by L. J. Hatton
Eager to get my bearings, I headed for a set of heavy curtains that scraped the floor—behind them was a blank wall. I trembled as I reached for the next cord. There was no window there, either. I ran to the room’s opposite side and found the same, searching along the wall with my hands in case there was something more than I could see.
Frantic, I settled my sights on the door with its crystal handle. If it opened into a wall, I was sealed in.
I rested my hand against the doorknob; it turned from the other side.
“It’s a dream,” I said as the door opened. “My dream.”
And as my dream, it should have been under my control. I willed the person on the other side of the door to be Jermay.
“Xerxes, come,” I ordered. I didn’t feel in control at all. “Xerxes, I need you!”
My dream. My dream. Mine . . .
Xerxes trotted over, leaning against my leg just as the person who had opened the door entered.
“I’m sorry,” Birch said, shuffling into the room. “At least they fixed your ribs.”
The mechanical imitation of Iva Roma came behind him.
“Of course he did! What sort of commander would he be if he allowed her to remain injured?” she asked, before addressing me. “Hello, Penelope. Do you like your room?”
“Wake up,” I told myself. “I don’t want you here. Wake up!”
I pinched myself, pressed my hand into my ribs, bit down on my tongue—anything to cause enough pain that I’d snap out of this cursed sleep.
“Silly girl,” Iva said. Her grin turned nearly manic as it widened across her too-stiff face. “You are awake. The warden let me pick your clothes after I mended your ribs.”
“You mended them?”
“Medical training is part of my programming,” she said proudly, reaching for a strand of my newly grown hair. “It lets me fix all sorts of things. I may have gotten a bit carried away prettying you up, but I’m told you didn’t like your previous hairstyle, and spoiling her youngest is a mother’s right, isn’t it?”
No! It was a dream! There were no machines that could mend bones or lengthen hair. Nye hit me hard enough to knock me out, and this was the result.
I glanced at Birch. He must have guessed my thoughts, because he shook his head solemnly.
“What do you want?” I demanded of the robot.
“The warden asked me to visit. Do you like your room?”
Her programming needed a tweak. She was stuck in a loop.
“It’s nice enough, for a cage.”
“They’re your quarters,” Iva said, shaking her head with a plastic pout.
“Where are my sisters? My friends? Where’s my father?”
“Inconsequential.” Her expression soured, but not smoothly enough to be considered a frown. “You have no need for remnants of an old life. You’ll adapt to your new one. You have no alternative.”
I had as many alternatives as there were windows or doors to leap from.
“I’ll kill myself.”
“That’s Magnus talking,” she said, heaving a forced sigh. “He’s warped all your perceptions of us, hasn’t he?”
“He protected me from you,” I said, refusing to humor her. “He loves me. Where is he? Is he a prisoner, too?”
“You can have a good life here, Penelope. You can also have a bad one. Which do you want?”
I liked her better when she was dead. This false mother had done more than steal the only concrete image I had of the real Iva Roma. I couldn’t even mourn my mother anymore—I wanted to destroy her with my bare hands.
Hands that began burning as my temper rose.
I called out with that inner sound of music that had brought the stars careening down upon Arcineaux’s facility, but instead of the crash of burning rock against the building, a searing pain shot through my wrists. The more I tried to sing down the stars, the more intense the burn, until I pried up the lace gloves to see what was below them.
Restriction bands.
I grabbed my throat, but there was no collar.
“I told you he doesn’t use them,” Birch said.
“I want to leave,” I said. When I stopped trying to use my abilities, the pain lessened. “My real mother would let me.”
Iva opened the door wide.
“You’re welcome to wander any space not closed by security protocol, darling. Birch can help you sort them out. Please be prompt when you’re summoned. We don’t want to give our guests a bad impression.”
She left me and Birch alone.
“There wasn’t anything I could do once the warden saw you,” he said.
“I know.” That was on me, and me alone. “I told him you didn’t help me, but . . . Was it . . . was it awful, whatever he did to you because of me?”
“He didn’t do anything,” Birch said. “It’s not like the centers on the ground. It’s better here.”
Birch laid his palm against the wall, causing the flowers painted on it to bloom. Real and fragrant roses trellised up the walls and across the ceiling and floor until he’d made me my own greenhouse, with only the furniture to hint that we were indoors.
“Making it look nice doesn’t set windows in the walls or let me out the front door. Put it back the way it was.”
He touched the wall again and the blossoms wilted into the paper, leaving them more muted than they’d been before. Birch was in the same condition.
“Why won’t you let me make things better?” he asked. “I want to make you happy—and believe it or not, so does Warden Nye.”
He pointed to the ceiling. At the very top of the room, a security camera’s red light blinked from inside a vent grate. Nye was watching us.
“By turning me into a living doll he can trot out for guests to gawk at? That’s not the kind of show I put on.”
I flounced onto the floor in front of the sofa, determined not to let myself be comfortable in my cell.
“He gave you back your cat. All I had to do was ask,” Birch said.
“You? You got him to part with Xerxes?”
“He says it’s broken, so you can keep it. I’m supposed to tell you he hopes that seeing it will give you a dose of perspective.”
It gave me a lot more than that. Hope was tempting me with the promise of possibilities again. It offered a hand up out of despair. I leapt for it.
“Can you put those flowers back on my wall?” I asked.
I raised my medallion, going through the motions of Zavel’s sleight-of-hand lessons to make it appear and disappear and warm up my fingers.
“Why do I get the feeling I’m going to live to regret this?”
“If it works, we’ll both live to celebrate. Put them back.”
“I don’t like that glint in your eye.”
Still, he put his hand back to the wall, and at his touch, it bloomed.
“Better?” he asked.
“Keep going,” I told him, giddiness bubbling up. “Show off. I’m not in the mood for an audience.”
I flicked my eyes to the camera above us.
Flowers spilled across the tables while moss turned the carpet green to the door. Vines crisscrossed their way to the ceiling. I’d never seen anything like it. Creepers made of blooming jasmine spun and curled onto the furniture. One of these had the misfortune of catching Xerxes’ attention. He pounced on it, only to be lifted into the air as the vine rose. The poor confused thing grabbed on with all four paws, terrified, before he remembered he had wings. He let go and coasted into my lap.
“Does the camera pick up sound?”
“I don’t think so,” Birch said. “I can make them believe a leaf strayed over the lens for a minute or so, but any longer and someone will come in person.”
“A minute’s enough,” I said.
Like all illusions, this required
staging and timing. Birch had provided the former, so that if anyone was looking in, it would appear that he was trying to cheer me up by turning my cell into a fairy-tale grotto of ivy and roses. The timing came from Jermay. He’d taught me tricks over the years so we could steal sweets from Mother Jesek, but now those lessons were more than childhood mischief.
I tested my skills, attempting to flick the casing of the medallion open discreetly. It passed through my cupped palm, and was open and shut by the time it reached the other side. Plucking out the control circuit wouldn’t be difficult at all.
“Is that magic?” Birch asked.
“It might be,” I said. Hopefully it would make us disappear right under the warden’s nose.
I set Xerxes off my lap, petting his head as I pulled up to my knees.
“If this works, I expect you to lose the ribbon,” I told him, palming the control circuit from the medallion.
He obliged in scratching it off.
I took a page from my father’s book and didn’t bother to hide my hands when I fiddled with Xerxes’ access panel. I ran through motions that anyone with a basic understanding of mechanics would recognize as pointless, while using the wardrobe’s mirror to make sure my face looked frustrated.
Birch squatted down for a closer look at what I was doing.
With one quick swipe of my fingers, I extracted the faulty cartridge and replaced it with the one from the medallion. I let out an exaggerated sigh and closed Xerxes’ panel again.
Failure and success in a single breath—I had to force myself not to smile.
I burned out the medallion by shielding myself and my friends from Warden Nye on the road, but the circuitry was still intact. Xerxes had plenty of power, but his command circuit wouldn’t hold; that’s why he was stuck small. My father’s components were usually interchangeable.
Xerxes trilled beneath my hand. His eyes glowed, losing the glassy quality that overtook them when he was powered down. I could see my father in him again.
“Welcome back,” I told him. “Play dead and stupid, kitty.”
He rolled onto his back, kicking his feet in the air, then scampered over to his basket to play with the trumpet vines.
“What was all that for?” Birch asked.
“Do you remember the flying machine Nye stole from my father?”
He nodded.
“Meet Xerxes.” I jerked my head toward his basket.
Xerxes was taking my “play stupid” command to the extreme. He’d completely ensnared himself in a tangle of greens.
“That’s what you’ve laid your hopes on?”
“Assuming the cartridge isn’t too old, he’ll be much more formidable when I need him.”
“If you say so.”
That might have been a sensible response from anyone else at any other time, but Birch followed his profession of disbelief by turning a wastebasket into a grapevine chair so he could sit down. In his hands, the wire mesh transformed. Vines knotted together into legs and a back, while the upended basket itself became the seat. Arms twisted up, lacing together at the seams, and leaves matted to form a cushion; there were even clusters of grapes hanging from the sides like ornaments.
He made no sense to me. He had power, yet he wasted it on decoration and party tricks. He treated the outside world like some dreamland he’d never see, and maybe that’s what it was for him.
How could anyone accept that fate so easily?
“Will they really let us leave here?” I asked, unwilling to sit stagnant another second.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere they’ll let you take me.”
CHAPTER 29
We returned to the wheel. Most of the hallways now had identifying signs above them, but not the doors to the elevator. It said “Aerie—Off Limits.”
Across from the wheel’s outer window, the room of automatic personnel was more complete, with a quarter of the machines completely outfitted with skin and clothes. The mixing vat was now filled with something clear, like thickening agar used to grow bacteria in petri dishes. Every half minute or so, one of the lab-coat robots would press a button and send a shock through the vat. A few inches of the gel would drain into tubes that siphoned it off to parts unknown, then a funnel above the vat would release more to be mixed. I still had no idea what the setup was meant to accomplish.
I stared out the window for what felt like hours. It was busy, being the day’s rush; small ships came and went, and I spent twenty minutes watching a technician fish for floating weather instruments with a long, hooked pole. Docked ships swayed with the currents of cloud-level winds strong enough to pull against the clamps holding them in place along the stationary outer ring of the Center’s gyro. Men on tethers, wearing magnetic suits so they could scale the hulls, saw to repairs on the vessels’ sides while others climbed rappelling lines to check for weak spots.
Most of the personnel I encountered avoided me, except the few I caught staring when my back was turned. They didn’t know I could see them in the glass, and I didn’t know if their looks were due to my ridiculous doll clothes or stories of my role in protecting the train and destroying Arcineaux’s facility.
“Why do you look down when they pass?” I asked Birch.
“Protocol,” he said. “We make them nervous.”
“If anyone’s nervous, it’s you.”
“Too much metal makes me queasy. Would you mind if we went somewhere else?”
I didn’t, and I knew exactly where he wanted to go.
We took up our habit of walking the circuit around the greenhouse, only he was moving unusually fast, with his arms stiff at his sides.
“They didn’t have a choice, you know,” he said after a while.
“Who?”
“My family. Just because my parents couldn’t buy my freedom, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t loved.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said. “But that thing—Iva—she’s made to look like my mother. Every time I see her, my better judgment goes out the window.”
“Warden Nye gave me a letter from them, when I was little. He wasn’t supposed to, but he even let me keep it.”
Our conversation became parallel confessions of our childhoods.
“I had a twin. He was taken at birth, too,” I told him, without mentioning that mine was as dead as his. I wouldn’t be the one to tell him his sister was dead. “Were you raised in a center?”
“On the ground.” He nodded. “It wasn’t so bad until Arsenic came. I actually had friends, but then there was an escape from the girls’ side. I miss the ground. No roots in the air.”
I knew how he felt. It was the way I felt about being near Anise. Now that Nye had confirmed my sisters were on board, our circle had a center again. If I could get close enough to her, I was sure I could use that feeling to pinpoint where she was being held and get her out. Together we’d be able to rescue everyone.
“Will you tell me where the prison is now?” I asked. “I’m not hiding anymore, and once Xerxes is ready to go, I’m not—”
Birch threw his arm out in front of me, and went still. I assumed he was composing an answer so he could dodge my request, but he ducked his head, moving in reverse until his back was against the rail. In the hall, it had been habit. This time, Birch was actually afraid. The hand that still held mine tightened painfully as he slipped his fingers between my own.
“Wha—”
He yanked me into the spot beside him. A door had opened at the end of the walkway, and a figure was headed toward us.
“Good afternoon, Warden Arcineaux,” Birch said mechanically, never raising his eyes.
“What are you doing running loose?” the gargoyle growled. “Aren’t there leash laws up here?”
Directed at me or not, I imagined retorts to give him, but fury choked them off in my throat. The re
striction bands made my fist shake at my side.
“I’m helping her acclimate,” Birch said quickly. “She doesn’t know her way around.”
Warden Arcineaux turned to me. His dark eyes hardened, and he took my face in hand, pinching my chin between his thumb and forefinger.
“So this is the Level-Five aberration? A freak’s freak, eh?”
“Get off me!” I pulled back, attempting to free myself.
The planting ledges around us began to rumble, vomiting up their soil. Arcineaux flicked it from his sleeve. Vindication made me calmer, lessening the burn.
“That trick was more impressive the first time.” He glanced from me to Birch and back again.
I spat on him.
It was something Jermay had taught me, and a habit Evie had tried to break me of for years. Jermay had said that any boy worth his trousers could spit at least three feet straight out; Warden Arcineaux was a lot closer.
“Penelope, no,” Birch whispered.
Arcineaux wiped his face with his sleeve, then grabbed my hair, bending my neck backward.
“So close to the stars, and unable to call them down. You must be miserable,” he said.
I started to lunge, only to feel a thin vine wind around my ankles, holding me flush to the rail. Birch patted my side, but I wasn’t the loyal lapdog the wardens had turned him into. My hand came up and slashed Arcineaux across the face.
“I guess this fancy shellac is good for more than looking pretty,” I said, wiggling my fingernails at him as he wiped the blood from his face. “You can thank your friend Nye for that.”
I willed myself to stand tall, prepared for him to strike me. Instead, he turned to Birch.
“Speed up your lessons, boy, before that wanders into the path of someone with less restraint.”
“Yes, sir,” Birch choked out.
He held his position, not releasing his hold on my waist, or the vines on my ankles, until Warden Arcineaux had continued on past us and out the door.
“Are you all right?” Birch asked, once he’d determined it was safe to move.
“How dare you,” I fumed, pushing him off when he tried to check my face. I was furious and humiliated, and I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore. I wanted out.