53. Lazarus
LAZARUS
The punch Lazarus is waiting for never comes.
Instead, soft knuckles tap his face, and he hears a frustrated sigh somewhere above him. He doesn’t dare move a muscle.
“You better be telling the truth,” Theokleia whispers into his ear. “I’m not giving you any more chances after this one.”
He feels the cold of a metal taser sliding into his pocket. “And if you’re doing what you say you are, you’ll need this.”
He stays quiet with his eyes closed, willing her to hear his wordless thank you.
Theokleia pushes off him and her footsteps are light as she walks away.
When Lazarus is finally dragged into the room full of the eliminated Auxiliaries and all the Priestesses clear out, he begins his search for the emergency exit.
He has to look in short increments, stopping to feign unconsciousness whenever a Priestess enters with another fallen Auxiliary.
But he’s come upon a problem: the entire room is cobblestone with no entries or exits except wherever the Priestesses are coming in from.
Even when he’s sure he hears the noise of stones scraping against each other like a passage opening, he can’t see any new tunnels.
Lazarus is in the process of scanning the far left wall when he hears a Priestess and falls back against the wall to sit. Something static lightly shocks him and he’s rolling through the wall and into a tunnel.
“Wha—Ow!” His back slams into the hard stone floor, and Forms. He just found the emergency exit. By accident. Through a solid wall.
Well, okay then.
The fact that the exit is open means that the others have triggered their own escape routes and are probably already making their way out of the maze.
That just leaves him to get Arete and meet them at Arc Eight. He sprints down the exit tunnel, which takes a sharp turn at some point that he hopes is an indicator he’ll pop out next to the Arc One hospital like he’s supposed to.
This time there’s no hidden door at the end of the path, but rather a big metal one with a push handle and a locking mechanism from the inside. Above it, weirdly clandestine for such an archaic, stone setting, is a neon green exit sign.
He pushes out into the open and squints against the bright sun. He finds himself in an alleyway of Arc One which is—thank the Forms—closed in on one side by the hospital, right where they predicted he’d be.
The cloak that Arete was meant to drop off is on the floor by the door and the coffee shop they told her to wait in is only a block away. He pulls the cloak over his Auxiliary uniform and speed-walks to the cafe.
The shop is warm and cozy, but it still reeks of Arc One opulence.
Inside, a small collection of people watch the Trial on their rings or tablets, eat food more expensive than a hundred meals at the Academy, and laugh jovially with their friends as Auxiliaries are knocked out or electrocuted or maimed one after the other.
The longer he scans for Arete the more worried he becomes. The shop isn’t very big but he doesn’t see her. So Lazarus, as he is wont to do, comes to the worst possible conclusion.
She’s not here.
But she made it to drop the cloak off, and if she got that far, how could she not have ended up here? Unless she found another shop she thought was more interesting or followed some stranger offering her candy or…
“Oh, thank the Forms,” he says when he finally spots a table scattered with tarot cards. Arete is still nowhere to be found, but she must be nearby. She wouldn’t leave behind her precious cards.
He falls into the seat she must have been using to wait for her and packs the cards up into their box. He’s nearly done when something catches his eye.
The Tower card. It’s been written on.
Trust Arete to doodle on a rare, nice set of cards. Hopefully the pen is erasable, he thinks, before he looks closely at the scribbles.
You want the girl? it reads. You’ll have to come up the stairs and get her.
He blinks in confusion. Then he gasps in horror.
Someone’s taken Arete, and they’re making him go back to the Academy to get her.
Meaning this whole convoluted scheme—escaping during a Trial to keep from setting off the alarms—is now meaningless.
He has the hysterical urge to start laughing. The Tower: representing, as he and Arete’s guidebook told them, carefully laid plans falling apart.
As much as he wants to sprint down to the docks, Arete be damned, he’s her brother now. She said so.
And he can’t leave his sister behind. So he pockets the cards, picks up Zeno’s violin from the floor, and rushes out of the shop to face what will probably be his own demise.
He scales the stairs three at a time, stumbling and tripping but somehow managing not to fall.
The haste and adrenaline fuel him; he hardly feels out of breath.
Because maybe the kidnapper just now wrote that threat, and he’ll manage to catch them before they make it to the Academy.
Maybe they’ll see him sprinting and get intimidated. He is rather tall.
He comes to an abrupt stop when he reaches the top stair. One step up and two steps forward will put him into the bounds of the Academy. If he crosses the threshold, he won’t be able to leave again. Not without setting off the alarm. He’ll be damned, shamed, and probably killed.
He almost turns around. He wants to turn around. But then he sees Arete’s curly hair. There’s a gun to her head.
“Lazzy!” Arete shouts, and that’s his mind made up. He stumbles across the boundary without another thought to reach the Academy lawn. It’s not until he’s halfway to her that Lazarus recognizes Arete’s captor and his heart rate spikes all over again.
“Lazarus,” Apollonia says, her features set in their usual sternness.
Lazarus reverts to a respectful tone despite the circumstances. “Councilwoman.”
“Remove the taser from your pocket,” she says with a rough hand on Arete’s shoulder to stop her from running.
There goes his only weapon. It barely makes a sound when it falls to the grass.
“Now, Lazarus. I think it’s time for us to talk.”
“Release the child first, and I’d be happy to.”
“The child?” Apollonia asks. “Why refer to her so callously? You know her name.”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Apollonia doesn’t budge.
“Let her go, and then we’ll talk, Councilwoman.”
“I will keep her, and I’ll talk if it pleases you.”
Lazarus can’t bring himself to glare.
“You are not leaving this place, Lazarus. Not now, not ever. You will feel my wrath and the wrath of every Guardian and Councilman who lent a drachma for your success.
“The level of your ingratitude is incomprehensible. We chose you and raised you to be everything you ever could have wanted—”
For the first time in his life, Lazarus interrupts her. “How do you know it’s what I wanted? I was a child.”
“You were my child,” Apollonia says without changing her grave tone.
Lazarus’ whole brain does a double take.
“What?”
“Why do you think we picked you? You are my blood. You have my eyes, my hair, my skin, my drive.”
Apollonia is… she’s…
She’s my mother.
It shouldn’t affect him. He shouldn’t care. He’s been taught his whole life that blood ties mean nothing. And yet…
“Then why?” Lazarus almost whines, desperation for her approval causing him physical pain.
My mother, my mother, my mother.
“Why do you hate me?”
“You think far too much of yourself, Lazarus. I do not care about you enough to hate you. I am indifferent. The fact that you are my son is of no importance to me. My concern is blood. My genes are powerful. You were the best choice for our future leader.”
Lazarus shakes his head. He can’t let this break him. It has to be inconsequential because he can only have one priority right now.
“I will stay, if you want me to. But let her go.”
Apollonia narrows her eyes in suspicion. “The sister of a boy you’ve barely just met?”
“How do you know that?”
“We know a lot more than you believe we do.”
Lazarus wants to ask her to elaborate, but he holds his tongue.
“Let her leave. She isn’t what you want,” he says, his voice even.
Lazarus isn’t sure where his panic went between two seconds ago and now, but all that’s left in his heart is confidence. He’s happy to suffer if it means Arete gets to leave. If it means all of his friends escape together. They won’t mind leaving him behind, surely.
Apollonia shrugs. “Come here,” she commands. When he does, she quickly switches the gun from Arete’s head to his own. “Run along, child.”
Arete stares up at Lazarus with terrified eyes.
“It’s okay. Go. You know what to do.”
“Laz—”
“Go. I’ll be fine,” he says, resolute. And he will be.
Well, not fine. But he will have done this for a good reason. And if he dies, he will die for a good reason.
“Okay,” Arete says, then she runs.
“I thought you could be something, Lazarus,” Apollonia says. “But I was wrong.”
Her gun is cold against his forehead. Her eyes are colder.
“You’re going to kill me right now?” Lazarus asks, voice shaking. Okay, maybe he was a little too hasty in saying he’s ready to die. He would really, really prefer not to die.
“As much as the Priestesses would love to get their hands on you, given your thievery, I have my orders.”
Arete better make it to the group because his ghost will be pissed if he did this for nothing.
“Goodbye, Lazarus,” Apollonia sighs, and Lazarus squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember the floating. He finally had it, for a moment. And he can take that to his grave. He’s no longer Icarus falling from too high, burnt up by the sun. He’s just a boy who died doing what was right.
The buzz of electricity fills his ears and he can almost feel it behind his closed eyes. Is this what death is supposed to sound like? Or did he mess it up? Only he could manage to die wrong.
“Lazzy,” Arete says, and Lazarus opens his eyes to find Apollonia’s limp form on the ground in front of him.
Arete victoriously holds up his taser.
“Did you—”
“Yes.”
“Are you alright?”
Arete smiles, eyes shining with their usual crazy glint. “Totally.”
Lazarus blinks slowly. “I’ll set off the alarms if I try to leave,” he says.
Arete scowls at him. “So set off the alarms.”
He opens his mouth to argue, but he can’t beat that logic. Screw the plan. They should have just done this in the first place.
He throws Arete over his shoulder and breaks out into a sprint so fast he barely hears it when alarms start blaring behind him.