EMBER
The smell of singed hair is what wakes me. It’s too familiar, too ingrained in my mind not to startle me. I think I was dreaming of something nice, and I’m tempted to close my eyes again and summon it back. I can’t remember what it was, but the general feeling of comfort from the dream has been replaced with bitter reality.
Blinking up at the white ceiling, I wonder how long I’ve been out. I try to swallow, but it’s like trying to drink sand. Shifting to stretch, I realize I can’t move. Panic rushes in. I jerk upright, tugging against the restraints holding my arms to the gurney. They aren’t handcuffs. No, handcuffs I could deal with. Two Peacekeepers have linked around each hand, trapping me. I try to pull free, but they click and gears turn, tightening their hold on me until blood trickles into my palms. Nurse lurches into the room, holding a tray full of needles and glass vials. I look down, seeing a large bandage on my left shin. Nurse lifts it and begins to clean it with iodine, making it look even more gruesome. The skin has been eaten away and patched back together.
I scream, kicking out, only to realize my feet are also bound. Nurse grinds to a stop, staring at me through its creepy gas mask. Its only words are the eerie hiss of steam releasing from its mechanisms.
Alexei.
My brother.
I see his face in my mind. My tenuous grasp on reality snaps like a dry twig, and I scream. I scream until my voice is gone and tears run marathons down my face. Until I’m sure I will die from the pressure building inside me. The guilt and anger tear themselves out my throat.
Then, spent, I fall back onto the gurney. Trapped even as my mind unspools inside me.
Alexei is alive.
My family is dead, but Alexei is a Hollow. Somehow, I can’t make it feel real. But I saw him. I touched him. My little brother. He looked nothing like the boy I remember. The tattoos, the scars. I swallow again. How could I have forgotten him? Now he is gone again. Not dead, but lost to me. In league with the enemy. My stomach lurches at the thought. No, not my enemy. Alexei will never be my enemy.
The door to the hospital slides open and Flynn steps in, his heavy boots thudding across the tile floor. Nurse turns and walks away, leaving us in silence. I glare at Flynn. To think, not long ago, just seeing his face could make me feel like everything would be all right. Now the sight of him only makes me feel dead inside. The betrayal is sour in my mouth. There are so many things I want to say, but I’m afraid what will come out if I open my mouth, so I just continue to glare as he sits on the edge of my bed and speaks.
“Ember, I know what you must be thinking—”
“That’s not my name! My name is Anastasia!” I spit the words out. My decision to stay silent is abandoned in an instant.
“Your name was Anastasia. That girl died the night her family was executed. The girl you are now, her name is Ember.”
“Вы взяли мою семью от меня.” You took my family from me. My voice has dropped to a whisper. Some vague, distant part of my brain realizes I’m not speaking English anymore, but Flynn still understands what I’m saying. I can tell by the way his face pales and his eyes drop to the floor.
“I saved your life,” he whispers.
I take a moment to make sure the words come out in English again. “Why did you let my family die? Why didn’t you save my family? Why let them…?”
He shakes his head. “I couldn’t.”
I am trembling now, and my voice is unsteady. “Don’t lie to me. You could do it right now. Or I could. I could go back and save them all.”
He reaches out to touch me, but I flinch away. “No, Ember. You can’t. Do you remember your Trial, what I said about Fixed Points in time?”
In my mind, I replay the conversation. “Yes.”
“What happened to your family, everything from your birth to the moment we rescued you, it’s all fixed. When we failed to get you and your brother, Tesla sent Catherine back further. He wanted to take you both the week before the attack. But she couldn’t. Do you understand? She physically couldn’t. Sometimes, the time stream fixes points to protect important moments in history. Altering an event like that could unravel the fabric of time itself.”
I don’t answer that. I’m too busy remembering.
Alexei’s obsession with tinkering has made us late for the family portrait. He screams. A fire has broken out in the house. The heat begins to melt the fragile lace of my gown, burning impressions of it into my arms and chest. I push Alexei into a corner and force him to crouch out of the smoke. My mind reels, trying to think of something, anything, that might save us. My mind snaps like a rubber band. There’s a dumbwaiter at the end of the hall. If we can get past the flames, I can fit him inside. It won’t hold us both. It’s too small for that. But I can get him out. And he will have to run into the forest and find a place to hide in there. Surely, some of my father’s staff has fled there. They will find him. They will take care of him. I turn my back to the door, trying to explain to my crying brother what I’m going to do. A pair of arms grabs me from behind. I scream and kick. But it isn’t a soldier. It’s Flynn, taking me away. Leaving my brother alone in that room. I scream to him, telling him to run for the dumbwaiter, but I don’t think he can hear me over his own sobs. Flynn drags me from the burning house as rubble collapses around us.
I blink back tears as the memory falls away. Flynn is still talking, but I’m not listening. The memories are flowing over me like water, and I can’t stop the tide.
The smoke is thick and dark. Someone else is there, rushing in behind us. The sound of breaking glass erupts around me. A piece of plaster falls from the ceiling. Everything goes dark.
I finally look at Flynn. His face is red.
“Did you hear me?” he asks.
I blink again.
“I said I was sorry, Ember. I never would have left him if…” He trails off, hesitant to speak the final words of his thought.
I’m still whispering, but my words hold a jagged edge. “No. You left him on purpose. You took me and left him. It’s all your fault. You let them take my brother.”
He balks.
“What I don’t understand,” I continue, “is why did you take me? Alexei was the important one, the one destined to be tsar. Why did you take me and leave him to the Hollows? And how in the hell am I speaking English?”
Flynn clamps his mouth shut. I glare at him until he nods.
“Do you remember when I first met you?” he asks.
“You mean when you ripped me from my brother’s arms? Yes, I remember. No thanks to you.”
Flynn shakes his head and looks deeply into my eyes. “No, Ember. That wasn’t the first time we met. Not even close.”
“What are you talking about?” I demand, turning my wrists in my restraints. For a minute, I wonder why I’m strapped down, and then I remember something else. I attacked Catherine. A pang of guilt arises before I can squelch it. But she almost killed that girl. That’s why I attacked her. The guilt quickly fades.
“You don’t remember because it hasn’t happened to you yet. But you asked me to trust you once, and I did. Now I’m asking you to trust me.”
I frown, not sure I can trust anything he says right now.
“I know that when the time comes, Ember, you’ll make the right decision. I trust you. And as for the English speaking, Tesla decided it would be best if all the recruits spoke the same language. We implanted it in your head when you got here.” He presses his hand over my wrist where the small metal creatures hold me. Instantly my hand is free. “A small thing really, in the overall—”
The slap is so quick he never sees it coming. His face is streaked with my blood as he gets up and turns his back to me.
“Why did you set the Peacekeepers on us?” I demand before he can leave. “You went through such trouble to kidnap me, why try to kill me now?”
He turns. His face, while red and bloody, is unrepentant. “The Peacekeepers are prog
rammed to detect Contra and destroy anyone with it in their system. It’s how we’ve been locating and fighting the Hollows. They detected some on your clothes. That’s the only reason they went after you. I didn’t know—I couldn’t have known—that they would attack you. I honestly thought you’d be safe.”
My mouth forms a hard line. “Are you going to wipe my mind again?”
Flynn’s face droops. He actually looks like I’ve hurt his feelings. I pretty much don’t care.
“No, Ember. Another memory wipe might do permanent damage. We won’t risk it. Unless you give us no other choice.”
Before I can say anything else, he’s gone, and Nurse is moving forward again. I barely feel the prick of the needle, but as it pushes the clear liquid into my vein, the room fades to black.
When I come to again, my head is throbbing. Next to me, Ethan is sitting cross-legged on the floor. He’s reading something on his thin tech board.
“Hey,” I manage weakly.
His eyes flick up to me, and he frowns. “It’s about time. What, the world goes to crap on crackers and you decide to take a nap?”
I laugh once, and it’s dry and painful. One of my arms is free, but the other is still strapped down with half a dozen wires and tubes plunged into my flesh.
“Your skin graft is healing well, according to Flynn,” Ethan says.
At the sound of his name, I flinch. “No offense, but I don’t trust anything Flynn says anymore. My brother…” I begin to explain what happened. How it wasn’t his fault. How Flynn had left him to the mercy of the Hollows.
Ethan takes my hand, pressing something small and round into my bandaged palm. I almost ask what it is, but the look on his face stops me, warns me to wait. I clench my fingers around it and give him a barely noticeable nod before slipping it into my pocket. He turns the board to me, revealing a set of blueprints. “They escaped. With this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s called a Dox. It’s one of Tesla’s designs. The purpose was to develop a sort of temporal Band-Aid. Something that could draw enough energy from the stream to contain a paradox.”
“In English?”
Ethan chuckles. “That is the English version. If you want the technical response, I’ll have to use words like anthropic directionality and corporeal tardyons, and let’s face it, no one wants that. The bottom line is this: If the Hollows need it badly enough to risk breaching the Institute to get it, it’s bad. Chernobyl bad. Flynn thinks they must be planning to do something that could rip a hole in the stream. Otherwise, why would they need the Dox?”
I nod. The foggy edges of my brain have snapped to attention. “That would be very dangerous.”
“Always the queen of understatements, aren’t you?”
I flinch again at the word queen. “How much did Flynn tell you?”
Ethan sits on the edge of my bed. “Exactly nothing. I figured it out, though. That is, the part about you and your brother and who you were before. I sort of took the little bit of info I managed to hack from your file, and I ran it through the historical database.”
I suck in a deep breath.
He reaches out and pushes a stray tangle of hair off my forehead. “Doesn’t really matter to us, you know, who you were. We know who you are. The rest is—”
I finish the thought for him. “History.”
He smiles and kisses my head before whispering, “Let me know when you’re ready to go.”
I’m confused, but the look on his face as he sits up is enough to keep me from saying anything. Suddenly, I realize something obvious. They are watching me. Waiting to see what I’m going to do. I smile at Ethan as I realize something else, too. Loosening my grip on the anger inside me, I let it be replaced by the peaceful feeling that comes from knowing you are loved.