Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Then I hear footsteps in the corridor. More than one pair, and none of the Guard among them. The treads are too loud and too firm.
The door opens. Adrian stalks in first, Matthew a reluctant step behind him. He doesn’t want to enter the room. But he does.
Adrian’s eyes burn with the coldest hate I’ve ever seen. He opens his mouth to speak and then closes it again. For a brief moment he looks uncertain. They expected to burst in here and find me in a panic, trying to break out of the window. Or to find me already gone. But I’m here and I’m just sitting in this chair, watching them. It makes them wary.
Matthew narrows his eyes. Adrian glances at him and back at me and his voice is icy. “Would you care to explain what the devil she’s doing, Matthew?”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning . . .” Adrian takes a threatening step in my direction. I can almost see his fingers itch to close around my throat. “She was waiting for us. Why would she do that?”
Before anyone can say anything more, there’s a clatter of footsteps down the hallway, and then a woman sweeps into the room. She’s not alone; Erik and Mina Ma are with her. I feel a rush of warmth at seeing them. Erik’s eyes widen and he makes a jerky move, as though to grab me and hug me and conceal me from Adrian, but he stops himself. Mina Ma seems furious. For a minute it looks like she is going to demand to know why I’m still here and expose the part she played in my escape.
“You’re Elsa,” I say to the other woman. “Elsa Connelly.” Her hair is still golden and her face is calm and unlined, but there’s a hint of steel in the line of her mouth. Her eyes reveal her to be older than she looks: they’re sad and weary.
I’ve dreamed of her, too. She stood in my dreams with sad eyes and asked me what my heart desired.
“Yes,” she replies, almost kindly, “and you are Eva. Is that correct?”
I nod.
“That is not her name,” snaps Adrian. A chill skitters down my spine as his eyes burn gold into me. He didn’t look at me with so much hate before. Now it couldn’t be clearer that he wants few things more than to kill me and be done with it.
“Eva,” says Erik, looking pained, “you understand that you will go to trial, don’t you?”
I start to reply, but Adrian cuts in. “I think we can dispense with the formalities and get it done here. Now. We have an array of charges to choose from. Any one of them is enough to allow us to be rid of her.” He gives a bitter laugh. “Taking her own name, running away, consorting with a guardian, causing the death of a guardian—”
“What?” I stand up and stare at him. “What are you talking about?”
Adrian takes a step closer. I brace myself, but he makes no move to touch me. “Are you telling me you’ve already forgotten about Ophelia? My daughter has been cold less than an hour and you’ve already forgotten what you did?”
“Cold?” I repeat stupidly. Horror grips me so tightly I can’t breathe. “Dead, you mean? But she’s not! She wasn’t hurt that badly, she was okay—”
I catch Mina Ma’s eye and the words die on my lips. She doesn’t even look guilty. And I know from the look on her face that Ophelia was hurt that badly. She was never going to heal. A pain builds in the back of my throat, a silent scream itching to come out. She smiled at me and she closed her eyes and she never opened them again.
For half a second I am so angry with Mina Ma I am almost sure I will never forgive her. But it’s gone as quickly as it comes, because I realize it’s no different from what I did to Sean. She lied so that I would run. She lied to save me. How can I hate her for that?
“Adrian, that was a tragic accident,” Elsa interjects. She looks terribly sorry for him, but she is firm. “Theseus told us what happened. This child is no more responsible for Ophelia’s choices than you are.”
His expression doesn’t change. He knows it would never have happened if I hadn’t threatened her with that knife. That’s all that matters to him.
My legs can hardly hold me. I felt so strong a minute ago, and now I want to crumple and fade away. I can’t make Ophelia and death fit together. A fresh spasm of pain rocks me. Am I going to hurt everyone I love in this desperate bid to survive?
I could step back and let them have their trial and end everything. The fight has almost all gone out of me. Almost. And then I remember the way Sean kissed me as he left. How alive I felt. And I think of Sasha in her little pajamas with her too-big yawns. And I glance at Matthew, who has been silent so far, and there is a hard, mocking, waiting look on his face that makes me straighten my spine once again.
“You made a promise once.”
My voice echoes into the dusty silence. Matthew’s eyes flicker. Adrian looks at me in disbelief. And then his eyes turn, hard and accusing, to Erik.
“He didn’t tell me anything.” I speak carefully so that I need only tell as few lies as possible. I rub my eyes, rub away the tears. “He didn’t say anything. I was there too. Remember?”
Adrian gives a sharp laugh. “This is outrageous. Matthew?”
“There is a teeny, tiny, infinitesimal possibility,” says Matthew, idly studying his fingernails, “that Eva may be correct.”
A terrible silence. When Adrian speaks, his tone is dangerous. “And what, precisely, did this promise involve?”
“Matthew swore to save Eva if she was ever in danger from the Loom,” says Erik.
Matthew clears his throat. “I seem to recall the promise was contingent on her proving herself worthy.”
“I am worthy.” I look him in the eye. “You want me to run? I’ve done that. Fight my way out? I’ve done that too. I’m here, aren’t I? You told me to find a way out of the noose and I did. I ran away. I would still be running if you hadn’t gotten lucky. Your seekers found us because they were told where to look.” I can’t make myself say Ophelia’s name. It hurts too much. I point to the window. “It wouldn’t have been hard to climb out of there and escape. You wouldn’t have found me here if I hadn’t chosen to wait. Amarra tried to take my life from me, and I cut out my tracker because I had no other choice. But now there’s another way. I’ve done everything in my power to save myself. Now I need you to honor your promise.”
My hands are shaking, but I knit them tightly together. In the silence all I can hear is the sound of my heart. It sounds so alive.
“You can’t be considering this,” says Adrian at last. His eyes are on Matthew. He sounds like winter. The icy winds that cut your skin like knives. “You can’t sidestep a trial and a Sleep Order because of a promise you once made behind our backs.”
“You would have done it,” says Matthew. “You sidestepped everything only hours ago, when you made her your offer. That was somewhat behind our backs too.”
Adrian’s lips become a hard, flat line. “My offer would have kept her under our watch. It would have kept her under control, which is something you have all failed abysmally to do.”
“That I can’t deny,” Matthew admits.
Adrian glances bitterly at him. “And I suppose you will insist on taking her side.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Adrian smiles faintly. Almost ruefully. “How did she cause so much trouble?”
“Good question.” Matthew studies my face. “She looks so small, so fragile. How did you turn the Loom upside down, Eva?”
“I just wanted my life back,” I answer.
“Oh?” Adrian’s eyes glitter. “And so you fought for it. Whatever the cost. Matthew, would you truly ask me to let her go now? My daughter is dead.”
“Do you imagine Eva will ever forget what winning her life back cost?” Erik demands. “Do you really not believe Ophelia’s life is a steep enough price to pay? You weren’t the only one who cared for your daughter. Eva did too.”
“Funny,” says Adrian, “she didn’t act like it. Threatened her with a steak knife, didn’t she? Or was that supposed to be a loving gesture?”
“Adrian—”
“That’s enough.” Adrian’s voice is quiet, but it echoes like thunder through the auditorium. It silences everybody. Only Matthew looks at ease. He even looks like he’s conferring a great honor on Adrian by deigning to remain quiet. “We will put her on trial and she will be punished.”
“You can’t ignore everything Eva has said,” Elsa cuts in. “You can’t just pretend Matthew never swore he would—”
“And yet you can see I am ignoring it rather successfully, Elsa. People sometimes keep their promises,” he acknowl-edges. “People like Erik, for example. For all your faults, Erik, you do have an irritatingly moral streak. But not Matthew. When has Matthew ever been honorable?”
“People always expect the worst of me.” Matthew sounds mournful. “But I will grant I am not exactly trustworthy, and alas, I have proven duplicitous in the past, so there is an outside chance I may have deserved that.”
Erik’s jaw tightens. “What you swore that day, in this room, that was different.”
“It makes no difference to me.” Adrian puts a hand out and seizes me by the back of my neck. “There is nothing stopping me from destroying her now. This very moment.” I try to wriggle free, but his fingers are steel biting into my skin. It feels like he could rip me apart with just that one hand. His eyes are not on me. They’re on Matthew. Waiting. “Well? Will you stop me?”
Matthew seems particularly interested in his fingernails today. “Go on, then.”
“No!” Mina Ma shouts.
I struggle wildly, but the grip on my neck only tightens. Erik takes a step forward, and Matthew puts up a hand to stop him. Rage radiates off Mina Ma like ocean waves during a storm.
“He won’t do it.” Matthew smiles at Adrian. “You would no more stick a knife into me than I would into you.”
Does that mean he still cares about me? Otherwise I have no idea how destroying me could correlate in any way to Adrian sticking a knife into Matthew. It seems to make sense to Adrian, because he lets me go. I look between him and Matthew, and for some reason I think of an elastic band tying them together: a band made up of friendship and loyalty and secrets and the dark obsessions of the Loom. When they make conflicting choices the band is stretched and pulled, but it is elastic, so it doesn’t break. Instead, the two ends snap together again. And I understand that I’m a force pulling at one end and no matter how far I pull, the ends will always snap back together. No matter what Matthew chooses to do about his promise, he will always be on Adrian’s side. There is not much left of the man who sang lullabies in a pale green nursery.
But there might be just enough.
“We could go to trial and satisfy your thirst for blood, Adrian,” says Matthew. “But it would be such a waste of time, and I am due to have tea with a very important person in the morning. Let the girl go. Revoke the Sleep Order. We can’t have her running around, doing what she likes, so send her back to her familiars. I think you’ll find they are willing to keep her.” Suddenly he looks tired and bitter. “I’m done talking about this.”
“I agree,” says Elsa. There’s a funny look in her eye, like she’s watching the world she knows collapse and that pleases her. “If we did go to trial, Adrian, you would be outvoted.”
I don’t dare feel relieved. Not yet. Winning my life back, having it in my own two hands again, it doesn’t seem real yet.
Adrian doesn’t speak for a long time. His silence is far more chilling than any open rage. Then he smiles and I shiver. Beneath the smile is fury, and grief, and hate. He will never forget how Ophelia died. He will never forget that he wanted to punish me and I got away.
“I see I am outvoted,” he says, “this time. Very well. You may leave.” He goes to the door and stops beside it. “I have no doubt you will return. You don’t seem to be very good at obeying my laws. I will be here when you come back. And somehow I don’t think there will be many promises to rely on when you do.”
No one says anything for a long, long time.
“Erik, could you be so kind as to put her on a flight back to Bangalore at the end of the week?” Matthew asks, breaking the spell. “And do keep an eye on her until then.”
He glances at me and there is a brief, bitter, faraway look in his eyes. Then he turns around and walks away.
Adrian pauses before following. He shakes his head. “It need never have come to this. If you had done as you agreed to and stayed to help me with my work, none of this would have happened.” Ophelia. Unspoken but there, hanging above us like an ax. She would still be alive if I had only made a different choice.
“I couldn’t have stayed,” I say. “I will never stop being sorry about Ophelia, but I couldn’t have helped you. Not like that. I won’t be your monster.”
“You’ve always been our monster,” says Adrian. “Don’t ever forget that.”
I watch him go. Elsa is the last to leave, and she sweeps away, with a cool, calm dignity I envy, after giving me a long and searching look. I don’t know what she’s looking for.
When they’re gone, my knees give way. I sit down on the floor, on the ragged, dusty rug, and swallow a hard, dry lump in my throat. Mina Ma holds me tight and I feel her love and her relief, every bit as tangible as her arms.
“Thank you,” I say. She hears me and so does Erik, but he doesn’t turn around right away. He is staring at the open doorway.
Mina Ma frowns up at him. “Erik?”
“The Loom is coming undone at the edges,” he says, turning back to us. “Adrian and Matthew have both shown that they will bend their laws for their own ends. Adrian can no longer see beyond his obsessions, and with Ophelia gone”—his voice cracks—“that will only grow worse. For so long it has been iron and steel, and now the edges are fraying and the Loom is beginning to unravel. If it is hit in the right place, it may even fall.”
“Does that frighten you?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. I know I was frightened for you until a moment ago.” He crouches on the rug, looking me in the eye, and he gives me one of his faint twinkly-eyed smiles. “Don’t look so sad. Most echoes only leave the Loom once. When they are first stitched. Few leave it twice. That is something. Today you won.”
Everything has changed. I have changed. I have to keep changing. Growing up. Learning to be careful while the Loom watches me closer than ever, while Adrian waits for me to slip. But that, there, that hasn’t changed. When I was little, the Weavers were the dark, frightening monsters under my bed. They still are. Watching. Waiting.
I won. And I have paid dearly for it. I have earned Adrian’s hatred. We’ve unmasked the Loom for what it is: whims and obsessions and cruelty and all of it, unraveling. I sent Sean away and he will never forgive me for that. And then there is Ophelia. I will never be able to forget that. Things will not just magically go on the way they did before I began fighting for my life. Before Bangalore and before Amarra and the Sleep Order and before the Loom.
I wonder if the police will investigate Ophelia’s death or if they will turn a blind eye, unwilling to come too close to the Loom and to the strange, eerie games it plays with life and death. I wonder if Adrian will let me go to her funeral. Not that that matters. To me, Ophelia can’t be a body in a coffin in the earth. She’s laughing and smoking cigarettes in the garden of a cottage by a lake, sniffling over birthday cakes and frantically searching a dictionary for the meaning of a big word. The cottage by the lake is now over the hill and far away, and Jonathan and Ophelia and the other little ducks are there, and if I dream hard enough maybe, like the song, I will go after them and find them and one day all the little ducks will come back.
12
Last
My flight is in the morning. I watch the sun reflecting rainbow colors on the windowpane of our hotel room. I don’t know what I will do when I go back to Bangalore. I will give Sasha a big cuddle and hug Nik and Lekha and wait to see what happens after that. Ray led the hunters straight to me, but we will be at school together and I can’t avoid him forever. When I think about him,
everything becomes murky and confused. Sooner or later we will have to talk to each other. I will have to confront the hard and complicated tangle of Amarra and him and me.
The truth is, there is only so much space given to a single life. And I think I will always have to fight Amarra for our shared space. She will always be the ghost in the mirror. I have defeated her, but I won’t be rid of her. Tomorrow I will go back to that life we share. My guardians and I will separate for good. I haven’t seen Sean since I made him leave me, and I don’t even know if he’s safe. Erik promised to find out, though we both know I will probably never see him again anyway.
I get up. Mina Ma has gone to one of the shops nearby to get us some dinner. I leave her a note, check that my hair is concealing my Mark, and go out.
It’s funny walking down a street in London without looking over my shoulder. I take the tube to Oxford Street, where I still have about half an hour before the shops close. I buy presents for Lekha and the kids and an ice cream off the street because I’ve barely eaten all day. Later, when I get back on the tube, a dark-haired, green-eyed boy glances my way and smiles, and I have to look down at the floor because the longing in my chest is so intense it’s unbearable.
“Go away,” I silently tell the ghosts, swatting at them like flies. It doesn’t bother them. They follow me anyway. Reflections in the dark glass of the tube. Fragments of memories whispered in my ear. He won’t leave me alone.
I look at the dainty, delicate bracelet on my wrist. It’s knotted with shells off the beach, rough and small and flawless. He gave it to me. I look at it as though looking long enough might conjure him out of memory and into reality. If I could ask for anything, anything at all, it would be to see him again one last time.
But I fought for my life and I won. Perhaps that means I can win anything. Perhaps I can find a way back someday. Back to him.
Instead of going straight to the hotel, I get off at Covent Garden. I glance around. I know I’m in the right part of the city, but I’m not sure which way to go.