by Sophie Davis
Except, not really. Because instead of a woman surrounded by stone-wielding townsfolk, I saw a boy with skin the color of grass standing on a platform. Instead of Ms. Edelmen’s voice, I heard my father’s. Then, I heard the screams.
Make it stop! Make. It. Stop.
My throat burned, and my head felt like it was splitting in two.
Make it stop! Please, make it stop.
“Lark? Sweetheart, are you okay?”
I’m here, Lark. It’s okay. You’re okay. Just let go.
Her voice—Lila’s voice—soothed me, just as it always did.
“Lark, we’ve called your parents. They’ll be here soon. Lark, can you hear me?”
My parents? No. No. No. They couldn’t see me like this. I wasn’t supposed to know about the boy. About Jonas.
Let go, Lark. You don’t know about Jonas. I do.
“Why don’t you try to drink some water, dear? That will help.”
But I do know about Jonas.
“Who is Jonas, sweetheart?”
Oh, no. I’d spoken aloud. I’d said his name aloud.
“And who are you talking to, Lark?”
“Lila,” I muttered.
“No, Lark. It’s me, Nurse Jordan.”
Lark, listen to me. You need to let go of the memory. Do you understand? They will lock us up again if you don’t pull it together.
“Who is Lila, sweetheart? Is she a friend?”
She is me, only stronger, I thought.
You cannot tell them that. The nurse won’t understand.
“If you tell me who she is….”
Don’t do it, Lark. Please, just focus on letting go of Jonas and Kingstown.
“It’s so loud,” I moaned.
Through squinted eyes, I saw my parents standing just outside the classroom with Ms. Edelmen.
I want to help you, Lark. Let me help you.
All three of them entered together and came over to where I was huddled on the floor. My father knelt beside me, motioning the nurse away. When our eyes met, I saw fear and revulsion in his gaze. Then, my mother’s mouth was next to my ear. “Why can’t you be normal?” she hissed.
Sobs wracked my body, but I no longer felt connected to it. It was as if all the pain and fear and anger ceased existing in an instant. I was there, but not. Vaguely, I realized my father had me in his arms, though the embrace was far from loving. He scooped me up, and my head lulled to one side.
“I want to be normal,” I mumbled but wasn’t sure if I spoke aloud or only meant to. “I would trade it all just to be normal.”
You aren’t normal, Lark, a new voice said inside my head. But you could be. If you like.
What’s your name?
Raven, the voice said. I’m here to protect you. To help you feel normal.
I relaxed in my father’s tight grip.
Good. Just don’t let them find you. If they do, they’ll get rid of you.
Never, Raven promised.
Finally, I gave myself over completely to the darkness. And it felt so good to be back in my happy place.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RAVEN
There was an extra spring in my step as the three of us left the tavern an hour later. Spending time with Adam made me a little less lost, a little more tethered. Having Blake around was great, but as I so often had to tell myself, he wasn’t my boyfriend. Adam wasn’t my friend, but unlike with Blake, I didn’t feel wrong pursing a relationship with him. He was neutral. Like Switzerland. And he wanted to help.
Adam hugged me goodbye on the sidewalk, adding a kiss on the cheek that warmed my insides. “Whatever you need—whatever either of you need—just ask. Okay?” he whispered in my ear.
“Thank you,” I replied as we broke apart.
My and Blake’s parting was a little more awkward, if only because Adam had hugged and kissed me, and I didn’t want to overstep with Lark’s boyfriend. Blake gave me a quick squeeze and promised to call later. The guys both left in taxis, while I climbed into the car that Blake had hired to take me to and from dinner. Satisfied with the way the meeting had gone, and preoccupied watching Blake’s taxi pull away, I slid into the backseat.
And found it occupied.
My blood ran cold as I met big brown eyes and Asher’s very hostile greeting. “What the hell are you doing, Raven?”
“Did you follow me?” My voice was even and cold as steel, and Asher had the sense to look just the tiniest bit alarmed.
He stared at me, but barked, “Drive,” to the man behind the wheel of the town car.
“You can’t just—”
“Just what, Raven?” Asher snapped. “Protect you? Watch out for you? Make sure you don’t do something stupid?”
“Stalk me,” I spat, crossing my arms over my chest, and angling my body to give Asher my most defiant glare.
He sighed heavily. “It’s not stalking, I’m being paid to protect you.”
“Whatever.” I turned to stare out the window, though the tint was so dark that I could still see Asher’s reflection in the glass.
We rode in silence for a long time. Just when I started to worry that Asher was taking me back to the Montauk Institute and David, the car turned at the intersection for The Pines. The driver slowed to stop, and my hand was already on the door handle. I wanted out of that car and away from Asher as fast as possible. Unfortunately, he followed me upstairs, which wasn’t totally unexpected but still annoying.
“I’m going to bed,” I announced, stomping through the front door.
I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. Honestly, it was more that Asher had thwarted Blake’s attempt to cut him out of the meeting with Adam—and give me some privacy—than the whole being watched thing. How had Asher known? Had he followed me? Had he been inside the tavern? Sitting in the shadows like the rat that he was? Or…was there a tracking device on me?
“Raven, please talk to me,” Asher said through the bathroom door.
Standing in the master bath, I brushed my teeth and washed my face as though my very angry babysitter wasn’t pounding on the door. Finally, when I’d finished, I flung open the door and demanded, “About what?” I pushed passed him. “Do you want to tell me how you knew where I was? Oh, wait.” I spun to face him. “No, that’s not it, is it? You want to know what Adam said.”
Asher’s silence spoke for him.
“Fine. I’ll tell you what he said. Nothing I didn’t know. Okay? Happy? Everything Adam said was stuff I’d already read in Lark’s journal.”
Without waiting for Asher’s response, I strode into the closet for pajamas. He didn’t follow me, but he also didn’t leave the bedroom.
“That’s why I advocated against this dinner,” Asher called, no longer sounding mad so much as defeated. “I knew he couldn’t give you the answers you want. And I only came tonight because I thought you might need me.”
I hesitated, one leg in a pair of blue sleep shorts. Was that true? Lark and Lila had specifically cautioned me against Asher. They’d said his allegiance was to David and the Institute, whose motivations were not entirely aligned with ours. Hurriedly, I slid into the shorts and pulled a tee over my head, and then reemerged from the closet.
“How. Did. You. Know. Where. I. Was?”
“How do you think? I followed you,” Asher said.
It sounded like the truth. It was the logical answer. Yet...I couldn’t explain it, but I sensed a hint of deception. Or maybe I was just tired and paranoid.
In any case, I simply nodded and headed for my bed. Asher stayed where he was in the middle of the room, looking a little lost and unsure how to proceed.
“Whether you believe me or not, I am here for you. Literally. This is all for you, Raven. And I am here to support you mentally and physically, as well as protect you. Adam Ridell can’t tell you anything that I don’t already know—that you don’t already know. He isn’t a part of this. So now that you’ve spoken to him, can we agree that he is a dead end?”
I
rolled over so that my back was to Asher and pulled the blankets up to my chin. “Fine. Adam is a dead end,” I repeated.
Satisfied, at least for that night, Asher left quietly, though he didn’t vacate the apartment completely. Several minutes later, I heard the television switch on in the living room.
For a long time that night, I laid in my bed and tried to will Lark or Lila to join me in the body we shared. But I was alone, truly and completely alone. I gave up on sleep long after Asher had given up on some reality show and, presumably, went to bed. There was no need to retrieve Lark’s letter, I had it memorized after all, but I needed to do something with my hands and tracing her handwriting was something.
Besides, I’d vowed that once I learned the reason for my creation, I would focus on finishing Lark’s mission. And I now understood why Lark and needed me, so it was time to move on. Of course, if I was being honest with myself, a part of me—and not the part that was Lark—had known before dinner with Adam. But like anyone my age nearing the end of her life, I wasn’t ready for it to be over. Once I finished the scavenger hunt, life as I believed it would be over.
It was never your life, I told myself. Because you are not real.
With those heavy thoughts on my mind, I dove back into the riddles from the letter. Since it was first, I started with the gibberish riddle. It was most likely another cipher, though the simple ones I looked up online didn’t produce any viable results. Unless there were several layers of encryption, and that was one avenue I hoped not to travel down quite yet.
Besides, Lark’s clues were fairly easy. They were tailor-made for me.
“What am I missing?” I asked the empty room.
I reread the “Hand Hint” as I traced the letters in the riddle with my left index finger. And that was when it hit me: The letters all slant to the right, because Lark is right handed. I wasn’t, though. I was left-handed. But words weren’t spelled differently depending on the writer’s dominant hand....
What difference does being a lefty or a righty make?
Sitting at the desk, I studied the left-hand side, as though it might really be that obvious. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I checked the laptop, going so far as to shine a light into all of the USB ports and HMDI hookups on the left side. Finding nothing, I investigated the ones on the right for good measure. Nothing.
Frustrated, I went back to the browser window with my cipher search results and tried to find one that used a direction. The Vinyasa Cipher, I soon learned, was a common encryption technique, and could only be decoded with the correct keyword. I tried the website’s link to a free online decoder where all I had to do was type in a keyword and the cipher I wanted decoded and it would do it for me. Nothing happened. I copied and pasted the link into the search bar, only realizing after several attempts that my fingers were in the wrong places on the keyboard, and I was pushing ctrl+x and ctrl+c instead of ctrl+v.
Rectifying the mistake, I copied and pasted the link, for real this time; however, I never pressed enter, because a new idea had occurred to me. This was much simpler, much easier to decode. I placed my fingers on the keyboard in the home position. Next, I typed the line of nonsense from the letter, but instead of typing the letters as written, I shifted my fingers one space to the right.
Rgw ibw ib suaok1t ua d1jw became: The one on displ2y is f2ke.
The “2”s were odd, but I was pretty sure they were supposed to be “a”s; it was the only option that made sense. Or you’re wrong, I thought. But if so, what were the odds that my decoding method just so happened to turn the one line of gibberish into a mostly readable sentence?
“The one on display is fake,” I read aloud.
What did that mean? I started to stand, preparing to pace off some of my nervous energy as I considered all the options, but froze halfway out of my chair. My fingers flew across the keys. If my hunch was right…well, I didn’t know what it meant.
I soon had my confirmation.
The Kingsley Diamond was currently on display. For another three days, the largest red diamond ever unearthed would be in D.C. It’s tenure as the Smithsonian’s most brilliant gem was scheduled to culminate with a farewell party, one last chance for dignitaries and politicians and celebrities to see the diamond before it returned to my family’s private collection.
If the one downtown is a fake, where’s the real one?
Lark’s journal was in my messenger bag, which was thankfully in the bedroom with me. I hadn’t reached the end yet, but instead of skimming the unread passages, I flipped back through several of the previous sections until I found what I was looking for. Over winter break of Lark’s senior year, she had offered to take her mother’s necklace to the jeweler for a cleaning. When I’d originally read the entry, I’d focused on her memory loss—Lark had lost an entire day that time—but on a second read-through I realized the real significance of the passage. It was the day she stole the Kingsley Diamond, a crime she’d been planning to commit all along.
“What did you do with it, Lark?” I asked aloud, though I was hoping the answer would come inside my head.
It didn’t. I was just as alone in my mind as I had been earlier in the evening. Skipping to the entry about Lark’s trip to Navid, the jeweler who’d made both the butterfly and Blake’s key, I reread the section, paying close attention to every line of text. The answer was so obvious that I felt ashamed for not having realized the truth earlier. Lark—or possibly Lila—had commissioned Navid to make a duplicate, a forgery. Had he completed the work? I skimmed the later passages for mention of the jeweler, but there was no indication that she’d ever picked up either the original or the fake.
Does Navid still have the real one?
I checked the time. 3:35 a.m. Not exactly business hours. First thing in the morning, I’d give Navid a call, I decided. I was Lark Kingsley, after all. How hard could it be to convince the jeweler of that fact over the phone?
I must have fallen asleep at my desk, because that was where I woke when Asher burst into my bedroom before sunrise the following morning.
“Raven, we need to talk,” he announced.
I sat up with a start. “Huh? What? Owww!” A stab of pain ran through my neck when I tried to turn my head.
“Are you okay?” Asher asked, but for once he didn’t really seem like he cared much about my wellbeing; he seemed too distracted to care about much of anything.
“Yeah, fine. I must’ve slept wrong. Keyboards don’t make the best pillows,” I replied, as Asher began pacing the bedroom. “Um, are you okay?”
At first it didn’t seem as though he’d heard me. With increasing concern, I watched Asher wear a hole in the carpet and mumble to himself. “Asher? It’s—” I glanced at my phone “—5:02 a.m. And I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. So if you want to talk, then talk. Otherwise, I’m going to go back to bed, in my bed this time.”
I stood and stretched, hearing several audible pops as the kinks in my muscles loosened. Running a hand across my mouth, I realized with only minimal embarrassment that I’d been drooling. But I was beyond caring what Asher thought of me. With access to my entire medical history, he was likely privy to a number of more humiliating personal facts about me than my propensity for drooling during deep sleep.
Asher sighed loudly and stopped near the foot of the bed, placing his hands on his hips as he turned to face me. “Last night…last night I did a lot of thinking,” he began.
“Do you want a cookie?” I asked when he didn’t elaborate.
Again, it was as though my words didn’t register. Am I invisible? Or am I still asleep? I wondered.
“This is serious, Raven,” he said finally.
“Oh, so you can see and hear me? Good to know. Is there coffee? I could really use some caffeine.” I brushed passed Asher and headed to the bathroom.
“What? No, Raven, just stop.” His tone was so sharp that it stopped me mid-step.
Alarmed, I slowly turned and met his gaze. Troubled
was too light a word for the expression in Asher’s brown eyes. “Asher. What’s going on?” I demanded.
“Will you let me talk? I just…I just need to get this out.”
“Okay, talk,” I replied cautiously.
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs to capacity and releasing the air before continuing. “When you—Lark—came to the Montauk Institute, the Kingsleys said they didn’t know what was wrong with you. They said they believed you’d experienced a trauma but didn’t know the type or the circumstances.”
“Right, you said as much before,” I interjected tiredly.
“David believed your trauma was sexual in nature.” Asher paused to give me time to process.
I’d like to say that I was shocked by the admission, but I wasn’t. Given Lark’s age when she witnessed Jonas’ murder, and the little I knew about disorders such as ours, abuse was a natural assumption.
“It wasn’t long before David realized that wasn’t true. You didn’t exhibit the classic signs of abuse.” Because I didn’t care to know, I didn’t ask him to enumerate the “classic signs of abuse” and remained silent. “But you also wouldn’t tell him what had happened to you. Without that information, he wasn’t sure how best to treat you. Your parents just wanted you to be ‘normal’. They wanted you to be happy, to be their little girl again.”
Asher ran a hand through his hair, and for the first time I noticed his bloodshot eyes and raccoon circles. Has he slept? I wondered.
“David obtained permission to use experimental treatments on you,” Asher continued.
“Experimental treatments?” I repeated numbly, not liking the direction the conversation was taking.
“Yeah, a lot of hypno-therapy kind of stuff. That’s when he discovered Lila. Lila helped you cope, so David ran with it. He used her to ease your burden. But Lila was—is—very protective, and she refused to tell David the truth about Kingstown and Jonas.” He shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t know when Lila became aware of the entire story. But that’s not important.”