“Ran into a door.”
“And you want me to go home?”
“Our deal’s off, right? Since yesterday? You don’t have to keep me alive anymore.”
Niles closes his eyes, goes so still he outclasses the shadows. Then he steps in, arms sliding loose around my waist as his forehead rests against mine. My whole body relaxes without checking first with my brain.
“The deal’s still on.” He sounds exhausted and a little worn. “Tell me what happened.”
I fist my hands against his shirt to push him away. And I will, I have to, it’s just . . . he makes everything else intangible. Harder to hold, to care about. At least with his breath on my lips and his palms low on my back. “We need to have a fight or something, so they think you’re not important.”
He pulls back to see my face, so I let him see the truth of it.
“I’m going to get you killed,” I say.
His expression blanks out, an empty wall-screen with no emotion. Even his voice doesn’t comment. “Me? They threatened you with me?”
“Everyone. Anyone. You’re in my general radius—look.” I flatten my hand to his chest and work up the will to push. “Go home. I have stuff to do.”
“You think those Brink kids can take me?” He tries for a smile, but even its angles are flat.
“‘They crave life like water and drink death like wine,’” I say. Gilken understood courage. “They have everything to lose, and with that gone nothing to stop them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Their home world—Lady Galton’s going to gut it. I’ve seen the core-splitters. Their planet will die and nothing will matter. Don’t you see? Nothing will matter to them anymore. They’ll kill everyone to get back at me, they’ll—”
His kiss snatches the words off my tongue and swallows them whole.
“Please,” I whisper. “Just go. I don’t want you dead.”
“I won’t be,” he says against my lips, a kiss in itself. “Whose son do you think I am?”
“But—”
Except he steals that word, too, and the seconds after. Whole minutes. Maybe my soul.
“Even if your mom blew ten Archives,” he says into our breathy silence, “she couldn’t touch my dad.”
Holy hell.
“You’re . . . not serious,” I say.
He squeezes tighter, as if I’m the one stabilizing him. “Just tell me what the hell is going on.”
So I close my eyes and do.
Mom acts as my pillows. My head in her lap as I kneel on the cold clinic floor, Yonni’s bed high and tubed to our right. Mom smooths my hair. I taste blood. Mine, I think. She rubs red between her fingertips. “Oh, brightheart, what did you get into?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I need to get up, scoot away. Except under her hand, my forehead hurts less.
“You haven’t that option. We’ve reached the third and are nearing the fourth. Besides, the elevator’s stopped on your floor.”
I sit up, palms scraping the cold tile. I see the bed, the empty sterile walls, but I can also see the elevator. Duel images my brain takes in stride.
The lift doors open and men pour out.
Mom watches them, too. Her dress shimmers like the city haze as she sniffs her red fingers. A little sweet, a little burnt.
Everything clicks.
“Scent maps,” I say. “You’re mapping me. Planting suggestions in my brain.”
She smiles and traces my cheek. “Good girl. I pressed a receptor patch to your arm when you came to visit me. Fast dissolving and untraceable, but brief. It’ll last two weeks, then I’ll fade out.”
She put something on me? In me?
Of course she did.
I wait for the anger to kick in. It’d be so much easier to be angry. “But you’re already dead.”
I know she’s dead. Know it so deep it weaves through my blood.
“Yes,” she says. “It was necessary.”
The men march down the hall now, five total, and Dee’s with them.
“Then how is this happening?”
She scrunches her nose at me. “You’re a smart girl, it’s not hard. Ask the right questions. It’s a matter of heart.”
One of the men pounds the door.
I sit bolt upright on the couch—my couch—the pounding not just in my head but my ears. A sheet slips off my legs to puddle in the sun spots from the windows. Bright sun, pre-afternoon but well into morning. The air’s thick, almost metallic.
“Kit Franks.” A door-splitting knock. “This is the Records Office. If you refuse us entry, then under the authority of Record 269A–495, we will enter unaided.”
Wait, they’re real?
I sniff the air, taste the burned and the sweet.
Mom mapped me. She planted a patch and mapped me.
Pound pound pound.
“Coming, I’m coming!” I call.
I swing my feet to the floor, scrub my face. Can still feel the echo of Mom’s fingers. Now that wasn’t real. I don’t think. My shoulder burns up to my neck. I rub the ache and find gauze—a thin, neat strip.
Niles. Niles patched me up then said he’d be back.
The pounding worsens. Any more and they’ll bust it in. “This is not a game, Miss Franks.”