HARLOW AND DEAN KEEP ARGUING IN A COMFORTING thrum, one that I tune out as we wind up the hillside. We turn a corner, and I peer around a line of overgrown trees. A wall of mismatched wood rises at least fifty feet high. As we pull closer, I can see guards pacing along the barricade. I recognize a couple of them—Tace and Marvin are on the western side, mirrored bands covering both their arms.
Harlow presses on the brake, and whatever argument they are having pauses as a line of bodies swarms out of the slowly opening gate. They all carry huge blades, their mirrored bands and bracelets glinting in the sunlight.
Harlow opens the console between the driver and passenger seat and pulls out three strips of thick black cloth. She tosses one to Dean and then sends one back to me. It lands in my lap.
Dean sighs, and Harlow shoots him a death glare.
“I know, I know,” he says, reaching it up and tying it over his eyes.
I know better than to argue. This is how we stay safe.
Someone hits the hood of Harlow’s car with an open palm, and we all open our doors.
“Hands up, guys,” a deep voice says. I recognize it—Kyle.
I tie the cloth around my eyes. Years ago, the darkness would have scared me. Now there’s a strange comfort in it. For a moment, while I’m completely vulnerable—I’m also safe.
“In a minute I’m going to pull the blindfolds off you. You’re going to keep your eyes down, do you understand?”
Dean sighs. “Kyle. We do this every damn day.”
“She doesn’t,” Kyle replies, and his black jacket lets out a soft swoosh as he obviously gestures to me. “And I’m not going to stick a knife to someone’s throat without being very explicit.”
“You don’t have to put a knife to her throat at all,” Dean growls, a low threat in his voice. “None of us would do anything to put this place at risk—”
Irritation spins in my gut like nausea, and I shake my head. “I’m fine, Dean. All of you. I’m fine. I don’t want any special treatment. This is the protocol.”
I don’t need him sticking up for me, especially not in front of Harlow. I don’t need the way his gruff voice makes my knees weak and my heart flip over. I don’t need it at all.
“Dean. You’re first,” Kyle says. I hear the soft whisper of fabric, then a pause.
“Clear,” Kyle says finally.
Then he steps closer to me.
“You ready, Char?” Kyle asks me. I nod. He reaches back and pulls the blindfold from me. I keep my eyes shut tight, and I feel a guard step forward behind me, reaching around to position a blade a few inches from my neck.
“You may look down,” Kyle says.
Slowly, I open my eyes and look down. Kyle holds a small mirror at my waist level. He tilts it, catching my gaze in the reflection. The warmth of his brown eyes stares back at me, inspecting my irises for a moment before he nods to the watchman standing next to me.
“Clear,” he says, and the guard steps away from my back, taking the knife with him. I let out a sigh, trying to make it as quiet as I can. I’m sure everyone can see the fear on my face, but that doesn’t mean I want to make it obvious.
I watch as they pull the blindfold off Harlow. She looks down, her eyes shut.
“Commander,” Kyle says by way of invitation, his wide hands holding the fabric with an odd sort of reverence. Harlow opens her eyes and peers down into the small mirror. He nods to her. “You’re good.”
She claps him on the wide shoulder as she walks past, signaling for me to follow her.
I follow her, my eyes locked on her leather-clad shoulders as she saunters ahead of us. Her shoulders are meant for this—straight back, even. With the weight of the world resting on them, without a care.
I should know by now that those are the moments when Harlow shines—the ones when fear overtakes everyone else and she alone manages to keep her feet. It was that way in those days after the Crimson first started and we built the walls around this place, making the Palisade. We’d heard that eye contact through a mirror was safe—but Harlow was the first one to test it, earning everyone’s respect in the process. She’d always liked being the one to do things other people feared.
As we walk through the settlement, people incline their heads toward my sister. They ask her questions—clarifying shifts and double-checking perimeter watches, and I look around at our settlement, which is a small portion of the neighborhood we were able to wall off. Our old school is at the middle, with a block of houses in every direction.
When a woman with black curly hair and hole-filled jeans calls to her, Harlow turns to look at me. “Check on Nessa?” she asks, reaching a hand out to me. It is force of habit that I reach back and squeeze, but I am thankful for it. Sometimes I need to feel like a sister, and not a soldier.
I know we aren’t done discussing the headdress. She’ll rip into me later. But right now I have to find Vanessa, and I have a feeling I know where she’ll be.
My younger sister is perched on the balance beam, the dim light from the stormy sky filtering in through the high gym windows. The morning feels like days ago, but it’s still only early afternoon. She stands at the far end, high on her toes with her arms up by her ears. She takes a deep breath, lowering her arms as she bends in a slight crouch before launching herself backward. Her hands find the four-inch-wide beam, fingers splaying perfectly as her legs open in an even split in the air. One foot finds the beam again, and she rotates upward before throwing her body back once more, executing the same move but bringing her feet to the beam at the same time before throwing her body up into a backflip.
I’ve been at enough meets to know this combination by heart. Back handspring step-out, back handspring into a back tuck.
Vanessa wobbles slightly but keeps her balance. She wears a black sports bra and tight spandex shorts, and her stomach glistens with sweat. Only in the end of the world would my little sister still have six-pack abs.
“I’d give it a nine-point-four,” I say, my voice echoing through the gym. She pivots on her toes, eyeing me as she turns.
“Ridiculous. My feet were flexed, I could feel it,” she counters. Vanessa will never be satisfied with her performance. She is a perfectionist to the core. Her brown eyes drop to her feet, as if she can figure out why they’ve personally betrayed her.
I walk into the gym, my sneakers squeaking on the wooden floor as I eye the balance beam. Our school used to have a gymnastics team, and Dean had found the beam in the storage locker when we’d set up camp. Vanessa had shrieked with delight, even though Harlow and I weren’t sure about the structural integrity of something that had been packed away for years. But no matter how hard we’d tried to talk her out of it, Vanessa had kept pleading with Dean to set it up.
I spot the bruises on the back of her calves. “Harlow warned you about the beam, Ness.”
She glares at me as she works her way to the far side of the beam. “Harlow has no room to talk about things being ‘too dangerous,’” she snips, stopping to take a deep breath. She lunges forward, twisting into a round-off back-handspring double layout. She over-rotates the landing on the eight-inch pad lying on the floor and winds up on her back.
“Dammit,” she huffs, hitting the mat with her palms. I step on the mat and look down at her. Her eyes flash. “Don’t even say it.” She adjusts the straps of her sports bra, revealing the red mark on her side. It has the puckered look of a fresh scar mixed with the beauty of a tattoo.
Se racheter, it says.
She sees my glance, and quickly readjusts the bra to hide it.
“I don’t have to say it. You already know. Don’t put me in the middle, Ness. I hate lying to Harlow and she’s already pissed at me enough right now,” I continue.
“Harlow isn’t the boss of me.”
“She’s the boss of everyone,” I shoot back. “And I kind of agree with her on this one. Staying in shape is one thing, but if you get seriously hurt, Nessa—”
“Losing my edge is worse than getting hurt,” she argues. “I am not going to start from scratch when this shitstorm ends. You think Natalia Drake stopped training?”
I stick my hand out, but she doesn’t take it. She just glares up at me until I let it fall to my side. Natalia Drake, Vanessa’s rival on the balance beam—the one gymnast who always came at least a tenth of a point from my sister’s score.
“I don’t even know if Natalia Drake is still alive. And neither do you,” I snap.
Something flickers in Vanessa’s eyes, a ripple in the dam that holds everything back. It is a feeling I understand well, even if I don’t work it out by throwing myself around on a narrow piece of metal covered in leather.
“She’s alive,” Vanessa says, pushing herself to her feet. “And she’s nailing her double-back dismount.” Vanessa shoves past me.
I don’t know what to tell her, because I’ve said it before. It’s what we all know, a truth that hurts Vanessa too much for her to really look it in the face. It is a truth her guarded face dares me to say right now.
She doesn’t like that we worry about her. It reminds her that Harlow and I almost lost her once.
With a lithe, feline movement, Vanessa swings back onto the beam. I block the dismount mat, staring at her. She glares back at me, a strand of dark hair falling out of her bun and into her eyes.
She lifts her arms, arching her back in a quick stretch, but I see the quiver in her, the unsteadiness that I’ve just kicked up. The truth is, I don’t want her to lose the fire that made her one of the best gymnasts in the state. I don’t want to see her drive leached out of her by this place. I want her to remember Natalia Drake, and to keep doing the thing she loved. The world demanded she give up, and she didn’t. The same tenacity that made her come back over and over after falling off the bars or beam is the same tenacity that would get her through this. And I wish I had the kind of faith she did—that this is all just a shitstorm that will eventually blow over.
And if my plans succeed—the ones I’ve been busting my ass to see through for the past several months—then maybe this whole thing could be a hiccup in her life. Maybe it is too late for Harlow and me to be normal again. Maybe this whole thing has marked us past what we’d be able to return from fully. But I do hope, somewhere deep in the part of me that still can hope, that Vanessa will keep being Vanessa when this is over.
Until then, the more she acts like it, the better.
Because I heard what the Vessels said. I felt the sickness crawling up my throat at the thought. They were looking for the Chosen One, and they were only miles away.
I step back off the dismount mat, and Vanessa’s shoulders relax slightly. I mean, Harlow is already pissed at me. I don’t really want Vanessa on my bad side, too.
Footsteps sound behind me, and I turn to find Kyle, a grim expression on his face as he hovers in the doorway. Next to him is Alan, one of Dean’s closest friends and the arms specialist of the Palisade. His dark skin is covered with sweat. He ties his braids into a ponytail as he cocks an eyebrow at me.
“The Council wants to see you,” he says, giving me a warning look when I roll my eyes.
I nod, turning to watch Vanessa as I back toward the door.
“Your right knee was bent,” I say, and a grin spreads across my sister’s face before she gets back on her toes, ready to try again.
I turn, letting the smile slip off my face.
The Council’s voices are muffled through the door as we walk into the hallway. Kyle motions for me to wait as he walks inside.
After looking over my shoulder to make sure no one else is around, I inch forward, leaning as close to the door as I dare.
“The movements are more calculated now,” a deep male voice says. “They are centralizing or something. Traffic at the Blood Market has almost doubled in the past month.”
The Blood Market. The words send a small chill over my shoulders. The Blood Market is where the Runners take Curseclean to sell to the highest bidder.
The Torch has tried for almost a year to take it down, but they can’t get close.
“Well. We’re going to have to put more watchmen on the walls, then. If Runners want to sweep through here, then they won’t catch us by surprise,” a familiar female voice answers. Harlow. “But if we’re facing Runners and Vessels like the kind we saw today—three, working together, almost all fully aware—we will have to figure something else out.”
I don’t realize I’m leaning on the door to listen until Kyle pulls it open and I stumble inside, barely catching myself before careening to the floor. I look up and find the faces of the Council staring back from behind a line of tables in the middle of the school’s massive cafeteria. Harlow sits next to a man with graying hair and dark skin—Malcolm, the leader of the Palisade. On the other side is James, a woman with a lean face covered in a line of scars across her light skin. Next to her is a seat where my grandmother had sat up until three months ago. It’s still empty.
There’s a door in her heart that’s closed. Nine and thirteen.
I blink, shoving the memory of those words as deep as it will go.
Dean stands in front of a crudely made wooden table, and he casts a glance over his shoulder at me as I walk farther inside.
Of course Harlow would tell the truth about today in her report. Of course she couldn’t just cover for me for once in her fucking life.
“By all means, come in, Charlotte,” Malcolm says. I can’t read the emotion in his deep voice, but I know I don’t have anything to fear from him. He was voted to this position for a reason—he’s one of the best men I’ve ever known. Though that means that he’ll be impartial now, and the fact that he was a friend of my grandmother’s—more than a friend—won’t factor in when he considers punishment.
I stand next to Dean, stopping myself from giving him the same look I’d given him a thousand times over the years when we got caught doing something stupid.
“You had permission to go check the nets down at the shoreline, Charlotte,” Malcolm says, his voice vibrating through my lungs. I nod.
“Normally, I’d go over the bylaws that your own grandmother helped draft, but we don’t need pomp and circumstance. You both know that you jeopardized more than your own lives today. What I want to know is why.”
I bite the inside of my lip. My plan isn’t ready yet.
“I was being dumb,” I say, raising my eyes only slightly. I hope they buy this. Dean is still by my side.
I hear the clink of metal, and my eyes dart up just in time to see Harlow drop the headdress on the table in front of her. My heart sinks.
“Careful with that!” I cry, stepping forward. Dean grabs my arm, pulling me back.
Malcolm looks at the headdress and then slowly turns back to me. “Charlotte Holloway.” He breathes my name like a curse. “Please tell me this isn’t what I think it is. Tell me you didn’t jeopardize your lives for one of your puzzles.”
Heat singes the back of my neck as Malcolm’s words cut through the room.
Puzzles.
Like I’m a kid on the floor of a playroom. I cock my jaw to the side. I can’t tell him why I really needed it, because then I’d have to tell him how I know all of that.
I feel Harlow’s glare from across the room, and I don’t dare meet it. I know she knows what I’m really looking for, and why. And she knows that I can’t explain myself.
“I thought . . . ,” I croak out, my voice sounding small as it gets swallowed up in the vast quiet of the room. I look up, seeing the disappointment in Malcolm’s eyes as he sits back in his chair. “At one point, Anne had that headdress. It was in the hull as she docked in Bordeaux.” All that is true.
I hope Harlow will jump in. That she’ll stop me from having to stumble over a lie that will make me look like an idiot. But when she doesn’t, I know I have to jump in. “I thought it might be of some . . . use. It was stupid. I just . . .” I take a deep breath as I look to Malcolm. “If the Vessels are staying like . . . that, like the ones we saw today, then we’re in trouble. And if they’re centralizing . . . mobilizing, then we have to do something. Even the Torch Enforcers are pulling back. So I know it was a long shot. But I can’t just sit here and hope we figure something out.”
I look up, meeting Dean’s eyes for a fraction of a second before he looks down.
“Har—” he starts.
“That’s ‘Commander’ to you, Sergeant,” Harlow bites out. Dean falls silent for a moment, absorbing the blow as the air in the room thickens with tension.
“Commander,” he starts again. “We broke the rules. But Charlotte’s right. We have to change something, and soon.” Dean looks around to make sure the only people in the room to hear his next words are the ones who are supposed to be there.
Malcolm stands. “That isn’t for you two to decide. You are not Lou,” he says, his voice booming through the room as he invokes my grandmother’s nickname, immediately cutting off the argument rising in my throat. “Our troops had to go in, blind, to save you,” he continues, his voice more subdued now.
“We didn’t ask them to do that,” I retort, knowing that it’s a stupid thing to say even as the words slip past my lips. Malcolm’s gaze darkens. He looks down at me. “Know your place, Charlotte. And it’s not leading futile, renegade missions. From now on, you’re needed in the garden. Dean, you’re needed on the wall. That will be all,” Malcolm says by way of dismissal. I don’t look back at Harlow as I turn on my heel and walk out of the room, shoving the crash bar down harder than I need to—hard enough that my teeth rattle.
I know it’s the apocalypse, and everything has already come crashing down.
But even in this brave new world, I still feel like I’m the other sister, referred to in the possessive: Harlow’s shadow. Vanessa’s keeper.
Because my older sister is a commander.
And my younger sister is the Chosen One.