Chapter 37
Serenity
The air smells like rock. I lie there with my eyes shut and go through it. Cold stone. Old coffee. A heater somewhere close that has burned the dust off its own element. People. Too many people.
I’m looking for beeswax. For cut flowers and woodsmoke from the fireplace.
I’m not there.
I sit up too fast.
No!
The ceiling is bare with a strip light bolted into it and a run of gray conduit going off toward the door. It’s the room they put me in the first night. Paneling halfway up the walls, painted the color of old teeth. A chair beside the cot I’m in, and Grace’s coat folded over the end.
My boots are underneath the chair with the laces tucked inside them. Somebody did that.
On the table by the door, there’s the silver cage with the bird in it. I left it in this room the night I went to find Crowe. Nobody’s moved it.
I swing my legs off the cot. The room tips once and settles. There’s no pain anywhere in my shoulder, and I put two fingers under my collarbone and press hard enough to hurt. I don’t feel anything.
I’m wearing one of his shirts. It’s been washed.
The pull is still there.
Low on my left, under the bone. It was unbearable for days, and now it’s a dull throb, and it’s pulling south.
He’s alive. He’s alive, and he’s six hours away. And he put that distance between us.
There’s a folded sheet of paper under the cage.
I know it before I open it. Two pages, heavy stock, the second one behind the first. A designation typed at the head where a name should be. Careful notes going down the left margin, every entry lined up under the one above it.
At the foot of the second page, in the space marked for the purchaser, somebody has drawn one straight line through S.-L. de Val-Serein.
Above it, in fresh ink:
Serenity Sangrey.
Under that, his signature. Under that, a second signature in small upright letters, and beside it the word witness.
Nothing else. Nothing on the back of either page.
I sit on the edge of that bed with a bill of sale in my hands and my own name written into the line where the buyer goes.
You gave me to myself.
The door opens, and Grace comes in with two mugs.
She stops. Then she puts both mugs down on the table hard enough that one slops over the side. She stands there with her hands closed at her sides.
“You,” she says.
“Grace.”
“You left in the night.” She stops and gathers herself. “I woke up, and your bed was cold. I stood in that corridor at four in the morning shouting at people.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.” She hasn’t moved off the door. Her eyes are swollen, and her hair is flat on one side. “All that time I did what those people told me so they’d keep you breathing. Then I had you back for a day, and you walked out of here without a word.”
“He was going to burn. He would have died.”
“So would you.”
“I knew what I was walking into.”
“That’s supposed to help?”
“No.” I put the paper down on the blanket. “You’d have gone. If you were in my shoes.”
Grace opens her mouth. Then she shuts it again, and her shoulders drop, and she looks at the floor.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s the part I can’t get around.”
“Come here.”
“No.”
“Grace.”
She comes. She sinks down beside me and puts her head on my shoulder, and she cries for a while with her fist screwed into the front of my shirt. I hold the back of her jacket, and I cry too.
“They said you’d been shot,” she says eventually.
“I was.”
“Show me.”
I pull the shirt open at the collar.
Grace looks at the mark for a long time. It’s small and pink and round. She puts one finger on it and takes it away.
“It went through you?”
“Out the back.”
“Sery.” She sits up. Her face is blotched and serious. “Through the top of a lung. That’s less than a week old, and it’s gone.”
“I know.”
“So what happened?”
I open my mouth to tell her. “I don’t know,” I say.
Grace looks at me for two seconds longer than that answer is worth. Then she wipes her face with the heel of her hand and lets it go. So do I.
“How long have I been here?”
“He brought you Tuesday night. Half past two in the morning.” She sniffs. “You’ve slept through two whole days. The doctor came down from the medical wing four times, and by the last one he’d stopped being worried and started being interested, which I liked less.”
“He carried me down.”
“All the way to that bed.” Grace pulls her sleeves over her hands. “There was a car outside the gate with a man in it who wouldn’t get out. Viktor was up because somebody had telephoned ahead.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much.” She thinks about it. “He put you down. Then he stood there and said, ‘Don’t let her wake up on her own.’”
I can’t get any air in for a moment.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. He didn’t stay two minutes.” Grace turns her head. “A tall dark-haired woman came in behind him. The two of them went up to Viktor’s office. She signed something and left. Nobody’s seen either of them since.”
Faine.
I look at the second signature on the page. Small upright letters, no flourish anywhere in it.
“Is that what I think it is?” Grace says.
I hand it to her.
She reads the whole of the first page before she turns it. She gets to the bottom of the second, and I watch her find the crossed-out name.
“He’s put you in his own place on the paper.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a legal document.” She reads it again. “That’s an actual legal document, Sery. With a witness.”
“I know.”
Grace folds it back along his crease and gives it to me.
“He had you in that house when he came here, and he didn’t tell me you were alive,” she says.
“I’ve had a week to think about that, and I’m not finished.
But he brought you here, and he gave you back to yourself.
” She stands up and picks up the mug that didn’t spill.
“I have to figure out how I feel about him now.” She pushes it into my hands.
“Drink this. It’s gone cold, and you’re drinking it anyway. Then I’m taking you for breakfast.”
I don’t tell her everything. He never put a phone in front of me, and I never asked for one. I slept through most of that week, and the part I was awake for I spent on him.
The mess hall is up two flights, and it’s full.
That’s the thing I’m not ready for. When I first came here, Aurora was made up of quiet corridors and closed doors.
Now there are people at every table with plates in front of them.
A lot of them are in clothes that came out of a donation crate and don’t fit.
I’ve spent a year in buildings where nobody talked. The noise goes straight through me.
“A lot of them came from the quarry,” Grace says.
“I don’t recognize all of them.”
“You wouldn’t. That was a halfway house. They shipped people through. Some were at your compound. But the rest came out of other buildings that got emptied into that hole in the ground.”
“I can’t believe we both got out of that.”
“Me too.” She breathes in. “You have no idea how afraid I was for you. I was here for months, not knowing where you were. I ended up spying on Aurora so they’d send me updates on you.”
I glance at her. “Updates?”
She nods. “Just a word here or there. A photo.”
“They sent you a photo of me?”
“Yeah. Said you were better in the new place. What a joke. When I finally went in, you’d been sold weeks before.”
“Who did you speak to?” I’m struggling to put this together.
“A handler. I never knew her name, but she was a horrible bitch. I’m pretty sure she got a kick out of telling me you were gone.”
I think back to the day I walked out of the compound. A photo in the sunshine. “What did she look like?”
Grace shrugs. “Ordinary. Middle-aged. Gray hair. Heavy reading glasses.”
“Holy shit.” I’m staring. “So she sent you the messages after all.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Brown. She supervised the ward. She said she wasn’t a messenger, but obviously she sent them. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.”
“Oh, she was bad all right. She used those messages to blackmail me. I’m not sorry about what happened to her.”
My eyes are wide. “What happened to her?”
Grace glances around. “Decker…” She stops. “Let’s just say she no longer has a place to put those reading glasses.” She lowers her voice. “His bear kind of…took her head off.”
I cough. I should be horrified. I am, in a way.
“Let’s not think about that now.” Grace squeezes my shoulder. “Let’s get a table.”
I stand at the end of the hall with a tray and stare around.
There’s a woman near the front with gray coming through at the roots and a plate of eggs she hasn’t started. She keeps looking at the door.
There’s a man about sixty at the end of a bench with a heavy winter coat on and both hands around a mug.
I know how it feels from the inside. The door you keep checking. The food you can’t start because nobody’s ordered you to. The cold that never leaves.
Then a boy two tables down looks up.
I stood behind him in a line at six in the morning while he asked a woman with a needle not to use his right arm. She used it anyway. I watched the red climb under his skin for days, and I never said one word to anybody about it. They wouldn’t have listened.
He’s across the gap between the tables before I’ve decided if I should greet him.
“Nineteen,” he says.
“Not anymore.”
“No. No, I know.” He stops a foot short with his good hand half up. He’s shorter than I remember. “They said you got out. Somebody said you got bought, and I thought that meant—”
“It didn’t.”
“No.” He swallows. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
I put the tray down on the end of the nearest table.
“What’s your name?” I say.
“Dougie…Douglas.”
“Douglas.” I stick my hand out, and he takes it with the wrong hand, and we make a mess of it. “How’s the arm?”
“Better. There’s a doctor here who says it’ll take a couple more weeks.” He’s gone red to the ears. “There’s a river. Did you know there’s a river? Out there.” He nods toward a window.
“I think I passed it.”
“I’m going to go down and look at it,” Douglas says. He’s been planning it. You can hear it.
I pick the tray back up and sit down across from him, and I eat a whole plate of eggs in a room where nobody is counting anything, and I try to get used to the noise.
Later we walk the top corridor, the one with the windows.
Real windows, six of them, cut through the rock face and looking down the mountain. There’s snow on everything and the road going down is a single black line with the trees crowded up to both sides of it.
Grace tells me the rest of it in pieces.
Viktor put Crowe in a room for two hours. Nobody knows what happened in there, and Crowe left straight afterward and hasn’t been back.
“The moment Viktor realized you and Crowe were gone, he tore up the plan he’d been building and remade the whole thing overnight,” Grace says.
“The operation got as far as vehicles running in the yard. Then Faine answered her telephone, told him the quarry was already finished, and refused to say one word about where you were.” She shakes her head.
“I’ve never in my life seen a man that angry while sitting completely still. ”
“What about the others?” I ask. “The ones they didn’t get.”
“Jericho is working the trucks that got out,” she says. “Three junctions, two hundred miles of road. It’s a big job. He’s been at it since the morning it happened.”
“And the woman I told them about? Kalli?” I say.
“They haven’t found her.”
“She was alive in that truck. I saw her.”
“Then they’ll find her.” Grace stops at the fourth window.
“There were men on those stairs,” I say. “Between me and that room. None of them walked away.”
Grace keeps her eyes on the road below. “I know. Viktor had the report.”
“My wolf isn’t sorry. Not for one of them.” I splay my hand on the cold stone. “I keep waiting to be. It hasn’t come.”
“It might not,” she says. “You get to live anyway.”
We stand there a while after that. The truck coming up the mountain road below us has chains on its tires, and I can hear them from here.
“Stay,” Grace says.
I don’t answer.
“I’m not fighting with you. I want to say it once, properly, so you’ve actually heard it. Then you can do whatever you’re going to do.”
“All right.”
“Neither of us has ever had an ordinary life. Not one day of it.” She keeps her eyes on the road. “We were on the run from the week Mama died. Before that we were being taught to be invisible by a woman who was frightened every hour she was awake. Then that place.”
“I know.”
“There’s a room here with your name on it. Viktor’s already asked me what you’re good at, which is how he offers people work without saying so.” She turns around and leans back against the ledge. Her hand comes to rest on her own stomach. She doesn’t seem to notice she’s done it.
My wolf heard it the moment we came up out of the room they gave me.
A tiny life inside her. She was three feet from me in that room full of strangers, and I was so focused on finding Bastien that I didn’t read her.
Now I have this, and I don’t know how to say any of it out loud.
I keep waiting for her to tell me. She doesn’t. I have to respect that.
“There’s a town at the bottom of this road. I’ve been down twice. There’s a bakery and a library and a woman in the post office who talked to me about her knee for eleven minutes.”
“Eleven?”
“I counted. It was wonderful.” She half smiles. “You could learn to drive.”
“Grace.”
“You could have one safe year. One. Where no one could hurt you.” Her voice drops. “And you’d have me in it. Every day. Not a photograph. Not one line in an envelope.”
I look out at the road.
Everything I thought about for a year in that ward is inside this mountain. My sister with her hand on her belly. A door I opened myself this morning. A hall full of people eating breakfast because somebody came for them. Family, in one building, alive.
I don’t owe Bastien anything. I got him out of that room. He signed that piece of paper with my name on it.
I slip my hand into my pocket, and my fingers find the fold of it.
There’s a hollow space in my chest that my wolf normally fills. Her whole attention is on the pull that won’t let up.
“I’m tired,” I say softly.
Grace nods. “Of course you are.” Her hand is on my shoulder. “Just…just remember that we want you here too.”
I smile. Then I turn around and go back to the room they gave me. The silver cage is on the table where I left it. The key turns under my fingers. Seven turns, and it stops.
The bird lifts its head and sings.