“What’s it like now?” I ask. For the first time I let myself remember that all my family wasn’t evacuated that night. Grandpa is still there.
“How is it different?” I have to know.
But Megan just shakes her head, almost like she’s slowly waking from a dream. “I don’t know. It just is. I mean, for one thing, Ms. Chancellor is never around. At least, I haven’t seen her. I think she might be gone. Moved. Transferred or something. I don’t know. And there are way more guards posted. My mom has been working like crazy. I tried to snoop around and figure out what’s up, but they’re using next-gen encryption, and protocols like I’ve never seen. I do know that your grandpa brought in a bunch of security experts to revamp the cameras and gates and fences and everything. The passage that opens up into the basement? That’s long gone. They put up wire around the walls! Oh, and all the Adrian citizens who work at the embassy? They’re gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” I ask.
“I mean fired. Or farmed out, given jobs at other embassies on the row. Replaced. No one gets in unless they’re a US citizen who has been through all kinds of CIA background checks and/or is on a very short leash.”
Megan takes a deep breath.
“The place you left, Grace? The building where your mom grew up and you spent your summers when you were little? It’s not an embassy anymore.” Megan looks me in the eye. “It’s a fortress.”
I never had a home. Not really. Or that’s what I liked to say—liked to think. We moved so many times and so often that I never even tried to put down roots. But that’s not true, I’ve come to realize. My mother’s roots were always on Embassy Row. And she planted mine there, too. It’s more than a building, more than my grandfather. More even than the secret, ancient heritage of a grandmother I never knew. Like most things, I didn’t know it until it was gone. And Megan’s words make me miss the only home I’ve ever known.
I look back out the window. When I speak, my breath fogs against the glass.
“So … someone is trying to kill me. And Jamie. They want—no, they need—us dead. We’re a threat. And as long as we live … as long as our entire bloodline lives, we will always be a threat.”
“But, Grace …” Rosie stumbles over her words, she seems so confused, so lost, as she asks, “Do you want to be a princess?”
That this is a question people now seriously ask me is something I can’t quite comprehend.
“No, Ro, I most certainly do not want to be a princess.”
“Well, maybe if you explain that to everyone,” Rosie says. “Maybe if you just tell them, then maybe …”
I’m just starting to speak, to protest, to try to explain that no one has ever taken my word about anything, when Megan beats me to it.
“It doesn’t work that way,” she says.
“Yeah. They’re never going to believe me,” I say, but Megan is shaking her head.
“No, Grace. You don’t understand. Adrian law won’t allow it.”
Megan reaches into her bag for her laptop. In a flash, it’s open and connecting to the train’s Wi-Fi. We all sit in silence as her perfectly manicured fingers fly over the keys. Then Megan is spinning the laptop around.
“I’m talking about this.”
It’s a website devoted to Adrian history, specifically the history of the government.
“After the War of the Fortnight, all kinds of people still believed that Amelia was alive,” Megan says. “Or maybe they just hoped she was. Anyway, it was a rumor for a long time.”
“Okay,” Noah says, as if it’s not okay and he doesn’t understand at all. He’s not the only one.
“Think about it,” Megan tells us. “The country had just been through a war. A bloody, bitter revolution. Adria was fractured and broken. And they needed to move on. They brokered the peace treaty under the condition that the dead king’s brother would assume the throne but that there would also be a new parliament. Peace depended upon that. But there were still all these whispers—all these theories—that Amelia was alive, and as much as half the country wanted the war to be over, the other half didn’t want Amelia’s throne taken away from her if she was still alive—that if she really did survive, they owed it to her to keep her throne intact.”
“So?” Leave it to Rosie to cut right to the heart of the matter. “Amelia never was put on the throne. And then, presumably, she died. Unless she became a vampire. Did she become a vampire?”
“No,” Megan says quite simply. “But they wrote the constitution as if someday she might come back, and”—Megan turns to the laptop and then begins to read—“‘In the event that our lost Amelia should be found, she or her heirs shall return to the throne of the country that is rightfully theirs.’”
Megan’s words are still echoing around the train car, but my thoughts are racing by as quickly as the landscape outside.
“Don’t you see?” Megan sounds like she’s losing patience with us. “If Amelia had returned—if her heirs return—then it all goes away. The prime minister. Parliament. Not to mention the current king. All gone. Amelia’s heirs—that’s you, Grace. That’s Jamie—would reclaim the throne and then Adria would, by law, revert to the government it had before the coup.”