Call Forth the Waves

by L. J. Hatton

  He had truly expected us to be safe at the Hollow. All of us. He paused, giving anyone who might have been in the room with me a chance to go. I wished there was someone near enough to wake up and watch the rest. If he was that concerned with secrecy, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alone.

  My father leaned in close and began again.

  “I guess I didn’t need to give you the speech I prepared, did I? If you’re watching this, then you’ve already read the words I just spoke, so let me go off-script and start this with one of the several apologies I owe you—I’m sorry that it’s from a screen and speakers you’ve first heard me use your given name in conversation, my darling girl. I owed you better than that.

  “I’ve robbed you of your rightful self, and I should have acknowledged that, if only to you. I hoped he’d lose interest, or find another, easier pursuit . . . in short, I was a fool. He might have let your sisters be, but never you.”

  This was a version of my father I’d never seen and didn’t like. He was nervous and unsure. Haggard, he wrung his hands and constantly checked the space around and behind him to see if anyone was listening.

  “I’ve failed you, and I’ve lied to you—don’t disagree. My life has been lies upon half-truths wrapped inside innuendo and misdirection for so long, I forgot the truth. Worse, they were worthless lies, because they served no purpose in the grander scheme. I lost focus and chose not to believe the devil would collect on the bargain I struck when you were an infant.”

  How was this broken and contrite man the same one who raised me never to bend my back, but rather face the worst with my head up and proud? I took my eyes off the screen long enough to search out Xerxes for his input on what was happening, but he’d returned to his patrol route and had no time for me.

  “I’m a thief, you see,” my father continued. “And what I stole was time with you and your sisters. I tried to pay that debt with fanciful machines that never did quite what was required so that I could convince myself I hadn’t sold out completely.”

  Someone knocked on the office door behind him, and his face turned stricken. He looked over his shoulder, then leaned closer to the camera, whispering his next words.

  “Despite that effort, he’s called in the marker I owe. I can’t bear to pay it, and to that end, I’ve tried to reason with him or buy more time, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of currency.”

  Tears were streaming down his face, and mine, and I let them come, hoping they’d wash away the confusion.

  The knocking came again, faster and more insistent.

  “One moment,” my father called behind him.

  He stood and started to pace, too close to the camera at first to allow me to see his face, but he circled around the back of his chair and held on to the winged sides as though he needed the support.

  “And now I must confess my greatest lie, darling Penn. One I fear you will not find yourself able to forgive, for I have yet to forgive myself for telling it.”

  “Where are you?” I asked. “Tell me that. I don’t care about anything else.”

  I slid out of my chair to my knees in front of the computer, almost touching it with my nose, not daring to breathe lest the sound make me miss something critical.

  “Your brother did not die the night you were born. He did not die at all.”

  My heart stopped, lodged in my throat so I couldn’t swallow.

  Not dead? How could he not be dead? I’d seen the scars on the Hollow’s table, blackened by fire. Someone had repaired the roof and walls, but the evidence of my crime was there.

  Excuses found their way into my thoughts, wondering if this was some sort of message he was sending between the words for me to decipher. Or perhaps, worst of all, he’d simply lost his mind.

  “Yes, the stars sang down when you were born, and yes, your brother bore the brunt. He was wounded—terribly, horribly . . . fatally. At least I thought so. I took him from the room to stop your mother doing herself injury in her attempts to help him. But I felt his heart beating in my hand.”

  My father sat heavy in his chair again, facing me with his hands out, imploring.

  “Understand that what I did . . . grief and desperation do not always lend themselves to rational thought . . .”

  Once again, a furious knocking interrupted him.

  “A moment, please!” he shouted over his shoulder, then turned back to me. “I had given imitation breath to lungs made of iron and artificial beats to hearts that pumped by piston. How much harder could it be to simply repair life that already existed? He was my son. How could I not try?”

  Surely he wasn’t saying what I thought he was. The thought was too terrible.

  “I patched his flesh with metal and wire. By the time I’d calmed myself enough to realize what I had done, the way I’d desecrated his little body, it was too late. No one could live like that . . . and yet, he did. He cried. He kicked his legs, pumped his tiny arms, and, impossibly, opened his eyes. I watched dumbstruck as the patches I’d created integrated into his body with seamless precision. He went still, as if in concentration, and when he finally moved again, his wounds were gone and he looked the image of a perfect, healthy newborn. But he was so much more . . .”

  My father’s face changed, talking about the son he’d brought back from the brink. A light came into his eyes, and a smile fought its way onto his lips against the tide of his dark mood. I wondered if, all the times Penelope had disappeared inside Penn, he’d actually been imagining me as the boy he nearly lost and obviously wanted to keep.

  “He is as special as you are, and you have no idea how special that is. It took me years to learn that truth, myself.”

  This time, there was no knocking. Whoever was outside the door shook it and found it locked. They beat against the wood, trying to crash it in.

  My father stood and pushed his desk across the door before stacking the chair on top of it. When he returned to the camera, he went down on his knees as well, speaking quickly now.

  “They never imagined, and so I hid you both. Squint and Smolly raised your brother apart for years, and the bigger he grew, the more wondrous the changes he made to himself. Things beyond my skill and wildest dreams. When he was older, they brought him home, and he became the boy you knew. To be honest, I’m not sure what he knows of that night. I’ve never been able to bring myself to ask him, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Klok remembers every second from the beginning.”

  My world froze into the still-frame image of a family photograph with a new face filling in the twin-shaped hole beside me.

  Klok is my brother . . .

  Every petty thought I’d harbored, every jealousy, every time I’d thought myself his superior because I thought him less than human . . . He’s my brother. Not a surrogate or a grieving father’s changeling built to replace the one he’d lost. The similarity of our features wasn’t a mad genius’s plot to stall his mourning.

  His name wasn’t Klok. He wasn’t a machine. He wasn’t even dead. He was my brother.

  The self-consuming snake I thought my life to be spit out its tail. I hadn’t killed Nico.

  On the screen the desk lurched behind my father, moved by the force of something more than hands beating against the wood on the other side of the door.

  “If he or the Commission knew the truth of you and your brother’s existence, they would be after you both.”

  The desk pitched forward hard enough to topple the chair.

  “I know it’s not fair to say so much, then leave you again when I’m not near to answer the questions you’ve every right to ask, but I have exhausted all other choices and taken a few more chances than I had a right to.” My father’s tone turned desperate. “I leave you with my love—and another apology. You are impossibility incarnate, unaware of how truly formidable your birthright has made you. All you have to do is open your eyes, and you will see beyond the camouflage The Show afforded you. You are your father’s daughter, Penelope, and there has never been so proud a fat
her. Never think you were a regretted choice.”

  He leaned forward and switched off the camera. The image disappeared, leaving me alone. Again.

  CHAPTER 22

  I no longer recognized my own life.

  My future had all but ended; my present was in flux. My past should have been a constant, but it wasn’t what it had been two months ago.

  The brother I thought I’d murdered had been within reach since we were children. Not only that, but he’d saved himself from death by rewiring his own body within minutes of birth. Level-Five indeed.

  It was obvious now that my father had not slipped quietly away, but left on the run, with someone in pursuit, and all without our knowledge. The Commission was a body made up of many wardens, but it sounded like my father feared only one man. Nye or someone else? I knew my father and Warden Nye had made a deal before I was born, but there could have been others. Magnus was a circus man; he could juggle if he had to. He’d definitely had enough practice keeping his lies in the air.

  I’d always believed my father was protecting me. Maybe family didn’t mean what I thought it did.

  The tears on my cheeks evaporated from a sudden, searing heat. It scorched down my neck and into my hands, making them glow. I could see through my skin, between whirling molecules of flesh that bumped against each other without ever getting anywhere. My bones were mere shadows, my blood flowing magma threatening to erupt.

  The carpet smoked under my knees.

  “No!” I said, patting it out with the edge of my robe. “Don’t do that. Not here.”

  I needed something to focus my anger on, and I knew just where to put it.

  I stomped over to the glass wall that encased the second floor and seized Xerxes around the middle. He made a startled chirping sound when I lifted him up and stuffed him under my arm. I carried him back to the table and plopped him down.

  “Do you hate me?” I asked. “And don’t give me that blank bird-stare. I know you’re in there. I don’t know how, but I know you are, Papa. Do you hate me?” Xerxes twitched his head, pensive and confused by my rant.

  It was like I could see scars showing through my skin. Slashes from hurt feelings. Bruises from a broken spirit. All the secret hurts and wounds I’d swallowed like swords because I thought it was my penance. My body and my life had developed around them; only they weren’t as visible as Klok’s or Winnie’s. I was the only one who knew they existed.

  “How could you do it?” I asked. “How could you let me believe I was a born killer? All the times I put on my brother’s identity and walked out into that arena, withering with every step I took in his shoes? How could you?”

  I wanted to scream, but knew bad things would happen if I let the worst of my temper take over.

  “Did you lie to him, too? Or was that special torment only for me? Did you even tell him he had a family while he was growing up?”

  At least I’d had my sisters and Jermay. Klok was ten when Squint and Smolly brought him home to join the circus. Before that, they’d lived in the middle of nowhere. He hadn’t had much of anyone.

  “What about Mom?” I asked. “Did she know? Or did you really let her die from the grief of losing a son who was still alive?”

  A better question was one I couldn’t ask. Would he have let me die, too?

  The way my father had described the night Klok and I were born, it sounded like he’d lost his mind. Maybe he’d never found it again.

  Beep.

  I whipped my head toward the sound; I already knew what it was. Klok had come up the stairs. He was standing at the rail, well within earshot.

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” I said lamely.

  “You are yelling,” he rat-tatted. “Yelling is ineffective for maintaining a clandestine existence. Also, our mother was aware of my survival. Would you like me to bring you a fire extinguisher?”

  I ignored that last bit.

  “Our mother? So you did know?” I asked.

  “My memory is augmented. ‘Eidetic’ is accurate. I remember.”

  “How much?”

  “Everything that I remember. I can show you a timeline, if you would like specifics.”

  I’d resented Klok for six years because his presence in The Show reminded me of the crime I committed the day I was born. I thought he’d usurped my brother’s place in a family I didn’t realize he belonged to. Most of the time, his idiosyncrasies grated on my nerves, but now, knowing who he was, I couldn’t see him as anything other than wonderfully odd. I threw my arms around his neck.

  “I’m so sorry Kl—Nico. That’s your real name, isn’t it?”

  He pushed me back.

  “My name is Klok. Your apology is unnecessary. Hugging is nice, but it puts you at a proximity that increases the difficulty of reading my screen.”

  “I hurt you,” I told him. “That happened, didn’t it?”

  Maybe none of the story was true. Maybe our mother hadn’t died of grief at all. Surely I hadn’t killed her instead of Klok?

  “You were injured as well. Father inflicted far more damage. I remember pain, too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was afraid. It might have increased your pain. Brothers are supposed to protect sisters. Our father maintained that it was better you not be informed.”

  Hearing him refer to Magnus as his father was the worst. Klok had never been acknowledged as a son. I was certain my older sisters knew who he was, but they’d never been allowed to call him brother. All they could do was attempt to temper my sour attitude toward him, a tactic that usually backfired.

  “He was wrong,” I told Klok. Our father owed him more than a job as a stagehand, and he owed me, too. Both Klok and I had deserved to know our twin.

  “I concur. Also, the golem is getting away. If you wish to yell at him further, you should catch him.”

  “That’s okay, Klok. I think I’ve gotten all I need out of Xerxes for now.” I still had questions, but I wasn’t ready to ask them. I was experiencing answer overload.

  “Brothers are also supposed to threaten boys. Where is Jermay? I have several threats saved for use in case you discovered that we were siblings. How did you arrive at the conclusion that we were twins?”

  “Papa told me,” I said. “He left me a video for my birthday. Our birthday. I got it to play a few minutes ago.”

  “You have unlocked the computer,” Klok said.

  “It wasn’t easy,” I told him. “It turned out that you were the missing piece.”

  A week passed in near perfection.

  No one bothered us, and it had been days since anyone in the hotel made mention of seeing Commission personnel in the area. There was a lounge one floor down from our room where we could get all the food we wanted for free, and on the bottom floor, I was able to get us clothes that didn’t remind us of nearly falling to our deaths. Getting them required coaxing the boutique’s credit system into thinking I’d charged everything to a room, but I promised myself that I’d donate the clothes at some point and try to send the money when I had it.

  We never had to leave the hotel.

  I never wanted to leave the hotel. What I wanted was to find a way to bring my sisters and Birdie and everyone else to me so we could all live there together and pretend the world had shrunk to the three towers of the Harts and Palms.

  The elevator dinged, and Winnie stepped out with the morning breakfast run. I’d meant to ask her if Klok’s identity had been one of the secrets she’d kept while she was mute, but I still wasn’t ready to hear her answer. So long as I didn’t know, I could choose to trust that she wouldn’t betray me that way. I didn’t ask Jermay for the same reason. I might have gone to Anise, because she wouldn’t have lied to me if I’d asked her outright, but she wasn’t around.

  There was also a part of me that was still too paranoid to share Klok’s true identity. I could trust the others with my own life, but Klok’s wasn’t mine to risk.

  “We have a situation,�
�� Winnie said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Someone booked this room months ago. They showed up today to check in and were told that it’s unavailable. You can hear them shouting all the way from the lounge. They’re furious. I saw the concierge checking the registry. When he sees a weeklong work order, he’s going to want an update on the status in here. Once the first cracks appear in the story . . .”

  “It all unravels,” I finished for her. Winnie could maintain her control on the concierge’s mind so long as no one challenged what she told him to believe.

  “I can stall them, but we need to get out of here, soon. The concierge has override keys. He can get in here if he wants to.”

  I knew it couldn’t last forever, but a few more days would have been nice.

  “Can’t we move to another hotel?” Jermay asked.

  “That won’t get us any closer to where we need to be,” I said. Stalling only kept us playing the normalcy game. As normal as we got, anyway. “We’ll have to find a new place on the road.”

  “I swept the lounge and the lobby,” Winnie said. “There’s still no chatter about Commission sightings nearby.”

  “There’s nothing new on TV, either,” Birch said. “They’re not looking for us here.”

  “Then I guess this is it. We’ll wait for the lounge to close tonight and move on once there’s no one to see or question us,” I said.

  “Okay. I can keep the concierge from noticing us for that long. Just keep us off the grid. The last thing we need is another spike.”

  Klok used our last day to scan through the rest of our father’s files, while Jermay decided to waste his time in the hotel’s arcade. He tried to convince me to help him sneak in to the casino, using the weak excuse of playing for enough money to cover our stay, but I told him no. I knew what would happen. He’d get cocky, use some cheesy magic trick to game the house, and get us caught and arrested before we had a chance to sneak away.