by Tessa Elwood
She meets my eyes. Hers aren’t terrified, or even shocked. And I can hear her soft voice singing with mine.
The lullaby. Mom’s lullaby. The words, the tune. She knew them. The song of the Accountants, the song of the indies.
Mrs. Divs knew.
She raises the head of her cane first to her mouth, and then her temple in a simple salute. Not a Galton salute, but one I’ve only ever seen in Mom’s late-night meetings with her “special” friends.
What. The. Hell.
“For a moment there,” Mrs. Divs calls, muffled through the glass, “I was afraid she’d allow you to undo us, but I see she hasn’t forgotten who she is. If you see your mother, give her my blessing and apologize for my doubt.”
Then Mrs. Divs turns on impossibly steady heels and slips into her suite.
She’s an Accountant. God, she’s—she’s like Mom. She knew.
I yank the lobby door, but it swung shut behind me and won’t budge. I pull my keypass from my pocket—that I still have on me, thank God—and press it to the security lock.
Nothing happens. Its embedded screen dark and burnt, hot brown at the edges. I try again.
Which would absolutely work, because, of course, my run-down tower’s security system would somehow survive a block-wide—maybe even city-wide—blackout.
Shit.
I pound the door. “What the hell is going on?”
Mrs. Divs doesn’t answer or doesn’t care, her door shut tight.
“I know you can hear me,” I yell. “Don’t act like you can’t.”
“Kit Franks?” says a deep voice at my back.
I yip and spin.
Two men stand on the steps below, both around Dad’s age, with authoritative menace blazoned all over them. Enactors for sure, or higher-end thugs.
That was fast. The power’s gone, so, of course, it has to do with me.
Hell, it probably does.
Screw that.
I don’t think, I swing. Catch one smack on the chin—jutting square and hard as stone. My fingers scream, bones creaking.
Or maybe his bones. Lord, I hope so.
They move in a blur, suited arms and dark hair. Grab my fist and twist it behind me. Push me to my knees. The flash of a dosing tube, a sting at my neck.
“Seriously?” I say. “You’ve got to be—”
Wake up. It’s time, come on.”
A quick pain high in my arm, breath on my cheek. I’m lying somewhere . . . hard? My head throbs. It’s dark. When I open my eyes, it’s still dark. Everything is dark.
What. The. Hell.
“That’s it. Can you sit?”
“Niles?” I ask. It’s his voice. His palm under my shoulder, helping me rise.
“Look at me. I need to check your pupils.”
I blink. It’s him, the outline of him. Cheeks pale in the dimness, hair shadowed and lost. Fingertips spreading my eyelid apart as he peers in, face close enough to kiss. So I do. Taste the wear of the day and the humid dark, the warmth that sears his very skin. He burns with it, a desperate hum of tension and wire that curls my ribs and pulls even as he pulls away, anchoring us apart with a palm to my cheek. His thumb skims my lips where his just were, soft as air.
“You’re here,” I say.
“Yeah.”
My words soft, his cracked.
My head’s heavy but not cloudy, muscles sore without screaming. I don’t feel good, but not so bad, either. My neck hurts the most. I rub the assorted holes and scratches. I’ve got quite the collection. “Who dosed me this time?”
He laughs. A breathy, silent, mirthless thing that wanes as he stares into the dark. “I found the bracelet.”
“What?” I search his face, but even this close it’s hard to see. “Wait, how—”
“Decker.”
Oh shit.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I push closer, feel for wounds. “You went alone? Did you get caught? I know Decker doesn’t look like much, but—”
“I’m fine, Kit.”
He doesn’t sound fine. Or not fine, for that matter. His fingers dig holes in my skin.
I wince. “Ow.”
“Shit, sorry.” His hold evaporates and we separate. He stays close but doesn’t touch. I hear him, though, the pull of his breath before he finds words. “The bracelet. There’s nothing special about it.”
Something’s wrong.
I scan behind him, but it’s just black. What light there is doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. The air’s stale, without breeze or exhaust fumes. Enclosed. If I yelled, it might echo.
We’re alone in a hole in the dark.
If we are alone. I have my doubts.
I lean close, lips to his ear. “How bad are you hurt? Can you run?”
His cheek presses into mine a heartbeat, less. He doesn’t whisper back. “I’m not hurt, Kit.”
Not yet.
The Brinkers must have jumped him outside of Decker’s. Or maybe this is Decker’s doing.
“I told you to be careful, that they drink death like wine.”
His forehead breaks into wrinkles. “What the hell does that even mean?”
“When you’re clear, look it up.”
And he will be clear. I’ll make damn sure.
I stand in one swift motion, hand braced on his shoulder as the dizziness hits, and yell into the dark. “Niles doesn’t know shit about the bracelet! He never even met Mom. Lord, he never met me until a few days back—and look how that’s worked out for him.”
Niles’s tension could suspend cables. “Kit.” Almost inaudible.
“You want to ask me something?” I call. “You ask me. And you won’t get shit for answers until he’s clear.”
“In that case,” says another voice entirely.
A harsh finger snaps and light flares. Spotlights, not overheads. Blue-tinged, battery-powered backups aimed straight for my skull. I flinch, try to blink sanity back into my retinas.
We’re in some kind of large room or hangar, walls sketchy beyond the spotlights.
A man steps into the blue glare, flanked by two others. Not the Brinkers with backup or even Decker with thugs, but a broad-shouldered, sleek-suited man. Tall and oozing power like grace.
The Prime.
The Head of the Enactors, the most powerful person in our House apart from the currently lost bloodling Heir and the wife of the late Lord, stands not six feet away and smiles.
Oh . . . shit.
My nails bite Niles’s shoulder. He doesn’t make a sound.
“You,” I say.
His smile widens, and there’s something oddly familiar about it. Resonant.
“Me,” he says.
And not just him. The flanking Enactor on the right has the ghost-pale skin and glaring eyes of the power technician.
Well, I started this round.
“You want answers?” I ask. “Let Niles go.”
The Prime regards me, eyebrows raised. I may have started, but he’ll finish and we both know it.
He motions Niles up with two effortless fingers, and Niles matches with efficiency. Slipping from my grasp and on his feet almost before my hand registers the motion.
“May I introduce you to my son?” asks the Prime. “Or perhaps you’ve met.”
What?
Niles stands at attention, stares not so much at me as past. Blue light threads his black hair and glistens along his shuttered eyes. The impenetrable blank of his cheeks and chin. He says nothing, looks like nothing—not smart or relentless or irritating. No hidden warmth that multiplies and melts my skin.
Niles? The Prime’s son? But they look nothing alike. Their height, their facial structure, their eyes—the Prime’s are too round and light and—
Amusement flicks through the Prim
e’s gaze, slides into a small smile, and I see it. The Niles in him.
My dad excels at leverage, he’d said.
Think, Decker, he’d said.
“Appropriation,” I say. My own smile crawls out of nowhere at the beauty of it. The perfection. A razor’s edge he balanced while I fell. Am falling. My stomach a sickened spiral that rips on every broken crag and doesn’t land. Can’t—there’s no purchase. The only solid ground I had was him.
So, of course, he wasn’t real.
I laugh with all the heat scraping my eyes and throat. “Appropriation. God. I can’t say you don’t play fair.”
The statue of Niles becomes more statuesque. He makes a pretty statue. Cast him in marble to preside over the city’s high gardens. Probably will, what with him being the son of the Prime. Hell, if an Heir never appears and the Prime and Lady Galton duke it out to establish a new bloodling line, Niles may wind up ruling the House.
I’d have kissed a House Lord.
I can still feel his lips. My heart’s answering glow. Jackknifed now, but . . . there.
Niles watches with his stone smooth face, and probably sees everything. My laughter dies.
“I wonder,” says the Prime, “if you grasp the current state of affairs.”
“I’m trapped in a room with the Prime and his—his son,” I say. “Think I’ve got it.”
The Prime moves closer—easy, graceful, he damn near controls the air. “This little rebellion? Your ‘Accounting’? Won’t last.”
“My Accounting,” I repeat.
“‘Close your eyes against the blood,’” he recites, in Mom’s same singsong. “‘Promise yourself it was all for love.’”
He’s heard it before. He knows.
“That’s just a stupid lullaby,” I say.
“Come now, aren’t we past that?” He closes in, eats the space. “This power-out of yours won’t last.”
So the power’s still down. No wonder they’re running off of battery-backed spotlights. Mom must have blown the city’s energy grid. Probably had it on a timer.
“Don’t confuse me with Mom,” I say. “You think I have brains enough to manage a power-out?”
“Doesn’t take much to activate a trigger.”
“What trigger? You have everything I had of Mom’s.”
And Dee has everything else, full stop.
“You mean this?” The Prime pulls Mom’s bracelet from his jacket pocket, to dangle it aloft. The light catches it in starbursts. “Worthless.”
Niles gave the Prime my mother’s bracelet. He must have. Because there it is, in the Prime’s hand—charms tinkling in a silver ribbon that clatters to the floor, chain curling in the paved dirt. Even there, it shines.
I stand still and straight and do not—do not—retrieve it.
“It has no hidden circuitry.” The Prime shrugs in a Niles-like way. “And I don’t need silver or glitter.”
The real Niles might atrophy if he doesn’t move soon.
His name probably isn’t even Niles.
My stomach wants to eat my heart.
“Like I said,” I repeat. “That was everything of Mom’s I had.”
“No, not everything.” The Prime reaches one long finger and taps the center of my forehead. “You have this.”
Mapping.
He’s going to mind map me. Pry my brain for answers. Piece me apart.
Wonder how that works with a temporary scent map patch. Probably not well.
The Prime’s finger trails over my temple, down my cheek, and under my chin. He lifts.
“Don’t think I don’t know what her digivirus is doing.” Soft enough for a whisper. “Why she chose the Archive, the real project she set in motion. It was never about destroying the power grid, though I’m sure she felt it a nice perk.” He leans near. Entirely too near. Another inch, and our noses would brush. “And don’t think I won’t stop her. This House is mine.”
He’s too close and too tall and twice my age at least, the bastard.
Yonni always said there was nothing worse than a man who flaunts power against those who have none.
“Really?” I say. “’Cause I thought the House was the Heir’s. Though if you’re planning to usurp the line, good luck taking it from the Lady. I think she’s got you beat.”
He blinks. A slow blink. Lethal.
“Speculation,” Niles says. He appears at my elbow, calm and disinterested. “Not the first time she’s spouted random shit.”
“Perhaps.” The Prime leans away and takes his hand with him. I can still feel Niles’s fingers. “We’ll soon see.”
“Shall I take her to the mapping center?” Niles asks.
The words shred all the bits of me still intact. There weren’t many. I scan the space, but there’s nowhere to run. Plus the flunkies in back have their dosers out.
“No, to holding,” says the Prime. “We have to get the power on first.”
“Hell no.” I step away from their happy little family, nod at the silent Shadow/techie waiting in back. “You can send me with him.”
The Prime’s smile could gut a planet. “And what makes you think you have a say?”
The streethover’s rear doors have no interior handles. My seat has no cushion, a curved silver bench built into an enclosed pillbox that’s empty but for me.
And Niles, beyond the partition window that separates my mobile prison from the hover’s front seat. He steers us through the dead city. Skytowers loom in shadows, black-toothed gaps against the smoke-black sky. The haze saves the sky from being pitch, but not by much. There’s no light to reflect.
The city is different. Haunted. No flashing ad-screens, no streetlights or bright shopfronts. Some of the cloudsuite towers glow blue in peppered windows, but even those are dim. We could almost be underwater, in one of the Outer Brink’s black seas.
Seas that soon won’t exist once the fuel extraction begins.
At least the Brinkers have nothing to hold over my head anymore. Niles is the Prime’s son. They couldn’t kill him if they tried.
And once word of my mapping hits their radar, Dee and Dad will be safe, too. There won’t be enough left of me to make the Brinker’s broadcast happen.
Niles catches my eye in the skinny mirror that reflects the street behind. I look away.
“The whole planet’s down,” he says, and the silence jumps. “There are riots in East 5th.”
Not surprising.
I stare out the window.
“You were suicidal,” says Niles.
My eyes snap to the mirror. He watches, hair soft in the interior’s glow. Haloed.
“Holding” must be on the other side of the damn planet. We’re going to wreck if Niles doesn’t keep his eyes on the street.
“Wesfen said he had to break cover to keep you from jumping, which meant one less eye on you.”
So the power technician has a name.
I return to the window.
“Most of Dad’s people are tied up with the Heir search. I was bred for infiltration, and Dad thought you could use a personal touch.” He sounds different now. There’s culture to his cadence. It’s nice. I hate it. “Especially after he brought up the mapping and you laughed at him. The damn Prime. Met his eyes and just . . .” Niles shakes his head. “That was the second time I saw you.”
He can shut up anytime.
“Dad thinks you’re the key to Oen’s virus, so we had to keep you intact.”
Yeah, and mapping won’t screw with that at all.
Niles must read my brain. “The mapping is my fault. It’s too risky and Dad wouldn’t have used it, but I sold him on the bracelet—that you believed it was the key. And since it’s not . . . we have to search your subconscious for answers.”
So my being fried up as a slimy vegetable is on him, too. F
antastic.
I hope the Prime is right, that Mom has a project. A reason.
I hope the virus destroys them all.
The streethover slows. The darkened city gets darker, and we enter some kind of building. Warehouse maybe? Walls and ceiling swallowing the hover as its forward beams outline a world of pavement and dust.
We jerk to a stop, engine still humming as Niles turns in his seat. We face each other through the partition window.
“Aren’t you going to chew me out?” he asks. “Haul my ass over the carpet? Don’t you have anything to say?”
“To you?” Flat. Nothing.
I will be nothing, if they map me.
But the power’s still out, the city still dark, and they haven’t mapped me yet.
Niles closes his eyes, forehead thudding into the window. He doesn’t seem to care.
If my door had a handle, I’d be gone. I search the dark for something to see.
“If you could do anything,” Niles asks, softer now, “go anywhere, had no ties, what would you do?”
“Other than break your neck?”
He flinches, but nods.
I’d go home and raid Mrs. Divs’s cookie jar.
Except that’d land me with a treacherous Accountant and singer of lullabies who locked me out. The cookies are probably poisoned.
I link my hands behind my head and stare into the hover’s ceiling.
“I’d go eat pastries in Westlet,” I say, “visit all their city bake shops, start my own travel show.” I smile into his tight, wary face. “After I destroyed Galton, of course. Every last piece. I am my mother’s daughter.”
He doesn’t move, doesn’t seem to breathe. Dead eyes above his dead mouth. Then he opens his door, grabs a small bag, and slides it across the seat with him as he exits.
His door hangs open, the hover’s engine still humming, as he opens mine.
Stupid.
As soon as my door cracks, I slam into it, sending him stumbling as I leap for the front seat. He grabs my wrist as I reach his door and hauls me into him, chest to chest. His free palm flattens on my back, the other reaching for my cheek. He kisses me, desperation made form. Blinding, even with my eyes closed. He is spark and fire, and I will burn him up. I grab the edge of his shirt, curl my fingers in his hair. His hands slide from my hips to neck to waist, until my whole body’s a map of where he is and was and where I want him to be. He’s a fuse, singed, busted, and cracking, and my eyes burn until they leak.