Tether (3 page)

“Second,” she continued, “that Terminus is complete.”

“No,” Hypatia interjected. A tall, elegant woman with the dark coloring of a New Lands native, Hypatia was sitting to Erastos’s right, a symbol of her status as his second-in-command. “There’s still the matter of the energy source. Terminus might be structurally sound, but it won’t work without fuel.”

“I said I had three things to report.” Hypatia stiffened, duly chastened. The Tetractys might not have liked Selene, but they owed her deference. “Third, that Kairos’s last prophecy concerns how we will power the Terminus device.”

The Tetractys murmured to each other in excitement. Selene smiled; she liked shocking them. Erastos bent his head as Hypatia spoke into his ear. He cleared his throat, and the rest of the Tetractys fell silent. “And what does it say?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.” Selene could communicate the meanings of the prophecies, but the words themselves remained between the Korydallos and her Learner. “What I can tell you is that the energy source cannot be found on Taiga. Or, to be more precise, it cannot be found only on Taiga.”

“Meaning?”

“I need you to send me to the other world.” She’d been nervous about making the request, but in the end it was easy. She was so certain of her interpretation. She hadn’t always been, with the other prophecies, but each time she’d been right, as Corinna had assured her she would be.

“There is a reason each generation has only one Korydallos,” Corinna had said. “It isn’t something you can learn. It is something you feel, something that comes from deep within you and high above you—a true gift of
apeiron.
You are blessed, my child. Do not doubt yourself, and do not tolerate anyone who doubts you.” It had been difficult for Selene to believe in the supremacy of her own instincts as a thirteen-year-old Fourth Tier, barely out of the crèche, but she had learned, with Corinna’s guidance. It had all been in preparation for this moment, the beginning of the beginning. The Tetractys couldn’t stop her.

“Absolutely not,” Erastos scoffed. “We’re not going to send
you
through the veil.”

“Why not?” Selene argued. “I know what I’m doing. I can find the energy source and bring it back, and when I do, Terminus will finally be complete. The new world, Erastos. It’s within our grasp.” She examined her bare wrists, imagining the left one branded with the traveler’s mark.

“You’re seventeen!” he protested. “You don’t know what it’s like over there.”

“And you do?” Her eyes burned with the thrill of the challenge. Despite Erastos’s bluster, she was confident that she would have her way.

“I’ve read the reports,” Erastos continued. “It’s not like Home. There are barbarians who wage war with each other, who kill each other over nothing. It’s a moral wasteland. You wouldn’t last a day in that world, and I will not send our Korydallos through the veil only to meet her end!”

“I’m stronger than you give me credit for,” Selene insisted. “And I’m clever. You can send someone else through—send dozens if you like—but they won’t find them. They can’t find them. I’m the only one who can.”

“Them?” Erastos’s face was growing red with the effort it took to contain his anger. Selene could see that he was reaching his breaking point. She’d never been told not to speak of the veil and the world beyond; still, it was a topic not many had the temerity to broach. But she wasn’t one to avoid taboo subjects. She liked being controversial. It made her feel in control.

“The fuel cells,” she said. “There is more than one.”
Three,
she thought.
We need three.

“Tell us where they are and we’ll send someone for them.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I’m the only one who can successfully retrieve them.” She lowered her voice. “I’m no ordinary Listener, Erastos; you know this. I see things clearly, and I have never been wrong. You must trust me.”

Suddenly, she rose. The members of the Tetractys murmured in shock. It was against the rules for anyone to leave the Tetractys’s chambers before being dismissed, but Selene wasn’t just anyone. She was their Korydallos. And she meant to show them just how certain she was.

For the third time since I started my shift, my phone went off. It vibrated, then buzzed to tell me I had a voice mail. I ducked into the break room and dug the phone out of my pocket. Five missed calls, one from Gina and four from Grant, plus several text messages, also from Grant, all asking the same thing:
Where are you?
I pressed play, dreading to hear what Grant had to say.

Where are you, Sasha? I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. If you’re supposed to be my girlfriend, the least you can do is pick up the phone. Call me as soon as you get this.
My hands shook as I deleted the message. I knew I should call him back. I’d been ignoring him for hours, and Grant didn’t do well when left to his own devices. I took a deep breath, then exhaled, repeating my mantra—
Everything is fine
—the way my therapist had instructed me to do whenever I felt anxious. Sometimes it helped, but this was not one of those times.

“Earth to Sasha.” My boss, Johnny, snapped his fingers in front of my face. I hadn’t even seen him come in. “Anybody home in there? What are you doing? You already took your fifteen.”

“Sorry,” I said, gripping the phone so hard I was surprised it didn’t break. “I just need a few minutes. I have to deal with something. It’s personal.”

“We’ve got a whole restaurant full of people, and they’d like to eat sometime this century. Your personal something is going to have to wait until you’re off the clock. Move.” He swatted me out of the break room and over to the hostess podium.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. A stack of menus slipped through my fingers and tumbled to the floor, fanning across the linoleum like playing cards. I bent to pick them up, stammering more apologies. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I guess I’m just a little out of it today.”

Johnny scoffed. “Today and every day since you started this summer. What’s going on with you, Sasha? I don’t remember you being like this last summer.”

Last summer. Quite a bit had changed since then.

My disappearance on prom night hadn’t exactly flown under the radar in Hyde Park, the sleepy little neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where I’d lived since I was seven. It’d been headline news, and there was no end to the theories people had dreamed up to explain it. The most popular story was that Grant and I had eloped to Las Vegas in a fit of foolish teenage passion, returning only when it turned out we couldn’t get married because I was underage. Grant and I had decided to let that particular rumor grow legs, to lie low and ride it out as best we could, because even if we could have told people where we’d really gone, they wouldn’t have believed us. It was better to let them think what they wanted.

“I just seated someone at table twenty-three,” Johnny told me. “Go do your job.”

I was grateful for a reason to ignore Grant’s voice mail, but
if I avoided him for too long, he’d show up at the restaurant. Work was where I came to get away from him and everything he reminded me of: where we’d really been while we were missing, what had happened to us there, and Thomas, the boy from another world who shared his face. If I let myself dwell on that too much, I really would lose my mind, and I couldn’t afford to be the crazy one. Grant had that base pretty much covered.

Grant had come home damaged: distant and temperamental, prone to fits of anger and bouts of impenetrable silence. He’d retreated from everyone he knew—his mother, his friends, everyone … except me. Maybe it was because I understood what he’d been through, or maybe it was just because I put up with him. For whatever reason, Grant trusted me. I was his touchstone, the thing that reminded him what was real, and for better or worse, he was mine. It would’ve been so much easier, though, if he looked like
anyone
else.

Each minute spent with Grant was a million tiny paper cuts on my heart. The slope of his nose, his golden-blond hair, his broad, well-muscled shoulders—even his restlessness—reminded me of Thomas. There were times I couldn’t even stand to look at Grant, when the reality of everything he wasn’t became too painful to face. I’d been a prisoner in Aurora, but Thomas had freed me. He’d fought for me. He’d
believed
in me, in what I was capable of and what I could become, something I hadn’t even known I needed until I got it. And then he’d let me go.

But really, I lost him. I allowed him to slip away, because I was afraid to turn my back on the only life I’d ever known. I hadn’t been home for more than ten minutes before I fully regretted the choices that had brought me there. I should have stayed in Aurora. My work there wasn’t finished, and
I hadn’t wanted to leave, not really. I’d never believed in fate before Thomas, before the series of events that changed my life forever, but I was starting to. I was as certain as I’d ever been about anything that my destiny was waiting for me on the other side of the tandem, the mysterious veil that separated our worlds. But I wasn’t foolish enough to assume that it would wait forever.

The world in which I was born didn’t feel like home anymore, and probably never would again. Everything was so familiar, yet so dizzyingly unreal, like a movie set, and Grant was just a paper copy of the boy I’d left behind. But I refused to fall apart. I was made of stronger stuff—my time in Aurora had taught me that—and crumbling to pieces was a waste of Thomas’s sacrifice. So I did the only thing I could think of: I got a job. A job I was really sucking at.

Table twenty-three was in the back of the restaurant, and there was only one person sitting at it, hidden behind an open menu. I took a deep breath and pasted a smile onto my face. “Hi. My name is Sasha, and I’ll be your server. What can I get you?”

The customer lowered the menu, and I realized with a start that it was Gina. My best friend, or she had been; we hadn’t spoken since my return, though not for lack of trying on her part. My skin grew hot as her eyes met mine.

“Hi,” she said. There was an edge to her voice.

“What are you doing here?” I should’ve known she’d keep trying. Gina wasn’t the sort of person to take the hint and walk away. Part of me was glad she hadn’t given up on me yet, but our relationship was a relic of a much simpler past, and there was nothing I could think of that could fix it.

“I called you,” Gina said. “I call you all the time, but you never answer. What was I supposed to do?”

“Would you like something to drink?” I asked, trying to keep my tone light and impersonal. I stared at my notepad so hard I could’ve burned a hole right through it.
Just go away,
I thought.
Please, please, please just go
away.

Honestly, I was
desperate
to talk to Gina. All I wanted to do was tell her the truth about what had happened, to unburden myself to her, to
someone
I trusted, but she wouldn’t believe me, and I couldn’t bear to have her look at me like I was crazy.

“Let’s just talk, okay? Like friends. We’re still friends, right?”