Eleven

Eleanor stared up at Ash. “You can’t leave on your own?” she asked.

“Mother and Father have been searching for a way out of this world for ages, but they’ve never found one,” Melia said. She was running her hands idly through Thea’s hair. It had gone limp after her ordeal in the throne room, but now it sprang back thick and golden. Eleanor had the sense, though, that this was an illusion—nothing had truly changed.

“That means that if you take us with you, they won’t be able to follow us,” Ash said. “You have a way out, don’t you? You got here, you must have a way to leave.”

“Please,” Thea said. Her eyes were wide and hopeful.

Eleanor wetted her lips, looking quickly between the siblings. What if she helped them get away, and that was the reason the curse existed in the first place? But what if she helped them get away, and it changed the future so that the curse never happened?

She wished Otto were here. He would rattle off a half-dozen theories about time travel and paradoxes and changing the timeline, and at the end of it she’d still have no idea what was going on, but she’d know they could figure it out.

“What will you do? If you escape, I mean,” Eleanor said.

“Does it matter?” Ash asked.

“Of course it matters. Are you going to—to build armies and conquer other worlds?” Eleanor asked.

Melia made a face. “That’s what our parents want to do. Gather more prisoners to Empty and turn into soldiers and weapons and beasts so that we can conquer more worlds, get more prisoners.” She walked over to the stone fountain in the middle of the garden. She peered down into the water and ran her fingers lightly over her face. Her features shifted—her nose getting smaller, her jaw stronger, her eyes larger. Her lips turned a deep red, and shimmering purple appeared on her eyelids. “There’s nothing beautiful here. I hate it,” she said distantly.

“There are so many worlds, and I’ve never gotten to see any of them,” Thea said. “I want to see all of them. Go everywhere.”

Ash chuckled fondly. “I don’t know if you’ll have time to see all of them,” he said.

Thea shrugged. “Then the sooner I get started, the better,” she said, and he grinned. He loved her. There was no other explanation for the way he was looking at his sister. He adored her, and Eleanor had never seen Mr. January show the slightest bit of affection for anything.

“What about you?” she asked him.

He lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. I just want to get me and my sisters out of here.”

Eleanor looked between them, troubled. It was strange. They were nothing like the People Who Look Away—not yet. But it was like she could see exactly how they would get there, in this horrible place. How it would turn them wicked.

How Ash would learn more and more to bargain and lie. How Melia would put on false faces until there wasn’t a real one left. And Thea—little Thea, splitting herself into pieces.

How could you stay whole in a place like this?

She didn’t want to feel sorry for the People Who Look Away. And she wasn’t sure she should. Whatever may have happened to them, they’d still done horrible things.

But with a shock she realized that maybe, just maybe, they might have ended up different. Maybe they still could.

“Do you think it’s possible to change what happens to us?” Eleanor said softly.

“You mean like fate?” Ash asked.

“Fate. Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Do you think that people are stuck with who they’re meant to be, and there’s no way to change it?”

“People can change,” Melia said, still brushing her fingertips across the surface of the water. “We do it to people all the time.”

Eleanor looked at her in confusion. Melia’s expression was placid.

“Our parents don’t just make the Empty. We have all kinds of ways to turn people into useful things. But they have to have the right ingredients for what you need. Say you want to make a sword. You can’t make a weapon out of a gentle child. So either you find a violent man, or you change the child.”

“They turn people into swords?” Eleanor asked, aghast.

Melia shrugged. “Or monsters, or mirrors, or statues, or—”

“Keys?” Eleanor suggested, a chill running down her spine.

“Sure. Twins are good for that. You make one a lock and one a key. The lock is impossible to pick, or open with a copied key, because it always knows its twin.”

“Just about everything in this castle is made from bits of people’s personalities and emotions,” Ash said. “But these days all the villagers have inside them is dread and hopelessness. You can make good stones out of dread, and hopelessness makes good chains, but they’re not good for much else. That’s why they want to find a way to reach other worlds.”

“Did you know you can Empty worlds, too?” Melia asked idly. “Suck out everything from them, until they collapse in on themselves, and everything inside dies. Or you can leave just the shell, all Empty and gray.”

Eleanor thought of the gray world—the place where the People Who Look Away had taken all the cursed children of Eden Eld before them. Had they turned a whole living, thriving world into that terrible place? “That’s horrible,” she said with a shudder.

“Everything they do is horrible. That’s why we want to leave,” Ash said. “They’re making us learn how to Empty people, too. Even Thea will have to learn soon.”

Thea looked miserable. “They made me try once, and it’s way worse than having it done to you. You have to be a different kind of empty, to do that to a person.” A tear threatened at the corner of her eye, and she wiped it on her sleeve. Eleanor’s heart squeezed.

Ash sat beside Eleanor on the bench. The kitten-of-ashes jumped down, trotting away to investigate a flower. “We want to change our fate. And you’re the best chance we’ve found of doing it. Will you help us?”

Maybe this was how it all began. How the People Who Look Away got into Eleanor’s world to do their wicked deeds.

Or maybe that was how they stopped Mr. January—not by defeating him, but by saving him. She had to believe that Ash was right. That they could change their fates. Because if the People Who Look Away could have a different future, Eleanor and her friends could, too.

“I’ll help you escape,” Eleanor said, her voice hoarse. “If we get my friends out of the dungeon, I can get all of us out of here.”