Tether (31 page)

She and Sergei were dancing awkwardly together, neither knowing where to put their hands or how close to stand. Sasha didn’t move like that with Thomas. He remembered prom night as vividly as if it were yesterday: with him, she was a dash of quicksilver, as lithe and radiant as the aurora in the sky. It wasn’t because he was a better partner. It was because with him she was herself, even if she didn’t notice it.
When had
he
started to notice? Admiration had blossomed suddenly and unexpectedly when they first met, and attraction had followed quickly after, but it wasn’t until she went back to Earth that he realized the feelings were much bigger than that.

“I can tell you care about her,” Selene said. “But you must realize that the two of you can’t possibly last. Some walls are too high to climb.”

For the first time, Thomas saw something besides confidence and calm cross her face, a fleeting expression of regret beneath eyelashes as black as coal. “Speaking from experience?”

“No.” The look was gone, and she was Selene again, as inscrutable as ever. Maybe they weren’t as different as he thought. “We should dance together. That’s what everyone else is doing. It will seem strange if we don’t.”

“I don’t like dancing.” He scanned the room. Sound tech didn’t work in a place like this. The music was too loud and variant for the mikes and earpieces to filter, and forget about hearing each other the old-fashioned way: Selene was standing right next to him, her mouth only inches from his ear, and still he had to strain to make out what she was saying. He didn’t like being caught without comm in an enemy space, but though his ears were failing him, he could still count on his eyes.

It wasn’t hard to identify the Libertas guards throughout the club: they were the only ones carrying weapons, and they displayed them openly, daring someone to try something. The Night of the Masks was the rowdiest Columbian holiday of the year, and they had to know something might go down with the KES after Juliana’s broadcast. He spotted a young Libertine hanging in the back of the club, near the altar, and
identified him as the most likely to give up his gun at the slightest provocation.

Selene drew Thomas toward her. For all her confidence, Thomas could tell that she had little hands-on experience with men and wasn’t sure how to behave around him. But she had a spy’s instincts, and she understood the necessity of putting on a good show. She wrapped her arms around his waist, her hips swaying from side to side in a decent approximation of the music’s rhythm. For a second, just one fleeting second, he let his heart believe what his eyes were seeing and held her close, pretending she was Sasha.

“You’re not
that
bad,” she murmured, but despite the way her body moved—she had the same fluid grace as Sasha and Juliana—it was easy to see that she wasn’t used to dancing, either. The music bewildered her, and Thomas wondered if she’d ever heard anything like modern rock.

Who
are
you?
he thought. But there was no point in asking. She wasn’t going to share any more with him than she had already. He surrendered to the moment, clutching Selene under the strobe lights and watching Sasha over her shoulder.

Suddenly, Selene gripped his arm.

“Thomas,” she hissed in his ear. “Juliana is waking up.”

A crimson light, faint and far away, glimmered at the edges of my consciousness. I sagged against Sergei in relief, feeling the sudden sense of release that came with exhaling after holding your breath.

“What?” Sergei asked, speaking into my ear so that I could hear him over the blaring music. Why were all KES agents so
tall
? Sergei was even taller than Thomas, almost six five. My neck was sore just from looking up at him all night.

“Juliana,” I said. “She’s coming to.”

She wasn’t fully conscious, but whatever sedative they’d given her was wearing off, and she was slowly swimming out of her stupor. This was good news. If she would just open her eyes, we might have some sense of where to look for her. We’d have to get into the catacombs beneath Martyr, then count on the strengthening bond to tell us whether we were on the right track or not—which meant that either Selene or I, or both of us, had to be with the KES when they went below. “Where’s Thomas?”

“Right behind you,” Sergei said.

I turned my head and caught sight of him, green eyes skimming
the crowd. The minute his gaze found mine, it stopped wandering. There wasn’t anything I could say—he was too far away—but he understood. Selene must’ve told him. There was a glint in his eye, a determined set to his jaw. Thomas was on the hunt.

But first he made a beeline for me, shoving people out of the way to reach me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in.

“Look who it is,” he said. I followed the trail of his gaze to the back of the club, where our old enemy Stringy Hair, one of the Libertas commandos who’d ambushed me in the Tattered City six weeks earlier, was standing. He wore no mask; many of the Libertas agents had failed to follow the dress code, which I had to imagine was on purpose. People needed to know they were being protected—or threatened, depending on who they were.

“Make sure your mask stays on, okay? He can’t see your face. Or yours, either,” he said to Selene, who appeared next to me. She took my hand.

Very soon,
she said through the tether. Her mind was taut with concern; it made me tense up, eclipsing all the comfort I felt in Thomas’s presence.
We’ll find her, Sasha.

I know we will.
Thomas grabbed my other hand, and suddenly I was the rope in a game of tug-of-war between the two people to whom I was most loyal in this world.

And then this world exploded, and I was plunged into darkness.

brief pause, then a stinging slap on her cheek. Someone shook her. “Wake up, goddamn it! We have to go!”

“What?” Her eyes felt as heavy as marble. The last thing she remembered was eating breakfast, a nasty gruel she’d refused until hunger threatened to carve out her insides. And now … what time was it? How long had she been out? She knew enough of Libertas’s tactics to gather that she’d been sedated. It had happened once or twice before, when she was being uncooperative, but always via injection, never knockouts slipped into her food. Kit had reached a new low. She hadn’t even been making a fuss this time.

“Come on, Juli!” Lucas handled her roughly, trying to prop her up against the wall. “You’ve got to wake up!”

Her eyelids fluttered closed. He grabbed her chin in one rough palm, his fingers digging into the soft flesh above her jaw so hard that her eyes popped open, her brain roused by pain and terror.

“I’m rescuing you, you spoiled brat,” he hissed in her ear.

She tried to stabilize her jellied spine into something tough—steel or wood. She would even have settled for a strip of weak, bendy plastic. Anything but the wobbly pudding her bones seemed to be made of. “Help me.”

“I’m trying!” Lucas kept looking over his shoulder as if he expected to see someone standing behind him. If she didn’t get stronger,
strong enough to run, he would leave her behind. He wasn’t going to sacrifice himself, not for her, not for anyone. Why had he even thought to free her in the first place?

It was Thomas, of course. As much as Lucas envied him, as small as he felt in his brother’s shadow, Lucas couldn’t despise him. Lucas believed Thomas to be dead. News of his execution had reached Libertas ears; there was no way Lucas hadn’t heard. Now he was doing what he thought Thomas would do. It was sweet, in a way, if one could ignore the events that had come before this change of heart, but Juliana couldn’t. But she wasn’t above accepting his help, if it meant getting her life back, in whatever ruined state the General and Libertas and she herself had left it.

She took a deep breath and gave over to survival instinct, forcing her body to right itself.

I can do this,
she assured herself. She flexed and straightened her limbs, made them hard and wooden with sheer force of will. She felt unmoored, her mind floating up, up, up to the ceiling as her doll body assembled into something human-shaped and ambulatory. She felt Sasha’s cool blue light and Selene’s bright green one hovering somewhere very far away, but she knew they were close. She understood that somehow, despite the fact that her head was too filmy, full of cobwebs and candy floss, to figure out exactly how close, exactly where they were. How was she going to get to them?

She wondered if Callum had come, too. She was almost glad she’d been sedated, so she didn’t have to feel all the pain and misery of missing him. He knew everything now. He probably hated her. And Thomas … she’d seen the way he looked at her at Sophie’s house, as if she were some sort of monster. He would never look at Sasha like that. She’d lost Thomas to her analog completely.

The thought crashed over her like a pallet of bricks.

Lucas had to help her stand, then help her walk; it was impossible to accomplish anything without leaning on his shoulder. This slowed
them down, and they’d barely made it out the door before a loud crash above caught their attention and arrested their progress.

“What’s happening?” Juliana demanded.

“I created a diversion upstairs in the club,” he said, dragging her along the long, empty corridor. “It was supposed to draw everyone out of the catacombs so we could make it out the back way without being seen.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far, okay?”

“What kind of diversion?” she asked, thinking, somewhat hysterically in her half-drugged state, of the time her cousin Roman had set a large flock of pigeons loose in her father’s Counsel Room, painting every member of his cabinet with droppings and feathers. Only the General had managed to emerge unscathed. It was the first time she considered the possibility that the somber, imposing man her father trusted above all others might truly be invincible.

“This is Libertas,” Lucas said, as if the answer were obvious. “What else? I set a bomb.”

The bomb rent a huge tear in the festivities, scattering partygoers in all directions, stirring up the Libertas guards and bouncers like a drink shaker. Nearly everyone who wasn’t racing for the doors was on the ground, struggling to get their bearings in the wake of the blast. Something heavy was lying on top of me, making it hard to breathe. I panicked, thinking I’d been crushed by a piece of stone from the ceiling, but then I realized that the weight was human: Thomas.

Memories of him shielding me from the blast came rushing back. I shook him by the shoulder, and he grunted, rolling off me and inspecting me for signs of damage. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said. He helped me sit up. His heart was hammering, and his breathing was labored.

Selene was lying a few feet away, with her arm over her eyes. I crawled over to her and checked her pulse, which was weak but growing stronger; she was coming around. Sergei was to our left, eyes open and alert, keeping low to the ground. He and Thomas shared a look, and I knew without being told what they were thinking. Someone else’s chaos had offered them a window, and they would be foolish not to take it.