“Hello,” the giant image of me says. It is the product of a talented hair and makeup artist who labored for two hours. But on the cavern wall like that, she is fiercely striking, delivering a message with all the charisma of the Utod.
“My name is Audra Ellison. I am the daughter of Amerie Szabo.”
Subtitles appear beneath my face in three different languages.
A murmur ripples through the assembled crowd. Exclamations erupt from farther away. An insult, hurled at my projected face.
“You have heard of my mother, who is gone. And you have heard, quite possibly, of me. But not all that you heard is true. I am no traitor. I am no savior.
“Like many of you, I am an orphan. I am also Firstborn. And so are you. Firstborn to someone. Loved, even if you don’t know it. And wanted. By the parents who were lucky enough to raise you. By the parents heartbroken to have given you up.”
A cry issues from somewhere near me. A broken sob, farther down.
“I recently discovered a cache of damning information about the Historian’s most powerful Scions that we are in the process of leaking to the world. Good news to those of us who want to live free.
“The work we are doing today to take down the strongest pillars of the Historian’s citadel has just begun and may take years. The convictions—if they take place at all—may take decades. The hunters assigned to you are zealots committed to their cause. But the killing can end. It will end. And it does end, with you.”
A brief smattering of cheers. The rest are struggling to understand, or to keep up with the translations.
“With luck and God’s grace, this will be the last generation of Progeny hunters to ever walk the earth.”
A woman beside us bursts out weeping.
“There are those of us who have devoted ourselves to finding and ending the Historian. Her days are numbered.”
A ripple of shocked shouts from the crowd.
“Soon, she will have no money to support or reward her hunters. No incentive for her hate. No means to hunt!”
A rising roar, deafening our ears.
“Until then, we give you the best tool we have: information. These are the names and faces of the hunters assigned to those Utod known to the Historian. Perhaps you, like me, will recognize your hunter’s face. Have even made his or her acquaintance. Guard yourself. Protect yourself. Save yourself.
“I wish you life. I pray for us mercy and the hope of tomorrow.”
Silence, as the screen morphs to the first face. A man in his twenties who might be any kid in grad school or working the mail room of a Fortune 500 company, his name listed across the bottom of the screen. A woman, also in her twenties, who could be a collegiate athlete. A kid who looks like he’s in the military.
I glance at Rolan as the faces continue to flash across the wall. Ten of them. Thirty. Seventy. The montage goes on and on. Cries erupt at some of them. Murmurs at others. A scream at one.
This time, no one notices Countess Bathory as she makes her way to the far edge of the giant cavern.
No one, that is, except for Nikola.
33
* * *
I know him the moment I see him, even robed and masked.
His costume has not changed.
The same black robe of death. The same white, expressionless mask as before. Incognito to anyone expecting a prince clad in more finery than the devoted have worn here tonight.
He waits until the video has ended. Anticipates—expertly—the cries and applause and cheers that go on and on. I wonder if he saw the deference shown me earlier, though no one else could have known that I’m her.
But he knows.
I made sure of that.
The lights come on, full force. Blaring and too bright and unforgiving at once, as Nikola takes a small stage near the front.
And then he takes a page from my own playbook.
He tears off his mask.
The place goes frantic, and then wild.
He holds out his hands to quiet the mob.
“Progeny. Utod,” he says. He’s miked, and his voice booms through the massive sound system. “I know you are confused. I called the daughter of Amerie Szabo a traitor. I said the rumors of her being Firstborn were untrue. Let me explain.”
He pauses to translate into Hungarian, then continues.
“What you have not known—what I could not share—is that Audra has been working for me. For us. For life! And she has delivered,” Nikola says. “It’s true. We are behind the leaks hitting the news, even now, tonight!”
He’s taking credit for Jester’s work?
But I’ve left him no other card.
I glance around, wonder where she is. Fight back a surge of fear. If Nikola’s out here after she managed to get the presentation to play from his control center, what’s happened to her? To Claudia? To Piotrek?
Nikola continues:
“To this end, the Historian had to believe Audra Ellison was a traitor. So I condemned her—loudly—as a Progeny consumed with her own desire for power at any cost. What the Historian did not know is that Progeny do not betray their own!” he shouts. “One mother! One blood!”
The refrain echoes from the back and ripples toward the front.
One mother! One blood!
Nikola raises his hands for quiet.
“We have worked for the freedom of generations to come. Justice will not be swift. But the end to our persecution is in sight. We will decide our future. Not the Historian. Not the Scions. Not the hunters. And one day soon . . . we will be free.”
The cheers become a rolling roar.
By now I’m actively pressing my way through the crowd. Have to nudge my way past those caught up in the frenzy. After the video and the revelation of the hunters, Nikola’s appearance and rousing speech have galvanized them more than any frenetic rave.
Several people turn and take notice of me. Turn to hail—not me, but the giant gold dragon snaking down my shoulder. Reach to touch it. To take my hand.
I slip through them like water, do not stop on my way to Nikola’s dais. I want to kill him with a murderous outrage I have never felt before—for pretending to help those he’d gladly sacrifice. For manipulating those he should protect.
His head turns, gaze fixed squarely on me. I have forced him into this spot, this new alliance, and he is angry. But every reservation I felt returning to this place has long melted away. He doesn’t dare move against me in front of what is no doubt the largest gathering of Progeny in history.
But also because I’ve offered him a better public ally than the one rapidly losing key resources and hiding in her rat hole at this very moment. And he knows it.
Twenty feet from the stage, a loud murmur begins and passes through the cavern. The crowd parts before me. Nikola hesitates onstage.
I pull off my mask, drop it behind me.
“It’s her,” someone whispers, and then shouts: “It’s her!”
An excited murmur ripples through the crowd as masks swivel, blank-faced, toward me. My name rises up like a startled flock of birds.
Nikola’s voice returns at last. “On this night of remembrance and new beginnings . . .” He extends a long arm. “I give you our own Audra Ellison!”
An aisle opens to the stage as cheers explode through the cavern, deafening me.
And then something stops me momentarily in my tracks. Ahead of me, a gilded Greek goddess slowly removes her mask.
Beside her, a maharaja does the same—revealing himself as a towheaded blond. Farther on, a young woman as dusky-skinned as Jester, and a man with distinctly Eurasian features.
The boy can’t be more than twenty. The girl ahead of me, no more than eighteen. She should be finishing her senior year somewhere, dressing up for prom—not for this.
The girl grabs my hand as I pass. Lets it go reluctantly as I reach the stage. Nikola pulls me up beside him.
I turn to look out at the Progeny gathered around us, as one by one they remove thei
r masks. My gaze falls on a girl standing near the front. A waif dressed as a white swan, a delicate tiara on her head.
She can’t be more than sixteen. The age Claudia was when Katia found her digging through trash cans for food.
It isn’t Claudia that she reminds me of, though, with her huge eyes and sparrow’s bones for wrists. Not Claudia . . . but Ana, who died just two weeks ago.
Suddenly I’m not sure I can do what I have to next.
34
* * *
Nikola grabs my hand. I try to twitch away, but his grip is too strong. Crushing my fingers in his, he raises my arm into the air.
“Behold the newest royalty of the Progeny nation. The new Prince—Princess—of Zagreb!” he shouts triumphantly as his eyes bore into me like drills.
He reaches up with his other hand, taps off his mike. The next instant, the overhead lights black out, plunging the dais into darkness. The music thunders back to life.
Nikola hauls me from the stage straight toward the back wall—which turns out to be not a wall but a panel of cleverly painted fabric obscuring a tunnel.
“The others are looking for me,” I shout as he drags me after him. The passageway is lined with a simple row of industrial lanterns set in brackets, electrical wires hanging between them.
And no fewer than six guards.
“I’m sure they are,” he growls.
“They’ll notice if I don’t return. As will the entire Progeny nation out there.”
“Oh, you will return,” he says dangerously. “You will return, you will thank your new subjects that I have so generously given you, and you will also thank me.” He turns down an unlit side passage, yanks open a heavy wooden door, shoves me ahead of him, and slams the door shut behind us. Once inside, he throws away my hand as though it were a piece of garbage.
We’re in a surveillance room. Screens line the expansive back wall, most of their cameras trained on the cavern, where the strobe is setting off a new series of epileptic fits throughout the court. Gone, the frozen masks, replaced by flesh-and-blood faces upturned in frenzied rapture. Two screens monitor tonight’s entrance, which is attended by at least four guards that I can see. Three more flicker among varied tunnels and grottoes, including the colonnaded passage to the room where I met the Historian and the house on Csónak Street—or at least that’s what I’m guessing it to be by the dark smear across its lens.
Music blares from a set of speakers, broadcast from the cavern system itself.
Nikola storms away from me, hands going to his head, looking for all the world like he might bash it into the stone wall. A moment later, he grabs one of several remotes from the table in front of the monitors and turns the volume down.
“Do you know . . . what you have done?” he says quietly.
“Yes. I’ve told the truth.”
“You have put a price on my head now as surely as it is on yours. But not just mine . . .” He gestures to the bank of screens. “On all of theirs as well!”
“There was always a price on their heads, Nikola!” I say. “Or have you forgotten what it means to be hunted?”
“This was the one safe place left to us. You have cost all of us our only sanctuary!”
“You call this hole safe?” I shout. “When the Historian herself has been in these tunnels?”
“We had an alliance,” he says, closing his eyes, as though I were too stupid to begin to understand.
“I noticed—when you handed me over to her!”
“A small price, the life of one for many. Would you not sacrifice yourself for the welfare of your kind? Does it matter who makes the choice for you, if the result is the same?”
“How is delivering more power to the Historian a sacrifice for many?”
He turns away to sit on the edge of the desk in front of the monitors.
“The way you are with them . . .” he says faintly. “The way you stand out from them. You have no idea the power you hold over them, do you?” His voice hardens. “I wanted to kill you less than an hour ago.”
“You’ve always wanted to kill me.”
“That’s not true.” He shakes his head. “It is the furthest thing from the truth. I have wanted many things for you. Things you have not always seen fit to envision for yourself. But—” He waves his hand. “You have no memory of that anymore. You see me as some villain, having no context of our history. Yours and mine. We were allies, once. And now, we will be again.”
“I lost my memory, Nikola. Not my mind.”
“You owe your life to the swift speech of your friends. You realize that, don’t you? Your friend Jester got caught in our media room. I nearly shot her,” he says lightly.
I go very still as a chill pours down my spine—cold, and then hot.
“Until she explained that you had come to bring a very valuable service. To me, she claimed, in an effort to save your life.”
“What have you done with Jester?” I demand.
“I have detained her. But I am not unreasonable. And I have seen merit in what she said, for us both.”
Urgency rises up in me like panic. Unlike everyone else out in the cavern, I have burned none of the frenetic energy about to explode through my pores, fear and shock having done little to remove its raw edges.
“Nikola . . .” I say as evenly as I can. “She has nothing to do with this. It was me. I need to find the Historian.”
“Truly, Audra, you are such a confused girl. Railing against me one minute for having brought you to the Historian before. And now you want to find her?”
“Yes.”
“She’ll kill you.”
“That’s not your problem.”
“But I’m afraid that it is.”
“Please, Nikola. Let Jester go and tell me how to find the Historian.”
I don’t want to beg. I meant to come in every position of strength that I could. But I am—begging.
He looks disgusted. “Just like your mother, throwing your life away.”
“She didn’t throw her life away. You took it!”
“Do you really think anyone who loved Amerie could have killed her? No matter how much she might have deserved it—how much it might have needed to be done?”
I stare at him. “If you didn’t, then who did?”
“She marched to her own destruction. As you are doing now.”
“What’s it to you? If I die, I become a martyr. And the Historian gets what she wants. Either way, you win.”
He glances down with a small smile. “You know, there was a time that I aspired to be a martyr. To live on in the minds of our kind after my inevitable, and no doubt early, death.” He looks at me. “And then I realized I’d rather not die at all. That I’d rather live, even without my gifts, and find another way to power when they were gone.
“Besides, there is one problem with martyrs among the Utod: They take down a portion of the population with them. You, however, without your memory of before . . . you would condemn only those you know and love most. You truly want to find the Historian even though you will die and lose all that you worked to find?”
“Yes,” I say softly.
His hand lashes out, slaps me hard enough to spin me into the wall.
“Do not lie to my face!”
I stagger, clutch at a chair.
“Don’t you see? Everything’s changed! You want to kill her! You think, in your arrogance, that you can? Well, if that is how you choose to die, who am I to stop you? This is how you find the Historian: You go out there.” He points in the direction of the cavern. “You thank me for the princedom I have bestowed on you, and then publicly relocate your court to Budapest and my protection. Do that, and I will tell you how to find the Historian.”
Can I do that? Pretend this underground court is safe for just one day in the name of finding my daughter?
I close my eyes, summon the image of Eva. But it is replaced by the swan girl standing in the crowd.
How did she keep from getting trampl
ed all this time? This court, these rough-hewn caverns, are no place for a girl that age. She should be in a mall with her friends, trying on lipstick. In the freshman hallway, laughing by her locker. Skateboarding down the sidewalk.
Just like Ana should have been.
But Ana, too, found her way here after slipping away from the rest of us in Graz. To bargain with Nikola after Nino was taken.
And Nikola killed her.
It’s my job to protect Eva. But does that girl—any girl or boy out there—deserve to live any less?
“I can’t do that,” I whisper.
“You can. You will, if you want to save your friend.”
Nikola comes toward me, and I flinch away, but this time his hands are gentle as he wraps an arm around my shoulder. I stumble and clutch at the front of his robe.
“Poor, lost thing,” he sighs, holding me against him. “If you had only come to me, this could have been different. But you force my hand instead.”
“No court is safe anymore,” I say. “Not even yours. Especially yours. The Historian knows these tunnels—could walk in with her hunters, kill everyone, at any moment! You have to send these people away.”
He drops his arm, stares at me as though I’m insane.
“It has been safe because I’ve given her access. Because she knows she rules it at her pleasure, through me. It’s the reason there will never be an attack on Budapest. Because of me, and my alliance with the Historian. My willingness to hand you and whatever you’ve found over to her was the price of this sanctuary! And now you’ve ruined it. Especially now that you’ve released the names and faces of her hunters to the masses! Made them believe they’re empowered.”
“They are.”
“When is an animal raised in captivity ever able to survive in the wild? Let them out of this cage, and what will they do? I’ll tell you: look for a new one. They don’t know how to be free!”
“Speak for yourself.”
He straightens to his full height, glowers down at me. “I have lived long enough to know what it means to make choices.”
“You’ve lived long enough to lose your gifts. The only power you have left is whatever the Historian is willing to let you keep while she picks a few Progeny out of the herd for her hunters whenever she needs new Scions. Which keeps the Utod afraid and coming back here, to you.”