True North

by L. E. Sterling

For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I surge forward through the crowd, stepping past the broad shoulders of elegant men and their high-heeled ladies. My eyes stay riveted on Jared’s handsome form, the flip of a blond lock on his forehead. Jared’s awareness, the still attention of a hunting cat, remains trained on me. Maybe twenty feet away, I brush past a particularly large man only to be knocked by a waiter bearing a tray of drinks in cut crystal cups. The cups rattle against my bare arm. When I look up again, Jared hasn’t moved but he looks ready to spring. His eyes brush back over me, making sure I’m all right.

  I take another step or two, my skirt pulled behind me in the crush of bodies. “Jared,” I call.

  It’s all I have time to murmur before I’m hit with a stab of panic so thick it chokes me. It lances through my head, my eyes burning hot with pain. My stomach drops as though I’ve been sucker punched. Something claws at my wrists. I drag my eyes away from Jared, who has lost the facade of a disinterested merc.

  I hold up my wrists. Twin impressions of crescent moons appear on the delicate white skin, livid red and bloody.

  “Margot,” I breathe. Whatever hell my sister has been holding back from me tumbles through me like a broken dam.

  And as I rush headlong into darkness, doing all I can to stifle a scream until I am out of earshot of the other revelers, I imagine I hear Jared calling my name. I sink into unconsciousness.

  6

  The voices arguing on either side of my bed don’t help the splitting headache that threatens to pull me apart, stitch by perfect stitch.

  “Calm down, Jared,” Storm quietly warns. “She’s fine.”

  “She’s not fine. You need to cancel whatever the hell you’re planning. Something’s wrong.”

  “You’re being dramatic.”

  “I smell it on her.”

  “She’s tired. She’ll be fine.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  I crack open an eye. My attention snags on the giant watercolor opposite the window—huge red flowers, bright like fresh blood—and then watch as the magnificently untidy True Born above me grabs the bridge of his nose in frustration. It must hurt. The bones of his face have lengthened again, a sure sign he’s feeling protective.

  “I’m listening,” I croak, deciding to sit up and take part in this interesting turn of conversation. “How do I smell again?” I sniff.

  Storm smiles. “Good, you’re up,” he says, as though I’ve just had a nap instead of a strange narcoleptic fit brought on by…

  “Margot.” I almost yell the word as I try to pull off the sheets tangling me.

  “Whoa. Hold on there.” Storms blocks my path. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I take one short breath and look the leader of the True Borns square in the eye. “We have a deal, Mr. Storm. You made me a promise. Your turn.”

  Storm crosses his arms and nods with gravity. “Yes, we do, Lucy. But you need to slow down and talk to me.”

  I take a moment to watch the window glass streak with rain. She’s still there. Margot is a shadow self within me, an echo in my bones. With a squeak, I tell Jared and Storm about feeling my twin short-circuit me. And when I’m finished, when my so-called guardian doesn’t seem any more ready to spring into action than before, I feel I have no choice but to push the point home.

  “Well?” My voice rises in frustration. “When do we leave?”

  Storm looks out the window. The crackling veins of energy pulse back a weak light. Somehow, when he glances at me, I know I’ve lost this round.

  “Do you know where she is?” he finally asks.

  “No, but I know we can find her.”

  “You said it felt like Margot was panicked about something. Overwhelmed. But no sensations of physical harm? Did you think she was hurt?”

  I shake my head. “Not exactly, but my wrists…” I hold up the flesh of my wrists, swollen and red, as proof.

  He leans in closer. “Can you tell who is with her?”

  A stab of betrayal curls through me. “You know I can’t do that,” I say weakly. “That’s not how it works.”

  His glance is so pity-filled I’d as soon he slapped me. “Lucinda,” he says. Too soft. Like I’m a kitten he’s kicked.

  I slowly slide from the bed and walk over to the window. The rain calls to me, as wild and furious as I feel. I place my hand on the cool glass. It fogs up immediately from my touch, leaving an extra hand behind. The same size and shape as Margot’s.

  Storm comes to stand behind me. “Those idiot senators are going to try to pen the preachers. They haven’t got a clue what they’re dealing with. And if they continue on this path, there will be an all-out civil war. Which is bad for my plans. Worse for my people. In fact, it will be worse for everyone in Dominion.”

  Of course Storm is the True Borns’ defender. So who defends Margot and me? You do, a small voice chimes in. You’re all she’s got.

  I pull my fingers slowly from the glass, remember seeing Margot’s hands pressed against our bedroom window, just so, so many months before. The last time I saw her. I shiver, but not from the cold.

  “Our father always told us war was good for business and politicians. Shakes things up,” I say, turning. “Turns bad situations into opportunities.”

  Across the room, on the other side of the bed, Jared slouches against the wall. Mouth drawn into a tight line, his already prominent cheekbones stand out sharply. His white dress shirt has come partway undone, I note with interest, revealing a spectacular expanse of hard, rippling muscle. He watches me from under a shag of blond bangs with an inscrutable expression.

  “Did you ever have any intention of helping me get to Margot?” The question is for Storm, though I continue to look at Jared, who frowns.

  Storm replies without hesitation. “Yes. And I still do.” And though it’s good to hear, I know he’s not finished. “But Lucy,” he says gently, “there are things that need to happen before I can commit resources to that.”

  “You’re waiting for things to calm down?” I venture. “Here? In Dominion City?” When I see I’m right, I can’t help but scoff. “And just when do you think that will happen? When the dead rise from their piles of dust?”

  It feels as though the pieces finally fit together and I see where everything stands. Storm will try to save Dominion for the True Borns while my sister is lost somewhere out there—likely in Russia, and in the company of the coldest parents on earth. And if I don’t act, she’ll be stuck there. On her own. Suffering. And me along with her.

  Storm walks over to the door, the curved bone over his head wreathing him like a bright crown. “What do you think would happen if I abandoned the city now, Lucy? Once they start purging the preachers—do you think it’s likely they’ll stop there? Next it will be the True Borns, just as your father and his cronies had intended. And beyond that, anyone who doesn’t fit their political agenda of the month.”

  He’s right—I know he’s right. I heard the colonel myself. People are going to die, and Nolan Storm is probably the only one who can prevent it. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to throw something at him.

  I turn my back to him, freezing him out. As far as gestures go, it’s childish. And stupidly ineffective. I can still see Storm’s bright silhouette in the glass, still feel the magnetic pulse of his energy. But it’s the only weapon I have to counter the helpless anger I feel, the sense that this betrayal is far worse than any I have encountered in the past.

  Storm contemplates my back for a moment before quietly murmuring to Jared, “Lucy is wanted in the lab. See to it she gets there in the morning.”

  It’s easier than I imagine to slip out from under watch and guard at Storm’s headquarters. Kept but not a prisoner, I think to myself wryly as I punch the code into the elevator and it whisks me down without a sound. It’s still early morning, though. Jared isn’t expected to collect me for another couple of hours. Outside the glass of the tower, the sky is grainy, like sand, before which the buildings sit
like dark bruises.

  I tamp down a wave of guilt. In my former life I’d never contemplate setting up a secret rendezvous with a boy, let alone the strange boy I met in an alleyway while being attacked. I deliberately avoid thinking about Jared and what he’d say if he knew what I was up to. This isn’t my former life, I remind myself. And Storm isn’t my father. I can meet with whomever I choose. Besides, I reason defiantly, if Storm won’t help me get what I need, maybe this person can. I step out of the building shaking my head. Something about Alastair makes me feel as though I can trust him. I pray I’m right.

  My heart squeezes and relaxes as I spy a lone figure lounging against the glass and cement of the sky rise. He showed, I tell myself. At least there’s that.

  “What happened to you?” Alastair rakes me from head to toe, frowning. But if I look disreputable at this time in the morning—I’m clad in a pair of blue and white Grayguard gym pants and a sweater—he looks worse. Alastair appears to be one step from a kid gang himself. His brown leather jacket is ripped and torn here and there, the leather scuffed and old. The collar is turned up against the chill of the early morning air, catching on the strap of his canvas bag. His corded trousers look almost as beat up as Jared’s, and beneath the frayed hems poke scuffed boots, though of a fine make.

  I can only just make out his face beneath the broad brim of his hat, a collection of dark features and a pair of dark eyes that miss nothing.

  “Not a thing,” I toss out, though I’m a liar. My eyes are red and puffy from a night of crying myself to sleep, my hair a messy tangle.

  “Riiiight,” Alastair drawls.

  I square my chin, putting on my best princess face, and stare down my nose at him. “I don’t see what business it is of yours anyhow.”

  Alastair snorts a laugh. “Look, lady, I don’t have to be here.” He starts to turn away. My hand whips out and grabs his leather-clad arm.

  “Wait. I just…got some bad news last night.”

  Alastair stares at me as though to read the truth in my face. Nodding, he jerks his head. “Follow me. We’re too conspicuous here.”

  He leads me to the tiny courtyard beside Storm’s building, mostly a snarl of dead hedge, not even good enough to start fires, though someone has hacked through a portion. There’s a stone bench, though, and—wonder of wonders—no one sleeping on it.

  He tilts his hat off and scratches at his head. The hair underneath is mussed and flattened in fat, thick whorls of black. “You know, I really don’t get you Upper Circle folks.” He squints at me.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You have everything you could ever want. Food, nice place to live. And you can Splice. So why are you all so darned miserable?”

  “I’m—w-we’re not,” I splutter, indignant. “You don’t know anything about my life.”

  “Nope. Guess I don’t.” He grins, throwing me off balance.

  “Look, did you come all the way here this morning to insult me?”

  “Nope.” He tilts his head back to study me. “I came to figure out if you really would meet me.”

  That catches me off guard. “What do you mean?”

  “Why’s a richy-rich girl living in a tower rather than one of the mansions on the hill? And why is this same girl meeting a strange guy like me when she can just buy off one of her Personals to get her intel? It’s a question, don’t you think?”

  He’s right. Any sane person would be suspect of me. “You think I’m setting you up.”

  “Not exactly.” Alastair shakes his head at me. “You’re just so…so stupid,” he finally says.

  We stare at each other, the dawning horror of his words reaching his eyes. Alastair claps a hand over his mouth. And I begin to laugh. I laugh like it’s the last funny thing in the world while he watches, a strange blend of fascination and something I reckon might be horror on his face. If Jared or Nolan or anyone else has said that to me, I would have been enraged. But I am long past that point today. I’m risking my life on the faint hope that a street urchin in Dominion may be able to find information on my sister’s whereabouts in Russia. Alastair is absolutely right, I muse, letting another paroxysm of laughter take me. I’m an idiot—at the very least, a girl with no instinct for self-preservation.

  When at last I can control myself, I swipe at my eyes and sniffle. “Sorry. It’s just that I really can’t argue with that. What was I thinking?”

  I stand up to head inside. Alastair bolts up, holding his hands out as though to stop me.

  “Whoa. Look—sorry. I’m not exactly one of your Upper Circle bucks. I’m not all suave and sophisticated. I say what’s on my mind, even when sometimes I should just keep my damned mouth shut.”

  A drone flies overhead, low to the ground. It’s just a surveillance drone, I recognize from the red-striped underbelly, though lower to the ground than usual. Alastair grabs me by the arm and pulls me closer to the wiry tangle of hedges.

  “It’s just a surveillance drone,” I say.

  The drones are meant to be helpful. We’re taught the usefulness of these machines for sending out the Rovers to pick up the dying and the dead. And maybe preacher men. The thought strikes as Alastair keeps his eye on the meter-long flying robot. “What are you worried about?”

  He pulls his hat lower, bathing his face in complete shadows. But I can still see the glittering, playful darkness of his eyes. “Me? I don’t worry about anything. Just the same, I’d rather not give Ole Dominion any more information on me than I have to.”

  “You think they’re doing more than looking for Plague Struck.” It’s not a question. Nor does Alastair take it as one.

  He grins. “Maybe you’re not as stupid as I thought.”

  I ponder this. “Do you think they’re keeping tabs on the preacher men?”

  “How else do you think all those rich Upper Circlers control so many poor Lasters?”

  “Ali,” I say, grabbing his forearms.

  Alastair pulls his head back with a frown. “Ali?”

  I nod. “You found me in an alley, didn’t you? Like a big, wet alley cat.”

  “And that’s how you repay me for saving you? You just decide you can rename me…after a wet cat?”

  He says it seriously, but the corners of his mouth curl up, barely suppressing a smile. We’re strangely comfortable companions, this strange alley cat and me. As though we really can say anything to each other. “Well, you called me stupid. You’ll get used to it. So listen, Ali, you seem to know a lot about these things.”

  “What things?” he asks warily.

  “Politics. Surveillance.”

  “Sure,” he says slowly. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  I shake my head. “I know dancing. Mercs. A different kind of politics.”

  Alastair squints at me and scratches his head. “What other kind of politics is there? It’s people fighting over bones.”

  And it’s just that, that one response, that settles everything into place for me. He knows things I need to know, a voice inside me insists. I decide to go with my gut, to take a leap.

  “Have you ever traveled?”

  “Sure. I’ve been to the territories. A few other places,” he hedges.

  “Ali.”

  “Are you Upper Circle girls always so weird?”

  “You said you could get information for me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you get me information on who’s traveled out of Nor-Am in the last four months?”

  7

  I let myself into the lab. Row upon row of stainless-steel lab benches with raised shelves. The watchful eye of a giant clock glares down at me from above the door. I now recognize a few of Doc Raines’s tools of the trade. The large boxy machine, for instance, that allows her to separate genetic strands, then project them on a large flat-screen while she manipulates them. I imagine they have similar tech in the Splicer Clinics, where people go to have their blown genes ripped out of them and have fresh ones sewn in.

  Unlike at the Spl
icer Clinics, here, amid the hand scanners for reading genetic strands and nano-manipulation gear for experimenting with DNA variants, I’m not overwhelmed by a terrible sense of wrongness.

  In the Splicer Clinics, you’re always at the mercy of a test result. Just one genetic switch, one protein expressed a bit more than another, and you’d never be the same. Eventually you’d grow ill. Be Spliced, if you were lucky. Be looked down upon in our little world devoted to the pretense that the Upper Circle does not fall to the Plague.

  Here in Storm’s lab, at least, I have a say. No one asks me about my body or how well it’s functioning. Here, I am not illness waiting to happen. I’m still put through Protocols—but to get to the bottom of what I am, not what I will become.

  Until the day Margot disappeared, it hadn’t occurred to me to question our lives. It was only when I found her, stretched and clamped on a bed in our Splicer Clinic, a long and bloody pipette snaking from her body where they had been harvesting parts of her, that I realized things were not as they seemed.

  I close my eyes and fight to lock up the image of my sister that day: white as a winding sheet, shaking, sunken into herself. I can’t bear to think of what they might be doing to her now. Or what they’ve done with the tiny parts of her they managed to squire away.

  A familiar voice breaks through my train of thought. “I get that you’re mad at Storm. But are you going to speak to me again this century?”

  Startled, I turn. Jared leans against the steel bench closest to the door, arms crossed. I note the lines of strain around his mouth, his eyes. The tired and bruised look, as though he hasn’t slept well.

  Good, I think. In my head I know it’s not up to Jared what Storm does or doesn’t do. But he didn’t speak up. Didn’t argue with Storm. Didn’t offer to help me. And that’s what my heart remembers.

  Stay with me, Lu. Stay with me.

  He’d asked me to stay. And with every day that passes I become more convinced that he didn’t mean it.

  Instead of answering, I let my hands fall on a pair of hyper-loops, for examining microscopic DNA samples. Doc Raines had shown me how to use them. They’re the kind of gear even private schools like Grayguard can’t afford. I pull them over my head and begin fiddling with the fit adjustments.