It was such a relief to say, “No.”
I stood there until I realized I would have to return to my father. I stepped up to the blank gray face of the tower, rested my hot cheek for a moment against cool stone, and kissed the wall.
I turned and began to walk down the street, away from the glowing clock and into the deepening evening. As I did, someone fell into step with me, and I saw without much surprise that it was Carwyn. I was too limp and wrung out to feel much of anything. I supposed he had followed me there and watched it all.
He was not collared and hooded yet. His dark head was still bare, and his well-known face was exposed to public view. The evening was storing up shadows, piling up the layers of darkness in the sky. It was hard to make out anyone’s features unless you were really looking, and nobody was looking for Ethan. They knew where he was.
“Did you fake the crying for effect?” Carwyn asked. His voice was neutral, and that, rather than any show of praise or horror, was what made me answer.
“It was real,” I said slowly. “And it was for effect.”
Carwyn only looked accepting. I thought that might have been why I had been drawn to him at the start: that he was from the Dark city, and I’d thought he might be more like me than Ethan or Nadiya or any of the innocent people I knew. More than that, because he was a doppelganger, he surely would not judge me even if he knew all I had done.
In the end, though, I didn’t need him to approve of me or understand me. I was done feeling bad about the choices I had made to survive.
“So here you are back in the Dark city,” I said.
Carwyn inclined his head. “Here we are, back in the Dark city. You going home to your dad?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“I doubt they want a doppelganger under their roof.”
“I’m sure they would let you stay. I’m sure I could persuade them, if they had a problem with it.”
He looked down at me sharply, as if I had said something remarkable. Then he lifted a hand and touched it to my face. It was a brief brush of his skin on mine; I did not even have time to startle back before he drew his hand away, his fingertips wet with my tears. I saw then that he was looking at me with both affection and concern, with tenderness I had never dreamed I’d see him show. I remembered, with something like a shock, that he thought he loved me.
“You’ve done enough,” Carwyn said. “Now there’s something I have to do. Good luck with your part, Lucie.”
There was an expression on his face I did not understand. “Good luck with whatever you’re trying to do.”
“Thank you,” said Carwyn, still with that strange look about him. “I hope I succeed.”
I reached out and touched his hand before we parted. All my enemies were transforming into something else, it seemed, passing beyond reach of hate. There were no people left to be fought: there were only people left I had to fight for.
I went back to the clock tower every day and stood there all day. Every day a larger and larger crowd came to look at me weep.
Every day, people took pictures of me. Every day, the same old newspapers under the new regime discussed whether the Golden Thread in the Dark was grateful enough for being liberated, whether I was a weak traitor to the cause, whether Ethan Stryker was different from the other Strykers, whether he had truly worked with the sans-merci and whether that mattered. There was no consensus on me. I didn’t want one. I hadn’t counted on a sympathetic response. I just wanted everyone talking about me. I wanted everyone watching.
I watched them in their turn: I memorized the number of guards, the length of their shifts, when they came to the tower and when they went away, how each of them acted around me.
On the last day of Ethan’s imprisonment, his day of execution, I went to my hiding place in the wall. I slid out the brick, and among the gray ashes I saw the pure, true light of my mother’s diamond. I drew out the necklace, and the sunshine caught the jewel. Sparks were tossed in the air, like confetti made of dancing points of light. The room was suddenly bright, and as I held the diamond, light lanced through its sparkling facets, rose and gold like a fire waking between my palms. I hung the chain around my neck.
When I left the apartment, I took my sword with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It had been a long, bad time, but I had slept every night when I went home and not lain awake worrying about what I was doing or what I had become. The sans-merci had called in every one of us—me, Dad, Penelope, Jarvis, even little Marie—for questioning at the hotel, more than once, but they had let every one of us go. Sometimes, though, Penelope or Jarvis came back bleeding.