Tether (30 page)

“We were just going over our plan for tonight,” Thomas told us. “Gunner, go into the antechamber and see if you can find adrenaline in the supply locker.”

“Adrenaline?” I asked as Cora disappeared into the adjacent room.

“It can counteract most of the sedatives in use today,” he said. “I used it on you once. Do you remember?”

“No,” I said. “Wait—back at the Tower? After I passed out in the Tattered City?” When I woke up in the Tower, I felt much better than I had when I’d lost consciousness in the alley, after our scuffle with Libertas, except for a tiny pinprick on my finger, which I instantly wrote off. “You injected me with adrenaline?”

Thomas nodded. “You passed out because of the tandem sickness, and I kept you under artificially until we got to Columbia City. I thought it’d be easier, under the circumstances.”
Since you kept trying to run away
was what he meant. “But then I had to wake you up, so …”

“Aren’t you clever,” I said flatly. The memory of that day had faded, pushed aside by more urgent concerns, but now it flooded back. I remembered how lost I’d felt in this new, dangerous world, how much I’d hated Thomas for bringing me through the tandem, how the fear at being separated from my true home had hollowed me out. So much had changed in the months since I woke up to find myself in Aurora, but the scars of that first time lingered, and they ached now as I realized that getting used to something wasn’t the same thing as getting past it.

When Cora returned, she was carrying a small metal suitcase packed with black foam. Inside were six vials of adrenaline and a package of hypodermic needles sealed in plastic.

“That should be enough,” Thomas told her. “Everybody take some.”

“What if one of us finds her first?” Selene asked, either reading the question in my mind or thinking of it on her own.

“You’ll each be with an agent,” Thomas said. He hesitated. “Unless you’d be willing to stay out of this completely. Hear
me out,” he went on as Selene and I started to protest. “Libertas would like nothing more than to get their hands on all three of you. Having the queen in their custody is a victory, but capturing her two look-alikes as well would be even better, especially considering how the General used Sasha to thwart their first attempt to use Juliana as leverage. They don’t understand what you are, but they must see that you’re dangerous.

“Also,” he said as Callum appeared on the stairs, “I’d rather not bring the prince if I can help it.”

“Yeah, right,” Callum said, staring Thomas down. “I’m going. Juliana is
my
fiancée. I’m not going to just sit around like some pampered baby waiting for you all to rescue her. I’ve been in the catacombs before. I can help guide you through them.”

“You need us, too,” Selene said. “Sasha and I have a direct connection to Juliana. It’s the fastest and the easiest way to find her. If you leave us behind, you’ll be searching for her blindly, and you’ll likely fail.”

“All due respect, Your Highness, the wedding is off and the treaty has been broken,” Thomas reminded Callum. “Juliana isn’t any more your fiancée than Tim is.” Tim rolled his eyes. Thomas turned to Selene and me. “And, yeah, you might be able to help us find her faster, but we’re all trained agents of the King’s Elite Service—we’re more than capable of extracting Juliana without your connection, which, let’s be honest, you might not even be able to use if they’re keeping Juliana sedated.”

“They’re what?” Callum snapped.

“I’d feel much better about all this if you three stayed here while we look for Juliana,” Thomas said. He looked at me with a silent plea in his eyes, as if he thought I would back
him up. He was probably right: we were a lot safer right where we were, and if I were him I would suggest the same thing. But there was no way Selene and I were going to let the KES rescue Juliana without us. She was one of us—it was our duty to help her—but more than anything else, we just didn’t trust them enough. If we stayed behind, who was to say we’d ever see them—or Juliana—again?

I shook my head. “We’re going.”

Thomas sighed. “It was worth a try.”

The Night of the Masks didn’t properly start until late in the evening, so at eleven p.m. we donned our masks and party clothes and headed out into the Tattered City. As it turned out, Thomas did decide to leave someone behind; he’d assigned Rocko to stay at the safe house with Fillmore in case things went bad and extra help was needed. Fillmore seemed happy to be kept out of the fray—as a support agent, he couldn’t have gone with us anyway, even if he’d wanted to—but Rocko was livid. He spent most of the afternoon crashing around the safe house, glaring at Thomas and muttering mutinous things under his breath.

The revelry had begun as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the blocked-off streets were teeming with people on their way to clubs and parties. They were drunk and lively, and I wondered if they all suspected, somehow, that this was their last Carnival Columbia, that the world was changing and soon they wouldn’t recognize it.

We walked to Martyr, which was only ten blocks away from the safe house. Thomas had instructed us not to call too much attention to ourselves by clumping together—“Big groups are bad signs, and Libertas will be on alert more than usual tonight”—so we kept our distance, threading into the
crowds as if we, too, were just looking for a good party. The tether was humming like a beehive, which made it easy to keep track of Selene even though I couldn’t see her. I kept my eyes on Thomas’s golden head about ten feet ahead of me. The only person I was afraid of losing in the scrum was Callum, so I slipped my hand into his and squeezed. I half expected him to pull away; Callum had avoided me all day, and I got the feeling he was still mad at me. But he squeezed back.

“You nervous?” I asked.

“No. Why would I be nervous?” His mask covered only the top part of his face, so I could see his false smile in the undulating light of the aurora.

“Right. Me neither,” I lied. As if he sensed my anxiety, Thomas turned and met my eyes; we might have been wearing masks, but concern for me showed all over his body. I nodded at him, and he smiled, too; I was too far away to tell if he meant it or was just pretending everything was fine for my sake.

Martyr had been built in the hollowed-out remains of a neo-Gothic cathedral. The stone spires rose above the surrounding structures. The stained-glass windows winked in the light thrown off by firecrackers blossoming in the distant sky, and, as always, the aurora threw a faint green wash over everything. The line outside Martyr snaked around the block, and Thomas’s team, now deployed on their mission, began to snuggle into its folds two by two, like animals boarding Noah’s ark.

“Are you religious, Sasha?” Callum whispered as we took our places.

“Not exactly,” I told him. I believed in something greater than myself, but I still wasn’t sure what that was. Maybe I would never know.

“I am,” he told me. “I’m trying to take it as a good sign that this is all going down inside a church.”

“I hope you’re right about that,” I said, gazing up at the massive stone arch that guarded the door to Martyr. “We need all the help we can get.”

Thomas shoved his hands into his pockets and felt the small bulk of his KES ring. He couldn’t wear it inside Martyr; a hawk-eyed Libertas agent could pick it out in seconds, and it would blow their cover. He watched from the other side of the street as Sergei, playing just a little drunk, ushered Sasha into the line, leaving Callum to Cora; the crowd quickly engulfed all four of them. Thomas took Selene’s hand, careful not to imagine it was Sasha’s, and led her to the back to wait their turn. He hadn’t wanted to leave Sasha to someone else’s care, but the need to keep a close eye on Selene trumped the urge to fasten himself to Sasha’s side. The more space there was between them, the easier it would be to say goodbye; at least, that was what he told himself.

“Your world is very strange,” Selene said, her eyes wide as she took in the high-spirited tumult all around them.

“Is it?” he asked. He was barely listening to her, too busy surveying the scene. There were Libertas agents everywhere, some obvious in their black clothes and green armbands, with rifles hoisted on their shoulders. Some were more discreet, dressed as partygoers, but he knew they were agents from the way they held their heads, the way they appeared stiff and
alert—just like him. If he was lucky, they would mistake him as one of their own. Then he could get close enough to take one of their guns and make better use of it. The bouncers at the door were patting everyone down, so they’d had to come to Martyr unarmed, but he felt naked without a weapon.

“So many people,” she said. “So much noise. It’s very quiet where I come from.”

“Oh yeah?” If he was going to let Sasha go, watch her slip into yet another world, he wanted to know as much about that world as he could.

Selene nodded. “It’s very far away from here.”

“How can you know that?” There was no way of measuring distance between universes. It was quite possible they existed one on top of another, like layers of cosmic sediment.

“Oh, I just mean … it’s not like here. Nothing like it at all.” She lowered her voice. They were standing close together, trying to feign some kind of physical affection that would sell them as a couple. The temptation to treat her like Sasha was difficult to beat back, but she wasn’t Sasha. She wasn’t even Juliana. She was her own person, and she was not someone who belonged to him. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

“They told me that, of course, but some part of me couldn’t quite believe them,” Selene went on. “How could a world so accessible to us be so different from ours? But it is. Your father’s fear that we want to invade this universe is absurd. How would we live here? Look around you: there are no trees, no open spaces. No vestiges of what we lost so long ago. It would only be exchanging one broken world for another.”

“We have trees,” Thomas said. “And open spaces. Not right here, but in other places in this world. You saw that in the woods beyond the Labyrinth. It’s not all broken.”

“Well,” Selene said, smiling, “maybe we will invade, then.”

Thomas laughed in spite of himself. Selene wasn’t as strange as he thought she was, and anyway, he was ninety-nine percent sure she was kidding.

It took them nearly an hour to get inside Martyr. By the time they walked through a small entrance that had been carved into the enormous wooden cathedral doors, Thirteen Bells was chiming the hour—midnight, not that it was possible to tell from the number of times the bells tolled. They always rang thirteen times, regardless of the hour.

The last time Thomas had been in a club was the night he received his KES assignment, and it’d been nothing like Martyr, just a seedy place with loud music and watered-down drinks. Martyr was a work of art, if a club could be called that. The light in the place was crimson, the color crawling all the way up the vaulted ceilings and hanging there like a vermilion fog; the walls were covered with enormous paintings, each depicting the bloody torture and death of a saint, with a wide gold banner across the top informing casual observers which martyrdom they were viewing. To Thomas’s left, St. Stephen endured a plague of arrows buried to the shaft in his flesh; to his right, Joan of Arc strained against her funeral pyre, eyes lifted toward the sky as flames engulfed her.

“This stuff is horrible,” Thomas said. He had a strong stomach when it came to gruesome things, but the idea of hundreds of people partying under the tormented gaze of all these suffering saints made his skin crawl.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Selene replied. “There’s something romantic about dying for what you believe in, isn’t there?”

“There’s nothing romantic about dying,” he said tersely. Had the king’s death been romantic? Or those of Thomas’s parents? He was starting to wonder what point there was
in being a hero. He used to think it was the most important thing in the world. He’d wanted nothing more than to fight for the country he loved, under the command of a man he worshipped. Now it was only his conscience that drove him to fulfill his duty. Pride had nothing to do with it.

“You may be right,” she said. Her voice was dreamy, as if she was lost in thought. “But there’s nothing romantic about living the way we do, either.”

“The way
we
do?”

“All alone,” she said, “separated from everyone, serving a future we have to believe in or else we’ll crumble to dust.” She looked him straight in the eye, her gaze strong even through the distraction of her blue bird mask. “We’re very similar, you and I.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. Hoping to avoid further conversation, Thomas took Selene’s hand and guided her toward the center of the churning dance floor. At one point, Selene grabbed his arm and jutted her chin to the right.

“She’s over there,” Selene said, taking for granted he knew who she meant. Sometimes it seemed as though Sasha was the only “she” there was. He knew he shouldn’t steer Selene toward Sasha and Sergei—it had been his command, after all, that the groups separate so as not to look like a unit and to provide better coverage in the sea of people. But he did so anyway, drawn to Sasha like a moth to a flame.