Thirty-Three
Jordan
The wind cuts deeper than a fall evening in Virginia should.
Yani: Enter around back.
She hasn’t offered much more information since I left Hartsboro. Just that this was a safe house and there was something here I needed to see as soon as possible.
“Took you long enough,” she says when I open the back door.
There isn’t a sound in the house and no one’s in sight. The mudroom smells like paint. We pass through a bare kitchen and a scantly furnished dining room. We’ve finally found one.
“How many?”
“Five adults.”
“Where are they?”
“I separated them. Caught them trying to get their story straight. Upstairs in the main bedroom.” A door beneath the stairs is slightly ajar. She opens it for me to go through. I enter the basement and the light of thousands of candles nearly blinds me. The walls are covered in pinned papers. A narrow path snakes between the candles, around the room’s perimeter.
“It looks like some kind of shrine,” she says. “Weird, right?”
“Did you examine those?”
“No. If a single one of those tips over, everything on these walls would be up in flames in minutes.”
“I think that’s the point.”
Carefully, I navigate the path for a closer look, snuffing out the flames I pass. At first the wall hangings appear to have no connection to one another, just a smattering of collected clippings. Most have torn edges, as if they were ripped right out of old books. Others are sketches, maps, diagrams of the Sphere, profiles about its casing engineers, myths about sun tracking. Each is hand annotated with intricate details. I grab my phone but think better of it. This isn’t something just anyone should see.
“This isn’t a shrine. It’s research.” Carefully plotted and thorough. I remove a stapled stack from the wall for a closer look. Sphere Health: Four Key Critical Signs of Distress. Gem Mining. Enhancer Composition. Binding and Unbinding. Perilous Truths About Toushana.
I study a diagram that is hand drawn. The page itself looks so old, its inked markings are hard to read. But someone’s gone over it in pencil, retracing what’s been lost to age.
A place like this would have to be watched constantly. “When you found this room, was someone in here?” I ask.
“Yes.” She points to a cot I overlooked in the corner.
I point out another paper that’s familiar. “This one is from Dysiis’s original findings.”
“But those are locked away in the hidden library at Yaäuper Rea.”
Yani says the words before I can get them out. The fellow in the red ball cap was stealing things with information similar to this. The next wall is full of notes on the chemical composition of the matter inside the Sphere, how it intersects with tracing magic and tethers it to the magic inside all of us. The whole place is more of the same.
Everything points back to the Sphere.
“They’re trying to find out if magic will indeed be lost if the Sphere bleeds out.”
“Why do people in a safe house care about the Sphere?” she asks.
“They don’t.”
Upstairs, the five people are huddled in a single bedroom with wall-to-wall beds. The windows are covered with thick sheets of fabric nailed to their frames.
“There were four doors off the hall; what’s in the other rooms?”
“Nothing,” Yani says.
“You searched them thoroughly?”
“I did.”
One of the women fidgets, her eyes darting to a curtain nailed to a wall barricaded by a bed. The thud of her heart rages as I approach the blocked window and drag the bed out of the way. I rip off the curtain and behind it is not a glass but a narrow door.
No one moves.
I pull on the knob but the door doesn’t open. I tug dark magic to my hands and press it to the wood until it rots in my fingers. The door dislodges and opens. Inside is a small bedroom. A petite desk sits beside a little bed the right size for a very young kid. The walls appear singed, as if the room’s survived some kind of fire.
“Where is the child who slept in this bed?”
The woman whose fidgeting gave away the hiding spot sobs quietly until a gentleman pulls her into a tight hug.
No one speaks.
“Are they hiding somewhere else?” I ask.
The woman wails.
“Did they die?”
“We’ve been raided before,” the gentleman says.
“No one is raided and lives to talk about it.” Black tickles my palm. “Last chance—the truth.”
“It’s true, we have been raided,” another says.
“Then why aren’t you dead?” Yani asks, black spooling in her hands.
“We were told we’d survive if we gave up the boy!” The woman buries her face, shaking with grief.
“What’s so special about the boy?”
“He’s a…”
“Hush, now, Rosie,” an older fellow who hasn’t spoken chastises her.
“We can’t hide it anymore. He’ll kill us!” Her voice cracks. “We knew the risk taking him.” She meets my eyes. “He’s a descendant of a family line that was cursed with…with toushana.”
“A Darkbearer’s child.”
“She swore she wouldn’t hurt him,” Rosie goes on.
She.
“Who is she?”
“She didn’t give a name,” the older fellow speaks up. “We never saw her face. But she said she’d keep quiet about our little operation here if we gave her the boy and occasionally did favors for her. Errands, she called them. And then she had us keep track of her research, which I think you’ve seen in the basement.”
Yani’s eyes meet mine.
“She said she would raise the boy to have a better life,” Rosie says. “So, as a house, we agreed. She even sends pictures from time to time.”
“Show me,” I say.
Rosie grabs a photo book from beneath a mattress and hands it to me. I flip past a bunch of unknown faces and stop at a man wearing a red ball cap: the man from Yaäuper Rea. Rosie turns a few more pages and points. “We got that one about nine months ago.”
I gasp at the picture of a young boy in a fine tuxedo, with dark messy hair, shimmering hazel eyes, and reddened cheeks. He is unmistakable.
“Stryker.” My heart rends.
“You know him?” Rosie smooths away her tears. “Is he alright?”
“Beaulah.” The headmistress of House of Perl is raiding safe houses to collect Darkbearer descendants. I try to ask why but the question dies in my throat. I know the answer. A shiver runs down my spine as the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together.
“The Sphere is cracked, Yani. If it bleeds out, the Headmistresses—”
“Are dead,” she finishes.
“Would Beaulah, in particular, leave anything that big to chance?”
Yani gazes around the room, her hands moving to her mouth. Beaulah prefers control in her hands. That’s why she’s tried to fill the brotherhood ranks with so many from her own inner circle. She intends to use these descendants to do something to the Sphere to save herself. Somehow that is her plan.
I order everyone to stay put until I’ve come up with what should happen next. Then I pull Yani into the hall.
“Did you know about this?” I ask her.
“No, I swear.”
“You had no inclination that Beaulah was raiding on her own, exploiting these people to steal secure information, using Draguns from the brotherhood to barter for children, and storing her evidence here to incriminate them, if found?”
“Jordan, you and your high horse. She is just like anyone else, taking what she can to get what she wants.”
I flinch. “You…admire her.”
“You should try it.”
“You disgust me.”
“Not entirely.” Her teeth pull at her lip and I regret ever looking at her any other way than I do now. I leave her there. Stryker, the little boy we took on the museum raid. That eager gleam in his eyes. He earnestly listened to my counsel. He seemed so innocent. Beaulah stole him and is blackmailing these people to plot treason. While carefully keeping her hands clean.
If Quell is a monster in the making for binding with toushana, for hunting the Sphere, what does that make Beaulah?
Quell.
The weight of her name ricochets through me like a bullet in search of a target.
“Oh my god.”
If Beaulah is collecting Darkbearer descendants, she would want Quell most of all.
“I know where Quell is.”
I thought I was hunting the greatest living threat to the Sphere.
I was wrong.