The Ruby Circle

  I went to bed soon thereafter and was awakened midday by a new text message from Sydney. She reported that she, Eddie, and Jackie had made it to Pittsburgh but wouldn’t be truly investigating the museum until nightfall. She assured me everything was fine, and I assured her of the same, deciding it was probably best if she didn’t know I’d agreed to go talk to a potentially crazy girl who was either in love with me or despised everything about me. Sydney had enough to worry about.

  When the Moroi Court began waking up later in the day, I managed to get Neil to come back and walk me over to Nina’s. It was early enough that not too many people were out, but I figured it was better to be safe than sorry. Neil, driven by duty, was happy to help me regardless, but I knew he had an ulterior interest in going with me to see Nina. Months ago, he and her sister, Olive, had had the beginnings of a romance blossoming. None of us were entirely sure how far it had gone, but things had ended abruptly when Olive had taken off with little contact with Nina and none with Neil. I doubted Nina had any new details on her sister’s whereabouts, but Neil was probably hoping for some scrap of info.

  The late summer sun was still well above the horizon, even around six, when we reached Nina’s door. She lived in a section of bare-bones apartments inhabited by other Court employees (or ex-employees, as it turned out), far from the much more posh lodgings that royals like my father lived in. I took a deep breath as I stared at that door, summoning my courage.

  “It won’t get any easier if you put it off,” Neil told me, unhelpfully.

  “I know.” Resolved, I gave two short raps to the door, secretly hoping Nina was asleep or not at home. Then I could honestly tell Sonya I’d tried and leave it at that. Unfortunately, Nina opened the door almost immediately, as though she’d been waiting right by it.

  “Hello, Adrian,” she said warily. Her gray eyes lifted beyond me. “Neil.”

  He gave a nod of greeting, but I was momentarily stunned. Nina didn’t come from a rich or royal background, but that had never affected her beauty, and she’d always presented herself in an immaculate manner.

  At least, she used to.

  That Nina I’d known was nowhere in sight. Her dark, curly hair looked as though it hadn’t been brushed recently. In fact, I wasn’t sure it had been washed in a while either. A rumpled blue plaid skirt clashed with an orange T-shirt, over which she wore an inside-out gray cardigan. One of her feet was covered with a white ankle sock. Her other sock—adorned with red and white stripes—came up to her knee.

  And yet, it wasn’t the bizarre wardrobe choice that was most alarming; instead, it was the look on her face that told me Sonya hadn’t been exaggerating. Dark circles hung under Nina’s eyes, though the eyes themselves were bright and almost too alert, glittering feverishly. It was a look I’d seen before in spirit users pushed to the edge. It was a look I’d seen on Avery Lazar’s face.

  I swallowed. “Hello, Nina. Can we come in?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Why? So you can tell me again how totally unsuitable we are? So you can tell me how we can never, ever possibly work out—seeing as I’m not human and you apparently only hook up with people who double as dinner?”

  My temper started to flare at the slight, but then I reminded myself that she wasn’t well. “I’m sorry for what I said last time—I mean it. I’d met Sydney long before I met you. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Please—can we come in?”

  Nina stared at me wordlessly for a long time, and I used the opportunity to call on spirit and sneak a glimpse of her aura. Like Lissa’s yesterday, Nina’s aura was filled with the pale gold of a spirit user. Unlike Lissa’s, however, Nina’s gold had a weak, almost watery quality to it. It didn’t burn like a flame. The other colors were equally frail, flickering in and out.

  “Okay,” she said at last.

  She stepped aside and let us pass. What I found inside was nearly as disconcerting as her appearance. I’d been to her place before, back when she and I had done a lot of party-hopping together. The tiny apartment was actually more of a studio, with bedroom and living room merged into one. Despite the small size, Nina had always gone to great pains to keep her home tidy and well decorated. Much like the care given to her physical exterior, though, that upkeep seemed to be a thing of the past.

  Crusty, smelly dishes were piled high in the kitchen sink, where a couple of flies buzzed lazily. Laundry, books, and cans of energy drink were piled everywhere—tables, floor, even the bed. Weirdest of all was a stack of magazines on the floor with a pile of shredded paper next to them.

  “How do you sleep?” I asked, unable to help myself.

  “I don’t,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back. “I don’t. There’s no time. I can’t risk it.”

  “You have to sleep sometime,” said Neil pragmatically.

  She shook her head frantically. “I can’t! I have to keep trying to find Olive. I mean, I’ve found her. Kind of. Depends on how you look at it. But I can’t get to her, you see? That’s the problem. That’s why I have to keep trying. Why I can’t sleep. Understand?”

  I didn’t understand at all, but Neil’s breath had caught at the mention of Olive’s name. “You’ve found her? You know where she is?”

  “No,” said Nina, sounding slightly irritated. “I just told you that.”

  Without warning, she flounced down on the floor beside the magazine pile. She picked a magazine up at random and began tearing it, page by page, into tiny little pieces, building up the pile of shreddings.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Thinking,” she replied.

  “No, I mean with the magazines.”

  “This helps me think,” she explained.

  Neil and I exchanged glances. “Nina,” I said carefully, “I think maybe you should go visit a doctor. Neil and I can go with you, if you’d like.”

  “I can’t,” she protested, still methodically shredding the magazine. “Not until I reach Olive.”

  I crouched down beside her, wishing I had a better idea of how to talk to someone so clearly unstable. You’d think I’d be an expert. “How are you trying to reach her? By phone?”

  “By dream,” said Nina. “I succeeded. A couple of times. But then she blocked me. She turned the dream against me. I’m trying to fight through it, but I can’t.”

  I could tell from Neil’s expression that he was hoping that had made sense to me, but I was more confused than ever. A particularly resistant person could make it difficult for a spirit user to form a dream connection, but the rest made no sense. “Olive’s not a spirit user,” I told her. “She can’t do anything to the dream without your permission. You wield the ultimate control.”

  “She can, she can, she can.” Nina began tearing up the magazine with renewed energy. “Each time I try to talk to her, she throws up some obstacle! Things I never even thought of. Her nightmares, my nightmares. Someone’s. I fight them. I do. Really, I do. But it takes so much spirit.” She abruptly stopped the shredding and stared off into space bleakly. “It’s exhausting. And by the time I get through, she’s slipped away. She wakes herself up, and I can’t talk to her. Can’t ask her why she left me. Do you know?” Nina’s eyes flitted from me to Neil. “Do you know why she left?”

  “No,” I said gently. “All I know is that you need some serious rest.” I started to put a hand on her shoulder, and she jerked away, anger glinting in her eyes.

  “Don’t torment me,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t come here and act like you’re my friend.”

  “I am your friend, Nina. No matter what happened—or didn’t happen—between us, I’m your friend. I want to help you.”

  Her anger instantly flipped to despair. “No one can help me. No one can—Wait.” Unexpectedly, she grabbed my arm, her fingers digging in with astonishing—and uncomfortable—strength. “Maybe you can help me. You’re the best dreamer. Come
with me the next time I visit Olive. Then you’ll see—you’ll see how she’s controlling the dream! If we combine our powers, maybe we’ll be strong enough to stop her! Then we can talk to her!”

  I shook my head. “Nina, there’s no way she can—”

  Those fingers bit deeper into my arm. “She is, Adrian! Join me, and you’ll see.”

  I thought carefully before responding. Nina was right about me being the best spirit dreamer (that we knew of), and I’d never seen any sign of a non–spirit user being able to take control of a dream. Nina clearly believed that was the case and that it was preventing her from making contact with Olive. I didn’t dare say it, but I wondered if Nina had been using so much spirit lately that her control was faltering. That would explain why she was having difficulty forging a dream connection, and in her addled state, she’d come up with the idea that Olive was interfering.

  Yes, but what has she been using so much spirit on? asked Aunt Tatiana.

  It was a good question. Looking over Nina and her state of disarray, I found myself at a loss. Even if she tried to form a spirit dream connection with Olive every day, there was no way that alone could’ve driven Nina to this state. What else was she using magic on? Or was her mental deterioration being accelerated by something more than the magic? Was it a culmination of that and personal stress—like Olive’s disappearance and my rejection?

  “Adrian?” asked Neil tentatively. “Isn’t there any way you’d consider helping?”

  Not knowing my thoughts, he believed my hesitation was over a refusal to offer assistance. The truth was, I just didn’t know how. And honestly, Nina needed a lot more than help with a spirit dream. She needed help with her life.

  “Okay,” I said at last. “I’ll help you connect to her in a dream—but only if you get some sleep.”

  Immediately, Nina began shaking her head. “I can’t. I’m too excited. I have to keep looking. I have to—”

  “You will get some sleep,” I ordered. “I’m getting Sonya here, and she’s going to bring you a sedative. You will take it. And you will sleep.”

  “Later I will. Right now, we need to reach Olive. She’s on a human schedule. She’ll go to bed soon, and I can’t be asleep. We’ll reach her first and—”

  “No. No deal.” I made my voice as firm and harsh as I could. “If she’s waited this long, she’ll keep waiting. Sleep first. For God’s sake, Nina! Look at yourself. You’re—”

  “What? What?” she demanded, that earlier feverish look returning. “A mess? Ugly? Not good enough for you?”

  “Exhausted.” I sighed. “Now, please. Let me call Sonya. You’ll sleep today, and we’ll look for Olive tomorrow. If you’re rested, you’ll be better able to, uh, fight her control.” I still didn’t buy that, but Nina did, and she finally conceded.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can call Sonya.”

  I did, and Sonya was relieved to hear I’d made progress, small though it was. She promised to come over with something to help Nina sleep, and I promised to hang around until then. When I disconnected, Nina returned to her shredding and began humming what sounded like “Sweet Caroline.”

  “It’s really nice of you to help her,” Neil murmured, coming to stand beside me across the room. “Sleep will do her good. And for my own selfish reasons . . . well, I admit I’m eager for you to have contact with Olive too. Not that that’s your primary reason for doing this.”

  “Hey, it’s a good enough reason. They all are.” I tried to keep my voice light, not letting on just how bothered I was by Nina’s state. Because if I had to be honest, I wasn’t doing this just for Neil, Sonya, or Nina. Watching Nina as she sat there humming, so clearly out of her mind . . . well, the truth was, it wasn’t that hard to imagine myself in that state someday. And if it came to that, I hoped desperately that someone would help me too.

  CHAPTER 4

  SYDNEY

  I DON’T RECOMMEND TURNING INTO A CAT.

  The actual experience of being a cat isn’t too bad. But coming out of it? Awful. I felt as though I were being torn in two. My bones and skin stretched and twisted in ways that nature had never intended, and when it was all over, I felt beaten and bruised—like the time I’d fallen down a full flight of stairs as a child. A vaguely nauseous feeling settled in the pit of my stomach, and for a panicked moment, I thought I would throw up. Forced vomiting had been one of many punishments the Alchemists had inflicted on me while I was in their captivity, and the very idea of it triggered a flood of unwelcome memories. Fortunately, the sensation soon passed, and I felt more or less like my former self.

  “There’s a great place to get coffee about twenty miles from here,” Ms. Terwilliger said once I was settled and had my seat belt on. “We’ll stop there and get some gas before pushing on to Pittsburgh.”

  I nodded, finished a text to Adrian, and stretched my legs, still coming to terms with the return to my old body. Beside me in the seat sat the wooden box Ms. Terwilliger had brought, and I picked it up for a closer look. Free of its sealing enchantment, there was nothing extraordinary about it now. In the month since Jill’s disappearance, there’d been a lot of speculation about who would’ve taken her. Almost always, we’d laid the blame on some Moroi dissident who didn’t support Lissa. Yet, this clearly showed evidence of human magic, which kind of turned everything we’d believed upside down. Aside from me, we knew of no magic-using humans working with Moroi.

  I could only hope this museum offered some answers, as unlikely as it seemed. Inside the box, the words on that flyer glared up at me: COME PLAY, SYDNEY.

  Once we had our coffee, the drive passed uneventfully, with our only slowdown being summertime construction scattered along the highway. Honestly, it would have been a pleasant road trip, if not for the fact we were all still keyed up with worry and tension. I was worried Adrian might do something reckless back at Court. And, of course, I was worried about Jill. Eddie clearly was too, and rather than make him feel better, this new lead had only increased his agitation. He barely said two words to us the whole drive. We still made good time overall, rolling up to the Pittsburgh Robot Museum in late afternoon. A hand-painted sign declared that it was “world famous,” but none of us had ever heard of it. Judging from the empty parking lot, not many people had.

  “We’re usually busier on weekends,” explained the attendant at the admission window. We bought three tickets and stepped inside.

  “Please come in, please come in,” boomed a robot standing near the entrance. It didn’t move and had been patched with duct tape in a number of places. In its arms, it held a long, rectangular welcome sign.

  The bulk of the museum was contained inside one large gallery that displayed a motley assortment of robots used in both entertainment and practical business applications. Most of the displays were static, but a few were animated, like a mini assembly line showing a robot that checked for manufacturing quality control. A conveyor belt on an endless loop sent ceramic mugs around and around past a boxy-looking device that paused and scanned each one, flashing either red or green lights, depending on whether it found a defect.

  An adjacent room displayed “A History of Robotics” along its walls. It included mythological origins, like automatons that served the Greek god Hephaestus, which I thought was a nice touch. The bulk of the timeline focused on developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and then ended with THE FUTURE: ???

  I stared at those question marks a moment, thinking they might as well be a label for my own future. What did my life hold? Would I ever manage the college and world-travel dreams I’d harbored for so long? Or would my life be limited to a suite of rooms surrounded by vampires? Was being on the run the best outcome I could hope for?

  “Sydney?”

  Ms. Terwilliger’s voice drew me from the timeline room, and I returned to the main gallery. She and Eddie were standing by a huge glass display case featur
ing what looked like a metal dinosaur more than twice my height. I recognized it as the one from the flyer, beside which my name had been written. Ms. Terwilliger’s hand rested on the glass. “Can you feel this?” she asked me.

  I placed my hand next to hers and waited. After several seconds, I sensed some kind of buzzing energy. Eddie imitated us but then shook his head. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.

  “There’s an enchantment on this display,” Ms. Terwilliger explained, stepping back.

  “Can you tell anything about it?” I asked. She was more sensitive to that sort of thing than I was. It was a skill that required practice.

  “No. I need to open this case.”

  There was a small metal lock on the glass case that either of us probably could have opened with a spell. From what I could tell, there was no other security or electronic alarm on this display or the others, and I honestly wasn’t surprised. Something told me this place didn’t have the budget for anything too high tech, ironically enough. As it was, it didn’t even have air conditioning, making it hot and stuffy inside with only a few screened windows to provide ventilation.

  “Ah,” said the attendant, striding over to us. He’d probably grown bored at his post. “I see you’re admiring the Raptorbot.”

  I glanced up at its metal teeth and red eyes. “It’s something else,” I said honestly.

  “Are you fans of the movie?” he asked.

  “What movie?” I asked.

  “Raptorbot Rampage,” said the attendant.

  “Yes,” said Eddie, almost reluctantly. Ms. Terwilliger and I turned to him in surprise. He flushed under our scrutiny. “What? It . . . well, it was kind of awesome. I saw it with Micah and Trey.”

  The attendant nodded eagerly. “It’s about a scientist whose wife is dying of an incurable disease. Just before she dies, he builds this robot raptor and manages to transfer her soul into it. Only things go unexpectedly awry when she goes off on a rampant killing spree.”

  “It couldn’t have been that unexpected,” I argued. “I mean, why did he build a dinosaur body for her? Why not something more human? Or at least a more friendly animal?”