The Lost Girl

by Sangu Mandanna

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Going to go after him, are you? You don’t even know where he is.”

  “I can call Erik and ask him about the bank. Thanks to Ophelia, I don’t have to be careful about contacting him anymore. It’s too late for that now.”

  “You are being absurd.”

  I scramble for my shoes. “I have to find Sean before your seekers do. I might be in time. Get out of the way!”

  “No.” Matthew puts his foot down on my boots. I try to pull them out from under him, but he is immovable. I straighten up, ready to hit him, and he gives me a cold, dry look. “You will not be in time. I have no doubt they’ve found him already. If you go out there, you will also be captured, and as I have already told you, that does not suit me one bit. Do be sensible for a change. His capture does not mean death. Yours will. Tedious. Predictable. Remember?”

  “Move!”

  “And this is what he would want, is it?” he drawls, refusing to budge. “He’d like it if you went out and threw yourself into the jaws of the waiting beast? He’d be happy, would he?”

  It’s the last thing Sean would want. He will never forgive me if I am captured because of this. But he’s out there and if there’s still a chance I can help him—

  “I can go barefoot, you know,” I hiss through my teeth.

  I see him move, but I am standing too close to him. I can’t get out of the way in time. His hand closes over my throat.

  I gasp. Oxygen vanishes from my lungs. My hands claw frantically at his, but everything goes dim and dark at the edges. Then it’s all gone.

  7

  Echoes

  I groan against the floorboards. I must have bumped my head because it hurts. I open heavy eyes and blink at the empty loft.

  My confusion lasts only a second before it is wiped out by fury. I crawl to my knees. Matthew’s gone. My watch tells me I’ve been out cold for twenty minutes. My boots are on my feet. He must have put them on. His idea of a joke. I could strangle him.

  What did he think this would achieve? That if he delayed me I would change my mind? I’m not an idiot. I know the odds are slim. I know how unlikely it is that I will get to Sean in time. The seekers probably already have him, and if they are still waiting, hoping to draw me out, I won’t stand a chance at getting away. But I can’t turn tail and run and abandon him.

  I get to my feet. My mouth tastes like dust and fear and rage. I hesitate, staring at my boots. They feel heavy. Weighing me down.

  Matthew was right about that much. The sensible thing to do would be to run. Sean would want me to. He wouldn’t want me to waste our efforts, everything he’s given up for me, by going back for him. And Erik will step in; he will try to persuade the Weavers not to send Sean to prison. They may let him go. I make a bitter sound in my throat. It’s not likely to happen that way. But the voice of reason in my head, the one that sounds an awful lot like Amarra, tells me how much smarter it would be to run.

  Only I can’t. The Eva from before, who lived by the lake and knew so little of loss and loyalty and blinding terror, she wouldn’t have even recognized the sensible thing. She’d have been on her way to find Sean by now. But me? I recognize sensible and not sensible. I am still here looking at my boots. But I am also still going to go.

  I find some aspirin in Sean’s bag and take two for my throbbing head. Then I search for cash, not knowing how much I will need to get to the bank, and stuff whatever I can find into my jeans. I have just closed my fist over a last five-pound note when I hear it.

  The ladder.

  A creak. Someone is on the ladder.

  I whirl, almost tripping over my mattress. If it’s someone from the theater, I’m stuck. What am I supposed to do, fight them and run? But the trapdoor flips open and it’s not a stranger, it’s the top of Sean’s head.

  I sway unsteadily on my feet. I think I might faint. I drop the five-pound note. I’m going to kill him.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  He looks slightly alarmed. “Er, I went to get your stuff. Did I imagine the conversation we had before I left?”

  I almost bite him. I am dangerously close to tears. “But—but the seekers! I thought I’d never see you again. . . . I thought you were in trouble—”

  “I got away.”

  He sounds calm. Too calm. There are scratches on his arms. A bruise under his right eye. I got away. That’s all he says?

  “I hate you!” I sob. “Go away! I don’t care what happened to you! I wish they’d caught you!” I throw myself down on the floor and cross my arms so tightly they feel numb.

  Sean walks carefully toward me, but the tiny glimmer of amusement in his eyes only annoys me more.

  “Go away!” I say again, sniffling. “Or I will. I can’t bear it! I can’t make it through a lifetime of you going missing every five minutes!”

  “Okay.”

  I scramble to my feet. “No, I didn’t mean it! Don’t go away!”

  “I wasn’t going to,” he says, the corner of his mouth twitching like he can’t help himself. “But if it’s all right with you, I’m going to kiss you now.”

  And before I can say or do anything, he does.

  I stop trying to talk. His fingers tangle in my hair. He puts a hand against the wall behind me, trapping me in place. My heart beats very fast and a fierce, shocking wanting spreads through my skin, to my fingers and toes and belly. His other hand bites into my back, pulling me closer. I lick his tongue. He groans softly and pulls back, just a little.

  His eyes stare dizzily down into mine. His breathing is uneven. It feels like stars are bursting into flame across my soul and I am sinking deeper and deeper into a hot, spinning sky. I run my fingers over his lips.

  “I can’t live with losing you,” I whisper, “and for a while there, I thought I had.”

  He reaches for my fingers, tangles his hand with mine. “That’s how I feel every single day,” he says brokenly. “Every day, Eva. Your life is dangling by a thread. And I’m scrabbling to hold on, but it keeps slipping through my fingers. I’m here because I can’t stand not to be. It’s not some big noble sacrifice. I want to be here. I don’t like the world without you. I need you to be alive.”

  I wipe the back of my hand across my nose and blink away tears. “And I need you to be, so don’t ever scare me like that again,” I say, pushing at his chest.

  He steps back. “Wait just one minute. How did you know about the seekers?”

  “Matthew told me.”

  “Matthew!”

  “He was here.” I tell him what happened, almost word for word. His eyes narrow, rather dangerously, when I get to the part about my wanting to go after him, but he lets it go for the moment. My lips twist with dark humor as I finish: “And then he knocked me out.”

  Sean is incredulous. “What is he up to? All this, it’s really just because you impressed him by running away? Because you amuse him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand him. He says no one bothers trying to anymore, and I can see why.”

  “I can’t believe he knocked you out!”

  “I can,” I say darkly, “but never mind that. Ophelia told Adrian I’d be at the bank.” The sharp, cold sting of betrayal hasn’t gone away. “Did the seekers find you?”

  He nods. “I talked to Ophelia, she told me where to go, I got there, talked to the manager and gave him the key. He brought me the box, I emptied it, zipped everything up in my jacket pocket, didn’t have any problems. Then I walked out of the bank and saw them. One of them was missing an ear, and the other had scars across his face. But the eerie thing about them is how quiet they are. They know exactly how to go unnoticed if they want to. And they watch. Their eyes are so steady. I knew who they were as soon as I saw them. I legged it.”

  “But that bruise . . . those scratches—”

  “They caught up to me in an alley,” says Sean. “I think they’d been right behind me the whole time I was running, but they were just wai
ting for me to end up somewhere quiet. I got lucky. A car backfired in the road and startled one of them enough that he let go of me. I fought the other one and ran. Got in the first taxi I found, got out at the next traffic light, and went halfway across the city to sit in a Starbucks until I was sure they hadn’t followed me. We can’t hang around,” he adds. “The sooner we’re out of London, the better.”

  I feel shaky imagining how close he came to being captured. I swallow. “We have no reason to stay here now that you’ve got the stuff. We could get on a plane. Or a train. Anything.”

  “We’re going to have to think this one through,” he says, taking his jacket off. “Now that they know we’re in London, they’ll be watching the stations and airports to catch us on our way out.”

  I open my mouth to offer ideas, to say something sensible, but all I hear is:

  “You kissed me.”

  I grimace. It’s like the words were sitting on the tip of my tongue all this time, waiting for an opportunity to burst out.

  Sean almost blushes. “What, d’you want me to apologize for not being gentlemanly?”

  I half laugh, half choke. “It was a surprise, that’s all.”

  He looks down at me and his expression shifts. He looks sad, like he’s watching a wave come toward us and he has no way of stopping it from crashing.

  “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “We’ve broken every other law. What’s one more?”

  He shakes his head. “It’s different now. It was always wrong for us to feel like this, we knew that. But when they were just feelings we kicked under the carpet, we were safer. They couldn’t punish us for something we hadn’t done. Do you remember that night, ages ago, in your room? Don’t you think I wanted to kiss you then? But I didn’t. And now I have. Now we have broken that law.”

  There’s a truth in his words I can’t deny.

  “If we’re caught,” he says, “this could mean the difference between forgiving and condemning you. They don’t need another excuse to destroy you.”

  “Do you want to kiss me?”

  He nods. I lean over and kiss him. I’ve been longing to since we stopped.

  “Don’t,” he says, pulling me closer. “We can’t. This is the last”—he kisses my neck—“last time.”

  When he eventually pushes me away, it’s a positively indecent amount of time later. Heat has crept up my neck and all the way to the roots of my hair.

  It hurts somewhere deep in my body, deeper than a lung or a stomach or a heart. The world I knew has folded in on itself. I kissed him. He kissed me. In the last couple days, I have broken every law I’ve ever lived by. I feel like singing. I also feel guilty. Ray flickers in a corner of my thoughts. I was supposed to love him. Sometimes, when he looked past Amarra and saw me, sometimes, then, I even thought I could love him one day. I was never supposed to betray everything the Weavers wove me to be. I was never supposed to love anyone else.

  “Did you eat anything at Starbucks?” I ask, and somehow, miraculously, I don’t sound like I’m stunned or breathless. I sound blessedly normal.

  He shakes his head. He looks slightly shaken.

  I hand him a chocolate bar. He gestures wordlessly to his jacket. I follow his lead and ignore what’s just happened. As badly I want to, I know we can’t sit here kissing and pretending everything is shiny and okay.

  I unzip the inner pocket of his jacket and remove the contents.

  A debit card with bank details. I have no idea how much money is in the account, but anything will help. I feel a surge of love, of incredible gratitude for my guardians.

  A shiny disk with no label. It looks old.

  And a wax bird.

  I stare down at the bird and something swells in my chest. I run my fingers over the ridges in the wings. This is one of mine. I don’t think I have a distinctive style or anything, but I recognize what I once made. It was one of my early birds, made clumsily and happily in a corner of my bedroom while Mina Ma slept, a dark, delicious secret to be kept from everyone, even from Sean, who I hadn’t yet met at the time. I put the bird under my bed, and soon after it wasn’t there anymore and I forgot about it.

  “You were the only one who ever knew I made these,” I say softly, stroking the wings. “How did it get here?”

  Sean runs a fingertip down the bird’s beak. He smiles faintly. “I think it’s their way of telling you they always knew,” he says, “and they never tried to stop you. They never told the Weavers about it. I reckon it’s their way of reminding you how much they love you.”

  My throat closes up. I want suddenly to be little again. I want to follow Mina Ma around the supermarket, listening to her complain bitterly about “having to stick to a ridiculous list peppered with things you can’t get your hands on in this wretched country.” I want to hold Erik’s hand and run down the lakeshore, pulling him with me. I want Jonathan to push me in the swing they made for me for my seventh birthday.

  And Ophelia—

  I can’t. I can’t even think of her.

  “What do you think is on this disk?” I ask Sean, forcing myself to focus on the here and now. I hold the disk up to the light, watching it shine.

  He crumples up the chocolate bar wrapper. “This place is full of sound equipment,” he says. “There’s got to be some kind of portable CD player somewhere.” He checks his watch. “It’s still early. They won’t have finished rehearsals yet, but we can’t wait forever.”

  “I think there was an old radio thing in the dressing room below us. It might work.”

  “I’ll go have a look.”

  He isn’t gone long. He returns with the radio a moment later. “Dressing room wasn’t empty,” he says ruefully, “but I don’t think they paid much attention to me. They’re used to seeing me around.”

  We need to leave. Quickly. Sean plugs the radio into a socket in the wall. It doubles up as a CD player, with a little slot to pop the disk into. Sean presses play.

  The sound is scratchy, from the age of the player or the recording or both, but we can still hear everything. At first we hear only a few muffled sounds, footsteps and creaking and the sound of a door opening and closing. Then a voice:

  “Erik! To what do I owe this unexpected visit?” Matthew’s voice. It’s a little different. Younger. But unmistakable all the same.

  And Erik’s reply. “I came to give you my answer. I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not. I’ve seen what happens to them when they break your damned laws. I’d be mad to become responsible for one of them.” There’s a pause and a gurgle in the background, and I realize there’s someone else in the room with them. A child? A baby? “I couldn’t possibly teach her and raise her without coming to care for her. And then if she were destroyed, I couldn’t bear it. No. I have no intention of leaving the Loom altogether. But I can’t be one of those guardians. I can’t take charge of this little thing.”

  “I can’t ask anybody else!” Matthew snaps. “There is no one else!”

  “You have plenty of guardians willing to—”

  “None I’d trust with her. You’ve been here as long as I have. I need you to be part of her life. Look at her, Erik! Look . . . when I pick her up, she smiles at me!”

  “How dare she,” says Erik drily.

  Matthew snorts, sounding remarkably like the Matthew I’ve met. “I only mean it’s obvious the child can’t tell a good thing from a bad one. No one in their right mind smiles so unreservedly at me. She will be trouble. I can tell already. Soon she will have to leave me—leave the Loom and go north. She needs to be guarded. You’re the only guardian we deign to listen to. You’re the only one who can keep her safe.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard Matthew’s voice sound sincere. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him ask for anything. It’s a shock.

  I look at Sean, and it’s obvious he’s thinking the same thing: Erik was having this conversation on purpose. He must have hidden a recorder in hi
s pocket. But why?

  “I’m assuming this is the echo of Neil and Alisha’s first child?” Erik asks. “Amarra? That’s her name?”

  I tense, listening so hard my ears twitch.

  “You know it is.”

  “Matthew.” Erik’s voice is very careful. “I understand why this one is different. I understand that this isn’t easy for you. But you have whims. You change your mind in the blink of an eye. You wish for her to be guarded today, but as soon as she bores you, you won’t care what happens to her.”

  “That is an outrageous slur on my character—”

  “Shut up for a minute. You’ve changed. And I’m not entirely sure I can trust you. What good is my keeping her safe if she isn’t safe from you? If she is in trouble, how much do you truly think I could do to save her? Only a Weaver can save her.”

  Matthew lets out an exasperated breath. “What do you want? My word that if she is ever in trouble, I will do my utmost to save her?”

  “It might make me change my mind.”

  A long, tense pause.

  “What exactly are you trying to do, Erik?”

  “If you want me to move north for this child, risk my heart, I want a promise in return. You will protect her if she needs you.”

  Another pause. I realize I’m holding my breath. My ears are ringing. None of this makes any sense to me. It seems like a dream, intangible voices and echoes from long ago that are no longer real or solid or true.

  “I have one condition.”

  Erik sighs. “Here we go.”

  “I will do what I can for her. If she proves herself worthy of it.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Matthew—”

  “That’s my condition, Erik. I know what I’m asking of you, and so I will give you my word. But I’m not about to risk life and limb for some mewling shrimp of a thing who won’t even try to save her own skin.”

  “You care for that mewling shrimp of a thing—”

  “Only because she’s a living, breathing piece of a lost dream.” There’s scorn in his words, like he’s mocking himself. “It’s sentimental rubbish and I daresay I’ll get over it. The other, the real baby, that girl belongs to Neil and Alisha. But she belongs to me. I lost Alisha, but this—”