Glittering Shadows (2 page)

“Has anyone accounted for Freddy?” Papa asked.

“He’s missing, too.”

“I worry he might have something to do with this. He’s of the age when boys do foolish things.” He looked at Marlis. “You just saw Freddy at the Stanglers’ tea. Did
he seem any different than usual?”

“He
has
seemed different lately.” Marlis kept looking out the car window. It didn’t seem possible that at this very moment, the revived dead were sharing the same fresh
night air as they were. Here along the Wahlenstrasse, the streetlamps cast their glow on broad empty sidewalks. “But that’s no surprise—you let him go out at night with a girl. I
imagine it was quite a shock to his system.”

“That was very controlled,” Papa said. “Gerik was with them at all times.”

The only girls Freddy was normally permitted to see were Marlis and Ida and the other daughters of top officials. But magic ran in family lines. Eventually they would need someone else who could
revive the dead, so Freddy must have children, and it certainly wouldn’t be with the daughters of top officials.

“But the girl is a peasant from Irminau,” Marlis said. “Maybe she’s with the rebellion.”

“She’s a rustic?” Papa snapped. “Gerik should have told me.”

“Papa, you know how Gerik is with women. Can’t you just imagine him winking at Freddy and saying, ‘Go on, I won’t tell’?” She shot a look to Volland. He
agreed with her about Gerik.

“I’m afraid I can imagine it.” Volland grimaced.

“Gerik wouldn’t endanger the entire city!” Papa said.

A handful of people ran down the sidewalk, dressed in black. Everyone in the car glanced at them. Rebels, Marlis thought. Not the workers, who would be in uniforms. She didn’t see weapons
in their hands, and the guards outnumbered them for now. But her eyes tracked them until they were out of sight.

“Gerik might very well have been with them. But even with a chaperone, some women have a way of getting a point across,” Volland said.

“It wouldn’t be hard to convince Freddy that we’re his enemies,” Marlis said. “You’ve kept him like a prisoner.”

Papa’s eyes were fixed on the lights of the guard car in front of them. “Well, we will get this situation in hand.”

The guard car hit the brakes, and now their car stopped too, pitching all their heads forward. “What now?” Volland said.

There was shouting ahead. A flashlight beam swept by, but Marlis couldn’t see much. She had to fight an urge to open the car door and run into the street—she hated being trapped like
this, even behind bulletproof glass.

A reddish glow rose in the distance, as if something had been set on fire. The car had stopped next to one of the city’s parks. Expensive apartments with small balconies overlooked the
rosebushes. Even at night, such a place looked welcoming—but she saw more rough-looking people running past the car.

And then—the world shattered.

A light as bright as the sun blinded her. A wave of force rumbled the ground. Papa’s arms clutched her tight. A tower of fire and smoke shot toward the sky ahead, burning hot, dying back
quickly. Her mind scrambled to make sense of this—was it a bomb? The word “bomb” sounded odd in her mind, like she scarcely remembered what it meant.

She could hardly breathe, Papa was holding her so tightly. Or was it just that she had forgotten how to breathe? She pressed her face to his jacket, shutting her eyes. His body was warm and
solid, the only thing that felt safe.

Marlis felt every nerve in her body, every finger and toe. Her thoughts didn’t venture into fears or hopes. She could only think of facts, as if she were studying sentence structure or
photosynthesis.
I might die now
. That was just a fact.

I can’t be afraid to die. Mama has already done it
. She tried to think of it like jumping across a chasm, with her mother holding out her hands on the other side to catch her.

“It went off up there—” Volland had unbuckled his seat belt. “I can’t see—”

Marlis loosened her grip on Papa. Another fire burned now, closer ahead.

Someone struck the back window of the car with a rock. The glass held.

“Reinforcements,” Papa said, seeing uniformed men run by with rifles at the ready. “They’ll see us home. We’ll be all right.”

Marlis watched as a guard shot a man in the street. She couldn’t yet absorb that she was in the middle of gunfire and angry shouting voices, just a few blocks from home. The motorcade was
trying to turn around. Their driver reversed a little, then cut the wheel far left, going slowly to avoid the pack of guards, but one of the guards motioned for the car to keep moving forward
instead.

A head slumped sideways onto the window. Volland jumped. The face slid away, unconscious. The man could have been a younger version of Volland himself—thin, scholarly looking, light-brown
hair.

In another moment, the car was moving forward again, bringing into view the crumpled, burning chassis of an identical vehicle. “That’s the Walthers’ car,” Papa said,
jerking forward in his seat to see better. “The bomb…”

Their driver jerked the wheel to avoid a piece of the bumper. Marlis couldn’t see bodies through the flames. But they had to be there. They hadn’t lived. No one would have lived
through that explosion. Ida might have burned to death, or maybe the bomb tore her up first.

Marlis twisted the ribbons fastening her wrap around her shoulders. She looked the other way. The bodies of rebels littered the sidewalk like fallen toys. Guards on the street signaled all clear
and waved them through.

“The rebels—” Papa was trembling. He punched the seat ahead of him, his face flushed, his eyes bulging with rage.

“Papa, please. Your heart.”

“Damn my heart,” he retorted. “Damn me for letting this happen.”

They did not go home that night. The Chancellery had the thickest walls in the city, with bunkers a few stories below the ground floor. Papa and his ministers could meet there,
keeping the wives and children safe beneath their feet. Papa saw her safely down the stairs to windowless bedrooms dressed with old imperial furnishings, fringed floor rugs, and paintings of tall
ships. The Chancellery itself had been renovated on the surface, but the building was over two hundred years old, and the decor down here must be at least seventy.

“You’re safe now,” Papa said. “Try to get some sleep.”

She scoffed. “Sleep? I want to know what’s going on.”

“You’ll hear as soon as we get a clear picture. Stay with Mrs. Wachter.”

A few of the women were in the gloomy sitting room. Wilhelmina Wachter, wife of General Wachter; Ada Rasp, wife of the domestic affairs minister, who was playing jarring idle notes on the piano
in the corner; Mauritza Baum, wife of the head of the Chancellor’s guard, and her little boy, who was sleeping on her lap. Marlis saw them, but she also saw the empty space that would have
belonged to Ida and Mrs. Walther. Ida’s face, melted beyond recognition. Ida’s lace and blue silk gown, charred to nothing.

Marlis kept thinking of the bomb, the guards, the fallen bodies of the rebels, but it seemed as abstract as Mrs. Rasp’s tuneless fiddling on the piano. Part of her felt that Ida was still
in the opera box, waving at Paul.

Wilhelmina rose, her dress rustling. She hadn’t been at the opera, but she looked like she’d come from a dinner party, in dark green silk. “Are you all right, Marlis?”
Wilhelmina, while too distant to be considered a surrogate mother, was still the closest thing Marlis had since her own mother’s death. She admired Wilhelmina, and Wilhelmina was both kind
and candid with her.

“What will happen now?” Marlis asked, and then bit her lip. That voice was too scared to belong to her. “I mean, we know so little. I hate not knowing. Is it all over, if the
workers have gotten out?”

“
Something
is certainly over,” Wilhelmina said. “And I can tell you the workers
are
out. I saw them on the streets around Roderick Valkenrath’s house, and
the rebels are popping up everywhere.”

Mrs. Rasp let out a shuddering cry. “My god, how long before they overpower us even here? If they think we used magic to force people into slavery, it’ll be like the Revolution all
over again. They’ll be hanging us in the square.”

“But
didn’t
we use magic to force people into slavery?” Wilhelmina asked. Although she had a forceful presence, she looked pallid, or maybe it was just the lighting in
the basement.

“I suppose you think we deserve to be hanged?” Mrs. Rasp asked.

“Shh,” Mrs. Baum said, stroking her boy’s hair when he stirred a little.

“Of course not,” Wilhelmina said. “I know why we did what we did. But—” She shook her head and glanced at Marlis again. “You might as well have a seat. I know
you won’t sleep. For now, we can only wait.”

Marlis pulled out from under her dress the necklace her mother had given her as a child—gold in the shape of a real human heart. Mother had loved science; Marlis thought of her every time
she rubbed the familiar shape between her fingers.

The women sat, talking sometimes, falling into heavy silence other times. At some point in the night, the power flickered. Wilhelmina had candles at the ready. The workers underground had
managed some of the electric plants. But the power remained on—for now.

Marlis finally fell into fitful sleep in her chair. A child’s wailing woke her again. More women had joined them. Now Mrs. Alberti sat at the piano. The ornate cuckoo clock on the wall
said it was six in the morning. Some of the wives had gathered at the table around a pot of coffee, speaking in hushed tones.

Marlis rose, shaking off her bleariness. “Has there been any news?”

“Not much,” Wilhelmina said. “It sounds like we might be down here longer than we thought, though. We haven’t seen your father, but I spoke to my husband. The military
have their hands full, so they want us to stay under guard.”

“Did he say what’s happening out there? Have they found the Valkenraths? Freddy?”

“Roderick is dead,” Wilhelmina said. “They found his body underground. That’s all we know of him. Apparently the streets are madness—fires and riots. People beat a
police officer to death in Langstrasse. They’re trying to get it under control.” She spoke calmly but looked pinched. Beside her, Mrs. Baum dropped her face into her hands.

Marlis went into the hall and paced. Down here, she heard nothing, felt nothing. What did the world look like outside these walls? When she stepped into the light of morning, would it be
transformed? She wanted to be at her father’s side, hearing every detail. Here they were, all the ladies crowded in a concrete hole, like inanimate valuables tucked into the cellar for
safekeeping.

I can’t bear this blindness
.

Marlis tried to go up the stairs. A guard stopped her at the top. “Sorry, Princess. Your father said not to let you up.”

“I won’t bother him. I won’t say a word. I’ll stay outside the meeting chamber. It can’t be any more dangerous up there.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” the guard said. “The crazies might just find a way to storm the Chancellery. I heard they have more magic than anyone expected.”

Her heart beat faster.

“But don’t worry.” He spread a hand hastily. “The military’s out in force.”

The door above the guard opened. Volland! He would always spare her a moment. “What’s going on?”

“It’s bad, dear,” he said gently, walking past the guard. “All of the workers are dead. It happened a few moments ago, at sunrise. Freddy must have ended his
magic.”

“He
chose
to kill all those people?” She adjusted her vision of the world outside—now seeing the streets littered with bodies.

“It’s possible he may have been killed himself. Although we had protection spells on him, spells can be broken. If he dies, his magic dies with him. But for it to happen right as the
sun rises does suggest a deliberate action to me—that he, or his captors, chose to end the workers’ lives at dawn. We can only speculate for now.”

Marlis clenched her fist, smothering just how disturbed she was at the idea of losing not just Ida but also Freddy. She’d grown up with both of them. “Freddy never got to…I
mean, he was so young.”

“He may have betrayed us,” Volland said, but he sounded sympathetic.

“Even if he betrayed us…it’s our fault, really. We never really—I don’t know. We didn’t give him much respect.”

“You might be right. But it’s too late now.” Volland patted her shoulder. “Can you tell the others? I just wanted to share the latest news.”

“Of course.”

She watched Volland’s scarecrow-lean body dash back up the stairs. The door shut her out once again.