Tandem (39 page)

“Yes, of course,” she said, with an inscrutable glimmer in her eye. “Who else?”

When his mother was gone, Thomas stood at the end of the driveway and reached into his pocket, pulling out a blue origami star. Gloria had sent him back for a few things she’d forgotten to pack for Sasha, and he’d seen it lying on her bedside table. Normally he wouldn’t have touched anything he wasn’t explicitly told to bring, but it had seemed out of place and significant, calling out to him to pick it up and open it. So he had.

Now he opened it once more.

T—I’m sorry, but I can’t. I wish I was better, but I’m not. —J

THIRTY

As it turned out, there wasn’t much to do at Asthall Cottage after dinner. I ended up playing hearts with Callum, who was extremely good at it and beat me three hands out of four. Finally, I pled exhaustion and turned in for the night. Callum walked me to my room, lingering at the door.

“I like it out here,” he told me. “It’s so peaceful.”

“Me too,” I told him. It was such a relief to be away from most—if not all—of the prying eyes at the Citadel.

“When we’re married, we should come out here all the time,” Callum said. “Every weekend if we can.”

“That’s a good idea,” I murmured. Briefly, I tried to pretend that I was actually getting married to Callum, that any of his plans for the future might come to pass. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant prospect—if I was going to be forced into marriage, there was no one I could think of better suited to being a husband than the sweet, considerate young prince—but it didn’t feel
right,
either, and not only because I was way too young to get married.

He kissed me on the cheek. “See you in the morning.”

I smiled. “See you.”

He got halfway down the hallway before turning back. “You know what’s weird?”

“What?” I asked, hand on the doorknob. It was ridiculous, but I was overjoyed by the fact that all the doors in Asthall had
knobs
. There were no panels, no biometric scanners, no codes to memorize. I could have stayed there forever.

“In a few days, we’ll be sleeping in the same bed,” he said, raising a playful eyebrow.

I swallowed hard. “Yeah. Weird. Well, good night!” I slipped through the bedroom door and shut it firmly. Kissing Callum was one thing, but sleeping in the same bed with him … we had to find Juliana by then. We just
had
to. I did the calculations in my head. Two days. We were running out of time.

“Hey.”

I jumped. “Thomas, you scared me. What are you doing in here?”

He rose from where he was sitting, in an armchair close to the window. “I was hoping to talk to you,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“About what?” I sat down on the bed and watched as he paced the room. “How jealous I am? And manipulative? Are you here to call me a liar again?”

“Stop, please.” He hung his head in shame. “I spoke to my mother, and I asked her when the last time was that she’d seen Lucas. She told me that he came out to her house for her birthday, April eleventh. Except Lucas told me that he’d just gotten back from seeing her this weekend. Which means that first of all, he lied, and second of all, there’s no explanation for his absence during the time when you saw him in your visions.”

I sat perfectly still, not even breathing. I knew where he was going with this, but I wasn’t going to make it easy on him, not after the things he’d said to me.

“And I found this.” He held up the origami star. “On the nightstand in Juliana’s room. Do you know what it says?”

I nodded. “I saw her write it. Through the tether.”

“You were right. About all of it.” He shook his head, despair etched all over his face. “She left. She turned her back on us and she left. I thought bringing you here would buy us time to rescue her, but she doesn’t want to be rescued. I ripped you out of your world for nothing. I’m so sorry, Sasha. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Please don’t,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. I was so tired, and he looked so sad, that my anger evaporated. “It’s all right. If I were you, I wouldn’t have believed me, either. She’s your friend, he’s your brother. I’m just some girl you barely know.”

“No, that’s not true,” he insisted. “You’re not just some girl. And you would’ve believed me. But I couldn’t … I couldn’t bring myself to see what was right in front of my eyes. I didn’t want to see that I was wrong, that I was capable of being wrong.”

“We’re all capable of being wrong,” I whispered.

“I didn’t want to be. I’m supposed to be better than that; otherwise what was all my training for?” He sighed. “I let you down. You deserve better.”

“So do you,” I said fiercely. I stood and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, pulling him close to me. I could smell the comforting piney scent of his cologne and feel a faint heat rising off his skin; his cheeks and ears were flushed, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to look directly at me, as if I was an eclipse, a dangerous celestial event. “You trusted them and they betrayed you. You would never have done that to them.”

He stared at me, struck dumb, then took me by my wrists and pressed my hands against his chest. “I’m taking you home,” he said, his voice hoarse. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost—he was pale, wide-eyed, trembling—but there was something building inside him, something strong and resolute. I imagined I could see it swirling in the darkness of his pupils.

“What? When?”

“As soon as possible. Tomorrow, if I can manage it.”

“Why now? We haven’t found Juliana yet.” I had a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Shouldn’t I have been excited to go home? Wasn’t that what I wanted? Yet while a part of me was excited, another part was full of dread.

“I don’t care,” Thomas said. “You’re not safe here. That Libertas bombing … if you had gotten really hurt, or God forbid
died,
I would never have forgiven myself. I can’t believe there was ever a time when I thought I could justify bringing you here and putting you in so much danger. I can’t turn back time and make a different choice, but I can do this.”

“How are you going to do it without the General finding out?”

“I don’t know. I’ll start by asking Dr. Moss if he has an extra anchor, or if somehow he can get me the remote that controls yours,” Thomas said. He was growing frantic now, which worried me. I’d never seen him this unspooled before. I was afraid he was going to do something stupid and rash. “I turned it in to the General when we arrived at the Citadel, but maybe Mossie can get it back under the pretense of having to fix it or something … I haven’t thought it all through yet. But I’m going to make it happen if it kills me.”

“No,” I protested. “No, I’m not going to let you do that. You’ll get in so much trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Thomas insisted.

“How can you say that? How can you—?” The words stuck in my throat. “How can you think I’d go home and leave you to deal with the fallout?”

“You have to,” he said. “There’s no way for both of us to get out of this, and if one of us is going to get their life back, it has to be you. Don’t you see that?”

“I won’t go!” I cried, digging my nails into the fabric of his jacket. “Not until Juliana’s back. There are other lives at stake here, not just ours. You told me that.”

“There’s more than one way to stop a war,” he told me. “I’ll figure something out. You don’t have to be part of this. It’s not your world. It’s not your problem.”

“I can’t go home yet. I refuse to let you send me back.”

“For God’s sake, Sasha,
why?
”

“Because,” I said in a near-whisper. “I’m not ready to leave you.”

The frankness of my admission seemed to catch him off guard, but I was tired of hiding how I felt, from him and from myself. He had a right to know, and I had a right to say it.

The shock of what I’d revealed wore off in seconds, and then I was in his arms. His lips fit perfectly against mine. The kiss was tentative at first, and we were both shaking. He started to pull away, but I grabbed him by the back of his neck and pushed myself up hard against him, tangling my fingers in his hair and letting my tongue graze his top lip softly, sending a shudder down his spine. Thomas held my head in his hands, cradling it like a precious object. His lips roamed the soft planes of my face, pressing against my cheek, my temple, the corner of my eye. He traced the ridge of my jaw with kisses. I arched my back, offering him the smooth skin of my neck to kiss, gasping, breathless, before pulling him back up to meet my mouth once again. The weight of him kept me from floating away, atom by atom, into the universe.

We came apart then, our foreheads and noses touching, as if we couldn’t bear to fully separate. We grinned at each other, both giddy with a sense of release.

“What are we doing?” he panted, happily bewildered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t want to stop.”

“Sasha,” he breathed. I loved the way he said my name, like an incantation, like a magic word. “What are we going to do? We’re from—”

“I know,” I said, nodding frantically. “I know that this can’t go on forever, but I also know that I’m not ready to lose you, and tonight I don’t care what’s right or what’s not. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. Then he kissed me again, harder this time, a kiss full of long-suppressed wanting that echoed my own.

In the middle of the night, I awoke to pounding at my door. I rose from a dreamless sleep, untroubled by visions of Juliana, with the imprint of Thomas’s lips on my own. I smiled as I went to the door, knowing that there was only one person who could be on the other side.

But when I opened it, I found myself face to face not with Thomas, but with Callum. He was so excited he couldn’t even stand still.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and dragging me down the hallway. “I have something I want to show you.”

“Callum, it’s almost dawn!” I hissed. “Where are we going?”

“Remember when we were talking about those things your father’s been saying?” Callum said, charging ahead.

“Yeah?” I rubbed my eyes, shaking off his grip. I was trying not to betray my annoyance, but it was proving difficult. “What about them?”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since, how he kept saying ‘touch and go.’ It sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I woke up just now and I remembered.” He stopped suddenly. We were standing in front of a metal door that was out of place in Asthall’s otherwise old-fashioned interiors. It was the entrance to the KES situation room, and unlike every other door at the cottage it had an LCD lock. Callum pointed to it. “Look what’s written there.”

I crouched down and peered at the console. Sure enough, there were three words etched into the metal of the panel’s frame. “No way,” I breathed.

The label read
TOUCH AND GO
.

“It’s the brand name!” Callum cried, grinning proudly. “These are the same consoles you have at the Castle.”

I squeezed his arm. “Good job, Cal! I can’t believe you even saw that.”

He shrugged happily. “I guess all that paying attention to doors and windows has finally paid off.”

“It sure has. How much do you want to bet that one, one, two, three, five, eight is an access code?”

“Could be,” he said. “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, this is sort of exciting.”

“Although …” I chewed at my lip. “Like you said, all the consoles are the same. So the access code could be for any room in the Castle. There are hundreds of them! What are we going to do, go around to every single one and try it to see if it works?”

“I guess we could,” he said, less enthusiastic now.

“That might take days. And you never know—it could be the code to a room in the Tower, or anywhere in the Citadel for that matter. Someone’s going to wonder what the hell we’re doing long before we get to all of them.”

“Okay,” he conceded. “But don’t you think it’s more likely that the room the code opens has something to do with the king himself? If he’s trying to give you clues, he has to believe that you know which room, or could at least figure it out.”

He was right. The only problem was that I wasn’t Juliana. The king’s real daughter might have known instinctively what he was trying to tell her, but that would’ve been just between the two of them. Even Thomas couldn’t help with this.

“I have no idea,” I said, the thought of Thomas, of the last time I’d seen him, making me woozy. “It’s not the code to his room, and anyway he didn’t move there until after his … accident.”

“The royal bedroom?”

“You mean the one he shared with the queen?” I considered it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Either way, we need to go back to the Castle,” Callum said. “In the morning, first thing.”

“That would raise an awful lot of eyebrows.” Not to mention that it would attract the General’s attention, which I absolutely did not want. But it didn’t seem like I had a choice. If the king
was
trying to tell Juliana something, who knew what it could be? What if it was urgent? I’d wasted so much time thinking his exclamations were nonsense. I didn’t have a second to lose.

“Who cares? You’re the princess, you can do whatever you want.”

I gave it some careful thought. “Okay. I’ll tell Gloria we want to go back.”

Callum took my face in the palm of his hands and kissed me deeply. It took all I had in me not to squirm away, my mind full of strong memories of another kiss. “This is so exciting!” he cried when we separated.

“Shhh, keep your voice down.” But I couldn’t help laughing. I’d never seen him this animated, not even earlier by the ocean.

But all I could think of was how much I wanted to tell Thomas.