Tandem (34 page)

“The truth is, Juli,”
I heard him say,
“the Monad isn’t even sure you have anything to tell us.”

I shut my eyes tight as things I had seen in earlier visions elbowed their way back into my mind. The underground bunker where Libertas had been holding Juliana, the wide fabric bracelet with the gold star tetractys the girl had been wearing on her wrist, and then Lucas’s face, peering at me smugly, his features illuminated by the harsh light of the overhead fluorescents.
Him.

Oh my God,
I thought in disbelief.
Lucas is Janus.

“Your Highness,” Thomas said. “Agent Mayhew was just leaving.” He put a slight emphasis on
Agent Mayhew,
as if he was trying to inform me that Lucas was his brother.

I nodded, swallowing hard and forcing a smile. “Good afternoon, Agent Mayhew.”

I held my breath, anxious to see how Lucas was going to react to me. He knew I wasn’t Juliana. But then why had he been seeking me out? Was he going to expose me? Or did he just want me to know that he knew? Did he think I was just a look-alike, or was he aware of the tandem, and the fact that Juliana and I were analogs, that I was from another universe altogether? And, finally—how much did he know about Thomas’s involvement in my presence in Aurora? He didn’t seem to, from the way he’d been talking to Thomas earlier, but Lucas was a double agent—
the god with two faces,
Juliana had said, a reference I now understood—and there was no way for me to tell just at a glance what he was thinking or intending to do.

Lucas bowed his head and returned my polite smile. “I just wanted to congratulate you on your upcoming wedding to Prince Callum, Your Highness.”

Yeah, I’m sure you do,
I thought. “Thank you,” I said. I lowered my voice in a way that implied I was confiding something in him. “Although I have to tell you, I’m looking forward to having it over and done with. You can’t imagine how many boring meetings I’ve had to sit through while the queen and Gloria argue about place settings and flower arrangements and who can’t sit next to who because of what political scandal.” I sensed Thomas relax at my side.

The two-faced god grinned. “But I thought women liked planning weddings.”

“Well,” I said with a wry laugh. “Most women get to choose their husbands.”

“Your Highness, we need to go,” Thomas said. “Gloria wanted you back in your suite at four o’clock sharp for your fitting.”

“Yes, of course. It was good to see you, Lucas,” I said, extending my hand for him to shake. He took it, squeezing just a bit too hard. He looked into my eyes, and I could read his meaning in them:
I know who you are
. Or, rather:
I know who you
aren’t. “Thank you for your congratulations.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” Lucas said. His eyes lingered on me a moment longer, then he turned, with a farewell nod to his brother, and walked away.

When the sound of his last footsteps had faded, I turned to Thomas, who was still staring after Lucas. I gave him a slight shake to get his attention.

“Sorry,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Lucas doesn’t usually come to the Castle—support agents don’t have the clearance. He said he’d just gotten promoted, but I can’t think—”

“Forget that,” I commanded. He narrowed his eyes, sensing my urgency. “You and I need to talk,
now
. Somewhere private.”

“Library?” Thomas suggested. I nodded.

“How’s it going with the prince?” he asked as we made our way.

“Good,” I said, grateful for the momentary distraction from what I was about to tell him. “He’s really nice. I think he’s lonely. Did you know that his mother wouldn’t let him go to school? This is his first time leaving the city he grew up in.”

“Queen Marian gets a lot of criticism from the press hounds about that. They say she does it to make sure that they’re weak and entirely dependent on her.”

“I think Callum might despise his mother,” I said.

“I don’t blame him.” Thomas looked like he was about to say something else, but he refrained. “You brought Callum in with you to see the king this morning. How do you think that went?”

“Callum lost his father when he was little,” I said. “He seems to understand what I’m going through. I mean—well, you know what I mean.”

“And there weren’t any problems with the king?”

“No. He just kept saying the same old stuff over and over again. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror,’ ‘touch and go,’ and that string of numbers …”

“One, one, two, three, five, eight,” Thomas said. “It’s from—”

“The Fibonacci sequence,” I finished for him. “I know.” After about an hour of seating charts and arguments, I’d started to tune the queen out and for some reason the numbers floated up in my memory and snagged in my mind. They wouldn’t let go until I figured out what they were trying to tell me, which was that they weren’t random at all.

“You’re good,” Thomas said. “I had to look them up.”

“Granddad taught me to recite the sequence when I couldn’t get to sleep,” I told him. “That, and the exact value of pi. I can do that one to twenty-five decimal places.”

“Your granddad is quite the character,” Thomas said. I smiled. My upbringing had been eclectic to say the least, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything—well, almost anything.

“What do you think it means?”

Thomas shrugged. “Not sure. Maybe nothing. Could be just a coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Thomas agreed.

“The king keeps calling me ‘angel eyes,’ ” I continued. “Is that his pet name for Juliana?”

“No, it isn’t.” Thomas frowned. He locked eyes with me, and without even saying a word I knew we were thinking the same thing. Something was up. The Fibonacci sequence wasn’t a string of random numbers; it was an ordered progression that continued infinitely. Granddad called the Fibonacci sequence “magic numbers,” and they were. They occurred in nature all the time: in the spiraled scales of a pinecone, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the curve of waves, and the ancestry of honeybees.

This was another lesson Granddad had taught me:
The world is far less random than it appears.
Once you started paying attention, patterns emerged where before you only saw chaos. So what was it that we were missing?

TWENTY-SIX

“What’s the matter?” Thomas asked, once he’d done a thorough sweep of the library for anyone who might be lurking in corners or behind bookshelves. “Did something happen with the queen?”

I shook my head, kneading my hands in my lap. I had no idea how to phrase what I was about to tell him. All I knew was that I couldn’t keep this secret from him anymore. Not telling Thomas that Juliana had arranged her own kidnapping with Libertas in order to preserve his good opinion of her was one thing, but I couldn’t hide his brother’s treachery from him. It made him too vulnerable, made it too easy for Lucas to manipulate him, and I couldn’t allow that. In spite of the fact that Thomas had brought me to Aurora, he had always tried to protect me, and I wanted to protect him, too.

“Then what?” Thomas reached out and took my hands in his, a tender gesture that made me light up inside. Why did everything have to be so difficult? Why did I have to like him so much after everything that he’d put me through? But for better or worse, I cared about him, and I knew that he cared about me. So informing him that the two people he was closest to in the entire universe had betrayed him would be the hardest thing I’d ever have to do.

The hardest thing apart from leaving him when all this was over.

“Thomas,” I said softly. “I know how Libertas managed to kidnap Juliana.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “It wasn’t a kidnapping. She wanted to escape, and Libertas helped her do it. They promised her a new life if she gave them a piece of information that they needed, something the king told her before he was shot. Lucas works for them. They planned the whole thing together.”

“No.” Thomas snatched his hands away. “You’re wrong. Juliana would never do that. Neither would Lucas.”

“She didn’t want to marry Callum. You told me that yourself,” I insisted. “And maybe she was afraid that what happened to her father would happen to her, too, if she stayed. I don’t know if Lucas approached her first, or if she somehow figured out what he was doing and struck a deal with him, but either way—”

“Stop!” Thomas cried, rising to his feet. “Don’t say anything else. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, I do!” I was trying to keep calm—it wasn’t like I’d expected him to take this news
well
—but I was having a hard time controlling my temper. “I saw it!”

“Then you misunderstood.” His voice was cold and vibrating with anger. “You said yourself the visions were intermittent and that you didn’t remember them well. You’re just mistaken.”

“I remember them now, and I’m telling you that this is what I saw. I
saw it,
Thomas.”

“If you’re not mistaken, then you’re lying,” Thomas accused. “You’re jealous of Juliana and you’re trying to get me to hate her, but it’s not going to work. I
trust
her. She’s my friend.”

I reared back as if he’d hit me. “You really think I’d do that?” My voice was so small it would’ve fit inside a thimble. “You really think I’d lie about Juliana because I’m
jealous
?”

“You asked me if I was in love with her and you—you—” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but I caught his implication just fine without it. He thought
I
was in love with
him,
and that I wanted to destroy what he had left of her to get my own way. I couldn’t believe that he would consider me capable of that, after everything we’d been through.

“Be careful what you say next,” I warned him. “You won’t be able to take it back once you do.” But we both knew we had already gone past the point of no return.

“I won’t stand here and listen to this,” he said. “I won’t.”

“And what about Lucas? You think I’m lying about him, too?”

Thomas’s jaw tightened. “You don’t know anything about my brother, or Juliana, either. You think you do because you’ve been here for three days, but you don’t know
anything
about this world or our lives. You’re just trying to manipulate me so I’ll send you back, but if you think that I’m going to take your word for it that the two people I trust more than anyone have been playing me for months, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.”

“Thomas,” I said. I’d managed to get my anger under control somewhat, and my tone was even. “I know this is a shock. I know you don’t want to believe it. But I wouldn’t be telling you if I didn’t think you needed to know.”

“You don’t know what I need,” Thomas snapped. “Our deal is off. I’m not going to tell the General about your little ‘ability,’ because I don’t think it actually exists. But you’ll stay here until he decides to send you back. I’m not going to stick my neck out for you anymore. From now on, you’re on your own.”

Back in Juliana’s room, I sat immobile on the bed, trying to process the emotional runoff of what had just happened with Thomas in the library. I considered searching for him, but the Castle was huge, not to mention the rest of the Citadel—I’d never find him if he didn’t want to be found. I wanted to dissolve into tears, but they wouldn’t come; my entire body had frozen up.

I felt like I’d been torn in half. One part of me was so angry with Thomas that I wanted to hit him until he felt even a small amount of the pain I’d felt at his unfounded accusations.
Jealous? Manipulative?
How could he believe those things of me? He knew who I was, more than anyone else, and yet it was so easy for him to just assume I was lying about Juliana and Lucas. I hated him for that. I hated him for having more faith in them than he had in me, when I was the one who’d done everything he asked, the one who’d tried to help him. How could he turn his back on me when I was the only one who hadn’t turned my back on him?

But as much as I wanted to sink into my anger, there was another part of me that understood what he was going through. Thomas wasn’t difficult to figure out. He was a truth-teller, a boy with scruples and dignity and an outsized capacity for loyalty. He wasn’t naïve, but he trusted himself and his instincts, and those instincts had told him that Juliana and Lucas were loyal to him. Doubting them meant doubting himself, those things that he counted on every day in his job, to keep people safe, to keep
me
safe. From his perspective, I was telling him that he was a fool, that he’d let emotion override common sense and perhaps, unknowingly, jeopardized his own mission. My heart broke for him, because I knew what it was like to have your entire world ripped away, to discover that someone you cared about wasn’t who you thought they were.

The two halves of me were playing tug-of-war with my brain and with my heart and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed a distraction, something else to occupy my mind so I didn’t go crazy trying to figure out what I was going to do about Thomas. Because at the moment there was nothing
to
do except to hope that he would come to his senses. I opened the nightstand drawer and took out the copy of
Twelfth Night
that Thomas had sent through the tandem with me. Tears sprung to my eyes at the sight of it as I tried to reconcile the boy who’d thought to bring my favorite book into an alternate universe in the hopes that it would comfort me with the boy who’d just called me a jealous liar. No, I couldn’t read it, not today. I went to put it back when the little blue origami star caught my eye. I pulled it out and held it in my palm.

I’d seen Juliana write something on the inside of the paper before she folded it up and placed it in the drawer herself, the night she had escaped. I didn’t even have to open it to know what it said, because I’d seen the words in a vision of Juliana, as if I’d written them myself:

T—I’m sorry, but I can’t. I wish I was better, but I’m not. —J

She’d
wanted
him to know what she had done. Or maybe she thought he’d figure it out on his own, that he’d suspect her without needing to be told, and this was her apology. It was a sorry attempt at making things right. Maybe those words would mean more to Thomas than they did to me, but they felt insubstantial for the amount of trouble she’d already caused, and the amount that I was sure would come. I placed the star on the nightstand and stared at it. I wasn’t sure yet what I should do with it. It felt obvious that I should give it to Thomas and allow him to make of it what he would, but what was the point? He’d already decided I was a liar; why would this note, which I could have easily forged, convince him of anything?