I counted the doors we passed, looking for distinguishing marks. Initially, they had all looked the same, but in the many hours I’d spent roaming the corridors, I’d found scuff marks and handprints. He moved quickly, long legs breezing down the corridor until he stopped outside a door like any other. A flick of the handle and the door opened, revealing a flight of stairs. I soaked it up, committing the layout to memory so that when he inevitably brought me back, I would know which way was out. An elevator carried us to Floor G2. He flicked his fingers at himself, weaving an illusion. A bitter citrus smell filled the elevator, and his outline blurred and then sharpened. In the fae’s place stood an unassuming, drab human male, in comparison. He straightened his scarlet tie, human fingers fumbling a little. Damn, he was good at this. His act was in place moments before the elevator doors opened, and off he strode out. As a human, his stride was heavier, and when he spoke, his voice had deepened with a gravelly undertone. His illusion was perfect in its imperfections. If I wasn’t walking next to him, if I hadn’t seen his transformation myself, I wouldn’t believe he was fae.
We walked down the glass halls, Larsen attracting glances from Arcon staff, and paused outside a clear-walled office. Inside, Sota sat silent on his dock. I tried the door, but it didn’t budge.
“Nobody goes in or out without my authorization,” Larsen explained.
I pressed my hand to the glass wall. Sota’s red eye was a constant glow. His charge light blinked. My friend. My only friend in the three systems.
“You will do everything I ask,” Larsen spoke softly. “While in public, you will act as though we are acquaintances. If you try to alert the authorities or contact anyone, I will punish him.”
Sota? I mentally called. Silence came back. “Is he mentally intact?” I asked, looking up to find Larsen’s hideous smile firmly on his lips.
“Yes. He fought our every attempt to crack him open. He has a filthy vocabulary for a tactical drone.”
Sota had picked up some of the more colorful language from the sinks and delighted in shocking message recipients with oddly placed swear words in the middle of their messages. I smiled at the memory. He had fought. Good for him.
If I had come sooner, if I had stopped Larsen in his meeting room instead of running…
“You gave him life. Obey me, and your gift will continue.”
Obey me. Everything about that order made my skin crawl. I’d spent my entire life obeying them. I had obeyed them until it almost cost me my life, and it had certainly cost the queen hers. “For how long am I supposed to pretend?”
“When your usefulness has expired, I will let you know.”
I arched an eyebrow. He didn’t want to kill me. All I had to do was pretend to know him as the human Istvan Larsen while I plotted the best way to kill him. In the meantime, I’d garner as much information about his operation and motives for being here and pass that information on to someone who could do something about it. Someone like Kellee. Inside, I smiled. “Agreed.”
He nodded. “Now follow me.”
We walked through Arcon, floor after floor after floor. Miles of corridors, through a sprawling mass of glass laboratories, weapons development and the day-to-day administration of such a vast company. Wherever he went, people showered Larsen with attention. Staff would fall into step beside him and debrief him on the latest profit margins. Others would stop Larsen and chat like they were the best of friends. The more I watched, the more my insides clenched in anxiety at the depth of his deception. His act went beyond a charade. He lived this role, breathed it, became it. There was danger in illusion. It was too easy to fall into the trappings of another life. Hadn’t I done the same as Kesh Lasota?
The glass pyramid fa?ade was just Arcon’s frontage. Its collection of buildings spread outward, into neighboring locations, like a university campus scattered across miles of land, and much of Arcon lay buried beneath street level in areas Larsen avoided.
He barely said a word to me the entire time I walked at his side, and without an introduction, his people also ignored me. But they were curious, casting me keen glances as we passed by. I figured the young CEO rarely had company.
Any questions I asked, he ignored.
Several times I lingered near clearly marked exits, instincts plucking on my determination, urging me to flee. But running would solve nothing. I was exactly where I needed to be.
Finally, the tour ended in the long meeting room where I’d leaped through a window. That section of glass had been repaired with a metal plate. From the outside, it must have looked like a blemish on Arcon’s perfect fa?ade.
Larsen moved around his oak chair, running his hand along the carved back. The oak wasn’t from Earth, I realized. It had been carved as a single piece from the vast oaks—the original trees—found on Faerie. Seeing it there, I could almost smell the accompanying rain and hear its sweet symphony as it fell on the lush undergrowth, lifting delicate puffs of magic into the air. The oak chair would have lost its ingrained fae magic a long time ago, but that didn’t stop his touch from lingering, perhaps imagining the same as me.
He looked my way, unblinking, daring me to ask all the questions clamoring in my head. I wanted to know what he was doing here, what the point was in all of this, and I wanted to ask if he missed Faerie like I did. But more than anything else, I wanted to know his name. As much as he pretended to be Larsen, he wasn’t human and never would be. The same as I would never be fae. I needed to know his name.
He came around the front of the chair and lowered himself into it. When he looked away, I caught the flicker of pain crossing his face. Dropping his head back, he closed his eyes. He still wore the human illusion, but this young human male had suddenly aged.
“A long time ago,” he began, keeping his eyes closed, “we would pluck humans from their lives and have them live among us on Faerie. We replaced them with one of our own, a changeling adept at pretending to be human so no one would miss them. In those times, their tek hadn’t advanced to the levels of today…” He opened his eyes and blinked, refocusing on the room and me. “It was harmless.”
“I know the tales.” And it was a long way from harmless if you were one of the humans the fae had taken.
“We would make them dance and sing. And the foolish creatures always fell in love with us, with Faerie.”
I turned my attention to the windows and Calicto sparkling outside. Some aspects of Faerie hadn’t changed at all in thousands of years. They still lured humans into their games and killed them with their so-called kindness.
“When we grew bored, in days or years, we would send them back to their world, back to Earth.”
Where they would die, I thought. They all died, wilted like flowers cut at the stem. The cruelty didn’t come from taking the people. The game was all about sending them home again and watching the human rant and scream and demand to return to the world they had come to love. A world that to anyone else, didn’t exist. To love the fae was a madness. And the fae knew it.
When he didn’t continue his tale, I looked back and found his face turned to the glass, his sharp features in profile. He knew what those tragic humans had gone through because, cut from Faerie, he felt it too.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
He hesitated and then lifted a hand, tossing away time as though it meant nothing. Did he even know how long? Something the imprisoned fae, Talen, had said came back to me: no fae would willingly put themselves through this agony. Not only was Larsen severed from everything he knew and loved, but he also endured day after day surrounded by human tek. He had built up a resistance, but it must have still pained him. Was it a punishment? I’d assumed he was doing all of this deliberately, but what if I’d been wrong? What if his act was a prison?
I smiled, realizing the trap I’d fallen into. Sympathizing with my jailor. A novice mistake, and one I knew to avoid. It seemed I had forgotten much in five years.
“Strange, how I stumble upon the Wraithmaker, of all creatures,” he mused, still gazing out of the window. “In all the three systems, on all the countless planets, you are the messenger I hired to take the blame for a murder.” His gaze cut to me. “What brought you to Calicto?”
“It was the destination of the first ship I boarded after escaping Faerie. Why did you kill Crater?”
He ignored my question and frowned. “How did you escape?”
I smiled instead of answering. I wasn’t about to tell him, considering I may have to escape again soon.