“Will I be able to use it to come here?”
“You can travel it with me,” Hunter says, “but it can only be activated by mystic energy—you won’t be able to use it on your own.”
“And how do you make this … portal? Is it dangerous?”
Hunter considers this. “A little. But don’t worry. Just watch.”
I step away as Hunter lifts his right arm and stretches out his fingers. At first, nothing happens—all I see is how hard he is concentrating, his lips pressed together tightly, his brow furrowed. But then his hand begins to glow green: electric rays shoot from his fingertips with a soft hum.
The rays look like they’re about to hit the wall. Then they stop. Hunter lets his hand pulse steadily for a moment; then he curls his fingers and the rays begin to bleed together, shrinking. They’re not long and thin like jousting swords anymore. Now they’re so small they don’t look like rays at all—instead, his hand is like a glowing green ball. Bands of energy start moving around the hand like rings around a planet, faster and faster. All I can hear is a loud whizzing. All I can see is this pulsating magical fist.
The whizzing grows so loud it’s nearly deafening. Then there’s a loud zap as Hunter punches the empty space in front of him. The air reacts as if it were solid, cleaving open into what looks like a miniature black hole, the edges of which are ablaze with green light.
The sounds in the apartment return to normal. I glance back at Hunter. The rays have completely disappeared. Turk’s jaw has gone slack, as though he’s in shock.
“Now,” Hunter says, slightly out of breath. He points to the loophole and grins. “Who’s first?”
I hurt with such an intense pain that I can barely see. There is nothing to focus on save the agony. It feels like I am burning up, ripping apart. All I can see are dots of color that grow brighter as the pain increases. The dots begin to move, weaving in circles of blue and pink and yellow. There is fire and there is heat. Then something cool rushes over me. The dots begin to form a picture. Another memory …
“Aria, there’s something else you should know.” Hunter takes my hands in his; we’re standing in the middle of my bedroom, about to say goodnight.
“What is it?”
He frowns. “I hate to be the one to tell you this. But the Conflagration—the terrorist explosion that killed all those innocent people and sent the mystics underground twenty years ago? That was orchestrated by your family. By your father. He bribed a group of mercenary mystics to create a weapon. A defensive weapon, he claimed. But then he turned it against them and detonated it in a public place so no one would ever trust mystics again.”
I always knew my father was a bad guy, but this … “So my entire life—the lives of everyone in this city—has been based on a lie.”
“I’m so sorry, Aria.”
Before I can respond, I hear my father’s voice. “Aria! Open up.” His fists pound savagely on my bedroom door. “I know you’re in there with him. It’s all over, Aria. Open up the door.”
“Hunter,” I say frantically, “you need to go. Now.” I rush over to my windows and open them; immediately, hot wind blows into my room.
Hunter’s lips are trembling. “Come with me.”
“That will only make things worse.” My bedroom door sounds like it’s about to crack. We have seconds, at most. “I’ll be fine.” I kiss him passionately. “Go.”
Hunter activates the loophole on my balcony at the same time my father breaks through my door. Kyle rushes past, reaching for Hunter as he disappears into the loophole and it seals behind him.
“Where did he go?” My father grabs my shirt, twisting it and lifting me off the ground. I can hear the material start to tear.
“I don’t know.”
“This isn’t a game, Aria. Tell me where.”
“I told you … I don’t know!”
He drops me and my knees hit the floor. A piercing pain shoots up my thighs. The man before me barely resembles my father anymore. His skin is blotchy, his eyes bulging out of their sockets like an angry animal’s.
Then he raises his hand and smacks me—my teeth clamp down and slice open my tongue. Tangy blood fills my mouth.
“Johnny, stop!” my mother cries from the doorway.
“You’re a traitor!” My father stares at me with a look of pure disgust. Something silver glints in his other hand—he’s holding a pistol. “This ends now, Aria.”
“Aria,” Kyle says from the corner, “don’t be an idiot. Tell him where the mystic is hiding.”
“Kill me if you want,” I say. “I won’t be some puppet for you.”
My father unlocks the safety of his gun. Points it directly at my head.
“No, Johnny!” My mother rushes into the room. “Don’t!” She comes up to my father, who pushes her away.
I close my eyes. This is it. I’m about to die.
Then I hear another voice. “Johnny. Wait.” I open my eyes. Benedict is in the room, looking concerned, a syringe in one of his hands. “There’s a better way.”
My father turns to him. “Speak, Patrick.”
“We can flush her memories of this mystic boy and build new memories in their place.” Benedict uncaps the needle. “It’s experimental, but she doesn’t have to die, Johnny.”
My father looks at us all—my brother, my mother, Benedict, and me—and nods. “All right.” His eyes find me again. “Maybe this time around you’ll be a better daughter.”
“Maybe you’ll be a better father,” I say, spitting blood.
I can tell he wants to hit me again, but he doesn’t. Benedict approaches—I try to back away, but Kyle comes from behind me and grabs my arms, twisting them behind me. “No!” I scream.
“You’re going to sleep now, Aria,” Benedict says.
Slowly, sketches of memories begin to find their places, like birds coming home to roost. Pictures of my parents flash before me; my feelings for Hunter return and take root. The secrets and lies and betrayals. Davida. Thomas. Everything that was cast out of me is returning, only clearer. And it hurts. There is a fine white net of pain covering me, like I’m being stabbed all over, every pore ravaged. But there’s an undeniable comfort in the pain—I own it. It is the price of knowing.
I am in Dr. May’s office. My entire body is immobilized. I am on a table, hands at my sides, about to be slid inside a large machine.
Benedict leans over me. “Aria, can you hear me?”
I try to answer but find I can’t speak.
“Listen closely. Hunter is not gone to you forever. A mystic’s heart is not like a human’s. They take different forms to the naked eye—some are different colors, some are fractal boxes, some seem to be made of glass.”
Benedict disappears for a second, then returns. “The heart is the seat of a mystic’s power, and the localized energy there works its magic on the eye of the beholder—to look within it is to see an ever-shifting reality, a quicksilver mirror of ourselves. You have to trust that at some point after this, you will gaze inside his heart and see yourself, and that recognition will unlock everything.”
I’m trying to understand what he’s telling me—I’ll find Hunter again, even though they’re wiping out my memories?—but I’m feeling so sleepy.
“Aria, do you trust me?”
I have no energy left. All I can do is nod.
And then I feel whole again, together, my body burning not with pain but with something else—love, maybe.
The love letters, Romeo, the boy in my dreams whose face I’ve never been able to see, is Hunter.
It’s been him all along. Behind everything, Hunter.
And just like that, I am back—back in my room, in this prison cell that I call home, with the boy I love before me, asking me, “Do you love me?”
“I do,” I whisper. “But are you you?”
He takes me in his arms and whispers, “It’s really me. And it’s really you, now, Aria. You’ve come back to me.”
I grab Hunter’s
arm for balance, feel his strength beneath my grip, the lithe muscles of his arms. How is he here? I watched him die … didn’t I?
Suddenly, my throat closes up, and my skin begins to itch like I’m having an allergic reaction. The joy at being in Hunter’s arms vanishes, replaced by anger—at my parents, at my brother, at Thomas: everyone who lied to me.
I can’t breathe.
“Aria?” Hunter says, his face frantic. He slips behind me and clasps his hands together just below my breastbone.
Then he yanks his hands hard into my gut.
I cough and the locket goes flying out of my mouth and lands under my armoire with a plink.
My eyes water, and I gasp and fill my lungs with air. Then, without warning, I vomit all over myself.
• XXVIII •
“Everything okay in there?” Stiggson asks, rapping twice on the closed door.
“Yes!” I yelp as Hunter comes back from the bathroom with a wet towel. I use it to wipe the vomit from my mouth and chin while Hunter vigorously scrubs the carpet. “I only need a few more minutes.”
I take a sip of water from a glass on my nightstand. I can’t believe I just threw up. More so, I can’t believe I threw up in front of Hunter and that he’s actually cleaning it up right now—which is incredibly sweet but awfully embarrassing.
“Hold on.” I motion for Hunter to stop. He looks at me with his beautiful blue eyes, and he’s so handsome that I want to cry.
“What?” he says.
I let my jaw go slack. “You’re alive!”
He drops the towel, then stands and embraces me. I don’t care that my breath is sour—Hunter is here, taking me in his arms. Nothing else matters.
“I thought you were dead.” The words rush out of me; there’s so much I want to say to him, now that I remember, now that I know the truth. “I don’t understand.… I watched you get—I saw you—”
“I know,” Hunter says, kissing my neck just below my ear. “It’s complicated, but I’m here.”
“It’s really you?” I whisper.
“Heart and soul.” I can feel his chest against mine, rising and falling, his warm breath on my cheek.
“How were you able to look like Davida?”
“It’s complicated,” Hunter says. “But basically, that was her doing. I kept the glamour she cast on me so that people would truly think I was dead. But tonight, I couldn’t stand it any longer and came looking for you—and I was caught.”
I glance back at my bedroom door, where Stiggson’s shadow is waiting. “Explain to me what I saw. When you were shot.”
We sit back down on the bed, and Hunter takes one of my hands, interlacing his fingers with mine. Davida’s uniform is tight on him now that he’s in his regular body.
“That night,” Hunter says, carefully choosing his words, “when your father’s cronies got hold of me, they put quicksilver cuffs around me. It’s what they use to immobilize mystics. I couldn’t move. Then they threw a bag over my head and tossed me into the hold of the police boat.”
I wince. “I remember that.”
“There were three men in the boat with me, and they were all up top.” Hunter bites his bottom lip. “I only know this because Davida pulled the bag off my head and told me so. She’d stowed away.”
I think back—Davida was there that night. But then she’d disappeared. “But why was she there?”
He takes a deep breath. “You know Davida’s talent?”
“She can take on someone else’s appearance,” I say, thinking of the day when Davida took on my face, and I stared at a mirror image of myself.
“That kind of power—to take on another person’s form—is incredibly rare. Only one in a hundred thousand or so has that talent.”
And then I remember what I learned from her secret journal: she and Hunter were betrothed. They’d been promised to marry since birth. “Oh no,” I whisper, suddenly realizing.
“I couldn’t move,” Hunter says, a desperate edge to his voice. “I’d been stunned. I couldn’t even speak. I could only watch as Davida sliced off my cuffs, stole my face, and took my form. Then she gave me hers. She rolled me behind some crates where no one would see me, and …”
“She took your place,” I finish for him. I place my free hand on his cheek—he’s hot, burning up.
“I didn’t have a choice, Aria. I had to lie there and listen as they dragged her up top, made her stand in the stern, and then … shot her.”
Hunter sobs quietly, and I wipe his tears away with my thumb. “Shhh. It’s not your fault.”
“Of course it is!” Hunter says in a harsh whisper. “If I hadn’t taken you to the Depths, if I hadn’t—”
“You can’t think like that,” I say. “She sacrificed herself for you. The least you can do is make sure her sacrifice wasn’t in vain.”
He says nothing for a moment, just stares at me before nodding. The hurt in his eyes nearly breaks my heart. It’s clear that he felt deeply for her. “Right. The next morning, once the boat had been docked and the stun worn off, I snuck back underground. Alone.”
Suddenly, I hear her voice in my ear: Do you love him? Then I will protect you both … for as long as I can.
Davida didn’t sacrifice herself only for Hunter. She sacrificed herself for me. For both of us, and for what we mean together. My father is right about one thing: a marriage between feuding families can be powerful. Instead of the Roses and the Fosters coming together, what would a union between a Rose and a Brooks do for Manhattan?
Hunter’s cheeks are glistening with tears. He wipes his nose on his sleeve, then uses his hand to brush back his hair. I want to enjoy this moment with him, but it’s nearly impossible. People are waiting for me outside my door. Expecting to see Davida.
“Did you love her?” I’m not sure why I need to know, but I do.
Hunter nods. “Yes.”
“Oh.” I feel my pulse quicken. That wasn’t the answer I expected.
“As a friend,” he clarifies. “I was supposed to marry her, but that was before I met you. I’m in love with you, Aria. Davida knew that.” For the first time tonight, Hunter smiles. “I loved you the first time I saw you. I loved you even more the first time I kissed you that day in the Block.”
“You’re the one I want to be with, Hunter,” I say, trying to convey all the things I feel. “And I love you, too.” I can’t help but relish in this one moment of happiness amid so much sadness.
“Davida loved you, Aria,” Hunter says, gripping my shoulders. He stares right into my eyes, as if he can see directly inside me. “That’s why she did what she did.”
I feel tears well up. “Even though there was so much I didn’t know about her. I … I loved her, too. And you”—I rest my palm against his cheek—“this whole time you’ve known our history and you never said anything?”
He nods, silent.
“The letters … Romeo and Juliet … they were from you?”
Another nod.
“That night, when you saved me from those boys and took me to Java River—how did you just sit back and let me think we’d never met?” I ask. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”
“That we’d had a secret affair and were madly in love, and your parents erased me from your memory?” The way Hunter says this makes me realize that I never would have believed him if he’d told me. I would’ve thought he was nuts. “I knew you’d lost your memory,” he says. “Davida told me. So I didn’t expect you would recognize me. Not saying anything was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I knew it was right.” He takes my hands, pulls me close. “And now you remember. We have each other, and that’s all that matters.”
There’s a noise like something falling, and Hunter leaps up and rushes over to the windows. He peeks out the curtains. “We will be together, Aria, but not right now.”
“What?” I say, standing. “What do you mean?” I point to my window. “Let’s use the loophole, get out of here—”
“It’s t
oo dangerous,” he says, taking a few steps toward me. “We should wait until things have calmed down, until after the election—”
“They’ve moved up the wedding, Hunter,” I say. “It’s in five days.”
“They what?” Hunter says, louder than he intended to. Someone pounds on the door; then there’s the clink of something metallic.
“Aria! Open up now!”
“They’re looking for ways to get underground,” I say, “to kill the rebels.”
“They’ll never manage,” Hunter says with a surprising amount of confidence. “So don’t worry about that.”
“They’re planning something awful,” I say, shuddering. “We have to go underground. Warn the rebels, and your mother, and figure out some way for us to get the truth out to the rest of the city. We owe it to ourselves … and to the people of Manhattan.”
Relief flashes in Hunter’s eyes. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“The loophole,” I say, but Hunter shakes his head. “It’s been disabled,” he says. “Turk sealed it off when he thought I was dead. We’ll have to enter somewhere else.”
“The Seaport entrance?”
“It’s being monitored.” Hunter scratches his chin. “There’s an entrance on Forty-Second Street, on the West Side.”
“Perfect.”
It’s only when I stop to breathe that I realize my bedroom door is open: Stiggson, my brother, my parents, and the Fosters are in the doorway, their mouths wide open.
And behind them are five burly men with guns pointed directly at my head.
• XXIX •
“You again?”
The disbelief in my father’s voice is undeniable. He’s not even yelling, which is how I know he’s really mad, though his cheeks have lost some of their earlier redness. His thick eyebrows are drawn together over his eyes, which are muddied with confusion. A light sheen of sweat covers his forehead.
Dad whips out his pistol. “How many times do I have to kill you?”