“I’ll pass,” I said.
Aunt Leila looked up from the sink and frowned, sparkling drops caught in her long black hair. “It would not be any work. You would only have to make appearances. Of course you would not make decisions about what is best for the city. It would simply be good for you to be viewed as supporting us.”
She did not want real support or the real me.
I looked at her, and I remembered loving her, remembered eating cookies and learning the sword at her house, remembered her being all I had when my father was caged. I looked at her, and I could only see Mark Stryker, who had loved Ethan and still been ready to commit any atrocity. Now here was my aunt, and she loved me. I had not known two years ago that love was not enough to keep people from becoming monsters.
“I know how it would be,” I told Aunt Leila. “I attended meetings of the Light Council.”
“It is not the same thing at all!”
“Being your decoration instead of someone else’s?” I said. “Would I not be sitting and listening to new rules that kill new people? I’d be your golden-haired doll instead of Mark Stryker’s. No, thanks. I’ll pass. Unless—”
Aunt Leila laughed, the sound old and wise. “I will not spare any Stryker.”
And I, I found slowly, discovering the truth as if it was something I had found under dust in the attic of my own home, I did not want to join the committee. Not even to save Ethan. I was so tired of compromises and cowardice.
Aunt Leila looked at my face and sighed.
“Did you hear nothing of what I told you? Did you understand nothing of my story? That Ethan Stryker’s blood tortured your father and murdered your mother, my sister, and exiled you, my niece as dear as a daughter. That I have seen them do the same to countless families, and I will not stop until every drop of his blood has answered for mine. Doesn’t it matter, what they did?”
My mother gone, my father wrecked, my aunt twisted, my life ruined. If I thought about it too long, I felt the same consuming rage that Aunt Leila must have felt. If I had stayed with her instead of meeting Ethan, revenge might have been all I wanted as well. Rage might have consumed me until it was all there was left of me.
Mark Stryker had not suffered as Aunt Leila had suffered. Mark had no excuse for all he had done. But when you were making other people suffer, no excuse was good enough.
Ethan had known nothing, had done nothing but try to help me and try to save the city. Aunt Leila was murdering people, but Ethan had given himself up to save someone. I had already underestimated him, and I would not let him be condemned.
“It matters. Something else matters more. I love him.”
“Love?” said Aunt Leila. “What of it? I loved my sister, more than you ever loved her, you who denied her to the whole Light city. Do you think any force in the world cares about who you love? Love never saved a single human soul. I have seen so many suffer, so many children and women and men die of neglect or brutality or starvation. Do you think any one of that crowd cares about your trouble? Did you care about theirs?”
“Not as much as I should have.”
Aunt Leila nodded, watching me with intent eyes, pitiless as a wolf. I did not know what had changed her, what had made her someone who prized revenge above love. I did not know if she had always been like this, for as long as I had lived and loved her.
Ethan cares about the crowd’s trouble, I thought. Ethan does.
“You can have the doppelganger,” Aunt Leila said at last.
“What?”
“The doppelganger,” Aunt Leila elucidated, saying the words with a certain malice, as if she wanted to take love as well as my beloved from me. “He’s the one you were with at this hotel, isn’t he? He’s found some way to take his collar off. When we found Ethan Stryker in the Dark city, I thought he might be the doppelganger, but we tested him—he’s the real thing. But you seem to like the imitation well enough. You can keep the doppelganger, and we will kill Ethan Stryker in two weeks, in a festival nobody will ever forget, in a purge of all his kind.” She licked her lips, like a wolf after a meal, and I felt sick watching her. “We have to have the real one. He’s the one I want.”
“They’re both real,” I told her. “But he’s the one I want too. It was me who took the doppelganger’s collar off. I saved him, but that doesn’t mean I love him. It means I would have saved anybody. You think you can keep me from saving someone I love?”
“I already saved a man for you once,” said Aunt Leila. “Not this one. Not a Stryker.”
She spoke as if it was entirely her doing, as if the world changed only by her will. I had spent so long feeling guilty for what I’d done, for putting on an act to get Dad out, for pretending to be innocent and thereby losing all innocence. It was something I had done, and I would not let Aunt Leila take it away from me.