Brutally strong arms around my waist. Something presses beneath my sternum, thrusting upward several times. Water leaves my lungs, flowing from my nose and mouth. I cough and gasp. Hawthorne’s arms shift. One crosses my chest, and Hawthorne drags us through the water with sidestrokes and scissors kicks.
We reach the shore. Hawthorne wades with me to a low wall. He yanks my limp body from the lake. Sitting on the stone edge, me on his lap, he tries to catch his breath.
Roses hang in my face. He snatches them from my hair and tosses them away. My goggles are gone—washed away at the bottom of the lake. Touching my cheek, Hawthorne pats it lightly. “Don’t die,” he whispers hoarsely.
I open my eyes. Water drips from Hawthorne’s chin onto my chest. He lost his helmet at some point. The thorns in my hair dig painfully into my back. My hand struggles to reach his. I touch his skin, and my silver holographic sword entwines with his gold one before my fingers slip limply from him. He lifts me in his arms and carries me over the wall and into the night.
Chapter 9
Something Left Behind
The inside of Hawthorne’s chrome airship has that new-craft smell.
Quietly shivering, I feel my lips tremble. Water drips from my hair, sliding down my shoulders and arms. Droplets of red blood from scratches and cuts from broken glass and thorns stain the creamy leather of the copilot’s seat. Hawthorne leans into the cockpit, fawning over me. He grasps the straps of the seat, securing them over my shoulders. The thorns in my hair dig into my skin. I wince.
Hawthorne scowls. “Who put these vines in your hair? It’s completely asinine!” He tugs my bristly braids from behind my back, laying my hair over the seat back. I don’t answer him because the violence of my chattering teeth won’t allow it. “I left you in the hands of a bunch of sadists.”
He opens a compartment next to me. Inside is a small aerosol device containing CR-40, a topical polymer. He shakes the can and coats the skin of my left hand with the chemical. The silver sword of my moniker dims, and then goes dark.
I reach up and touch his cheek, finding it almost hot compared to my icy fingers. He’s cut up, too. Bruises are forming on his jaw and chin, and under one eye. His bottom lip is swelling. Seared skin on his forearm is red and angry. His hand envelops mine for a moment, and the fierceness of his stare warms me. Then, he straightens and closes my door.
Hawthorne comes around the airship, touches a fingerprint panel, and the pilot’s door lifts. He seats himself, and the door glides down, locking in place. The engines fire with serious growls that only erupt from a premium airship with power-upgrade modifications. He must have spent a fortune on it.
As if reading my mind, Hawthorne mutters, “I didn’t buy this. It was a gift from my parents—or maybe not a ‘gift’—maybe a bribe.”
He doesn’t bother to spray his own hand with the CR-40 but tosses it behind his seat. The golden glow of his holographic sword shines between us. Reaching over, Hawthorne touches a light on a holographic cockpit board. Heat radiates from a vent in front of me. I lean forward, extending my juddering fingertips to it. We lift off into the night sky. The windscreen in front of us modifies, illuminating the terrain, making it discernable as if everything is bathed in the first blush of morning light. He flies the airship away from the chaos of the social club. The heat warms me, and I stop shivering so hard.
“A bribe?”
Hawthorne’s expression turns brooding. “What do you do when the son you sent away at ten suddenly returns and holds your future in his hands?” he asks.
“You’re loved, Hawthorne.”
He gives me a side-eyed look. “They don’t love me.”
“No . . . I do.”
He turns to me. “I love you, too, Roselle, so maybe you can understand how I felt when I saw you throw yourself off a building, clutching a man who held an incendiary device. You could’ve vaporized before my eyes.”
“They killed my father.” I can hardly say it without choking. Kennet didn’t love me. I know that. But now he never will. I lost my chance. My heart feels puncture, as if it’s being forced through the narrow space between my ribs. I didn’t know how much I was holding out hope that he’d one day love me, until this moment. “Someone had to stop those soldiers from killing everyone. I could, so I did.”
“If you love me, like I love you, you won’t do anything like that again.”
I look away. “I can’t promise you that. I’m secondborn—”
“You think I care that you’re secondborn?” he snarls, and then clenches his teeth. “The only person I care about is you.”
“I’m still a soldier. It’s my job to—”
“You’re so much more than a soldier—just promise me you won’t do anything reckless like that again. Everything is about to change. The Rose Garden Society has an agenda, and you’re at the top of it. You know as well as I do what Salloway is planning. After tonight, it won’t just be Gabriel’s death they call for—Salloway and his cronies will up their timeline.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Who do you think had your father killed tonight?” he asks with a note of cynicism that was never there when he was secondborn. “I would’ve thought it was the Rose Garden Society. Don’t get me wrong, they wanted Kennet dead. But Kennet wasn’t just executed, Roselle. He was tortured. Someone hated him enough to make it extremely painful. It wasn’t just political. It was personal.”
“Mother,” I say. A lot of people had a motive to kill my father, but no one hated him like my mother did. Kennet would have inherited the title of The Virtue before I would. Dune and the Gates of Dawn want me to rule. I’m closer now that my father is dead, but the viciousness of Kennet’s murder is not their style. They would’ve simply put a fusion pulse in his head. Mother sent the Death Gods to brutalize my father. If they’d caught me, would they have tortured me as well?
“Othala hasn’t been able to get to you at the Halo Palace, so she changed her line of attack,” Hawthorne says. “If she becomes The Virtue, she’d rule everything. Now that your father is dead, she’s one step closer to her goal. That’s bad for the Rose Gardeners. They need you to become the firstborn heir to The Sword before your mother has a chance to become The Virtue, or you’re as good as dead. If she eliminates all the other heirs to the title, then everyone bows down to Othala, and she saves her son.”
“My mother would then become The Virtue, and Gabriel would become The Sword. I’d still be a threat to Gabriel, so they’d get rid of me. Then Gabriel will inherit the title of The Virtue when my mother dies.”
Hawthorne’s expression is grim. “But Othala can’t save Gabriel. He’s the only one who can do that, but he won’t. No one needs to kill him; he’s doing that all by himself. He’s completely psychotic now that he’s mixing Rush with Five Hundred.”
I cringe. A painful ache squeezes my heart. Separately, the drugs Hawthorne is talking about are dangerous. Together, they’re lethal. “Something can be done. Gabriel—”
“Doesn’t care about anything except getting high and killing you.”
In a broken whisper, I ask, “How are you still alive, Hawthorne?” The night I left him, he’d betrayed my brother, a death sentence in the Fate of Swords, especially if Gabriel is as sick as he says.
“I don’t know,” Hawthorne admits. He sighs, as if he’s trying to sort it out. “Your family doesn’t know what we did the night you escaped. Everything was erased.”
“Erased? How?”