Hunting November

by Adriana Mather

  Ash pauses again, lifting up the corner of another tile, and this time I hear a group of adults recapping their evening at a gala and laughing. Ash waits, continuing to peer down through the sliver of space. I hear the ding of an elevator, and as the doors close, the chatter is abruptly cut off. Ash holds up his fingers, counting off—three, two, one. The instant his last finger falls he pushes the tile aside, grabs the metal support beam, and swings himself down. I’m next, and by the time my feet hit the ground Ash is already three doors down and pressing the button for the elevator.

  Ines drops with Aarya right behind her. The elevator doors open and we fly inside the empty space. Ash pushes the second-floor button, and as the doors close behind us, Ines offers me the branch, which I gladly accept. The air between us is tense with the fear that the guard has likely checked for us by now and found us missing. None of us says a word as the elevator climbs and the doors reopen.

  We step out, do a fast look both ways down the hall, check the room numbers, and reorient ourselves. No one has to tell us to hurry, we all just start running, taking a corner faster than is safe, down the hall and to the room we changed in. Aarya does a quick knock on the door. She presses her ear up against it and, after three grueling seconds, concludes that no one is inside. Ash whips out his lock-picking tools, and the instant it clicks open, we pile in.

  We run through the living room and bedroom and out onto the balcony. Ash relocks the balcony door, using his tools, and I tie the rope. One by one they climb down. As soon as Ines lands on the ground, I toss the branch gently down to her and untie the rope. I swing my legs over the balcony and waste no time grabbing hold of the decorative masonry. I work myself three-quarters of the way down and jump the last few feet into the grass.

  Ash hands me my backpack, which he retrieved from the bushes, and I shove the branch into it as we all book it out of the park. When we’re three blocks away without any obvious pursuers, Aarya looks at me and her serious expression melts into a smirk.

  “You’re absolutely mental, you know that? The way you licked that branch…” She laughs. “I always thought you had some quirk, but that was brilliant.”

  “You didn’t see her make the pinecone kiss the man at the table….I’ll never forget his look of utter shock and horror,” Ash says with a grin.

  And now that we’re on the sidewalk hailing a taxi with the branch in my hand and no Hawk staring us down, I allow myself a laugh, too.

  WE ALL SIT in Aarya’s living room and I unzip my backpack, pulling out the branch. I run my fingers over it, humming with anxious anticipation. It has four pinecones, all identical and all superglued to the branch. I take my knife from my boot and begin to cut the glue, easily popping off the first cone.

  I examine the bottom of it, pulling at the remaining glue. I inspect each of the scales for anomalies and look at the branch, but there is nothing there but pinecone and wood. So I start on the next one, which proves much the same.

  “Anything?” Aarya asks impatiently.

  I shake my head, removing the third pinecone and examining it carefully. But once again, there is nothing special about it, and no message from my dad. What if I got it wrong? What if it wasn’t table number eleven, or if it was, but the clue wasn’t the pinecones? I hold the fourth cone in my hand, knife poised to cut it off.

  “I would move faster if I were you,” Aarya says. “Or the Ferryman might very well kill your father while you’re being precious about those pinecones.”

  Ash gives Aarya a sharp look and Ines shakes her head.

  “What? I’m only stating the obvious,” Aarya continues.

  “If it’s obvious, then you don’t need to state it,” Ash says.

  But Aarya only shrugs. “Testy, testy.”

  I cut the fourth pinecone off, turning it over. The wood beneath it is smooth and normal. But as I pull off the superglue on the base of the cone, my face lights up. The bottom of the pinecone is hollowed out and inside is a small rolled-up piece of paper.

  I tip it into my palm and immediately unroll it. Written on the paper in my dad’s handwriting is a message. I read aloud:

  We’re taking to the street in treason

  Welcome to the first Death Season

  It’s time to make a change, and we’ve picked a day

  The head Lion we will slay

  My mind races. “A rhyme?” I say, confused.

  I’m silent for a beat and Aarya taps her fingers on the armchair. “Out loud, November, say what you’re thinking out loud.”

  I shake my head. “I’m just…I’ve never heard my dad recite a rhyme in my life, much less write one.”

  Ash looks at the paper with me.

  “Your nonrhyming father aside, we need to decipher the meaning,” Aarya says, and leans forward with a curious look, like she would take the paper from my hand if she could. “It’s a threat to Jag, that’s for certain. But clearly that’s not all. If it matches the other clues he’s left, then you should be able to understand it.”

  “November?” Ash says.

  I stare at the paper, hyperaware of the small time window and the insurmountable pressure. Nothing immediately jumps out at me, and so I read it again, but the words just swim on the page like nonsense. I huff. “Why is he making me chase clues about him over two damn continents?” I say, more to myself than to them. “Here I am trying to understand some absurd rhyme when I should be warning him that the Ferryman is closing in.”

  Aarya grunts. “Are you kidding? If it were my dad, it would have been five continents, only to end up back where I started…annoyed.”

  “My dad isn’t like most Strategia,” I say reflexively.

  “Are you sure?” Aarya says in a tone that tells me she has her doubts. “Because testing children in frustrating and uncomfortable ways is about as Strategia-like as a parent gets. And I’m sorry to burst your rosy bubble, but he sent you to a Lion property and into a celebration hosted by Jag, of all people. He’s not exactly trying to keep you safe.”

  I open my mouth to argue with her, angry that she would even suggest such a thing. The choices my dad’s made my entire life have been about keeping me safe. He loves me. He’s doing this for me. But given the recent chain of events, I’m also not sure she’s wrong.

  “Let’s just go out on a limb here and suppose that November knows her father better than you do, Aarya, and give her a minute to digest the message,” Ash says.

  “Oooh, please don’t use sarcasm on me, Ashai,” Aarya says with overblown drama. “How will I ever go on?”

  “With the same psychotic clown routine you’ve been using for years,” Ash says.

  “Rawwwrr,” she says, and slashes her fingers at him like a large cat.

  But I’m barely listening because I’m staring at the message, reading it repeatedly, not absorbing the words and my mind drawing a giant blank. I exhale in frustration. Stop it. Get control of yourself. It’s just like learning to fence. The more emotional you get, the more ineffectual you’ll be.

  I elongate my breaths, slowing my heart rate and rolling back my shoulders. And I look at the message again. I’ll break it down in pieces, translate it, write it backward—whatever I need to in order to make sense of it.

  “Okay,” I say. “What I’ve been doing so far isn’t working, so I’m going to think this through out loud. Jump in if you notice anything, ’cause right now I’m just spinning my wheels.”

  Aarya puts her hand on her chest, looking aghast. “As if you thought I would keep my opinions to myself and deprive you all of my musings.”

  I look from the paper to Ash, ignoring Aarya. “What we know is that every clue so far has required both me and Ash to decode, so I don’t imagine that this one is any different. There are probably things in here that you all will know and I won’t.” I clear my throat. “Let’s see…the first bit reads: W
e’re taking to the street in treason.” I pause. “On this part, I’ve got nothing. That doesn’t even sound like something my dad would say, to be honest.” I look up at them to see if they have any input, but no one says a word. “Then he writes: Welcome to the first Death Season. What’s weird about this is that he did say ‘death season’ to me once and only once, when I was six.”

  “Would he expect you to remember that?” Ash says.

  “Actually, yeah,” I reply. “It’s part of a story we’ve told dozens of times. And…hang on…you know what?” I say, feeling a glimmer of hope. “It’s time to make a change, and we’ve picked a day could also be a variation of that story.” I read the next line. “But The head Lion we will slay has no meaning to me beyond the obvious killing-Jag connotations.”

  “A code based on personal experiences,” Ash says. “That fits the pattern.”

  “It definitely does,” I agree.

  “So let’s hear it, Ember,” Aarya says. “When did your dad say those things to you?”

  I raise a wary eyebrow at the nickname. “Okay, so, my mom died in October the year I turned six,” I say. “By the time early December rolled around, there was none of our usual cheer. Everything felt…wrong.”

  Ines gives me a sympathetic look, but Aarya looks like she wishes I would get on with it.

  “Then one evening,” I continue, “my dad came into my room with a pile of those holiday magazines…did you have those? The ones where everyone is wearing terrible Christmas sweaters and looking pristine while ice-skating?”

  Ines shakes her head.

  “Well, anyway, he came in and dumped the magazines onto my bed and told me to sit up. He said that winter was always our family’s favorite season and that he was going to be damned if it was going to transform from one of the happiest times of year to the death season. He said we were going to treat that winter as the first winter.”

  “So the ‘death season’ could translate to winter,” Ash says.

  “Right,” I say, feeling more confident. “He said we would treat it as the first winter and that it was time to make a change. He told me to pick a day, any day in December, and we would start a new tradition, something that was just ours, that had nothing to do with the years before. So I chose the twentieth.”

  “Hmmm,” Aarya says, like she’s considering the whole thing. “Winter and December twentieth.”

  “The weird part is that it’s five days past that date,” I say. “And December twentieth is obviously in winter, so why the redundancy?”

  “Unless the December part isn’t necessary,” Ines says, and I look at her.

  “How so?” I say.

  “Your story said to pick a day, right? And you picked the twentieth. So what if it’s winter and the number twenty?” she says. “Like in, for instance, an address.”

  My eyes widen. Could this really be the clue I’ve been waiting for all along? “Ines, I think you might be a genius.”

  Ash grabs the atlas of the UK and spreads it out on the table. He flips to a map of London and we all crowd around it.

  It only takes a few seconds before Ash plunks his finger down. “Found it. Winter Street.”

  “And Winter Avenue,” Aarya says, pointing to the complete opposite side of the city.

  For a brief second we’re quiet.

  “We’re taking to the street in treason,” Ash and I both say at the same time.

  “Well then,” Aarya says, grinning. “Twenty Winter Street it is.”

  “Or One Winter Street,” I say, “considering the rhyme says first Death Season. It could be One Winter Street, apartment number twenty, for instance.”

  Aarya gives me a look that almost appears to be respect. “Yes, yes it could.”

  “But what about the last line?” I ask.

  “If I had to take a guess,” Ash says before Aarya can jump in, “it was designed to look like a threat, in case anyone else found it. It’s actually a brilliant code.”

  “An address,” I repeat, and stand, itching to get to it. I need to tell Layla.

  Aarya is already up, checking the weapons in her boots and on her belt. “While I understand that we have a seriously limited time constraint to find your dad, I just want to say that it’s a terrible idea to go to an address that the Ferryman may or may not know about without staking it out first.”

  “If you wanted to be safe, Aarya, you should have stayed home,” Ash says, repeating her comment from our text conversation.

  I grab my coat and gloves and toss Ash his. And in less than a minute we’re out the door.

  * * *

  Ash drives through the streets of London, and I sit up front with him, tapping on my knee, silently repeating my hopes that we’ll find my dad and that this isn’t just the location of yet another clue. Here we are racing to beat the Ferryman, and I can’t even be certain we’re headed toward my dad. If I don’t see another clue for ten years it will be too soon.

  Ash looks over at me, periodically reading my face. “Something we should know?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “Not exactly. It’s just…that message from my dad…it…” I look over at Ash. “It was a rhyme. My dad doesn’t rhyme,” I say, repeating my objection from earlier.

  “Apparently he does,” Aarya says from the backseat.

  “Are you thinking the message was altered? That it wasn’t from him?” Ash asks, ignoring Aarya.

  “No. It was his handwriting,” I say. “And it follows the patterns of the other clues he’s left us. It’s just that all of a sudden, after seventeen years of raising me in a small town away from Strategia, talking to me in non-Strategia ways, and teaching me non-Strategia values, he suddenly does a one-eighty.”

  “Didn’t your dad also lie to you your whole life?” Aarya says, which earns her a disapproving look from Ash through the rearview mirror.

  “He did,” I say. “And I’m learning to accept that, even though I don’t like it. But sending me to Logan’s and to that Lion ball is different. Why would he willingly put me in danger…to what, test me? Everything in me tells me he wouldn’t do that, yet here we are with an address that he could easily have hidden in the tree outside my house instead of in a Lion event. What kind of a parent would do something like that to their child?”

  “Mine,” Ash and Aarya say at the same time, and it puts the kibosh on my rant.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You did and it’s fine,” Ash says. “You’re right that Strategia parents aren’t as warm or cuddly as other people’s parents. But they have a level of responsibility that other parents don’t. They know their children will grow up to stop disasters, to thwart attacks, to sidestep wars—and they do what they need to in order to get us prepared. When you’re looking out for everyone, there are always personal sacrifices. Strategia aren’t perfect.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Aarya says.

  I nod because I’m not sure what to say. Ash’s point is absolutely fair, and from a nonemotional standpoint that logic makes perfect sense. But I’m not coming from a nonemotional standpoint and I don’t want to. I want my dad—the one I’ve always had, the one who loves me so much he would risk everything to keep me safe.

  Ash slows and I spot the sign for Winter Street. We pass a restaurant cleaning up for the night and a closed chocolatier’s with the number 6 on the awning. And the instant Ash puts the car in park, I’m out the door.

  I walk quickly to a brick apartment building with white trim, bay windows, and a bronze number 1. It only takes a few seconds for Ash, Aarya, and Ines to join me. We don’t discuss it; we just casually walk up to the door, and Ash pulls out his lock-picking tools as though they were keys. I stand next to him, blocking him from the view of any pedestrians, and in a couple of seconds we’re inside.

  The lobby is modest but c
lean, with mailboxes near the entrance and a flight of stairs with a polished wooden railing. We walk toward the staircase at an easy pace, avoiding any movements that might signal we’re out of place here. And we make our way steadily up two flights, where the apartment numbers begin with twos.

  Three doors down is apartment number twenty and my heart pounds furiously as we close the short distance. I take a hopeful breath, raise my hand, and knock. Four seconds pass. I knock again. Still nothing.

  Please let my dad be here. Please.

  I look at Ash and he pulls out his lock-picking tools, slipping them into the keyhole. There is the familiar click, and he cracks the door an inch. He peers through the opening, but instead of taking his time assessing the inside like I would have imagined, he opens the door wide.

  For a split second I try to convince myself that it’s because he sees my dad, but in my gut I know that’s wrong. And the instant I lay eyes on the room, I panic. The living room is a mess—furniture overturned, glass on the floor, and blood.

  I rush into the room. “Dad!” I call out, but there’s no answer.

  Beside me, Ash has his knife drawn and Ines is clutching a blow dart. But I can’t think about weapons right now. All I can think is that there is blood on the floor that belongs to someone, and I hope more than anything that someone isn’t my dad.

  I race into the bedroom, which is disconcertingly tidy, with a quilt folded at the bottom of the bed and my dad’s plaid duffel bag, which matches my own, sitting on the floor next to an armoire. My heart sinks. “No,” I say, backing out of the room.

  Ash touches my arm. “November—”

  But I pull away. “I’m not…This is not…No,” I say, trying to unknow this horror.

  I walk back toward the living room, but Ash blocks my path. “Why are you…move, Ash,” I say.