Tainted Crown

by Jenn Vakey

  I narrowed my eyes at her words. I had no idea what actually happened to the people in the facility. Gryffin and Lillith were the ones I had talked to the most, and they had only been there for six weeks. Maizie had been there for years. Knowing that she could have been dealing with something that I hadn’t even bothered to ask about made me feel like a horrible friend.

  “Everything okay?”

  She smiled, one that reached her eyes. “Yeah. Now that I’m officially out of Eden and old enough to make medical decisions, I’m having what they did to me reversed.”

  It took a moment for understanding to dawn. When it did, I blinked in surprise. The law in Eden said that anyone who was born with a hereditary condition wasn’t permitted to bare children. To ensure it, they surgically altered them in childhood. It was an awful practice. One I hoped my brother would put an end to when he took the throne.

  “That’s great,” I told her. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks,” she said, shifting. She bit down on her lower lip like she wanted to say something else, but she just blew out a breath.

  “You should get going,” I stated. “Noella usually doesn’t stay long after dinner.”

  She nodded, and I stepped past her. Before I could make it far, she grabbed my arm and stopped me again.

  “You really should reconsider going with the others to Denver,” she said. She bit her lip again, then gave me a coy smile. “Besides, I could always use the help recuperating after.”

  I gave her what I hoped was a polite smile. “I can’t let my team go without me. Leeya’s the only other person who’s been to Denver, and that was only once.”

  “And you don’t think she can handle it?” She raised her eyebrows like she was daring me to dispute it. At the same time, there was almost a note of hope there. Like she actually wanted me to say that Leeya wasn’t as good as everyone had been claiming she was. I could tell she had been bothered at dinner by what Lillith and Aarys had said. Not that she understood where it was coming from.

  Even if I knew it would ease her discomfort, I couldn’t say anything to put Leeya down.

  “No, I know she could,” I said gently. “But that’s not the point. What kind of leader would I be if I sent my people into a situation I wouldn’t go into myself?”

  I could see her trying to formulate an argument. I didn’t give her the chance.

  “Well, I should get to bed,” I said. “We’re going to have an early day tomorrow, and I’m beat after the fight today. Goodnight, Maizie.”

  Maizie made a sound as I turned, but she didn’t try to stop me again. I could practically feel her watching me as I walked. Knowing I couldn’t just go into the room until she was gone, I stopped one shy.

  I knocked gently on Linley’s door, then pushed it open. Despite being late, my sister was sitting up in the middle of the bed.

  “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I asked, stepping in and closing the door behind me.

  Linley raised an eyebrow and asked, “Then why are you knocking?”

  I smirked, crossing the room toward her. I loved her sassy side.

  “Are you okay after today?” I asked, sitting down next to her. “Leeya told me what happened at the house.”

  Linley looked over at me, guilt twisting her expression. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen. I won’t do it again. And I’m fine. Leeya and Lamont saved me. They stopped the bad Sentry.”

  Sighing, I wrapped my arm around her and pulled her into my chest. “Nothing like that should ever happen again,” I told her. I considered for a moment just how much I should tell her. I didn’t want to scare her, but at the same time, I needed her to understand why I had put restrictions on her. As much as I knew she wanted it to be so, she wasn’t just a normal child. She never really would be. “Did you hear what happened with Isley?”

  That guilty expression grew, and I knew she had. “They were here for me. They thought she was me, and they tried to take her.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I assured her. “Things aren’t great right now in Eden. The people know what Dex and Adler did, and they aren’t supporting him. As soon as he’s arrested, things will be a lot better. Until then…”

  “I need to stay where I’m supposed to be.”

  I nodded. Kissing her on the side of the head, I stood. “I’m going to stay with Leeya tonight. We need to talk about what our plans are. If you have a bad dream, could you go into Gryffin’s room?”

  Linley rolled her eyes and groaned in that dramatic way of hers. “Fine.”

  I kissed her again, then turned to leave.

  Relief filled me when I closed the door and saw that Maizie was gone. There were still a few of the new people milling about, but no one was paying attention to me. No one to stop me from going where I really wanted to be.

  Leeya was standing in front of the dresser brushing her hair when I walked in. She had already changed into her night clothes. I looked down at the tight shirt and shorts that left very little to the imagination and smiled. How did I ever get so lucky?

  “So I thought I had just forgotten about us sharing a room,” she said, eyeing me in a teasing way.

  I walked up behind her, pulling her into my arms. She sighed and sank into me, her head resting against my chin.

  “We needed the rooms, so I put Gryffin in mine,” I answered. “Complaining?”

  She tilted her head back and brushed it against my jaw. “No. I like sleeping next to you.”

  “You scared me so badly,” I said, turning her in my arms to face me. I ran my fingers through her hair, tilting her head so that I could look into her eyes. “When I saw you after that blast.” I shook my head. Words could never express everything that I had felt that night. “You were out the whole way back. They wouldn’t let me stay with you in the clinic. I was so afraid they would be coming out to tell me that you were gone. Then during the attack today, you just disappeared. I didn’t know what happened.”

  Leeya pushed up and pressed her lips to mine. I closed my eyes, leaning into it. Feeling her.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, brushing against them again before pulling away. “But I’m not sorry I went back for you. I’ll always go back for you.”

  I wanted to tell her that I would have been fine. She would know I was lying. Even with friendly Sentry there, I knew deep down that I wouldn’t have walked out of that house had Gryffin’s message not aired. She had saved me, but at what cost?

  “I need to tell you something,” I said, my throat feeling tight. I had been trying to keep from thinking about it. She had needed my focus on her. But there was no putting it off any longer. She would want to be part of the fight once we were in Eden, but it wasn’t a chance I was sure I could take. Not if... “Noella found something.”

  Leeya reached up and pressed her fingertips to my lips, stopping me. “No you don’t,” she said. Her eyes were filled with so much sadness that I already knew what she was going to say. “I wasn’t actually asleep. I heard everything you talked about. But…” She swallowed and I tightened my grip on her. I didn’t want her to say it. “Noella was right about the blast.”

  My eyes closed as I dropped my forehead to hers. The words were like a knife to my heart, hurting so much more than I thought they would. The timing was unarguably bad with everything we still had to do, but I realized now that it was something I had really wanted with her.

  Dex had stolen that from us, and I knew now that there was nothing that would stop me from getting vengeance. Even if it meant breaking my own rules and making him pay with his life.

  “When this is all over, we’re going to have a big wedding and move into that house on the river,” I promised.

  “Hopefully this war doesn’t last long,” she said.

  I shook my head, meeting her eye again. “Your idea is great. Once we get that done, things will be a lot easier. They won’t be able to stop us.”

  She still looked nervous as she smiled and stepped away, moving toward the bed. Kip
picked up his head to watch before settling back down in his place in the corner. Once she was situated, I flipped off the light and joined.

  It had never just been the two of us like this before. Either Linley or Kip had been between us. Others had been around so I couldn’t touch her the way I wanted to. We might not be doing anything more than this, but nothing in the world felt better than pulling her into my arms and holding her as we drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  LEEYA

  Things moved quickly after the initial plan had been formed. Our little group, which had grown to include Faida, Noella, and Jaron, spent hours locked up in the meeting hall that following morning hashing out the details. There were still scenarios we couldn’t plan for. It was decided that we would improvise when needed instead of wasting precious time planning for problems we might never be able to solve.

  News spread quickly that our group would be leaving the next morning for Denver. Even with the early hour, there was a crowd outside when we boarded the hovercraft. To support the story, we each had a bag packed to take. Instead of several days’ worth of food and clothing, the bags had a single change of clothes and as many vials of serum as we could fit. I just hoped we would find this many people to take it. Otherwise, I wasn’t sure we would really stand a chance here.

  No one really talked in the hours it took us to get to Eden. Unlike every other time our people went into the city, we wouldn’t be doing it under the cover of darkness this time. That made me nervous. I had a sense that everyone else was feeling the same. With our plan to move on Dex and the council just after dark, though, we couldn’t wait. There was too much we needed to do beforehand.

  “Stop here,” Rhydian called to Lamont, who was driving the hovercraft.

  I looked ahead and saw the looming wall through the tops of the trees. It was still a little ways ahead, but we needed to hide the hovercraft. Not only did we not want to risk losing it, but our presence in the city would become known if it was found.

  Lamont maneuvered the machine into a thick section of brush and we disembarked. After spending a few minutes covering it with branches for added camouflage, we grabbed our stuff and stepped out onto the path.

  “Where are we?” I asked, looking around. It was true that I had only been here twice, but this didn’t look like the same place we had stopped to wait for dark the last time.

  “We won’t be using the same exit,” Rhydian explained. When he walked past to start leading the way, he reached out and grabbed my hand, lacing our fingers together. Pulling me along with him. I grinned, trying not to blush. My eyes shifted quickly to Jarrell. He was the only person in our group who didn’t know about the two of us. His eyes found our hands, then after a moment, he just shrugged and turned his focus to the path ahead.

  Okay then.

  “There’s another exit?” I asked, remembering what Rhydian had said.

  He nodded. “Too many people know about the one in Laborer section. We’ll be using an older one that opens up into Scholar section.”

  I trusted that he knew what he was doing here, but that thought worried me. Scholar section was the smallest of all the sections. Between those who taught the children between ages four and ten, and the ones who cared for the younger children during the hours parents were working, only one percent of the population was assigned Scholar section. While it was true that the section would be virtually empty during this time of day, it wouldn’t give us many places to remain out of sight.

  Rhydian pulled a light out of his bag and started shining it on the larger stones that lined the path. It was different than any light I had ever seen before. Well, that wasn’t true. I’d seen one once, that night I left Eden. The blue light the woman in Distribution section had used when she tattooed the marks on Lillith and me.

  “Here,” he said, stilling when the light touched on one. I looked down to see a glowing purple smear where the light shone on the stone. Purple like the color worn by those in Scholar section? Or was it just a coincidence that color had been chosen. The one marking the path from where I left from Laborer section had been green, not blue.

  Not that any of this really mattered. All that did was that we had found where we needed to be.

  Rhydian put his light away and pressed a button on the band wrapping his wrist that controlled our communicators. He didn’t talk, simply sent a signal. Then we stepped into the trees and walked straight toward the wall.

  Similar to the other exit, there was a canopy of trees thick enough to hide our movements as we approached. Also the same was the lack of any sign on the wall that there was any kind of opening there. But after only a moment, stone that looked to be solid split and shifted, revealing a smaller, but still very there, hole.

  “Quickly,” Rhydian said, then moved through the opening. One by one, the rest of our team followed and filled the small gap between the wall and the closest house.

  Harun, the man who always guarded the exit, closed it again after we were in, then led us without a word around the corner and into the home. That was where things were different. Unlike the one we had used to conceal our people during the rescue, this one looked to be lived in.

  I stepped toward the shelves as the others moved around. Like I would expect to see in a Scholar’s home, there were rows and rows of books. What I hadn’t expected was the person in the photograph resting on one of the shelves.

  “This is your home,” I said, looking back to find Harun opening a box up that sat on the table.

  He met my eye with a smile and nodded once. “Since I first took over control of the exit. We’ve maintained this one as an emergency exit should our operation be detected.”

  Rhydian walked over to him and clapped his hand over his shoulder as he looked down into the box. “Hopefully all of that will end after tonight. What do you have for us?”

  With a smirk, Harun started pulling items out of the box. I had never seen most of them. In fact, they were things most had believed to be myths. Solutions that temporarily changed the color of hair when it was rubbed in. Drops to change eye color. There was even a spray that would alter skin pigment. Then, of course, there were the more common items, like the clothing we would be wearing.

  We got to work quickly after that. Gryffin was the only one who didn’t need to change the way he looked. His shapeshifter ability was all he needed there. I darkened my hair until it was nearly black. We hadn’t been able to determine whether or not they had identified me yet. It was too much of a risk to go lighter, because if they had, they would have connected me to Lillith. With a slightly darker complexion, and brown eyes instead of my violet, I hardly recognized myself.

  The same could be said for the others. Rhydian’s blonde hair was now red. He didn’t change his eyes, because we might need them to prove who he was to people we approached. His sun-kissed skin had been lightened, hiding the evidence of just how much time he spent outside, and his face was dotted with freckles.

  “Well?” he asked.

  I grinned. “I’d still marry you.”

  He chuckled, and I ignored the way Lamont, Jarrell, and Harun turned at my words.

  Given that it would give us the most freedom, as well as allow us to carry our weapons, we each dressed in Sentry black. Gryffin took the final yellow one that lay on the table and tucked it into his bag. Then we all turned to face Harun.

  “We have a complete list of those, Sentry and other, who have been arrested for working against Dex and the council,” he informed us. “We were also able to work with a few friendly Sentry still on the outside to compile a list of those that are believed to be willing to stand against them. We can’t be as certain about those. We were able to ensure that each of them will be off duty for the next several hours, so you should be able to approach them in their homes.”

  Rhydian nodded, understanding his worry there. “Our teams will be equipped with sedatives in case we run into a problem. If that does happen, we’ll work with some of our
Sentry to have them detained until this is over.”

  Harun nodded and passed out a tablet to each group, giving two to the team going to the prison. I looked over Rhydian’s shoulder as he skimmed through the list. There were more than I had been expecting. The prison alone had over eighty people. If all went well, we could have as many as a hundred and fifty new Tainted in Eden by the end of the day.

  “You all know the plan,” Rhydian said, tucking the tablet into his pocket. “Meet back here when you’re done. Use the code phrases if you run into trouble. If you run low on serum, there will be an extra stock here.”

  Harun patted a bag that was still on the table, then opened it for us to see the additional stash. He pulled one out and smiled before jerking the top off and downing it. I grinned myself.

  Everyone agreed, and we walked out into the city. Rhydian and I moved two blocks over before starting our trek toward Sentry section. Orson hadn’t even floated the idea of separating us this time. Not that we would have listened. He could have put his foot down and ordered it, and I still doubt a single member of our team would have argued when we went against it.