The Essence (12 page)

But as I moved closer, something in my gut told me I was wrong.

I stopped in front of the girl lying facedown on the stairs, her limbs at odd, unnatural angles. There was a single bloodstain square between her shoulder blades. She’d been shot while she was trying to escape.

With trembling fingers, I brushed aside her hair, needing to see the truth for myself, needing to be certain.

Beneath the golden curtain, her face, turned to the side, was ashen, and her wide eyes were vacant.

My heart ached as I lifted her hand, clutching her cold fingers. . . . Fingers I’d held not so long ago during a riot in the park, a day that I’d decided to save her life, when we’d gone from being rivals to friends.

And suddenly I wished I’d listened to Brook when she’d warned me about her father. When she’d warned me he’d made threats against me.

Except she got it wrong.

I wasn’t the one in danger by being here today. I wasn’t the one who’d been injured.

It was everyone else.

Somewhere below me I heard a strange clicking sound, and I set Sydney’s hand down reverently, once more brushing my fingertips over her cheek. A final farewell.

Zafir reached for my arm. “We have to go,” he insisted, ushering me down the steps.

I heard another click, this time closer, and I glanced up to see a man, just a few steps below me, holding a camera. It wasn’t something most people owned, the camera. It had been a luxury item even before the days of Sabara’s rule, and seeing it here, in the streets, seemed odd and out of place.

I thought Zafir might take it from the man since he was pointing its lens right at me, snapping photo after photo. Instead, the guard moved to stand in front of me, signaling to one of the soldiers near the top of the steps who rushed down and escorted the man away from us. I didn’t know if they’d let the man keep his images, or his photography equipment. It wasn’t my concern at the moment.

When we reached the bottom of the steps, the woman who’d been screaming the boy’s name—Phoenix—stopped us.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,”
she said weepily, still forgetting to speak in Englaise as she clutched her small boy to her heart.
“Thank you for saving my son.”

I smiled, but guilt coursed through me as Zafir shepherded me into the awaiting vehicle, a different one from the one we’d driven to the school this morning, and I wondered if the other had been destroyed. I wondered, too, where this one had come from. I said nothing, though. I just waited until the door was closed behind me before letting myself cry.

I saw Max running toward our vehicle long before the palace had come into view.

“Stop!” I shouted at the driver as I was climbing over Brooklynn to reach the door.

I stumbled only a few feet over the pitted road before I fell into his arms, which came around me and lifted my feet off the ground as he hauled me against him. “You’re safe. . . . You’re safe. . . . You’re safe. . . .” he whispered over and over again.

I was shaking all over but I somehow managed to find my voice. “It’s okay, Max. I’m okay.”

I inhaled the scent of his skin—wondering when I’d stopped smelling the smoke, when it had stopped filling every part of me—while I ran my fingers roughly through his hair. I could taste his worry as his lips moved restlessly over mine, not settling in any one place, just pressing to mine and then moving on to my cheek, my nose, my chin, as if he were trying to memorize my every feature with them.

Then at last, his kisses slowed, and his agitation became something gentler, something far more distracting. My pulse raced as his mouth traced my jawline and he whispered against my ear, his breath hot and teasing and filled with yearning, yet I couldn’t understand a single word he’d said.

It didn’t matter, though. I understood his meaning well enough.

We were together.

“Brook’s father is already claiming responsibility,” Xander announced over breakfast. “He’s spreading the word that he plans to hit the queen where it hurts.”

My stomach knotted. I stared down the table to where Brooklynn sat, wondering if she felt half the responsibility I did. If she’d lain awake last night replaying yesterday’s events over and over in her head.

“We have to get you out of here, Charlie,” Xander went on. “All of you—your entire family.”

My father pushed a loaf of hot bread toward Xander. “Are you sure that’s necessary? We’re safe here, aren’t we?”

“Look,” I tried, hoping to stop all this talk about fleeing before it got out of hand, before my family had to be displaced. “I know Brook’s dad. I grew up with him. Maybe I could just talk to him.”

“You realize what he did yesterday, don’t you?” Max’s voice was subdued, his dark eyes serious. “He killed innocent people, Charlie. I think we’re past talking now.”

“Besides, you didn’t see him,” Brook said sorrowfully from her side of the table. “He can’t be reasoned with. I warned him what would happen if he tried anything—”

Xander’s fist pounded against the table and the room went silent. He glowered at Brooklynn. “You saw him? Tell me you didn’t know about this.”

All eyes turned to Brook.

“It was before the attacks, before her tour. I told Charlie we should tell you, that we should postpone her trip into the city,” she explained. “But I had no idea he would actually make good on his threats. . . . Especially not like this. I thought . . .” She shrugged. “I thought he was harmless.”

“Brook’s right,” I tried to intercede. “This isn’t her fault. It’s mine. If I’d have listened, none of this would’ve happened in the first place.”

Max’s hand found mine beneath the table, and without meaning to, I blushed. “It’s not your fault either,” he said. “He’s a madman. Someone like that can’t be reasoned with. You need to listen to Xander. We’ll get your parents and Angelina to safety, and you’ll leave a few days early for the summit.”

My eyes went wide as I turned to him. “What about you? You’re still going, aren’t you?”

Xander’s voice drew my attention. “He can’t. Not now. Ludania needs someone who can rule in your absence, and Max is the most qualified. He was raised in the palace and he was in the military. He can keep the palace—and the country—running while we concentrate on keeping you safe. Eden and I will go with your family, to my grandmother’s private estate in the southern region. They’ll be safe there, no one knows where it is.”

I glanced down at my mom and then my dad, and finally to Angelina. “They could go with us. To the summit, I mean.”

Xander shook his head. “No, Your Majesty. Ludania is nothing without a queen. As second in line to the throne, Angelina’s safety is as important as your own. Separating the two of you is the only way.” His expression softened. “As her sister, surely you understand that.”

I did. Of course I did, but it didn’t make it any easier to accept, and despite being the leader of an entire nation, at the moment, I was powerless. Less than powerless.

They were leaving me with no options.

“There’s more. These are already starting to circulate.” It was Aron, who’d been quiet up until now. He slid a piece of paper down the length of the table.

I stared at it. On it was a picture, one that the photographer had snapped of me kneeling over Sydney’s body on the steps of the Academy. My skin looked as if it were reflecting the light from the camera’s flash, creating sparks of light all over the image. My expression looked dazed.

Below the image, the caption read: “New Equality Brings Death to School Children!”

“What is this?” I asked, blinking hard as I tried to focus, my eyes stinging.

“It’s a periodical. They’re like the underground missives we used to read, only now they’re no longer secretive. It’s how news is being spread throughout the city and beyond,” Aron answered.

“The irony is,” Xander added, “the person responsible for this periodical is only able to distribute it
because
of the New Equality he or she is condemning.”

I folded the paper and slipped it into my pocket. Not because of the message it delivered or because I was proud of the changes I’d made that allowed for such a publication to exist. Instead I kept it because it was the only photograph I had to remind me of Sydney.

PART II

brooklynn

Brooklynn stared out in the general direction of the Capitol. Not that she could see it anymore. The concrete wall that surrounded it and its jagged-toothed buildings hadn’t been visible for hours. Instead she watched passing shadows of a countryside shrouded by the cover of night, images that blurred into unfocused smudges, making one impossible to distinguish from the next.

The floor beneath her feet rocked, and she reached for a handrail to steady herself. She waited until her stomach caught up with the lurching motion of the train; something she kept telling herself she would grow accustomed to with time. Train travel wasn’t nearly as exhilarating as she’d thought it would be. For her, it was the opposite, in fact. She felt endlessly queasy, and she longed to stand on solid unmoving ground once more.

Unfortunately, fate had different plans for her and her queen.

Everything had happened so quickly after the attack on the Academy. Yet it wasn’t until they’d left the school that day that they’d realized the assaults hadn’t been confined to only their location, but that nearly an entire section of the city—just barely rebuilt from the rebellions that Brook herself had been a part of—was on fire. Buildings had crumbled like oily black pyres that burned angrily and then collapsed into piles of charred rubble.

Now Brooklynn, Charlie, and Aron were on a train headed north, along with Zafir and fifty of Brook’s best soldiers. They’d be arriving at the summit several days early, but at least they’d be arriving intact.

It was now Max’s job to find those responsible for the attacks on the Capitol, those who’d dared to kill innocent children and threaten the life of their queen, those who included Brooklynn’s own father.

She wished it were her instead of Max.

She’d rather be anywhere but here, she thought, letting her forehead fall against the glass and trying to ignore the stomach acid burning the back of her throat.

“Here,” Aron’s voice interrupted her, his hand finding the crook of her elbow and leading her away from the window. “Sit down and drink this.”

She lifted her gaze to his, frowning as she took the steaming mug from him. Wrapping her hands around it, she inhaled deeply, expecting to breathe in something delightful, an elixir meant to soothe her stomach. Instead, she winced. “What are you trying to do, poison me?”

Aron dropped down beside her, pushing her out of his way so he had room on the bench. “Don’t be so grouchy, it’s not my fault you can’t sleep.”

“No,” Brook reluctantly relented. “I suppose it’s not.” She lifted the cup to her lips and blew on it before taking a sip. The bitter liquid scalded her tongue. “Where’d you get this, anyway?”

Aron watched her closely, his warm eyes crinkling when she grimaced. “That bad, huh? The old lady in the galley swears it’s a cure-all for motion sickness.”

She took another swallow, a more generous one this time. “I’m not motion sick, I just . . . I just don’t like trains is all.”

“How would you know? This is the first train you’ve ever been on.”

Brook’s scowl deepened. “Well, I don’t like
this
train.”

“Because it makes you sick.”

Brook nodded. “Right.” And then she frowned at him. “No,” she countered. “I mean, that’s not what I meant. I don’t trust it. It doesn’t feel . . . stable.” She glowered at Aron over the top of the earthenware mug, but she continued to sip the foul liquid inside. “What do you want, anyway, Midget?” He leaned back, and Brook had to duck to get out of his way. She wondered when his shoulders had widened, and she suddenly realized that the nickname sounded odd rolling off her tongue. “I mean, why are you even here?”

He closed his eyes, and Brooklynn could’ve sworn he looked relaxed, that he actually liked the rocking of the locomotive beneath them. She narrowed her eyes, trying to decide if she saw the hint of a smile on his lips, or if fatigue was finally getting the best of her and her eyes were playing tricks on her. “On the train? Or here now, with you?”