“I saved him,” I said. “Not you. And I’ll save Ethan.”
“Lucie,” Aunt Leila said, obviously trying to be patient, “I don’t understand the way you are acting. I spent so long planning for us to be reunited. I rallied the sans-merci to bring you back to me. I told them what had been done to you and to my sister, and they rose up to reunite us. I thought of you every day of the two years of your exile. And now . . .”
“And did you think that nothing would happen to me in two years? Did you think this is what you were going to do to me, once you got me back?”
Aunt Leila looked annoyed, as frustrated as a parent with a child who could not understand their homework. Her determination did not even waver. She did not take me seriously at all.
“We are finally together again. The city is ours, and justice is being done. Can’t you be good?”
She walked over to where I was sitting and gently stroked my hair back from my face, and I knew then what I had not known when we were separated by exile and time: that she was lost.
She acted like I was a little girl who would accept Carwyn instead of Ethan as if they were dolls. Neither of them was real to her. Even I was hardly real to her. Maybe the child she had loved was real, but that was not me. Not any longer.
I whispered to her, “You should know me better than that.”
Outside, I could still hear the murmuring of a crowd, like the turbulent air before the violence of a storm.
“And you should know me better than to think you could save him. You should remember better. Tell the wind and fire where to stop,” said Aunt Leila. “But do not tell me.”
She should have remembered that my grandmother was the first to say those words, when people said she could not save the man she loved.
She should have remembered that she had taught me to be unstoppable too.
When she let me leave the hotel, she thought I was going back to Penelope’s apartment, but I did not. The subway was running again, and I took it downtown. I followed the path to the Dark city, to the ruined wall, along the single remaining bridge. I went back to be buried again, back home.
The Dark city was not as different from the Light city as I had recalled. It did not bring back memories of standing with Dad in the cemetery, of crawling home every night too spent even to weep. It felt familiar in a different way. There were streets I knew, and a skyline I had seen from my bedroom every night. There had been more to my life here than the end.
I felt different, though. There was so much to be worried about, but I wasn’t worried. I had a single focus and I was heading toward it.
My aunt and I had walked past the clock tower many times when I was a child. She used to tell me how the windows of the tall gray building had once looked out on another bridge across the river, before the city was torn into Light and Dark and all but one bridge ripped down. We would walk along the wall and listen to the river sighing behind it, and my small, cold hand had felt safe in hers.
The building looked pale and stark by day, but the clocks at the top of the tower were the same as they had been during our evening walks: one of the few mechanisms in the Dark city operated by Light magic, the first tower built when Light magic came. The hands on the clocks had burned gold with magic, cutting the night up into shimmering seconds.
There was a guard at the door, wearing a band of black and scarlet on each arm.
This had been the stronghold of the Light Council’s men in the Dark city, and now the Dark had reclaimed it.
I stood on the dirty corner of the street and remembered what my aunt used to warn me about. She’d said that if you lingered on the corner too long, the Light guards at the top of the tower could see you.
Where else would they keep their prized prisoner, the one they wanted to show off as an example, but at the highest, most conspicuous point of their new fortress?
The guard at the door was young, I thought. The rebels at the hotel and around the cages in Times Square had been older, but of course they sent their most experienced and embittered to do murder. This was a prisoner being kept for display, to show the power of the sans-merci. Nobody in the Light or the Dark city would want to help a Stryker. The sans-merci did not think anybody was coming for Ethan.
I stood on the street corner and stared up at the glass face of a clock, at the lucent hands making their inexorable progress around it. Somewhere behind the gray stone and golden light was Ethan. I squinted until my eyes stung, looking up at the top of the tower, and from high above I thought I saw a pale face looking down.
I wanted so much to believe that he could see me, that he would see a fair head and know that it was me, that I understood everything now, that I had more faith in him than I ever had before and I loved him as much as I ever had. I stood there with my fists clenched and my eyes straining to see the impossible, and I tried to believe.
I had lied and pretended and hated myself for doing it all, thinking it would buy me and the ones I loved safety. I had been a fool.
There were people on the street, and they shot me looks as they walked by. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking that they recognized me, but then I slowly registered the hot slide of tears on my face, the way my eyes and my chest were aching.
They were looking at me because I was making a scene.
I didn’t even care. At least, at last, I was making a scene for myself and no one else. I did not care if they saw, and I did not care what they thought.
I was not going to be strong for anyone any longer.
Not even for Ethan. I had tried too hard to be strong for him when he had asked me to be honest with him instead, when he had offered to be honest with me. I called up that moment again in my mind, how unhappy I had been and he had been, how afraid I had been of incriminating myself and damaging what was between us, when I could have told him all the truth and had him tell me all the truth. I knew everything now, and I thought I could love him better with truth between us.
Whatever dark deeds had been done and dark secrets had been kept when we were children, whatever darkness ran in my blood or his, seemed distant compared with the memory of how he had listened to whatever I let fall, had offered to help me with no thought of return, and all the time had been doing what he thought was right for himself and for our two cities, as well as for me.
Aunt Leila thought that with my mother’s name spoken and her death avenged, justice would be done. But this was not justice, what was being done to Ethan, any more than what had been done to me was.
I could not stop crying at the thought that he might be seeing me right now and I could not see him, that he might never know I was there at all. Both thoughts seemed unbearable, and I would not bear them, would not bear any of this, for a moment longer.
He had known me and loved me and chosen me, out of all others, and I had been so scared he would change his mind that I had not told him I chose and knew him back. I’d learned my lesson. I’d learned to know Ethan better while he was gone than I had ever allowed myself to know him before. I’d had what few people could ever have—the chance to experience how life would be with someone else in the place of the one I loved, someone who came with all the same luxuries, offered the same place in the world, even wore the same face. Carwyn had never been kind like Ethan, never touched me like Ethan had—gently, considerately, and with willingness to let me go if that was what I wanted. That was why I never wanted anyone else but Ethan to touch me, and for him never to stop.
I had thought we would have so much longer together. I had thought that if I behaved a certain way, I could coax a guarantee from the world.
But there were no guarantees, and I might never see Ethan again—his drowning-deep dark eyes, the lines of his face that bore a resemblance to every one of his family and only ended up marking how very different he was from them all, the way his locks curled lightly against his collar as though even his very hair wished to touch the world kindly. That I had seen Carwyn every day for weeks made it hurt more,
like seeing a house that reminded me of home and left me feeling more homesick and far away from any comfort.
I put my hand to my face to muffle the sobs, but I let the messy choking sounds come. I let my tears fall until my face felt like a stiff mask, twisted with grief. The patina of dried tears made me feel as if I could not change expression or my face would crack. My eyes were so puffy, I could barely see. And I found a strange glory in my stupid, useless, wildly unrestrained misery. I did not have to be restrained anymore. I cried and cried, cried for my mother, for the loss of her and how I had denied it, for all my love and all my guilt, for my father and the child I used to be, and for Ethan. I even cried for my aunt and for Jim and Charles and Mark Stryker. I cried for everyone I had not been able to save, and cried as I had never allowed myself to cry.
Ethan had only ever wanted to love me. He had never asked me to be strong all the time.
I stared up at the pale glimmer that might be his face, high up in the tower window. I concentrated on directing my thoughts to him, on lifting my whole soul up to him, as if I could pluck it like a bird from a cage and send it flying to his hands.
A group of people had gathered, I realized. Others were still walking by, sliding glances of mingled discomfort and fascination at me, as if I were a traffic accident. But the group watching me was quiet. I had broken down in an ugly mess, no artifice and no dignity left, and people I did not know were still watching me with sympathy. Not everyone had turned away. Not every heart had to be won by trickery.
“Are you all right?” a stranger asked me.
It was such a relief to say, “No.”
I stood there until I realized I would have to return to my father. I stepped up to the blank gray face of the tower, rested my hot cheek for a moment against cool stone, and kissed the wall.
I turned and began to walk down the street, away from the glowing clock and into the deepening evening. As I did, someone fell into step with me, and I saw without much surprise that it was Carwyn. I was too limp and wrung out to feel much of anything. I supposed he had followed me there and watched it all.
He was not collared and hooded yet. His dark head was still bare, and his well-known face was exposed to public view. The evening was storing up shadows, piling up the layers of darkness in the sky. It was hard to make out anyone’s features unless you were really looking, and nobody was looking for Ethan. They knew where he was.
“Did you fake the crying for effect?” Carwyn asked. His voice was neutral, and that, rather than any show of praise or horror, was what made me answer.
“It was real,” I said slowly. “And it was for effect.”
Carwyn only looked accepting. I thought that might have been why I had been drawn to him at the start: that he was from the Dark city, and I’d thought he might be more like me than Ethan or Nadiya or any of the innocent people I knew. More than that, because he was a doppelganger, he surely would not judge me even if he knew all I had done.
In the end, though, I didn’t need him to approve of me or understand me. I was done feeling bad about the choices I had made to survive.
“So here you are back in the Dark city,” I said.
Carwyn inclined his head. “Here we are, back in the Dark city. You going home to your dad?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“I doubt they want a doppelganger under their roof.”
“I’m sure they would let you stay. I’m sure I could persuade them, if they had a problem with it.”
He looked down at me sharply, as if I had said something remarkable. Then he lifted a hand and touched it to my face. It was a brief brush of his skin on mine; I did not even have time to startle back before he drew his hand away, his fingertips wet with my tears. I saw then that he was looking at me with both affection and concern, with tenderness I had never dreamed I’d see him show. I remembered, with something like a shock, that he thought he loved me.
“You’ve done enough,” Carwyn said. “Now there’s something I have to do. Good luck with your part, Lucie.”
There was an expression on his face I did not understand. “Good luck with whatever you’re trying to do.”
“Thank you,” said Carwyn, still with that strange look about him. “I hope I succeed.”
I reached out and touched his hand before we parted. All my enemies were transforming into something else, it seemed, passing beyond reach of hate. There were no people left to be fought: there were only people left I had to fight for.
I went back to the clock tower every day and stood there all day. Every day a larger and larger crowd came to look at me weep.
Every day, people took pictures of me. Every day, the same old newspapers under the new regime discussed whether the Golden Thread in the Dark was grateful enough for being liberated, whether I was a weak traitor to the cause, whether Ethan Stryker was different from the other Strykers, whether he had truly worked with the sans-merci and whether that mattered. There was no consensus on me. I didn’t want one. I hadn’t counted on a sympathetic response. I just wanted everyone talking about me. I wanted everyone watching.
I watched them in their turn: I memorized the number of guards, the length of their shifts, when they came to the tower and when they went away, how each of them acted around me.
On the last day of Ethan’s imprisonment, his day of execution, I went to my hiding place in the wall. I slid out the brick, and among the gray ashes I saw the pure, true light of my mother’s diamond. I drew out the necklace, and the sunshine caught the jewel. Sparks were tossed in the air, like confetti made of dancing points of light. The room was suddenly bright, and as I held the diamond, light lanced through its sparkling facets, rose and gold like a fire waking between my palms. I hung the chain around my neck.
When I left the apartment, I took my sword with me.
Chapter Twenty-One
IT HAD BEEN A LONG, BAD TIME, BUT I HAD SLEPT every night when I went home and not lain awake worrying about what I was doing or what I had become. The sans-merci had called in every one of us—me, Dad, Penelope, Jarvis, even little Marie—for questioning at the hotel, more than once, but they had let every one of us go. Sometimes, though, Penelope or Jarvis came back bleeding.
Marie woke up screaming every night, knowing the monsters were coming, and we could not tell her they were not.
They had not let Ethan go. They never would. And more and more victims for the cages were being brought in a grotesque parade through the shining streets of the Light city every day: the rich, those from the Light Council’s families, prominent Light magicians and public figures, but also people the sans-merci disliked and who could conveniently be accused of collaborating with the Light. A lot of people were being killed. Nobody seemed to have any more to eat in this just new world.
I wore a long, dark coat to hide the sword as I made my way from the Light city to the Dark. The coat’s severe lines and metal buttons made me look like a soldier, and my long, loose, fair hair made me look like a fairy-tale damsel. If people found that incongruous, if they did not know what to make of me, I had not known what to make of myself for a long time either. They could learn.
I was wearing my mother’s necklace outside my coat. It was the first time I had ever seen the jewel in the open light of day.
It was morning, and the air was crisp and golden as a fresh apple. The clock tower was a stark line bisecting the lucent sky: a tower with a hero in it, and perhaps I could be like Ethan now that I finally understood him. Perhaps I could be a hero too. Perhaps I could save him—save someone my way, and no one else’s. I felt as clean and purposeful as the blade I drew as I walked toward the door and the guard standing by it.
He was thin and tall, and his hair stood up in clumps. I had noticed him before, the worried one who would be easy to intimidate. He always took the morning shifts, when there were fewer people.
But quite a few people were already here. They came to watch me.
They could wat
ch this.
“Out of my way,” I said, and brought my sword around in a slow, gleaming arc. “Get help. You’re going to need it.”
He stood there for a moment as if he had been slapped, took a step toward me, and watched the crowd surge restlessly in his direction.
He took a step back. He obviously did not want to be responsible for killing the symbol of the sans-merci. He called out, and three guards from inside the tower came streaming out the door to his side, just as I had hoped. I moved in front of the door so they could not get inside the tower again.
“I am Lucie Manette,” I said. “I am the Golden Thread in the Dark. I am the only child of a murdered mother, and I will not let anyone be taken from me again. I am going to stand at this door with a sword all day, and I will fight anyone who tries to take Ethan Stryker away to the cages. That means you can do one of two things. Go convene the Committee of the Free and bring him a pardon, or come and kill me.”
The guards called in reinforcements. With every extra soldier, the mob increased by ten or twenty people. One of the sans-merci drew a weapon, and then glanced toward a light—not the light of my rings or my sword, but the light of someone’s camera.
Everyone in the crowd knew that a picture or a video of me being murdered by someone wearing the colors of the city’s liberators would be seen by every soul in both cities within a day.
I lit my sword with fire and struck down the guard’s weapon, and nobody else drew one. I let myself breathe.
I looked up at the tower, at the shining glass and gold. I wondered if Ethan could see me. I had never hoped more that he could.
The mob grew and grew, greedy for a spectacle. I knew how easy it would be for the mob or the rebels to get out of hand, for someone to decide that eliminating me would solve more problems than it caused. I knew that I did not have long before Aunt Leila came.