Tether (28 page)

The sparrow, the starling, and the lark,
I thought. But Selene
and I were missing our sparrow. I could see why Thomas was so annoyed. It would be easy to differentiate between petite, long-haired Adele and tall, curvy Cora, with her auburn curls; but in similar clothes, wearing the same mask, Selene and I would be indistinguishable from each other. In the midst of a huge club, with people swarming all around us, drunk and disorderly and dancing to deafening music, it was going to make things difficult.

Thomas kneaded the back of his neck. “There’s still time. You’ll just have to go out and get another mask. We have to be able to tell the difference between them.”

“Can’t you do that already?” Selene asked. He shot her a dirty look, but she wasn’t trying to be sassy; she was honestly wondering how he could mistake one of us for the other.

“I was talking about everybody else,” he said. “They need to be able to know at a glance which of you is which.”

“Are you hearing me, Mayhew? There are no more masks left,” Fillmore whined. “The whole city’s been cleared out. I had to show my badge just to get these!”

“Your KES badge helped you get something in the Tattered City?” Cora asked, flabbergasted. “I’m surprised you’re not sitting in the same Libertas oubliette as the queen right now.”

“Not exactly …” Fillmore trailed off. Thomas folded his arms across his chest and glared at him until he confessed. “I’ve been here for years. You can’t have expected me to just
resist,
could you?”

“Oh, please tell me you didn’t,” Adele groaned.

“Didn’t what?” I asked. “What did you do?”

“He joined the Blackmarket Runners,” Rocko said, in a bored sort of way, as if he couldn’t see what the big deal was. Callum glowered in Fillmore’s direction; clearly, this was an Aurora thing.

“What are those?”

“Smugglers,” Tim explained. Selene was confused, so he explained what smugglers were.

“He betrayed you,” Selene told Thomas, in her usual straightforward way. “What are you going to do with him?”

“I didn’t betray you! I swear, I’ve never done anything for the Runners that went against the KES,” Fillmore insisted. He was trembling now, afraid of Thomas, who was looming above him looking very pissed off.

“
Everything
the Runners do is against the KES,” Thomas said. “You know that, Fillmore. How could you be so stupid? Do you realize how tightly woven the Runners and Libertas are? You might as well have had the ten stars tattooed on your forehead!”

The Libertas symbol is a tetractys?
Selene asked me, shoving her way through the sound of Fillmore’s squalling to the base of my brain.

How did you know that?

I saw the shape of it in your head just now. Ten stars in an equilateral triangle.
The green light of her mind grew stronger and began to pulse; it was so bright, it eclipsed Juliana’s. Selene was getting worked up—odd for her.

What’s wrong?
I asked, but she didn’t respond.

“Tell me none of your Runner friends know about this safe house,” Thomas said.

“Of course not,” Fillmore told him. “I’m not stupid.”

“I disagree,” Adele said.

“Tomorrow is going to be a very long day,” Thomas said. “I want everybody to get a good night’s rest. We’re going to need it.” He glanced at Selene and me. “You guys let me know if anything changes with Juliana.”

The KES agents began filing out of the room, heading for
the sleeping quarters on the second and third floors. I was hoping Thomas would stay behind, that I could get a moment alone with him, but he fell into deep conversation with Adele as they hiked up the stairs, and I held back, feeling left out, as if someone had slammed a door in my face.

“Hey.” I turned and found Callum standing right beside me. “Can I talk to you?”

“Sasha?” Selene said, pausing on the landing. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll be there in a second.” I gave Callum a tentative smile. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

He ran his hands through his dark curls, staring at the floor. “This is weird. You. Her.
Her,
” he said, pointing in the direction Selene had just gone. “You were really the one I met at the Castle?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know it’s hard to understand. Sometimes I still can’t believe it, and it’s happening
to me.
But I never meant to hurt you, Callum. I didn’t want to lie to you. I just didn’t have a choice.”

“I’m having such a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that it was
you
at the Castle but
her
in the catacombs. I look at you and I see her. I know you’re not the same person. I could tell when I met her that something had changed. But it’s so improbable, my brain can’t accept it. You know?”

“Totally,” I said. “What changed?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, when you were with Juliana—how was she different from me?”

Callum gave the question careful consideration. “I guess I always felt like you were keeping me at a distance. You were so nice and polite and gracious, and I liked that about you, especially after the things I’d heard about Juliana. She has a
reputation, you know. But I could tell you were performing for me. I ignored it, because I wanted so badly for everything to work out, but it drove me nuts. I almost would’ve rather had you be mean to me, which was what I’d expected.”

“Sorry I wasn’t enough of a jerk,” I joked. He fixed me with a blue-eyed stare.

“I just wanted you to be who you were,” Callum said. “To not be so cautious around me. But Juliana … she’s not great at hiding how she feels, or who she is deep down. I like that I can tell when she’s scared, or angry, or sad. She is who she is, you know? No varnish.”

“That’s for sure.” I, for one, thought Juliana could use a little varnish; then again, I wasn’t well on my way to falling in love with her. Callum had it bad for Juliana, and part of me wondered if he didn’t enjoy the challenge best of all. But that was none of my business. I was only too glad that he had no lingering feelings toward me. “If it helps, I was being myself at the Castle, as much as I could under the circumstances. I liked you. I still like you. Juliana’s lucky she met you. It’s probably better than she deserves.”

“Did she really run away?” Callum asked. I could tell this question was nagging at him. I nodded. “You’re angry with her, aren’t you?”

“Well, she’s the reason I ended up here in the first place, and she tried to steal my life, so yeah, she’s not my favorite person. But it doesn’t matter.” I could feel about Juliana any way I wanted, but it didn’t change the fact that I needed her.

“I think it does,” he said. “I’ve been watching the way you and Selene act around each other. You react to each other’s emotions. Whatever that bond is between the three of you, it seems pretty intense.”

“You have no idea.”

“Then Juliana must know how mad you are,” he went on. “She must be able to feel it. Maybe one of the reasons you find it so hard to connect with her is because she’s afraid of what you’ll think if she lets you into her head. I’m not going to make excuses for her. She’s done some bad things. But if I know her at all, she’s plenty ashamed. If you try to forgive her, maybe things will get easier.”

He leaned forward and placed a soft kiss on my cheek. “Good night, Sasha. Sleep well.”

I turned his words over in my head as he started up the stairs. I called his name, and he paused on the landing. “Thanks,” I said. “For the advice. You’re a good person, Callum. Better than the rest of us, I think.”

“I’m not particularly good, actually. And I’m not being selfless. I have a stake in this, too. I want Juliana back, and you’re the best hope of finding her.” He looked away, carried off by his thoughts. He appeared changed somehow, made older, maybe, or ever so slightly less handsome by his time with Libertas. Sadder, too, but then, Callum had always been sad deep down, under the layers of optimism and hopeful cheer.

“We will find her,” I said, even though I had no business promising him that. There were so many ways we could fail, but I didn’t want to let him down.

“You have to. You owe me, Sasha. I saved your life once.”

“I know you did.” If there was anything that moving through worlds had taught me, it was that debts had to be repaid in full. “I want us to be even.”

“Help me find Juliana,” he said, “and we will be.”

I followed Callum up the stairs, trying not to worry about what the next day would bring, but it was hard not to imagine all the things that could go wrong. The KES agents were trained, armed guards, but they were also flesh-and-blood people—they could be hurt or killed, and I was afraid for them. It didn’t even come close to how worried I was about my own friends, though, and Thomas most of all.

Selene had chosen a room for us on the third floor of the safe house, and I gravitated toward it without even thinking. It was still so strange, the way the tether tugged at me when I was near her, reeling me in like a fish. Sometimes it was as if the universes wanted us to find each other; other times it seemed so obvious that we were dangerous together, meant to be separate for our own good and the good of the world.

I wanted to be rid of the tether, but I was also becoming dependent on it and attached to the way it bonded me to my analogs. Things with Juliana were complicated, but I
liked
being close to Selene, no matter how much I tried to resist it. The thought of losing that connection was just as terrifying as the thought of merging with my analogs even further. The more I tried to understand it, the more confused I became.

It didn’t help that things were so clearly weird with Thomas. I wanted to talk to him, but I had absolutely no idea where he was—in one of the bedrooms, I figured, trying to get some sleep. It wasn’t like before, at Gorman’s Gate, when I knew he’d be happy to see me; if I sought him out now, I had the sinking feeling he’d blow me off so he could keep a tight focus on the mission ahead. Something had changed between us in that moment when concern for me kept him from protecting Juliana. It had only been a few seconds, a couple of heartbeats, but in that time a key had turned and set us on a different course.

A creaking sound came from somewhere behind me. Someone had left a door ajar, and it was swinging in a light breeze. I pushed it open and found myself facing a staircase leading up to a glassed-in roof deck. Someone had gone outside. I knew I should ignore it and go to bed, get some rest before I collapsed on the floor from exhaustion, but I was a slave to my own curiosity, and I had a pretty good idea whom I would find up there.

Thomas was sitting on the roof with his head tipped back, looking at the aurora through one of the open skylights. I called his name softly. His face fell when he set eyes on me, and every trace of tranquility in his posture disappeared. And yet it was still there, that charge between us. He was happy to see me, too. He was just afraid to admit it to himself.

“You’re still up?” he asked, shoving his hands into his pockets. I sat down beside him. “I thought everyone had gone to bed.”

“They have,” I said. “What are you doing up here?”

He shrugged. “Oh, nothing. Just thinking. I like watching the aurora. Calms me down.”

“It is kind of hypnotic,” I agreed, letting my gaze drift
up toward the sky. Apart from Thomas, the aurora was my favorite thing about his world. I’d missed it back on Earth. Something about it made me believe that the universe wasn’t completely indifferent to us, that it was watching and that it understood. I almost said that to Thomas, but I thought it might make me sound a little nuts.

“So,” I said.

“So.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Sasha, I’m sorry about before, when I was kind of distant. There’s a lot going on, things are getting so complicated, but I don’t want you to think—”

“I don’t,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder. “I get it. You’re worried about Juliana.”

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes, I am. It’s more than that, though. It’s … it’s everything. I thought I could find Juliana, like that would be so easy, and then get out, but I don’t think I can. I have to see this through. Even if we rescue her from Libertas, there are still so many things that need to be done. I can’t walk away, no matter how much I wish I could.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I can’t go with you, wherever you go,” Thomas said in a rush, as if he thought if he didn’t say the words quickly, he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to say them at all. “I want to, but I can’t. I have to stay here.”

“I don’t think you were invited,” I said. Bringing Thomas along with us to Taiga had never been part of Selene’s plan, and we would definitely have a problem if I tried to suggest it. The better I got to know Selene, the more ridiculous the General’s fear that she and her people were trying to invade Aurora became. From what I could tell, she was far more concerned about keeping outsiders away from her universe than about invading anybody else’s.

“You know what I mean,” he said with a sad smile. “After.
When you’ve done what you have to do. I want us to be together—believe me, that’s all I want—but I have obligations here. I have a duty.”