I ran stumbling across the floor, to the sofa, and into her arms.
Penelope stroked my hair and murmured to me, words of love and gratitude that I had come to her, words of misery she assumed was shared. She spoke to me as if I was part of her family and not the agent of its destruction. Her tears fell into my hair, and I hung around her neck and tried to say all the right things back to her, tried to offer her what little comfort I could. I did not say that I’d agreed to Jarvis being sent because I was too much of a coward to stand up to Mark Stryker. I did not say that Jarvis was lost because of me.
I still could not cry.
When Marie came home and my father woke, we had to tell them. Penelope did it holding tightly to my hand, as if we were in it together, as if we were allies. We were able to reassure them both, make them believe that something bad had happened but we would all be spared from the ultimate horror of losing Jarvis.
Later that night, I lay in bed and thought of Jarvis, and of Ethan.
Ethan had not wanted any of this to happen. I did not want to turn away from him and be alone in my misery. I did not want him to be alone either.
He had sent Jarvis to the Dark city to save lives, to help people. I had wanted someone to go and try to protect my Aunt Leila, to protect what used to be my home. I had wanted someone to be sent, but I had not been able to choose someone or been able to truly hope for change. Ethan had.
He had not been brought up to fear, and he had refused to learn how to hate. Even now that his father had been killed, he wanted peace.
And he had not been wrong about our relationship, and how it worked. Neither of us had been truly willing to tell the other about our families, about our beliefs, even that we could both sword fight. I knew fear and hate, and I did not know how to tell him about either. He had asked for the truth, and I had not felt able to give it to him.
Just because I had failed to trust him did not mean that he was unworthy of trust.
I loved him and I did not want to be without him. Jarvis was gone, but perhaps we could find him. I had saved somebody from the Dark city once before, and with Ethan to help me—Ethan and all his resources—maybe I could do it again.
If I could not, I did not want to lose anybody else.
Of course, what I wanted was not the only thing that mattered, I thought, and lay curled on my side with my hands curled too. Both the curl of my body and the curl of my hands hid emptiness.
I had never understood why Ethan loved me, why he had wanted me or chosen me. But I had always tried to be good to him, not to show too much of my damage or my ugliness to him, and now I had spilled the bitterness of years all over his wounds. He had just lost his father.
I remembered the part I had played to save my father. I remembered knowing that if I slipped up, nobody would remember how hard I had tried. All they would remember was how terribly I had failed, and the pure perfect image of me I had worked so hard to put in their minds would be shattered and stained.
Ethan might not want me back.
I rolled over in bed, tangled in sheets and darkness. The one thing Ethan had asked me to do was trust him, and the one thing he had said to me over and over again was that he loved me, loved me, loved me.
If I could not trust that, I could not trust anything.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next morning, I woke early and went softly through the apartment, getting dressed so as not to wake Penelope or Marie—who I knew had cried themselves to sleep last night—or my father. I dressed in the nicest clothes I had, buttoning up a white blouse with pearl buttons, brushing my hair until it shone.
I left the apartment and walked up flights of stairs until I reached the roof of our building, and I walked outside to look down at the sleeping world. Sunrise was brimming at the edge of the sky, a line of brightness that seemed about to spill over the land. The Dark city was a cluster of lightless buildings, lower on the ground than we were. The Light city was a spread of towers that were already gleaming. They were scenes of black and gold placed side by side.
The Dark and the Light, and the bridges between them. They looked so perfectly ordered, connected but separate, designed to be this way. The unalterable order of things, set in stone, and in metal and magic. It was a system that had hurt me, but it was something I could work within: it was the world I knew. There was something about the very stability of it that steadied me.