Pawn (7 page)

I pushed myself off the bed and stood. No, not stood—I swayed, seconds away from falling, and my legs shook under the stress of bearing my weight.
Shit.

“Whoa, what do you think you’re doing?” Knox reached out to steady me, and when I tried to take a step, my foot caught on the lush carpet. Yes, something was definitely wrong.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” I clumsily fell back onto the bed. When I stuck my legs out to see what was wrong with them, my mouth dropped open. They were several inches longer. And thinner.

It wasn’t just my face and my hands and my hip. I was taller, too.

Knox sat down beside me. “They did a good job on you,” he said, glancing at my legs. “If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“Good for them,” I said faintly. “I need some air.”

“Excellent idea. I could use some myself.”

Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to stand on my unsteady legs. This time I knew what to expect.

“Let me,” said Knox, offering me his arm. I pushed it away and shuffled across the carpet. I needed to do this on my own.

By the time I finally reached the door, I was panting, my muscles burned, and a bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. Knox had left it open, and I poked my head around the corner, only to see a long white hallway that looked about a mile long. My heart sank.

“Stubborn little thing, aren’t you?” Knox reappeared beside me with a wheelchair. “You really should learn when to ask for help. There’s no shame in it, you know.”

“I’m not letting you push me around in that thing,” I said flatly.

“You have two choices—stay in this tiny room all day and mope, or go for a ride.” He paused. “Well, you could also try to walk farther than you already have, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Doubt the doctors would, either.”

I didn’t particularly care about what the doctors thought—or the fact that Knox thought the bedroom was tiny—but my legs were shaking so badly underneath me that my knees were practically knocking together. A wheelchair might have been embarrassing, but it had to be better than collapsing.

“Promise to take me wherever I want to go?” I said.

Knox placed his hand over his heart. “You have my word as your loving and devoted fiancé.”

I rolled my eyes and eased myself down into the chair. My legs ached with pain beyond anything I’d ever felt before, and I could feel where they’d elongated the bones and tissue. No wonder they’d kept me unconscious.

“Where to, Your Highness?” said Knox as he handed me a blanket. I tucked it in around my lap, grateful for the warmth.

“Think you can manage a tour?” He’d never let me leave the building, but I might as well learn the layout.

Knox pushed me forward. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The long hallway was only the start of it. Knox wheeled me down another one, then another, and another, and I struggled to remember where we’d turned. It wasn’t until I started imagining the hallways as the sewers that I figured out a way to keep track. I knew the sewer system better than most city workers, and it was dangerous to get lost down there. I was willing to bet it wasn’t half as dangerous as it would be getting lost in this place, though.

“Where are the exits?” I said. The doors all blended into the walls, and none of them looked like they would lead to the streets.

“Thinking about leaving us so soon?” said Knox.

“There might be a fire,” I said lamely, and I could practically hear his grin as he pushed me into an elevator. They were rare in the Heights, most being rickety and the sort that broke down once a week, and I hated the way I felt trapped inside them. But I was stuck in the chair for now, and I doubted this elevator broke down much at all. It was exquisite, with the ceiling made of white molding and buttons that shone like gold. Mirrors surrounded us on all four sides, and I saw the scowl on my unfamiliar face. Lila even looked pretty when she was miserable.

That was also the first good look I had at my new body. As the elevator flew upward, I stared at myself, trying to find any connection to my real appearance. Everything from my hair to my feet had been changed into an exact copy of Lila’s, and the harder I looked, the more I realized even I couldn’t tell the difference.

My eyes widened as I caught sight of my chest, and my hands flew upward. “You gave me
implants?
”

In the mirrors I could see Knox struggling to keep a straight face. “
I
didn’t do anything, and I doubt they’re implants. Those haven’t been done in years. Chances are they’re as real as your old ones.”

I didn’t find that very comforting. “What was wrong with mine?”

“They weren’t Lila’s.”

“Yeah, but there wasn’t that much of a difference, was there? Who spends so much time staring at Lila’s chest that they’d notice?”

Knox smirked. “Roughly half the population.”

My face turned scarlet, and I was still trying to come up with some kind of retort when the doors glided open, flooding the elevator with sunlight.

For a moment I thought I was imagining things. Clear blue sky stretched out before me, nothing like the smoggy skies of the District of Columbia, and white peaks loomed in the distance. Mountains.

“This is the exit,” said Knox, wheeling me forward so we were close to the edge of the roof. The bitter wind whipped around me, but I was too dazed to worry about the cold. We were in a compound that seemed to be carved out of the mountain itself. When I stood on my shaky legs to look around, there were no towns or houses or anything in sight. Just the roof and snowy peaks.

“You didn’t think we’d keep you in the city while we made the alterations, did you?” said a voice behind me. Daxton.

He sauntered toward us, wearing a crisp black suit that made him look as if he’d come from some extravagant event. Behind him stood a jet with the Hart family crest stamped on the tail, and the air around it seemed to ripple from the heat of the engines.

“Where are we?” I said, wishing my voice wasn’t trembling as much as my knees. I grabbed the rail to steady myself.

“Somewhere no one will find you,” said Daxton, smiling as he removed his leather gloves. “The family calls it the Stronghold, and its location is quite secret. You understand.” He winked. “We thought this was the safest place for you until you’ve adjusted.”

Until there was no chance I’d give away their game publicly, he meant. “How long will that be?”

“That, my dear, is entirely up to you.” He unwound his scarf and stepped toward me. I flinched, but he gently wrapped it around my neck. “Wouldn’t want you to catch cold in this chill.”

“I’ll take her back inside,” said Knox, and he touched my elbow. I stood my ground, refusing to let go of the frozen rail.

“What do you want from me before I’m not your prisoner anymore?”

“My dear,” said Daxton, his eyes wide with mock concern. “You’re not my prisoner. If you really wish to go, we won’t keep you here, but do understand that there will be consequences if you choose to leave.”

Like a bullet with my name on it. “Yeah, I know.”

Knox cleared his throat. “Sir, I believe she means how long she’s stuck here until she can take over for Lila.”

Daxton’s lips curled upward into a leering smile. “Have you decided not to fight us after all? What pleasant news. Mother will be thrilled to hear it.”

I dug my nails into the steel railing. “I’m not going to fight you. Tell me what I need to do to get out of this place, and I’ll do it.”

Daxton cupped my cheek, his hand like fire in the icy wind. “I am so very happy to hear that, darling. I understand how difficult this must be for you, and we are all here to help you. I will have Knox and Celia begin working with you tomorrow. Only your progress will dictate how long it will take. I am hoping for a few weeks, but it will last as long as it must.”

Unless I was hopeless. Then I had no doubt it would be easy enough to replace me.

“When we’re certain you will pass muster, you will meet Mother,” he continued. “She will be the final judge.”

I tightened my grip on the railing and tried not to sway. Nina called Augusta Hart the Bitch Queen, and with good reason. There hadn’t been a single photograph taken of her since before I was born that showed her smiling, and she was notoriously unforgiving with both the people and her own family. It was common gossip that her husband, Edward, had just been a figurehead while she ruled the country with an iron fist, and apparently the same was true for Daxton.

Knox helped me into my chair, and I struggled to hold back the horror building inside me. Pretending to be a VII was one thing, but I would’ve had an easier time making an elephant tap dance than gaining Augusta’s approval. Any hope I had at outsmarting them faded, and the only thing I had left was staying alive long enough to make sure they didn’t hurt Benjy.

V
Augusta

Lila was right-handed.

Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but even though I barely knew the shapes of the cursive letters that formed my name, I could draw. I’d been holding markers and crayons since I was big enough to steal them from the supply cabinets in the group home, and everything I’d ever done had been with my left hand.

It wasn’t just learning how to mimic the curves that formed Lila’s signature. I had to learn to eat with my right hand as well, and the Harts seemed to have an endless stream of rules I had to follow in the dining room alone. Sit up straight, use the correct fork without hesitation, hold my pinkie up as I took a sip of water—everything Lila did instinctively, I had to learn from the ground up. It was a well-rehearsed show, as if Celia and Knox expected the cameras to be on me constantly, and I couldn’t ignore the possibility that they were right. I would have no second chance.

“Get the basics down, and you’ll be fine,” said Knox on the first day of my training. “The trick isn’t to convince them you’re Lila—it’s not to do anything to make them question it.”

That probably held some special distinction for Knox that was supposed to make it easier on me, but I didn’t know enough about Lila to mimic her. Everything I did, from the way I walked to the way I spoke, was different. I had an accent she didn’t. I’d never worn a pair of heels before, and those were all Lila seemed to wear. The foods she ate were ones I hated, which made maintaining her slight weight easy enough, but it also made the urge to sneak into the kitchens for a real meal gnaw at me unbearably.

I didn’t, though, and not just because I could barely find a bathroom in the Stronghold, let alone the kitchens. If I were caught, or if they had any reason to suspect I wasn’t going along with their plan, I had no idea what they would do to me. Knox at least seemed to pretend he was on my side, but Celia—she never looked me in the eye. Not that I could blame her, but it did little to make me feel like any less of a pariah. To her credit, she didn’t seem to take it out on me. She grew more and more distant as the days passed, but she was never cruel. She was as stuck as I was, and the most either of us could do was pretend not to hurt as much as we did.

The one problem that wasn’t going to be solved anytime soon was the fact that I couldn’t read. Lila had loved books, and according to Celia, she had an entire library to herself in their New York home. She had constantly carried an old-fashioned paperback around with her to read in her spare moments, and many of the speeches she gave were read off glass screens in the middle of the crowd. Teleprompters, Celia said. Knox called them cheat sheets.

That wouldn’t work for me, though. I had to learn how to repeat a speech fed to me through an earpiece, which I quickly discovered was much harder than it sounded. I tried again and again, but it never got easier. Worse, Lila sounded exactly like Celia, her voice rich and much more adult than mine. Some sort of technology had been implanted in my voice box to copy hers, but it wasn’t really the sound of her voice that tripped me up. It was the way she talked and formed sentences. After a week, I still didn’t have it down. When she spoke, she sounded like she had the answers to everything, and there was something about her that made even me want to follow her off a cliff. I couldn’t mimic that no matter how hard I tried.

Celia also made the mistake of trying to teach me how to read, even though I insisted it was useless. It wasn’t that I was stupid or wasn’t trying. Letters strung together had simply never made sense to me. I knew what words meant, and because Benjy had read to me every night, I knew my favorite stories by heart. But while I had a talent for remembering what I’d heard, something about reading didn’t work in my head. Celia tried to keep her cool, but eventually she gave up.

“I’ll record your speeches for you,” she said after a disastrous lesson using one of Lila’s favorite childhood books. “You can memorize them instead.”

This worked for me, and once we figured it out, things gradually grew easier. Whether I liked it or not, I was slowly turning into Lila Hart.

It took me eleven days to learn everything I needed to fool the casual observer into thinking I was Lila. Every moment I wasn’t sleeping or receiving lessons from Knox and Celia, I watched recordings of her. Speech after speech after speech, public appearances, family recordings from when she was an infant onward—by the time those eleven days were over, if there was something to know about Lila, I knew it. She didn’t eat red meat; she preferred music so old that the songs were sung by people, not by digitally created voices; her eyes never crinkled when she smiled; and according to Knox, she’d gotten that butterfly tattoo only months before she died. It had been an act of rebellion that she’d purposely revealed during a formal dinner between her uncle, her grandmother, and the leaders of foreign nations I’d never heard of. Even Celia, who stared blankly at her hands while the speeches were playing, managed a smile at the memory.

But those were only snapshots. Glimpses of who she was. Facts. In a way, it felt like the more I learned, the less I knew her. And I was no closer to having a conversation with her than I had been before Daxton had found me.

The speeches she gave were dangerous and full of reasons why there should be equality among the people like there had been during the early twenty-first century—when no one was marked or assigned careers, when freedom meant more than being able to walk down designated streets at night. When one person’s entire life wasn’t determined by a single test; when you had the chance to be whatever you wanted to be and live the kind of life you wanted without being told what to do. When we all had a choice. A
real
choice.

My entire life, I’d been told that the ranks were there for a reason. Everyone had their place, and the only way society could function was if we all respected the system. We were all equals when we took the test, and we were all scored the same way.

But in the speeches Lila gave, she said that the children who grew up in the neighborhoods meant for IIs and IIIs weren’t given the same opportunities as the others. At first I didn’t understand—there was only so much you could learn, right? Who cared where the schools were or what kind of supplies we had?

And then she talked about the education the children of Vs and VIs received.

“Some kids have tutors to help them with the test?” I said, stunned. “Isn’t that cheating?” Getting five minutes with my teachers had been next to impossible, let alone anything more. It wasn’t their fault, not really—there were dozens of us crammed into a classroom. Most days the teachers were lucky if they got everyone to shut up at the same time.

Celia pressed a few buttons on the remote. “I wouldn’t call it cheating. It’s more...teaching to the test, shall we say?”

“Most of the highly sought-after tutors are people who have worked in the testing centers,” said Knox. “If your family has enough money, they’ll hire one.”

“Yeah, but only VIs can afford that,” I said. He shrugged.

After that, I made a point of listening to what Lila was saying, not just the way she said it. If the government lied to everyone about the so-called equality of the test, then what else were they lying about?

None of the speeches Lila gave were televised. Instead they were recorded on handheld devices like the one Daxton had, some so shaky that I had to look away, but it wasn’t what she looked like that mattered. She talked about doing away with Elsewhere and reverting to the system of government America had used before the Ministers of the Union had been formed, one where the elections were real and not a way for the Harts to legitimize their stranglehold over the country.

It was political treason, and if she’d been anyone other than a Hart, she would have been shot on sight. She was questioning the very system that was responsible for her family’s power and the VII on the back of her neck. She was leading a rebellion.

School didn’t teach us anything about the time before the ranks. There were mentions of the past, the World Wars and long-dead kings of countries across the oceans, but as far as the textbooks were concerned, history began seventy-one years ago, when the first citizen of the union was marked and Daxton’s grandfather became prime minister. Years before I was born, there had been people who’d remembered a time before, but now everyone over the age of sixty was sent Elsewhere and never heard from again.

Maybe instead of killing me, that was what Daxton had in mind. I’d be as good as dead anyway, since no one knew where Elsewhere was. Presumably someplace warm where people could grow old and die, where they wouldn’t take up space in already-crowded cities and could keep an eye on the criminals who were sent there as well, banished from society for the smallest of crimes. That wouldn’t be so bad, except for the part where I wouldn’t have Benjy.

But something about the way Lila spoke—she believed in her message. There was no need to tell IIs and IIIs that something crucial was missing from their lives, but judging by the well-dressed crowds, few members of the audiences were below a V. Not only was she speaking to the population about her traitorous ideas, but she was convincing the smart and the powerful.

No wonder Daxton and Augusta had had her killed.

The door handle rattled one afternoon as I watched the last recording of her, a rousing demand that the rank and assignment system be demolished in favor of freedom and choice. Knox, who sat beside me, jumped up and turned off the screen. From the other side of the room, Celia launched herself toward the door.

I expected her to chew out whoever was on the other side, but instead she stepped back and opened it all the way. Daxton entered, and behind him walked a woman with chin-length white hair and a face so smooth it looked like she was made of marble. She held her shoulders back with such perfect posture that my spine ached just looking at her, and as a member of the only family exempt from going Elsewhere at age sixty, she was by far the oldest person I’d ever seen.

Augusta Hart.

“Good afternoon, Mother,” said Celia. “We weren’t expecting you for another two hours.” The bitterness in her tone was obvious to me, but Augusta didn’t seem to notice. If she did, she didn’t care.

“My schedule freed up unexpectedly,” said Augusta, her voice as cold as her expression. She stared at me, as if she could see right through Lila’s face to the person I was underneath. I held her gaze, but she said nothing to me.

Daxton hesitated. “Mother, this is Kitty. Lila’s replacement.”

“Stand-in,” corrected Augusta. “What have you been teaching her?”

“Everything,” I said. “How Lila talked, how she acted, how she walked and what she ate—”

“Celia,” interrupted Augusta, as if I hadn’t said anything at all. “I asked you a question.”

My face grew warm as I glowered at her, and a muscle in Celia’s jaw twitched. “We’ve been teaching her exactly what you told us to, Mother. The basics and enough to help her fully adjust. Nothing more.” She flipped on the television screen Knox had turned off in such a rush. Somehow Lila’s last speech had been replaced by a recording of her running around as a child while wearing a frilly tutu and a crown I wasn’t so sure was plastic.

Augusta nodded curtly, still watching me as if I were a piece of furniture instead of a living, breathing human being. “If she passes tonight’s test, she will be taken back to the city and will resume her duties. If not, you will all remain in the Stronghold until she is ready.”

“Of course,” said Celia, and Augusta sniffed.

“If all goes well, the media will be informed of your return from vacation tomorrow, so no one will have a chance to speculate,” she added, as if the Harts hadn’t controlled the media and public opinion for decades. “You holidayed in Aspen. Do prepare her for that, as well.”

Augusta turned to leave the room, and I tightened my fists. “It was nice to meet you,” I said before I could stop myself.

She stopped dead in her tracks. Seconds ticked by, and my heart pounded as I waited for her to say something. Maybe I was nothing more than a pawn to her, a nameless piece in whatever twisted game she was playing, but she had to acknowledge me eventually.

Finally Augusta stepped toward the door, and Daxton held it open for her. “Don’t be silly, dear,” she said. “You’ve known me your whole life.”

* * *

Celia spent the next two hours preparing me for dinner. She stuffed me into a dress and painful high heels, and while she did my hair, she drilled me on everything I’d learned over the past eleven days. No matter how hard I tried, nothing I said was exactly right.

“No, no, no,” she snapped, yanking my hair. “She named her cat Missy, not Misty, and her favorite color’s chartreuse, not green.” She let out a frustrated groan and turned to Knox, who sat on the couch watching the whole production. “She’s going to fail, and it’ll be our asses on the line.”

Knox stood and crossed the room. He took my hair from her and nudged her aside, his gentle fingers expertly finishing the intricate hairstyle. How many times had he done this for Lila?

“All you can do is your best,” said Knox patiently to me while Celia collapsed in a huff on the sofa. “If you aren’t there yet, we’ll keep at it until you have it down. No one can expect you to learn how to be a completely different person in less than two weeks.”

Apparently Augusta did, and her opinion was the only one that mattered. “What’s she going to ask me?” I said, using my loose dialect instead of stumbling over Lila’s prim and proper accent. If anything screwed me up, it’d be that.

“I don’t know,” he said, tying off a twisted braid. “Just remember what we’ve taught you, and you’ll do fine.”

“Whatever you do, don’t mention the speeches,” added Celia, and Knox shot her a look. She returned it. “She needs to know she can’t talk about them, else Mother will have all our heads.”

So the speeches they’d shown me hadn’t been on Augusta’s approved teaching list after all. Somehow that didn’t surprise me. “I won’t,” I said, glancing at Knox in the mirror. “Don’t worry about it.”