“No.”
His eyes flitted over my face. “You’re acting traumatised.”
Instead of answering, I pulled my chin from his grip and hid my face against the softness of his shirt again, almost immediately soothed by the returning thump of his heartbeat. “I need…”
“I know.” He sighed, pulling the blankets tighter around me. “Sleep, Seph. I’ll keep you safe tonight.”
For the first time in weeks, I woke up with a heavy heart. It lagged in lazy thumps against the cocoon of my ribcage—a barrier that suddenly felt too meagre for the immensity of my emotion. I could hear the rumble of Quillan’s voice, and I seemed to be rolled into a bundle of blankets beside him. I blinked my eyes open, finding my face inches from Quillan’s thigh. He was already dressed for school; his pale blue tie knotted and his wavy hair combed back from his face. There were dark smudges beneath his eyes, and his eyelashes were sticking together, forming spikes that threatened to warm my heart with their uncharacteristic unkemptness. He must have splashed his face with water, because his collar was also slightly damp and the sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up to the elbows.
I pulled myself up slightly and startled, because Silas had been sitting beside the bed, watching me the entire time that I had been watching Quillan.
“You’re awake,” he said plainly.
He was looking much more composed than Quillan, though I doubted that it was due to any effort on Silas’s part—I suspected that there wasn’t a single aspect of his appearance that would dare to defy him by being out-of-place. His hair had begun to grow out of its latest cut, and the dark strands had been swept to the side in a tumble of waves to just below his left ear—leaving the right side looking disproportionally short, though the ragged affect suited him. He had also neglected to shave, but the spreading shadow only heightened his deliberate mystery, lending him an air that was somehow wild and cultivated at the same time. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before, which didn’t entirely surprise me, as it seemed that Quillan had also been awake all night.
Quillan shifted, bending over in order to see my face. “How are you feeling?” He was cautious, and I double-checked that I wasn’t leaking any of my emotion to them.
I grunted a non-committal reply, extracting myself from the blankets and crawling to the end of the bed. I slapped my cheeks to try and wake myself up, before combing my hair away from my face and stretching out the aches from my body. They both watched on with an odd curiosity set against a background of apprehension, and I continued to ignore them as I straightened my pyjamas and looped my somehow-still-tangled hair into a ponytail.
“Noah and Cabe have had their memories taken away.” Silas finally spoke again. “I questioned them last night. They seem to think that you have a boyfriend, and that he has been marked by the Klovoda as a POI. They believe we have all been tasked as your bodyguards until the Klovoda decides what to do with him. Why you’ve been separated from your fake boyfriend is a little hazy to them, as is the reason he’s been marked as a POI in the first place. They’re aware that you’re an Atmá, but they have no idea that you belong to…”
“To us,” Quillan inserted casually, though the harsh creases that suddenly appeared either side of his frown betrayed the ease of his tone.
“POI?” I asked, ignoring the awkward silence that had momentarily descended, forcing Silas and Quillan to both turn away from each other.
“Person of Interest,” Quillan supplied. “A Zev marked by the Klovoda for any number of reasons; usually, because they’re dangerous, but it could also be because the Klovoda want something from them that they can’t get elsewhere.”
“How is this possible?” I asked. “Is replacing memories an Atmá power? Like the valcrick and the forecasting?”
“We don’t know.” Quillan’s shoulders slumped forward, tilting his head into his hands and betraying his exhaustion. “We’ve never heard of it before. We’ve never heard of anything like this… except…”
“Except the hypnotist,” Silas said.
“The what?”
Silas didn’t answer. I arched a brow at him, but he only stared back, impassive, so I turned my inquisitive expression on Quillan.
Quillan seemed to struggle for a moment, before finally saying, “There have been rumours of someone working in the dark for Weston—or Dominic Kingsling—or even someone else in the Klovoda. He seems to be a bit of a vigilante. Sometimes his actions help the Klovoda, sometimes they hinder.” His tone held a note of uneasiness, and I knew better than to attribute it to the subject matter of our conversation. He was uneasy because he was giving me information.
“If he’s hindering them, how could he be working for them?” I scratched my temple, ignoring the way Silas was glaring at his twin.
“He’d be dead if someone important wasn’t protecting him.”
“Could he have done something like this? Is that why they call him the hypnotist? Does he actually hypnotise people?”
“The hypnotist can do strange things—even by Zevghéri standards. Speculation isn’t easy to count on, though.”
“So the messenger might have convinced this guy—this hypnotist—to help him break into the house and mess with Cabe and Noah’s heads?”
“It’s a possibility,” Silas said, deciding to participate in the conversation. His tone held a note of finality, and it seemed like even Quillan was warned off the topic for now, because the room tripped into silence once again.
Once it became unbearable, I spoke up. “What do we do?”
They glanced at each other, and then looked away again.
I padded to the door, pulling it open and peeking out into the hallway. “This is really bad.” I didn’t need to say anything more, because they knew.
We needed Noah and Cabe. Even if their memories came back eventually, we needed them now; the balance inside the house was too precarious for me to suddenly become close with Silas and Quillan and distant with the other two. I had foolishly told Tabby about one of my pairs—for reasons that I hadn’t even stopped to examine yet—but she had held back on reporting it to Weston. This sudden shift in our dynamic might just convince her once and for all, and then it was only a matter of time before Weston decided to pay us another visit.
“Why did I do that?” My voice was faint, and it tapered off on a groan of sorts. I deflated, slinking back to the bed and turning my face to stare blankly at the wall. “Why did I tell Tabby?”
“Because we pushed you too far.” Quillan answered me immediately, his voice delivering words in such an unwavering way that, before I knew it, they had become facts. “We couldn’t tell you anything, but we expected you to trust us, and then we bonded—which you weren’t ready for—and still… the larger pieces of the puzzle were—are—hidden from you. You’d had enough of secrets, and with the death of Aiden, Weston wouldn’t have seemed like such an important threat; not with what the messenger had proven himself capable of.”
“I…” Still staring at the wall, I stood again, wringing my fingers. “Maybe you’re right.” Even if he is right, this is still my fault. I returned to the door and opened it again.
“You need to win them back.” Quillan appeared behind me, his voice low. He shot a hand forward and pushed the door closed. Soon, Tabby would come to investigate why the door kept opening and closing. “And you need to do it quickly, Seph. We’ll be doing what we can, but this is a delicate situation in many ways. They have no memory of the bond, but that won’t stop them from feeling its effects. In other words, they will start to feel drawn to you, and they won’t understand why. In a normal situation, that might generate suspicion that you could be bonded to them, but right now they’re sure that you belong to another pair—one of them a POI. We’re already on tender-footing with the Klovoda because of our father. They won’t want to do anything to attract undue attention, and getting involved with you in this made-up scenario would definitely constitute attracting undue attention. If I know them, t
hey’ll do their best to get rid of you. They’ll request the Klovoda to take you back and give you to someone else, and the Klovoda won’t admit that they have no idea who you are. They’ll take you, and they’ll find out as much about you as they can because you’re an Atmá, and because someone is obviously using you to play games with the Adairs. Trust me on this, Seraph, you don’t want the Klovoda finding out about you right now.”
He waited, but I held my tongue.
“Silas tried to get the name out of them,” he added, when it seemed like I wasn’t going to respond. “But they won’t say it. They just stared at him when he asked. I’ve never seen anything like this—I don’t want to believe that it’s a power, because that could mean something else for us, and it won’t be anything good. Not for us. Not for the Zevs. The Klovoda have tried messing with Atmá powers in the past and it was a disaster. It almost exposed us all.”
Again, I said nothing.
“Do you understand what this means?” Quillan asked.
I gave a short nod, opened the door again and left the room. I was no longer straining. I was strong again, but my thoughts were confused. Noah and Cabe didn’t remember our bond. I needed them to remember—realistically, unselfishly, I knew that… but… would it be so terrible if they truly forgot?
The messenger had always wanted the bond gone, and it seemed that his three-month silence had only been the calm before the storm—the intermission before the finale. Everything else that he had done now seemed to have been part of his overall performance. The messages, the photos, the bomb… even the attempted murder of Noah and Cabe and the successful murder of Aiden and his pair; each incident was nothing but a showy interlude to distract from the messenger’s true focus. Now, he had finally shown his hand. He wasn’t going to sit back and play with me forever, punishing me for each step closer that I got to Noah and Cabe.
That was never his intention. Everything had been leading to the inevitable separation of me from Noah and Cabe.
I walked back to my bedroom and paused inside, searching the room for any signs of disruption to the usual order. There was a small frame propped against the window, tucked up into the side of the sill, and I scooped it into my hands. There was a sketch within, depicting two children sitting side-by-side atop the gnarled branch of a sturdy-looking tree, age evident in each sinewy twist of bark. An ashen cityscape dwindled into the background, gradually feeding into the bare twinkle of a looming twilight.
It was an old drawing, judging by the faded, yellowed paper, and the watermark creeping into the bottom right corner. There was an indecipherable signature set into the bark of the tree and a scratched-out date in the top right corner. Only 199— was visible. I turned the sketch over and extracted it from the frame, finding the freshly-written words that I had expected, complete in the messenger’s sloping red handwriting.
We have been together from the beginning, you and me. We will be together again.
The bottom edge had been folded over in order to fit into the frame, and I flattened it out now, staring at the faded words that revealed themselves to me.
Hollow Ground Medical Centre, Washington Precinct, 1999. Forecasting experiment #12: Lela and—. The topmost layer had been scratched, obscuring the second name and leaving a patch of clean, white, cardboard-like surface—indicating that the defacement had happened recently.
I flipped the sketch again, examining the details of the two children: the too-big sweater worn by the girl, and the shaggy hair of the boy. The only detail that really stood out was the tumble of lazy curls that sprouted from the head of the girl, falling in disarray to her shoulders. They were shaded in darkly, and simply looking at them doused me with an unwelcome urge of familiarity. I brushed my fingers over the likeness, and a shudder immediately climbed down my spine—a jittery breeze hitting me from behind and stirring the strands of my ponytail over my shoulder.
“Look, Lela, I can see home! Over there! See?”
I jolted, realising that I had closed my eyes. I immediately shoved the sketch into my backpack, where it couldn’t influence me, but the feeling of premonition remained. I closed the window in my bedroom and retreated into the closet, slamming the door behind me and checking every square inch for hidden recording devices before I quickly tore my clothes off and pulled on a faded skirt; a long-sleeved, stretched-out sweater; and my chameleon sneakers. There was a strange solace to be found in things that had been worn thin with the simple need to exist, to survive. My worn clothes, my thin-soled sneakers… they rationalised my fear into practicality.
Once dressed, I skipped from the closet to the bathroom as though afraid of the stretch of space in-between, and then I brushed my teeth and washed my face, trying to scrub away the feeling of being watched.
I have to decide what to do.
Cabe and Noah had been drawn to me because of the bond, but I knew that our relationship was more than that. I knew, without having to investigate further, that the messenger had taken away the memories of our friendship as well as those of the bond—since the two would have been too closely enmeshed.
I would have to begin again from the start.
No… earlier than that.
I would have to begin again from the time before they knew me—a year prior to Noah almost running me over with his car. A year before they finally accepted that I was their Atmá.
I pulled out my phone, sending off a quick message to Poison, and then I grabbed my bag and headed for the dining room. I sat beside Silas, slipping him the messenger’s drawing beneath the table, and smiled politely to Abe, who was grumbling his way around the table as he set down dishes of fruit and baskets of bagels. I poured myself a coffee, observing Noah and Cabe chatting together, heads bent and voices lowered in a way that prompted me to think that I didn’t want to hear what they were discussing.
When Tabby and Clarin entered the room, I watched Clarin walk to the seat beside Cabe, and then I gave him a wide-eyed look and almost imperceptibly shook my head. He frowned, glancing at me, and then at Silas, before he switched directions and sat on my other side.
“What’s going on, mouse?” he whispered, dropping an arm over the back of my chair and leaning in to whisper in my ear.
Tell tale tit,
Your tongue shall be split.
My tongue thickened with indecision, curling to the roof of my mouth.
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Where was the messenger now? Was he listening, somehow? Watching? Suddenly, his many warnings reared again in my head, and I turned away from Clarin.
“Noah and Cabe are angry at me,” I whispered back, causing Silas to shoot me a sideways look. “Don’t bring up the bond around them right now, okay? It’ll only make things worse.”
Clarin looked over at Cabe and Noah, his brows arching high. “What?” he repeated dumbly. “I thought you guys would never fight.”
Silas rocked back in his chair and stood, pinching Clarin’s wrist between his thumb and forefinger and shoving it roughly away from the back of my chair. Clarin rolled his eyes, but I caught him rubbing at the aggravated skin beneath the table. Cabe and Noah continued to whisper, Clarin and Silas fell into silence, and I pushed a slice of strawberry around my plate until Tariq and Tabby entered the room. After that, the atmosphere lightened considerably. Tabby successfully drew Noah and Cabe from their whispered conversation, and I put more effort into pretending that everything was normal for Tariq’s sake. By the end of breakfast, however, Noah and Cabe were shooting me narrow-eyed glances, and I was sure that they had shared their individual stories from the night before.
I stood and met their stares, before striding out of the room, toward the garage. They might have forgotten the bond, but I hadn’t forgotten anything. I still knew them, and I knew that they would follow me. They couldn’t walk away from a challenge any less than they could walk away from a mystery. My behaviour the night before, combined with Silas and Quillan’s interrogation, must have them intrigued. r />
Sure enough, they were close on my heels as I passed through into the dark garage, and the reverberation of the door bouncing against its frame skittered an uneasy brand of anticipation down the length of my spine. I crept toward the closest car—Cabe’s Lexus—just to feel that I had something at my back, and then I turned to face them.
“Morning.” Noah lifted his brows in greeting, leaning back against the wall of the garage as though it were his job to supervise the encounter that they were orchestrating, despite the fact that I had led them there.
“Morning, babe.” Cabe’s tone was a mocking echo of his brother’s greeting. “Probably best if you get in the car.”
I cringed. “How will Tariq and Clarin get to school?”
“Miro can drive them.” Cabe’s voice lost its false cheeriness. “We won’t force you to do anything, but…” He moved forward suddenly, pulling open the door that I was leaning against.
The door pushed against my back, forcing me to roll to the side. Despite the fact that the space beside me had been empty a moment ago, I collided with something, and that something had the familiar scent of sweetly-spiced smoke. Noah stepped forward, forcing me to move with him, until the backs of my knees hit something, bringing us both to a halt. I could feel the open space behind me. It loomed, as though the backseat of the car was working in league with Noah, ready to swallow me up at his command. Cabe smiled his usual smile, the easy and charming twist of his lips causing a strange pang in my chest. He stepped forward until his shoulder was anchored against Noah’s.
“Umm,” I began. “If you guys want to talk, we can do it here.”
“No.” Noah shook his head. “Not with Silas around. He’s always been a good little boy for the Klovoda. You obviously ran crying to him last night, because he asked us a bunch of questions after you left Cabe’s room, and then he came back again in the morning with Miro. We don’t want him interfering right now. This has nothing to do with the mission, nothing to do with your little boyfriend, nothing to do with them. This is about you sneaking into our rooms last night. Now get into the car.”