The Lost Girl (32 page)
Authors: Sangu Mandanna
Tags: #Romance, #Fantasy, #Young Adult, #Science Fiction
“And yet you can see I am ignoring it rather successfully, Elsa. People sometimes keep their promises,” he acknowl-edges. “People like Erik, for example. For all your faults, Erik, you do have an irritatingly moral streak. But not Matthew. When has Matthew ever been honorable?”
“People always expect the worst of me.” Matthew sounds mournful. “But I will grant I am not exactly trustworthy, and alas, I
have
proven duplicitous in the past, so there is an outside chance I may have deserved that.”
Erik’s jaw tightens. “What you swore that day, in this room, that was different.”
“It makes no difference to me.” Adrian puts a hand out and seizes me by the back of my neck. “There is nothing stopping me from destroying her now. This very moment.” I try to wriggle free, but his fingers are steel biting into my skin. It feels like he could rip me apart with just that one hand. His eyes are not on me. They’re on Matthew. Waiting. “Well? Will you stop me?”
Matthew seems particularly interested in his fingernails today. “Go on, then.”
“No!” Mina Ma shouts.
I struggle wildly, but the grip on my neck only tightens. Erik takes a step forward, and Matthew puts up a hand to stop him. Rage radiates off Mina Ma like ocean waves during a storm.
“He won’t do it.” Matthew smiles at Adrian. “You would no more stick a knife into me than I would into you.”
Does that mean he still cares about me? Otherwise I have no idea how destroying me could correlate in any way to Adrian sticking a knife into Matthew. It seems to make sense to Adrian, because he lets me go. I look between him and Matthew, and for some reason I think of an elastic band tying them together: a band made up of friendship and loyalty and secrets and the dark obsessions of the Loom. When they make conflicting choices the band is stretched and pulled, but it is elastic, so it doesn’t break. Instead, the two ends snap together again. And I understand that I’m a force pulling at one end and no matter how far I pull, the ends will always snap back together. No matter what Matthew chooses to do about his promise, he will always be on Adrian’s side. There is not much left of the man who sang lullabies in a pale green nursery.
But there might be
just
enough.
“We
could
go to trial and satisfy your thirst for blood, Adrian,” says Matthew. “But it would be such a waste of time, and I am due to have tea with a
very
important person in the morning. Let the girl go. Revoke the Sleep Order. We can’t have her running around, doing what she likes, so send her back to her familiars. I think you’ll find they are willing to keep her.” Suddenly he looks tired and bitter. “I’m done talking about this.”
“I agree,” says Elsa. There’s a funny look in her eye, like she’s watching the world she knows collapse and that pleases her. “If we
did
go to trial, Adrian, you would be outvoted.”
I don’t dare feel relieved. Not yet. Winning my life back, having it in my own two hands again, it doesn’t seem real yet.
Adrian doesn’t speak for a long time. His silence is far more chilling than any open rage. Then he smiles and I shiver. Beneath the smile is fury, and grief, and hate. He will never forget how Ophelia died. He will never forget that he wanted to punish me and I got away.
“I see I
am
outvoted,” he says, “this time. Very well. You may leave.” He goes to the door and stops beside it. “I have no doubt you will return. You don’t seem to be very good at obeying my laws. I will be here when you come back. And somehow I don’t think there will be many promises to rely on when you do.”
No one says anything for a long, long time.
“Erik, could you be so kind as to put her on a flight back to Bangalore at the end of the week?” Matthew asks, breaking the spell. “And do keep an eye on her until then.”
He glances at me and there is a brief, bitter, faraway look in his eyes. Then he turns around and walks away.
Adrian pauses before following. He shakes his head. “It need never have come to this. If you had done as you agreed to and stayed to help me with my work, none of this would have happened.”
Ophelia.
Unspoken but there, hanging above us like an ax. She would still be alive if I had only made a different choice.
“I couldn’t have stayed,” I say. “I will never stop being sorry about Ophelia, but I couldn’t have helped you. Not like that. I won’t be your monster.”
“You’ve always been our monster,” says Adrian. “Don’t ever forget that.”
I watch him go. Elsa is the last to leave, and she sweeps away, with a cool, calm dignity I envy, after giving me a long and searching look. I don’t know what she’s looking for.
When they’re gone, my knees give way. I sit down on the floor, on the ragged, dusty rug, and swallow a hard, dry lump in my throat. Mina Ma holds me tight and I feel her love and her relief, every bit as tangible as her arms.
“Thank you,” I say. She hears me and so does Erik, but he doesn’t turn around right away. He is staring at the open doorway.
Mina Ma frowns up at him. “Erik?”
“The Loom is coming undone at the edges,” he says, turning back to us. “Adrian and Matthew have both shown that they will bend their laws for their own ends. Adrian can no longer see beyond his obsessions, and with Ophelia gone”—his voice cracks—“that will only grow worse. For so long it has been iron and steel, and now the edges are fraying and the Loom is beginning to unravel. If it is hit in the right place, it may even fall.”
“Does that frighten you?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. I know I was frightened for
you
until a moment ago.” He crouches on the rug, looking me in the eye, and he gives me one of his faint twinkly-eyed smiles. “Don’t look so sad. Most echoes only leave the Loom once. When they are first stitched. Few leave it twice. That is something. Today you won.”
Everything has changed.
I
have changed. I have to keep changing. Growing up. Learning to be careful while the Loom watches me closer than ever, while Adrian waits for me to slip. But that, there,
that
hasn’t changed. When I was little, the Weavers were the dark, frightening monsters under my bed. They still are. Watching. Waiting.
I won. And I have paid dearly for it. I have earned Adrian’s hatred. We’ve unmasked the Loom for what it is: whims and obsessions and cruelty and all of it, unraveling. I sent Sean away and he will never forgive me for that. And then there is Ophelia. I will never be able to forget that. Things will not just magically go on the way they did before I began fighting for my life. Before Bangalore and before Amarra and the Sleep Order and before the Loom.
I wonder if the police will investigate Ophelia’s death or if they will turn a blind eye, unwilling to come too close to the Loom and to the strange, eerie games it plays with life and death. I wonder if Adrian will let me go to her funeral. Not that that matters. To me, Ophelia can’t be a body in a coffin in the earth. She’s laughing and smoking cigarettes in the garden of a cottage by a lake, sniffling over birthday cakes and frantically searching a dictionary for the meaning of a big word. The cottage by the lake is now over the hill and far away, and Jonathan and Ophelia and the other little ducks are there, and if I dream hard enough maybe, like the song, I will go after them and find them and one day all the little ducks will come back.
M
y flight is in the morning. I watch the sun reflecting rainbow colors on the windowpane of our hotel room. I don’t know what I will do when I go back to Bangalore. I will give Sasha a big cuddle and hug Nik and Lekha and wait to see what happens after that. Ray led the hunters straight to me, but we will be at school together and I can’t avoid him forever. When I think about him, everything becomes murky and confused. Sooner or later we will have to talk to each other. I will have to confront the hard and complicated tangle of Amarra and him and me.
The truth is, there is only so much space given to a single life. And I think I will always have to fight Amarra for our shared space. She will always be the ghost in the mirror. I have defeated her, but I won’t be rid of her. Tomorrow I will go back to that life we share. My guardians and I will separate for good. I haven’t seen Sean since I made him leave me, and I don’t even know if he’s safe. Erik promised to find out, though we both know I will probably never see him again anyway.
I get up. Mina Ma has gone to one of the shops nearby to get us some dinner. I leave her a note, check that my hair is concealing my Mark, and go out.
It’s funny walking down a street in London without looking over my shoulder. I take the tube to Oxford Street, where I still have about half an hour before the shops close. I buy presents for Lekha and the kids and an ice cream off the street because I’ve barely eaten all day. Later, when I get back on the tube, a dark-haired, green-eyed boy glances my way and smiles, and I have to look down at the floor because the longing in my chest is so intense it’s unbearable.
“Go away,” I silently tell the ghosts, swatting at them like flies. It doesn’t bother them. They follow me anyway. Reflections in the dark glass of the tube. Fragments of memories whispered in my ear.
He
won’t leave me alone.
I look at the dainty, delicate bracelet on my wrist. It’s knotted with shells off the beach, rough and small and flawless. He gave it to me. I look at it as though looking long enough might conjure him out of memory and into reality. If I could ask for anything, anything at all, it would be to see him again one last time.
But I fought for my life and I won. Perhaps that means I can win anything. Perhaps I can find a way back someday. Back to him.
Instead of going straight to the hotel, I get off at Covent Garden. I glance around. I know I’m in the right part of the city, but I’m not sure which way to go.
“Excuse me?” I say to a girl passing by. “I’m looking for this place. . . .” I describe it for her, and she gives me directions.
I end up back in the cobbled square. Next to the fountain.
The theater looks different in the dusky daylight. It doesn’t look like our sanctuary. I stand in the light and watch the color of the clear, cold water in the fountain change as the sun drops lower in the sky. The square around me is alive. The markets haven’t yet closed down for the day, and butchers, fishmongers, and housewives walk past me. I stand there as the water changes from blue to pink to gold.
I look into the fountain and see the pennies. And I laugh to myself, but I take a penny out of my pocket anyway. I drop it into the fountain and watch it spin until it hits the bottom. I want a wish. I could wish for an awful lot of things, but I’ve only dropped the one penny, so I take a deep breath and make one wish.
I wish as hard as I can.
I look up, and there he is. Like magic. He has his hands in his pockets and his face is bruised. It still looks like a war zone. He stands at the other end of the fountain. Too far away. But he’s alive and he’s safe and I wished and now he’s here.
He raises a hand. Like he’s waving. Like a hello. Or a good-bye. I try to raise my own. I try to open my mouth and speak. But nothing works. I can only watch him. He looks like a mirage. But then a child bumps into him and he helps her up and that makes him so solid, so real.
The fountain is bright gold between us. His eyes are the green of marbles and lagoons and nurseries and lights in the sky in the north. If I go to him he will taste of kisses and battles, of knights and promises. I don’t know how long we stand there. It could be minutes. Hours. Days. For the longest time we just stand there and look at each other across the water.
E
normous thanks to my agent, Melissa Sarver. For believing in me, for fighting for this book, and for just generally being all-round fantastic; and thanks, too, to Holly Root, for pointing me to Melissa.
To my editor, Sara Sargent, for being so much fun to work with, for remembering every romantic moment, and for loving Matthew (almost) as much as I do; and to Alessandra Balzer, Donna Bray, and the rest of the team at Balzer + Bray, for taking a chance on Eva and her story.
To Sarah Hoy and Michelle Taormina, for designing an amazing cover; to Anastasios Veloudis, for the gorgeous artwork; to Rosanne Lauer and Brenna Franzitta, for catching every inconsistency and making sure my disastrous typos don’t see the light of day; to Caroline Sun and Olivia deLeon, for getting the word out about
The Lost Girl
; and to marketing director Emilie Polster and her assistant, Stefanie Hoffman, for turning my manuscript into a real, live
book
. I honestly can’t thank you all enough.
To my parents, for being funny and clever and raising me in a house so full of books, it’s astonishing it hasn’t collapsed.
And finally, to Steve. For making me believe this book was worth it. For a real-life love story. For everything.
SANGU MANDANNA
was four years old when she was chased by an elephant, wrote her first story about it, and decided this was what she wanted to do with her life. Seventeen years later, she read
FRANKENSTEIN
. It sent her into a writing frenzy that became
THE LOST GIRL
, a novel about death and love and the tie that binds the two together. Sangu lives in England with her husband and son. You can visit her online at www.sangumandanna.com and follow her on Twitter @SanguMandanna.
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The Lost Girl
Copyright © 2012 by Sangu Mandanna
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mandanna, Sangu.
The lost girl / Sangu Mandanna. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: “Sixteen-year-old Eva is the clone of a girl living far, far away on another continent—and when this ‘other’ dies, Eva must step in and take over her life.”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-06-208231-2
EPub Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN: 9780062082336
[1. Cloning—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M31219Lo 2012
2012006548
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
12 13 14 15 16
LP/RRDH
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
