by Anna Jarzab
“Civilized? It’s like they’re offering us up as collateral!”
Callum looked me in the eyes. “That’s exactly what we are,” he said darkly.
I grimaced. “Well, I don’t like it. No offense.”
“None taken,” he said. “I have to say, though—if I had to be married off to anyone, I’m glad it’s you.”
“Really?” I would’ve thought he’d hate the idea of having to live in a foreign country, to marry the enemy. Not to mention that Juliana had a reputation for being difficult and demanding and stubborn. Other than the rather unique situation they’d both been born in to, it didn’t seem to me that Juliana and Callum had much in common at all; while Juliana had run, Callum was here to do what was being asked of him. He would probably be disgusted if he knew what she’d done.
He nodded. “And I’m glad to be here. I don’t know how much they’ve told you about me, but my life until now has been … restricted.”
“Well, don’t get any ideas about this place,” I said. “It’s quite the gilded cage.”
“You don’t understand,” Callum said. “This is the first time I’ve ever left Farnham. It’s actually the first time I’ve ever left Adastra.” Adastra City was the capital of Farnham; I’d seen it on the map in the Tower room. Thomas had mentioned that the name came from the Farnham national motto: Per Ardua Ad Astra—Through Struggle to the Stars. “I wasn’t allowed to travel anywhere or do anything. Mother wouldn’t even send my brothers and me to school. She said it wasn’t safe. I almost never leave our palace, I don’t have any friends besides Rick and Sonny. So to me, this”—he gestured vaguely at the surroundings—“this is freedom.”
“I didn’t realize.” I was starting to see why Thomas had such a low opinion of the queen of Farnham. She sounded like a real piece of work.
Callum waved my pity aside, clearly discomfited by the discussion of his confined—and, I’d gathered—unhappy childhood. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now.”
He wandered over to the grand piano in the far corner of the room. Though it was meticulously dusted, it didn’t appear to have gotten any use in years. He sat down at the bench and started randomly pressing keys. After listening for a few minutes, I realized that he was picking out a real melody, though I didn’t recognize it.
“It’s a little out of tune,” he observed.
“What’s that song?”
“Oh, nothing you would’ve heard.” He paused, his fingers hovering over the keys. “Actually, I wrote it.”
“You did?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I had a great music tutor. I play a whole bunch of instruments, but piano is my favorite. After a while I got tired of all the stuff she made me practice and I started writing my own songs.”
“Will you play it for me?” I asked. “I mean, really play it?”
Callum blushed and looked away. “No, that’s all right.”
“Are you sure? I’d like to hear it,” I insisted. I’d never met anyone who could write his own music before, and the song—or what I’d heard of it—had been lovely. I had a healthy appreciation for classical music; it was the only kind Granddad ever listened to, and the sound of a piano always reminded me of quiet nights spent sprawled out on the living room rug, doing math homework while Granddad read in a nearby armchair.
“Well, how about this one? I wrote it about living at home with my mother. It’s called ‘I Hate This Place So Much (So Much).’ ” He flexed his fingers, then brought them down hard on the keys and sang, “I hate this place so much—I’m crushed. Gotta get outta here, outta here, outta here.”
I giggled. “That’s very good.” He had a beautiful voice, deeper than I’d expected, a nice, strong baritone.
“I’m glad you think so.” He grinned. “Maybe I’ll play you another one later. We have a whole lifetime, after all.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to sound surprised. I’d almost forgotten who he thought I was, which was dangerous. I could never forget, but it was easy with Callum; he was so friendly and relaxed, remarkably unaffected. “I guess you’re right.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, I don’t play the piano.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I was seized by a sudden panic. For all I knew, Juliana could play the piano.
“No, I meant, what do you like? Do you have any hobbies?”
I considered the question. What did Juliana like to do? No one had ever told me. All I had to fall back on were the old visions from my childhood, which told me almost nothing. “Shopping?” Juliana certainly did own a lot of clothes.
Callum laughed. “Traditional royal pastime,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Well, I really like reading and history,” I continued. “I spend a lot of time in the Castle library.” That was true, at least, a little gift of knowledge gleaned from my dreams, though I hadn’t thought to mention it until it popped out of my mouth.
“That’s interesting,” Callum said. “Maybe you can teach me a few things about this place. It’s much bigger than our palace in Adastra. Older, too, I’m sure. Lots of history here.”
“Of course,” I said. “Like you said, we have a lifetime.”
Callum smiled. “Something tells me that might not be enough.”
THOMAS IN THE TOWER / 3
“How’s our little princess?” asked Dr. Moss. He was speaking to Thomas, but his eyes were locked on his computer screen. It was driving Mossie crazy that he couldn’t figure out why Sasha of all people could see through the tether, and he was determined to discover the cause of her unusual ability, even if it meant working around the clock.
“Fine,” Thomas told him, picking up a slip of red paper and folding it into a star. He’d amassed a small pile of them in the time he’d been there. He paused to fish a handful of toggles out of his pocket, popping them in his mouth one by one. “No thanks to us.”
“She’s a strong one,” Dr. Moss said, giving Thomas a pointed stare.
“Yeah,” Thomas murmured. “She is.” He paused. “She asked me last night if I was in love with Juliana.” The question embarrassed him, but he felt like he had to tell someone.
“Are you?” They’d never discussed this before, but Mossie must have wondered.
Thomas shook his head.
“And did you tell her that?”
“I didn’t get the chance.” He wasn’t sure if he would ever tell her. She might not have the nerve to ask again, and he preferred not having to talk about it at all, but he also didn’t want her thinking what she clearly already thought was true.
He rubbed his eyes. He never slept well anymore. He was too worried about Sasha and Juliana, and when he wasn’t thinking about them, he was thinking about his own analog, lost and trapped in a universe where he didn’t belong. His mind kept wandering back to Grant’s mother, who had cooked for him, done his laundry, asked him about his day, and told him every night before bed that she loved him. Thomas couldn’t remember the last time someone had said that to him, as himself. The thought of the General saying the words “I love you” to anybody was absurd, and Alice Mayhew, though she had been kind and generous with him, was only his mother by default. Come to think of it, Thomas couldn’t remember the last time that he told someone he loved them. Love just wasn’t the sort of thing he had much occasion to express.
“Have you let the General know that Juliana is in Farnham?”
“No,” Thomas said. “I don’t think I can.”
“Why not? Wasn’t that the point of dangling Ms. Lawson off the roof of this building?”
“I promised Sasha I wouldn’t say anything to the General.” Even as he said it, the excuse sounded ridiculous. What did one little promise matter, when it meant the possibility of Juliana’s return? And yet, he was incapable of breaking it. He put great stock in the power of a person’s word, and he wouldn’t break his own, especially when it came to Sasha.
“Then how do you propose to get Juliana back?”
“I have no ide
a,” Thomas said. “I was hoping you might be able to help me with that.”
“You want me to falsify intelligence?” Dr. Moss feigned disappointment, but Thomas knew full well that he enjoyed the promise and challenge of subterfuge. Plus, he hated the General, for a specific reason Thomas had never been able to pry out of him, and he looked for any opportunity to spite him, even secretly.
“Can you?”
“I can certainly try. Does Ms. Lawson know exactly where she is?”
“No. But she does know they’re keeping Juliana in a farmhouse somewhere.”
“Oh, wonderful. Only a handful of farms in Farnham,” Dr. Moss said. Farnham, while not nearly as technologically advanced as its neighbor to the east, had a much more substantial agricultural industry than the UCC, due to the fertility of its soil. Trying to find Juliana in a farmhouse would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
“They’ll be near the border,” Thomas told him. “Close enough to a major metropolis, and not far from the Tattered City. I’d say that narrows it down to the Louisiana Region, within a hundred miles of Adastra.”
“Hmph.” Dr. Moss was struggling to look put out, but Thomas knew he would have fun coming up with a clever way to trick the General into thinking the KES had uncovered a lead as to Juliana’s location.
“You’d better watch yourself around that girl, Thomas,” Mossie warned.
“What do you mean?”
“Your loyalty to her makes me nervous,” the scientist said. “If I know the General—and I do—he’s watching you both closely. If you give him any reason to doubt you, he’ll take you off Operation Starling, or worse.”
“I don’t consider my loyalties compromised,” Thomas said. Dr. Moss scoffed. “I’m just trying to do what’s best for everyone. Sasha’s afraid that if the General knows she’s got a direct line to Juliana, he’ll never let her go back home. I had to promise to keep it a secret so that she would feel comfortable enough to tell me about it in the first place! What choice did I have? I’m not trying to hide any information, I’m just … omitting how I got it.”
“You know well enough the General isn’t the type to split hairs,” Dr. Moss said. “He won’t care about any of that. And, for what it’s worth, the analog is probably right—he would keep her here. He wouldn’t risk sending her back to Earth knowing what she can do, and to be honest, I’d rather she didn’t go back, either. Imagine what we could discover about analogs and the tandem if we could study her.”
“No!” Thomas put his hands on Dr. Moss’s shoulders, swiveling him around so that they were facing each other. He stared intently into Dr. Moss’s eyes. “You cannot tell him. Sasha goes home in four days, maybe less if we can find Juliana before then. She goes home. That’s what she wants. I’m not going to be the one to screw that up for her, and neither are you. We’re responsible for the fact that she’s even here. We owe her.”
Dr. Moss sighed. “You may be right. But I won’t say I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, stop thinking about it, because it’s not going to happen. I won’t let it.”
Moss regarded him for a long while. Finally, he said, “Did you volunteer for this assignment, Thomas?”
The question took Thomas aback. “What do you mean?”
“You say you’re responsible for Sasha Lawson being here,” Dr. Moss said. “And that’s certainly true in a way. But did you want to do it? That is what I’m asking.”
“Not especially.” In fact, he’d fought tooth and nail against it; he’d wanted a place on Juliana’s search-and-rescue team, but the General hadn’t given him the option.
“And what did you do when the General told you he was sending you to Earth to seduce and kidnap a sixteen-year-old girl?”
Thomas glared at him. “Don’t say it like that, you know that’s not how it was.”
“Wasn’t it? Your heart’s not in this, Thomas; anyone who’s known you as long as the General has can see that. Go ahead, talk all you want about how this is a necessary evil to ensure peace between Farnham and the Commonwealth, but you don’t believe it, do you?”
Thomas rubbed the back of his neck in agitation. “You really think the General knows?” Mossie nodded. “So why give me the assignment in the first place?”
Mossie hesitated, which spoke volumes. The man never missed an opportunity to expound his own opinions.
“You’d better tell me,” Thomas said fiercely.
Mossie took a deep breath. “Sending you through the tandem to retrieve the analog was a trial run,” he said. “He needed to know that you could do it, that it could be done at all.”
“What are you talking about?” Thomas demanded. “A trial run for what?”
“Much as I hate to admit this, the General is a smart man,” Mossie continued. “He sees what’s coming, and he has something special planned for you.”
“What is coming?” Thomas was growing more and more exasperated. It was just like Dr. Moss to confide half truths, to speak in riddles.
“We may not be the only universe that has developed the technology to pass through the tandem,” Mossie told him, avoiding Thomas’s eyes. Mossie was hiding something from him, something big, but Thomas knew from experience that prying information out of him was impossible—he would have to wait for Mossie to offer it up. “And on the off chance that we are, we won’t be for long. Soon enough, land disputes and treaties with Farnham will be the least of our worries. The future of war is interuniversal, and he intends for you to help him fight it.”
Twenty-Five
“ ‘And then, that hour the star rose up, the clearest, brightest star, that always heralds the newborn light of day, the deep-sea-going ship made landfall on the island … Ithaca, at last.’ ”
“Angel eyes,” the king said, as if in response.
I let The Odyssey fall closed in my lap and sat back in my chair, watching the king’s fingers weave the air in front of him. His bed had been adjusted so that he appeared to be sitting up; the queen claimed he liked it that way, though how she could’ve known that was anyone’s guess. I glanced over at Callum, to see how he was handling all this; I was growing used to the king’s idiosyncrasies, but I knew from experience how jarring it could be for the first time. I’d warned Callum about it, and he seemed to be handling it fine, though he was a bit on edge.
“This must be incredibly scintillating for you,” I said. He gave me a nervous smile.
“It’s nice,” he replied. “That you do this, I mean. For him.”
I shrugged. “I’m not even sure he can hear me.”
“Even if he can’t,” Callum said. “It’s sweet.” He sat forward as if he wanted to touch me, but he was sitting on the opposite side of the king’s bed, too far away to take my hand. “Besides, it’s a good book. Nothing wrong with the classics.”
“This is my first time,” I told him, realizing only after I said it that I might’ve found a better way to phrase it.
“You didn’t have to read The Odyssey in school?” I shook my head. Juliana might have; Thomas had told me that she had gone to a private school in Columbia City called the Lofton Academy for Young Women, but that the king had pulled her out the year before and hired a tutor to finish out her education. Still, I felt confident Callum wouldn’t have any idea what she did or didn’t study there.
“Not that I’m an expert on what people have to read in school,” he continued.
“I guess that means you did,” I said, trying to draw the conversation back to him. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life locked up, not being able to have friends or go places without an escort or attend school. I felt ashamed for thinking my life on Earth had been boring and confined. There were far worse ways to grow up, as Callum, and even Thomas and Juliana, were teaching me.
“Well, I had a Greek tutor for nine years, so, yeah. I read it.”
“Your tutor was Greek, or he taught you Greek?” I smiled.
“He taught me Greek.” Callum laughed. A ligh
t brown curl fell over his eye. “He was Irish, actually, I think. Seamus Ryan.”
“That’s a very Irish name,” I teased.
“He was obsessed with The Odyssey, Ol’ Shay,” Callum said. “But I preferred The Iliad. More action, less time spent on boats.”
“What have you got against boats?”
“I just have this feeling I’d get seasick and end up with my head hanging over the side.” He patted his abdomen. “Delicate royal stomach, you know.”
“Have you ever even been on a boat?”
“Nope. This is my first time outside of Adastra, remember?” Callum said. “Not much ocean where I come from, sad to say.”
“You’ve never seen the ocean?” Even I’d seen the ocean, on a vacation to Florida with Granddad. I’d spent the entire time with my toes buried in the sand, the sun beating down on my pale legs, breathing in the salty air, and loving every minute of it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, pressing his lips together so that they nearly disappeared.
“Like what?”
“Poor little rich boy,” he said with a small sigh.
“If you’re a poor little rich boy, then what does that make me?” I asked. He smiled almost in spite of himself. It was nice to have a conversation with someone without having to second-guess everything that came out of my mouth.
“I don’t know,” Callum said, playing along. “What does that make you?”
Analog, a small voice whispered inside my head. But of course I couldn’t say that to Callum, so I let the question slip by unanswered.
“Juli,” the king said suddenly. I closed The Odyssey and put my hand on his. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“Touch and go!” the king shouted, startling both Callum and me. “Touch and go! Touch and go! One, one, two, three, five, eight …”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said wearily. I picked up The Odyssey and set about locating the line I’d left off on before. The king always seemed calmer when I was reading to him.