Firstborn

by Tosca Lee

  “Audra!” Luka says, shielding me from the street.

  “Do you know how to drive a motorcycle?” I grate out.

  “Yeah, why?”

  A moment later a motorcyclist pulls into the alley, gets out his spare helmet, hands over his keys.

  As we double back toward the river, the ride is a blur of twilight consciousness beneath the late-morning sun, the hum of the motorbike far too steady for my racing Progeny heart. I tighten my arms around Luka’s waist, fingers splayed against his chest. Lay a helmeted cheek against his back as one of his hands covers my own.

  Just across the river Danube, Luka pulls over under a bridge to call Jester. I look out at the graffiti-covered wall lining the pedestrian walk along the river, follow those muddied waters south. Somewhere, miles from here, they flow past the shores of Csepel Island in Budapest, where my mother’s body was found. I have never been able to look at them without thinking of her, and of death—the one constant in any Progeny’s so-called life.

  I watch a river cruise ship inch its way upriver, as tall as a two-story building. Wonder what it must be like to be a tourist on those grisly waters—to have so few cares that one could drink, photograph, and journal a week of life away.

  Luka paces back, clicks off the phone.

  “Traffic is backed up for a mile at every exit from the city,” he says. “They’re searching cars.”

  “Then we can’t leave by road,” I say, sitting straighter with effort. The adrenaline is back, just a tiny tendril itching at the back of my spine.

  “What’d you have in mind?” he says, getting back on the bike.

  I point south to the light rail bridge with its tram wires down the middle, pedestrian walk on either side.

  At the bridge, we abandon the bike and Luka grabs my hand. We’re still wearing our helmets. Even so, heads turn in our direction as though alerted by an inaudible siren, set off by the Progeny charisma in my veins.

  Twenty yards in we lean out over the handrail, as though contemplating the river below. The ship is approaching.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Luka breathes. I want to tell him this is the kind of thing Nino and Ana would have done into their old age for fun had they survived so long.

  The thought of them sends a pain through my chest so hot that the minute the prow of the cruise ship passes beneath us, it’s all I can do to climb onto the rail as fast as I can and jump, if only to escape it.

  We drop onto the roof of the ship’s observation lounge. Slide down onto the railed walkway of the upper deck. Gasps, a scream from above. I glance back toward the bridge drifting slowly downriver in our wake, the pedestrians glued to the rail.

  You didn’t see that.

  My head is swimming. Luka half-carries me below, where he raps on the door of the first stateroom he comes to.

  A middle-aged man answers the door, brows lifted in surprise at the sight of our helmeted heads.

  “Frank?” a woman says from behind him. I look up.

  We’re here to clean. Go up to the lounge and stay there. The couple glance at one another. A moment later, the woman retrieves her purse, asks for extra towels, and hands Luka two euros as they leave.

  Luka catches the door before it closes, helps me inside. He’s barely bolted the lock behind us when I collapse on the rumpled bed.

  8

  * * *

  By the time I wake, the sky has darkened to a rusty sunset. I stare out the window, transfixed by the string of lights along the shore, the silhouette of a church in the distance. Somewhere in that riverside city people are sitting down to dinner, tucking in children, worrying about lovers or jobs. Somewhere out there, other twenty-one-year-olds are studying in dorms, going on dates, or meeting friends at cute outdoor cafés. As the sky burns down to embers, I wonder how many Progeny walk those streets . . . and how many hunters follow.

  Luka pulls me gently toward him, curling me close in sleep. Warm breath against my hair. A thing so simple, I barely believe it’s real. I never thought I’d feel that again.

  If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend we’re safe. Can imagine lolling in bed for hours, just watching the world pass by.

  A few minutes later, Luka raises his head and the illusion shatters. His eye is swollen, a fresh cut drying beneath his brow—a restless edginess in his good eye. His hair is damp, freshly washed, tucked behind an ear. He’s shaved, causing the black bruises on his face to stand out more starkly than ever. It hurts to look at him. Because somehow, I’m positive this is my fault.

  He touches a kiss to my temple and then props his head in his hand.

  “Are you all right?” he says, studying me closely, something like fear in his eyes.

  I tilt my head back to squint at the ceiling and nod. And though the roar in my brain has subsided to a dull throb, my entire body feels like lead.

  I roll away, push up from the bed. Slide my feet to the floor . . . and then stare.

  All around us, loose pages are laid across the dresser and sofa, spread out in lines on the floor. No fewer than ten are tucked into the frame of the mirror.

  The contents of the folder.

  At the mere sight of them, my heart begins to race. I bolt up, ignore the immediate prickling of my vision, and start blindly grabbing them off the dresser.

  “What are you doing?” I shout, gathering them together before scrambling for the lineup on the floor.

  “Audra. I didn’t do this. You did.”

  I freeze on my hands and knees, shove away from the pile on the floor as though it were a snake.

  “You were sleeping so hard, I actually checked to make sure you were still breathing,” he says. “You were like that when I went to shower. When I came out . . .” He gets down and crouches beside me, gathers up several pages like I’m some mental patient who has just lost all her marbles.

  Apparently my sleepwalking ways are back.

  I see the questions in his eyes. But I’m not ready to answer. I take down the rest of the pages—articles and hard copies of e-mails—and catch sight of myself in the stateroom mirror. I don’t recognize the girl I see there: blood crusted on her chin and upper lip, down the front of a grimy shirt. Hair hanging in greasy strands past the hollows of her cheeks. Circles beneath her eyes. A shell of the woman who met me in the mirror back in Maine. At least the scrubby patch above my ear has grown out enough to resemble a botched haircut.

  I shove the contents back into the folder and excuse myself to the bathroom, lock myself in. I undress and take refuge in the spray of the cabin’s tiny shower, use up an entire little bottle of shampoo. By the time I turn off the water, my headache is almost gone. Loitering as I finger-comb my hair, I realize this is the first time I’ve bathed in nearly a week.

  Now that I have, I should be out there with Luka, celebrating that we’re alive. Making up for lost time. Making love.

  But a lot has happened in five days. And it’s hard to make love when you’ve closed yourself away with your secrets.

  I wipe the steam from the mirror. Slowly open the towel tucked around me.

  I turn sideways, lay my hand over the curve of my belly. Think back to the night Claudia dressed me in a pair of velvet pants as we prepared to enter court our first night in Zagreb. They were mine, from before—and so snug I nearly caught my skin in the zipper.

  “Audra?” a soft rap on the door. “Are you all right?”

  No. “Yeah.”

  I wrap myself back in the towel, strangely self-conscious. Emerge from the bathroom and steal to one of the drawers in the closet. Pull on a turtleneck, a pair of khaki pants—both a size too big. Despite the fact that I would pretty much kill for a clean pair of underwear, I draw the line at bogarting another woman’s practical cotton briefs. Commando it is.

  It occurs to me that I’m unabashedly stealing, but given that I had three men shot yesterday and have been branded a terrorist, it seems like the least of my sins.

  Luka’s got the television on, is surfing th
rough the channels. He stops on one, turns up the volume though I’m not sure why; it’s in German.

  “Audra.”

  I walk over . . . and then sink down onto the bed, staring at it. My picture is plastered across the screen.

  I don’t need to speak German to understand the word pasted like a banner beneath it:

  Terrorist.

  Luka comes to sit beside me.

  I try to think of something clever to say about being upgraded from “murderer,” painfully aware that in all this time since I got him back we haven’t spoken. Not really.

  He reaches over, covers my hand with his own, twines his fingers with mine. His knuckles are scraped, cuts across his wrists from the zip ties.

  The hand of my husband.

  Of my daughter’s father.

  Those cuts are because of us.

  He picks up the remote, mutes the TV. Silence and expectation fill the room like dread.

  For five days I’ve dreamed of nothing but what it would be like—might be like, since assuming I’d succeed was nothing but a pipe dream—to have Luka back. To be back in his arms. To tell him everything . . .

  But I hadn’t counted on the everything I’d have to tell him. And right now, I have no idea how he’ll react to what I’m about to say.

  I pull free and get up. Try to choose my words. But it’s hard to pick and choose when there are only four words that say what he needs to hear.

  “We have a daughter.” I turn back to find him staring at his empty hand.

  In that moment, I hate myself. For not running to him and gushing about our baby. For not begging his forgiveness for not having told him. For not shaking him and saying that of course I went back for him, that there was no way I would ever let him die—not while there was breath in my body and how dare he ever doubt it.

  That he was never alone.

  But instead I stand there frozen, not knowing how to have this conversation. Hating the Audra of before for making me feel like the interloper. For doing this to Luka. To us both.

  “Eva,” he whispers and looks up at me.

  I fall back a step, dumbstruck. “You . . . knew about her?”

  Relief, betrayal, anger wash over me in such quick succession I don’t know which one to grab on to.

  “It was my mother’s name,” he says quietly, looking down at his hands. “We named her Eva Amerie.”

  I sit down hard on the corner of the bed.

  “Luka, I need to know . . .”

  He nods. “The night you came back to me and said you still wanted me even though you knew what I was, I asked you right then and there to marry me,” he says softly. “You called me an idiot. And then you said yes. We got married the next day. It didn’t make sense. We didn’t make sense. But I didn’t care. I wanted as much life as we could get out of this existence . . . I told you about that.”

  My mind reels back to the conversation that day in Graz on our way to Zagreb’s underground court. Was it just two weeks ago?

  “You said we fought,” I stutter. “That I became obsessed with finding a way out.”

  “We did. But I didn’t tell you the whole story. You had found something of your mother’s by then. A stash of her notes.”

  I have to work to suppress a shudder. To tamp down the adrenaline jittering along my arms.

  “You started talking about bringing an end to the Scions—something I said was impossible. It was dangerous to talk about. Dangerous to even think about. But you were obsessed. You began meeting secretly with Ivan and others. You barely slept. Went nearly every night to court, and came back in the morning with this fire in your eyes. I was jealous. I felt like I was losing you. Especially when the courts in Budapest and Zagreb began to swell. I could sense that they were as fixated on you—on what you represented to them—as you were on the idea of bringing the Scions down for good.”

  “Then why didn’t I?” But I already know the answer.

  “When you found out you were pregnant, it changed everything. I had never seen you terrified before. You weren’t afraid to become a mother—in the morning light, I swore you looked like the Madonna of paintings. But those moments were always followed by dark thoughts about what kind of future any Progeny child could have. You became quiet and withdrawn. You went less and less to the underground, and began to scour your mother’s letters as though something new would show up in them that you hadn’t seen before. Something you had missed. Twice you disappeared for two days at a time. I was frantic, convinced you had left me for good, though you swore each time you returned you never would . . .”

  His eyes, when he looks at me, are haunted, and I know what he’s thinking: that I did leave him, irrevocably, the day I erased him from my memory.

  He rakes back his hair. “One day in March, you said we had to go. We were in Zagreb. You had gone to court the night before and came back the next morning in a panic, saying your work had been exposed.”

  Ivan’s words the last time I saw him, come back to me:

  It was March. We were in Zagreb. One night, you simply vanished . . .

  “Exposed how?”

  “You wouldn’t say more than that. But I knew it had to do with your mother’s letters. Suddenly, you didn’t trust anyone. All your plans to destroy the Scions . . . for the first time I heard you say it couldn’t be done. We knew we didn’t have three years left. Not anymore. That the day might come when they’d take one of us, or try to use me against you . . .” His voice turns hollow.

  “What did they do to you?” I whisper. I had refused to let myself think of how they might interrogate or torture him, knowing the mere thought would reduce me to a catatonic huddle, kill any chance I had of finding the only leverage that would matter—and Luka, in the process.

  “Nothing that could ever make me give you or Eva up,” he says, gaze hard. And there it is, in his eyes—the killer. The hunter who nearly strangled a man to death earlier today. I wonder if the Audra of before would have stopped him.

  “Eva was born June fifteenth. We had gone into hiding in Spain and then in Italy. You persuaded a local midwife to deliver her in secret. The next day we took her to a foundling box in Rome known to Progeny circles.” His voice breaks. “You had begged me to find a place for her, somewhere safe. But I was already connected to you. Any child I would have tried to give up under my name or arranged an adoption for would have been immediately known for what—whose—it was . . .”

  Like that, the killer is gone. And somehow, the sag of his shoulders is far more frightening.

  “I saw her, Luka.”

  He’s on his feet in an instant.

  “Where?”

  “Krk. A monastery—on an island in the bay.”

  “Where is she now?” His eyes are wild. I can practically hear him calculating the distance from here to there, the number of hours and minutes.

  “I don’t know. Safe. They couldn’t tell me where.”

  He sinks back down as though struck.

  “Is she beautiful?” he says hoarsely.

  My expression crumples and my voice comes out with all my heart in a tight whisper. “She’s perfect.”

  He heaves a ragged breath and leans forward, hands over his face. And then he’s sobbing.

  I cover him with my arms, my body. “I’m sorry,” I say again and again, clasping him tightly, my tears against his neck.

  If I ever looked down on a couple for giving up a child—and I don’t know if I ever did—I take it back. If I was ever less than compassionate toward the parents of a lost child, I repent. My heart breaks, is breaking—over and over. For the baby. For myself. But most of all, for him. Because I have mercifully forgotten. But Luka . . . Luka remembers it all.

  And I wonder how he can look at me at all for the tragedy I’ve brought to his life in repayment for his love.

  We hold each other as the shoreline drifts by, silent and stealthy as a life, escaping a mile at a time.

  This is not the reunion I imagined. The ne
ed and skin and heat of my imagination have given way to broken bereavement.

  Jester texts to say she’s located the ship’s itinerary and will send us an address before we dock in Regensburg. We’ve switched TV channels to the ship’s closed-caption station, where a miniature vessel on the digital map wends a blue path north, toward Germany, so slowly as to appear static.

  For as quiet as I am, for as still and tight as my arm is around him, my mind is racing. Cannot help but pick at the pieces of a past I don’t remember like the scab of a wound.

  “Luka.”

  He murmurs and turns his head, and I realize he’s been sleeping.

  “What happened . . . after?” Right now I can’t bear to say Eva’s name any more than I think he can bear to hear it.

  He rubs his face. “You went into depression. We both did, but yours . . . was dark. I wanted to talk about everything about her—from the way she was born to the moment she opened her eyes, to the sounds she made when she slept . . . I needed to keep her memory alive, for myself. But you couldn’t stand to talk about it. You were focused completely on what you had to do to keep her safe. You talked about dying. About how losing your memory felt like a form of dying. I hated hearing you talk like that.” He pinches his forehead, as though engaged in a simultaneous, louder conversation in his mind. “After a while I came to realize that it was your way of paying some price. As though you felt you had to die to have the hope of having her back again.”

  In a way I guess I had.

  “When did I get the tattoo on my back?”

  “Probably when you went to the States to begin the trial at the Center. You went ahead of me, so that when I came in a few days later, it would look like I had followed you.”

  “To kill me.”

  He nods, the faint lines around his mouth deeper than I remember.

  “After your second appointment at the Center, you came back in the best spirits I had seen you in for months. ‘We’ll get her back, Luka,’ you said. And I was surprised to hear you say that, because that had always been our plan—getting her back. But I remember you said it that day several times, as though you finally believed it.”