Sawyer is useless all day. She zones out during a meeting with the board of directors, and stumbles over her words while practicing the speech for Friday. The event is two days away, and everyone else in the Resurrection has done their part to prepare. They’ve dedicated months to planning how to hijack the broadcast so Sawyer’s speech would play instead of live feeds of the convention. Every aspect has been tested and is ready to go.
Every aspect but Sawyer. Because she’s still mentally stuck in her great-uncle’s den.
Driven to near madness, she decides to call her father. But when he answers, she panics and rather than bringing up Paul, she tells Lincoln about what she found in the bathroom at the Catholic boarding school. Guinness jumps in her lap, and she gratefully pets the cat while she practically dumps the story onto her dad’s lap through the phone.
“You know, one of my dad’s hopes for the Registration was to make that stuff more accessible for women,” Lincoln says. “He even thought people should be able to have an extra Registration for pregnancies. That’s one of the things your little group talks about, right?”
“It’s not a little group, Dad,” she mumbles, knowing the contradiction is pointless. The Resurrection could have a billion members, and her father would still call it a ‘little group.’
“Well, your grandfather would’ve agreed with you.”
Her hand stills on Guinness’s back. The cat mewls, kicking at her arm to get her to continue petting. “Actually, Grandad is sort of why I called.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah . . .” Sawyer swallows and licks her lips. “I visited Uncle Paul yesterday. He mentioned Grandad and said he refused to let Gideon win even after he was no longer an oligarch. Do you know what that means? What did he do to try and . . . defeat Gideon?”
Her father’s sigh crackles through the phone’s speaker. The sound startles Guinness, who jumps off Sawyer’s lap and saunters to the windowsill.
“Honey, you shouldn’t take anything Paul says too seriously. He’s not all there anymore.”
“He’s not stupid,” Sawyer argues. “And he’s not making stuff up. He just doesn’t realize who he’s talking to or what year it is.”
“Exactly. He’s probably mixing up events from several points in time.”
She almost asks about the Sin-Fighting Warriors, but the words are too thick with emotion to pass through her throat. “Okay. But he also mentioned a woman named Juniper. Do you know her?”
Lincoln answers with silence.
“Dad? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yes, honey. I’m sorry, I . . .” he clears his throat. “I haven’t heard that name in a while. You’re sure he said Juniper?”
She sits forward, perched on the edge of the couch. “Yes, I’m sure. I think he had an affair with her.”
“Oh, honey. I wish you wouldn’t let this stuff bother you.”
“This is my family, Dad.”
“You do too much. With that dangerous rebel stuff and everything. Why don’t you take a break from it all? You could visit your brother in France.”
“Don’t change the subject,” Sawyer says. “Who is Juniper?”
“Like you said, she’s a younger woman Paul had an affair with for a short time. It ended after Paige found out.”
“How do you know about it?” Sawyer asks.
Lincoln sighs again. “That’s enough, Sawyer. Forget about all of this. It doesn’t matter. It was over fifty years ago.”
“It does matter, Dad! How long was he cheating on Paige? Is that why they got divorced? Did you know Juniper?”
“Let it go, Sawyer.” Lincoln’s ‘dad voice’ makes Sawyer snap her mouth shut. She pulls her feet onto the couch, grabbing her knees like she did as a kid when she got in trouble. “I’m sorry, but bringing this all up can’t do any good. You don’t have to unearth every bad thing in this world. Don’t let this become your next obsession like the Resurrection. Let it all go. None of it is good for you. If you keep trying to get justice for everyone else because you can’t get it for Ell—” He abruptly stops talking, but not before his words punch Sawyer in the chest. “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean that.”
“Yeah, I know,” Sawyer says, her voice smaller than ever. She presses her forehead to her knees. “It’s okay.”
“I am sorry. I hate seeing you in pain.”
“I know, Dad. It’s okay,” she repeats. “I need to go, but I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She ends the call, feeling worse than she had when it started. It’s not only what her dad said that bothers her, it’s how she reacted. If she would get angry just once like Ellery, then maybe she wouldn’t keep walking into situations that suck her into an emotional storm. Even through her biggest act of defiance, the Resurrection, she’s always hesitant to do anything too drastic. Friday’s conference will be their biggest move yet, and all she’s doing is giving a speech her dead wife wrote.
She’s in the midst of brooding about her own failures when her phone starts ringing. She picks it up and flips it around, expecting her father’s name on the screen. Instead, it’s Lynell.
Relieved, Sawyer answers.
* * *
They decide to meet at one of her dad’s vacant rental properties. Malakai’s eyes track Sawyer as she paces the hallway, occasionally flicking to the back door where Lynell and Daniel should enter when they arrive. Sawyer opens the clock on her phone, watching the second hand tick in a circle until someone knocks on the back door.
“Nice house,” Lynell says, neck straining to look at the high ceiling. The living room, foyer, kitchen, and dining room are a large, open-concept box. Tall windows fill the walls, but Malakai pulled the blinds shut before Sawyer even stepped foot inside. “It’s not yours, is it?”
“Of course not,” Sawyer says. “It’s a rental, currently without occupants. No cameras.” She watches the couple take in the area, Daniel’s body nearly as tense as Malakai’s. Lynell looks both relaxed and stressed, as if she can separate fear of an immediate threat from anxiety of future dangers.
“You okay?” Lynell asks, dropping onto one of the cream velvet chairs the interior decorator picked out for staging. The entire house is filled with old contemporary-style furniture and decoration. Bold accents, such as the geometric blue rug in the living room, break up the generally monochromatic earth tones. “Have you gotten any more threats since last we talked?”
“No, nothing. He’s gone silent.”
“Not silent. We have plenty to update you.”
Lynell launches into the story, Daniel dropping in a morsel of information every few sentences. At first glance, he carries all the stress for them both, but the longer Lynell speaks, the more Sawyer sees hints of a deep turmoil. Lynell picks at a scab on her forearm while explaining their recent history with Anna, information that didn’t make it to the papers, like Eric threatening her and Zach sacrificing himself to save her. Lynell’s foot shakes and a hitch in her breath ends every sentence when she talks about someone kidnapping Anna.
“I’m so sorry.” Sawyer personally knows how weak those words are when your world is falling apart around you, but she has nothing else. A weak hand reaching out is better than being completely alone.
“We’ll get her back,” Lynell says. “But . . . that’s one of the reasons I needed to talk to you. The kidnappers gave us a ransom.”
Sawyer frowns. She has money, sure, but so does Lynell. “You don’t have enough money?”
Lynell shakes her head. She stops scratching the scab and presses her thumb against the bleeding edge. “It’s not money. I had my first committee meeting on Thursday. Earlier this year, they voted for a policy change to go into effect next week. I called for a revote on Friday. The last one was three against five, and I was trying to get one member to change their vote so I could break the tie, when Anna was taken. The ransom is to let the policy change happen and they’ll give Anna back.”
“What is the policy change?” Sawyer asks.
Lynell hesitates. She pops the knuckles on her good hand and looks at a spot above Sawyer’s head, while taking several long breaths.
Then she explains.
It’s worse than Sawyer had feared. Harlow passed along information she learned from her father, so they knew the committee was planning a change involving the price of the Registration but not much else. This will make the lives of anyone who can’t afford or doesn’t approve of the Registration virtually worthless. The rich will be able to kill without consequence. More so than they already can.
The silver lining is that Lynell and Daniel seem to hate the policy change as much as Sawyer. The fact that Lynell told Sawyer at all is a near miracle. But if Sawyer had a child and her child was taken, she would also align with anyone to save her kid.
“What can I do?” Sawyer asks.
“I remembered you mentioned Friday last time we met. There’s something about the convention you didn’t tell us,” Lynell says. “We need to know everything before we come up with a plan.”
“Right.” Sawyer unleashes a shuddering exhale. “The Resurrection has spent the last few years growing and planning. We’ve never had more money, resources, or recruits. Our sources told us that the Registration committee plans to make changes to the laws, but we had no idea to what extent. Still, we figured it’s time to take more direct action. We’re hoping to make a statement, a call to action, but we want it to be as impactful as possible. As soon as the date for the annual convention was announced, we started planning a way to use it in our favor. We realized we don’t have to be on site to speak or take over, we just have to be able to hack the broadcast.”
Lynell’s eyes widen a fraction. “How are you going to do that?”
“It’s difficult, but we have people smarter than you and me about technology and virtual broadcasts. We needed a handful of our people in the convention to help hack the hardware encoder and streaming network communication to replace their video with ours.”
Lynell leans toward Sawyer as she listens, and Daniel occasionally reacts with a sound of understanding, approval, or shock.
They’re a good audience, Sawyer thinks. And that’s a vital characteristic of a good leader. Ellery used to practice listening because it was one of the only things that didn’t come naturally to her. She wanted to reply, to take action, not sit in silence trying to listen to someone else speak while her mind had already moved way beyond the conversation.
“We were going to do it during the typical speech an oligarch gives every year at these conventions, but we’ve altered our plans slightly since they announced your succession, which last I heard, will be before any announcements, like the policy change. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Lynell confirms. “That’s what they told me at a pre-rehearsal yesterday. Also, who does that? Has a pre-rehearsal? Isn’t a rehearsal all the pre you need?”
Daniel, who has mostly been silent until that point, grips her knee and whispers, “Lyn.”
She looks at him. Her shoulders quiver slightly with a breath.
Sawyer realizes that for every small hint of stress she’s caught in Lynell, Daniel has felt a dozen more. He’s probably more in tune with her feelings than she is.
Watching them makes the pages in her back pocket seem to heat up. She’d grabbed the printout of the speech at the last second before leaving, some unseen force driving her actions. She’s not sure if it was a desire to have Ellery’s words close to her, or if something deeper wanted her to be prepared in case she needed to share the speech with Lynell.
Part of her doesn’t want to. She isn’t ready to share this part of her wife with anyone, much less the Elysian heir. But in less than forty-eight hours, she’ll be giving Ellery’s words to the entire country, and despite barely knowing the woman, Lynell is already more than just the Elysian heir.
Her hand is moving to pull the speech free before she’s made up her mind to do so. “Maybe this will help,” she says.
No one hears her because at the same time, the air splits with the sound of Malakai screaming.
“GET DOWN!”
In a blink, Sawyer watches everything around her move without a moment of hesitation. Daniel lunges forward, grabs Lynell, and yanks her to the floor. Malakai, a gun in his hands, is running toward Sawyer, waving at her to drop.
The window closest to them breaks, glass flying through the air and shattering onto the floor. Sawyer’s eyes follow the object that broke the window, landing with a sprinkling of glass in the center of the room. A small blinking device.
Bomb.
Then there’s an echoing pop and the object goes off. Rather than an explosion that melts the skin from her body, smoke bursts from the device.
Sawyer coughs and finally drops to the floor, unable to see or process everything she’s hearing. Someone is shouting. Two people, maybe. There’s another shattering of glass, but Sawyer can’t understand why. The building is already heavy with smoke.
The storm in her mind has finally freed itself and become real. She’s legitimately stuck in a sandstorm, and she’ll never be able to see or breathe clearly again.
Her heart speeds up. A nauseating wave of dizziness washes over her.
More glass shattering and shouting, and she realizes it’s not smoke bombs being thrown through the windows.
It’s bullets. Three of them so far. Or maybe four.
“Sawyer!” This voice breaks through to her consciousness like the others hadn’t. Maybe it’s because she hadn’t expected it. Or maybe it’s because the voice is feminine rather than masculine. It’s not Malakai shouting orders or Daniel yelling for Lynell.
It’s Lynell, her voice filled with fear—fear for Sawyer.
“Lynell, we have to go!”
“Get Sawyer!”
“I got her.”
Sawyer hears the words but can’t distinguish who says them through the chaos. A large hand grabs her wrist and pulls her up. Sawyer can’t make out distinct features, but she knows it’s Malakai pulling her toward an exit he likely already had mapped out.
“Go! Hurry!”
They’re running, and the smoke is starting to dissipate. Whoever threw the smoke bomb is going to be inside soon. They’re going to catch them and kill them. Or worse.
Sawyer speeds up, her brain finally caught up with the events, clicking into the clear urgency to follow Malakai and escape.
But with the clarity comes awareness of the feelings in her body. Sharp stings of cutting pain jump around, as if trying to confuse her about its origin. She’s not sure what caused it. Was she shot? Was it the glass?
She sees the exit, a side door through the house’s laundry room, and relief starts to emerge amongst the fear and pain.
The relief shatters with the glass behind her, and a woman’s scream fills the air.