Chapter 56
Jane
Jane woke up in a house that was vaguely familiar. It itched at her memory while she tried to sit up, her head spinning. The truth serum was followed by a sedative and she couldn’t recall what she’d told Cartimandua. The more she tried to remember, the more her head hurt.
“Get up.” Asher looked the same, snarling and growling and swaggering. But she could tell he was afraid. She could practically smell it on him. Strangely calm, she rose slowly. Waves of nausea roiled through her. She was wearing a ritual blue chiton and gold leaves in her hair. “We’re in the amphitheatre.”
“Congratulations, genius. Where else would we be?”
She ignored him, moving gingerly to look out of the window. The sun was too bright, too sharp. It gilded the sand on the ground, the glint of soldier’s weapons, the rows and rows of Elysians crowded together. The house trembled faintly with the force of the spectators cheering and stomping their feet. The other houses stood on identical platforms, decorated with green and gold, fluttering fabrics and leaves made out of wire and tiny solar lights. The Green Jack statues were draped with wreaths and garlands. Horses galloped passed, manes braided with green ribbons. “It’s already started,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
She realized then that Asher was wearing a ceremonial tunic in cream-coloured linen painstakingly embroidered with hundreds of oak leaves. They matched the gold leaves wound around her head like a crown. They dug into her scalp.
The solar lamps flashed red. Asher clenched his jaw. “We have to go downstairs. Now,” he insisted when the bulbs went red again. He was sweating. “We have to go out the front door and wave and smile and act like we’re in love.” Jane snorted. Asher snorted back. “Not my idea, Highgate. We were matched, despite Kiri’s trick with the hydrangea petals. She shouldn’t have messed with me. I was sick for days and yet here you are again, the date that wouldn’t die. I don’t know where you were,” he added, disgusted. “But you should have stayed lost.”
“I had no choice,” she said.
“You got caught,” he corrected, shoving her down the first few steps. “Figures. Can’t even run away properly.”
She stopped on the landing, turning to stare at him. Something in the way he’d said Kiri’s name sent a warning tingle across the back of her neck.
“You gave Kiri up to Cartimandua,” Jane realized. She’d never felt this kind of rage before, so cold her insides might shatter. For a moment she felt nothing, not the nausea or the pressure in her head or the chafing of her numen against electricity.
“I had to,” Asher replied. He didn’t sound sorry, but his hand clenched, and unclenched. There were fresh scars on his arms, pink and puckered with scabs. “I have friends to protect too.”
“I doubt that.”
She didn’t have time for his pain. And she’d lived with the Greencoats, her body remembered her training, however brief it had been.
She turned sideways at the last moment and his fist cracked into the wall instead of her face. Power surged flashing faintly blue. She smelled smoke and ozone and burning hair. Asher staggered backwards, the shock enough to stop him, if not knock him out completely. Jane hooked her foot around his ankle. His forehead cracked against the wall. She stepped over him dispassionately.
“Come on, Asher,” she said, descending into the glaringly bright foyer of the ground floor. Glass glittered all around them, clear as a vid screen. “Time to be famous, just like you’ve always wanted.”