Chloe scoffed. I smiled sweetly in her direction as I continued bouncing, building more and more momentum.
“Seriously, did no one teach you about safety? You must have at least the basics, since Leo asked you to play spotter. Some of the things you can do on a trampoline will leave you dead or paralyzed if you don’t go about them the right way.” I did another flip, landed on my butt, and bounced back up to my feet. All very flashy, if you didn’t do trampoline work. All pretty basic, if you did.
Sometimes the simplest things are the showiest because they don’t have hidden difficulties. They’re exactly as hard as they look. As if in answer to that thought, my fingertips started heating up. Pyrokinesis is the easiest, showiest trick in the magic-user’s arsenal, hence why it tends to be the first to manifest. Lucky me. If I started a fire here, I’d see a lot more fire in short order, when the Covenant strapped me to a stake and lit me up. I shook my hands frantically as I continued bouncing. Chloe gave me an odd look. I stopped shaking my hands and started flapping my arms. She rolled her eyes and turned away.
Still hot still hot still—damn. I stuck the fingers of my left hand in my mouth just as they caught fire. Leo was walking back in our direction, a bundle in his arms. He wasn’t close enough to have seen the spark. I kept bouncing and flapping, willing my right hand to cool down.
Dammit, Mary, I thought. She was the one who’d been teaching me to deal with this crap, and where was she now? Back in America, haunting her familiar ground, and staying well clear of this nest of dangerous people with terrible ideas. I would have switched places with her in a second, if only to keep them from catching on.
My fingertips were cooling down. I pulled my hand out of my mouth and stuck my arm out by my side, jumping in a T-shape for a moment before executing a series of flips, timing it so I was hitting the trampoline feet first and bouncing up again. A badly timed landing could result in a concussion (best case) or a broken neck (worse, more common case), but I was pretty confident about things like this, and more, I was showing off.
I knew Leo had reached the trampoline when I heard him say, in a distinctly impressed tone, “Damn, Annie, I didn’t know you could get that kind of height out of this old thing!”
“If this is what you think of as ‘old,’ I volunteer to test all your new equipment,” I said, and stopped flipping, beginning to bleed momentum back into the mat. After I’d dropped enough to feel like it was safe, I stopped bouncing, landing on my knees and turning the last of my kinetic energy into a slide to the side of the trampoline. Leo was standing there, face turned upward to watch me work. He looked impressed.
My cheeks reddened. I didn’t want Leo looking at me that way, like he was a person and I was a person and we were just two people who happened to be in the same place somehow. This wasn’t a coincidental meeting at a coffee shop or a comic book store. This was a Covenant training facility, and his grandfather was in charge of the whole damn thing.
“Here,” he said, offering me his bundle.
It unrolled to reveal a stack of blunt throwing knives. They looked cold-forged, the sort of thing you’d find at a Renaissance Faire “try your luck” stall. I raised my head and eyebrows at the same time, giving him a curious look.
“What do you want me to do with these?”
“Well, that’s a bit up to you,” said Leo. “I’m trying to assess you. Impress me.”
Statements like that have always awakened the part of me that has more competitive urge than sense. I looked around the room, finally focusing on the banners hanging near the ceiling. “Are you using those for anything?”
“Hmm?” Leo looked up. “Those? No, they’re leftover decorations from the last ball we hosted. Why?”
I wanted to say something about the . . . the arrogance, and cruelty of an organization that hunted intelligent beings having balls so casually, but I didn’t. It wouldn’t have fit my cover story. So instead, I filled my hands with knives, and said, “Watch this.”
It took a few minutes of bouncing to build the kind of height I needed. I was going more slowly this time, both to avoid showing off, and because there’s a word for people who bounce full-speed with their hands full of knives. The word is “skewered.” Besides, nothing was attacking me or rushing to break my concentration; for once, I had the luxury of going as fast or as slow as I desired. I bounced while Leo watched with anticipation and Chloe watched with exasperation. And once I had the kind of air I needed, I started throwing knives.
There’s this character from the X-Men. Clarice Ferguson, better known as “Blink.” She teleports and throws energy daggers at people, which means that a lot of the time, she’s drawn flying through the air or falling as she impales things. I’ve done Blink cosplay for four different cons, and I have a pretty good grasp on her style of throwing shit. I jumped and I flung, and one by one, the banners fluttered to the floor, neatly cut away from the rope that held them.
When my hands were empty, I landed on the trampoline in a perfect Spider-Gwen crouch and waited for the reactions. I didn’t have to wait long.
“Holy fuck,” breathed Chloe, finally looking like she was taking an interest in the program. “How did you do that? Can you teach me to do that?”
“Annie,” said Leo, wide-eyed and staring. “What in the world . . . ?”
“I’d do displays of marksmanship between acts some nights,” I said, rolling into a seated position and trying to look shy. “They’d set up the trampoline and hang balloons around the ring, and I’d see how many of them I could break before I ran out of time. I got pretty good. Some nights, they’d fill the balloons with glitter, and the air would sparkle as it fell.”
Details can make or break a story. In this case, the details were taken from real life, from acts I’d seen or participated in when visiting the Campbell Family Carnival. Most of the backstory for “Timpani” came from my friends and acquaintances with the show. The Campbells aren’t technically family—not by blood—but they raised Dad and Aunt Jane, and they’re always happy to see us. I wasn’t the one who’d broken the balloons around their ring, at least not the first time I’d seen it. That image will still be with me for the rest of my life.
“How are you with a bow?” Leo asked, leaning forward, eyes suddenly sharp.
I fought the urge to lean away. He looked too interested, like I had suddenly transformed from a toy into something worth coveting. “Crossbow, good, anything else, not good. You can’t safely draw a bow while you’re bouncing up and down, and I pretty much stick to trapeze and trampoline. Things that keep me as high up as possible.” That’s the only thing I have in common with my sister. Neither of us has ever been happy with our feet on the ground—although for her, high heels will work in a pinch, and for me, it’s always been roller skates.
“All right; we can work with that,” said Leo, and offered his hand to help me down from the trampoline. After a moment’s hesitation, I took it. This was part of the con. I was going to pull it off, or I was going to die trying.
He held on a trifle too long before letting me go, and he was still looking at me with those covetous eyes. Dying trying might still be on the table.
The next wrinkle in my plan came while I was unpacking my things and getting ready to ask where a girl was supposed to go for a shower in this joint. The door to my room opened. Chloe stepped inside. I stopped what I was doing and plastered a smile onto my face, in case she was here to haul me off for some new series of tests I didn’t want to take and couldn’t afford to fail. Instead, she glared, marched to the dead center of the room, and pointed at the floor.
“This,” she said, in a tone that was distinctly shriller than it had been earlier, “is my side of the room. If your filthy things wind up on my side of the room, I’ll have them burned.”
I blinked. “You’re my roommate?”
“No,” she said. “You are going to be my roommate. Tempora
rily. And you’re never to forget the hierarchy in this room. I was here first. You’re a short-term do-it-yourself project, and I will not yield to you on matters of cleanliness, window positioning, or anything else.”
“Wow.” I blinked again. “You’re super important, aren’t you?”
Now it was Chloe’s turn to blink. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t trust me, if I were you. I’m a stranger from America, with a story that isn’t exactly easy to verify and some really weird skills that only make sense if you believe everything I’ve said. Which I wouldn’t do. So if they’re putting you in here to keep an eye on me while they verify my story, you must be super important.”
Chloe stared at me for a moment before the corner of her mouth began to twitch. “You’re fucking with me. Either I agree that I’m super important and stop questioning you, or I deny being super important and you don’t have to listen to me. You have siblings, don’t you?”
“I’m the youngest,” I agreed, before remembering my cover story. I forced my face to fall, looking down at the open drawer in front of me. “Or I guess I was the youngest. I’m an only child now. Not the way I wanted it to happen.”
“And since we don’t know yet whether you’re lying or not, I don’t know whether to feel bad for reminding you, or annoyed that you’re such a bald-faced liar.” Chloe shook her head and sat on the edge of her bed. “You’re good. I’ll give you that much, no questions asked. You’re very, very good.”
“If you think I’m lying, why am I even here?” I finished shoving my stuff into the dresser—sans Mindy, who was off investigating the house—before sitting on my own bed and frowning at her, hoping I looked more perplexed than annoyed. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to dispose of me in London?”
“It’s harder than you’d think to hide a body in London, especially if you’re planning to stay there,” she said. “We have a private graveyard here at Penton Hall. Your body would never be found, not by the best investigators in the world. London is a city with a remarkable number of cameras.”
“So?”
“So those cameras will show you leaving the bookshop shortly after you entered, in your rubbish hoodie, with that odious suitcase of yours, and catching the Tube all the way to Wimbledon. You walked into a residential neighborhood after that. No cameras there. No sign of what happened to you either.”
She sounded almost unspeakably smug, and was roughly my height and build. I raised an eyebrow. “You did that?”
“While you were having a nap in the guest room, right after you’d arrived. Having you reappear won’t raise alarm bells unless someone reports you missing—and if you’re really an orphan, as you say, no one’s going to do that.”
“And they loaded me into the van through a back door. No cameras there either, huh?”
Chloe’s smug silence was answer enough. I shook my head.
“Moments like this make me glad I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “You’d just make me disappear.”
“I think Leo would be sad about it. He’s a little sweet on you, you know. He’s also my brother, and your superior, so I’ll thank you to keep a safe distance.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Romance is the last thing on my mind. I’m here to avenge my family, not to start a new one.” Leo wasn’t hard on the eyes. But Leo wasn’t my type, and more, he wasn’t Dominic, ripe and ready to be swayed from the creed he’d lived by for his entire life. Leo was a believer. This was where he belonged; this was what he wanted to be doing. Nothing he’d shown me gave me any cause to think differently. And dating Darth Prepboy really wasn’t why I was here.
Chloe looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Then she smiled. “You know, I believe you,” she said. “Not about everything, mind—that’s still being looked into—but about my brother. You’re not here to try picking up a husband.”
“No, still not doing that,” I said.
“Sorry. Leo’s quite well-regarded among the Covenant girls, and he’s not betrothed yet. Some of them are thinking he might be engaged one day instead, and they’re keen for the job.”
I frowned. “The difference being . . . ?”
“Betrothed is when they do it for you, according to the bloodlines and what’s hoped for. I’m to marry a Bullard, for example—Anthony, thank God, not Robert, who’s too old and a dreadful bore—because our families haven’t been combined in generations. Engaged is when you do it for yourself. Mum and Dad were engaged. He was meant to marry a Post girl, and she a Carew boy, when they fell in love and simply couldn’t be talked out of it. It’s part of why Grandfather’s still in charge. Normally, he’d have stepped aside by now, but there are some members of his cabinet who don’t feel my father has what it takes to lead the Covenant, because he broke tradition marrying as he did.”
I stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language—which, to be fair, she sort of was. “Um, okay. See, back in America, everybody just sort of falls in love, gets married, maybe gets divorced, whatever. The normal way. No bloodlines involved.”
“That’s because you’re heathens,” said Chloe, and laughed, presumably at my expression. Then she shook her head, and said, “It’s not like we can exactly go to the club and meet people. The Covenant is a secret society. We protect mankind. We have a sacred duty to keep doing that until all threats are eliminated, until humanity is able to walk in the night without fear. It’s easier if our marriages are arranged for us. Avoids inbreeding, guarantees healthy children. Everything we do is for the sake of the next generation, which might be fortunate enough to be the first born without this fight.”
She spoke like a rational person, like the things she was saying made perfect sense. Of course they’d have arranged marriages, because who else would understand? And of course they’d go along with it willingly, for the sake of the children as yet unborn, the ones who would inherit a better world built on bones. It was a perfectly reasonable way to look at things.
It was disturbingly close to the way we’d always looked at things. It bore a striking resemblance to my family’s expectation that one day, you’d go on a job and come back with a fiancé, someone who’d seen how bad things could get, someone who would understand. And of course we’d raise our children with smiles on their faces and knives behind their backs, because the Covenant was out there, lurking, a faceless, amorphous monster in the night. We had to be prepared to defend what was ours. We had to be ready to die for a better world.
Whether we’d intended to or not, we’d created ourselves to mirror them, and it had never been more obvious than it was right now, with Chloe making cheerful, measured statements that sounded utterly insane to my unfamiliar ears.
“So what happens now?” I asked, just to break the silence.
Chloe sobered. “We get changed. We go to dinner. Leo and my father continue looking into your story. You train with us, while they do. And when they decide one way or another, whether you’re a traitor or an ally, they come for you. They offer you a choice.”
“What’s the choice?” I asked.
Her smile was almost sympathetic. “I think you know, don’t you? Now get something decent on, I won’t let you make me late for food—and I meant what I said about touching my things. Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.”
I already was. “Got it,” I said, and turned back to the dresser. It was time to keep playing make-believe, only this time, I wasn’t playing for the hand of Prince Thrushbeard from the Butterfly Kingdom.
I was playing for my life.
Eight
“Trust the mice. They may lead you weird, and they may lead you stupid, but they’ll never lead you wrong.”
—Frances Brown
In a bedroom at Penton Hall, still trying not to freak out
CHLOE WAS ASLEEP: I was absolutely sure of that. The best actress in the world couldn’t have snored that l
oudly, or that consistently, or continued doing it even after I’d started flicking balls of wadded-up paper at her face. The mystery of why there’d been an open bed in her room was answered. Anyone with any status whatsoever around here would demand a new roommate after their first night with her, for the sake of ever sleeping again.
I rolled out of bed and onto the floor, trusting the rug to cushion my fall. It did an admirable job: I landed with barely a thud. Chloe continued snoring without a hitch. As white noise generators went, I couldn’t have asked for better. I already knew that there were no cameras on the room—that had been confirmed when Chloe stripped for bed without hesitation or making any effort to cover herself, something I couldn’t imagine her doing if she knew there was a chance her grandfather might see the footage—and now I was confident that even if there were microphones, they wouldn’t be particularly sensitive. They couldn’t be.
When I got out of here, I was going to leave Chloe a note suggesting she look into some sort of sleep study. There was clearly something wrong with her breathing.
Sticking my head under the edge of the bed, I whispered as loudly as I dared, “Professor Xavier is a jerk.”
Mindy popped out from behind my suitcase and ran to sit primly in front of my face, curling her tail around her paws. Her ears were up and her whiskers were tilted forward; she looked smug, inasmuch as it was possible for a mouse to look smug.
She wasn’t alone.
The mouse next to her was slightly larger, its brindled fur spotted with white. It had a downy black feather and a bone bead on a string around its neck, but was otherwise naked. That was unusual for an Aeslin mouse, or at least for the ones at home: most of them wore so much in the way of regalia that they could be mistaken for taxidermied toys. This mouse had his—definitely his; remember, naked—ears flat and his eyes cast down in a gesture of respect. Which meant he wasn’t just a field mouse she’d slapped a necklace onto.