17

The eleventh farmhouse we break into turns out to be the lucky one. The floors are a rich, painted tile with intricate design work, the walls a creamy stucco plaster. Here and there Oriental rugs cover the tile, lending the simple dark wood furniture a regal air. In a place like this, no one will notice a little missing food.

“Why is there no one home?” Ali whispers in my ear.

It’s a good question. I smell no death. Nothing seems to worry Jared.

But there are no portraits of a family on the walls or side tables. No children’s rooms upstairs. It’s like a perfect, empty hotel.

Perfect, except when the wrong guests come to stay.

“We don’t camp here,” Jared mutters. “We bunk out in the barn.”

Careful not to leave footprints, we quickly raid the larder—stocked for an apocalypse, apparently—and tramp out to the barn. Jared pulls two bottles of water and one of wine from his bag. Ali sets a blanket down in the hayloft where we make camp.

I watch as Jared turns, muscles rippling through his back. He hauls up the ladder and rests it against a wall. He comes and sits down between Ali and me.

“Open the beans and the soup,” Jared orders with a grunt.

“Yes, Your Highness,” I grumble. But it’s Ali who takes the rustic can opener and does the honors, pouring the cold contents into three oversize mugs and handing them to us.

We’re quiet for a moment, gulping down our first meal in what feels like an eternity. The air grows cool, the sky outside the hayloft beginning to marble despite the heavy cloud cover. I sneeze, the hay tickling my nose and throat, and settle my back against a bale. Real hay is so much different than the synthetic stuff we’ve sat on during class trips.

Occasionally Jared flips out his phone and tries to get a signal. It’s been as blank as a dead Feed in every one of the farmhouses we’ve tried. At first I thought we’d been moving on so we could find a signal, so Jared could check in with Storm.

It wasn’t until the third house, at least ten miles from the one we’ve camped at, that I finally understood. The farmhouse was small, with a quaint red-tile roof sagging down over the door like a bushy eyebrow. There’d been a woman outside, dressed in a simple cotton work dress. Her hair hung in a limp braid under a kerchief. She hummed to herself as she hung laundry on a line. I’d been about to get up from our hiding spot, wave at her, beg her for running water and food and maybe even a bed, when Jared clamped one large hand around my arm and the other across my mouth.

“Don’t even think about it, Princess,” he warned in a small hiss while I glared at him from beneath my bangs. Something in his face changed as he looked at me. Then he leaned close to my ear, his breath buzzing the short hairs there, stirring dangerous thoughts that were doused in the next instance. “If they’re looking for us, they’ll kill her, Lu. Don’t do that to her.”

Fight knocked out of me, I nodded into his hand. His fingers still smelled of blood and gore and the sticky sap of grass. It wasn’t until they were slowly pulled away, one after the other, his eyes locked on mine and looking as lost as I felt, that it hit me. Jared wasn’t truly worried about the woman. He was worried about what it would do to me if I got her killed.

Ali poked at my shoulder. I swayed. Jared bared his teeth, but Alastair ignored him. Then we were off once more, tramping through the small copse of woods we’d been following to get from farm to farm. Eventually we arrived at the tall grasses of a farmer’s fields, tall enough to swallow us whole. Jared’s heated gaze burned into my back. It was hot enough to make me feel empty and full of longing for some ending I could never have.

There, in the twilight barn, we chew the cold stuff in silence. The wind kicks up. The air is layered with the smell of hay and fire and smoke, darker than a campfire.

“What do you think it is?” I ask, sniffing. “That smell? You think there’s a fire nearby?” I don’t miss the dark and brooding looks Jared and Ali exchange. “What?” I ask, mystified.

Jared’s growl nearly drowns out Alastair’s answer. “The soldiers were setting fire to the train cars as they went through.”

My stomach jerks violently. I barely have time to stagger to my feet before I get sick on a pile of hay in the corner. Ali wisely stays put, though Jared comes up behind me. He throws one arm around my back, and with the other wipes my hair from my face. Breathing heavily and leaning my weight against an old wooden beam, still smelling of nice things—trees and dirt and earth—I try and fail to put sense to the attack on the train.

“Does anyone understand what happened back there?” I finally rasp through a scratchy throat.

Unlike in Dominion, there are no clocks here. There’s nothing to mark the gaps between moments. Instead there’s just the silence of the grave until Jared scrapes his foot along the wooden floor.

His eyes glow green against the darkness of the hayloft as I turn to him. “Things have changed.”

“You think I don’t know that? Stop trying to protect me. I’m not a baby.”

Those eyes deepen, the muscles in his neck tense. But then he shifts his hands behind him, and the loafer is back. Unconcerned, untouched by the chaos and death and violence all around him.

“All I’m saying, Princess—”

“Do not call me that,” I bark. And oddly enough, it works.

Jared nods, his eyes snapping back to indigo. “All I’m saying is, things changed the moment we figured out there are Watchers here.”

I don’t feel myself moving, just feel the moment of impact as I flop down in front of him. “I know it. I feel it. I just don’t understand what it means.”

There’s a question behind the question if he’s smart enough to find it.

“You already know the answer to that, Lucy,” he says solemnly.

“Do I?” I eye him, wondering if I have enough of the pieces to puzzle it out.

“I think we should abort.”

“No!” My hand shoots out to Jared’s chest. “No, we can’t. We’ve come all this way.”

“Jared’s right, Lucy,” Ali chimes in. “This is a whole bag of awful. Going back to Dominion is about the only sensible thing we can do.”

I dart a glare at Ali and turn to plead with Jared. “We can figure this out, Jared. I know we can.” My fingers curl and tighten around his wrist.

Jared flexes his fingers, and my own hand flares out in response. He stares down at his cuticles, still rust-colored, as though surprised by them. “What do you think it means that there were Watcher signs on the train?”

“That there are Watchers here, obviously.”

A ghost of a smile tips onto his lips, disappears. “What else? Other than the obvious.”

Think like Foxes. The familiar refrain jogs through my head. What does it mean that soldiers tried to abduct us on board a train marked by Watchers? “I suppose… I guess it means there’s a preacher here somewhere, or someone who is connected to Dominion.”

“Right. And what do the preachers in Dominion want?”

“Me.” My heart sags as I struggle with the words. “Margot and me.” Admitting all that violence is because of us, because of my sister and me, is worse than living through it.

Jared gives me a look so full of tenderness and understanding I think I’ll crack in two. “Lu, this isn’t your fault, honey.” He stretches his other hand over mine, the heat seeping into my cold bones. “Let’s think about this. The Watchers want you. The Watchers are here. But here’s what I’m thinking. There’s no way that Father Wes is organized enough or, hell, rich enough to stretch his sticky fingers across the big pond.”

Of course. What’s my father’s cardinal rule? Follow the money.

Light blooms in my mind as the idea takes root. “So the Watchers have a backer. And that backer wants the Fox sisters.”

“I think so. Badly enough that he or she is willing to invest in resources all the way over here.”

“Wow.” It’s all I can manage for a moment while I contemplate the staggering amount of money that would be necessary to pull the strings of a group like the Watchers—and on two continents nonetheless. Only one of the Upper Circle’s most elite could afford that kind of clout. The niggling thought claws at the back of my mind.

“So the Watchers clearly know that Margot is here, too… As did, I suspect, our buddies back there on the train.” Jared scratches at his jaw.

“What do you suppose the soldiers wanted? I don’t think they know where Margot is, either.”

“Well, they sure as hell weren’t throwing you a Reveal party. My best theory is that they were hoping you’d tell them where Margot is and they’d nab you both. Not a bad idea, really. Whoever was in charge of that little operation, they had at least a few brain cells rubbing together.”

“That doctor…” My stomach shrinks again. “And I was stupid enough to mention her.”

“Aw, c’mon. Stop making her feel bad,” Alastair drawls from nearby, his soup cup abandoned.

Jared cuts him with his eyes. “Stay out of this.”

“I’m as in this as a body can get,” Ali grumbles, and busies his hands with his rock.

Jared fixes on me. Every line and juncture of his body is tense and ready to spring, despite his best laid-back act. “It was either that or we were going to be lab rats, poked and prodded until we were in even more hot water. You did what you had to, Lu. You got us out of there, and without bloodshed.”

“But what if—”

“No,” he cracks out. I don’t think he intends to sound as harsh as he does. “Never think about the ‘what-ifs,’ Lu. They’ll eat you alive. This is survival. This is war.” His finger jabs the floorboards as he talks, punctuating his words like bullets.

But the question behind the question remains hidden, unanswered. As quiet-quiet and deep as the riddle of my blood.

Who pulls the Watchers’ strings?

I don’t know what wakes me. A slight tension in Jared’s back, maybe, nestled so close to mine his heat is like a blanket. I can feel his wakefulness moments before headlights cut the darkness around our heads, lighting up the shadows of the barn like search beacons. Jared soundlessly jumps to a crouch and presses himself to the side of the small open window like a perfectly trained merc.

I’d been dreaming of the baby. Bald, its anemic face drawn and purpling in death. When I went to hold it, my fingers turned a mottled blueberry, infected by the baby’s last sharp, stabbing cries. I dropped it and it fell with a thud, and I knew it had been lost. Its family gone. Then, in the darkness of my dream, I heard Margot. Just her voice, my sister’s words echoing through my head like a summer’s breeze.

“It’s too late, you know. The babies have already come and gone.”

And just before the dream ended, I saw a bank of metal monsters—huge, glistening metal machines that pushed skyward in a vast space, skyscrapers growing like metal flowers under a roof. A wall of cribs fell under the shadow of the metal monsters, teeth polished and bared. And then the world erupted into flame.

When I open my eyes, I’m sure the warmth I feel is coming from the flames of the fire that had consumed me, stripping the flesh from my bones and leaving me nothing. My mouth full of ashes. Wet tracks soaking my face. I press the heel of my hand across my mouth to stop my whimpers.

Alastair’s still-sleeping breath fills the small hayloft. I touch Jared’s shoulder, his flesh scalding me through his light-blue cotton T-shirt. He turns his head slightly, a wry look to his lips that tells me we’re on the same page. There’s no way Alastair is from Dominion’s mean streets if he can sleep like that. Lasters in Dominion sleep with one eye open and a hand on the trigger, if they’re lucky enough to have one.

For one long second, his eyes linger over my face, my neck. He crosses one spectacular arm over his shoulder to touch the hand I’ve left there, capturing me for a moment. I lean harder into his back. His flesh hard and muscular, a jungle cat. I inhale the unique him-smells, now mixed with sweat and hay and dirt. His back heaves, as though he hasn’t breathed deeply in a year or more. I feel us both relax despite the dangers below.

We have visitors. The car that drives up is olden-times, a Rolls. I’d seen them often enough at the homes of Dominion’s most elite, chauffeured by mercs in drivers’ uniforms and strapped with semis. It parks with a final loud purr in front of the farmhouse. The sudden silence is deafening. All four doors open, spilling out men in uniform.

Jared presses himself tighter against the window frame, pulling my body with him, huddling me close at his back. I can see nothing now but the cloudy outline of a bright yellow moon. A cat’s eye, as Margot liked to call it. Rapid-fire Russian drifts up from below. I catch about every word in three. “Woman.” “Guns.” “General.”

“Jared,” I whisper, grabbing a fistful of his T-shirt. He tenses and shifts, leaning his ear down to hear me. My lips meet his flesh as I make the words. “They are on the hunt, too.”

For hunters, they’re doing a lousy job, I think to myself as the sounds of merriment waft up to us where we hide like mice in the corners of the hayloft. The night has deepened from gray-black to gray-blue, a sure sign dawn is coming.

One of the soldiers sings a bawdy song, loudly and off-key, on the farmhouse porch. A moment later there’s a telltale sound of a zipper being pulled, a stream of water hitting the dirt off the porch. The glug of a bottle as the soldier drinks and sings another verse.

Then the shuffling of boots on the wooden beams of the porch. The door bangs open again and the festive sounds of a party spill out over the hum of cicadas before it’s muffled by another bang. Jared still stands sentinel at the window frame, keeping an eye on the one lousy guard posted at the perimeter of the farmhouse.

Jared whispers in my ear. “They should have been smart enough to search the grounds. And if they were smart,” he tells me with a wicked, feral grin, “they would have posted at least four sentries. Would have kept the odds a little even.”

We wait some more. In the early dawn light, the yard is washed out, everything turning the soft color of bone. Ali’s rock skips over his fingers soundlessly. He hasn’t said much since we woke him with a hush. But it’s become clear that with these so-called hunters on the loose, the only thing they’ll manage to shoot is one another. Someone named Sergei is being shouted at—something about his mother. In another few moments they stumble out again into the yard, all of them staggering as they weave over to the Rolls.

It’s Sergei, the one who looks like a barrel-chested bear, who says in a thick, slow baritone, slow enough that I can understand him, “Russia is big and she—she is small.” His grin is sloppy as he holds up for his friends a grainy black-and-white surveillance image blown up on a Feed page.

Another one—I heard someone call him Aleksei—tries to grab the image with fat white fingers. “That bounty is mine, Sergei. I’ll get her.” His words slur and he trips, falling flat on his back in the dirt.

The other two laugh, knee-slapping laughs. And Sergei holds up his prize again, this time high enough for me to see.

A pale face, pointed chin. Hair falling in loose curls just past the shoulders, a color I’d as soon say was reddish brown if the NewsFeed image were in color. I can’t see the eye color but it doesn’t matter—I know her face as well as I know my twin’s.