The Progeny (12 page)

“So, did everyone in the fraternity go on to become a—”

“No. I suspect the Scions keep many charitable organizations as grooming grounds for positions in their members’ enterprises. The hunters are a small and very specialized part of what the Scions do as a whole. I actually don’t like talking about it. I was . . . completely brainwashed. I hate thinking about it, actually.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“You.”

I’m quiet for a long moment.

“What did you tell them you got from my memory?” I say finally.

“I said I botched it. That you were too badly burned for me to retrieve anything.”

I swallow. “And what did you get for my death?”

“I told my contact I didn’t want anything. That I wanted to travel and just be left alone. I dropped out of university, quit my job. I didn’t want anything to do with them. Forty thousand euros showed up in my account the next day.”

“That’s
it
? The going rate on a
life
?”

“Audra, I failed.”

“You
killed
me as far as they knew.”

“But I retrieved nothing. Based on who you are—what you possibly knew—I failed. They probably should have killed me but paid me instead. Leave with your life and a little bit of money—it’s enough to keep anyone indebted and paranoid. That’s how they work.”

“You could have reported it as an error, refused to keep it, so they couldn’t have anything on you—”

“How do you think we paid for this new life?”

I let out a breath, recall the stack of cash in my packet upon arriving in Maine.

He’s gazing at me in the darkness as though there are fifty things he’d say, given the courage to voice them all.

“You could still go back,” I say. “To save your family. Say I faked my death and you’ve been tracking me ever since—”

“I lied to you at lunch,” he says abruptly. “The other day. I said you were pretty. You’re not. You’re beautiful.”

I stop, and then give a short laugh. “Okay, you must be—”

“Really tired. That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?”

I hesitate. Actually, it was. “How’d you know that? Hunter prowess?”

“It’s what you always say.”

I open my mouth, but before I can say anything else his phone chimes, startling us both. Luka holds it up, shows me the text.

Café Abbazia, Opatija. 16:00 Wednesday.

I don’t recognize the number except for the first digits of the country code. Croatia.

Ivan.

When Luka puts down the phone and takes my hand, there is no word for how disconcerted I feel.

No, I know how I feel. And I know what I feel like doing right this minute. And even though in all this time I haven’t once tried to match his ear to an egg or overanalyze the angle of his nose (106 degrees), some rational part of my brain is yelling at me that I also chose to trust Rolan—to jump in a car and drive all the way to Indiana with him—and look how that panned out.

I study Luka in the darkness, see his face again in the Greenville grocery, eyes locked on mine. Is that the gaze of someone searching for an ancient diary and ten million euros . . . or the recognition he once saw in my eyes?

Girls like me don’t get European guys who look like they should be dating models named Gisele. There is nothing desirable about me. I am not rich, I am smart. A nerd who watched
Firefly
’s lone season three times with friends whose names have been erased from my memory. But he and I? Unless I managed to glamour him with my Progeny supercharisma, I don’t see it. And I wonder if he’s working the plain-girl-lack-of-self-esteem angle on me. Because I agree it’s the best play—and far preferable to getting strangled with my shirt.

“So, obviously . . . you and I . . .”

He looks down.

“And you were okay with me forgetting you.”

“No.” He looks up, gaze intense. “I was not okay with that. But I was less okay with you being hunted by whoever stepped in after me.”

“Luka, I don’t know what—”

“I don’t expect anything,” he says and lets me go.

“I was going to say I don’t know where you’re from,” I lie.

“Oh.” He laughs softly. “Slovakia.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Audra Ellison,” I say with a lame smile.

“From Sioux City, Iowa,” he adds.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

We sit in awkward silence until he says something about getting an hour’s sleep and I agree. But my mind is racing.

How many conversations have we shared, he and I? Were we . . .
involved
involved . . . or just kind of involved? I’ve studied his face in my mind more times in the last hour than I care to admit. The curve of his lower lip, the hair teasing his jawline. And, okay, his ears. Once.

What was it like with him—with us? How did I ever manage any kind of relationship, let alone one with a hunter while chasing my mother across Europe—and how did he? I strain to remember anything about him, but he is gone. Like so many faces and details of a life that had no doubt once been full, a shell now in the absence of those who filled it.

Eventually, I must have slept, because the next thing I know Luka is gently shaking my shoulder.

“Audra, wake up.” I open my eyes as he retrieves an envelope from the glove compartment. “Time to go.”

14

“W
hat about the car?” I say, glancing back at it. Even in the forgiving light of dawn it looks like junk.

“We leave it,” he says, shoving the envelope in his pocket.

It’s nearly half a mile to the closest Walgreens. My hands are freezing, and my mouth tastes gross. My head feels worse. The hour’s sleep I got wasn’t nearly enough, and my new passport photo shows it. Luka prints our itineraries while I buy toiletries, and puts in a call to the passport agency for an appointment. And then we’re out the door and hurrying to the Red Line station. Luka dismantles his phone as he goes, breaking the SIM card in two. He tosses half into a sewer, the other half in an open cup of stale soda sitting in a trash bin. He hurls the phone itself into the back of a beeping garbage truck.

We take the Red Line of the L into the city, get off at Jackson station. By the time we wait an hour for the passport agency to open, my hands are shaking from the chill as much as from nerves.

Luka takes them between his own and rubs them. His fingers are warm. He’s been talking in low tones the last five minutes, though I couldn’t repeat a word of what he just said. I hate to say it, but I miss my meds.

“Just focus,” he says, low near my ear. I close my eyes. “It’s a Progeny thing, the jitters. You always had to work them off somehow—running, swimming, working some poor souvenir guy over for a deal. Just to get it out.”

“I feel like I’m going to climb out of my skin.”

“That’s good.”

“No. It’s not.”

He bows his head against mine. “You can do this. You have to. Or you’ll never get out of the country. You don’t have any contacts here, and the underground here is an inch deep. You’ll die if you stay. We both will.”

“You’re not helping,” I say. All I can think is that I’m going to be picked up for having an identity that doesn’t exist. Maybe, at least, I’ll be safe in jail.

The very nice man on the eighteenth floor takes my appointment confirmation, which isn’t for two weeks yet, and issues me a number. When it’s finally called, I pass my application and driver’s license beneath the agent’s window. She smiles at my story about our elopement to Amsterdam as Luka beams and puts his arm around me.

“And your birth certificate?” she says. I look at Luka. He slides me a page from the envelope. It’s a folded map of Greenville, Maine. I look blankly from the map to him. He shoves it into my hand.

“Here,” I say, not even attempting to smile as I hand it to the woman, fingers tapping a nervous SOS against the countertop.

My name is Emily Porter and I was born wherever you were, lady.

She takes the map, stares at it for a long moment, looks up at me. My heart stops.

“Well, what a coincidence! I’m from Ogallala, Nebraska, too!”

Luka and I make inane comments about fate, love, the size of the world.

“I’m just . . . trying to find your date of birth,” she says, finger scanning the map.

I point to Mooseless Lake but fumble for a date. I search desperately and then see the digital display behind her.

“Well, happy birthday!” she exhales with a laugh.

“Yup. Happy birthday to me.” I smile stupidly. “I’ve got my honey and my birthday cake, all together.”

Luka gives me a weird look as the lady returns my “documents” and tells us to come back at one o’clock.

We have enough time to buy a change of clothes, backpacks, sandwiches. We check in to a nearby motel long enough to take turns in the shower and change. The spray of hot water in that chipped and scuff-marked bathroom is the most luxurious thing I can remember. And I will never take brushing my teeth for granted again. I even have time for a half-hour nap, the experience at the passport agency having drained the last of my reserves. When I wake, Luka’s gotten me some ice for my lip, which is still a little swollen but already beginning to heal.

By the time we return at one, I wonder if there’ll be police waiting to detain me. Instead, I’m handed a spanking new passport.

Less than an hour later, we’re back on the L to O’Hare. And for the first time since we left Lafayette, Luka, in a new black sweater, face half-obscured by a hat, looks nervous.

“Keep your head down and phone on,” he says as we arrive, and then strides out of the train ahead of me.

I make my way to ticketing, through security, and catch a glimpse of him only once before reaching the gate. I sequester myself near the window and keep an eye out. Ten minutes before boarding I start to panic.

Despite my suggestion that he should have taken his shot at freedom while he had it, and the knowledge—if not the memory—that I have taken this trip before, I am afraid. Not of abandonment, or even of being alone. But at the prospect that the one tie I have to who I was has disappeared.

It occurs to me in that moment that, regardless of what she was to others, a part of me hates my faceless mother. Despises her for not going into hiding or doing whatever she had to in order to keep me. For leaving me with the inheritance of a cause that superseded her daughter, took my mother from me . . . and may, at any moment, end my life as well. Yes, I’m thinking only of myself, it’s selfish and I don’t care.

A sound chimes from behind me and I realize it’s the phone ringing in my backpack.

“I’m standing across the concourse, near the McDonald’s,” Luka says. I glance up, just under the brim of my cap, and find him facing the other direction, phone held to his ear.

“I see you,” I say, feeling instantly, stupidly better.

A pause, the sense that he might say more.

“See you in Amsterdam,” he says at last.

I nod, though I know he can’t see me, and line up to board.

*  *  *

M
idway through the flight I head to the bathroom and spot him near the back of the darkened cabin, hat pulled low on his head. Asleep like the other passengers around him.

I emerge from the lavatory to an empty galley, having
suggested
to the two attendants on duty that it’s time for drink refills in coach. Meanwhile, I’ve started the slow climb out of my skin again. I’m just pouring myself an unsteady cup of coffee with a full inch of cream when the curtain parts.

I glance over my shoulder.

Luka says nothing as he steps behind me. His fingers cover mine on the cup. He takes the coffeepot from my other hand. His breath is warm on the curl of my ear as he pours, steam rising in the too-dry air. I close my eyes, the cup weightless in my hand. A bead of sweat slips down my sternum.

A passenger comes through the curtain and Luka moves away. But electric verve has fired my veins, and the moment he moves I gulp the coffee, burning my tongue.

I’m aware of him as I return to my seat. Glance back once. Know he sees me.

I tell myself I can’t sleep after that. Try to watch a movie—

And I am gone.

I wake just before landing, a crimp in my neck. Rub my eyes and grab the napkin off my drink tray.

The guy next to me has apparently finished the entire Steven James novel he started before takeoff. There’s an in-flight magazine on the tray in front of me, open to the crossword in the back, a pen resting in the fold. But what catches my eye is not the magazine itself, but the smattering of
T
s scattered across the page.

No, not
T
s, with their thin middles and thicker ends. Tao crosses.

That, and a drawing of some kind of dog—a German shepherd, maybe—inside a circle.

I slide the magazine closer. What the heck?

“Excuse me,” I say to the man beside me, offering him the pen. “Is this yours?”

“Yes, thank you.” He slips it in his pocket. I wait several minutes and then tear out the page, wad it up, and drop it in the melted ice of my drink just in time to hand it to the flight attendant upon landing.

On the other side of customs, I make my way through Amsterdam’s airy Schiphol airport, past duty-free stores, open eateries, the casino. It’s early morning, the terminal bustling with the promise of a new day. But I’m not taking in the neat little sandwiches in the café cases, the tulips with their easy-carry boxes, the stores selling postcards of the famous Red-Light District. I’m looking for the hat obscuring that honey-dark hair, coffee on the brain.

My phone rings, and I glance around, full panorama.

“Hi,” he says.

A half hour into the next flight, I make my way back to the empty galley. This time he’s waiting for me. He pulls me toward the window, arms winding around my waist, mouth already on mine.

*  *  *

B
y the time we lay over in Munich, pass through the chaos that is Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, and land in the seaport of Trieste, I am exhausted, strangely elated, and thoroughly distracted.