Chapter 3
Oil lamps are being lit all around the inside of the compound as I knock on Agatha’s second-floor bedroom door again. ‘Come on, Ag,’ I plead softly, knowing she can hear me through the paper-thin walls. ‘Answer the door.’
There’s movement inside. Footsteps. A clinking of jars. I try the door handle – locked.
‘Take a hint, Marian,’ Agatha calls out.
Yeah, I am. Briefly, I consider climbing from my next-door bedroom window to hers, but she’s probably locked that too. I shake the door handle. Wait – I dig in my pocket for the hairpin Benedict brought me. The lock pops with a well-placed poke.
‘What are you –?’ Agatha runs to block the door, but I’m already slipping inside.
I fall against the panelled frame, closing it.
‘No,’ she growls, pointing behind me, ‘I don’t want to talk. Get out.’
I cock my head. ‘You got new spectacles?’ From time to time, she wears a pair she picked up from a trader. But these – ‘They’re so …’ I didn’t know they came that large.
Agatha rips them off and tosses them on to her rumpled bed. She wipes under her eyes, which I now see are red and puffy.
Oh, Ag.
‘They’re safety spectacles,’ she says. ‘They protect me during experiments. Now if you’re done, I want to be alone.’
‘No, I’m not done.’ I push off from the door.
‘Talk to me; you’re obviously upset.’ She spins away.
Back when we were younger, we could fix things between us so easily – I could just read her an old-world book.
We’d spend the night giggling in her bed.
It was me and her against the world. ‘Come on, what was I supposed to do?’
‘How about not slamming me to the floor?’
Would she rather an elbow to the face? My split lip throbs at the reminder. ‘Okay, first off, you know anything less than that and he would have made me do it again, or worse, have Coatl take a shot. And secondly, you told me to do it.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
My brows knit. Didn’t she?
She stomps back to the table where she was clearly working before. Every inch of the wood planks is covered in tools, large glass bottles of liquid, and fabric bags of who knows what. ‘You know, you didn’t even try to stick up for me. You never do.’
I go still, and the air fills with a charge.
‘Never?’ That’s a punch to the heart – and patently untrue.
I do defend her. Constantly. But it’s rarely overt, because it can’t be.
We have to be strategic when it comes to Atlas or things go bad very quickly.
She knows you cannot tell the man what to do.
Her face tightens with anger, defiant at my challenge, and something pings in my chest as I realise where she’s going with this – Felix.
It’s been two years since the Dresden boy Agatha was obsessed with told her he’d rather die than work another day in the mine and convinced her to run off with him.
They left in the middle of the night with one weapon between them and a single sack of supplies.
And their plan? Hope that a passing trader would be foolish enough to let them leech off his precious resources as they raced around the badlands on the run. A death sentence.
I had no choice but to chase after her and drag her back home. But mistakes were made, and I regret everything that came after – how I handled it and the people I got involved. Atlas had Felix exiled. Agatha’s punishment was a beating. And I vomited into a bush after being forced to watch it all.
No matter how many times I apologise, my mistake still haunts us.
‘Maybe if I wasn’t always blindsided, I could help you better. Warn me, Agatha. Tell me what you’re up to.’ Let me back in.
‘Oh, like the way you share everything you do?’ she throws over her shoulder.
My muscles lock. But when she doesn’t push for answers on how I spend my free time, I exhale and dig the heels of my hands into my eyes.
‘Can we just … stop? This isn’t about us.
The problem is him. It’s always him. He loves pitting us against each other.
But we’re not going to let him divide us, right?
’ That was always our promise to each other. We stick together. No matter what.
‘He doesn’t pit us against each other. He wants me to be you.’
Her words cut to my marrow, because that’s also an ugly truth. I walk around the table to look her in the eye. ‘He’s a shallow, morally bankrupt man.’ A man who’s never accepted his youngest daughter for who she is. Or his eldest, for that matter.
‘He’s not morally bankrupt. That would be Coatl, who we both know would be worse.’
My cheek ticks as anger brands me. ‘That’s not a defence of Atlas’s behaviour.’
Although, it is the reason I don’t betray Atlas to a passing vagabond – Coatl would be worse.
And I’m not certain anyone else, myself included, could stand against the insurrection of guards if there was a change of leadership.
It’s shocking, but Atlas’s ruthless stranglehold on Notting is the safest for everyone.
‘Father can be kind,’ Agatha mutters. ‘He has been kind. And vulnerable. He does open up to me sometimes, usually when you’re not around … and he’s feeling troubled. We actually have a lot in common – loneliness. Loss. He’s haunted, too, by what could have been.’
My head dips as I absorb another dig about Felix.
‘Father was even mistreated and abandoned by his father.’
Saints, not this again. ‘Being a victim doesn’t justify anything he’s done.’
‘I think he hates that he can’t control me,’ she continues. ‘Which is what he likes so much about you – you don’t resist. You’re so compliant. Predictable.’
I stare at her, frustration bubbling so far up my throat I could choke on it.
There was a time I was compliant, yes. When we were children.
When he’d tie a five-year-old Agatha to a tree for not being quiet enough.
When he left her there, crying all night.
But then I grew older and found my voice, and we took our punishments together, our skin blistering as we spent entire days in the hot sun.
That’s when he figured out that Agatha was my weakness, and he could control me by hurting her. By hurting anyone.
Collective punishments began after that. For the guards. The Dresden. Whoever he needs to control. And with his enforcers, loyal guards ruled by Coatl, and no other options for people, his grip on Notting has never been more ironclad.
But me, compliant? No. My resistance began two years ago, the night he handed Agatha over to Coatl to be beaten with a stick.
I bite my tongue and painstakingly wait for the blood to slow in my veins. ‘I’m glad you don’t want to be me. I don’t want you to be me. Be you.’
Agatha’s eyes grow glassy.
‘But at least let me train you, so we can avoid –’
She pulls back, vigorously shaking her head.
A sound of exasperation leaks from my throat. ‘If you want to do your experiments, this is how you get there. You have to beat him at his own game. Ag, please. Pick any weapon, and I’ll train you. With a little practice you could learn.’
‘I don’t want your help. Stop acting like him.’
Her hand slaps the table, but I feel it as if she hit my face. ‘That’s not funny.’
‘I’m not joking,’ she quips. ‘Stop trying to control me. I don’t want to be a guard. I want to study alchemy.’ With lips tight, she returns to her experiments, reaching past her magnifying scope to draw her candle closer in the dimming light.
I wait, but I’ve been dismissed. Fine. I let the hairpin fall from my hand on to her desk, and leave.