True North Read online

  “The ticket ends in…” I read the stiff cardboard ticket again. “Starry Oskol. That’s where she’ll be.”

  “You’re sure.” Alastair lets out a whiff of disbelief.

  “Sure as coffins,” I toss back.

  Jared’s eyes rake over me, making me doubt myself. Was it true? Could Turner’s sources be trusted? And what did we really know about the man? Along with the rest of the Gilt, Turner might just been following shadowy hunches and bad rumors.

  In the end, what did we really know other than it’s the end of the line? The trains don’t run past Starry Oskol anymore, we’re told.

  They say Russia has been in lockdown for the past three years. Under quarantine. The main rail line was shut down, the highways cordoned with barbed wire and sentries riding tanks.

  “They still believe in superstitious nonsense,” our father had scoffed at the time. “Those peasants,” he’d spat, “still think the Plague is airborne.”

  “Don’t they have genomicists, Father?” Margot answered meekly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “How can they not know?”

  Our father beat his black leather gloves against his open palm. “You know who runs Russia, girls? Those who know how to exploit the rabble to their advantage.”

  It wasn’t until later that we wondered whether our father had been telling us that the scientists and NewsFeed had been bought off—the way we suspected was happening in Dominion.

  Jared’s phone buzzes unexpectedly. A washed-out lemon-yellow decal flashes across Jared’s chest as he leaps up to answer it. Life sucks. And then you make lemonade! runs beside a crude drawing of a glass and some lemons. His indigo eyes flicker over me—not cold, exactly, but distant—as he gets up to speak to someone back home. Only after he’s left do I realize I’d been staring.

  Alastair tosses his rock. I half-heartedly watch from the corner of my eye as the rock bounces slowly back into his outstretched palm, as though attached by a spring, before hovering slowly down in a highly unnatural fashion. I turn my head hard. He’s watching me, a sly smile dressing his handsome face.

  Did I just see what I thought I did?

  Before I can ask, Ali finds a way to distract me. “Tell me something about Margot.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “You’ve said you’re the same.” Ali cocks an eyebrow and shoves his rock back into his pocket. “What do you mean by that?”

  But I don’t have words to describe the person I have shared my soul with since before we drew breath. Margot and I aren’t just sisters. We’d shared flesh and blood. Lock and key, like the strange birthmarks on our toes where they had separated us.

  “Everyone always says that. So how are you different?”

  We’re different now, I want to say. Disconnected these past four months, I’ve been steadily gaining an independence that leaves me as sad as it does uncomfortable.

  The pinch of the soft skin on her thighs, the hot pressure of a kiss at her neck—I’m not sure we’ll ever know why I’ve had this eerie extra sense of her. Up until now it’s always been enough to know it exists. There has always just been a “her” and a “me,” never quite separate, never quite the same. A coin with two faces.

  And now? Jared stalks up and down the length of the car, his face a mask as he listens to someone half a world away. He meets my eye, spins, and heads back to the other end of the car. The muscles in his back bunch beneath the pale lemon of his shirt.

  Now, under the spell of the clacking train, there is only the silence of me.

  “In the Upper Circle, the ladies say people fall in love so they don’t have to be alone,” I say, surprising both Alastair and myself. I run my finger over the grime-coated window. Making the letters of a name I know as well as my own. “Margot and me, we’ve never been apart. Never been ‘alone’ until now. We used to switch places, you know. It felt like putting on a fancy party dress. No one knew. Not even our parents could tell when we were determined.” I grin at a memory of me donning one of my sister’s party dresses before pinning up my hair. The hair was the key. Margot always wore her hair slightly longer and straighter than my own shorter curls. Margot’s eyes, with the faint shots of gray streaking through the hazel. Her skin like cream. “She’s so beautiful. When she walks in the room, people can’t peel their eyes from her.” I can feel the wistful smile tug at my lips. I miss those days.

  A funny expression steals over Alastair’s features. Brown eyes marble black with some emotion I can’t name. His fists clench in his lap as his long, thick eyelashes hood his eyes, and he tells me, so slowly I can’t help but blush, “So you are both the same, then.”

  I stare back out the window at the endless darkening vista and pretend I don’t understand his meaning. “I guess so.”

  Ten minutes before we reach the border, a man in uniform tells us to prepare our papers for the blockade. It’s fallen full dark by the time we arrive under the canopied station. Lines of men and the occasional woman in drab green khakis and machine guns halt the train. All along the tracks, men enter the cars with guns drawn and scream at the remaining passengers in Russian, French, Greek, then English, to get off, to pull out their papers.

  Our car is boarded by a man kitted up in a blue hazmat suit. His face purples with rage under the clear film of his visor. He screams as another suit behind him trains a machine gun on us.

  “I was feeling so welcome,” mutters Jared, who stands and flares his eyes at the duo. They visibly shrink back, guns lowering like withered flowers.

  “It’s for Plague, then,” I say.

  Jared ignores me. “Stay behind me, Lucy. Alastair, you take point,” he tells Alastair, hints of steel in his voice. “Keep Lucy between us at all times. Do you hear me?”

  Ali smiles, putting a hand on my lower back that Jared doesn’t miss, if his frown is anything to go by. Ali’s dimples deepen. “Hearing has never been one of my issues.”

  The hazmat team tags us and leads us off the train. We’re in a station of some sort. Concrete walls are lit by fluorescent lights, flickering and garish, that track the length of the industrial ceiling. Everything the light falls on looks sick and spoiled. Everything else is pooled in shadows. At our feet, pools of grime-filled water pock concrete walkways, as though we’ve landed at a sewer instead of a border crossing. The air is fetid and ripe with fear.

  We’re not alone. The train has disgorged a least a hundred poor souls. They now shuffle in well-behaved lines through a maze of partitions, over to a bank of tall desks shut off from the crowds by what looks like bulletproof glass.

  “What are they afraid of?”

  Jared’s eyes rove restlessly, cataloguing each gun, each man. A tired-looking woman at the window of one of the closest booths breaks down and weeps before she’s dragged away by four hazmat suits. My stomach drops. Alastair asks under his breath, “How do they know if they’re sick?”

  The woman howls, kicking her legs and flailing. The hazmat team grabs her firmly and hauls her out of sight. Jared’s nose crinkles, the bones in his jaws longer than before as his instincts flare. Not more than a minute later, four shots ring out. Half the line ducks. The other half closes their eyes and stifles sobs.

  Instinctively, I grab for Jared. He swivels his head toward me, and I’m not surprised to see he’s going feral. The outer rims of his eyes lighten to a deep, vivid green. Claws extend on his hands, a hunch in his shoulders starting somewhere near his neck. He snarls. The room goes silent. And though I know it’s not intended for me, some part of me shivers with it. His nose quivers as he scents the room.

  It’s then that I clue in to what kind of trouble we’re in. If soldiers come at me, he’ll not be able to control himself. Jared will rend them limb from limb. Then they’ll kill him. It might take an army, but they’ll kill him. I close my eyes and lean into his clothes, tightening with his transformation across his ripped chest. His flesh is hot and smells peppery. He’s ready for a fight.

  “Stay with
me,” I murmur, using the same words he gave me all those months ago. “Stay with me, Jared. Don’t leave me alone here.”

  Jared looks down at me. His lips twist in confusion. I place my hand above his heart. Its steady pulse calms me. “I can’t do this without you. Don’t take any unnecessary risks. Please.”

  We’re interrupted as a hazmat team approaches. One of the men steps too close to me. Jared’s snarl turns into a roar that echoes through the cavernous space of the depot. The hazmats and everyone else freeze. Moments later, two uniforms step forward, machine guns trained on us. A dark-haired one lets go a violent stream of Russian and motions for us to step out of line. We comply, while the second uniform pulls up the rear as they lead us to a room tucked off behind the processing counters.

  The door opens and we’re dumped in a brightly lit office. Behind me, Ali sings, “If the Plague don’t kill you, we got bullets.” It’s the refrain of a song that was popular in Dominion a few years ago, during the bread riots.

  An examination table sits to one side of the room, the desk across from it. Over the windows are steel bars and metal slat blinds. A square industrial clock with Cyrillic numerals hangs over the desk. No personal touches. No filing cabinets. Just a small sink for washing. A bare white cupboard, I assume for supplies. A small fridge.

  Protocols, I reckon. Seconds later, a man in a white coat and wire-framed glasses strides briskly into the room. A second man with a gun, glassy-eyed and looking trigger-happy, stands sentry.

  Jared’s chest puffs out, his hands clenching automatically as he steps in front of me. I lay a hand on his shoulder to let him know I’m there, safe and whole. I feel his shuddering breath, the restraint it’s taking for him not to rip the room to shreds.

  “Let’s just ask them what they want,” I whisper into the heat of his back.

  But I know he won’t. He’s busy sussing out the armed sentry. Even I, with my untrained eye, can tell we won’t get out of this unscathed. Face red and still covered in spots, our young guard has got his machine gun aimed at us, twitchy finger on the safety. I can practically see Shane shaking his head. Hold a gun like that and someone ends up with scrambled brains, sure as rain.

  The Protocols doctor steps forward, eyes black pits beneath the glass of his wire-framed glasses. He throws out something in a language like slippery ice cubes. Jared shakes his head. The doctor repeats it, in another language this time. It’s too fast for me to catch. We stare blankly back.

  Ali steps out from behind me. He raises his long, thin fingers, the hands of a pianist, and utters a few slippery vowels. In there I hear Ali throw the odd word I understand. “Visitor,” “girl,” “English.” He speaks slowly, so obviously he’s not a native speaker, but has enough to get by.

  The cold-eyed doctor stares at us meanly. Then says, in stilted English, “State your business here.”

  “Family,” Ali pipes up again, this time in English. “This one is our charge. We’re her men. Her mercs, see?” Ali thumbs in Jared’s direction. “True Born merc. We reunite this one with her family. Not safe traveling alone, is it?” he finishes.

  I choke down a bubble of hysterical laughter. Who would believe Alastair is a merc? You can practically see his skin and bones under his dirty brown leather jacket. One of the pockets ripped and dangling. And what kind of merc doesn’t have a gun?

  The cold-eyed doctor just regards us carefully. “We will see.”

  My chest knots. They can’t take Protocols from me. Not here. If they draw my blood, they’ll know I’m not the normal sort of Splicer. They could kill Jared and Alastair just to get their paws on me, keep me locked up here for years.

  “You can check,” Ali calls as the doctor pulls out two plastic-wrapped Protocols kits from the cupboard. “Perhaps you know her host. We’re traveling to Starry Oskol?”

  It’s not something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it—the doctor pausing for just a second too long.

  “A lot of people are traveling to Starry Oskol these days,” scoffs the doctor as he unwraps the trays.

  “Why?” I ask before I can think of what comes out of my mouth. Jared growls again. I shrug in apology.

  The doctor, though, seems to like this game. “Starry Oskol is the place where the foreigners think they’ll find their cure.” His black eyes flash a glare as he comes forward, clearly amused at the stupid foreigners. “They arrive by the trainload, and we end up with a trail of corpses all over Russia. But you already know this, I think.”

  “We’re not them,” Ali says firmly. “We didn’t know.”

  The doctor nods, his mouth a blank and colorless line. “Perhaps her family is already there, seeking their cure.”

  Resnikov. He was a big enough fish to make our mother sit up and take notice. Maybe he’s a big enough name to drop here. I clear my throat and shrug again. “It’s an engagement party. My sister is getting married to a man from around here…maybe you’ve heard of him? Leo Aleksandrovich Resnikov.” I scrunch up my nose and tilt the vowels on the name like I’m unsure of it. As though I’ve barely heard it before.

  It’s enough. The doctor stops, syringe upturned in one gloved hand. He stares hard at me.

  “Who?” the doctor asks. But he’s lying. I know he’s lying. He knows.

  “Our father and he are very good friends. Business partners, too, I’m told. Do you know him?”

  The syringe drops to the doctor’s side. He barks out a command in rapid Russian to the sentry, whose gun dips up and down in the chaos. The sentry barks at us, his mouth angled and hinged wrong when it opens and closes. With the tip of the gun, he waves us, red-faced, to the door. The doctor puts down the syringe and wipes his glasses carefully.

  Under his breath, the doctor mutters unhappily, “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “If this is first-class I want my money back.” Alastair clamps down on the pebble in his hand, fist turned down, and complains. “Seriously? This is supposed to be a good thing?”

  We’ve been relocated to a “special guest” car, according to the doctor. He’d watched us board the train while a squadron of olive-clad uniforms stood behind him. Their guns weren’t trained on us, but they weren’t relaxed, either. And now we sit in a garishly lit car. Like our last car, this one is empty save us. It smells better, though, and the seats aren’t cracked. Still, the conductor doesn’t come by as the dark train speeds through the night. We’re all three on edge.

  Jared, who’s been more a mountain than a man the past hour, stretches and nods to the top corner of the car. “Cams every four feet. Whatever tripped them up,” he says, his voice muted so it doesn’t carry beyond us, “they’re not just letting us go.” A shiver of fear travels up my spine as I spy the small box with its round, dark eye, aimed at us.

  I let out a disappointed huff. I had hoped Resnikov’s name held more weight than that. Maybe he has enemies among his countrymen.

  “Do you think it helped at all?” I murmur close to Jared’s ear. Close enough that his smell invades me, swamps me with longing.

  He reaches out to touch my hair, almost as though he’s forgotten we’re barely speaking. Lightning-fast, he pulls his fingers away. Something shifted between us at the border crossing—we’ve reached a tacit truce, though we’re still unsure of each other.

  “Yes,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I think they would have taken our blood and killed us all.”

  I shiver again and turn, suddenly aware of Alastair’s dark, thoughtful gaze on me.

  “No guards, though,” I say, pretending cheerfulness. “Good sign?” Jared barely moves his head. The news must be bad. “What is it?”

  Jared slowly turns and looks me full in the eyes. “Lucy.” He shakes his head.

  I can’t sit still. Too close to Margot. Too far away from Jared. “Well.” I put on the well-worn act of an Upper Circle matron. “I’m ripe for a new set of clothes. I’ll move to the next car to change.”

  Jared nods at Alastair, who jumps up. “I’ll co
me with you.” Ali follows me through the overly lit car to the dark juncture. It’s still unlocked—a good sign, I reckon. He pulls open the heavy door. We step inside a car flooded with people.

  I jump into the queue for the bathroom at the long end of the car. Blank, horrified faces stare at us. Dark, smudged eyes, crying children. Something smells dead in the car, though no one says a word. They are crammed in here, sometimes three or four to a seat rather than the two it holds. And the children: babies sitting on the floor in dirty diapers, crying for their mamas. There are a lot of orphaned kids in this car.

  I’ve heard it said that Laster women get hit hardest. Something to do with the rigors of having children. A hand reaches out, grabs my wrist. I look down into the exhausted face of a young woman. Sick. The other sense of mine prods me gently, sending gooseflesh up the back of my neck. Thin, haggard, her hair is covered in a bright scarf tied behind her neck. A baby rides in her lap, quiet and watchful in the way no baby should ever be, its face sucked dry of fat. Slumped into the woman’s side is a little girl no more than seven. Her hair is neat enough, falling around her face in long, honey-brown tresses. Every so often her eyes flicker open and I see the glaze of swiftly approaching death.

  The woman’s voice floats up, thin and reedy. “Pozhaluysta.” Please.

  “My Russian is…poor,” I tell her haltingly in her native tongue. We speak many languages, Margot and me. Mostly just a smattering, though, enough to get us through cocktail parties with politicians and their wives.

  It’s enough that her grip tightens. Her hands are full of false hope. “Help. Please.”

  Behind me, Ali tenses and tries to break her grip. “Now wait a minute, sister,” he tells the woman. She doesn’t spare him a glance.

  I stop Ali with a small shake of my head. Turning back to the woman, I glance again at her two children. “How?” I ask, blinking against the stinging of my eyes.

  But we both know. Her baby with the watchful eyes will likely be orphaned and alone by dawn.

  “Take…Sigil.” The mother holds up the thin wrist of the baby.