The girls should’ve stopped and asked for help. Hanna would know that. Finn would’ve taught her.
Unless Eliana was too scared and didn’t know who to trust.
She’d want to keep going. She’d run somewhere she knew, somewhere she liked, somewhere nearby.
The library.
I took off down the hall, and I pushed through the plastic sheeting and promptly tripped over broken hunks of stone flooring.
It was darker in the library than I thought it would be, with the only light coming through the skylight. That should’ve been enough, but the towering bookshelves, rickety scaffolding, and semi-opaque plastic sheeting made it feel strangely dark and enclosed, like a musty igloo.
Somewhere nearby—muffled through the plastic—a girl screamed, and then there was silence. I sat crouched on the floor, holding my breath and listening, hoping she would make another sound, give me a clue as to which way I should take through this renovation labyrinth.
There was a rustle of plastic—somewhere between close and far away—and that was all I had to go on, so I ran toward it.
Then I saw her, slumped on the floor behind a bookcase. Her legs were all akimbo, with one foot poking out from the shadows and into the light, so her rose-gold nail polish glittered on her toes.
“Hanna!” I gasped and fell to my knees beside her.
A trickle of blood ran down from her temple, and I gingerly put my head to her back, listening for the sound of her heartbeat.
It was there—steady, strong—but I was so focused on listening for it that I didn’t notice someone come up behind me until their hand was on my shoulder.
53
Pursuit
I screamed and hit back at the figure behind me. My fist collided with an arm—firm under my hand—and Pan let out a pained gasp.
“Oh, Pan! Sorry!” I said in a surprised whisper.
“What happened? Is she okay?” Dagny asked, and she was already pushing me aside as she bent down beside Hanna.
“I don’t know. I found her like this.”
Dagny put one hand to Hanna’s forehead, and with the other gently took her wrist to check her pulse. “Did you move her?”
“No.” I glanced back over my shoulder. “Where are the guards?”
“Sealing all the exits,” Pan answered. “Dagny convinced them that the duo chasing after them stole expensive jewelry, so they’re trying to make sure they don’t escape.”
“Good. I think,” I said.
Hanna groaned and mumbled something about her head hurting.
“You’ll be okay—” Dagny’s words of comfort were cut off by a loud crash, coming from deeper in the library. A clatter of metal against stone, accompanied by a small scream.
“Eliana,” Hanna said weakly.
I stood up, but Pan put his hand on my arm, stopping me.
“Wait for the guards. They’ll be here any second,” he reasoned.
I gently shrugged his hand off. “She could be in danger. I can’t wait.”
I pushed through the plastic sheeting, with Pan following a step behind, and ventured farther into the darkness of the library. Several feet away, around a bookcase and under some scaffolding, I discovered the cause of the crash—an overturned paint can. White paint pooled all over the floor, followed by a trail of paint puddles and smudged footprints, too smeared to discern how many sets of them there were.
The trail led through another barrier of sheeting, and when I squinted, I could make out the form of someone crumpled on the floor. I crept under the plastic, only to find that it wasn’t a body at all—but an abandoned paint-soaked dress.
Suddenly Eliana jumped out from behind a bookcase, swinging a mallet as she did. I managed to grab it—gripping my fist around the rubber hammer—and I stopped it just before it collided with my skull.
Eliana let out a surprised yelp as she let go of the weapon and jumped back from me.
That’s when I realized that she’d stripped down to her bralette and panties, with white paint splattered on her exposed arms and legs. Her long black hair had come free from the updo it had been styled in earlier, more paint tangled in the length of it.
“Eliana! It’s me!” I set the mallet down behind me, so she would see my empty hands, palm out. “It’s me. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I think. Yeah. Sorry. I thought you were them.”
Pan had followed me as I went after Eliana. He slipped off his suit jacket and started undoing the top few buttons of his shirt. He pulled it off over his head, then handed it to Eliana, leaving himself standing in a tank top undershirt.
“Thank you,” she mumbled as she slipped it on. “I slipped in the paint, and I was afraid I’d leave a trail of paint for them to find me.”
Faintly, the sound of footsteps pounded down the hallway, and the library quickly erupted in noise, as the red guards flowed in, searching the room and shouting their locations.
“Medic!” Dagny yelled, presumably flagging them down. “We need a medic!”
“Where did they go?” I asked Eliana, knowing we had mere moments before the guards rounded us up.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I slipped free after they hurt Hanna.”
But it was already too late—the guards had found us, and there was no way we were getting away anytime soon.
54
Interrogations
I collapsed back into the hard wooden chair outside the medic office and let out a shaky breath.
“She’ll be okay, Ulla,” Dagny repeated.
She’d been the one who went back with Hanna, the one who stayed with her after the guards came and took them back here, the one who helped her while I was being questioned.
As soon as the guards had stormed in, they’d detained us and hauled us down for questioning. Not that I could really fault them for that. They were only trying to figure out what the hell was going on and if I was a threat.
I’d answered them honestly—or at least as honestly as I could, given that a lot of what had happened didn’t really make sense to me. They scoured the library and all the surrounding areas, and they were still working on a wider sweep of the Mimirin, but there was no sign of Sumi or her swarthy companion.
What we were left with wasn’t much. As Soldatsun had so eloquently put it, “Either they managed to leave here and vanish without a trace from a building surrounded by guards, or they were never really here in the first place.”
“They were here!” I had shouted at him, sitting on the other side of the cold table in the tiny rectangle of an interrogation room. “I’m not lying!”
“I never said you were,” he’d countered.
“I’m not making this up,” I’d persisted. “Ask Pan. Ask Dagny. And what about Hanna? Who hurt her?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he’d replied coolly.
And around and around we’d gone, for over an hour. Eventually they’d cleared me as a nonthreat. As soon as they let me go, I ran straight down to the medical office to find out how Hanna was doing.
Dagny had just come out of the room when I arrived. I sat back in the hard chairs outside the medical office, catching my breath and steadying my nerves, as she stood in front of me, explaining that Hanna was going to be fine. She had a bump on the head, and we’d have to watch for signs of a concussion.
“They’re sure?” I asked Dagny again. “She’s going to be okay?”
“Yes, they are sure.” She spoke slowly, like I was a small child. “A healer came down and checked her over. She’ll be fine, minus the major headache. She needs to rest for now.”
“What about Pan and Eliana?” I asked.
“You’re the first one I’ve seen.”
I looked back down the hall, as if Pan and Eliana would suddenly appear. It was the only way to get into Medical—a narrow corridor at the bottom of the steps and a solitary elevator door, leading into the small but adequate medical wing.
“Are they still with the guards?”
I asked Dagny.
She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Were you questioned?”
“Yeah, but I doubt that I was much help. I never really saw whoever it was that was after Eliana and Hanna.” She lowered her gaze, pausing briefly before saying, “They told me you knew the guy.”
“Knew is much too strong a word,” I corrected her. “We talked a few times.”
“I thought you didn’t know anybody else in Merellä,” she said pointedly.
“I don’t! I don’t know him at all. Not really.” I sighed. “Nothing he told me about himself was true. But he knew my name.”
“I’m guessing you never caught his.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. If he’d told me something, it probably would’ve been a lie anyway.”
Dagny stared at me for a moment, and she opened her mouth like she meant to say something more, but the sound of approaching footsteps got our attention. A guard came down the stairs, escorting Eliana. She still wore Pan’s dress shirt, baggy over her tiny frame, but they’d supplied her also with a pair of loose gray sweatpants.
“I’ll leave you with your friends, then.” The guard motioned toward us, then turned on his heel and left Eliana alone with us.
Eliana gave us a sheepish smile. “I didn’t know where else to go, so he brought me to you.”
“Yeah, of course.” I sat up straighter and tapped the chair beside me. “Join us.”
“Hanna will be fine, but she needs to rest now,” Dagny said, answering the question before Eliana could ask it.
Eliana sat down. “Good. I knew she’d be good.”
Dagny was still standing, her arms folded loosely over her chest, and she was looking down at Eliana when she asked, “How’d it go with the guards?”
“What do you mean?” Eliana asked cautiously.
“Do they know who is after you?”
“Um . . .” She shook her head, the white paint dried and clumping in her tangles of hair. “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me much.”
“What about you?” Dagny pressed. “This is the first time you’ve been up close and personal with them. Did you recognize them?”
“Nope.” She shook her head again. “But my memory is so messed up, I didn’t expect to remember them.”
“Nothing about them seemed familiar?” I asked.
“No, nothing at all.” Eliana looked down at her hands in her lap, and she slowly began to peel the white paint off her fingernails and cuticles. “They didn’t even say much. Not to me and not to each other.”
“So, they were basically silent?” Dagny asked, and she didn’t try to hide the skepticism in her voice. “Why did you run from them? If you didn’t recognize them and they never spoke?”
“It was just a feeling that I had. Like a gut feeling, that I should run,” Eliana replied noncommittally.
The latex paint came off in a long strip, revealing the nail polish underneath. A black lacquer.
With my eyes locked on her slender fingers, I asked, “When did you change your polish?”
“Um . . . what?” she asked in confusion.
“Your polish on your nails.” I pointed to them. “They were a different color before.”
“Oh, yeah, I made a quick change this afternoon.” She self-consciously folded her hands together and gave a wan smile. “Needed a change for the fest.”
“The thing is, Eliana, that I saw you and Hanna touching up your polish right before we left tonight. You did matching colors,” I said, and she slowly lifted her eyes to meet mine. “And right now I’m willing to bet everything I’ve got that if we were to go back in there”—I motioned toward the room behind me—“and check Hanna’s nails, they wouldn’t be black.”
A dark realization shifted over Dagny’s face, and she moved toward us, blocking a quick escape down the hall if anyone tried to run. “Not even close,” she agreed. “They’re rose-gold.”
Eliana looked from one of us to the other, then she relaxed back into her chair, and a cheery smile spread across her face.
“Okay. You got me. You’re quick,” she said with a click of her tongue. “I thought I’d pass for longer, but oh, well. I’m not Eliana. I’m her twin sister, Illaria.”
55
Helpless
“Don’t freak out,” she said, and she smiled at me with Eliana’s pouty lips and studied me with Eliana’s dark caramel eyes.
But it wasn’t Eliana. It wasn’t her voice now—too syrupy and slightly deeper. Illaria had given up the pretense now that we had seen through her deception.
“I know this is a lot to take in, and it will all sound completely bappers.” Illaria held up her hands in an attempt to placate Dagny and me. “But I truly am Eliana’s sister, and I only want what’s best for her. Right now she’s really sick, and I want to get her home.”
“That’s all well and good,” I said. “But why would any of that possibly require you to impersonate your sister? And where exactly is she now? Did your friends take her somewhere?”
“It all seemed easier, really,” Illaria said simply, ignoring most of my questions. “If she was missing, you’d be right on our heels. But if I hung around, so that you thought that Eliana was still here, maybe in a day or two I could miraculously remember everything and leave on my own, and there wouldn’t be a need for any more confrontation. We underestimated how quickly you’d become attached to Eliana.”
“That doesn’t explain where she is now, or why you had to chase and kidnap her,” Dagny said. “Once you found her, why couldn’t you approach her and talk to her? Why’d you have to resort to sneaking around like this?”
“Because she doesn’t know who I am!” Illaria’s cheery mask slipped for a moment, letting her frustration escape. “She’s really sick, if you hadn’t noticed.” With a grim smile, she shook her head. “She thinks I’m her ‘shadow.’”
Damn. Illaria was the shadow. The dragon and the shadow were Sumi and Illaria.
I’d assumed that the shadow had been Mr. Tall, but Illaria was saying it wasn’t him. Who was he, and what did he have to do with all of this?
And Eliana couldn’t even remember that she had a twin sister, even when she was face-to-face with her? What was going on with her mind?
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why we need to get her back home, so we can help her,” Illaria said.
“Where is home?” Dagny asked.
Illaria clicked her tongue loudly and exhaled, making a strange sound as the air whistled through her teeth. “It’s far, far away, and that’s all you need to know right now.”
I put my hand on her arm—firm but gentle enough to show her the strength I had coiled inside me. “Maybe reconsider. We’d really like to know more.”
Illaria tilted her head, narrowing her calculating eyes at me, and that’s when I really noticed the differences between her and Eliana. They were nearly identical, but Illaria looked a little bit older somehow, and she had a small scar on her cheek, shaped like a tiny hook. She clicked her tongue again—an odd, loud sound, like a few beats of a metronome.
“I’ve considered, and the answer is still no,” she said coolly.
“Are you ready, Illaria?” Sumi asked, and I looked over to see her standing right at the foot of the stairs that led down into the medical wing, as if she’d materialized out of thin air.
“How’d you . . .” I’d been about to ask her how she did that and where she came from, but I probably already knew as much as she was willing to share with me.
Sumi was a tracker. She’d helped us find Eliana once before—though she didn’t take her then, and instead let Hanna and me go after her and bring her to our apartment. Why had she left her then? Why was she here for her now?
She moved closer to us, and that’s when I noticed the psionic stun gun in her hand. I’d never been hit with one before. It wasn’t supposed to be lethal, but I’d heard that it hurt like hell a
nd then left you incapacitated.
“Where’s Eliana?” I asked.
“She’s gone,” Sumi said, and her tone was almost apologetic. “Jem-Kruk took her home.”
“Jem-Kruk?” I echoed softly.
The image flashed in my mind—the viny triskelion symbol on the cover of a book, as I talked with Hanna’s grandfather Johan in his study. It had been called Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir, a fable for children. But it was one of those stories that Calder and the Mimirin kept locked up in the catacombs so we didn’t mix up our facts with our fiction.
“Sumi, it’s time for us to go,” Illaria announced.
That was all the instruction Sumi had needed, apparently, because she lunged at Dagny. Dagny readied herself to block an attack, but it was impossible. A purple lightning bolt shot out from the sharp prongs of the psionic stun gun. As soon as they connected with Dagny’s arm, her body went slack, and she fell backward.
I was on my feet by the time Dagny hit the floor, and I barely managed to duck out of the way of Sumi’s first shot at me. I grabbed Illaria and pulled her in front of me like a shield.
That did not work out as well as I’d hoped, because Sumi instantly dropped down, crouching low, and fired the psionic stun gun between Illaria’s legs. It missed Illaria entirely, and I felt it searing straight into my calf.
The pain was brief—albeit intense and white-hot—but every ounce of strength in my body drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the floor. I couldn’t move or speak, and I struggled to keep my eyes open.
Sumi crouched beside me, and she gave me a sad smile. “I’m sorry it had to go this way.” Her words sounded farther and farther away, like I was slipping underwater. “But if you really care about Eliana, remember to find the woman in the long white dress.”
And then everything went black.
56
Recovery
“I can’t believe you’d let that happen!” Hanna was yelling when I came to. I slowly blinked my eyes until I could make out the stark white ceiling above me.
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