“Is it?” Her voice broke.
I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and buried my face into her neck. It was nice that it didn’t hurt. “Shh, don’t cry. It is okay. And thank you for healing me.” I took a deep breath and noticed something odd. “You smell good.”
“Pavati drew enough water for me to have a bath. It was chilly but worth it.”
“I need to do that tomorrow. Desperately.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a shower—it felt like years ago. I shouldn’t have been hugging Khaya with how I smelled, but I didn’t let her go.
“You still want to go to that address?” she asked.
“I need to know who Drey was … who I am.”
“I understand. I’ll follow you, if you’ll let me.”
It struck me, the sudden sense that we were both lost and following each other nowhere. Drey had always quoted that saying about the blind leading the blind. He’d been talking about Eden City and the rest of the world, but it applied equally well to me and Khaya.
I wasn’t even sure what I hoped to find—a recording from Drey, or maybe even a journal that Khaya could read to me, telling me the truth? Something.
“Then you’ll just have to follow me this one last time,” I said, speaking into her neck. “After that, whatever I find, I can forget about all of it and just … be with you. We can both be anonymous nobodies together and go wherever our feet take us.”
Like the cure for Drey, it sounded too good to be true. But I could always hope.
“Okay,” Khaya said softly.
Eventually she shifted and slid onto the bed next to me, and I tucked her under the blanket and re-wrapped my arms around her. I couldn’t wait for the day when we’d have real blankets and beds that were soft and not made of crackly plastic or dirt. In the meantime, I supposed these would have to do.
She fell asleep, and I must have followed shortly, because then Pavati was waking us up, shaking our shoulders, a faint, natural light illuminating the doorway behind her. I knew it must be morning.
“Tavin, Khaya.” Pavati sounded more distressed than I’d ever heard her. I understood why when she said, “Tu is gone.”
twenty-four
My drowsiness dropped away as if Pavati had slapped me awake. Tu was gone?
“Where’d he go?” I asked, sitting bolt-upright.
“I don’t know,” Pavati said, clutching her elbows through her sweatshirt and looking vulnerable for the first time.
We were all up and moving in about two seconds, searching through every hallway and room in the mazelike underground mansion Tu had built for us, calling for him and hearing our shouts fall dead, muffled between the earthen walls. The place was empty of everything but us, our few supplies, and the police cruiser. At least the car was still there. It wouldn’t do us a fat lot of good underground without Tu, but it meant he hadn’t gone far.
Hadn’t I wanted him to go away? But not leaving us stranded, not leaving Pavati looking as crushed as she did, not leaving Drey dying and me so far from his final answers. I’d been a short-sighted idiot, telling him to get lost when we all relied on him so much.
And maybe I felt bad for reasons beyond losing his usefulness. He was more than a tool, after all. Maybe I felt bad for being a jerk. And maybe, just maybe, after everything Pavati had told me, I even felt bad for him.
So when Tu suddenly came walking down the stairs that dropped from the morning light up above, I felt overwhelming relief rather than disappointment that he wasn’t gone for good.
“Tu!” Pavati cried from where we’d been aimlessly standing in the center of the main room. “Where have you been?”
Tu looked taken off guard by her worried tone. He also seemed hesitant, as if he didn’t know if he was welcome or not. It must have made him forget to be sarcastic. “Getting gas.” He hefted two red jugs in either hand. “I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but we were low.”
I hadn’t noticed. I had been too busy trying to drive in a moving tunnel.
Pavati only stared, her mouth open.
“Where did you find gas?” Khaya sounded reserved—not exactly cool, suspicious, or timid, but somehow all three.
“A nearby town. I saw it on the GPS last night. After I brought us closer to the surface, it started working again. It was part of the reason I decided to stop here, aside from … you know.” Wanting to strangle me. “I didn’t want to wake anyone this morning. I was, uh, rested up sooner than you guys.” Probably from Khaya’s healing that had knocked him out before the rest of us went to sleep. He was being remarkably tactful for Tu.
“Did you steal those?” Pavati asked, finding her voice—and with it, her equilibrium. She arched a dark eyebrow at the jugs of gasoline. “If someone saw you, they could have followed you.”
Tu finally scoffed—he’d held out for a while. “Followed me underground? Please. And Khaya left the Swiss cash in the car last night. I used that.”
Pavati’s second eyebrow shot up with the first. “Huh. Amazing. I didn’t know you’d had it in you.” Her face broke into a grin. “I thought you’d abandoned me.”
Her cheerful expression seemed to be hiding something darker inside, but for now it was nice to see a smile back on her face.
“Never,” Tu said, so seriously that Pavati looked away from him.
“Shall we eat breakfast and get back on the subterranean highway?” She headed for the car and our store of food, but then she stopped. “First things first, Tavin. Good Gods, you need a bath.”
As if on cue, a fierce itch attacked my scalp. “Yeah, I agree.”
An hour later, we were back on the unnerving subterranean highway, as Pavati called it, and I felt more gloriously clean than I’d ever felt in my life. In one of Tu’s many rooms, there’d been an indentation in the earth, the surface hardened nearly to stone, which Pavati had filled with the warmest water she could find. It wasn’t very warm in this neck of the woods—she’d lamented not being near enough to any hot springs—but it had been good enough for me. Ice water, or maybe even acid, would have been good enough. I’d waged war on myself with the soap we’d taken from the market, and was now feeling more refreshed than I had in days.
We covered miles quickly, and even managed to pick up a crackling radio station for a few minutes, long enough for a song to make us feel like we were as carefree and happy as a bunch of kids on a road trip.
But I wasn’t carefree or particularly happy as we neared Drey’s address, and my disquiet increased when we actually arrived.
Resurfacing in the mountains was a blinding experience in the veiled late afternoon light, even though it wasn’t bright outside. It was cloudy, but the snow reflected what little light there was from every surface. The troubled sky lurked behind it all like a dark shadow.
We had to take a few seconds to blink and squint, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Especially me, since I was driving.
I hadn’t seen snow that often before. In Eden City, it only snowed on national holidays, thanks to Luft, when the city was already half closed-down and Drey and I didn’t have to go out in the truck. Snow was a special occasion, which only added to my sense of expectation.
When we reached a wide, pale clearing surrounded by trees, I stopped the cruiser. The road was buried in snow, and I didn’t know where it lay across the field. I didn’t want to get our only means of transportation stuck in this icy wonderland.
“This is it?” I asked, looking at the GPS. Tu nodded, unusually quiet.
A small cabin sat at the opposite end of the clearing, reminding me, absurdly, of a cupcake with white icing, the thin chimney sticking up like an unlit candle on top. The Matterhorn, the crooked peak I’d seen so often on the postcard, rose hazily in the distance through the clouds.
Everything was hushed as we opened the car doors, as if a blanket had not only settled on the gro
und but also overhead, muffling the world. The cold air felt like a held breath, like something was about to happen. Or like something was waiting. Before I got out, I slipped the gun and pocketknife into my pants, just in case.
Our voices fell quiet with everything else. Tu looked around, almost like he was expecting someone, too. But there were no tracks. That should have helped alleviate the—apparently shared—feeling that something was waiting, but it didn’t. Maybe the cabin itself was what was waiting.
There was nothing else to do but go check it out. We trekked across the clearing in silence, my feet growing numb in my boots. The sweatshirt was no longer enough to keep me warm, and my foggy breath drifted around my face with the light snowflakes that began to fall.
The tiny, sheltered porch creaked when we stepped on it. The door was locked. I had an inspiration, right when Tu was about to break a small window, and checked under a frosted, snow-filled pot, its previous contents long dead. That was where Drey had always kept a key next to the back door of the garage. I had to kick the pot to dislodge it from its frozen
resting place and ended up breaking it, but it was worth it. There was a key underneath, glinting gold under a thin sheet of ice. I used the pocketknife to chip it free.
The door creaked even louder than the porch when we opened it. We filed quietly inside, as if trying not to wake someone. Tu stood in the entryway, his formidable arms folded against the cold. Pavati crossed the room to a small iron stove with split wood stacked nearby, located some matches, and started building a fire. Khaya followed me as I looked around.
The only furniture next to a small kitchenette was a table with a single, rickety chair. A threadbare plaid couch sat beside the stove. There were no pictures on the walls, because the walls were lined with bookshelves. There were more books in that tiny cabin than I’d ever seen in my life.
A narrow staircase ran up the back wall, and I dashed up it when I didn’t see any immediate answers to my questions in the main room. I had to duck so I didn’t smack my head on the ceiling, now the floor, as I came up into a small loft with a low, slanting roof. There was a musty-looking bed and a single nightstand. A quick search yielded nothing under the bed, nothing in the drawer of the nightstand but another book.
No device with a recording. No letter. No pictures. No nothing.
I rushed back downstairs, scanning every nook and cranny, opening every cupboard and drawer. I found nothing except utensils, tools, dried and canned goods, and books, everywhere books, shelves and shelves of books. But not a word, not even a whisper, from Drey. Maybe the books could somehow tell me Drey’s secrets, but I couldn’t read them. I picked up one from a shelf, hoping to see handwriting—a journal of Drey’s—and then another and another as I found only typewriting, until I was tearing books off the shelves and hurling them in a pile on the ground—the dumb, infuriating things, keeping their damned secrets locked in their pages.
“Tavin,” Khaya said.
“This was only a place for me to escape to.” To escape even from the truth, apparently. All that hope, that anticipation, and yet … “There’s nothing here,” I said more loudly.
“I told you,” Tu said from the entryway. “This is the sticks. Just a place to hide under a rock.”
I spun on Tu with a rage I’d never felt before, and he took a step back.
I moved toward him and accidentally kicked up the edge of a ratty rug, uncovering a line in the floor: a trap door. My hope skyrocketed. I dropped to my knees and wrenched it aside as quickly as the rug. But all hope came crashing back down when it only revealed refrigerated packets of money and another gun, this one a six-shooter that looked too rusty to use.
A gun. All Drey seemed to have left me was guns.
Khaya put a hand on my shoulder. “What do you want to do now?”
I wanted to scream. But instead I stood and walked over to a window. I leaned my head against a freezing pane of glass, looking out into the world of tumbling white. The sky was falling.
Drey was dying. He might already be dead. And I would never know his secrets.
A tear splashed on the dusty wooden windowsill. Mine, I supposed.
Maybe this was for the best—not knowing. I took a deep breath. I’d said I would be satisfied to remain a wordless nobody, whatever I found here. And I had Khaya. She was enough—more than enough, more than I’d ever hoped for or deserved. I had an indefinite future with her to look forward to. I didn’t know who I really was, but we had each other, and that was okay. The world would be okay.
Drey … Drey wouldn’t be okay, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I could ruin my life just to say goodbye, but I knew Drey wouldn’t want that. This place was the proof. It held no cure, no answers … it was only a place to hide, to be safe. That was all Drey had wanted for me.
I would just have to accept the fact that I was powerless, keep the guns under the floorboards—just in case—and stop pretending I was something I wasn’t. I didn’t want power anyway, if all it meant was what Khaya had said: that I could hurt people. There had been enough pain already.
My hand found Khaya’s, where she had come up behind me. She was an anchor, grounding my thoughts, my emotions.
“Maybe we should rest here for a while,” I said. “Get warm, regroup.” I glanced up at Pavati and Tu. “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, of course.”
That was when we heard a noise outside. The low hum of engines.
I spun toward the door, and all of us scrambled out onto the porch in a stampede. For a second, the cloud of our combined breath made it difficult to see across the snow-filled clearing. But the air cleared except for the snow, which wasn’t dense enough to hide the line of black SUVs approaching across the field.
“Tu,” Pavati said, realizing the truth before the rest of us. “You didn’t … ”
“They’ll help us!” Tu said, but he couldn’t say anything else before I tackled him, my anger resurging in a blinding wave. Both of us flew off the porch and into a deep drift of snow. The cold was shocking, the white powder in my eyes and down in my sweatshirt, but that didn’t keep me from hitting any and every part of him I could reach, as hard as I could. My knuckles split but I didn’t stop, not even when flecks of red began to stain the snow.
Pavati and Khaya dragged me off of him, and only then did I realize he hadn’t been fighting back, only holding up his arms to protect his head as best he could. Which hadn’t been very well, while lying on his back in a snowdrift. His nose and lip were bleeding profusely from both sides, and the white of his left eye was a vivid half-red.
The sight of his blood only made me want to see more, and Pavati and Khaya both had to use their full weight and strength to hold me back, the three of us slipping and staggering in the snow. My control was so far gone I didn’t know if it would ever return.
But it did, slowly. Especially after Khaya twisted my arm behind my back like she had Tu’s the night before, if not as far. The sharp pain brought me to my knees and pulled a gasp from my throat, cutting through the red haze and clearing my head rather remarkably.
“Okay, okay,” Tu said, his words thick through all the blood, holding up one hand in a gesture of truce while the other clutched his nose. I’d probably broken it.
The SUVs had parked in a loose semi-circle in front of the cabin.
“Not okay, Tu,” Pavati said, no longer holding me back now that Khaya had me subdued. Her tone was so dangerous I wondered if she would charge him next. “Not okay.”
“Look, you’re right, I called someone. When I did that publicity visit to China a year ago, the president slipped me this number when he shook my hand. I’ve called it twice now, once in each town, and gave them the address here. This is them—the Chinese, not Eden City!” Tu clarified as Pavati took a threatening step toward him. “They just want to help us.”
“Use us, you mean,” Pavati sa
id, casting a narrowed, sideways glance at the surrounding vehicles. Doors were opening, people in black suits were getting out. “This is going to be bad, Tu. I’m not going without a fight.”
“Just hear them out! They’re not here to hurt us.”
“I have no doubt they’re here with our best interests at heart.” Pavati spat at his feet in disgust. “Grow up, Tu.”
Khaya released my arm and helped me to my feet as the men approached. About half of them looked Chinese, and the other half were white. All of them looked strong, trained, and armed, though I couldn’t exactly see any guns or muscles beneath the suits.
“Why are the Swiss here?” Tu called, as loud as he could through his battered lips. “I thought I said no one else.”
A Chinese man with streaks of gray in his neatly combed hair stepped forward. He started speaking in Chinese, but Tu interrupted him.
“English, please, so my friends can understand.”
So we could understand that he wasn’t betraying us, his so-called friends? But he had betrayed us.
The man’s smile never reached his eyes. “Of course,” he said. “And of course you understand the Swiss have to be here. We had to give them something to fly into their airspace, land on their soil, and borrow transportation from them on such short notice.” He gestured at the hefty vehicles. “That is simply how it’s done. Protocol—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about protocol,” Tu said. “And what do you mean, give them something? What do they want?”
The Swiss representatives didn’t say anything. The Chinese man—probably some high-up dignitary or diplomat—clasped his hands in front of himself and said, “As you come from China, this young woman here”—he held his hand out to Pavati—“comes from America, and the Swiss have promised to take care of her until she can be safely returned to her rightful place.”
Take care of her, my ass. They were either going to keep her or sell her to America—or the highest bidder—for an obscene amount of money.
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