I collapse into the chair in front by the metal table in the center of the room. A copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets lies in the middle, just where I threw it after finding it misshelved by Dante a few days ago. I guess the new Recorder, Bartie, is too busy writing manifestos and trying to start an unneeded revolution to bother with doing his actual job.
Sighing, I snatch up the book and head for the S shelves. There’s just enough room to squeeze the sonnets between King Lear and Macbeth.
I head for the door—might as well see if there’s anything attached to any of the rest of Harley’s paintings.
I pause. Orion had a contingency plan for everything—why not make sure the clues are close together, just in case someone tampered with one? I’m the only one who ever really bothers with the book rooms—and before me, there was only him. What are the chances of someone else putting a book on the wrong shelf—right next to the book that held the first clue?
I rush back to the S shelf, my hands shaking as I reach for the poetry book. The pages are glossy and thick, dotted with illustrations from the Elizabethan era. On the first page is a color portrait of Shakespeare. The Bard wrote about star-crossed love, but I doubt he ever realized his works would one day be soaring through the stars.
I frown. We’re not exactly soaring now, are we?
I flip through the pages quickly, creasing them in a way that I know Elder would frown upon. But . . . there’s nothing here. I force myself to slow down, reading each poem even though they make little sense to me.
I take a deep, shaking breath. Part of me wants to throw the book against the wall. I’d gotten my hopes so far up.
Maybe Elder’s right. Maybe this whole thing is pointless.
Still, I take the book with me as I head back to my room in the Ward.
The Hospital’s still busy even though it’s nearly time for the solar lamp to turn off, but the third floor is almost empty. Only Victria sits in the common room, staring out the window. I start to say something to her, but I remember the angry look she gave me when she found me in Harley’s room and in the cryo level, so I move straight to the glass doors leading to the hallway. She glances up at me as I pass, but not with an angry glare.
She’s been crying.
I think of saying something to her, but I doubt she’d care to speak to me. I hear her sniffle as I reach for the door. She hates me. There’s a muffled sound behind me, like she’s holding in a sob. But I hear anyway.
I let the glass doors close and head over to the couch.
“Go away,” she says, but there’s no heart in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
She turns back to the window.
I lean into the seat cushion and cross my legs. “I’m just going to stay here until you tell me.”
She waits a long moment, as if testing me. When I don’t move, she finally speaks, her words fogging the glass of the window, “I just miss him. The worse things get, the more I think about what he might have done.”
“Is this . . . is this about Orion?” I ask.
She chokes out a laugh, a wet sound marred by her angry tears. She swipes her arm across her face. “It’s stupid really,” she says, still talking to the window more than to me. “He . . . he was older than me. I was just some stupid little kid to him. But . . . I’ve always loved stories. Books. And I’d go to the Recorder Hall, and he’d be there.”
My lips twitch up in a small smile, and I think back to what I knew of Orion before I discovered he was a murderer. He wiped my face and hands clean when I’d been crying once, and I sort of wish I could do the same for Victria now.
“The thing that makes me so upset,” Victria continues, “is that I never had a chance to tell him. I mean, I think he knew, but I never actually said the words. I’d go to the Recorder Hall almost every day, and we’d talk and joke, but . . . I never said what I wanted to. And now it’s too late.”
It’s sad how much Victria and I have in common—she wants to reveal her deepest secrets to people who are nothing but ice, too.
“I think,” I say slowly, “that if you really loved him, he probably knew, whether you said it or not.”
She finally turns to look at me, and there’s a hint of a smile on her lips. Her eyes are mostly dry now. “I just wish I had a choice,” she says.
“A choice?”
“If I could, I’d make myself not care anymore.”
We’re both silent for a long moment.
If I could quit caring about my parents, frozen below, would I? It would make things easier. I wouldn’t wake up every morning with a hollow ache inside of me.
And then I think of Elder. It’s the question I ask myself every time he looks at me with those soft eyes of his, every time he jumps to do something just because I asked it: do I love him? I don’t know. But I do know that I can at least tell myself I don’t.
“I think love is a choice,” I say. That’s why I can’t love Elder. Because I don’t have anyone else to choose from.
“But who,” Victria asks, “would choose this?”
We both look up when the elevator doors slide open.
Shit.
Really?
After all this, he has to walk in? What, does he have a stalking meter on me or something?
“Get out,” I say.
Luthor grins.
“My two lovely carros, all in one room together.”
“Get out,” I say again.
He moves toward where we are sitting. I jump up, but Victria doesn’t; she curls her legs up under her and wraps her arms around her stomach.
“You know,” Luthor purrs, “I think it might be fate. To see the both of you, here, together.”
I put my hand in my pocket, but I don’t back up as he draws closer. There’s nowhere to back up to, anyway—we’re trapped in front of the windows.
He reaches out to touch me. He strokes my left arm in a sickeningly gentle way until his fingers brush against my elbow, then he grabs me and pulls me roughly to him. Victria chokes out a sort of sob-scream, but I jerk my right hand out of my pocket and slap him full across the face.
It’s a strong slap—but not strong enough to make a full-grown, well-muscled man fall to the ground. Not without a little help, anyway. He crashes down, his fingers still wrapped around my elbow. My shirt rips before I can shake him off. He lies on the floor, looking up at me passively.
“What the frex?” Victria whispers. She’s still curled in on herself, but she leans forward to stare at Luthor’s body.
“Kit gave me one of those new med patches,” I say. I nudge Luthor’s face with my foot, showing her the pale green square outlined by my handprint on Luthor’s cheek.
“You were pretty fast to get that out.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, “I don’t exactly trust Luthor.”
“Yeah.” Pause. “Me either.”
I look at her, really look at her, past the hard shell she always wears. Luthor spoke to both of us with that purr in his voice. And, even now with Luthor on the floor, she holds her arms around her stomach. In protection, but not for herself.
“Are you pregnant?” I whisper.
Stupid question. Nearly all the women on board the ship are pregnant—the Season did most of that, and Doc’s needles did the rest. But the ones not on Phydus, people like Harley and Luthor and Elder and Victria, chose whether to participate in the Season or not.
She nods.
I step over Luthor’s immobile body and sit down on the couch next to her. “What did he do to you?” The words come out as a whisper.
She stares at Luthor. He blinks at the ceiling. The Phydus patches are stronger than when the drug was in the water. He’d do anything I told him to, I think. He would walk off the roof of the Hospital if I led him to the edge. Nice thought.
Before, Victria was crying. Now, her eyes are dry, even though I can see the still-damp tracks of tears snaking down her cheeks. Now she keeps the tears inside her, controlling them in a way she can’t control the past.
She curls tighter, her knees under her chin.
“It was him,” she says, eyes shut.
I’m afraid of what she means, but I’ve already guessed the truth. I touch her shoulder. Her whole body shifts into me, but she doesn’t let go of her knees, of the way she’s made herself into a tight bundle around her stomach. Because she lets me, I wrap my arms around her.
“It was him,” she says again. Her voice sounds like a faraway echo. “During the Season.”
“Luthor?” I whisper. My voice catches in fear of what she’s saying.
“I didn’t want to,” she says. “He was so violent.” She glances up at me, her eyes wet and red. “He mentioned you. Because he didn’t get you . . .”
Because he didn’t get me, he went to her.
“I tried to . . .” Her voice cracks. It doesn’t matter what she tried to do, or didn’t. I understand.
I remember that moment when I gave up. When I waited for it to be over.
For me, though, it stopped.
But not for her.
No wonder she hates me: because I was spared, and she was not.
And now, with her body curled up in protection around her baby, I realize that it’s not stopped, at all, during the past three months.
What lasted for minutes for me is still with her, growing inside of her, a thing she must hate and love all at the same time.
I wrap my arms tighter around Victria and pull her closer to me. “It’s over,” I whisper, even though I know it’s not. It never will be.
I tug at Victria’s left hand until she releases the death grip she has on her knees. She looks at me curiously as I flatten her fingers. Her hand is cold and clammy, but it’s no longer shaking. I wrap my pinkie finger around hers.
“This is a promise,” I tell her, squeezing her pinkie with mine. “A promise that you don’t have to be alone with this secret and pain anymore.”
Her finger lies still in mine—she doesn’t believe me. She stares at Luthor’s immobilized form.
I think we both get the same idea at the same time. Our eyes meet. Luthor can’t move—he’s helpless.
For the first time, we have the ability to take back a little bit of what he took from us, months ago.
So we’re going to.
Victria uncurls from the couch. She’s hesitant at first, but then she gets up slowly, deliberately. She stands over Luthor’s body.
And she kicks him as hard as she can, right in the stomach.
He gives out a sort of breathless Oof! but doesn’t move.
She kicks him again, and again. Water leaks from his eyes, but he doesn’t protest or move to defend himself, even when Victria kicks him in the groin, hard.
She drops to her knees, beating his chest with her fists. “How could you,” she gasps. “I knew you!”
I squat down next to her. “Let it go,” I say, “Come on.” I touch her shoulders to pull her away, but she jerks back—not to hit him, but to bury her face in her arms, sobbing.
I can’t stand to see her break like this. I can’t stand to know that when the patch wears off, he’ll blame her, he may still try to hurt her, or me.
