Firstborn

by Tosca Lee

  “How were we going to get her back?”

  “I was supposed to take you to the monastery on Cres Island on what would have been Eva’s tenth birthday.”

  “Ten years?”

  “I think—you didn’t say, but I think . . . you were waiting for someone to die.”

  Nikola.

  It has to be. Nikola, who once drafted a Progeny census in an effort to locate other direct descendants of Anastasia like me and destroy them. Nikola, easily in his mid-thirties when few Progeny survived to thirty.

  Nikola, who openly confessed to killing my mother.

  Last week wasn’t the first time he’s betrayed me.

  “You were supposed to take me to Cres to do what?” I say.

  “Meet with someone you had prearranged. Resume what you started before Eva could come into her gifts or expose herself in a search for her birth parents.”

  So I hadn’t gone into hiding, rolled over, and given up. I had planned—been planning—to finish this once she was safely removed from my memory.

  I had not abandoned my child, or the Progeny cause.

  As though reading my mind, Luka says, “Audra, everything we’ve done—everything you did—you did to protect her. The night we deciphered the tattoo on your back, I was afraid you had realized what the numbers meant. Thought you might ask me straight out, see through any lie I threw at you . . . I couldn’t tell you about her! Not while there was any chance another hunter could get to you first. Knowing they could take your memory . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, again and again, cupping his face, smoothing back his hair. Because I am. Sorry I left him alone in this. Sorry I left him to grieve in silence. And I’m angry, too—at Nikola, at the Historian, at the cruelty of an entire war that left Luka and me no more options than to tear off pieces of ourselves until there’s nothing left.

  Most of all, I’m angry at myself. For all of my bitterness toward my mother for not being here for me, for giving me up even to keep me safe. Because I’ve done the same to Eva. She isn’t just any Progeny kid. As a direct descendant of Anastasia and the child of a hunter, she’ll be the most hunted of the hunted. And now that I know she exists, her life is in danger every minute I breathe.

  Staying alive will never be enough.

  I end the Scions or die.

  9

  * * *

  I order room service to be left outside our door: burgers, fries, and coffee. Bottles of apple juice and extra sandwiches. And ice cream—chocolate.

  “What are you doing?” Luka said when I picked up the room phone and dialed the restaurant.

  “It’s called living.”

  The minute the food arrives and the hallway is clear, we pull the tray inside, wolf down the burgers. It’s been days since either of us has eaten a real meal.

  “So what was all that stuff?” he says, gesturing around the room at my phantom crime board.

  “It’s what the Historian was prepared to kill you to get.”

  I tell Luka what happened the night I left him in Bratislava. About the note from Nikola. How I went to Budapest to bargain for his life, not knowing he’d already been taken.

  “Do me a favor,” he says. “Quit trying to protect me.”

  I drag a fry through a puddle of melted ice cream.

  “I mean it, Audra. You’re the one we have to worry about now.”

  He doesn’t have to finish his thought: now that I know about Eva.

  I tell him about Rolan’s heretic sect. My mother’s notes. The church in Nyirbator. How the minute we got to the monastery in Košljun, I knew the diary was there.

  “So . . . the diary . . . is our child?” he says strangely.

  “No. The diary is a cache of incriminating information on the Scions that has been collected for centuries. The minute I started looking through it all . . .” But how do you explain what it’s like to see the future, all at once, in a single instant? Luka dead. Me, lost to the murky waters of the Danube. Rolan on the run with my memory, as much a fugitive as the rest of us. Lives, flashing by, in the space of a moment?

  I retrieve the folder, spread out its contents on the bed. As his gaze slides from item to item, his face falls—along with his hopes of ever seeing Eva again.

  I grab his wrist. “But then, a couple hours later, she was there. Eva. With Clare. Whose name I’m pretty sure isn’t really Clare. That’s what they call Franciscan nuns—Poor Clares.”

  “They exposed her to convince you to fight,” he says, anger written in the tight line of his jaw.

  “Well it worked,” I say.

  He flips an article across the bed. “You can’t fight this! You saw what they did with the media!”

  Throughout the evening the story of my “terrorism” has gained new developments—including barrels of explosives discovered in the back of Rolan’s truck and a botched plan to bomb the Austrian Parliament.

  At least Rolan—whose photo was added to mine several hours ago, along with Luka’s—hasn’t been taken into custody. I take a small bit of comfort in that.

  “We have to fight it.” I reach over and retrieve the article—about an IMF chief acquitted of fraud after awarding a tycoon hundreds of millions of euros in some legal dispute against a conveniently defunct state-owned bank. “There are names in here, Luka.”

  He digs his hands into his hair. “The only ones with enough power to go after these people—if they’re even Scions—are other Scions!”

  “Maybe. All I know is that there’s something in here the Historian wanted badly enough to send me after it. To let me live long enough to find it knowing I was the only one who could. And now that I’ve seen it . . .”

  Luka’s eyes meet mine. And I know he’s just realized he’s looking into the eyes of a dead woman.

  “Audra—” He slides to the edge of the bed in front of me. “I’m begging you. Don’t pursue this. I can’t lose you and Eva both. Not again. Not for good. We’ll find a place. Somewhere farther away. Eva’s safe. We’ll hide, hole up on an island like you always wanted. We’ll get a shack in Fiji. We’ll wait. Give the world time to forget us . . .”

  “Don’t you get it?” I say. “The world may forget us, but the Historian never will. And what about Claudia, Piotrek, Jester? How safe do you think they’ll be after helping me? There’s nowhere safe for them, either. And I won’t spend the rest of my life as a walking time bomb!”

  “You can’t protect everyone!”

  I grab his hands. “You’re right. I can’t. Which is why I need to know why the Historian wanted this so badly. Nikola called it a weapon. It’s time for us to use it.”

  He’s quiet for a long moment before he gets up and paces away to stare out the window.

  “Luka.”

  He doesn’t move.

  “Piotrek said you persuaded three gunmen you couldn’t see,” he says at last.

  He turns his head, his perfect profile silhouetted by the lights along the river.

  “Is that true?”

  I don’t answer.

  “You’re right,” he says quietly. “The Historian will never stop hunting you. Not just for what you found but because of what you are. Like Rolan said: They’ve seen it now, if they didn’t know before.”

  He curses softly, under his breath.

  “Did you know?” I ask.

  He turns and leans back against the sill, shakes his head.

  “That you’re Firstborn? No. I considered the possibility while I was being held captive, but told myself it was impossible.”

  “Firstborn. Is that what they call it?” I say dully.

  “It’s what the Scions call it, or so I’ve heard. You’re a myth, Audra. Jester was right that day in the car: Anastasia’s line disappeared a hundred years ago. Killed off, supposedly, before it could get stronger.”

  “What do you mean ‘stronger’?”

  “That’s what happens with each successive generation—it gets stronger. At least according to legend, which might just b
e Scion hate-mongering. That day you practically broadcast your persuasions ahead of you in Vienna, and when you did it again at the airport in Bratislava . . . I chalked it up to some freak thing you did. When Rolan said what he did about being sworn to your bloodline, I thought he meant the Progeny as a whole. Which didn’t make sense to me. None of it did until he said the thing about the Scions having seen what you are for themselves. I figured you had recruited a small army of Progeny to pull my rescue off. That they were in the crowd of bystanders. When I realized you and Rolan acted alone . . .”

  “Jester and her hacker friends helped,” I point out.

  “Audra, you persuaded a bridge full of people to forget that they just saw us jump onto a cruise ship!”

  “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know either until you were captured,” I say bitterly.

  “Hopefully that means no one else did until yesterday. Whatever your mother did, she must have never let on what she was. Not even to Ivan. Or the Historian would never have let you leave her sight alive. And Nikola would have killed you himself.”

  I flash back to my conversation with Rolan the day we left Budapest.

  Anastasia’s line has been hunted by a faction of princes for generations in an effort to keep you out of the Scions’ hands.

  Pretty bad when you can’t even trust your own kind not to turn on you.

  He blows out a long sigh. “How much do you trust Claudia, Jester, and the others?”

  “With my life,” I say.

  “I hope that isn’t misplaced. Because if we stay, you’ll never be safe in another underground court again. Not while Nikola’s alive. And they can never know about Eva. A Firstborn female with a Progeny’s ability to sense other Progeny and a hunter’s ability to strip a Progeny’s memory, and who can pass an even more powerful legacy to her own heirs . . . Do you know what the princes would do to her? Never mind the Scions! Do you see why I want to run?”

  I feel the color drain from my face.

  The image of Eva’s eyes—Luka’s eyes—so large in her three-and-a-half-month-old face breaks something inside me.

  I cross to the window. “You have to go to her. Find out where she is. Go away with her, Luka. Stay with her. Protect her.” I clasp him by the shoulders, and realize that I’m pleading with him.

  Because he’s the only one of us who can.

  He shakes his head. “If you’re going to do this, you have to stay alive. Not just for your sake, but for hers. Which means I stay with you. I told you weeks ago I made you a promise. You just didn’t know it was a marriage vow.” He pulls me close, and I hold on to him for dear life as he rests his chin on the top of my head. “No more secrets. We find a way to finish this, together.”

  Together.

  The words of the letter I wrote to myself before float before my eyes:

  He’ll kill for you. Don’t let him. Kill for him, instead, if you have to. One of you has to live.

  The phone on the dresser chirps with Jester’s ring, and I let go of Luka, steeling myself for the long good-bye.

  “Yeah,” I answer, clearing my throat.

  Jester’s voice is frantic. “Audra, someone got video of you and Luka jumping onto the ship—”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not. Someone you persuaded found the video on their phone. It hit social media thirty minutes ago. We hacked several accounts, but it’s too late. It’s blowing up. The police are moving along the river, closing in at Passau.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You won’t make it to Regensburg. You have to get off the ship!”

  10

  * * *

  I grab a TSA-approved Ziploc bag from the toiletry kit in the bathroom, drop SIM cards, the flash drive, my current phone inside. Fold up the contents of the folder, shove them in, and seal it.

  “Audra,” Luka says, from the window.

  I drop the Ziploc into a plastic shopping bag. Cinch it up tight, slide the loops over my wrist.

  Luka crosses the room, unbolts the door.

  “Time to go.”

  We run down the corridor toward the back of the ship as the PA system comes on to announce an emergency stop in Passau, first in German, then in English and French.

  “Here!” Luka says, pulling me toward an open-air stairwell. We hurry down to the lower level, peer over the rail. Sounds of music and shocked conversations drift back from the restaurant on the top deck . . . along with the thwap thwap thwap of an approaching helicopter. Below us, the reflected lights on either side of the river stretch like a ghostly watercolor painted across the surface.

  Luka climbs over, reaches to steady me as I join him, back against the rail. Hair blowing in his eyes, he takes my hand.

  “I love you, Audra,” he says.

  I love you more.

  We leap together.

  The frigid water slices fatigue from my limbs, seizes up my lungs. I surface with a ragged gasp, every nerve beneath my skin stabbed to icy life. A shout—Luka, ten feet upriver. A beam of light rushes toward me. I dive below the surface, death grip on the plastic bag knotted around my wrist, and angle toward the bank.

  The next time I surface, the helicopter is directly above the cruise ship, following it to the dock. Police lights flash from the road. I search for Luka, unable to help the morbid thought that the Danube that claimed my mother might claim another one I love. He resurfaces a few feet from me, points farther downriver.

  By now my teeth are chattering, but I am more alive than I’ve been in days. I strike out with the current, will warm blood into my limbs . . . Swim for an eternity, carried away. I can no longer keep my jaw still. Twice, I gulp water instead of air, my lips too cold to know the difference.

  A hand grabs my shoulder.

  “There,” Luka says, the word a stifled breath. I swim woodenly toward the cobbled bank. Scrape my knee against the stones, though I don’t feel the pain. Crawl from the water into the chill September air.

  Luka hauls himself from the river behind me, breathing heavily. My legs feel like tree stumps, thick and numb. We stagger toward the road. I broadcast a desperate persuasion. A minute later, a car stops and unlocks the doors.

  We crawl into the back as the man in the driver’s seat—a guy in his twenties with unruly short hair—notches up the heat.

  “Side streets,” Luka says, and I nod, shivering too hard to answer. A moment later, we’re headed through a wooded area, north.

  Luka strips off his shirt and then mine and pulls me against him, and I can’t tell whose skin is clammier. It takes a full fifteen minutes before my fingers are warm enough to unknot the plastic bag, pry open the Ziploc, and retrieve my phone. I call Jester.

  “You made it,” she says with an audible exhale. And then, to the others, “They made it.”

  I rub my hand over my face. It’s got to be nearly eighty degrees in the car, and the tip of my nose is still so cold I can barely feel it.

  “Audra, get out of the area as fast as you can. It’s small, not like Vienna, and they’re locking it down. If you don’t get out now you’ll be trapped.”

  “Where are you?” I say.

  “Heading your direction. But we’re an hour away. Can you get out?”

  I don’t know. “Yes.”

  “Head west, if you can. They’ll expect you to get out of the country, to run for the Czech Republic. Stay off major highways. Get to Munich. And, Audra . . .” She hesitates.

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful. They saw what you can do and know what you are. There’s been more than one report of known hunters leaving their marks since this morning.”

  “What do you mean ‘leaving their marks’?”

  “A handful of Progeny know or at least have an idea who their hunters are. I created a secure message board a couple years ago to collect as much information as we could. To learn more and create our own database.”

  “You’re crowdsourcing the Progeny?”

  “Why no
t?” Her voice takes on an angry edge. “They’ve done it to us for years with genealogy sites and DNA testing!” She takes a breath. “What I’m trying to say is that several suspected hunters have recently disappeared.”

  “That’s good, then . . .”

  “For the Progeny they’re hunting, yes. But I think they’ve all been pulled to pursue a single target. You.”

  I flash back to my conversation with Rolan—an experienced hunter officially assigned to Luka and me both. I glance at Luka. He mouths, What?

  But I don’t dare tell him. I have two options and two options only when it comes to the Scions. And hiding isn’t one of them.

  “Okay,” I say, trying to sound normal. Whatever that is. “We’ll call when we’re out.”

  I click off, and Luka looks at me.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said get out. They’re setting up a perimeter.”

  The line of his mouth is grim. I don’t need to tell him that next time the shooters won’t be common.

  I sink down low in the seat, pull up a map, point wordlessly to Munich. Luka nods, understanding.

  I guide us toward the town of Tiefenbach, angling northwest, away from the river. Our driver’s got a gym bag in the backseat, and I rifle through it, hand Luka a rugby shirt, pull on a crewneck two sizes too large for me.

  And then we wait as the pavement rolls by beneath us. I force myself to look away from the map on the phone, to count minutes instead. Every one that passes without our getting shot at or stopped is a minute more that we have to think, to plan, to escape.

  To live.

  We’ve just emerged on the other side of Tiefenbach after a painfully slow meander through town and gone a couple miles, maybe three, when our driver slows and then comes to a stop.

  “What are you doing?” I say in English, sitting up. And then I see it: a line of cars ahead of us, inching its way forward. Blue lights in the distance. A blockade of police vans.