by Emily Colin
“You’re right, I did have every intention of coming back through the tunnels to take her life. And I don’t believe she’s telling the truth now, no matter what the juniper trance showed. But you know what? She’s not worth my time, not worth another thought. I have dedicated my blade to the service of the Brotherhood. Let the girl rot. I’ll trouble her no more.”
His gaze rests on my face, then widens to take in my hand resting on the knife, the tension in my stance. He is examining me, assessing me for weaknesses. Well, two can play his little game. I straighten my spine, drop my hands to my sides the way I do during inspections, and stand at attention. And then I give him a slow, sardonic smile, daring him to find fault. “I’ll not carry her betrayal with me. Perhaps she did me a favor—for now I’m free.”
“Free to run,” he says, his mouth twisting. “Free to die.”
“If that’s what you really believe, then why are you doing this? That’s what I can’t figure out. What’s in this for you?”
Kilían’s mouth compresses. “My reasons are my own.”
I tilt my head, considering, and bait him. “You may devalue my freedom, Bellator Bryndísarson, but at least the choice is mine. Wish you could say the same?”
“I serve the resistance in my own way,” he snaps, tension thrumming through him. “My role is just as important. Perhaps more so. As for the girl, perhaps she’s telling the truth. Or perhaps she’s playing a deeper game, manipulating the two of us against each other to achieve her own means. She could have betrayed us both to the Executor and saved herself considerable pain. Either way, something’s amiss. And I intend to find out what it is.”
He turns without another word and vanishes into the dark. I watch him go, weaving soundlessly between the trees, his form blending in and out of the shadows until he merges with them and I can’t see him anymore. Only then do I allow myself to sink down at the base of the giant oak, head in my hands and breath coming hard.
Kneeling like that—baring her neck for me—it can only mean one thing.
Je me rends, she was saying. I surrender.
Which in turn means—whatever game she’s playing, it’s over.
“Damn her to Belial and back again,” I mutter into my hands. If what she told Kilían was true, she’s played all of us—the Commonwealth, the resistance, and me—for fools. And for what? An agenda of her own? Or some ridiculous, noble reason?
Either way, I have no intention of leaving her in that cell, to be interrogated and experimented upon like an animal. The Executor knows she’s lying—but he can’t crack her, and despite myself I feel a bright flash of pride. Then I realize that out here, it’s not forbidden, and let the feeling spread, filling my chest with warmth, chasing back the awful emptiness.
“Twenty minutes underwater, Eva?” I murmur, as if she were here beside me. “Coming out of the ice tank swinging? You’re full of surprises, apprentice mine.”
With those words, I can see her—her fall of black hair, her wide-spaced eyes, dark as chocolate, her arched brows and pointed chin, that delicious mouth, her lips a deep shade of pink, and her pale skin, gorgeously flushed the way it had been when I’d broken away from her in the woods that night. I suck in air, striving desperately for equilibrium, and her scent floods me—soap and salt and that sweet, sharp richness.
Now that the bone-deep sense of rage and betrayal that has accompanied me for days is gone, I realize what I ought to have known all along: I miss Eva. She has become as essential to me as breathing, as necessary as food or water or air. I want her back—and more than that, I need her. As much as I hate to admit this, it’s the truth.
I feel wetness on my face and pull my hands away, puzzled. Gingerly, I run a finger down my cheek, and realize the moisture’s coming from my eyes.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m crying.
I push myself to my feet, sheathing my blade. Roughly, I wipe the tears away.
I will get her back. No matter what Kilían says, I’ll find a way. And if that means the resistance moves on without me—so be it. We’ll make it on our own.
For the first time in days, the sick, empty feeling inside me begins to retreat. The horrible weight on my chest lifts, and I can breathe again. I find my way back to camp, careful to keep to the shadows, beginning to formulate a plan.
32
Eva
“Hey!” I wrap my hands around the bars of my cell, rattling them. “I know you’re out there, Benedikt. I want to talk to the Executor. Now.”
A few hours have passed since Kilían interrogated me. I woke up on the floor of my cell, my back propped against the wall and my head filled with the remnants of a juniper haze. My body is my own again—no claws, talons, beaks, or flippers. Still, if I had any doubt about what I saw, those shallow grooves in the stone put paid to it. I want answers—and there’s one person who I’m sure can give them to me.
“Benedikt!” I yell, shaking the bars again. I can smell him—sweat and metal and the dried figs he likes to eat. Nasty, shriveled things. I can’t stand them.
He appears in my line of vision, taking his sweet time strolling over, his sverd loose in his hand. “Yell a little louder, Marteinn, why don’t you. There might be a few citizens asleep in the Rookery who haven’t heard you yet.”
“I wouldn’t have had to yell if you’d come when I called you the first time,” I tell him, and bare my teeth in a facsimile of a smile. My face is streaked with mud and blood—I can feel it caking my skin—and Benedikt takes a step back before he can stop himself.
“The Executor isn’t at your beck and call,” he says.
I stand my ground. “I want to talk to him. Get. Him.”
He flares his nostrils at me in disgust—whatever, it isn’t as if he smells like a rose—and stalks off. Ten minutes later, he is back, Efraím in tow.
“Marteinn,” is all Efraím says. His lips are a thin seam of disapproval.
“May I please speak with the Executor.” It isn’t a question.
He tilts his head. “What gives you the right to make demands?”
I don’t say a word. I don’t have to. Somewhere in the darkness behind him, I can hear the limping beat of the Executor’s heart. Sure enough, the man himself steps from the shadows, a leather bag slung over one shoulder.
“I’ll speak with her, Efraím,” he says.
“Sir—”
“You may leave.” He swivels to face Efraím and Benedikt. “Both of you.”
“She’s dangerous.” Efraím’s voice comes low, a warning.
“I know what she is. Better than you do. Now go.” His tone doesn’t brook refusal.
They obey, backs stiff, walking off down the long hall that leads away from the cells. The Executor and I stare at each other. I fight the urge to drop my eyes, and win.
Inexplicably, his stern mouth curves upward, as if my defiance has pleased him. “So,” he says. “You wished to speak with me.”
My hands are still curled around the bars of my cell. I shake them, just a little, and see his eyes narrow as the metal trembles. I can’t wrench the bars apart—the Architect knows I’ve tried, when my guards’ backs were turned—but it doesn’t do any harm for the Executor to think I could. “I don’t suppose you’d consider letting me out so we could have this conversation in a more civilized fashion.”
His bottomless eyes narrow still further. “I don’t suppose,” he says, “that I would.”
“Or,” I say, “you could come in. The accommodations are poor, but there’s enough space for two.”
He smiles at me, that shark’s smile that I’ve dreaded and detested in equal measure since the first time I saw it. “I think we both know I’m wise enough to know better.”
I step back, hands open to show my willingness to refrain from throttling him. “Tell me the truth, then. What’s happening to me?”
The smile is back, but this time it’s different—anticipatory, with what I’d swear is genuine happiness lurking
around the edges. “You’re becoming what you are meant to be.”
To the nine hells and back with not throttling him. If I wasn’t confined in this cell, I’d pin him to the wall and choke the information out of him, Executor or no. “In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve been electroshocked, beaten, and nearly drowned,” I say, feeling that prickling heat rush over my body again. “I’m not in the mood for riddles.”
He opens the leather bag that’s slung across his shoulder, reaches in, and pulls out a portable comp. “Here,” he says simply, and passes the comp through the bars.
I take it and flip it open, fingers clenching on the plastic cover. The screen comes up immediately, login information bypassed. I see my name. My date of birth. And then a flurry of information that makes no sense. Words that can’t possibly have anything to do with me, with who I am.
It can’t be. It’s a ploy. A trick. A lie.
I rearrange the letters in my mind, wishing I could make them say something else. But no matter how hard I try, they are still there, an undeniable reality in black and white.
Eva Marteinn. Deliberate mutation, Trial 12.
Parents: Mixed parentage. Genetic fracturing employed to maximize intellectual and physical capacities. Blueprint incorporates Panthera pardus (leopard), Canis lupus arctos (Arctic wolf), Hydrurga leptonyx (leopard seal), and Falco peregrinus (peregrine falcon). Human genetic material harvested as per typical extraction procedures. Human progenitors—
That’s as far as I get before the comp falls from my shaking hands to the floor.
My worst fear. Everything I’ve worked so hard to combat.
“No,” I hear myself say, small and cold and not like me at all. “It’s not true. No.”
“It’s a gift,” the Executor says, his eyes bright with excitement. “So many died. So many were not strong enough. But you, Eva—you are the end result of years of hard work and sacrifice. You are my prize.”
“Your prize experiment, you mean.” My voice is thin with shock. “Where did you—how did you even—”
“It wasn’t easy. There were so many failures. Dreadful, terrible things.” He shudders. “But you lived, Eva. To protect you, we encoded a trigger in your genes that wouldn’t allow the shifting process to begin until the time of your Choosing. We watched you, though—I watched you—more closely than you can imagine.”
My leap from the window of the Rookery, my speed in training, my skill in scenting Ari that night in the woods, my ability to hold my breath in the ice tank, even my dreams—they coalesce into an impossible, irrefutable image. I lunge, throwing myself against the bars. “What have you done to me?”
He steps back, cocking an eyebrow. “Why, Eva,” he says, “we haven’t done anything to you at all. This is who you’ve been. From the very beginning.”
I think about the shadows I saw when I was a small child in the Nursery—the way they’d writhed on the wall, the way no one else could see them. Teeth and claws and talons.
“‘The shifting process,’” I say, each word a growl. “Meaning—what?”
That gleeful smile is back again. “Eventually,” he says, “you’ll be able to take the shape of each of the animals whose genes you share. And oh, what a weapon you will be. There will be no one inside any of the Commonwealths or outside our borders who will dare to challenge us then.”
I want to call him a liar. But all I can think of is how I’d woken to find my hand gone, replaced with a bird’s claw. “This is about defeating the resistance?” I say, my voice shaking. “You corrupted my DNA—killed who knows how many others—for the sake of power?”
The smile fades. “There are things you don’t know, Eva. Threats whose existence you cannot begin to imagine.”
“Enlighten me then,” I snarl, and hurl the comp back through the bars, so it lands, shattering, at his feet.
“One day,” he says, his voice serene.
Questions flood my head, too many to sort through. “Like the fables?” I say, remembering the old stories the Mothers used to tell. “Lachlan and the Selkie? The beasts that ruled the Houses? You’ve made me into one of them?”
The Executor’s thin lips twitch, as if I’ve irritated him. “In a way.”
“Are there others? Or am I the only one?”
“Just you. Once we see how the process works—what the dangers are, and the risks—we will proceed.”
The dangers. The risks. “How am I supposed to change into four different kinds of animals? A seal, for the Architect’s sake? I’m not a selkie. I’m a person. You’ll kill me!”
“Oh,” he says, nudging bits of plastic and wiring out of his way with his foot, “on the whole, I think not.”
“What do you mean, you think not?” The waves of heat come again, making sweat break out on my skin. “I’m a bellator, not a shapeshifter. I know how to fight. Not to…” Words fail me, and I slump against the bars, my forehead against the cool metal.
“You are both. Designed to be the perfect warrior.” His voice vibrates with conviction. “And we had the perfect partner for you, to anchor you during your first shift and all the ones to come. Too bad you had to go and screw it up. Not to worry, I’ll find you a substitute before it’s too late—but I was so pleased with my choice.”
I lift my head, staring at him. “What partner? Are you talking about Ari?”
“Did you think,” he says, his beady gaze fixed on me, “that I didn’t notice how Westergaard met your eyes all those years ago in the Square, when you committed your little act of rebellion? I knew then he would be a match for you.”
Our secret, the one I’d thought belonged to us alone—it hadn’t been a secret at all. “He was my mentor,” I say, feeling my body tremble.
“Certainly. Hand-picked for you, for the strength of his spirit and his gifts as a bellator. And when the time came, he would have been your anchor, meant to tether you when you shift. We tested him at birth for the aptitude, which is quite rare.”
I think of the story Kilían told Ari—how he was switched with a regulation-born child shortly after birth. This must be the reason why. “I don’t understand. An aptitude for what?”
“Shapeshifting comes with a price.” He shrugs. “You may have the genetic raw material for it, but it takes tremendous energy. That energy has to come from somewhere. In your case, Westergaard would have acted as your anchor. You’d pull energy from the earth, through him, and he’d keep you from destroying yourself in the process. Alas, now I need to find someone else for you—and soon. Luckily, we have one other with the ability. Otherwise, I’d be forced to expend valuable energy chasing Westergaard down—and I have no need of a traitor.”
“How?” My brain feels as if it’s melting. “How would Ari know how to do such a thing?”
The Executor lifts a shoulder, looking uncomfortable for the first time since he arrived outside my cell. “He has the aptitude, as I said. The two of you were compatible in training, in battle. You would have figured it out when the time came—as you will do with his replacement.”
It occurs to me that he has no idea how Ari or whoever he has in mind to take his place is meant to do this—if, indeed, he’s telling me the truth at all. I swallow hard. “You’re insane.”
Anger flashes across his face, quickly concealed. “I know how it must sound, Eva. But believe me, in a few short weeks—maybe even days—you’ll see for yourself.”
“And Ari?” His name is a razor blade in my mouth. “If he were to successfully serve as my—what did you call it? My anchor?—what would happen to him?”
“Ah, well. That’s a bit of an interesting situation. Physically, he would remain unharmed. But otherwise, I suspect serving as your anchor would force him to subsume his will to yours. If you gave him an order, he couldn’t disobey you. His life—his purpose—would be to serve you.”
My jaw drops. “I would control him? He’d be my slave?”
The Executor shrugs, as if Ari’s free will—or the lack thereof—is immate
rial. “He is a bellator, after all. Perhaps it wouldn’t work that way for him. At any rate, it doesn’t matter, as he’s gone.”
“Perhaps?” I wish, harder than anything I’ve ever wished for in my life, that these bars would vanish so I could get my hands around his throat. “What in the nine hells is wrong with you?”
“Wrath is a sin,” he reminds me.
I’m about to tell him how little I care when something else occurs to me. “If I’m the first,” I say, each word a chip of ice, “how do you know all this?”
“I never said you were the first, Eva. Just the only one at my disposal. As I said, there are threats in the world of which you know nothing.”
Rage curdles inside me, sins be damned. “I am not at your disposal!”
“Really?” He gestures at the cell. “What do you call this?”
“This,” I say from between clenched teeth, “is a temporary inconvenience. Make no mistake, I will get out. And when I do, I will take great pleasure in killing you for what you’ve done.”
He rolls his eyes, as if my threats amuse him. “You won’t hurt me. I’ll tell you exactly what I want you to do, and you’ll stay right here and carry out my orders.”
It’s all I can do to keep my voice from shaking. “Why would I help you?”
“Because,” he says, running a finger along the bars, “if you don’t, I’ll devote all of the resources at my disposal to dragging Ari Westergaard back where he belongs. I’ll torture him every day, and make you watch. Until finally, I’ll have Efraím finish what he started in the scholar’s room.” He smiles at me, that cold shark’s grin. “Efraím will slit the exile’s throat in front of you, and when he dies, you’ll know it’s all your fault. That you could have saved him, if only you’d cooperated when I asked.”
He turns his back and walks off down the shadowed hallway, my curses trailing in his wake.
