Firstborn

by Tosca Lee

  “Better that a few of them die,” he spits. “They don’t know how to function in the world.”

  “It’s called living, Nikola,” I say. “And everyone has to figure it out.”

  “You could have been a god to them. Didn’t you see the way they looked at you? Like the embodiment of Bathory herself. You may be willing to throw that away, but I am not. Kill the Historian if you can, but the hunters will survive for a generation without her. It’s enough time for me. I will be prince for as long as I live. After that . . . what do I care?”

  I step toward him. “You will close down this court. Or they will know how you killed Ana and Nino, and the way you handed me over to the Historian for my mother’s documents—”

  “They were to be mine! I was her sibling. I protected her!”

  “She knew better than to leave them in your power-hungry hands. And so did I. I told you a year ago I’d never give them to you for that reason. Which is why you tried to kill me the first time.”

  His eyes widen.

  “Remember, Nikola? Because I do!”

  “That may be,” he says dangerously, and then points to the monitors behind him. “But you will never survive to tell them.”

  I glance up at the screens.

  “I don’t need to. You already have.”

  He stares at me and then turns.

  The image on every one of them is so static as to seem frozen, each figure in that crowd gone still.

  “The Historian’s hunters know this place and can return any time,” I say loudly. “You are not safe here!”

  As my words echo from the speaker, Nikola glances down at his robe, looks for his mike.

  I lift my hand, the tiny red light flashing in my palm.

  With a savage roar, he lunges for me as panic breaks out in the cavern.

  35

  * * *

  I shout Rolan’s name. But nothing can be heard over the chaos in the cavern, the skirmish in the corridor outside.

  The mike has fallen from my hand, skittered away. Nikola drives me into the wall, hands around my throat.

  His thumbs lock over my windpipe, and my lungs turn to fire. Lightning shoots behind my eyes as he pulls me toward him, spittle spraying from his lips onto my cheek.

  The next instant, his eyes go wide. He blinks, expression confused. I grab his forearm, punch him in the throat for all I’m worth. Shove my knee into his groin. But it’s the knife between his ribs that sends him staggering back.

  I’m on him in a flash, tackling him into the table, falling with him to the floor. Crazed from pain and unspent adrenaline. By the lives at risk in the ancient subterranean hunting grounds. At the prospect of all he has cost me.

  My mother. My daughter.

  “Tell me how to find her!” But I no longer know which “her” I mean.

  He throws me aside, and I launch myself at him again. Grapple for the knife hilt glinting between his fingers, red as the bloody velvet of my dress as he tries to pull it free.

  Nino. Ana . . .

  A wheezing grunt erupts from his mouth as I shove the hilt deeper, up toward his ribs, hitting bone.

  Tibor.

  I scream for Rolan.

  Nikola lets out a wet, broken laugh.

  “Looking for someone . . . to finish the job?”

  “No,” I say, jerking the hilt of the knife free. “Just afraid you’ll bleed to death before he can get here.”

  I drive the knife into his stomach, my entire weight behind it, hair dangling in his face.

  “You see,” I whisper near his ear. “I brought my own hunter into your court.”

  “I was . . . finished . . . when you showed up here,” he hisses from the pool of his robes, smeared like a bloody mop on the floor.

  “Tell me how to find the Historian! Let it come from your lips instead of your memory.”

  He smiles, gums bloody.

  “Where is she?” I demand. “Where do you meet her? Who’s her lackey? What’s his name?”

  He looks away.

  “I’m offering you a shot at redemption, Nikola!”

  “I lived as a prince . . .” he says, eyelids beginning to sag. “I die . . . a prince.”

  “Oh no. No, you don’t!” I push to my feet, stagger across the room to tear open the door.

  “Rolan!” I run down the corridor. The guards are gone.

  Mayhem from the direction of the cavern. Sounds of an all-out brawl from the next tunnel.

  “Rolan!” I scream.

  A few seconds later, he comes running into the corridor. He’s lost his hat and mask, though not his velvet coat.

  “Audra!”

  “Hurry,” I say, turning on a slippery heel.

  I don’t think about the fact that I have become a killer. That witnessing this final act will make me no better than the hunter I’ve asked to complete it.

  I am thinking of one person now, and one person only.

  I tear back down the corridor, into the surveillance room. Come up short on the blood-soaked stone.

  The room is empty.

  “Where is he?” Rolan says, behind me.

  I run out into the corridor, in the other direction, toward the unlit tunnel.

  “Audra, wait!” Rolan says, rushing after me.

  He’s got his gun in one hand, pulls out his phone with the other, hands it to me, flashlight on.

  We run twenty yards into the tunnel before it abruptly ends. Stop, stymied, before doubling back. Rolan nudges me, points down the floor of a narrow side corridor. Droplets of blood.

  We duck into it, winding one way and then another, until the blood disappears and the tunnel dead-ends.

  I go back, retrace our steps. Feel my way along the walls in case one of them is another painted hoax. Retrace our steps again.

  But Nikola is gone.

  36

  * * *

  By the time we return to the cavern, half the population has taken to the tunnels for the surface.

  And I have just lost my single tie to the Historian.

  “How could he just vanish?” I shout.

  But I know how. The Budapest princes have owned the city’s only survey of these caves since the late 1800s, when it disappeared.

  They know this subterranean maze better than anyone.

  We emerge into the dwindling chaos. Progeny stand around in groups, some of them pointing toward exits, some bobbing as though the music were still going, unheard by everyone else. A few of them crying, comforting one another.

  I make my way along the perimeter of the cavern, looking for Jester’s bird or Piotrek’s harlequin, Claudia’s Chinese empress.

  Someone says my name. It echoes up to the stone ceiling, and then around the cavern itself in hushed tones as a few of those who remain move toward me.

  “Is it true, what Nikola said? That wasn’t staged—it was real?” the Grecian girl asks in a German accent. Her male counterpart stands beside her in a matching white toga. Her gaze falls to my hands, caked in drying blood.

  “Mein Gott,” her sibling whispers. “Are you all right?”

  No. I’m not all right. I wipe my hands on my dress. “Yes, it was real. Nikola escaped.”

  The maharaja is there, along with what could pass as a cast of Baroque nobles straight out of a period movie. They look different beneath the harsh glare of white light. Everything that was beautiful and glittering before looks cheap, gaudy as gold rickrack.

  I glance past them to the next group of stragglers, and the one beyond that. Find myself looking for a white swan, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

  “This place isn’t safe. You have to get out. You can’t come back.”

  “My sister, Melia,” the toga guy says, pointing to the girl beside him. “She saw her hunter’s face. She knows that face. She is afraid to leave.”

  “You stand a better chance up there than in here,” I say. I raise my voice. “Get out of Budapest. Be careful.”

  I wish there was more I could do. S
omeplace I could tell them to go. But there is no crisis center or church shelter for Utod, and after tonight, any place associated with me is no safer than this cavern.

  “Everyone out!” I yell. For all I know, Nikola has contacted the Historian and told her to send in a squad. Tonight. Now.

  Ten and then twenty and forty more drift toward the tunnels with a last glance back. And I wonder if I’ll ever see any of their faces again.

  A figure summons me from across the cavern.

  Claudia.

  I find her with Piotrek and a badly shaken Jester. Jester’s hood is gone, only a black skullcap covering her hair, her costume askew.

  Piotrek grabs Rolan by the shoulder, and they hurry away down a tunnel.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  “Piotrek,” Claudia murmurs.

  “What about him?”

  “He killed someone,” she says, lower lip trembling. “One of Nikola’s men.”

  “What’d they do to you?” I ask Jester.

  “Nothing. Thanks to him.”

  I stalk several steps away, consider going after them. Rethink that.

  A knot of some seventy Progeny remain in the center of the cavern. I run toward them, waving my arms like a person trying to scare away a flock of birds.

  “You have to leave! There’s nothing for you here!” Some of them turn to stare. Several more reluctantly drift away. Others continue urgent conversations, planning, perhaps where to go from here. And a few loiter near them, eyes shifting from one group to another, as though unsure whom to follow.

  And I can’t help but think of what Nikola said about animals released into the wild.

  Piotrek and Rolan come jogging toward us a few seconds later, both of them paler than before. With a last look around, we make our way out through the grotto.

  We strip out of costumes, down to jeans, black slacks, and bodysuits. Throw peacoats and robes over our shoulders, wigs and hoods over our heads.

  And then we are hurrying out the way we came, flashlights shining on the path before us. Rolan with the safety off his gun.

  37

  * * *

  We return in wary silence, let in by a neighbor I persuade from sleep to admit us.

  We gather in the front room to keep from waking Luka. It’s still early by Progeny standards—just past 4:00 A.M.

  Rolan paces before the window, studying the street. Piotrek is somber. Claudia watches him in short, stolen glances. And Jester’s expression has hardened to stone.

  I want to ask her if she’s dug up any more on Serge. Wonder if the leverage we have on him is enough to secure his help. It has to be.

  Eva has never felt so far away.

  “Audra, what’s on your hands?” Jester asks.

  “I stabbed Nikola,” I say dully.

  “I hope he’s dead.”

  “He got away.”

  “This isn’t how I thought it would happen,” Claudia says faintly.

  “What did you expect?” Jester says. “Did you think it would be bloodless? We disbanded our largest court rather than let the Historian rule it. The Progeny nation now knows Nikola is a traitor! More important, they know the names and faces of their hunters. Did you hear them?” she says. “The way some of them cried out? They recognized them! And now that they know who they are, they may live.”

  Claudia looks up with dull eyes. “Easy for you to say! There’s no blood on your hands.” She glances at Piotrek. “How will he get to heaven? How are we any better than them now?” Claudia says, glancing at Rolan, who doesn’t turn.

  “We aren’t,” I say.

  “How can you say that?” Jester says angrily.

  “Because we aren’t,” I say, looking up. “For four hundred years this entire thing has been about making wrongs right, and taking revenge and saying who’s better and who deserves what for being innocent or guilty. Looking for a diary to prove who’s wrong. The entire thing is wrong!”

  They all stare at me in disbelief.

  “Don’t you get it? No one is only good or bad or Progeny or Hunter or”—I point at Rolan—“monk or Scion. Innocent, guilty, right and wrong got lost in this a long time ago. That’s the whole point!

  “We think we’re better because we’re told that. Because we don’t live long enough to be more than victims. Nikola was right about one thing. We don’t know how to be free. To deal with a lack of black and white. With this.” I raise my hands.

  Claudia looks away, and I realize it isn’t just the deaths tonight that have shaken her. She, too, has lost the only safe haven and structure in her world. The gilded court was all that was shining and safe and good to her for years. The best manifestation of what it meant to be Progeny. The one constant in a life defined by loss of loved ones.

  I let out a heavy breath and wish Luka were awake. He’s dealt with similar demons. I remind myself to ask him to talk to Claudia later.

  I glance around. “What happened back there anyway?”

  “I found the media room. Went in like I belonged there,” Jester says. “Said I had brought new music . . . by the time they caught me, I had the file loaded, it was already in the queue. One of the guys called Nikola on a radio. He was there in seconds. I talked fast. I told him that with the Historian’s support system failing around her and the rest of the leaks already programmed to break, this was the best thing that could happen to him.”

  She looks skyward, shakes her head. “They took me to some other room and locked me in. I assume Nikola went to find you. I heard fighting . . .”

  “We had lost Jester earlier,” Piotrek says. “But saw them moving her. Claudia went for help. I got Jester out. But I . . .” He trails off as Claudia begins to weep.

  “You did what you had to,” I say. “Rolan, were you able to . . .” I don’t even know how to ask the question about harvesting a memory. In all this time, Piotrek has studiously avoided looking at him.

  The older man turns, the lines around his eyes more pronounced than before, lips pursed as though he’s got a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Enough to learn Nikola comes and goes from there unseen,” he says. “There must be another way in—one only he knows.” He glances up at me. “Probably the way he got out.”

  We sit in silence after that, and though I know our actions tonight will unquestionably save lives, I feel defeated.

  Jester defaults to her laptop, and I finally get up to look for some meds or even a shot of something for Claudia. Progeny don’t drink because alcohol dulls their gifts, but right now, I’m not sure it matters.

  Piotrek comes into the kitchen, and I pull him aside. “Are you okay?”

  He shakes his head. “Rolan put his hands on that man’s head and was quiet for a minute. That is all. But it was like . . . it was worse than watching someone die.”

  “Knowing that’s how it could have been for any one of us?” I say.

  “No. It was like watching Rolan die. You should have seen the terrible look on his face. As though he absorbed something horrible. You’re right,” he says, gaze level. “Everyone suffers from this war. Even them. I wish I could take back asking him to do it.”

  I stare at the glass in my hand, half-filled with a couple shots of some kind of brandy. I asked Rolan to do the same for me once. I realize now I had no idea what I was asking and wonder if it’s anything like reliving my own life, the two times I have.

  “Audra,” Jester calls from the front room.

  I hand Piotrek the glass for Claudia and go out to the table where Jester’s set up shop.

  She points to the screen.

  “Gerald Schelert—the Scion you delivered the message to . . .”

  “The one we leaked last night,” I say.

  She nods. “He committed suicide yesterday.”

  I lean in and read the news article translated from German. Gerald Schelert, father of three.

  “He jumped off one of the company towers,” she says and silently closes the page.

  I thin
k of Serge and his kids. Their mom, who may or may not have been a Scion. Who no doubt enjoyed the fruits of his pact with history . . . and certainly would have given it all up to keep her children safe.

  I tell myself we never made the decision to jump for Gerald Schelert. God only knows how many Progeny orphans the Scions have created over the centuries. But thinking of those three children makes me want to weep.

  I glance at the clock on Jester’s screen: 5:07 A.M. I told Luka we’d be back by morning. What I didn’t say is that I hoped to bring good news: a way to the Historian, which we would exchange for Serge’s help in finding Clare . . . The knowledge that we would see Eva again.

  In a couple hours, I’ll call Serge.

  But right now, I want—no, need—to curl up with Luka.

  I kiss Jester’s cheek and excuse myself, slip silently into the dark bedroom. Inside, the last of my unspent energy seeps out of me as I sag onto the edge of the bed. I lie back and turn toward Luka, reach for his warmth . . .

  And find only the pillow.

  “Luka?” I murmur, sweeping an arm across the comforter. But he’s not there.

  I push up in confusion, cross to the light switch, and flip it on.

  The room is empty.

  Luka is gone.

  38

  * * *

  I hurry from room to room in rising panic.

  “I thought you were lying down?” Jester says.

  “Luka’s gone!” I say.

  She blinks. “He was supposed to wait for us. Where would he go?”

  “Someone took him. Nikola must have come back and taken him!”

  “We don’t know that,” Jester says, moving into the bedroom. She scans the bed, the floor, the items on the dresser. “There’s no sign of a struggle.”

  “Maybe he went to get something to eat. Or to look for us?” Piotrek says from behind me.

  “No. He wouldn’t just leave without saying something.” Would he?