The Sentry

by Lyssa Morasey

  The duke takes his seat at the head of the table, nodding to Aren and me in turn. He doesn’t comment on my clothes, thank the Goddess, or the fact that I didn’t put up my hair. Good—I try to avoid getting on his bad side whenever possible.

  My father rules over the entirety of the Western Province of Nixa’s Kingdom, which stretches from Canada and Alaska all the way down to the Panama Canal, minus the strip of land east of the Appalachian Line where the Wardens live. That means that it’s easily within his power to ship me off to Nunavut for a month if he’s angry with me. Or he could throw me in the torture chamber downstairs with his infidel captives. Either way, he holds a great deal more power over me than a father should over his daughter.

  The outer door creaks open, and a trio of young shifter servants files in with our dinner plates. I inspect the contents dubiously—cod fish, baked beans, mashed potatoes. Nothing that I’d pick myself if I’d had the choice. Luckily I’d finished off my secret box of Teddy Grahams earlier and had a good amount of the gingersnaps before, so I don’t have much of an appetite. Maybe I can sneak some of the fish out to give to Keira when we meet tonight.

  “How has your schooling been going?” Fenris asks, his gaze swiveling between me and my brother.

  “Okay,” says Aren quietly, cutting into his food. “I finished my last algebra book.”

  “Excellent.” Our father’s eyes settle on me next, and I shrug. When it comes to school, I do as well as I need to avoid punishment and not much more.

  Rhody paws at my foot from under the table. I rub my sole down his flank, digging my toes into his fur playfully. He runs his tongue up the length of my shin until it’s sticky with dog saliva.

  “Cassatia,” Fenris says, “stop playing with the dog.”

  “Sorry.” I extricate my toes from Rhody’s fur and pull away my leg.

  “I didn’t get that dog for you to fool around with during dinner,” he reminds me sternly.

  “I know.” He got me Rhody to keep me from messing with his hunting dogs, actually. He was given to me as a puppy for my thirteenth birthday, supposedly as a reward for mastering the violin part of Avasol’s Concerto.

  My father strokes the little white beard he’s been growing out, studying me. “I have something important to ask you today, Cassatia,” he says eventually. “I’ve been invited to celebrate Arrival Day in Svalbard with our king and queen, and I would like for you to accompany me.”

  I drop my fork. It clatters onto my plate, loud enough to make Aren jump.

  “You want me to come to Svalbard with you?” I’ve never even left the state of Idaho before. And Svalbard….

  “I do.” He clears his throat. “You are the heir to this province, and you are almost eighteen; it’s about time you visited the seat of our kingdom.”

  Svalbard. All the way up in the Arctic. Even Keira hasn’t been there.

  I fight to keep my voice even. “I’d love to go with you, Father.”

  “Do I get to come?” Aren asks.

  “Not this time.”

  Any normal thirteen-year-old boy would’ve thrown a fit over that, but my little brother only nods and returns to his meal. He’s gotten used to being left out, I guess.

  “We’ll leave Friday morning, and you will allow your maid to help you prepare. That’s an order, Cassatia.”

  “Of course.” Rhody noses at my leg impatiently, demanding my attention. I agree with him—I want to get out of here before I get too excited and lose my ladylike façade. “Can I be excused?”

  He looks at my plate. “You didn’t touch your food.”

  “No,” I say truthfully. “But I really need to practice my violin.”

  He sighs, waving his hand at me airily. “All right. We’ll talk later. You can go practice.”

  “Thank you.” I stand, curtsy a little, and leave with Rhody. Only when I am outside and descending the stairs, skirting apologetic servants and ducking under the arms of window-scrubbers, do I allow myself to smile.

  Svalbard. I’m going to Svalbard. I’m going to see Austfonna Castle and meet the king and queen and prince. I’m going to ride in a plane and see the ocean and fly over foreign countries.

  But best of all: after years and years of her putting up with my problems and complaints and profound ennui, I finally, finally have something exciting to talk with Keira about tonight. She’ll be relieved as hell.

  Ten Years Ago: Cassatia

  I hadn’t expected my new maidservant to be so young.

  The shifter girl stood, arms folded neatly behind her back, at my father’s side, looking into my room with wide silver eyes. She’d probably never seen a room like mine before—as big as a Sen house, cold enough to turn your breaths into clouds, with a canopy bed and snowflake-speckled curtains framing the windows. Most people probably have never seen a room like mine before.

  “This is Keira,” my father said. He pushed her forward into the room.

  Keira the shifter gave a clumsy curtsy. “Pleased to meet you, princess.”

  “I’m not a princess,” I corrected her quickly. “I’m a lady.”

  “Yes—and you will address her as my lady,” my father told her.

  “I’m sorry, my lady,” she said, looking me right in the eyes. I stepped back in surprise; shifters never made eye contact with Nixans, except for maybe Caphian.

  “She’s my new servant?” I asked, not quite ready to believe it. Keira didn’t look any older than me—younger, maybe. Leah, my last servant, was eight years older.

  “Unless you want a different one.” My father pressed Keira forward another couple steps. “The ceremony begins at six-thirty. I expect you at the castle doors half an hour before.” He dipped his head to us and turned to leave; both me and the shifter girl curtsied to his back.

  “What ceremony, my lady?” Keira asked once he was gone. She folded her arms over her chest, shivering. The jacket she was wearing didn’t look warm enough for New Fauske.

  “The graduation ceremony for the Academy.” I wished I could go to Professor Fayeren’s Academy—I was old enough to. But my father had hired private tutors for my schooling instead so I wouldn’t be around other Nixans my age too much.

  Keira was my age, though. But she was just a shifter, so it was okay.

  “Why do you have to go to it, my lady?”

  “I just have to stand with my father,” I replied. “And you don’t really have to call me my lady.” Leah always did, but it sounded strange coming from another seven-year-old.

  “Oh.” Keira looked relieved. “Do I call you Cassatia, then?”

  “Or Cass.” My mother had always called me Cass.

  “Okay,” Keira said. “I like it.”

  We stood facing each other in silence for a minute before I realized that Keira wasn’t planning on doing anything. “Aren’t you going to get me ready for the ceremony?”

  “Oh,” Keira said. “I have to dress you, don’t I?” I nodded.

  She ran back into my closet and came out with two dresses—one green and one pink. “Which one do you like?”

  I narrowed my eyes—Leah had never asked me what dress I liked. She’d never asked me much at all. “The green one.”

  “Okay.” She threw the pink dress on the ground and kicked it off to the side. Leah had never done anything like that, either. “Do I need to take your clothes off? Diana said I did.”

  Yes. I shook my head. “I can do it myself.”

  Keira helped me into the dress once I was out of my day clothes and tied a clumsy bow to fasten it around my waist.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked. She couldn’t have had much training with Diana, the retired Sentry who took care of all the castle shifters.

  “Only a week,” she said. “My eyes just turned.”

  “They’re pretty eyes,” I told her, looking at them in the mirror above my vanity table. “I wish I had silver eyes.”

  “I wish I was a Nixan lady,” Keira said. “Maybe we can trade.”
/>   I shook my head. “You don’t get to have any friends if you’re a lady. It’s no fun.”

  “I could be your friend,” she offered, fingering my hair. “Do you want me to give you a braid? I’m good at braids.”

  I nodded. “But you can’t be my friend. My father won’t let you.” I couldn’t have Nixan friends, much less shifter friends.

  “Well, that’s too bad. I don’t have any friends here either.” As Keira pulled my hair back behind my shoulders, I caught the glint of a gold watch around her wrist. I hadn’t ever seen a shifter wearing gold before.

  “Where did you get that watch?”

  “Oh.” She glanced down at it. “My foster mom gave it to me before I left. It’s not real gold, though.”

  “Was she nice?” It didn’t matter for Keira either way; shifters never got to see their foster parents after their eyes turned.

  “Nicer than your dad.” Keira finished with the braid and stepped back. “There. Do you like it?”

  I ran a hand down the braid, feeling its bumps and twists. “Yeah. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” She searched through the jewelry laid out on my vanity table and held a sparkly diamond necklace up to her neck like she was imagining herself with it on. She hesitated for a second, then fastened it around my neck instead. “I think it’s cool that you’re a Nixan. There aren’t any Nixans in Skalten.”

  I shrugged. “Shifters are cooler,” I said. “Have you ever shifted before?”

  She shook her head. “I told you, my eyes just turned.” She shivered. “I wish I could shift into something warm, though. I have goose bumps in here.”

  “It doesn’t feel cold to me.” It never did. “Do you want a better coat?”

  “A coat?”

  “I’ll get you one.” I went back into my closet and found a mink fur coat hanging up behind all the skirts and dresses, dark brown like Keira’s hair.

  “I can’t take that,” Keira said, backing away, when I showed it to her. “I’d get in trouble.”

  “You can say it’s yours,” I told her. “I don’t need it. I only have to wear coats when my dad takes me on trips.”

  Shyly she took the coat and wrapped herself up in it, burying her face in the fur. “It’s very warm,” she murmured. “Thank you.” Quietly she added, “I really wish we could be friends.”

  The castle bells began to toll, chiming six times. “I have to go.” I should have been downstairs already—my father would be mad.

  I was halfway out the door when Keira called, “Wait!”

  Shifters weren’t allowed to tell Nixan ladies to wait. The duke wouldn’t want me to listen to her; he’d want me to report her, probably, for being such a bad maidservant.

  I turned around. “What?”

  Keira held up a pair of emerald-studded heels. “Don’t you need shoes?”

  26 September: Keira

  Wes drags me through the squeaky-clean halls of the Warden bunker like human cargo, making sure to give everyone we come across plenty of time to gawk and glare and occasionally poke. I almost snap the finger off of a little kid who tries to touch my eye.

  Basil follows after us for a while before running off with some other Warden guys. Once he’s gone, I make a halfhearted attempt to strike up conversation with my captor.

  “So, you go to school? Sen kid school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you work at Starbucks?”

  “Do you think that’s funny?”

  “No—just asking. I love Starbucks. I stopped by one right before I came here, actually. Wonder if it was—”

  “Shut up.”

  And that’s the end of our conversation.

  I’m doing my best to play it cool now that the Wardens have decided not to kill me. Sure, I’m still trapped in a bunker with a bunch of my worst enemies, but at least no one’s pointing a gun at me.

  The ring of a bell screeches through the bunker like a fire alarm; at its signal, Wes pulls me after him up via elevator to the dining hall on the fourth floor. It’s enormous and infested with Wardens, every single one of them wearing black and almost every single one staring at me like they had in the hallways. Word travels fast here, apparently. I’m already a celebrity.

  Wes throws me a tray and takes me through a serving line, where an army of glowering lunch ladies fills the tray up with potatoes and chicken and a tiny milk carton. He then brings me over to one of the big cafeteria-type tables in the back, where Basil and the Wardens he went off with earlier are sitting. As soon as I set down my tray, an intercom crackles on and Fenella’s voice informs the bunker of the arrival of a shifter on the premises. It’s pretty much unnecessary at this point, I would think, but it does add to the pairs of eyes I feel crawling up my back.

  “Tough luck, Doorstep,” one of the Wardens—a burly guy with bad acne—says sympathetically. “How long do you have the shifter for?”

  “Doorstep?” I ask Wes.

  He ignores me, of course. “Till the next council meeting,” he tells the other Warden, “so a month, basically.”

  “I can’t believe Fenella’s letting her stay here,” another one of the boys says, shaking his head. “She’ll probably go on a killing spree while we’re all asleep.”

  “Well, I was considering it,” I say, examining my fingers.

  “She can’t,” Wes growls. He jangles the chain connecting us. “This thing keeps her from shifting. She’s stuck with me.”

  And I’m no happier about it than you are, I want to say.

  The food isn’t half bad, but that’s probably just because I’m starving. I scarf it down as quickly as possible so we can get out of here. Wes, unfortunately, is perfectly fine taking his time. We spend the better part of an hour in the dining hall, and the staring and gawking don’t let up for one second of it.

  After dinner we go up to floor seven, where Wes’s room is. It’s the top floor of the bunker, still at least five hundred feet below subway level.

  We turn down a few halls before Wes stops at a door marked with some pretentious Latin inscription. He shoulders it open and flicks on a light to reveal a little square room occupied by a single unmade bed and a keyboard shoved against the wall. Socks and dirty boxers litter the ground, and the floor—tiled like everywhere else here—looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in months.

  Yep. Definitely a boy’s room.

  “So you live in here by yourself?” I ask, feeling the walls. “Seems pretty lonely to me.”

  “You do when you don’t have a family.”

  “Why don’t you have a family?”

  Wes narrows his eyes at me as if debating whether or not to answer. “I never had parents—not that I knew, at least—and my twin sister was taken captive in the Massacre of Alexandria.”

  Fantastic. One more thing to add to Wes’s hatred of me.

  “Well,” I say, truthfully, “I didn’t have anything to do with the Massacre.” Though most of the Sentries that Caphian took to Alexandria had been from my sector, he’d picked the experienced ones, not the Sentries fresh out of trials.

  Before the Massacre, things had been going pretty well between the Nixans and Wardens on this side of the globe. Aside from a few little border skirmishes, everything had been peaceful for a good fifteen-year stretch. Unfortunately, a small gang of Warden vigilantes decided to shake things up last April, when they crossed the Appalachian Line armed with machine guns. The Sentry border guards mowed them down before they could do any harm, and the Line-crossers had nothing to do with the actual Warden leaders in Boston, but Fenris is the kind of guy who’d take any excuse to go after the Wardens. He sent Caph off with a huge Sentry team across the border to attack a dustie-Warden conference in Virginia, our first major attack on the Wardens since before the turn of the century. We killed a whole lot of dusties and fire-people—hence the massacre part of the name—and took a couple of the youngest back to New Fauske as captives. And, of course, one of the captives just so happens to be the twin sist
er of my new Warden friend.

  Wes pulls from his pocket the key to our cuffs, removes his own and refastens it around one of the legs of his bed. “I don’t care what Fenella wants; I’m not sleeping with this thing on my arm.”

  “Can I take mine off, too? I think it’s cutting off my circulation.” Wes scowls at me in response.

  He leaves his new fire-gun next to the key on a little table by his bed, inviting me to make a go for one of them. I won’t; I’m not an idiot. Fire-iron would burn the flesh off my hand just as fast as actual fire.

  “Turn around so I can change.” Wes extricates a pair of pajama pants from underneath his covers. I roll my eyes and squat down with my back to the bed while he strips down to his underwear.

  Once he’s in his pajamas, showing off a semi-defined six-pack, Wes runs off to brush his teeth and leaves me alone in his room. Probably not the best idea, but whatever.

  I plop down onto Wes’s bed with a sigh and slip off my coat, letting it dangle by a sleeve from the form chain. It’s not unbearably hot in the bunker, but the warmth of the coat has left my neck and armpits sticky and gross with sweat. Or maybe it’s just stress sweat from nearly being condemned to death earlier; there’s really no way of knowing.

  It’s Saturday night, I realize: the night I always meet up with Cass. If she doesn’t know I’m gone yet—she probably doesn’t—she’ll be finding out pretty soon. Saturday night means that I only have ten days left to steal Ferignis and get back to New Fauske. And yet here I sit, chained to the bed of a pissy Warden infidel.

  You better not be mad at me, Cass, I think, wishing more than ever that we could mind-link like Sentries, because I only came out here to save your spoiled little ass. I could have died today, and it would’ve been all your fault. I finger the pendant around my neck and bite my lip, thinking about Cass waiting for me up in a tower back in Idaho.

  Wes spends a good half hour in the bathroom before traipsing back in. When I hear his footsteps approaching, I get up from the bed and return to where I stood before beside it. “Didn’t move a muscle,” I tell him proudly.