The Progeny (22 page)

We let go several blocks east and run down the side of the street. Piotrek jumps up onto the post of a chain fence, teeters, then balances like a ballerina. I laugh and then gasp as Claudia leaps for him. He hops at least five feet to the next post just as she lands where he was perched a mere second ago, and then Claudia’s chasing him the better part of a city block from post to post, one long stride at a time.

“He’s crazy.” Luka laughs, and I nod in agreement. But my heart races with them as we run to catch up.

On the very last post, Piotrek jumps into the street—right toward an oncoming car. I scream, too late, as he skirts across the car’s roof, landing on his feet with an audible chuckle. The car screeches to a halt.

“That was you,” Claudia says, her finger pointed at me. And only then do I realize my mental shout for the driver to
stop!

By the time we find ourselves back in the city square, the sky is indigo, threatening dawn. That can’t be right.

“I know a place,” Piotrek says, slowing to a walk. We’re at least a mile from the upper city on a narrow side road. He leads us to a tiny restaurant. The windows are dark, a lone light shining from a back room, maybe the kitchen itself. Piotrek slides his mask up, presses his forehead to the window. When nothing happens, Claudia turns to stare intently through the window beside him. A minute later we’re admitted by an older man who welcomes us as though we were expected—even though he’s still in his nightshirt.

By the time we sit down I feel the soreness of my feet. My lower back aches. My ears are still ringing.

I sigh and slump back in my chair as the proprietor comes with coffee, not even caring what Piotrek is apparently ordering for the table.

And then I smile up at the ceiling. A laugh rises from my chest. Claudia removes her mask. She looks spent and sated at once.

Luka groans.

“A night like that could kill a man,” he says. And I doubt he’s feigning his fatigue.

The proprietor’s wife, a plump woman in her sixties, emerges a few minutes later with sugar and a pitcher of thick cream. She’s still in her dressing gown. Piotrek murmurs at her, catches her hand and kisses it. She blushes, and then laughs like a girl.

“I miss surfing in Hvar.” Claudia sighs. “A splinter of the court used to meet near the coast about a year and a half ago. We’d drop clothes on the way to the beach. Swim until dawn. Go surfing in the morning.”

“We surfed?” I say.

“You didn’t. We did,” Claudia says. “You were a miserable surfer.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Pio, didn’t you have to give her mouth-to-mouth at least once?”

“She loved it,” he says, sliding a lazy smile my way.

“Hey. We never saw Tibor,” I say belatedly, a weird languor like fatigue taking over my limbs.

“No. But he saw us,” Claudia says.

“Everyone was costumed. How could he know I was there?”

She leans in, her eyes shining.

“Audra.
Everyone
knows you were there.”

*  *  *

L
uka and I stagger into Claudia’s flat just before dawn, shed shoes, jewelry, masks. Claudia and Piotrek arrive a short time later, having taken a different route home.

Claudia chatters in incoherent exhaustion before disappearing down the hall, the two cups of espresso she’s just made forgotten on the counter. I swear I hear her bump into the door of the bedroom.

“Good night,” Piotrek says as he retrieves the espresso, a tiny cup in each hand. He pauses just long enough that I think he might say something, but then tilts his head and strides down the hall after Claudia.

I am by now more spent than I can ever remember being. And though I know I will be sore tomorrow, I am, for the first time in weeks—possibly years—at peace.

Luka peels off his jacket, loosens his tie.

He’s obviously exhausted, but I know he is acutely aware of my slightest movement, the breath I have yet to exhale. I have felt his eyes on me all night.

In three strides I’m across the room. My mouth finds his. His arms tighten around my waist.

“I think,” he murmurs, lifting me off my feet, “that you’re going to kill me.”

*  *  *

W
e return to court that night. And then the next, and the next. I wake every afternoon to a ringing in my ears, the echo of electronic music still drumming in my veins, and rise in anticipation of the frenetic melee.

We’ve acquired a minor court of our own: namely, a girl named Ana—the Mad Hatter of the first night—and her sibling, Nino, who is half as vocal as Piotrek and twice as crazy. The only two to ever share their faces let alone their names with us. They’ve crashed here with us the last two mornings, collapsing on the living room sofa, only to disappear sometime around noon.

I’ve come, by now, to recognize each of their trademark persuasions: Claudia, with her haughty demands, casting the desire to please her like a spell. Piotrek and his unspoken ability to make anyone feel beautiful. Ana, with a fragility that would make the most feeble old lady leap in front of a truck to save her; and Nino, with his danger. By now I’ve seen more than one policeman hightail it away from him with a glance, including last night after he rode a stolen skateboard down the funicular to the lower city.

“He’s going to die,” Piotrek said, blinking into the darkness—before he shrugged and followed suit.

But it’s Ana who finds the gentle place in my heart. For every way that Claudia is sharp, Ana is soft. For every word Claudia says, there is a mere cant of Ana’s eyes. Polish, like Piotrek, she is a waif of a girl, a sparrow in Cosplay boots with precariously high heels, tremoring like a leaf on a stem.

“Nino’s going to marry me at Christmas,” she says, touching a thin silver ring on her finger. She can’t be more than sixteen. But for all his lunatic ways, Nino is a different man around her. Gentle, near-reverent, as though she were not a kooky girl in striped leggings but a pale Madonna with anime eyes, always yelling for one of us to “look after Ana,” before embarking on his next crazy stunt.

“Are any siblings actual siblings?” I say to Claudia one night.

“A few,” she says. “But blood relations are rare in Utod circles. Most of us are orphans, after all.”

In all this time, Tibor has yet to make himself known. I don’t care. For the first time since I woke up in the Center, I feel that I am home.

*  *  *

“Y
ou know, there are bigger courts,” Claudia says one morning as we eat cold pizza after Luka, more haggard by the night, has already collapsed in bed. She has reclaimed the sofa in the absence of Ana and Nino, and stretches like a cat.

“Bigger than Zagreb?” I say around a mouthful of food.

“Budapest is bigger. So is Moscow. We should go. Court’s moving in a few days, anyway.”

“Moving where?” I say, slightly panicked.

She shrugs. “It changes. There’s a communiqué that goes out every month in the homeless magazine.”

“A print magazine?” I say. She nods. “Isn’t that risky?”

“There’s a code if you know where to look,” Piotrek says, slouched against an armchair on the floor. “The magazine is sold in every Croatian city by the homeless, who keep the profits. Do a good deed, find a safe place. Because we”—he lays a hand on his chest—“are the ultimate homeless.”

“Who puts out the magazine?”

“The Franciscans,” Piotrek says. “Our truest brothers for centuries, which is a scandal when you consider that Erzsebet Bathory—Elizabeth, as you say—was a Protestant. A Calvinist, even. And that the Habsburg king, a Catholic, became Holy Roman Emperor before her death. Tsk tsk.”

“Does the Church know the extent of the Franciscans’ involvement?”

“They are not so involved today, except as helpers.”

“But the monk, Brother Goran, who gave me the key . . .”

“This is the first I have ever heard of a Progeny monk. But who is to say what is happening with those Ivan knew before he died? Who could ever understand Ivan, or those he ran with?”

But I have heard the same said of my mother. And of me.

“The Scions are far more powerful today than the Church,” Piotrek says. “What can a few Franciscans do to them? Yes, a few may be murdered. But even the Scions fear for their souls. The Church is well funded by the rich Dispossessed,” he says, wiggling his brows.

“You won’t get to heaven like this, Pio,” Claudia says.

“I am Utod. My heaven is here,” he says, spreading his arms.

“This isn’t heaven,” Claudia says, sitting up. “And we can’t go from court to court forever. Even Ivan said as much.”

I glance down at my plate, no longer hungry. It’s the first time we’ve talked about Ivan in days. I’ve been all too willing to forget the questions he left behind—including my reason for dying.

Piotrek shrugs. “We can go to Istria for a while, if you like.”

“I don’t want to go to Istria. I want to
live,
” Claudia says, shrill.

“I’ve actually never felt move alive,” I say honestly.

“You call this living? Scurrying in the dark like rats?”

“I thought you loved court!” I say, feeling strangely betrayed.

“Look at me,” she says. Her hair is askew, her makeup smeared. In her Queen of Bloody Hearts getup, she looks vaguely like a crackhead. “I’m eighteen. I feel forty. Some days I wake up and wish I hadn’t.”

I glance at Piotrek, waiting for him to intervene. Leaning against the armchair, his back is bent like that of an old man.

“I say we leave, see the world!” Claudia says.

I glance between them. “You can’t be serious?” I say.

“Of course I’m serious,” Claudia snaps.

“Where shall we go?” Piotrek says with a slight smile.

“São Paulo,” Claudia says. “Madagascar. Egypt.”

“Mother Russia!” Piotrek says in a thick Russian accent.

“China,” Claudia says.

“China takes money.”
And passports,
I think—a thing Luka inquired about earlier today. In private, I wondered aloud why we needed them at all, given my success at the passport agency.

“You can’t
persuade
a check-in kiosk or a customs camera,” he said. And I had to give him that.

“Money is easy to get,” Piotrek says. “We are Utod. The world is our orchard.” But his expression is weary.

“Oyster,” I say.

“I don’t like shellfish.”

“So it’s settled. China,” Claudia says. “What will you do about Luka?”

Do I imagine it or do she and Piotrek look at me at once?

“Bring him with me, what else?”

“Suit yourself,” Claudia says after a beat, untangling her legs onto the floor.

A few moments after she has gone down the hallway to collapse into bed, Piotrek rolls his head toward me.

“She gets this way every few months. Wanting to leave like a restless lover.”

“Do you ever? Leave, I mean.”

He shrugs a shoulder, eyes half-lidded. “For days. A week, maybe. At most, two. But we always come back.”

“You don’t want to see the world?”

“Of course. But for as much as we say we want to live, we are far too good at merely existing. And the underground court is that, because it means safety. And so we create our own world, every night. Again and again.” His gaze is distant. He sounds as tired as he looks. “Claudia believes that life is short. She wants to consume it. But you cannot consume life in safety. And in the end, we want safety more, even, than life.”

I think, not for the first time, that maybe this is what it’s like to have a terminal disease. To know that every minute is just one in a limited and dwindling supply and that you’d better squeeze some life in while you still have the choice. No wonder the image of my mother in the rain has never left me since the monastery. The moment is all we’ve ever had.

He rolls to his side, gets up, and then pauses. “But she is right. Perhaps we should go a few days early. Wait for court in the next city.”

“We can’t leave,” I say. “At least not yet. We haven’t gotten our passports.” And the truth is, I no longer care if we get them at all.

“I will contact Jester tomorrow,” Piotrek says, before ambling down the hall.

To my relief, Jester is silent. Claudia sings the next evening as she powders her face, all talk of China forgotten.

25

P
ounding on the door wakes me, impossibly, from sleep. My limbs are leaden, weighted to the bed. I glance at the old digital clock across the room on the dresser: 5:07
P.M
.

I push up in a panic, look around me. My clothes are where I left them, a black star of a mask, a riot of blond braids splayed across a hat that sat last night like a sinking ghost ship on top of my head. It’s the outfit I laid out while asleep the morning before. Aside from that single night of closet raiding, I’ve apparently been too exhausted to experience any new sleepwalking adventures . . . at least as far as I know.

I stretch an arm across the bed, find it empty. I never heard Luka rise.

“Audra!” More pounding. Claudia. I untangle myself, trip from bed.

“What?” I say, hoarse. I yank open the door. Claudia stands there in a plain black sweater and pedal pushers, Audrey Hepburn glasses on her head. It’s bizarre, seeing her in something so normal—possibly her weirdest costume yet—until I recall her penchant for watching artists in the park on weekend afternoons.

She holds a phone toward me.

“What’s this?” I take it from her, realizing I never washed the makeup off my face, including the feathered eyelash that clings like a dead spider to the corner of my eye. I peel it off, stick it to the doorjamb, and take the phone from her. Squint at a single line of text:

T says: Bring the talon tonight.

“Who’s this from?” I say, confused.

“Tibor, through Jester.”

I give her a weird look as Luka appears in the hallway. He’s freshly showered, wet hair tucked behind his ear.

“Tibor wants my pendant?” I’ve worn it every night. Have not missed the eyes that stray toward it each time I arrive, the words spoken to cupped ears behind the pounding music. Or the following our predawn wilds have acquired as we spill from the underground well before first light. If they—or any of the faceless others—know who I am, they’ve said nothing about it. Or at least not in front of me.