by Dima Zales
“Or they might stick the helmet into a fire,” Itzel says with way too much enthusiasm in her voice. “Or—”
“How about we not apply our imaginations toward possible tortures and save all the brain cycles for thinking up escape ideas instead,” I cut in sternly.
Everyone quiets down. Hopefully, like me, they’re keeping their eyes open for opportunities and in general brainstorming escape schemes.
Also, hopefully someone’s having better luck at it than I am.
When we reach a winding staircase and start ascending, I rerun the conversation with Lilith in my head and wonder if it was the right move to pretend to be gnomes—or admit to it in Itzel’s case. After all, if Lilith thought we weren’t, she might’ve tried to glamour us to tell her if we were sent by Tartarus. With the right coaching from me, Itzel might’ve been able to fake being under Lilith’s influence. But as things stand, we’ll face the kind of painful questioning I saw in my father’s memories, or worse.
Then again, when Lilith gets the answers she’s looking for, she’ll have us for dinner, so maybe the delay is a good thing.
Echoing my dark thoughts, our surroundings get danker and drabber with each step. The higher up we go, the more the interior design brings to mind dungeons custom made for the Inquisition.
Eventually, we stop at a floor that looks particularly rat-infested.
The guards lead us by a tiny cave-like cell adorned with rusted bars and a giant lock. Inside it, I glimpse a shadow of a person who makes the sorriest homeless guy in NYC seem like a healthy and thriving individual.
“Oh no,” Ariel whispers. “Is that what’s going to become of us in a few weeks?”
“Probably not,” I say. “I doubt Lilith would find us as appetizing in that case.”
Silently, we continue on our way, and as we walk by cell after miserable cell, I imagine I smell dirty bodies and decay—though it must be an illusion, given the suit’s ability to filter out outside air.
When we turn the corner, I see two burly guards throwing a tall, limp man into one of the cells.
He’s cleaner than the other prisoners we’ve seen, and his tiny room is a luxury suite in comparison to the rest of the cells. There’s a bucket, a bed, a small bookcase, a table, and even a window.
The guards toss him on the bed, which allows the light from the window to fall on his face.
I gasp, recognizing him from our Headspace conversation.
It’s Grigori Rasputin.
My father.
Chapter Forty-Five
My heart is beating wildly, and I want to jump up and yell that it’s me, Sasha, that I’ve come for him, but I suppress the suicidal impulse. Instead, I check my angles, then adjust my body in such a way that none of the guards can see me wave my gloved hand at my father.
He has two black eyes and his face is swollen, so it’s hard to tell if he saw my beauty-pageant-worthy maneuver or not.
Hoping that he did, I tilt my body once more to cover another gesture: using my extended thumb and pinkie, I mime answering a phone.
I think he lifts his head, but that could be my imagination.
Even if he did see what I did, I have no idea if he understood. Did they even have phones in Russia during the czar’s reign?
The guards herd us into the corridor, preventing me from any more gestures. We walk a few feet and stop next to a cell the size of a closet in a typical Manhattan studio.
The leftmost man unlocks the metal lock, and his colleagues push us in.
After locking the door, all but one of the guards leave, and I look around.
There’s no window, no beds, and not even a bucket to use as a bathroom. The place feels haunted by all the prior occupants who died in it—likely of malnutrition or infection.
“Let me guess.” Felix tilts his helmet toward Itzel. “You’re not getting paid enough for this.”
Ignoring him, Itzel does her best to nervously pace the room—which is hard to do, given how tightly we’re crammed in here.
The guard paces also—and has more luck doing it, given the length of the corridor.
I focus and reach Headspace with ease.
The shapes that surround me play uncanny music, but I ignore that in favor of seeing if my surreptitious gestures to Rasputin have paid off.
I think of the essence of my father the way I did the last time—but nothing happens.
Crap.
He’s not in Headspace. Maybe he didn’t see my gesture? Or maybe he’s low on power and/or badly hurt after his beating?
To keep myself sane, I decide to see what the visions that surround me are. To my horror, I witness Ariel getting brutally beaten with wooden staffs, which break her bones without messing with the spacesuit.
The torture seems to be taking place in a ruin of some kind, with cracked red rocks piled everywhere and the floor covered with soot. Was there an earthquake here recently?
Can there be earthquakes on a floating island?
When the terrifying vision ends, I get right back into Headspace.
Another set of shapes surrounds me this time. They look similar enough to the ones I just saw that I have little doubt they show my friends getting tortured.
No, thanks. One was plenty as far as extra motivation for escape.
What I need is to figure out when they’ll be coming for us—and bonus points if I can figure out why the torture room was so damaged. Except when I try to access that, I fail miserably. Itzel’s nature strikes again.
I change my tactics and do my best to learn something about the future of the pacing guard.
This also fails—probably because I need to know more about his essence. Alternatively, Lilith with her probability manipulation mojo might be protecting the guard from seer visions because she knows he’s guarding Rasputin.
Speaking of my father, I try reaching him and fail once more.
Exiting Headspace, I ask Itzel to chat up the guard to see if we can learn something about him that would aid my seer sight.
She tries—but the guy ignores her so completely that I wonder if he might be deaf.
About an hour passes, and a new guard shows up.
Maybe I’ll have better luck finding out something about this guy?
I don’t, nor is Itzel able to chat this one up.
Frustrated, I return to Headspace and try getting in touch with Rasputin again. He’s now had an hour to recover, and if he saw my gesture, he should accept my summons.
As soon as I make this new attempt, a familiar Headspace entity shows up in front of me.
It’s Rasputin, and he’s pulsing with eagerness.
We reach for each other in the Headspace equivalent of a hug.
The connection clicks into place, and we start to meld together.
Exhaling a metaphysical breath, I prepare to witness my father’s memories.
Chapter Forty-Six
I’m floating in Headspace.
Wait a second. Did I get kicked out of my connection with Rasputin back into—
No.
This is his memory.
It just so happens that the memory is of using Headspace.
Sure enough, I become aware of my father’s thoughts, and it’s a trippy experience because he’s actually thinking about me. A three-year-and-eleven-month-old version of me, who is, according to his obviously biased view, “The cleverest, prettiest, most perfect little angel in all time—past and future.”
I pay close attention and realize something extremely interesting. My father is using Headspace slightly differently from the way I’ve been doing. At least, it’s not just the essence of the young Sasha that he focuses on, but his feelings toward her. Feelings that shock me, as he clearly loves the little me intensely. His love is so strong, in fact, that I don’t understand how he could be the same man who abandoned me at an airport, leaving me to be raised by strangers.
His concentration pays off, and vision shapes surround him.
He must not like th
ese shapes because he mentally swears. “Again the same,” he thinks with anger. “Every future is the same.”
He debates whether he should even see the visions, but then he decides to do so.
He examines the nearly identical shapes very carefully.
Unlike with me, his instincts help him when it comes to choosing the most useful of the shapes—or at least, he believes that to be the case. Then again, how do I know the same isn’t true for me? Maybe when I choose one at random, I actually get the most useful one as determined by some nebulous intuition?
He reaches for a bunch of shapes that seem slightly different from each other. He clearly intends to see multiple related visions.
The first vision starts.
Rasputin is bodiless in a room made of white marble.
A six-year-old version of me is in this room with tears streaming down her face. She’s naked and holding a dagger that looks like a sword in her tiny hand.
Also naked is the woman tied up at little Sasha’s feet. She’s gagged, but what can be seen of her face is very pretty—and terrified.
“Please don’t make me do this again,” little Sasha pleads in Russian to the ceiling. She then repeats the words in English.
No one replies.
Sasha sobs, her thin shoulders sagging, and looms over the woman on the floor.
The victim’s eyes widen in horror, and she struggles harder against her bonds.
“I have to,” Sasha says to the woman almost pleadingly. “If I don’t, you will suffer.” Her face twists in such an unnatural-for-a-child sorrow that I want to hug her and somehow steal her away from this horrible room.
The woman on the floor tries to slither away from the little girl, but her bindings don’t allow it.
Sasha bends over her and gently moves her matted hair, exposing the white neck underneath.
Inhaling deeply, the child me slices down with the dagger.
The weapon sinks into the woman’s throat, and blood gushes forth from the jagged wound.
The woman’s body goes limp.
Sasha’s stray tears turn into a stream that join the crimson puddle at her feet.
She kneels next to the woman—
The vision interrupts, just so that another can start.
It’s nearly identical to the first, except this time Sasha looks a little older—and she’s killing a young man.
In the third vision, she kills a child her own age.
In the fourth, vision-Sasha is even older, and she doesn’t seem as emotionally distraught after she does the horrible deed.
In the following visions, she kills her victims almost robotically—
The visions stop, and Rasputin and I find ourselves in what looks like a lake-side meadow.
“No.” Rasputin is all but shaking with fury. “I won’t let my angel become a demon.”
Before I can figure out where we are, we’re back in his Headspace.
He’s thinking about how to prevent it. In every future where he takes the little me and runs, we get caught and the inevitable still happens.
He lets himself consider an idea, one that he’d thought about before but rejected.
It’s a horrible one, but he sees no other choice.
What if he takes himself out of the equation?
What if he gives her to someone else to raise?
He thinks about my essence once again, but this time, he dwells on the idea he just had and he pictures me grown.
A bunch of shapes surround him, all very different.
He reaches for one, but I already know what he’d see. Me—the way I am now—being raised by Mom and Dad on modern Earth. A future much happier than that of the child soldier/serial killer in his visions.
Before I see if I’m correct, the memory short-circuits, and I find myself in a vacuum-like blackness, facing the synapse hologram of my father once again.
Chapter Forty-Seven
This ephemeral version of my father looks a little better than his real-world self. His eyes and face are still swollen, but his posture is less defeated.
“What have you done?” he asks in rapid-fire Russian. “Why would you come to this deadly place?” He floats down. “You’re as stubborn as your mother—and you can’t even understand me. All my fault. If I left you with a Russian family, you wouldn’t have forgotten how to speak our mother tongue. Maybe if—”
“I’ve re-learned Russian since we last spoke,” I reply, my words halting and slow as I pull on all the knowledge I’ve drilled into my brain. “I came to save you. I had to.”
He stares at me in shock, then starts speaking again, this time slower and enunciating every word. “It was a grave error to come here. I don’t have enough power for a long conversation, but you have made a mistake.” He rubs his temples in frustration. “I can’t believe I didn’t foresee your arrival. I would’ve avoided using my power for a week if I’d known. My visions help me temporarily escape my dreadful conditions, but—”
“Stop beating yourself up.” I float closer to him and smile. “Using your power to make yourself feel better is understandable under the circumstances. Also, with me is a… how do you say it?” I rack my brain for the Russian word for “gnome” but don’t find one and just say it in English.
His eyes light up, and he says a word that sounds a lot like “gnome.”
“Yes, that’s it,” I say. “That’s why you didn’t foresee my arrival.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not just that. Lilith made my fate invisible to me long ago, and yours recently became too chaotic to keep up with. Still, I should’ve been trying. If there was some way I could’ve glimpsed it—”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m here now, and I want to help you.”
“You can’t. I wish I’d taken your summons when you reached out to me. Maybe I could’ve—”
“So you were ignoring me?” I can’t help my accusing tone.
“I was afraid I’d be weak and ask you to come,” he mutters. “Or that if you got to know me, it would be harder for you to ignore my plight.” He floats down. “It seems like it was all for nothing anyway. You came here, the last place you should be.”
“Oh, please.” I float down a couple of feet. “You’ve been getting tortured for nearly twenty years. Did you really think I’d allow it to go on?”
“It’s been less than a year since I left you at the airport.” He floats to my level. “The time here passes nearly twenty times slower than on Earth, so it’s been longer for you.”
I look at him in confusion, wondering if my Russian skills are letting me down.
Twenty years of my life happened in less than a year from his perspective?
That’s insane.
That means that in the hour during which I waited for the guard to change, a whole day passed on Earth. That—
“We don’t have much time,” Rasputin says solemnly. “Tell me how you got here, about the gnome, and why you are wearing that strange outfit.”
I fill him in as quickly as I can.
“It’s good Lilith didn’t see your face and doesn’t know your name,” he says when I finish. “She’s extremely vindictive and would follow you to the edges of the Otherlands if she felt slighted.”
“I take it if I were to escape, she’d feel slighted?” I ask.
“Indeed,” he says grimly. “Which is why it’s critical that she doesn’t get any of your hair or blood. As a vampire, she could use those things to locate you.”
“Well, thanks to my lying skills, she thinks we’d die without the suits,” I say proudly.
“Quick thinking and so great at deception,” Rasputin mumbles under his breath. “So much like—” He stops abruptly.
“You were going to say ‘your mother,’ weren’t you?” I say. “Who was she? Where is she? How come—”
He winces. “You have to understand, I didn’t know who she was when we met.” He looks at me pleadingly. “I was just a fool, in love and out of my depth.” He shakes his
head. “But at least it wasn’t all bad. Just look at you.” He examines me with paternal pride. “I wish I got a chance to see you without that suit just once in the real world.”
“You’ll see me without the suit so much you’ll be sick of me,” I say. “We’re getting out of here together, you and I.”
“No.” He floats down. “If you get the chance to escape, you must leave without me. Lilith has my hair, so she can track me.”
“So what? We’ll get rid of it,” I say with a confidence that I wish I felt. “Do you know where she keeps it?”
“Yes, but going after it will make the escape even less likely to—”
“Enough,” I say. “When I make a bird call, I want you to create a distraction.”
“What?” he asks, and before I can answer, the Headspace conversation interrupts, and I find myself back in my cell.
Chapter Forty-Eight
“Twenty times slower?” Ariel says incredulously after I bring my friends up to speed on my Headspace extracurriculars. “That’s a pretty drastic time differential.”
“My new client won’t be happy.” Felix looks glum. “Should’ve taken Monday off. Maybe Tuesday too.”
“Yeah.” Itzel’s voice is dripping with sarcasm. “Next time Sasha asks you to go someplace, make sure to clear your schedule for the rest of your life—which might be short. Oh, and add many zeros to whatever she offers to pay you as well, not that you’ll live to spend the money but—”
“She isn’t paying you,” Felix says. “I am.”
I ignore the rest of their back-and-forth because something Felix said sparked an important realization.
If the time difference is indeed what Rasputin said, it’s already Monday afternoon back on Earth.
Nero was expecting me at work.
By now, he would’ve called Thalia, and she would’ve told him we took Ariel back to rehab—meaning we should’ve been back long ago.