My mother and father never believed any of it. They supported doppelganger rights, thought they should be able to vote and be allowed to live with faces open to the light.
Even in the Dark cities, doppelgangers were a little apart from us. There are very few doppelganger children; I never saw one. I saw their hooded figures on the street, ordered coffees from them, smiled reflexively at them in the grocery store and never knew whether under the shadow of their hood they were smiling back.
I was secretly afraid of them, though I would never have told my parents that. But at least I had seen a doppelganger before. Up until that day, I would have sworn that Ethan never had, not up close.
He was a golden boy in every sense of the word, untouched by darkness or suffering. I would have sworn that was true, and I would have been wrong.
There. That’s it. That’s everything I knew, back then. That is the world we lived in, with bright cities and dark twins.
That brings us up to that moment on the train, with the boy I loved and the stranger who had saved him.
Now you know everything, except the story of what happened next to all of us: Ethan of the Light city, Carwyn of the Dark, and me, who was born with a foot in each.
This is the tale of who I was able to save.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Strykers did not actually live in Stryker Tower, because it was a place of business, and it would be difficult to sleep in a building that lit up everything within a three-block radius bright as day. They lived in a different building, this one on the south side of Central Park, with a carved stone entryway that reminded me of a museum’s and a doorman who had scared me at first. I’d seen that doorman escort out people whose names Ethan’s cousin Jim had decided were no longer on the approved list.
This was such a bright place, a center for glittering luxury. Death and doppelgangers and darkness were all things that I had thought I’d left behind long ago.
Ethan had put me on the list and would never have taken my name off. I had run through this echoing marble hall as if I belonged here a hundred times, hand in hand with Ethan, in from the park wearing a bikini top and shorts, bundled up in a winter coat and laden with presents.
Everybody here thought of me as belonging to the Light, as if growing up in the Dark had not affected me, as if the shine of my rings had made me immune to my surroundings. But I knew who I had been in the Dark, and remembered those I loved in the darkness. I remembered it all even more vividly that day, when I had been so close to someone from the Dark like me. I felt out of place passing the doorman, as if he might stop me, read the darkness on my face, and have me thrown out into the street. I glanced up and saw my own golden head in the mirror-like surface of the ceiling as I went through to the elevator.
When I knocked on the door, Charles Stryker answered it: Ethan’s father. Normally, it was the housekeeper or Ethan himself. Ethan’s dad must have been in a state of some distress to actually open his own door.
Charles Stryker and his brother were alike, but Charles was older than Mark and he looked like the sketch before the oil painting: Charles’s features a little more uncertain, blurred, the line of nose and jaw less decided and his eyes smaller, hairline humbly receding, while Mark’s would never retreat.
I liked Ethan’s dad more than his uncle, but I had never liked either of them much.
“Lucie,” said Charles, who did like me, and he took hold of my wrists, his rings cool against my pulse points. He pressed a kiss as cold as the rings onto my cheek. “Very nice to see you, as always, especially after . . .”
Charles often abandoned sentences.
“Ethan will be so pleased.”
“You know it,” said Ethan, behind his father.
He clasped Charles’s shoulder—he was always the one showing his dad affection rather than the other way around, and Charles always seemed puzzled but pleased by it—and his dad smiled at him, a smile weak as lousy tea, before he slipped away.
I stepped up to Ethan, arm around his neck, top lip pressed against his bottom lip, in my place, the perfect place. His body was solid against me, the curve of his neck pressed into the inside of my elbow, his breath warm against my cheek. The planes and curves and heat of his body all adding up to sanctuary.
Even when I felt like I didn’t belong in the Light, I knew I belonged here.
“Hey,” I murmured into the corner of his mouth, “where is he?”
Ethan flinched, making a tiny space between us where all the cold could rush in. I drew back, into the dark, silent hall.
“Ethan, where is Carwyn?”