Chapter 27
27
I nara
I rise like a ghost from Rex’s bed. He’s still there, I think, tangled in the sheets, asleep. Or maybe he’s gone, and I’ve only imagined that he still slumbers.
In bare feet and a silk robe, I walk the halls of the Roy’s great house. Somehow, I know exactly where I’m going. There are other ghosts in the walls, laughing, murmuring, dancing to the sweet song of violins. Over a hundred years of the history of lives lived and now long gone. I move quickly to avoid them all.
But something stops me. In a long corridor of locked doors, one door is left ajar.
I enter and find a child’s bedroom, complete with a set of toys. There’s no dust or cobwebs, and the air is heavy, undisturbed, but the bed is fresh as if it had been made this morning.
Maybe it was.
The windows overlook the gardens. I can imagine the little boy standing here, a shock of raven-black hair. He completes the puzzles his mother bought for him and sets up the city of blocks. The tiny buildings are replicas of ones in New Rome. There’s the park and Hotel Magnifique with the lion statues and the white Corinthian columns. Above it all, the skyscraper with a sign declaring it belongs to Roy Enterprises.
A little boy pretending he’s king of the city.
On impulse, I open a drawer, half expecting to find children’s clothes. Instead, there’s a wooden box with a golden lion’s head on the top.
I shouldn’t continue, but I can’t stop myself. The box opens to a bundle of papers and notebooks. The top one is a leather-bound journal, again bearing the golden lion’s head of the Roy crest.
I open the journal. The first page has a name scrawled in the top right corner. Rex Roy.
The next page reads, “Yesterday was the memorial for Mother and Father. Hamish made me go. The adults all wore black and whispered, but none of them looked really sad. They saw me and said “poor boy” behind their hands. One man told me I was brave. I told him the coffins were empty, so this ceremony meant nothing. He patted my shoulder and said my parents had done great things for the city. He meant their money. I suppose no one’s really sad because there’s still money for the city.
Hamish took me home and gave me this journal. He said to keep a record of my thoughts. I’m here at the crypt where my parents’ bodies actually are. I keep dreaming that they’re not dead, only sleeping. I brought a blanket to sleep here in case they do wake up. It’ll be scary for them to be in darkness, calling for help. I’ll be here to free them, just in case.”
I close the journal and set it down so I can lift out a bundle of pages. As I do, one flutters free. It’s a newspaper article, printed on paper so thin I can see through it.
I don’t need to read the headline. I recognize the article and the shape of the words.
“Death Comes to Small Town. Horror haunts Elirya.” The picture is as familiar to me as my name. It’s a fenced front yard, the tree with the red swing my dad hung for my brothers, three brick stairs, and a stoop. The front of my family home. And in the foreground, close enough you can see the tear tracks on her little face, is a little girl.
The little girl is me. I trace the outline of my tangled hair. The photographer had been lurking in my hometown for weeks, interviewing locals, trying to capture the sense of horror.
He knew the killer would strike again. He’d gotten wind of the crimes before the cops arrived and had come and snapped this picture. He must have been right up in my face.
I don’t remember him. I don’t remember anything about that morning. Only the night the terror came and took my family away.
The bundle falls from my hands, scattering pages. I fall to my knees among them.
I’m on the floor, surrounded by scraps of faded paper. Articles torn from a newspaper so long ago.
I’m not dreaming anymore.
I’m in Rex’s childhood bedroom. Who else’s could it be? And here is proof of how long he’s been hunting me. Article after article about my family’s death and the man who took their lives.
After the awful night when he came for my family, the Bondage Killer had been at the height of his horrible reign. The newspapers moved on from the victims quickly and focused more on the man who seemed to be one step ahead of the cops. He’d taunted them, sending them letters about how he chose his victims. He told them what he’d planned to do next and killed six more people before they pinned him down in an abandoned warehouse where he had been hiding out.
I sift through the papers. After that initial article, the newspaper editors suppressed all pictures of me and censored my name. It was too little, too late. The first one had done enough damage. The photographer won an award for the photo, if I remember correctly. A child’s pain and trauma served up for all to see.
Enara. They spelled my name wrong and never printed a correction, either. My mentor, Lacy Collins, had kept these articles in a murder book. She never wanted me to see it, but I dug it out and paged through it one day when she was at work. That’s why the headlines are burned into my brain.
I read everything I could about the Bondage Killer, trying to understand why he would snuff out so many lives. Why he spared me. Profiling him for my own purposes after all these years.
It seems Rex had been doing this, too. A journal flaps open. This one has the same boyish scrawl, grown neater. Rex, the boy, growing older. The pages have clippings glued to them. Pages on pages of the Bondage Killer’s letters to the police and press. In the margins, Rex wrote notes. Decompensating, Rex marks beside one rambling manifesto. Only six days after the last kill. He’s unraveling.
The final page has another copy of the article with my home and face. Rex has circled my face with a pen. “Who is she?” and underneath, in bold letters: SHE’S LIKE ME.
* * *
From the diary of Rex Roy, aged twelve. . .
Today, I found someone to live for. Hamish found me at my parents’ grave, but instead of telling me to return to the manse, he brought a newspaper to read while he waited with me.
It was her face that caught my attention first. She was scared and sad and mad all at the same time. It’s a mix that I’ve felt, but no one understands.
It was strange to see what I felt on someone else’s face. Strange and good.
She’s like me.
Hamish says they shouldn’t put kids’ pictures in the paper like that. I agree, but I’m glad they did. Otherwise, I never would’ve known about her.
They said her name was Enara. I stole Hamish’s phone and looked it up, and it means Swallow. I’m going to find her and tell her she’s like me.
She watched her family die, like me. She has no one like me.
Maybe we can have each other.
I have to find her, and then we’ll be a family.
I can’t wait to tell her.
I know when I do, she’ll still be sad/mad/scared, but it will help her to know she doesn’t have to be alone.
* * *
Inara
I read them all. Every journal, every note. A written history of how, years ago, a younger Rex had tried to find me.
Tried and failed. His journal entries grow more frustrated over the years. The article printed my name wrong, which sent him on the wrong trail for a while. By the time he figured it out and enlisted Hamish’s help, I had disappeared into the system. His private investigator had found nothing.
But he never stopped searching. My heart weeps for the boy who was so angry and alone. I could weep for myself, too, the tears overflowing from the wellspring of pain I’ve kept tamped down over the years, thinking I was the only one who’d understand the depth of my loss.
There was someone out there who was like me. And after all the years of searching, he’s found me.
I lay the journals back in the drawer and leave the room. I feel like I’ve wept for days, but when I touch my face, it’s dry. There are no more tears. Just a big empty space where my heart used to be.
This is what he wouldn’t tell me. He’s been obsessed with me for years. The most horrible night of my life shattered everything I am and bound me to him.
I don’t know how to feel. I feel everything and nothing. What does it matter how I feel? I was meant to be here.
I can only continue on, drawn by a compulsion to discover the full truth about him. I will plumb his depths as he’s plumbed mine and drown in his perfect darkness.
This is the course I laid out for myself. I’m here because I want to know everything about him. I just didn’t realize he already knew everything about me.
Well, not everything. I still have some secrets, but I don’t know how long I can hold onto them. Something tells me Rex will be inexorable in his desire to peel me apart and own all of me. It’s a risk I’m willing to take to get close enough to him to find evidence of his crimes.
The scariest thing is that a part of me wants him to know everything about me. I have to fight my own desires to walk this dangerous line.
I creep forward, continuing my search for Rex’s secrets. My instincts pull me down the hall to the elevator. The doors glide open, and the keypad lights up, ready for me to input a code.
I consider what it might be. Rex’s birthday? The date his mother or father married?
The date they died?
I plug those six digits in, and the keypad beeps, blinking red. Wrong.
Could it be my birthday? I think of that and discard it.
I know what the code is. I just don’t want to admit it.
I plug in the date that the article with my picture was printed. The one marking the worst day of my life. The one that drew him to me.
The keypad blinks green. The elevator whirs to life and descends. Slowly at first and then so fast, I brace myself on the side.
The doors open to darkness. I can’t see, but I can sense the vastness of the space I’m about to enter. I step out, and the lights flicker on. It’s still dark, but there’s enough light to reveal I’m stepping onto a path hewn from rock. It smells like I’m outside, but there’s no sky.
I’m shivering, and not because I’m cold. I continue in bare feet, finding a set of stairs and descending.
Lights blink on as I walk. The rock underfoot turns into a bridge-like platform glowing with blue-green light, suspended over a cavernous space. Currents of air waft over me. There are shapes in the darkness, over and around me. The bridge leads to a landing that gives access to a towering case containing a black suit of body armor. I stop to study the visored helmet and thick-plated torso and shoulder coverings. I’ve seen this sort of body armor before, in prototype sketches from the secret weapons lab Mina found.
The bridge continues to another landing in front of cases that hold rows and rows of tools and weapons. There are guns like I’ve never seen before, with misshapen barrels built to hold ammunition that I can’t even imagine. Some guns are loaded with different-sized harpoons. Some are shaped more like hand cannons. And that’s just what’s on display. There are cases and cases that must be filled with all types of ammunition, bombs, and grenades. I bet there’s a case for canisters of the special gas Rex used to knock Gregory Martin out before he stabbed him.
There’s a twinge in my gut as if I’ve been stabbed. I’m surrounded by weapons and tools of destruction. This is worse than I could’ve imagined.
On my right is a case for different knives, boomerangs, and metal throwing stars. Some of them are the knives Rex probably used to kill Martin and carve up his other victims.
I’m panting like I’ve run a mile. It’s overwhelming, this evidence of a legacy of violence. Rex took all his billions and poured it into R&D to help him stalk and destroy his prey.
A part of me feels vindicated. I knew his depravity ran deep. But I had no idea it could be this massive, this monstrous.
Another part of me wonders if I’m his next victim.
I thought I had reached the point of no return before, but now I’m here on the literal cliff’s edge, facing the abyss and feeling the rocks crumble to dust at my feet.
There’s no use in stopping now. I’ve breached Rex’s lair. I might as well go on. I reach the end of the bridge and step onto a hexagon-shaped platform.
“Initiating welcome sequence.” A cool robotic voice makes me jump. I whirl and face a bank of screens. At least a hundred of them are suspended in a cluster that extends around half the platform.
The screens light up one by one. Each one shows a different view—a city street, an oak-filled park, a glittering high-rise with each window reflecting the sun. A vast network of surveillance covering the city of New Rome. People are walking their dogs, streaming in and out of shops, stopping at stands to buy coffee or hot dogs, oblivious to the surveillance.
I stand and shiver, facing the evidence of Rex’s hypervigilance. He has the means to surveil an entire city, and he has.
And then the screens blink off. When they come back on, they all bear the same image. Each one reflects my wide eyes and fear-filled face.
If I wasn’t before, I’m hyperventilating now.
“Welcome, Swallow,” the computer greets me. I bite back a scream.
I don’t realize I’ve been walking backward until I bump into a console. A bank of lights illuminate more of the recesses of the cave. There are more cases—of suits of armor and guns—as well as platforms holding whole cars and motorcycles.
There’s a rustling sound in the farthest corners of this vast cave. Something like birds—or bats. I dig my fingernails into my palms, seeking a bite of pain to keep me from screaming.
I can sense someone watching me. A darkness gathering in the gloom. And I know it’s him.
A shadow swells behind me, morphing into a figure who leaps from one suspended platform to another. Fear jolts through me.
I whirl and run back the way I came. The platform vibrates as my feet pound past the cases of weapons and armored suits. I can feel the darkness stalking me, following me, a predator reaching its claws out to snatch me.
I can’t let him catch me. I’ve crossed a line and learned his deepest, darkest secret. After this, there’s no turning back. It’s all over.
He won’t ever let me go.
My foot slips, and I skid into the platform railing. A shadow swoops over me. I duck, my breath tearing at my throat, and race for the elevator door.
I’m almost to the last set of stairs when I’m ripped off my feet. A hard arm holds me around my middle, and a dark voice rasps, “Going somewhere, little bird?”