Phil drove me home in what had been Teo’s car. He was silent until we’d gotten a good distance away from the jail, and then he said, “We need to get Tjuan out of there.”
I tried to think despite a pounding headache. “Maybe we can. Elliott is in a facade of Tjuan at the moment.”
“I know.”
“We could send him to the police station. Shock may know where the weapon ended up. We could put the gun right in the facade’s pocket.”
“And send Elliott to jail?” said Phil.
“I don’t know, he could fake a heart attack or something, leave the facade once it was in there. Except . . . the body wouldn’t die. It would just . . . sit there, warm, without a heartbeat.”
“Are we caring about that?” said Phil. “Are we caring about the Code of Silence more than we are about Tjuan?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I massaged my head. “I’ve had kind of a day.”
“Sorry,” said Phil. “You and Caryl figure it out.”
“Caryl? She’s all right?”
“She’s the one who called me, Millie. And the bail bondsman.”
Of course.
Another idea hit me. “Qualm. We have Qualm now. Shock can put Qualm into the facade!”
“And then Qualm will snap the kid’s neck. Great idea.”
“Oh. Right.”
We couldn’t actually make Qualm do anything. Only Winterglass could do that, and he wouldn’t do shit for me until I got him that vial.
We were silent after that on the long drive back to the North University Park district in the dead of night. When Phil let me back into the house, the clock on the wall in the living room said seven after three. The house was quiet.
“Where’s Elliott?” I whispered to Phil.
“In Arcadia,” he said. Good. I wasn’t sure I could stand to see him right now, walking around in my partner’s skin.
Phil’s room was downstairs, so I left him, heading straight to the upstairs bathroom to shower. I sat on my little plastic stool and let the water pound me, wanting it to scour off every skin cell that touched anything in that place.
I couldn’t wash off my record, though. Charged with obstruction of justice, arraignment set for mid-March. Even if Tjuan got cleared of all charges, I had broken the law, and that made me a criminal.
Maybe that should have made it easier for me to calmly pull off a heist, but without Tjuan I had no contingency plan, no exit strategy. If this had been a movie, I’d have gone ahead, called it additional motivation to do things right. But this was Caryl and Claybriar and Shock, people who had been (mostly) good to me, people whose lives I couldn’t just throw away.
I dried off, put on a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in, and wheeled myself back down the hall to my room, trying to make my exhausted brain think past the missing piece in my perfectly balanced plan.
I still had one “Tjuan”; I still had an Ironbones to use as a threat to the second standing stone. But Elliott couldn’t be in two places at once, and I didn’t want even the slightest risk that a real Ironbones might touch the stone at the same time I did. The whole point was that it had to be the real Tjuan making the final threat.
It didn’t work now. But I had to make it work, or Tjuan was going to spend the next decade behind bars, and Dame Belinda was probably going to find ways to get the rest of us too.
At some point I stopped pretending that I was trying to patch up my plan and just sat on my bed crying.
“Get some sleep,” said a tiny voice nearby.
I started and turned to find Caveat in her winged iguana form.
“Were you watching me in the shower, too?”
“Sorry. Caryl asked me to. Was worried you might harm yourself.”
Despite everything, I suddenly felt so fucking proud of Caryl that, even without Elliott, she’d thought to save herself, to call the bail bondsman, to have a spirit watch out for me. She was being a goddamned regional manager. At twenty. She’d grown up in a cage and she was handling this better than I was.
“You need to sleep,” Caveat repeated, “or you’ll be no help to anyone. Caryl has contacted Queen Dawnrowan to let her know what happened and why the meeting is delayed. But we still need to follow through.”
“Is that you talking, or Caryl sending a message through you?”
The little spirit was silent for a moment, and I felt the weight of her hesitation.
“Caveat,” I said, “what is it?”
“Have you ever wondered,” she said, “why I can speak to you at all? Why Elliott was able to recruit me?”
“To be honest, I’ve had other things on my mind. But you do make me curious.”
“I’m not like the other spirits.”
“You’re . . . more like Elliott,” I said. “Like the wraiths. You—you’ve been exposed to human thought.”
“Not by choice,” she said. “I’ve been watching this city for a long time, longer than you’ve been alive. Spirits can see through the barrier, you know. We just can’t cross it at will.”
“That’s . . . creepy.”
“I crossed it once by accident. It happens sometimes.”
“Right,” I said, arranging myself more comfortably on the bed. “Traumatic or intensely emotional events. That’s what causes hauntings, apparently, and certain miracles. We learned about that last fall, and we’ve been working on getting it added to the Project handbook. So you’re saying some kind of trauma pulled you over?”
“A fast-food place. A gunman came in, opened fire on the crowd.”
“Holy shit.”
“I’m what you might call . . . a spirit of extreme caution. I merged with a small boy as he decided to be very still, to hide. He watched seven other people die.”
“Oh my God,” I said. Even as tired as I was, I knew. I knew immediately. “Tjuan.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And you just . . . stayed with him.”
“At first I didn’t know how to leave. And then I felt for the boy. I cast a spell to make him forget what he saw, not realizing that the spell trapped me here. That I wouldn’t get called back, when the other spirits were, because I was bound.”
“So what happened? When he got sick, was that you?”
“I . . . made an error in judgment. I’d come to care for him over the years. He was bright, and he found success, but there were people who resented his presence. I tried to use just a little influence on him, make him cautious, because he had such a run of good luck that he became too trusting. He didn’t see the contempt his coworkers had for him. Somehow, between the stress at work and my attempts to communicate with him, he started to sense me. He turned on me. It was . . . bad, for both of us.”
“That’s when he got committed.”
“They medicated him, but of course that didn’t do anything to me. Only the electricity they eventually channeled into his brain disrupted our link. But it also gave him back that terrible memory I’d kept from him.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. The whole time I’d known him, he’d been carrying that around. “What happened to you?”
“I stayed trapped in that room, watching the doctors perform procedures on one person after another, until the next convergence, when the Bone Harp was played to draw me back to Arcadia. From that point on, I stopped watching this world.”
I sat for a moment, massaging my forehead, trying to take it all in. “And then Elliott came to Arcadia, telling stories of what happened in the fall.”
“I recognized a name in those stories.”
“Oh, Caveat. Does Tjuan know?”
“No.”
“Does Caryl? Does Elliott?”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re the one with the plan. You’re his only hope. I came here because I wanted to make sure he was all right, to find some way to help him.”
“And now—”
“And now it’s my responsibility, more than any, to help save him. I’m the one who brought him to this place, who made him into a man who trusts and is trusted by no one.”
“I trust him. I’d trust him with my life.”
Caveat took the trouble to project a respectful inclination of her head. Her usual stillness made the gesture all the more striking. “And so for you,” she said, “and for him, I need to see this thing through, this plan you’ve made for the White Rose. Even if it means sharing another human’s mind. I’ll do whatever you want. Please, don’t give up.”
She brought her forelegs together in what looked like entreaty. Her eyes fixed on mine.
“I . . . kind of want to hug you,” I said.
“Not necessary,” said Caveat.
“I can see it now,” I said dryly. “The resemblance between you.”
“Sleep now.”
“Caveat?”
“Yes?”
Caveat was silent for a long time. Then she said, “If you manage to save him, I will.”
• • •
I did manage to sleep a little, but in just a couple of hours I heard an unfamiliar boop-boop-boop in the drawer of my nightstand. Instantly I knew that it was Alondra’s phone.
I rolled over at the speed of sound, pounced on the drawer, grabbed the phone, and hit the button to answer the call. I didn’t speak. I just sat there listening.
“Hello?” said a male voice on the other end.
I said nothing. I was still waking up, still trying to figure out what I should do. If this was Alondra’s boyfriend, I was going to feel like a heel.
“It’s Tracy,” the voice said. “You okay?”
A man named Tracy. The Eastern regional manager was a man named Tracy.
My mind raced. I tried to find something approaching Alondra’s high, breathy voice. “Was sleeping. What’s up?” It was crisper, more curt than she would have been, but I didn’t want to risk saying more.
“You haven’t been reporting in, and I was worried, that’s all.”
My skin went clammy. It took me a minute to find English sentences, much less my fake Alondra voice.
“Can’t talk right now,” I said.
“What’s wrong? Are you in danger?”
“No privacy. Let’s talk later.”
“Okay. Be sure to let me know if you feel threatened in any way.”
“Of course. Bye for now.”
I ended the call and stared at the phone. Then I picked up mine and used it to call Caryl.
“Millie,” she answered. There were tears in her voice, and my heart lurched despite everything.
“Yes, it’s me,” I said, pushing past it. “Someone named Tracy just called Alondra’s phone from New York and asked why she hadn’t been reporting in.”
There was a long silence. When she spoke again she sounded as though she were trying to squeeze the words out through as little air as possible.
“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” she said.