The Progeny (21 page)

“I envy you,” I say, pulling his arm around me. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“After you came back to me, you said something about how we’ve both been slaves to a past we didn’t know how to leave behind. The day you had your procedure, a part of me was jealous. Because just like that, it was gone. You were free.”

“Maybe not as free as I thought.”

“For a time you were. And I felt envious and stupidly abandoned. I didn’t expect to feel the way I did.”

“Losing your identity is no picnic, either.”

“Your identity isn’t you, Audra.”

But what else is there, when your past, your roles, your upbringing and parents and culture—your very name—are stripped away? What’s left? So far my answer has been: not much.

Eventually I doze, if only for a half hour, afraid of what my sleepwalking self might do, unable to turn off my mind.

24

W
hen Claudia said I could use whatever I wanted in the closet, I didn’t realize the sheer trove of weirdness I’d walk into.
Alice in Wonderland
skirts, pin-striped corsets, gladiator sandals, straitjacket shirts, black shorts with fringe to the ankle, velvet bodices covered with timepieces—or cocktail umbrellas or buckles—purple wigs, and masquerade masks. Miniature hats that look like shrunken-head versions of something from the Kentucky Derby. It’s as though Cirque du Soleil, a goth ball, and a gaming convention all crash-landed in the same eight-by-three-foot twilight zone that is Claudia’s spare closet.

“What is all this?” I say when she comes to check on me. And then I pull up short. She’s outfitted in a pair of leather riding breeches, an abbreviated tuxedo coat, and a tiny top hat with a veil over a fall of pink hair.

“Clothes,” she says, as though I were the village idiot. “You can’t meet Tibor dressed like that.”

“Who’s Tibor?” I say, exasperated.

“The Zagreb Prince. Who answers only to Nikola.”

“Nikola?”

“The Prince of Budapest. The oldest court.”

None of this means anything to me.

“I wasn’t aware that I had to look like Lady Gaga to meet him.”

She huffs and starts rifling through the closet, pulling things from hangers, tossing them on the bed.

“What about the passports?” I say.

“Jester’s working on it.”

“Jester?”

“You didn’t think I could just go pick one up at the pharmacy down the street?” she snaps.

A loud exclamation sounds from the other room. Luka. Piotrek talks over him in protest.

“You both need to change your attitude,” Claudia says, getting on her hands and knees to dig in the back of the closet. She tosses out a pair of boots.

“So you want me to look like a freak.”

She gets up and stares at me, indignant in pink hair, and I could almost laugh at her. She throws a pair of blood-red velvet pants with zippers down both sides at me, hard.

“It’s almost ten. You’d better hurry.”

I let out a long exhale as she laces me into a black corset, fits me in a purple wig. It’s piled high with curls and topped with a giant black rose. She brushes fuchsia lipstick on my mouth, ties a black mask behind my head, and attaches a pair of golden chandeliers to my ears.

“Well, well,” she says, looking me over as I zip up the pants, almost catching my skin in the metal teeth twice.

“They fit.” More or less. Good thing they stretched or I wouldn’t be able to sit without popping a zipper. Claudia’s at least a size smaller than I am.

“They should. They were yours,” she says, tossing me the boots.

I give her a weird look, but she’s rummaging through a dresser drawer.

“What happens when someone realizes they can’t sense Luka?” I say, chewing my lip.

“You’re ruining your lipstick! There will be too many Progeny there for anyone to realize they can’t sense him.” She pauses. “Stay close to him if we leave with anyone. Shouldn’t be hard for you to do, I think?”

The last thing she hands me is a heavy pendant on a long chain. A bronze, three-toed talon. The Bathory coat of arms.

I turn it over in my hand. “Was this mine, too?”

She looks away. “It was your mother’s. You gave it to me before you left.” The hurt is there, I can see it.

“I’m sorry,” I say, thinking that between her and Luka, I’m surrounded by abandonment issues varied only by circumstance, all of my making.

I clasp the pendant tightly before lowering the chain carefully over my wig. As I do, I catch sight of the mirror and start. It’s not the first time in my life I’ve failed to recognize myself.

*  *  *

I
give a nervous glance around as we step out into the night. On the street, Piotrek pauses to lean on the silver handle of an elaborate cane. A black-and-white cravat is tied at his neck, his face obscured by a mask that hangs down from the edge of a top hat brimmed with feathers. Luka, apparently, has managed to hold out for the most part. He’s dressed in a black jacquard tuxedo jacket over an equally black shirt, black pants, heavy boots. A thin jet tie hangs from a tight, smart knot at his throat. His mask is plain, and clings to the contours of his cheekbones. As we make our way up the street, he pulls the generous cowl of a shapeless black trench coat over his head. At first I think he looks like a hooded monk until he turns his head; from this angle, he might just be the grim reaper.

Claudia loops her arm through Piotrek’s and leads us toward the Lego church. There’s a couple milling ahead, a man and woman in period costume. There’s another pair farther down the street—a noblewoman in petticoats, and a knight with a shield across his back.

“If we were trying to look like them, I think we missed the mark,” I murmur. Luka reaches for my hand and clasps it over his arm.

“Have I told you today that you’re beautiful?” he whispers. “Even with purple hair.”

“Well,
you
look like a vampire.”

More actors stroll down the street: a peddler with a cart, a cap pulled low over his head, a peasant woman in an apron.

Then it hits me. I can
feel
them. My pulse ratchets up a notch, so loud in my ears that at first I don’t hear, let alone see, the young couple of tourists who approaches our foursome.

“Can we get a picture with you?” the girl asks. Claudia smiles and turns toward her, arm looped with Piotrek’s. Her scarlet lips glisten in the wan light of a real gas streetlamp, and I blink; with the pink hair and rhinestones raining from her ears, the netting of her veil like myriad tiny windows over the pale skin of her cheeks, she’s dazzling.

I almost
persuade
the girl to forget the picture, recalling what Luka said about photos and Progeny. But every one of us is masked.

Hiding in plain sight.

“Who are you supposed to be?” the girl says after snapping a selfie with them.

“Run away,”
Claudia whispers, before diving into a cartwheel. Piotrek tips his hat toward her just before the girl literally takes off running.

Luka glances at me sidelong.

“How can they keep from attracting attention this way, masked or not?” I hiss. “All a hunter would have to do is look for the freak parade at midnight!”

He shakes his head. “There are pop-up masquerades all over Europe,” he says. “People got tired of expensive clubs, started taking to cemeteries and ruins. See those people headed toward the square?” He points toward a group of costumed partygoers.

I do, and I can’t sense them at all—unlike the actors, who nod in our direction before we’re even within speaking distance. Claudia skips to the peasant man’s side, whispers in his ear. He chuckles, as though she’s told him a joke—and maybe she has. When she turns away, something glints in her hand. She takes Piotrek’s arm and pivots, pulling him around as though they were dancing all the way to the corner.

Two blocks north of the church, the streets are darker, the buildings in various states of repair—one pristinely restored, the plaster of the next one leprously crumbling away. Claudia and Piotrek pause before the beaten-up double door of a more decrepit building—a large residence that seems to extend to the corner, the windows of which are shuttered and painted over with graffiti. With a quick glance around, she fits a key into the lock and lets us in.

She marches swiftly down the hallway ahead of Piotrek, searching the walls. At the corner, she pauses to touch the peeling paint. There, faintly, is the sign that looks like two towers. And then she’s leading us down the hall to the door of an apartment that looks like it ought to be condemned.

“Where are we going?” Luka says finally, his hand tight around my own.

“There is a story that there were once tunnels from St. Mark’s Church to the castle Medvedgrad, where the evil Black Queen threw her lovers from the walls when she was done with them,” Claudia says, eyes glinting. “There are rumored tunnels all over this area, including Visoka Street, where the new president has elected to move her residence.” She smiles mysteriously and opens the door.

I hear it then: the faint pound of bass like a distant heartbeat, as though it might be coming from an apartment one building over.

Or from underground.

We follow her to the cellar, but instead of opening onto a dirty floor, the stair broadens into a tunnel—one hacked out of the original cellar, by the look of it. Electric lights are strung along a ceiling so low that everyone but Claudia has to duck beneath them. I can hear it more distinctly now, the pulse of European trance—coming from somewhere in the distance.

We walk, stooped over, for at least fifty yards until I start to worry that I might seriously have a claustrophobic attack. Just as I’m about to say I want to go back, the tunnel ends at a door. It’s obviously old, bound by iron and guarded by a man in a mask and smart black tuxedo. Without speaking, he fits a key into the lock. The minute he throws the door open on a cavernous underground chamber, we are assaulted by heavy bass. More than that, I actually have to take a step back at the sheer volume of Progeny ahead of us. It hits me like thunder, and I grab for Luka, who steadies me with an arm around the waist.

The man steps aside, head tilted as though he were a butler, but straightens the instant he takes notice of the pendant hanging midway down my chest. At first I think he’s staring
at
my chest, and have just started to snarl when he steps back and abruptly bows low.

I glance at Luka, who swiftly ushers me through.

“That was weird,” I say, but my words are swallowed by tech-heavy music, the beat interrupting the natural rhythm of my heart as the swarm of bodies begins to jerk, ghoulish beneath a shuttered strobe.

Is it my imagination, or have people turned to stare? One, and then five, and then twenty. They haven’t stopped moving, but the laughter I thought I saw in thrown-back heads gives way to frozen masks swiveled in our direction.

I look around, expecting to see a bar, but there’s no such thing—just a tattoo artist working on a costumed figure reclined in an old barber’s chair in the corner. I get it; the pulse of so many Progeny in one location is more intoxicating than any cocktail, but in none of the usual ways. Goose bumps rise on my arms, climb to my shoulders like an army of ants.

Luka pulls me close, and I imagine, more than hear, him telling me to breathe. But every time I do, I feel as though I’m inhaling the electric pulse in choking particles. Purple lights flash over the chiseled ceiling until I feel like they’re going off behind my eyes. Exposed flesh all around us lights up in glowing tattoos: three claws on the shoulder of a woman, tearing skin down the bare chest of another. The dragon, eating its tail, constricting the neck of another in an ultraviolet choker.

Ahead of us, Claudia has thrown herself into Piotrek’s arms, arching back so far it’s a miracle her wig hasn’t come off. A scaled dragon, invisible until now, dips into her décolleté. She drops her arms back like a blissed-out rag doll as a Mad Hatter in red stockings takes Piotrek by the shoulders.

Luka pulls me toward him, and the beat is undeniable, infectious, far too demanding. The only thing that feels better at all is to
move
. The lights go out completely, fluorescent lashes, masks, and fingernails glowing in a bobbing frenzy in the pitch-black around us. I hold tight to Luka’s neck. His trench coat is missing. He’s warm, clothing already damp beneath my arm. Tension, fear, and confusion have welled up in me at once, and I feel it all sweating through my pores like a demon that must be exorcised here, now, as the strobe shocks the black cavern back to life.

It does not stop.
I
cannot stop. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with a Greek comedy mask, a cap with bells falling down over pale, gilded cheeks. He kneels so close to me I fall onto his back. Hands lift me onto a set of shoulders. I flail once and close my eyes. I am floating, a dozen hands grasping my arms, back, and legs. And for the first time since I woke up in the Center, I do not think of danger. I do not think at all. There is only the beat of surrender, and breath and bliss. I open my eyes on a ceiling raining blue light, the strobe flashing like lightning.

Amerie loved rain . . .

And for that one, perfect, ruined moment, she did not worry about the future, and the past was washed away.

I barely feel my feet touch the floor, belatedly realize I have landed on my toes in the boots with the precarious heels that should have crippled me by now. But I feel no pain. There is nothing but this rapid burn of everything I have been carrying with me for far, far too long.

I am alive for the first time since I woke up in the Center’s clinical white room. Perhaps ever.

I don’t know how long I go like that—a half hour, an hour, two.

The Mad Hatter comes to cup my face with a smile. She kisses my cheek before melting away. Claudia grabs my hand, pulls me through the thinning press. And then we are rushing into a tunnel, up a stair, and onto the street. Piotrek veers left onto a main thoroughfare, all but abandoned this time of night. There’s an old blue tram rolling toward us. He leaps up onto the outer step, and Claudia has followed suit. They’re out of their minds, I think, even as my foot finds a hold on the second car, my fingers fighting for purchase as if I were a climber on a sheer rock face. I glance back, purple hair in my eyes, to find Luka laughing at the end of the car.