her eyes. My hand hovers above her arm for a long moment before I’m brave enough to touch her.
“Just tell me this, then,” she says. “Were you trying to hurt Nikolai?”
I don’t say anything.
She lets out a long, thin breath. “And I helped you.”
Her words go through me like a knife in my ribs. Twisting. “I can explain,” I say.
“And now,” she says, “there are probably palace guards chasing after both of us. All because I just had to help you. I’m so stupid.”
“Natasha—”
“I was going to survive,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. My eyes burn.
I’m strong. I’m vengeful and awful and strong, and my whole reason for being is supposed to revolve around Cassia, around killing Nikolai, and now—
“I had everything under control,” Natasha says. “I was going to marry Nikolai and sail away on the royal fleet and tell this island and everyone on it goodbye, because that’s the kind of selfish person I am.” I can’t tell whether the water beading on her lashes is rain or tears. “I was going to survive. Until you arrived.” She looks at me like I can’t possibly understand. But I do understand. I understand waking and wanting. Falling asleep and wanting. The way, if you find something good enough to want, it eats up all the empty space. It fills you.
I understand.
Surviving is her purpose like revenge was mine.
Between us, there could only ever be one happy ending.
“You still could,” I say. My voice is scraped hollow. “I didn’t kill him, did I? I failed. I failed becau
se I couldn’t let you die. But you can still go back. Marry Nikolai. Survive, Natasha. You can still survive.”
“You don’t get it,” she says. “You’ve ruined everything.”
“Why?”
She shakes her head. A tendril of hair sticks to her skin, tracing the shape of her jaw and collarbone. Her arms shake. Every muscle in them is long and taut.
“Because I don’t just want to survive anymore,” she says.
Then she reaches forward. The water surges up around us. Her fingers lace through my hair.
She kisses me like the world is ending.
59
NATASHA
Ella’s lips are sticky with salt water and sweat. She swings her legs over mine. I hold her face in my hands, a thumb on each temple. I press my lips to hers and hips to hers and I breathe what she breathes, there in the flooding street, the water and night swirling around us. When she shifts, the current pushes, pulls. She tugs at my hair and draws me closer. Our noses brush.
I run my hands down her arms and find goose bumps there.
When I kiss her, I try to forget that she’s not mine and I’m not hers. That we have people to go back to and people following us. This kiss isn’t a beginning but an end.
Her lips leave mine. Our foreheads press.
Do I have time to memorize her? The way her nose turns up at the tip, just a little? The way the water gleams on her skin?
“Natasha,” she whispers.
“We can’t stay here,” I say.
She nods her head against mine. Then she closes her eyes. Winces. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“The reason I wanted to kill Nikolai,” she says.
Kill Nikolai. When she says it, it’s real. She wanted to kill Nikolai. My lungs aren’t cooperating. I feel dizzy.
“Cassia,” she says.
I understand it. All of it. In that word.
Cassia. Beautiful, clever Cassia. The exiled royal princess. Of course I understand. I always envied Cassia. Admired Cassia. Maybe even had an inkling of something more toward her, the same way I always had an inkling of something toward Nikolai, something I never tried to put words to. Cassia.
“We were—” Ella says, but I shake my head against hers.
“You don’t have to,” I say.
“Maret,” Ella says. “Her aunt. She’s the woman you saw me talking to. We came here together. Nikolai sent his men to kill Cassia. So I wanted revenge. Maret wanted the throne.”
Cassia’s dead? And Nikolai killed her? I think about that boy. That boy I’ve started to know over the past few months. So unsure, so cautious, so aware of how little Gospodin and the rest of the councilors expect of him.
“You really think,” I say, “he could’ve killed his sister?”
“I was there,” Ella says. “I saw Andrei kill her.”
I feel nauseated. Nikolai? Nikolai, who couldn’t even stand up to his sister when she beat him at a board game?
Ella searches my expression. She must see my doubt, because she says, “And bog plague. Nikolai orchestrated the bog plague. It was in the food at the food drive. Poisoned mushrooms, just like Inna used.”
My body stills, but my mind is leaping. Grabbing at memories. The food drive. Gospodin wiping his fingers so meticulously on the tablecloth. Sofie and Ness, giggling with their treats in hand.
“Natasha?” Ella says.
“It was Gospodin.” I’m shaking my head. I’m shaking all over. “Not Nikolai. It was Gospodin.”
He stays in power because he promises to keep people safe from the Flood. And only so many people can fit on the royal fleet. So the fewer people who survive until Storm One, the better his success rate. The better his odds of getting the royal fleet well-stocked for the Flood year.
They would’ve died anyway, he’d say. This was a necessary evil. To keep the peace. You understand that, don’t you, Miss Koskinen?
Ella shakes her head. “No, it was Nikolai. That’s what Cassia always said. That Nikolai was after her. Not Gospodin.”
Then she’s quiet too, and our foreheads are still pressed together, and the smell of her is drowning my senses, and I just want everything to freeze, no more Gospodin, no more Nikolai, no more Flood, just Ella.
“You’re wrong,” I say.
We must root out dangerous individuals, whether they be insect or man, and see them to their deaths before they can contaminate others. That’s what Gospodin told me to read from Captain’s Log. That anyone who threatens his power, anyone who threatens his idea of peace, should be snuffed out.
“You weren’t there,” Ella says sharply. “You didn’t see Cassia die.”
When she says Cassia’s name, my stomach tightens. I’m jealous of a dead girl. “I know you knew Cassia. But I know Nikolai. And I don’t think he could do it. Tell someone to kill her.”
Ella sits back. “If you’re so sure he’s innocent, then marry him.” She doesn’t try to disguise the derision in her voice. “Survive.” She stares at the water moving across the ground. I feel the abrupt distance in every part of me. “He wants to marry you. A fool could see it. So be the queen.”
If she looked at me, she’d see how badly I want her to tell me to do the opposite. Forget Nikolai. What does it matter, whether Nikolai or Gospodin is the bad guy? Ella and I could find a boat. We could run away. She hid from me for so long, fearing that I would hate her, but now that I see all of her—it’s the opposite. If she looked at me, I’d kiss her again and she would know.
She never does.
“No,” I say. “Ella, no. I’m . . . I’m not leaving you.”
She looks up. Voice soft, she says, “Then where should we go?”
I pause. “Long term? Or right now?”
It’s such a painfully big question. I’ve spent months desperate to secure a future with Nikolai. Imagining myself sailing away on the royal fleet, waving Kostrov goodbye and basking in my luck to survive at least longer than my mother did.
I want to not want that.
But.
This future—this stupid, impossible, tempting future—is all I know how to want. I don’t have an answer to anything long term, so I’m relieved when Ella says, “Right now. Just . . . just right now.”
“Pippa,” I say. “We can go ask Pippa for help.”
“Okay,” Ella says. “I—okay.”
I look in her eyes. She looks in mine.
I forget about breathing.
“Natasha, I don’t know what I just did,” she says. “I can’t believe . . . I’m sorry.”
What am I supposed to do? Tell her it’s fine? Tell her it doesn’t matter that she just tried to kill someone? It’s not fine.
But I helped her. And wasn’t there a part of me that knew she must, must have been up to something terrible the moment she tumbled out of the ferns in the greenhouse? I helped her anyway. Because it’s Ella. It’s Ella.
I just wish I could take this moment, all the good parts, and siphon them into a bottle. I would take that bottle far away from Kostrov, and I would revel in something beautiful and astounding and more than this.
Ella nods. Then she bites her lip, hesitant in a way I’m not used to seeing Ella look. “I just . . . I know that you’re probably . . . I—”
I grab her by the shoulders and kiss her again. I hold her to me, I feel her heartbeat. Then I let my hands drop to my sides. “Let’s go.”
For a moment, she looks shocked. Then she nods.
The city is still dark, but window lights flicker valiantly, casting streaky squares of yellow across the wet street. As I pass through one of these boxes of light, a dark shape trembles in the waves shuddering out from my foot. A rat. Dead. It’s curled in on itself like a comma, clutching its tail in death-stiff claws. Ella’s calf brushes it. She chokes.
I reach back and grab her hand, just for a moment, and squeeze.
“I’ve never liked cities,” she says.
“Well, I'm not all that fond of New Sundstad right now, either,” I say. “What is there to like?”
“I hear the Royal Flyers are pretty spectacular,” she says.
I laugh before I can stop myself. But it’s gone as quickly as it arrived. Too soon, the enormity of what I’ve just done starts to sink in.
I ran away from Nikolai. I ran away from the palace. That means I made my choice, doesn’t it? I made my stupid, spur-of-the-moment choice to chase the wild feelings in my stomach instead of the logical plan I’ve been constructing since I was a child. Stay in the palace. Survive.
“Where are we?” Ella says.
I feel an uncomfortable jolt in my stomach looking around at all the buildings, like my guts stopped while the rest of my body kept moving. It’s familiar in the worst way possible. The butcher’s shop. The brown-stained bricks. My old neighborhood. I keep moving.
“Almost there,” I say.
We don’t stop until we reach the blue door, the crooked house where Pippa and Iskra and Rasa live.
I reach out and take Ella’s hand. She laces her fingers through mine. I rub my thumb along the black marks crawling up and down her wrist.
“Come on,” I say.
I never liked it here but we have nowhere else to go. I tell myself it is not permanent. It’s just a good hiding place. Somewhere Ella and I can sit for a few hours until we have a plan.
A small voice within me asks—but then what? Am I supposed to leave Kostrov? Am I supposed to run back to the palace, pray that I’m right about Nikolai, and plead my innocence?
Everything is upended.
There could be guards chasing us now. There probably are.
“Are we going in?” Ella asks quietly.
I take a deep breath. Then I step forward and raise my hand to knock.
60
ELLA
Natasha raises her hand to knock, then lowers it again.
“I . . .” She shakes her head. Never finishes her sentence.
Girls at the Edge of the World Page 28
