“I wanted you to be safe!”
I fell silent.
Conn’s hands opened and closed, and he stared at them as if something should have been there yet now was gone. “My—you heard—” His voice broke. “You saw—” His mind was really working now, tunneling through the shock to remember every moment, every detail since he’d walked away from me on the beach. “Oh God.”
“Conn.” I groped for my courage, because there was something I had to know. “What upset you?”
“What upset me?” He made a sound too harsh to be a laugh.
“No, not what I did. What upset you before you saw me, when you dropped the part you were working on?”
“The truth,” Conn snarled. “That’s what. The fact that nothing turns out the way I plan. Nothing is the way I want it to be.” He glanced at the metallic ruins around his feet and then simply stared, as if counting all the broken things.
I was counting them, too. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have spied on you, and I won’t do it again, I swear. I’m sorry I hurt you. I didn’t know that I could be this sorry. But, Conn.” It took me a moment to speak again. “You hurt me, too.”
The anger drained out of him. He looked at me, and he looked lost.
“Conn, please tell me. What happened to you in 1997?”
He sank to the edge of the mattress and sat there, feet heavy on the floor, arms limp and resting on his knees.
Finally, in a low voice, he said, “My baby sister, Moira, had a fever.” He paused, then started again. “She was three months old. My mother couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else taking her, and my father didn’t want my mother to go alone, so they went to the Ravenswood Medical Center together. I was eight. I knew what it meant to visit the doctor. Long waits. Nowhere to run. I wanted to stay at home and play with my cars, so they asked a neighbor to look after me.
“It’s strange. I only remember pieces of my parents. The sound of my mother’s slow heart. My father’s hands showing me how to use a socket wrench. He was a mechanic, and I wanted to be one, too.” Conn’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “I didn’t want Moira, when she was first born. But then my mother put her in my arms and I fell in love. She smelled like milk. And she’s the one I remember perfectly. So curled and soft and fuzzy-headed, like a caterpillar. I always held her carefully. Sometimes she would fall asleep in my arms, and then I was proud.
“Here, orphans become wards of the state. Well, that was true for you, too. But here there is no foster care system, no adoption. All of us are tattooed with an O—” He tentatively raised a hand to touch his shoulder, and his eyes asked me if I had seen it. I looked away. Nodded. Conn shrugged a little. He said, “I was put into a school with other children like me, and when I was twelve years old, a professor from the department of education visited our class. We expected him. We knew that our careers would be chosen for us that year, and we’d be sent to different schools—special ones, where we’d practice to become whatever the government wanted us to become. I was very nervous. There was only one thing, then, that I wanted to be. And after my evaluation by the professor, I thought I was lucky. I was going to get exactly what I hoped. I was sent to the IBI Academy.”
Conn gazed up at me. “When I met you, I wanted to destroy you. I didn’t understand your game. Why you stayed solid. Why you spent time with humans. Had you recruited them? For what? Something deadly, I was sure. Something cruel.
“You seemed so smug, tight in the center of your three friends, who circled you as if you were the weakest of them, as if you were the one who could be hurt, when I knew full well you were nothing of the kind.
“I needed information. Taylor Allen and her crowd were more than happy to give me some.” He made a disdainful noise. “A lot of petty gossip. But nothing about strange disappearances, or cases of you being aggressive to other students. This made you seem even more dangerous. It was clear that you were so serious about whatever plan you had up your sleeve that you wouldn’t slip into typical Shade behavior until the moment suited you.
“The trick to catching Shades is to lull them into a false sense of confidence. And to be close enough to them when that happens, and quick enough. I had to get close to you.”
“‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’” I said.
“‘The Love Song.’” He nodded. “It didn’t make sense that you’d play through the charade of being my class partner, but then you’d already played through every charade high school had to offer, and you didn’t know what I was. Yet … the more I talked with you, the more I began to doubt what I knew. You were either the most deceitful person I’d ever met, or”—his voice dropped—“the sweetest. Quick. Funny. Passionate about what touched you, sensitive to small details. And when you told me about your past, and I read your file—”
I winced.
“—I had an insane thought.” Conn’s eyes held mine. “I wished I could be like you. Because I saw that you hadn’t let your past rule the person you’d become. You were not bitter. In fact”—he gave a short, hollow laugh—“you seemed to think that most of your foster parents were good people. You cherished your friends and your art, and you weren’t angry at your life. I am angry, Darcy.” He rubbed at his hand, at the blood where the screwdriver had cut him. “I am bitter.”
“You arrested me.”
“I … I was living in a topsy-turvy world where my enemy was my friend and insanity seemed like the most perfectly sane thing. I asked myself if what I felt was worth another Ravenswood. I decided it wasn’t.” Conn looked up to where I’d been standing, motionless, the entire time. “I can’t ask you to forgive me. But I want you to understand.”
I lowered myself to sit on the floor. Then I reached across the distance between us to rest my scarred hand on his. “I do,” I said.
34
Conn looked at my hand with astonishment, so I drew it back. A silence fell between us, one that didn’t end until he lifted his gaze to meet mine and it occurred to me that he might be longing for his privacy after having had so little of it. He might want to be alone in this apartment that was perfectly oriented around the needs of one person. He probably didn’t want to see my face, which must have been a constant reminder of everything he had lost. But Conn wouldn’t be the type to say so.
I cleared my throat. “I have to go. My meeting with Meridian is soon.”
He nodded and seemed like he might speak.
“I’ll see you on Monday,” I told him. “At the museum.”
“You will?” There was a catch in his voice.
“Yes.”
* * *
AT THE SANCTUARY, I discovered Orion pacing in my bedroom.
I placed my hands on my hips, annoyed—though, admittedly, this did seem like karmic punishment for me entering where I wasn’t wanted. “Did I say you could come in here uninvited?”
“You never minded before,” he said, sulky.
And that was true, for I had been lonely and the Sanctuary always felt empty—so large and quiet and spattered with shadows that were only echoes of people who never showed me their faces. Not like Orion. He had always been real.
But that was not enough.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
I bristled. “Out. Do I ask you how you spend your days?”
“I wish you would. It would be a sign that you cared.”
“Orion.” I sighed. I had been hoping for some time to calm my nerves. Time to sort through everything I had learned that day, and through my own raw feelings. The last thing I needed was this. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re cutting it awfully fine.”
“What?”
“Your meeting with Meridian.” He folded his arms and drummed the fingers of one hand. “I thought we could celebrate beforehand.”
“Celebrate what?” I stared. “Do you … do you mean Meridian’s mission?” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice. In my mind, I saw babies gasping for air as gas pumped through
hospital floors. People choking and twisting and knowing, knowing what was happening to them, knowing that they were going to die. It was as if Ravenswood had been a shadow, and after I heard Conn’s story, it had become flesh and blood. I couldn’t pretend anymore that Meridian’s plan might be innocent. It couldn’t be.
“Of course,” said Orion. “You’re about to become a contributing member of the Society. It means you will truly be one of us.”
I stood still, trying to school my face into a glad expression. Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet, J. Alfred Prufrock says. Yet I had seen pure honesty today. I had stolen Conn’s privacy and still he had chosen to open himself up to me, to let me see everything I had asked for, even if it hurt.
Truth was like an exploding star: violent, glitteringly beautiful. Now that I had seen it, felt it, it was impossible to settle for anything less. Yet I had to pretend.
“Yeah,” I told Orion. “It’s great. I can’t wait.”
Relief washed across his face. He slipped a hand around my waist, dragged me forward, and covered my lips with his.
I squirmed and tried to tell him to stop, but his mouth garbled my words, making them sound like they came from underwater. Then Orion laughed, and the sound cut through me, because I realized why he was laughing.
I was acting like a human.
I vanished from his arms and reappeared at a safe distance.
“I taught you that!” Orion cried. “I have helped you and helped you, and now you cast me aside!”
“No,” I said. “Help is freely given. You did something else. My body isn’t a bargaining chip. It’s not yours just because you want it, or because you think I owe you something.”
“I do want you,” Orion said. “But not like you say. Not only that.” He took a step forward.
I took a step back. “No.”
In a resentful voice he said, “There’s someone else.”
My mind reeled with the sudden fear that Orion knew. That he had been following me all along. That he had seen me with Conn. “But…” I groped for something to say. “That’s impossible. Since my trial, I’ve seen no one but you and Savannah. It’s not as if the Sanctuary is crawling with people our age—or people who look our age.”
“Oh, they’re here. I told them to stay away from you.”
“You did what? Do you have any idea how … isolated I’ve felt? How much I’ve needed friends?”
“Yes,” he said, and that word was his revenge.
I looked at the art supplies lined along the wall, wishing for a pot of black paint so I could pour it over Orion’s face. “Take me to meet Meridian,” I said. “After that, I don’t want to see you again.”
* * *
“WELCOME, WELCOME!” Meridian spread her hands as if they could hold the entire practice room. The trunks that had once been filled with IBI flamethrowers, I saw, were flung open and empty. Orion slipped into a corner of the room, where he brooded.
Meridian was flanked by Veldt and Loam, the hulking Shade who had voted for me at my trial. “I hear you’ve been making great progress, Darcy,” he said.
Veldt asked, “Are you ready to do something for your people?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Don’t worry.” Meridian smiled at my expression. “It’s easy. Unless you want something more challenging?”
“Easy’s good.”
“All right. We want you to—”
“Wait a sec.” I shot a glance at Orion. “I thought this was supposed to be top secret,” I told Meridian. “No one else is supposed to know about my task. Orion should leave.”
“Orion’s my son,” Meridian said. “He already knows everything.”
“You do?” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You said you didn’t.”
He shrugged.
“Ah.” Loam chuckled. “A lovers’ quarrel.”
“Now, Darcy,” said Meridian. “I appreciate that you’re eager to be part of the mission. Of course you’re curious. But you’re involved on a need-to-know basis. Orion’s right to keep details from you, despite your relationship.”
“There is no relationship,” I said flatly.
Meridian glanced at Orion, who shrugged again. She paused, seeming to reorder her understanding of the situation at hand. “Then you shouldn’t resent his secrecy,” she said. “Can we count on you to emulate it?”
I turned so that I couldn’t see Orion, not even out of the corner of my vision. “Yes.”
“Excellent,” she said. “I understand that you enjoy exploring Chicago, and have visited some of the tourist sites downtown.”
Orion could have told her this, of course, but a gleam of certainty in Meridian’s eyes made me gasp. “You followed me, that first day.”
“The Society does have strict regulations about spying on our own kind,” she said, “but I hope you’ll agree that what I did was necessary. I wanted to make certain that exploring was all you were doing. And given my son’s interest—” She paused. “Well. Regardless. I was pleased to see how shocked you were by Cecil Deacon’s home, and the way humans revere the Great Fire. And Orion had been right when he suggested at your trial that you could easily disguise yourself. No one on the streets looked at you suspiciously, not even when you were elbowing your way through the farmers’ market. It’s almost uncanny.” Her eyes measured me. “You carry yourself like one of them. There’s a certain … weight to the way you stand. It’s not exactly attractive, but it will help you complete your task.”
“You want me to pass as human.”
Veldt said, “Specifically, we want you to pretend to be an IBI officer.” He misread my expression. “Don’t worry, we have a uniform for you.”
“And these.” Loam handed me a pack of contact lenses with green irises. “They’re contraband, exactly for the reason that we’re giving them to you. The Society makes a lot of money by bringing them from the Alter and selling them on the black market.”
“Even humans can be born with dark hair and eyes,” Veldt explained. “Not Shade black, of course. There’s nothing like that. But those human fools don’t see the loveliness in darkness. They dye it. They hide it.”
“But what am I supposed to do?” I said.
“You will direct the flow of humans,” said Meridian. “It’s very simple. All you have to do is tell the human herd where to go.”
“Where, exactly?”
“We will tell you that the day of.”
“Day of what? When?” I said, frustrated.
The three exchanged glances. “I think she should know that,” Loam said. “She needs to prepare herself.”
Meridian nodded. “New Year’s Eve.”
That was barely two weeks away. “But what will happen?” I said, hopeless for any real answer.
Meridian smiled. “We’re going to throw a party.”
35
Conn was waiting for me inside the doors of the empty art museum, his face framed by a pane of glass. I manifested at the top of the museum steps, yet Conn didn’t notice me until I knocked at the door, and then he startled.
He opened the door. “You could have ghosted your way inside.”
“This was more polite. More human,” I said, stepping into the lobby. “I appeared on the steps so you’d see me coming.”
Conn shook his head. “Someone else might have noticed you. Next time, just come right in, okay? Don’t expose yourself, especially not for my sake.”
“You didn’t see me anyway.”
“No,” he said. “I was thinking.”
“About what?”
He smiled. “You. I was thinking about you so hard I didn’t even see you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and when Conn sensed my awkwardness he hastened to add, “Don’t mind me. I’m in a strange mood.”
“Like when we met in the library?”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly like that.”
His words echoed, then murmured, then vanished. We stood in a high-domed chamber
with curved walls that swept around us in a perfect circle painted the color of lace or bone. The dome was robin’s egg blue. I could see frosted doors on the other side, which I assumed led to the galleries. No art hung on the walls here. It was a bare space. Vast. Yet also somehow intimate, maybe because the only sounds we could hear were the ones we made with our bodies and our words.
I groped for a way to explain how the room made me feel. “It’s like we’re inside an egg, and are going to hatch.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s an in-between place.”
I cracked open the frosted doors.
We entered a hall lined with statues, and I recognized some—not from the Art Institute I knew, but from books. In my world, those sculptures didn’t belong in Chicago, but in galleries far away, like one classical statue of the goddess Diana that I was pretty sure should have been in a collection in New York City.
The works after 1871 were fascinating. Most were completely new to me, but some were made by artists born soon before the Great Fire, and I almost recognized these sculptures, except for little twists of difference. Rodin’s famous statue “The Thinker” was called “The Dreamer” here. The sculpted man sat, his chin propped on his fist like the one I knew, but in this world he was looking up, not down.
“I suppose I should give you my report,” I said with reluctance and also some surprise that Conn hadn’t asked for it already.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Let’s get that over with. I wish we could just enjoy the museum. I wish we didn’t have to talk about the Society. But we should.”
I told him what I knew about the task Meridian had given me, and her plans for New Year’s Eve.
“A party?” Conn said. “You’re supposed to … herd humans?”
“I know. Doesn’t sound good, does it? They already made me practice yesterday afternoon. I dressed up in the IBI uniform and stood in the middle of a street intersection, stopping cars and telling people when they could cross the street. The humans obeyed. None of them looked at me twice. Meridian was thrilled.”
Conn furrowed his brow. “And she hasn’t said anything else about this … party.”