Tandem (25 page)

“A spy who doesn’t lie? Useful.”

“I’m not a spy,” Thomas told me. “I’m a soldier. I’m a bodyguard. I’m an interuniversal transporter. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t care what you are,” I said. “To me, you’re nobody. You don’t even really exist.”

“What did I lie about that’s got you so worked up?”

“You told me your parents were dead,” I spat. “And yet, I found out last night that the
General
is your dad. You’ve even got a mother on top of that! Alice? Is that her name? Oh, and a brother, too. You’ve just got a whole crap-ton of living relatives, don’t you?”

“Who’d you hear all this from?” I noticed he didn’t deny it.

“Straight from the horse’s mouth,” I said. “In fact, I think he enjoyed it. He knew I didn’t know. He knew you’d lied.”

Thomas shook his head. “My parents
are
dead. My biological parents. They died when I was five, exactly how I told you before. I didn’t lie. I just … omitted the fact that, a couple years later, the General and his wife adopted me. That brother you mentioned? His name is Lucas. He’s the General and Alice’s real son.”

“Adopted?” I had no idea what I expected Thomas to say in defense of himself, but this definitely wasn’t it.

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and looked over at me tentatively. “Do you want to know how it happened?”

I nodded. I did want to know. Here was my chance to find out something real. His story. How he’d come to be who he was.

“Other than my parents, I didn’t have much family—nobody close, nobody who could take in a five-year-old kid. So I got processed by the government, and was placed in an orphanage in New Jersey Dominion called the Princeton School for Boys. I didn’t think I’d ever get adopted,” he admitted with a small shrug. “Older ones almost never do. So it was kind of a shock that I was—to me, and to everyone else.”

“How did the General even find you? Was he just in the market for a new son?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never asked,” Thomas said. “What? Someone offers you a new home, a family, after three years of being completely alone in the world, you don’t question it.”

“So you were eight?”

“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes trained on the ground. “The General was at the orphanage on behalf of this military school, Blackbriar. The General is an alumnus, and he does voluntary recruitment for their scholarship program. He came on Field Day, where we did all these sports and activities. I wasn’t great at sports, because I was too small—back then,” he added, catching my dubious look. There were a lot of words I might use to describe Thomas, but “small” wasn’t one of them. “But I was a fast runner. The fastest in the whole school. When the General picked me out, I thought I’d be getting a Blackbriar scholarship, but it turned out I was too young to go there. Instead, the General had decided he wanted to adopt me, officially, and I ended up going to Blackbriar anyway, two years later, as his son.”

“Are you close, then? You and the General, I mean?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Thomas told me. “Lucas—my brother—thinks I’m the General’s favorite, and I guess, from all outward appearances, I must be. But I’ve never thought that. He treats me the same way he treats everyone else. It’s not like having a real father. I know what
that’s
like, and it’s not like that at all.”

I realized I’d been holding my breath and finally let it out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” Thomas said. “I didn’t tell you.”

I nodded.

“But you should know,” Thomas continued, shifting his chair so that he was facing me directly. “I’m not going to lie to you. This situation is so weird and I realize that it’s a struggle. Believe me, I’ve done it. Stepping into the life of your analog, even for the right reasons, isn’t easy. It makes you doubt all kinds of things you thought you knew about yourself. What you’re willing to do. What you want. Who you can trust. I don’t want you to feel as lost as I did as Grant. You have no idea how many times I wanted to tell you who I really was. I wanted someone to know.” I stared down at my hands in my lap. I couldn’t look into his eyes. I knew what I’d find there, and I couldn’t see it, couldn’t acknowledge it in any way.

“
I
know who
you
are,” he told me. “And I want you to feel like you can trust me, because I know how much that means.” He sat back, his speech finished.

It took me a few moments to figure out what to say. “Can I … do you mind if I have a few minutes alone?” My voice cracked. It felt like I hadn’t spoken in days.

Thomas indicated the king with a slight incline of his head. “He’ll be here.”

I let out a breathy laugh. “That’s okay. He doesn’t talk much.”

Thomas nodded, getting up and putting the chair back where he got it. “I’ll be right outside if you need me,” he promised.

“I know you will,” I said. “And thanks. For what you said.”

“I meant every word,” he told me.

When Thomas was gone, I went back to reading
The Odyssey
out loud to the king. I just didn’t know what else to do. I hadn’t wanted him gone so that I could think. Thinking about Thomas was the last thing I wanted to do. I needed something else to focus on, and took comfort in the familiar act of reading. There was something about saying the words aloud that was meditative and soothing. I let the cadence of my own voice, speaking words that were written thousands of years before, wash everything away like a receding tide.

“ ‘But once your crew has rowed you past the Sirens, a choice of routes is yours,’ ” I read. “ ‘I cannot advise you which to take, or lead you through it all—you must decide for yourself—but I can tell you the ways of either course.’ ”

The king muttered something unintelligible, startling me. I looked up at him, but his eyes were still closed. I wasn’t even sure that he’d said anything at all.

I cleared my throat and kept going. Something shook inside of me, as if someone was jangling a set of keys against my rib cage. “ ‘On one side beetling cliffs shoot up, and against them pound the huge roaring breakers of blue-eyed Amphitrite—’ ”

The king made another inscrutable noise. This time I was sure I’d heard it, and started to wish Thomas would come back in. The king spooked me; I couldn’t explain it, but I didn’t like it, not one bit.

I paused in my reading and watched him. His eyes flew open, staring straight ahead, and he raised his hand; his fingers resumed their hypnotic dance. “Mirror, mirror.”

I tried to ignore it, but after a few moments I could sense him looking at me. I put the book down.
He’s in a hospital bed,
I told myself.
He can’t do anything to you.

“What is it?” I didn’t expect him to answer, but was it possible that he was attempting to communicate? The doctors were certain the king’s mumblings were random and meaningless, but what if that wasn’t true? What if he was actually trying to say something?

“Angel eyes,” he said. I wondered if that was his pet name for Juliana. I smiled at the thought. It was sort of sweet. My dad had called me “Little One.”

“Angel eyes,” he said again, more insistent this time. “Mirror, mirror.”

“On the wall,” I said, playing along. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

“One, one, two, three, five, eight,” he said.

“That’s not how the story goes,” I informed him. Not that he was listening.

“Touch and go,” the king said. “Touch and go.” I sighed.

The door slid open and Thomas came in. “Is everything all right?”

“He’s talking again. And doing, you know, the hand thing.” But the king’s odd behavior didn’t seem to bother Thomas.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess that’s normal. Relatively speaking, anyway. Are you ready to go?” All traces of awkwardness from our previous conversation had disappeared, at least on his end. He was acting as if the past half hour had never even occurred. Maybe I should’ve been grateful; I wanted to ignore it, too. But the fact that
he
wanted to ignore it made me want to talk about it more, which I knew was a bad idea, so I bit my tongue and said nothing.

Thomas glanced at his watch. “Sasha?”

I liked it when he said my name. It felt good to be reminded, by someone other than myself, who I was. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

I put
The Odyssey
back in its place on the bedside table. The king didn’t seem to notice us leaving. It was as if he had no idea we were even in the room. He looked so sad and desolate lying there alone, in an impenetrable bubble where nothing mattered except for what was going on in his head. He was older than my own father would have been if he had lived, much closer to Granddad’s age. Someday, I realized with a jolt, it would be Granddad lying in that bed, or one very much like it. The thought made my heart ache. I felt the sudden urge to stay with the king, just so he wouldn’t have to be alone. But I couldn’t. I had a schedule to keep. And a life to live.

TWENTY

“Are you nervous?” Thomas whispered.

Of course I was nervous, and having him at my side right now wasn’t helping. My thoughts were like a flock of birds being chased into flight, wheeling around inside my head, looping and gliding so fast that I couldn’t sort them out, but they all came circling back to Thomas in the end. In spite of all my doubts and fears, I felt connected to him. He was my only link in this world to my past, the reality of my true life. The only one, as he had said back in the king’s bedroom, who knew who I was. I wanted him close, but I wanted him far away, too.

And now, to complicate things even further, Prince Callum was coming. I hadn’t had to be really intimate with anyone in my short time as Juliana, other than Gloria and Thomas. My analog was the sort of person who kept most people at a distance. But Callum was Juliana’s
betrothed
. Would he expect to kiss me? To hold me? To … sleep with me? I had no idea what he would want, or what questions he would ask, and no one could tell me that, not even Thomas.

“You’ll be fine,” Thomas assured me. “He’s got no reason to suspect anything. He’s never met Juliana. He’s never even been outside Farnham. To him, Juliana is whoever you allow her to be.”

Yeah,
I thought.
But who is
that
?

We’d nearly reached the head of the grand staircase, where I was supposed to meet the queen to await the arrival of the Farnham prince. I was almost as unnerved by the prospect of spending more time with the queen as I was by meeting Callum. I’d spent the last few hours in the queen’s study as she discussed last-minute details for Juliana’s wedding with her staff, but no one asked my opinion, or even glanced my way. The wedding was a monsoon, and all I could do was sit there while it raged all around me. It didn’t bother me so much, because I wouldn’t even be there to see it, but I couldn’t imagine Juliana being able to stand it.

“Hey.” I tugged at the sleeve of Thomas’s jacket. “I was just wondering if you’d heard anything about Juliana—or Grant.” It was driving me crazy that even though I was still dreaming about her, I didn’t know anything about where Juliana was or what was happening to her. I wished I could force a vision, see through her eyes while I was awake. I was sick of this passive power; it wasn’t helping anyone. And as for Grant—I felt responsible for him. Whatever he was going through, it never would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for me. I had as little control over that as he did, but I couldn’t get him out of my head.

Thomas hesitated. “The KES raided a Libertas hideout downtown last night on a tip, but they didn’t find anything. I’ll tell you as soon as I know anything more.”

“You don’t think—you’re sure you’ll find them?”

“We’ll find them,” Thomas assured me. “Libertas is going to hide Juliana as well as possible for as long as possible, but we’re better trained and better funded and smarter than they are, and eventually they’ll slip up. When they do, we’ll be there. And Grant …” Thomas shook his head. “To be honest, I’m worried. We should’ve heard from Libertas already. They might not know he’s not me, but he can’t tell them anything. They’ll have figured that out by now. If we don’t hear from them soon …” He trailed off, but I knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing I was thinking:
If we don’t hear from them soon, it means he might be dead.

I didn’t want to hear him say it. I wasn’t going to give up hope that Grant was alive. I just couldn’t accept that an innocent boy was dead because of me; I wouldn’t accept it, until I knew one way or the other.

“I’ll be standing off to the side,” Thomas said. He reached out a hand as if he was going to touch my shoulder, but then he stopped, obviously thinking the better of it. He cleared his throat and continued, “This should all go according to protocol. Just follow the queen’s lead.”

At the grand staircase, Thomas peeled off and left me standing at the top all by myself. There was another row of KES agents already stationed at the foot of the staircase; these men would protect Callum for the length of his stay in the UCC—which at the moment was indefinite. By custom he wasn’t allowed to retain his own Farnham guard.

The queen swept in from the other side of the staircase with a pair of KES agents trailing behind. Though her exterior was unruffled, the queen had to be agitated; the situation was so politically sensitive, there was no way she could be as calm as she seemed. The mere mention of Farnham and its royal family made everyone in the Castle uneasy; even Gloria had been jumpy as she helped me prepare for the meeting. What would it be like when there was a foreign element in their midst? A perverse part of me was looking forward to finding out.

“Let’s get this over with, shall we?” The queen smoothed the gold-trimmed satin sash she wore over her pale blue dress and reached up to give the rather impressive diamond crown on her head a minuscule adjustment. Gloria had given me the choice of many blingy headpieces, but I’d gone the other way, opting for a simple circlet of gold rowan leaves to wear with the beige peplum top and matching skirt she’d dressed me in. “I take no pleasure in marrying you off like this, you know, Juliana. I think it’s a barbaric tradition. I thought we’d done away with it a long time ago.”