“Oh.” The word escaped me and hung over my head like a cartoon thought bubble of humiliation.
Adam closed his eyes again and leaned against the doorframe like he was Atlas shouldering the world. Then he opened them and looked at me.
“Meet us downstairs, by the service elevator. And try to stay out of sight.”
Us. Like he and Mercy were a club and I was not a member.
“Oh. Okay.”
Mercy reached out and swung the door shut in my face. Her singsong voice called out as it clicked shut, “Bye-bye, Harlow.”
It almost made me miss Her voice. Almost. I turned on my heel and staggered around the corner to where Dora was hiding. She was oblivious, doing the funky chicken down the hall toward me.
“Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Downstairs, by the service elevator, Adam wants you.”
I clamped my hand over her mouth.
“Shhh. Did you not catch the fact that Mercy was in his room and totally invited herself along?”
Dora froze mid-poultry-strut and her face got serious. I could see her doing the math.
“Mercy’s been psycho-stalking him since he got back. She probably conned her way in there two seconds before you arrived.”
It was possible, I supposed.
“He was acting all weird and intense.”
“Adam? Intense? Wow, what a surprise. Um, hi … have you met him before?”
“He only said yes because he feels sorry for me.”
Dora groaned. “Let’s just nail you to the cross right now, Moan of Arc. Are you gonna be this big of a drag the whole trip or just for your super-sweet seventeen? He agreed to go, didn’t he?”
She had a point. I was sneaking out. In Japan. To a kickass punk club. With Adam. On my birthday. Even if Mercy was going to be there, she didn’t know anything about punk rock. At least I had that on her.
“Everything is Swizzle Stick.” Dora had adopted the name of her favorite candy to mean anything that was good and pure and full of light. Swizzle Sticks were colored sugar inside a preservative paper tube—disgusting, I thought.
“Say it,” Dora commanded.
“Everything is Swizzle Stick.”
I should have been ecstatic. But the seismic rift that had developed between Adam and me was niggling at me, and Mercy’s constant presence at his side was the uncrossable moat that kept us from reconnecting. It had all started when he came back, and I didn’t know why or how to stop it.
Of all people to deliver the news, Mercy Mayer was the one who’d told me Adam was back. It happened three months prior to our trip, as I was leaving the All Knowing, the school we attended at our main compound in Twin Falls, Idaho. The All Knowing was shaped like an immense winged bird in flight, the smooth white wings of the roof capping massive, three-story black-glass walls. The sons and daughters of the Ministry were educated in the Bird’s Eye, sequestered from everyone else. Mercy had caught up with me as I took the winding staircase from the Bird’s Eye to our dedicated exit, lording the revelation over me like a trophy and savoring the moment my elation turned to hurt.
“He’s been back for a week. It’s my birthday next week—he’s going to be my second at my initiation into the first Rite. You didn’t know?” The smile that crept across her face told me the question was rhetorical.
“I don’t keep particularly close tabs on your social schedule,” I said, trying to conceal my shock.
Mercy sniffed. “I wouldn’t classify being inducted into the mysteries of the Inner Eye as a social event. That would apply more to the dates Adam and I have been on the past few weeks. Not that you care.” She snapped her gum.
Adam was back, and he hadn’t bothered to let me know. Of course, the only thing that mattered was that he was okay. I could nurse my petty disappointment in private, later. Not to mention how I felt about him taking an intimate role in my rival’s initiation into the Fellowship, which meant he had been initiated himself. Right then I just needed to see him, touch him, know that he was really there. It was like he’d come back from the dead.
Adam and his parents were the first Ministry members to disappear. Other members of the Fellowship had preceded them, but this was different. Adam’s father was the Eparch, the second in command. He was with the General when my father discovered me. Since there’s no religious allegory more classic than the abandoned baby, it was no shocker the General claimed to have found me as an infant, squalling on the steps of a forgotten temple. He said the structure appeared to him out of nowhere, deep in the Cambodian jungle. Somewhere in the exchange he lost his left eye, but no one ever spoke about it. I knew there was more to the story, but my father clammed up like an oyster whenever I asked. All he would say was, You came to me in the Violet Hour, when stars succumb to fate and the world hangs suspended in between. Let us pray.
The Violet Hour, just before dawn, was therefore our religion’s most sacred time. It had an entire meditative devotion ascribed to it, and it was said to be the time we were most attuned to the power of our Inner Eye. Prophets are prone to hyperbole, and I concluded that my father was one for the record books; because of his talent, VisionCrest had gone from a cult to a multinational corporate religion in seventeen short years. It comprised high-ranking government officials from every country in the world and claimed a full quarter of the world’s population as its followers. What took most religions centuries to amass, my father accomplished practically overnight—almost as if some unseen force was driving his success. And I was at the heart of its symbolic center. Yippee.
The way the story went, my father had disappeared without a trace. The Eparch searched frantically around the temple all night, until the General re-emerged through the mists of dawn with me in his arms, missing an eye. The Eparch was my father’s first believer, though certainly not his last.
Given all this, the absence of the Eparch and his family was impossible for the Ministry to hide, especially as the abductions were growing bigger and bolder. The official claim was that they were on a mission in Africa. The tension in my father’s shoulders told me he was lying, and I’d heard enough of his whispered conversations to know the truth. Besides, Adam would never leave without telling me. At least I didn’t think he would.
The Fitzes were gone for nine months. I was like a coiled spring ready to snap the entire time. No VisionCrest follower had ever come back or been found, dead or alive, after a disappearance. It felt like my life was on pause—like I hadn’t slept, eaten, or even breathed since it happened. So Adam’s return was a miracle. There was no other way to put it.
“Where is he?” I demanded.
Mercy shrugged. “Probably at the Blue House. That’s usually where I see him.”
“You were at the Blue House?”
The Blue House was a beat-up squatter house that wept baby blue flakes of paint every time the wind blew. It housed the near-constant rotation of skate punks and castoffs that the town of Twin Falls collected like Cracker Jack prizes—most of them the severed children of VisionCrest believers. Severing was the process of being officially cast out of the Fellowship; it was like being sent to live on another planet. The house was infamous among VisionCrest kids—a real-life cautionary tale that most had never seen with their own eyes.
Adam and I used to make a habit of sneaking off the compound to hang out there, fully committed to the idea of anything that gave the middle finger to VisionCrest. But Mercy’s mother, Prelate Mayer, was one of the twenty Prelates around the world who comprised the Ministry layer below Eparch Fitz, and Mercy was a model follower. I couldn’t believe Adam would hang out with her at all, much less at the Blue House.
Mercy was looking at me with narrowed eyes. “There’s lots of things about me you don’t know, Harlow. In fact, there’s lots of things about lots of people you don’t know. Take Adam for instance. He’s a True Believer now.”
I pushed past her. There wa
s no way that was true, and I was going to find out for myself. Adam and I had sworn to one another that we wouldn’t take the Rite when we turned seventeen. We wanted to be black sheep—different, difficult, out of step, and out of line. Just like our favorite punk rock songs preached. There must have been some other reason for him taking the Rite, or maybe Mercy was lying about it all.
“If he wanted to see you, he would have called!” Mercy yelled after me.
I headed toward the narrow gap in the perimeter posts of the VisionCrest compound; my secret escape hatch. An hour later, I was standing in front of the Blue House, desperate to see Adam but paralyzed by a gut-clenching fear that he didn’t want to see me. The citizens of Twin Falls ogled me as they drove by, too intimidated by the Fellowship to intervene. It was as if they were seeing a tiger who escaped from the zoo walking down the middle of the street—look but don’t touch.
Smooth clacking sounds, of wheels rolling over wooden seams, bounced off the river-rock lawn of the Blue House. This told me exactly where I could find Adam: the skate ramp around back. I stuck a leg through the gap-toothed fence, the weather-beaten slat scraping my bare skin. I turned sideways and squeezed my way through, then dusted off my skirt and squinted up at the skate ramp.
I spotted Adam among the rag-tag collection of grommets. He was taller and more filled-out than before. His shirt was off in the afternoon sun and my eyes lingered, transfixed. I followed the line of his shoulder and the ink that wound across it. The tattoos were like a billboard announcing that he had changed. They were strange and beautiful—and completely at odds with Mercy’s claim that he was now a buttoned-up believer. I felt a rush of relief. He was different, but he was still my Adam.
I thought about the last time I’d seen him. How he’d leaned me up against the side of the carriage house and pressed his body into mine. My face tilted up to the warmth of the sun. His breath against my lips. Before the gardener happened along and interrupted what most certainly would have been the single greatest moment of my life.
Adam.
Little glints of gold in his dark hair caught the sun; it was like seeing a mirage in the desert. He held his hand up to shield his eyes, and they flicked up and down over me. No smile of recognition lit up his face, no dimple appeared on his right cheek. The skin around his left eye was bruised, ringed in fading purple. I wondered if it was a souvenir of his kidnapping, or if he’d been fighting one of the lost boys. Either way, I knew he wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be.
“Harlow,” he said. His dark blue eyes skewered me.
Not the friendly greeting I was hoping for.
I only had two friends. My heart couldn’t bear losing one of them for a second time. I shifted uncomfortably, suddenly feeling every inch the awkward little girl I once was.
Adam hopped on his board and rode it down the curve, flipping it at the bottom and jumping off. He stalked toward me. Even the way he moved was somehow different. I toed the dirt with my Converse, unsure what to say or do.
“I’m so happy you’re back.” I instinctively reached to hug him.
He flinched, backing away. My heart dropped. I waited for the smooth line of his jaw to pull up into a smirk, a smile, an anything that said he was only joking—but he was expressionless.
“Yeah. I am.”
Why was he looking at me like I’d just killed his dog? Everything about him screamed stay away.
“You’re not living here, are you?”
“Look, Harlow, I don’t really feel like talking about this. Not to you. Why don’t you just ask Mercy if you want all the juicy details.”
All traces of the Adam I’d known had been swept away, vacuumed up, and scrubbed out with bleach. I stood there awkwardly while a menagerie of eavesdroppers smoked cigarettes and whispered from the periphery. Everyone was enjoying the show—Harlow Wintergreen, daughter of the Patriarch. Making a fool of herself.
“Where are your parents?” I finally asked.
“Probably dead. Happy?”
“What?” I stuttered.
“Go back to the compound, Harlow.”
He turned and walked toward the sagging porch. I practically fell over. His parents were probably dead? Why would that make me happy? I wanted to run after him, throw my arms around him, make the hurt written all over his body disappear. But he’d rejected me. In a weird way, it almost felt like he blamed me. I turned and ran, before I’d give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
Two weeks later, Adam was back on the compound, glued to the General’s side just like his own father had once been. It looked like Mercy had been right about his one-eighty after all—since if there was anyone Adam should hold responsible for his parents’ abduction, it would be the man who’d started the Fellowship in the first place. Yet Adam was now more devoted to my father than ever, and it was me he held at arm’s length.
Three months had gone by since his return, and still he barely looked at me. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, he preferred Mercy’s company. Mercy, who he once dismissed as “supermodel-marshmallow: flash where it doesn’t count, fluff where it does.” Then he gave me a feline grin and leaned toward my ear. “I don’t really go for that.”
In reality, there was more to Mercy than met the eye. She wasn’t at all the ditz she pretended to be, something I’d known since we were playmates as little girls. Maybe Adam had finally discovered it too.
Still, he’d agreed to come out with me to Koenji. And there was only one way to find out if there were still any feelings for me behind those tortured eyes. It was time to bring the counterattack. No mercy.
TOKYO PUNK
Forty minutes later, Dora and I were skulking in the lobby by the service elevators, hiding behind an arrangement of calla lilies so massive it looked like it had been FTD’d straight down the beanstalk. The hotel seemed to be made entirely of reflective surfaces, all smooth black marble and mirrored walls.
There was a zero percent chance the Ministry would look favorably on four members of the VisionCrest royal family melting into the Tokyo night unchaperoned, but the penalty for being caught couldn’t be too bad. I was already sentenced to isolation, and they couldn’t keep us all hidden away. It was worth the risk if I could get even one minute alone with Adam.
Dora and I stayed shifty-eyed, looking for Watchers. True to Adam’s word, there were none lurking. Even though I wasn’t taking any chances on ruining my big night, I hated cowering in the calla lilies like a fugitive. Adam and Mercy were late, and my mind ran wild with all the reasons they could be lagging.
I started second-guessing my outfit, the thought of Mercy’s pearl necklace and sweater-set look making me pull at my fishnets. I might as well wear a flashing neon sign that said desperate for attention! Maybe Adam was going for something more … normal, these days.
“Stop doing that or you’re going to rip them right off your legs. You look tough.” Dora eyed me approvingly. For her, that was high praise.
I parted the sharp-edged leaves of the arrangement with my fingertips, just in time to hear the elevator ding and see Adam amble into sight. Mercy was right behind him, rocking a miniskirt and platform heels. So much for the pearls—maybe she was the one who’d changed. If it were possible, Adam looked even more delicious than ever in a tight black Sex Pistols shirt and gray-wash skinny jeans. He looked casual-amazing, like he might go skateboarding or make out with a fashion model … he just couldn’t decide.
Dora elbowed me in the ribs when she saw his shirt, like it was some kind of sign from the universe.
“Ow!”
Adam caught me peeking out from behind the fronds. He bent over a bit and squinted as I let them snap back into place.
“Harlow? Are you hiding in the flower arrangement?”
Dora tugged at my hand and we did our best to step out casually from our hiding place, as if we’d just been getting a closer look at t
he shrubbery. She looked at me and said, “And that is how photosynthesis occurs.”
Mercy’s face was a mixture of amusement and horror. Her pity was infinitely worse than her scorn. Adam was unreadable, as usual.
“You ready to hear some awesome music?” I asked.
“If it’s not awesome, we’re totally switching and going to a dance club,” Mercy said.
Adam and I exchanged a look, and for a split second it was like old times—Mercy wouldn’t know good music if it bit her in the ass. As I looked away, I swore I saw the corners of his mouth turn up for a second. That tiny gesture gave me a boost of hope. Was it possible he was coming back around?
“Um, guys … hang on just a minute longer, if you don’t mind.” Dora glanced down at her phone and then looked past Adam and Mercy like she was expecting someone.
As if on cue, Stubin Mansfield materialized from behind the black granite column closest to us and walked right up like he owned the place. He pushed the sleeves of his pea-green cardigan up to his elbows and shook one knee and then the other, like he was limbering up for the 100-yard dash.
Stubin was the son of a low-level Sacristan and a total know-it-all. That was pretty much all I knew about him, other than the odd fact that my best friend had apparently invited him along. The kids of the Sacristans, who made up the majority of our Ministry group, usually kept their distance from the kids of the higher echelons. It was just how it was.
“Hey cats and kittens, what sort of Meow Mix are we getting into tonight?” Stubin asked, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be hanging out with us.
“We’re going to a punk club. That sweater looks awesome—is it vintage?” Dora was fawning. She never fawned.
“Yeah, I bought it cuz it matches my eyes. And aren’t you just a chick biscuit tonight,” Stubin responded. There was so much Velveeta on that comment, I could barely hold back the gag reflex. Dora was looking at him like he was some kind of celebrity.
The Violet Hour Page 3