The Progeny

by Tosca Lee

  Sometime midmorning, I spot movement on the ladder of the bunk beds across the room. Ana steps from the last rung without a sound, a blond-haired wraith in a white T-shirt.

  “Can’t sleep?” I whisper. She looks up, dully.

  It kills me to see the stars gone from her eyes.

  “Come on,” I say, holding back the covers as though she were twelve. She climbs in beside me and cries against my shoulder until it’s wet, clutching me like I’m the last strong thing to hold on to in a storm.

  My mind is disobedient in sleep. The last symbol, the one nothing at all like the boxy Glagolitic characters and set apart by a small space from the others, is littered through my dreams.

  * * *

  “Audra, get up.”

  I open my eyes on Claudia, in a blunt-cut black wig, bangs hanging down to her shades. “We have a problem.”

  “What?”

  “Ana’s missing.”

  I rub my eyes. “What do you mean missing—” I stop at the sight of a leggy, olive-skinned brunette with shoulder-length dreads sitting on one of the low bunks against the wall. She’s clad entirely in purple, from her dress to her tights and knee-high boots, an open laptop at her side.

  “Who’s that?” I demand.

  “That’s Jester,” she says.

  I stare, dumbfounded. That’s Jester?

  The new arrival gets up and comes over. There’s something different about one of her legs—the angle of her knee is slightly off—and only when she’s kissing my cheeks in greeting do I realize it’s prosthetic.

  “How’d you find us?”

  “I tracked Claudia’s phone,” Jester says. Her accent is unmistakably French. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  “Tracking a phone?”

  “No! That Tibor has declared war against Nikola and thrown his lot in with you. He sends his regards, by the way,” she says, dropping several German passports on the bed beside me.

  “What do you mean Ana’s missing?” I say, staring at them.

  “She said she was going for coffee, but that was hours ago. Piotrek’s looking for her.”

  Across the room, Luka’s scratching a pencil over the pad on the desk. A few seconds later he holds it up. It’s covered with imprints from the sheet above. The last symbol from my back, drawn again and again and again.

  “The top page is missing.” He strides over and pulls the neck of my shirt aside. Instinctively, I reach for the key. But I already know it’s missing.

  “She took the copy of the symbols and their translations from my backpack,” Luka says grimly.

  “What symbols?” Claudia says.

  In my anger, which is only a thin disguise for the fear turning my fingertips to ice, I round on Claudia. “I go to sleep for what—three hours? And crazy Tibor declares some war against Nikola, she shows up with a laptop as though none of this is bad enough that we need a digital trail, too, and Ana goes missing with a drawing of the symbols on my back. What genius felt the need to draw them over and over anyway before she ran off with my key?” I demand. “How many different ways can we try to get ourselves killed?”

  “Audra—” Luka says, gesturing at me.

  I glance down at myself, and then at the pencil in my hand.

  My sleepwalking activities have returned. That, and I’m such an ass.

  “What symbols?” Claudia says, as Jester’s laptop chirps.

  I go into the bathroom to splash water on my face as Jester practically sprints across the room.

  “I found her,” she calls out. In the mirror I see Luka and Claudia sit down on either side of her to stare at the screen. Claudia covers her mouth with a hand.

  What now? I don’t think I can take any more of sucking so bad at being on the lam.

  “She’s in Budapest.”

  I stride out to the bed and sit next to Luka. “How do you know?” There, on the screen, is camera footage of a woman coming up out of a subway station in a pair of shades and what looks like one of Claudia’s wigs. Her face is covered with electronic dots, an image of her on a window to the right.

  “How did you get this?”

  “Jester has certain skills,” Claudia says. A minute later she’s on the phone with Piotrek speaking in clipped Croatian.

  Jester’s a hacker?

  “Where’s she going?” Luka says.

  “She’s on the Buda side near the Danube,” Jester says with obvious dismay. “No, no—”

  “No what?”

  “Gellert Hill. She’s going underground,” Jester says, typing frantically.

  “Then we can find her.”

  “We’re about to lose her.”

  “You just said you know where she is!”

  “There’s a whole world under the Buda Hills! A church, bunkers, a complete World War Two hospital. Hundreds of cave systems, some kilometers long! Why do you think tracking Nikola is so difficult? Even the city doesn’t know everything that’s there. The Budapest princes have intentionally kept entire systems secret for centuries, going so far as to steal the city’s survey of the caves beneath Castle Hill in the late eighteen hundreds. As far as anyone knows, it disappeared and has never been found.”

  “You think Nikola has the survey,” I say.

  “Undoubtedly. It is the reason the Budapest court is the safest and most famous in the world. It has been the safe haven of the Progeny who found their way to it for years.”

  “So Ana’s looking for Nikola,” I say. With the key and a copy of the symbols on my back. “But you’re saying she may never find him. That she may never see the light of day again!”

  “Unless he reached out to her first. Look.” She points to the screen. “These are not the movements of a girl wandering aimlessly. She knows where she is going.”

  And as I watch the specter on the screen, she’s right; I’ve never seen Ana so resolute.

  “Why would she look for Nikola?” Claudia says.

  “To exchange information for Nino.” I get to my feet, fingers digging into my hair.

  “She’ll be underground in minutes,” Jester says. “I can try to trigger a fire or smoke alarm near the church, but then they’ll know something is up. They’ll be that much harder to find.”

  “No,” I say, getting up. “Let her go.”

  “She’s got your key!” Claudia says.

  “Her fake key,” Luka says quietly.

  But that’s not all Nikola will have if she reaches him.

  He’ll have Ana, too.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, fists pressed to my head.

  It won’t stop. It will never stop. Who will be next? Claudia? Piotrek? Or will they go straight for Luka?

  Claudia was more right than she knew that first night when she said it would have been better if I’d stayed dead. At the time, at least, she had been talking about the Scions—not our own blood.

  Piotrek returns and listens, grim-faced, to Claudia’s rapid account in Croatian. Luka asks if there’s someone in Budapest close enough to intercept Ana, but she has since disappeared.

  I get up, grab my jacket. “Let’s go,” I say.

  Luka, watching me all this time, closes up our bags.

  “She could be anywhere underground by the time we get to Budapest,” Claudia says.

  “Not Budapest,” I say, shouldering my backpack. “Vienna.”

  Because the only way I’m going to have anything to bargain with is to get to it first.

  We skirt down the back stairs to the first floor. Just outside the common room Piotrek slows and nearly stops altogether. The television in the corner drones on to no one. Two girls at the center table sit engrossed in conversation, the guy in the corner oblivious to all but his laptop. Luka veers toward me without slowing.

  “Move. Don’t stop,” he says, taking me by the elbow.

  Too late. Even after he walks me swiftly out the side door to the car, the television screen is embedded in my memory.

  Filled with a picture of me.

  31


  * * *

  Sitting in the back of the Skoda, I might be in shock.

  “What did it say?” I ask, my voice steadier than I feel. I can picture every letter of the caption, but it’s in German.

  “They found Nino’s body. You’re wanted for his murder,” Piotrek says. In the backseat, Luka reaches for my hand.

  I close my eyes.

  Did Nino bleed out on the floor of that trailer, or did they kill him? Did he die alone—or at Nikola’s hands?

  I try to block the images, but they play out with brutal detail, nearly as though I had witnessed them.

  What will happen to Ana now?

  “They’re calling you a serial killer,” Piotrek says. “Saying you killed a man in Croatia last week.”

  Beside me, Claudia stares out the window in silence. I wonder if she’s thinking how close to the truth it is, calling me a murderer. It doesn’t matter that I never drew blood, could not have possibly inflicted that kind of damage on a man Nino’s size. He and Ivan both are dead because of me.

  The resolve I felt ten minutes ago has frayed to a single thread. And I know if I allow myself to think about Ana—fragile, so lost without Nino—I will come completely undone.

  “Turn here,” Jester says from the front seat, laptop open on her knees. “We need to switch cars. I’m lining one up now.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I blurt out. “Tibor volunteered you, but you don’t strike me as anyone’s lackey.”

  “ ‘Lackey’?” she says. Claudia translates. I had no idea she spoke French.

  “Tibor’s been trying to gather information on Nikola for years. It’s something of an addiction to me now. I am sorry for you, but this is a gold mine to me. Katia was my sister.”

  “I need a chart,” I mutter. “Between ‘siblings,’ real siblings, and love interests, the underground’s worse than Arkansas.”

  Piotrek frowns in the rearview mirror. “I don’t understand.”

  “Does it seem strange to anyone but me that other Progeny are willing to kidnap or brutalize their own for Nikola?” I say. “For someone willing to kill his own people?”

  “He is the Prince of Budapest,” Claudia says quietly. “He is very powerful. More so today, as he’s become so elusive. He’s more a myth than a man to most Progeny—practically a god to young Utod like Ana. You’re the only person I’ve heard of, other than Tibor, ever speaking to him. And yes. Every prince has the authority to remove any Progeny he considers dangerous. Now you understand why I was afraid.”

  “So court is safe as long as you don’t stand out enough to get killed.”

  “I’ve altered your facial nodes in the police database,” Jester says. “It may help for a while. Meanwhile, here is the news article: ‘Audra Ellison, wanted for the murders of Nino Kolar and Imre Tomić and the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Ana Gudac.’ ”

  “Kidnapping?”

  “It says you drugged and kidnapped her after murdering her partner in a fit of jealousy. There’s no mention of anyone else by name. Only that you may be traveling with others.”

  At least I’ve been singled out. It isn’t a guarantee of anyone else’s safety, but for now, at least, they’re not in the news.

  I don one of Claudia’s wigs before we leave the Skoda at a car rental lot and switch to a larger Peugeot kombi complete with expressway stickers.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jester’s got the etching of the last symbol on my back propped against her laptop screen, where she’s re-creating it by hand, muttering at every bump through a construction zone.

  If Jester cracks that symbol, I will finally know what I’ve been protecting all this time. The thing that Nikola and the Scions alike want desperately enough to kill for. A weapon, Nikola called it. Evidence that most likely proves Bathory’s guilt—why else would I have erased it? What makes Nikola so sure, then, that he can use it against the Scions?

  But right now my biggest question is how to wield that same weapon against him.

  “You said you’ve been gathering information on Nikola for years,” I say to Jester. “Like what?”

  “Anything. What courts he appears at. Who his confidants are. Few have the courage to openly oppose him, but Tibor has never trusted him. Not since the rumor began that Nikola wanted to make a census. You can imagine the kind of alarm that would create, how dangerous that would be in any hand—even one of our own. Nikola argued that the Historian already has such a census in the form of a genealogy dating back centuries. Or, at least, that has been the rumor forever. Every time a hunter makes a kill and harvests a memory, a little piece of that puzzle gets filled in for the current and previous generation. It’s how they know to assign new hunters to marks as new Progeny are discovered.”

  “A death map,” Claudia says.

  “With such a genealogy the Scions can trace bloodlines for hundreds of years to the children of Elizabeth we descend from: Anastasia, who was illegitimate, and Pál—the only male to pass the legacy, which he received from Elizabeth herself. The Franciscans kept such a thing for us once until the practice was abolished, two hundred years ago, when the genealogy was stolen and many Utod died.”

  “What could Nikola possibly gain from a census?” Luka says. “Except for the potential to wipe out an entire underground?”

  “Just that,” I say. “The potential to wipe out an entire underground.”

  But why?

  “No, there is more,” Jester says. “Because the legacy is passed through the mother, the children of Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter are more powerful than those of her legitimate son. But they are also far more rare. They were the highest-priority targets of the Scions for centuries, the most hunted of the hunted. Tibor believes that Nikola is searching for some missing remnant of Anastasia’s line.”

  “More powerful how?”

  “No one knows. The bloodline died out or went into hiding nearly a century ago.” Jester lifts her shoulders. “But Nikola’s been obsessed with it.”

  Could that be what Nikola thinks I found? Some remnant of that line? Maybe it’s never been the diary after all!

  “For what purpose?”

  She shrugs. “Who knows? He’s a madman.”

  “And Tibor isn’t as crazy as he lets on,” I murmur.

  “No. On the contrary, he’s frighteningly intelligent, with a deep ability to understand the psychology of others.”

  “Crazy or not, Nikola’s no idiot, either. How did he become Prince of Budapest, anyway? How does anyone?”

  “A matter of connection and charisma.”

  “All the Progeny have charisma,” I say.

  “Yes, but the underground is the ultimate experiment in leadership. You know who the true leaders are—others talk about them in mythic terms. People follow them, if only out of curiosity. Why do you think I am here?”

  “You said yourself: because of Katia.”

  “For the excitement, no? We can’t all jump off high buildings,” she says wryly. “And everyone is talking about you for days now. We Utod have our own pop culture, being comprised mostly of young people. You are a celebrity.”

  It’s true that Progeny culture—court itself—is practically a cult of youth. In that way, I suppose, the legends about Elizabeth Bathory have lived on—forever young, charismatic, beautiful . . . and just as walled up as ever.

  “Nikola was nothing, once,” Jester continues. “But he was afraid of nothing. That will get you far at court. But it was becoming close to your mother that put him on the map.”

  “How?”

  “He became a zealot. Much as Amerie was rumored to have been. And zealots are idolized at court, because they are filled with passion. They are alive. They are out doing zealot things! Like having their memories erased.”

  “If you’re here for fame by association, I strongly suggest you rethink your motives,” I mutter.

  A blip sounds from Jester’s computer, and a large gold version of the logo she entered off my sketch balloons onto the
screen.

  “Aha,” she says. “Here it is.”

  I had forgotten about the computer, searching in silence all this time. Now, at sight of the symbol, I think I might be ill.

  Luka’s hand tightens around mine as though sensing the sick lurch in my gut. He’s been quiet, no doubt upset at what I said last night. Maybe even reconsidering his promise to protect me no matter what. And while I selfishly hope that’s not the case—would be lost, actually, if he left me now—a part of me can’t possibly blame him.

  I also feel guilty for wanting him to stay when I know Ana is somewhere on this earth alone.

  “This is the Glagolitic symbol for life,” Jester says with some surprise. “And . . . it is also the logo for Der Tresorraum in Vienna—a private vault unaffiliated with any bank.” She taps the screen and looks back at me. “How did you know it was Vienna?”

  “Luka figured it out,” I say, glancing at him. But he is tense, and silent.

  * * *

  Auerspergstrasse, Vienna, is lined with Baroque buildings, their columns set into outer walls, elaborate banisters trimming the roofs. Rich, yes. But not at all how I pictured the setting for a high-tech vault. I check my wig in the rearview mirror, make sure that a section falls over my face. It’s weird to have long hair, to be nearly my natural color again.

  “This vault offers anonymous safety deposit boxes,” Jester says. “You cannot get this even in Zurich anymore. However long you took the box out for—one year, ten, thirty—it wasn’t cheap. But here is why you did it: There’s no identification required. Just your pass code and biometrics.”

  “I don’t like this,” Luka says. “Nikola had no choice but to let you find it. He can’t fake your biometrics.”

  “Which means I’ll be fine,” I say. At least until I get in.

  Piotrek looks into the mirror at me. “We will let you and Luka out on that side street and circle back in fifteen minutes, and then every five after that.”

  “I’m going alone,” I say.

  “You can’t,” Claudia says. “Luka, don’t let her!”

  But he does not insist. An effort, I know, to try to prove his motives. But his jaw is twitching.

  “We’ve already passed more traffic cameras than I can count,” I say. “And for all we know, Nikola’s got someone watching the building. A second person is just another opportunity to identify one of us. I’ll find a different way out, meet you there on the back of the block,” I say, pointing to Lange Gasse street on Jester’s screen.