I remembered Aunt Leila’s face, and the utter lack of pity in her eyes. I could not stop her. Neither light nor dark, wind nor fire, love nor mercy, would ever stop her.
It felt like everyone I loved either was threatened or was a threat themselves.
Penelope and Marie were safe, though. They, my father, and Carwyn were the only ones in this bright city that I knew were safe.
I had to know who else was.
I was sure the schools were all shut, but that meant my school friends should be at home and able to answer me. I climbed off the bed and started sending messages, letting friends from school know that I was alive, and asking if they were safe. Those who did not respond I called.
Nadiya did not respond to the messages I sent, and she did not pick up her phone.
“Who are you trying to reach?” Carwyn asked.
I jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to face him. Propped up slightly by one arm behind his head, he was lying comfortably alongside the sword, as if it was his ideal bed partner.
“Nadiya,” I said. “You remember my friend from the club?”
Suddenly I remembered him asking me how well Ethan knew Nadiya. Asking me if I was sure that they did not know each other well.
From the look on his face, I saw Carwyn remembered it too.
“Vividly,” Carwyn drawled. “She was so very friendly. Remember when she pretended she wanted to buy dust, when really she wanted to drag me—sorry, Ethan—off, away from you? Do you know that she whispered in my ear that she wanted to speak to me alone? Do you want to know what I think?”
“I’m glad you asked,” I said. “Because I really don’t.”
“Too bad. I’m going to tell you anyway. I think your friend knew Ethan a lot better than you realized. I think that your perfect boyfriend was cheating on you.”
“I know that he wasn’t,” I snapped.
That didn’t mean that I thought Carwyn was lying. He didn’t have any reason to lie. I didn’t think he wanted to hurt me anymore, and if Nadiya had spoken to someone she thought was Ethan that way, his interpretation was fair based on what he knew. He just didn’t know Ethan like I did.
If Ethan knew Nadiya better than he had let on, if they had a secret between them, the secret was not what Carwyn thought.
“I’m going to see her,” I said abruptly. “You can wait here. Or you can leave, for all I care, but you’re not coming with me.”
Carwyn stretched indolently, as if he was perfectly comfortable and might settle back down to sleep. I hated him for the stupid pretense, as if anyone could rest while the city burned. I hated him for being able to pretend so well when I found that I suddenly could not pretend for a moment longer.
The subway was not working. I stopped and stared at the entrance, baffled. The subway had been the one constant in the two very different worlds I had lived in, running through both the Dark city and the Light, though not connecting the two. It was a chain that had been broken but still remained, thrumming with the same energy in both cities.
Now the reassuring rattle and rumble, the heartbeat of the city, was quiet.
I had to walk a long way to get to Nadiya’s place, exhaustion and the hungry magic sickness burning through me. I stumbled as I walked, and as I walked I saw things I would rather not have seen.
The city was not much changed. There were only small details, here and there. They were like the subtle signs, the pallor and trembling, of someone who was dying from internal injuries—the smell of smoke in the air, the far-off sound of a child screaming, store windows that were broken but not shattered. The cracks in the glass caught the sun, so the windows looked as if they were wrapped in vast spider webs made of light.
They had set up cages in Times Square. That was the one thing that stopped me. The cages hung on thick black chains, in front of the blaring bright colors of advertisements proclaiming new fashion brands and new movie stars, the unforgiving dazzle of Light power and commerce. I did not have to wonder what they were for. I remembered how the cages in Green-Wood Cemetery had looked, the black edge of magic to the metal, the sound as the spikes went into flesh and drank both blood and Light. I remembered my father’s screams.
They had not torn down the cages to spare lives. They had torn them down so they could build them somewhere new, somewhere there would be a flood of fresh victims for those black jaws. And these cages looked different somehow, looked even worse than the cages at Green-Wood had. I remembered the sword one of the rebels had cut down Gabrielle Mirren with, how its dark edges had distorted the world. The outlines of these cages were writhing black strokes cut into the sky.
They were empty, I told myself. They were empty, they were empty.
For now.
Nadiya lived in a big apartment block, red-brick with the windows full of white blinds, sternly anonymous. The only thing that differentiated her building from the line of identical buildings was a stoop that somebody had painted mint green in what must have been a fit of optimism. That had been a long time ago. The mint-green paint was peeling to reveal scraps of ghost-gray wood beneath.
Nadiya did not buzz me in, but she came downstairs when I pressed the bell. Long before she reached the door, I saw her bright hijab through the wire-mesh window. Her step was slow as she opened the door, and her eyes were huge as they met mine. She looked afraid.
I wondered how I looked.
“You knew Ethan better than I thought you did,” I said slowly. “Didn’t you?”
Nadiya bit her lip. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s not what you think.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
Nadiya was no fool. She looked at me, her gaze level and tranquil, and she waited to hear what I thought.
I thought of the accusation of treason against Ethan, what they had actually said: that he was passing secrets to a member of the sans-merci.
Ethan had said, when his father was killed, that it was all his fault.
Ethan believed that the cruelty to the Dark city had to stop. Ethan always acted to stop other people’s suffering. If people had approached him and asked him for his help to change the world, he might have helped.
I was an idiot. Carwyn had not committed treason. It had been Ethan all along.
I had thought of the treason as a crime and thought it could not have been Ethan, that it must have been committed by a doppelganger, because doppelgangers were capable of anything.
I had committed a crime myself when I undid Carwyn’s collar. People committed crimes every day. Ethan was not the sole exception to every rule, was not innocent of everything.
Acting to help people in the Dark city was like him, and not like Carwyn at all.
“Ethan gave the plans of his apartment building to the resistance,” I said. “Along with other information about the cages in Green-Wood Cemetery. You two were engaged in helping the resistance against the Light Council. You thought . . . Someone was meant to use the secret passage to talk to Charles Stryker, weren’t they? But they killed him instead.”
Nadiya began to nod, slowly and continuously. Her hijab blazed in the shadow of her hall like a flame.
“You were helping the sans-merci,” I went on.
Nadiya said, “No! Not those lunatics who have taken the city. Of course not. Ethan and I and . . . some of our friends, we wanted life to get better, for everyone, in both cities. We wanted a change in policies, to have the cages and walls taken down so there could be peace between us. We didn’t want any of this. We found people who agreed with us, who were printing pamphlets that spread the truth about how the Light Council’s policies affect the Dark city. We’ve been doing it for two years, and it never caused any harm. Ethan spoke on television, and we all celebrated his rallying call to change. That was all we wanted: change, not death. We only wanted to make a difference. We only . . . We only wanted to help.”
It wasn’t as simple as that. My Aunt Leila had started by attending speeches and passing out pamphlets. Some of th
e same people who were killing now had likely been passing out pamphlets with Ethan and Nadiya. I suspected Nadiya knew that as well as I did.
Trying to make a difference meant that you risked doing harm.
She and Ethan had at least tried to do something good. She and Ethan had meant it for the best, had wanted change and thought it could be change for the better. I didn’t feel I had a right to judge either of them when I had been so scared of losing what I had that I never tried to change anything. I had frozen myself and forced myself to be blind and deaf as well as still, and it had all been for nothing.
I had lost anyway.
“Do you have contacts in the Dark city?” I asked. “If Ethan went there, do you know where he might have gone?”
“Ethan in the Dark city?” Nadiya demanded. “Why would he go there? That would be suicide.”
Nadiya did not know anything. There were no rebels who would protect Ethan: his going had not been part of any plan. He had gone in alone, because he wanted to do the right thing. For me.
I had been so stupid, at every turn. I had thought of him as wrongfully accused, as cruelly kidnapped. I had thought of him as stumbling into danger like a helpless child who did not know what he was doing. But he had walked into danger like a knight of old, with his head held high. All this time, he had been fighting for justice and fighting for me. And I had never suspected, even when he tried to tell me: when he said that his father’s death was his fault, when he was so worried I would end up involved in the trouble he had caused. He had offered me all his secrets, and I had never dreamed he had as many secrets as I did. I had turned my face away.
I loved him, but I had failed him. I had thought of him as a victim. I had not seen that he was trying to be a hero.
“Look,” said Nadiya, “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. Not you, and certainly not Ethan. Can you believe that?”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “I believe you.”
I gave her a kiss on the cheek as we parted, still friends. The city was still burning, and Ethan was still lost.
When I got home, I found Penelope and Marie playing a game in the living room, both of them moving their pieces with shaking, fumbling fingers, and Carwyn nowhere to be seen. I presumed he was lurking in the bedroom. I banged my way inside, but I found him actually asleep.
Fury failed me, like the door falling shut behind me when I had not meant to close it. He was curled up on his side, perilously close to the sword.
Perhaps Carwyn had not slept well in whatever hideaway in the Light city he had managed to find, or in Ethan’s bed with the Strykers. Perhaps he had not slept well in the Dark city either.
I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered when the last time he had felt safe enough to sleep peacefully had been.
As soon as I had decided not to wake him, he woke. I felt the bed move as he stirred.
“Where’s my collar?” Carwyn asked suddenly.
I looked at him. He lay back on the bed, one arm behind his head, and he looked sullen but defiant. He tilted his chin to stare back at me.
“Why do you ask?” I said.
Carwyn waggled his eyebrows, and his sly expression made him look, briefly and utterly, nothing like Ethan. “I might want it for reasons.”
“I might stop talking to you altogether because I am a hundred percent done with your crap.”
Carwyn’s eyebrows drew together, serious now, as if he was annoyed or as if I had forced sincerity out of him against his will. “I might need it so that I can survive, all right? I think it’s going to be open season on Strykers in the Light city, and I should run away to be an anonymous doppelganger instead. Does that make you happy?”
“You surviving?” I asked. “I don’t care that much either way.”
“Oh, c’mon, baby, you know you don’t mean that,” said Carwyn.
“Try to remember what I just said about your crap.”
“I am remembering, and I’m absolutely serious,” said Carwyn. “You don’t care much about whether I survive or not? You, of all people. Who got me out of the hotel where everyone was dying? Who took me out on the town because she felt sorry for me, and felt even sorrier for me just seeing me treated like any doppelganger would be? Who took off my collar in the first place? Who didn’t turn me in when I came back pretending to be Ethan, even though you knew as soon as you saw me? You could have done it. You didn’t have to go to the guards. You could have gone to Ethan’s Uncle Mark—he knows all about me. He wanted me dead from the first moment he laid eyes on me: he wanted me quietly and cleanly erased out of existence, as if I was a stain on the family silver. If I had done anything to Ethan, he would have tortured the information out of me and made sure I disappeared.”
The litany of what I had done hung in the air like an accusation.
I had not done any of it because I wanted him to be grateful. I did not think I deserved gratitude: I had done the wrong thing, made so many mistakes, and so much of what I had done was because I loved Ethan, because Carwyn had saved Ethan, and because he looked like Ethan. Even though I had not wanted gratitude, I had not deserved Carwyn hurting me while he pretended to be Ethan. He had hurt me anyway.
“I was doing it because it was the right thing to do,” I said slowly. “None of it was for you. I don’t even like you.”
Carwyn blinked, then winked. Every small moment where he betrayed any uncertainty or seemed a little human, he covered over by acting worse than ever. “You sure about that?”
There was another silence. This one hung in the air like a question, rather than an accusation. I only had one answer.
“Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m really sure.”
Carwyn sat up now. He shoved himself lightly to the end of the bed, where I was sitting, and sat a careful distance away from me. I glanced over at him and wondered if I should tell him that Ethan had been the one working with the sans-merci. I figured that it wasn’t necessary. Carwyn must have always known Ethan had done it, because he knew he himself was innocent of the charges.
He had known Ethan had done it, and still he had spoken up for him and saved him. It had been too easy for me to forget, all this time, that the first thing I had ever seen Carwyn do was commit an act of mercy.
“What was it you said to me, the first day you met me?” Carwyn asked suddenly, as if he could read the beginning of my thoughts on my face but not the end. “‘I’ll collar you . . . And then I’ll hurt you’? Maybe I’ll let you. Maybe, for once, just for a change, it’s safer to be me than it is to be Ethan Stryker.”
When I opened the bedroom door, Marie and Penelope were gone, I presumed on an errand. We still needed to eat, even if the city was in chaos. I walked out of Penelope’s room and into the main room, then through the doorway into mine and Dad’s room. I heard Carwyn softly following me, but I did not look back at him.
I had thought I would have to be very quiet, that Dad would still be asleep, but the beds were all empty. Penelope must have taken him out with her. I hoped she knew what she was doing. I hoped nothing out there was disturbing or frightening him.
I knelt down on the worn wood floor. I found that the knowledge of which precise brick I had hidden the collar under had slipped my mind, something I’d thought would be branded forever in my memory as a guilty secret, lost with the rush of everything else that had happened, like the sea chasing away words written in the sand.
If even I couldn’t remember where it was, it had to be a pretty good hiding place. I put my hands flat against the wall and felt along the bricks, feeling the sharp indents on the ones that I had scraped at with a fork, and finally the real loose brick. I slid it out of the wall and put my hand into the hollow.
The first thing I touched was the chain of my mother’s necklace. I did not draw that out. I did not want Carwyn to see it.
My fingers came away gray with ash, with the bag in my palm. I unwrapped the collar from its material. I had forgotten exactly what it looked like: the shining metal divots where my
rings would fit in, to bind him and hurt him if he disobeyed.
Carwyn’s breath drew in sharply at the sight of it.
I held the collar out to him.
“Here it is,” I said. “It’s yours. I’ll put it on for you if you want, if you think people might check whether it’s sealed. Or you can take the chance, and be able to take it off. Put it on right now, put it on later, don’t ever wear it again. Do what you want with it.”
Carwyn stared at the collar but made no move to touch it. “What do you think I should do?”
“Like I said,” I answered, “it’s yours. I don’t think anyone should ever have put it on you against your will. But if you can use it to protect yourself, to make sure people won’t think you’re Ethan, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. This collar’s brought you enough trouble. If it buys you safety, I think that’s fair.”
It only occurred to me then that it might have kept Ethan safe in the Dark city, having Carwyn here in his place. But I could not snatch back the collar and hide it away again.
I didn’t really want to. Ethan would not have wanted his safety bought at the price of a lie. I had already lied and lied, and nobody was safe. I was so tired of lying.
Carwyn did touch the collar at last, running his fingers lightly over the leather and metal. His fingers brushed my hand, and he looked away from the collar and at me.
“What would you do?”
“How should I know?” I asked. “It’s not my collar. It was never my life. It’s not my call. I guess think about who you want to be, and how you want people to see you.”
Carwyn touched my rings, and then his collar. It was odd that his fingers on the metal encircling mine felt more intimate than when he touched my skin. My rings were as much a part of me as his collar had been part of him: identifying me, grounding me, branding me, anchoring me. They had kept me safe, and perhaps now they would put me in danger. And yet I knew I would never take them off.
“I think you’d use the collar to keep someone else safe,” he said. “If you could.”
I swallowed down a noise—even I did not know if it was going to be a laugh or a sob, and I was too scared of letting it be born to find out.