by Tessa Elwood
“You think I’d just stand by and watch?”
“I think your mother didn’t kill their kids, and it’s not your fight.” The words come gritty.
Niles leans in, blocks out the street. “Was that what that was? A fight?”
I cross my arms and don’t answer.
His reaches for my jaw, light fingers at odds with his biting glare. “You’re going to have a helluva shiner.”
“So what? Is my health more important than their hurt?”
“Who even thinks that way?” He glances from my cheek to me.
I straighten. Put us nose to nose so he’ll back the hell up. “And how am I supposed to think?”
He doesn’t move an inch. Stares back with brown-black eyes and parted lips that forgot to close. His palm slides along my jaw, fingertips brushing my ear, breath rising on an upbeat. Mine is almost gone. It wouldn’t take much to kiss him. I’d barely have to move.
“No,” I say, but there’s no air.
His “What?” comes near as soundless.
I pull away, far away, press into the passenger side.
His hand lifts, hovers where I was. “Kit?”
“No.” Stronger now. “Been here, done that, got it the first time.”
I yank open the door, slam out of the hover, and take off down the street.
Two beats and his door echoes mine. “Kit!”
“Stop.”
I swing around. He skids to a halt an arm’s length away. The sun picks out his hair and cheekbones, the round tip of his nose.
“If you’re going to kiss me, kiss me. Otherwise I don’t care how nice you are—hands off. It’s not a game. I’m not a game.”
Even if my skin has mapped the shape of his fingers and wants them back. Especially since I want him back.
I turn and head for home. Not two steps later, his hand catches mine.
Apparently, the boy has a death wish.
And I am not going to bawl.
“Niles,” I growl.
“Just to clarify.” He swallows and steps closer. “The kissing’s okay?”
“What?”
Another step, his half smile shaky and wholly un-Niles-like. “Assuming I get my shit together, a kiss would be fine?”
Oh yeah.
No.
I don’t know.
“Depends.” I can’t meet his eyes, so I stare at his lips—like that’s less dangerous. The upper one is a little uneven, lower one almost too full.
“On what?” he asks.
He is very, very close.
“Will it mean something?”
Because that matters. It didn’t last night, but it does now. Except it mattered then, too.
His free hand brushes my unbruised cheek, thumb finding the corner of my mouth. “That’s what scares me.”
“You’re scared?” It’s impossible to see his face as a whole. He is skin and undercurrents, clarity and heat.
“Terrif—” he whispers, except his mouth presses soft and close.
Or else it wasn’t a whisper to begin with.
He tastes like him. Niles. Careful, measured intent and contradictions. Messy assurance, sliding smiles. Laughter that lives in his lips, on his tongue, warming even when it isn’t there. His palm slides along my back. I wrap my arms around his neck. My dress bunches with his fingers, his collar crinkled under mine, and every breath I snatch, he steals.
The world explodes in horns. A horn. A single street-hover wailing past.
We jump, percussion and jitters, and I press my face to his neck.
“Yeah, yeah.” Niles glares after the streethover, then squeezes me tight. “Want to get breakfast?”
I smile into his skin. “What is it with you and breakfast?”
“Best meal of the day.”
I raise my head. “But isn’t it lunch . . . time . . .”
Something’s wrong with the pet shop behind him. I lean past his shoulder for a better view.
The digital puppy is gone, replaced by Mom’s soft smile.
She looks right at me. Even the low-grade window-screen catches the full spectrum of her eyes, their woven brown and gray. The perfect red of her lipstick. She only wore red to work; normally she favored brown. She told me that once.
Niles kisses my jaw. I feel it; it registers. My face must be working.
I can’t speak.
Neither does Mom. Her lips move, but nothing comes out.
The window isn’t digitalized for sound.
“Kit?” Niles leans back, sees my face, and spins. I’m behind his shoulder, his arm a barrier between me and her.
Then he swears.
“I can’t hear her,” I say.
He jogs forward and rubs his hand over the glass. Searches for a control point, a switch, a button. Maybe her soul.
She blinks.
“No speakers.” He slams the window with his palm.
Her face blitzes, fuzzed by the reverberation.
“No!” I tug him back and take his spot.
She’s here, right here. Under my fingertips, cheek smearing shimmers with each light drag. Her lips move, and I mimic their shape with my own.
“Ends,” I whisper.
Niles steps close. “What?”
I ignore him to sound out her words. “I have . . . tears—things, but rest—this . . . mystery, mine? They say good—good what?—three, but I really relieve—believe? In four.”
Mom cups her empty hands, raises them to her lips, and blows.
My palms tingle.
She says something else. It ends in heart.
Mine cracks.
“No,” I say.
The image fizzes, pops. The puppy returns, flopping ears and wagging tail.
“NO!” I slam the window twice as hard as Niles did. The glass reverberates. “Come back! You come back! You can’t leave this on me, you don’t have the right.” I smack the glass again and again, and then there’s an arm around my waist and a solid boy at my back.
He lifts me up, my feet swinging as he backs us away.
“No!” I kick—twist, tug. His arms are steel, his chest a wall. Lips at my ear, breath in my hair. “Kit, Kit, calm down.”
“Calm down!” I twist hard enough to break his hold. Or else his arms loosened. I face him. His hands don’t leave my waist. “I don’t have to calm down. My mother is dead and she was right there.”
Calling me brightheart, like she used to. When I was young.
I pull free of Niles. Grab my hair and get the stupid scarf instead. I toss it to the pavement. Kick it for good measure. “They’re dead.” I swing round and punch the window. My bones crunch my knuckles into my elbow, and my whole arm wails. “The Archive’s entire night crew. You heard. They had to pull that lady’s daughter out on a stretcher.”
“I know.” Niles’s behind me. Not tugging and lifting, just quiet and there. “I know.”
“She’ll never get her daughter back. She’s gone.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not okay,” I say.
“It’s not your fault.”
“She was my mom.”
“Don’t take on her sins.” His arms wrap around my waist, but I am stone and don’t move. “They aren’t yours.”
“You don’t know that,” I whisper.
“Yeah I do,” whispered back.
I twist, flatten my palm on his chest to push him away or pull him close, I can’t tell. “How?”
“Easy.” He takes my face in both hands and kisses my bruised cheek, at the heart of the ache. And it weirdly feels better, like I’m some kind of kid.
I close my eyes. “Weren’t you just yelling at me for that?”
“Because it was stupid as hell.” His mouth skims my jaw, breath and heat
. Another kiss. “And brilliant. God, you’ve got guts. Hell, the second time I saw you, you—” He stops.
I open my eyes. “Got in a fight over the intercom and blackmailed my aunt? Yeah, that was great.”
His face is quiet, skirting a blankness that almost takes over but doesn’t. “Blackmail?”
“I have shit on my cousin and threatened to use it. That’s why she backed down.” I twist my fingers in his shirt. “Who does that?”
His hands fall to my shoulders. “Isn’t he the one who dosed you?”
“He hadn’t dosed me then.”
And maybe he wouldn’t have at all, without the threat.
After that, Greg probably thought it an even exchange.
I sag. Release Niles’s maligned shirt, try to smooth out the wrinkles. “Niles?”
His hands tighten. “Yeah?”
The question drags at my tongue, aches with my cheek, but the past is past and probably should stay there.
There’s only so much damage a day can handle.
I step away from him. “We should go.”
“Kit.” Tight and clipped. He stands very straight, arms listless. “Ask me. Just ask.”
Well, I guess I started this.
“What was your dad’s reputation? The one he left you with?”
Niles doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, the question caught in the air or the grid of his brain. A closed grid behind silent eyes.
“Skip it,” I say. “I wasn’t trying—”
“Appropriation,” he says. “I’d say embezzlement but it’s not about money, though he certainly takes his cut. It’s about leverage.” He grins, beautiful and twisted. “And my dad excels at leverage. Think, Decker.”
My jaw drops. “He’s not—?”
“No. Not him.” Niles jams his hands in his pockets and he looks away. “And just so we’re clear? I’m pretty damn good myself. Even outclassed Dad a time or—”
I reach for his neck, step close and kiss him. Taste his surprise, his stillness, hesitant lips belied by the hand at my hip, grasping for anchor. A brief kiss, nothing special.
It shouldn’t be this hard to breathe.
“I thought we didn’t take on sins?”
“Oh lord,” and he’s breathless, too, forehead pressed to mine. “Don’t quote me. Half the stuff I say is shit.”
Niles doesn’t argue when I say I’m tired and want to be alone, probably because it’s the truth. He walks me to my suite, palm pressing mine in a silent I’m here.
Even unspoken the words bolster the landscape, give the sky some color. Command so much power . . . but not enough.
My world is preprogrammed by Mom. That last message, whatever else it was, was for me.
I smile and close Niles out of my suite. Lean against the door as his steps retreat down the hall, and wait for the stairwell door to open. I count to ten and slip down to the main level.
Mrs. Divs answers on my second knock.
She’s exchanged her bright gold dress for a more sedate red robe, its draped sleeves swinging as she puts her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me you got in a fight.”
“Did you see it?” I ask.
“Of course I see it, it’s half down your face.”
I shake my head. “I mean Mom, on the feeds.”
She snorts. “Better use asking if anyone didn’t see it. What is your mother up to?”
Behold the question of the hour.
“Did you record it?” I ask.
Mrs. Divs is a veritable newsfeed archive. She records everything, remembers everything.
She stomps her cane. “Now, how am I supposed to record anything with the power gone out? It was downright eerie to have that wall-screen running and nothing else on.”
“But you could tell me what she said. You remember every word, don’t you, Mrs. Divs? You have an ear.”
I’ve heard her recite whole conversations verbatim.
She preens, a silky red bird. “I do, don’t I?”
“There’s not a soul to match you,” I say.
She levels me a wrinkled glare. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doin’, young miss.”
But still, she swings the door wide.
I slip into her white lace wonderland, and she shoos me toward the couch. I take the end closest to the big green cookie jar. I didn’t have breakfast this morning, or dinner last night.
I reach out. “May I?”
She gently smacks my fingers. “It’s not even half on suppertime yet! We’ll have tea first, and see if you behave. Then we’ll talk cookies.”
I sink into the cushions, hand in my lap. “Of course, Mrs. Divs.”
Satisfied, she hobbles off to the kitchen. I try to ignore the jar. Even closed, it radiates sugar. Gingercrisp and fireplum, homemade and buttery.
Yonni couldn’t cook for shit, but she used to take me to the bakery. Once a week every week, whether she had an appointment later in the evening or not. I first met Missa in a bakery. We ran into her by accident. She bought me cloudcakes and Yonni coffee. Yonni was livid. She pulled Missa aside where I wasn’t supposed to see, and said in a voice I wasn’t supposed to hear, “Not a word, not a damn word. The kid doesn’t know what I do.”
I’d slid in by her elbow and nearly gave her a heart attack. “Uh, Yonni? I’m eleven.”
She gaped at me, then snatched the cloudcake from my hand, ordered me to a chair, and banned me from sugar for a month.
I might be on a sugar ban now, the way the cookie jar taunts me. I fold my arms and stare at the wall-screen. It’s muted. Some newscast plays, but not the standard House Update. The colors and logos are different, the camera panning along streets with trees—actual trees—growing between skytowers. Two boys meander the walkway, both tall, but one towering. Literally. He has to duck under low branches and the weirdly ornate signs hanging above open shop doors. Painted signs, not digitech. The letters don’t move. The shorter boy tugs the other into someplace called Our Divinity. The camera hovers in their absence.
The Lord’s dead, the Archive’s gone, Mom just hijacked the feeds, and this is the news? Not Lady Galton demanding an explanation from the Prime, or the Prime pointing out how all his resources are devoted to finding the bloodling Heir. Not some minor lordling in a panic over what will happen next, or the Market Brinkers with their protest signs, but this?
The couple reappears, carrying fluffy rolls with thick icing. The camera zooms in, and it turns out the shorter of the two isn’t a boy, but a round-faced girl. She raises her pastry, closing her eyes as she breathes in obviously epic levels of sugar, and bites.
I hate her.
Cups rattle in saucers, a cane scraping tile. Mrs. Divs appears from the kitchen, tray sloped dangerously, teapot skidding.
I jump up and grab it before she stains her scattered lace. “Seriously, just ask.”
“I am not too old to serve my guests tea, thank you very much.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I set the tray on the low table and straighten the pot while Mrs. Divs eases into the couch. She pours me a cup, and it takes all my willpower not to gulp it down.
On-screen, the couple has transferred to a garden area beside the bake shop. Green trees, green grass, even green tables and chairs. The girl talks about something and sets her sticky roll down to make shapes in the air with her hands. The boy’s in a hood, but he must be listening because she responds to his responses. And they must be the right responses, because she shares her pastry.
Then it hits me.
“It’s a restaurant review,” I say. “Or a travel show.” Prescheduled programming to give the newsfeeds time to evaluate Mom’s latest stunt. Make a plan.
Mrs. Divs glances at the screen and barks a laugh. “Travel, I’ll grant you. That, my girl, is a Westlet newscast.”
“Westlet?”
My cup freezes halfway to my mouth. “The House of Westlet?”
Inter-House network boxes are expensive. More than expensive. She’d have to get a communicator and a transfeed adaptor, and together those would cost more than her suite. Hell, more than our whole tower.
She nods, smug. “And live, too.”
“No,” I moan. “You didn’t rob somebody, did you?” I can almost see it, Mrs. Divs on the slow sneak attack, cane raised. Or worse, pulling the Poor Little Old Ancient routine on a very rich somebody. “Don’t tell me you conned a lordling.”
Dad tried that, once. It did not end well.
Mrs. Divs lifts the silver remote from her table, and the screen blacks out. “Of course not! It may surprise you, but my family used to have money back in the day. Quite a lot of it.”
I knew that, her furniture nearly screams “heirlooms,” but an inter-House box? That’s another level entirely. Lordling level. Missa level.
I raise my cup and swallow my questions back with my tea. It’s warm, and a little bitter.
She watches, her saucer perched between spider fingers. “Aren’t you going to ask what happened?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Not particularly.”
I shrug. “All right then.”
Another gulp and my tea’s gone. These cups are like thimbles, but snagging a refill probably won’t net me a cookie.
Mrs. Divs doesn’t move, a statue in a red robe and curled locks, gaze steady and cataloging.
Tea-gulping was a bad idea. I’m so not getting a cookie.
She almost smiles. “Ah, Kit. Sometimes you are very . . . reminiscent of your line.”
“Dad’s gone.” I meet her still gray eyes. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
She shifts somehow, her whole demeanor easing into a shrug that never quite happens. “Now that is nice to hear. A real mistake, that. Sullies the blood.”
Dad was Yonni’s blood.
I set down my cup with easy, measured grace. Otherwise, I’d slam it. “What did Mom say?”
Her eyebrows rise. “You don’t know? What with her pretty face broadcast planetwide? However did you manage that?”
“Does it matter?” I ask. “Do you remember what she said?”
“Perhaps. Though since you’re so interested, maybe you can tell me what she meant to say.” Soft and conversational. “Especially as you were seeing so much of her.”