The Progeny (27 page)

The resolve I felt ten minutes ago has frayed to a single thread. And I know if I allow myself to think about Ana—fragile, so lost without Nino—I will come completely undone.

“Turn here,” Jester says from the front seat, laptop open on her knees. “We need to switch cars. I’m lining one up now.”

“Why are you doing this?” I blurt out. “Tibor volunteered you, but you don’t strike me as anyone’s lackey.”

“ ‘Lackey’?” she says. Claudia translates. I had no idea she spoke French.

“Tibor’s been trying to gather information on Nikola for years. It’s something of an addiction to me now. I am sorry for you, but this is a gold mine to me. Katia was my sister.”

“I need a chart,” I mutter. “Between ‘siblings,’ real siblings, and love interests, the underground’s worse than Arkansas.”

Piotrek frowns in the rearview mirror. “I don’t understand.”

“Does it seem strange to anyone but me that other Progeny are willing to kidnap or brutalize their own for Nikola?” I say. “For someone willing to kill his own people?”

“He is the Prince of Budapest,” Claudia says quietly. “He is very powerful. More so today, as he’s become so elusive. He’s more a myth than a man to most Progeny—practically a god to young Utod like Ana. You’re the only person I’ve heard of, other than Tibor, ever speaking to him. And yes. Every prince has the authority to remove any Progeny he considers dangerous. Now you understand why I was afraid.”

“So court is safe as long as you don’t stand out enough to get killed.”

“I’ve altered your facial nodes in the police database,” Jester says. “It may help for a while. Meanwhile, here is the news article: ‘Audra Ellison, wanted for the murders of Nino Kolar and Imre Tomić and the kidnapping of fifteen-year-old Ana Gudac.’ ”

“Kidnapping?”

“It says you drugged and kidnapped her after murdering her partner in a fit of jealousy. There’s no mention of anyone else by name. Only that you may be traveling with others.”

At least I’ve been singled out. It isn’t a guarantee of anyone else’s safety, but for now, at least, they’re not in the news.

I don one of Claudia’s wigs before we leave the Skoda at a car rental lot and switch to a larger Peugeot kombi complete with expressway stickers.

Fifteen minutes later, Jester’s got the etching of the last symbol on my back propped against her laptop screen, where she’s re-creating it by hand, muttering at every bump through a construction zone.

If Jester cracks that symbol, I will finally know what I’ve been protecting all this time. The thing that Nikola and the Scions alike want desperately enough to kill for. A weapon, Nikola called it. Evidence that most likely proves Bathory’s guilt—why else would I have erased it? What makes Nikola so sure, then, that he can use it against the Scions?

But right now my biggest question is how to wield that same weapon against him.

“You said you’ve been gathering information on Nikola for years,” I say to Jester. “Like what?”

“Anything. What courts he appears at. Who his confidants are. Few have the courage to openly oppose him, but Tibor has never trusted him. Not since the rumor began that Nikola wanted to make a census. You can imagine the kind of alarm that would create, how dangerous that would be in any hand—even one of our own. Nikola argued that the Historian already has such a census in the form of a genealogy dating back centuries. Or, at least, that has been the rumor forever. Every time a hunter makes a kill and harvests a memory, a little piece of that puzzle gets filled in for the current and previous generation. It’s how they know to assign new hunters to marks as new Progeny are discovered.”

“A death map,” Claudia says.

“With such a genealogy the Scions can trace bloodlines for hundreds of years to the children of Elizabeth we descend from: Anastasia, who was illegitimate, and Pál—the only male to pass the legacy, which he received from Elizabeth herself. The Franciscans kept such a thing for us once until the practice was abolished, two hundred years ago, when the genealogy was stolen and many Utod died.”

“What could Nikola possibly gain from a census?” Luka says. “Except for the potential to wipe out an entire underground?”

“Just that,” I say. “The potential to wipe out an entire underground.”

But why?

“No, there is more,” Jester says. “Because the legacy is passed through the mother, the children of Elizabeth’s illegitimate daughter are more powerful than those of her legitimate son. But they are also far more rare. They were the highest-priority targets of the Scions for centuries, the most hunted of the hunted. Tibor believes that Nikola is searching for some missing remnant of Anastasia’s line.”

“More powerful how?”

“No one knows. The bloodline died out or went into hiding nearly a century ago.” Jester lifts her shoulders. “But Nikola’s been obsessed with it.”

Could that be what Nikola thinks I found? Some remnant of that line? Maybe it’s never been the diary after all!

“For what purpose?”

She shrugs. “Who knows? He’s a madman.”

“And Tibor isn’t as crazy as he lets on,” I murmur.

“No. On the contrary, he’s frighteningly intelligent, with a deep ability to understand the psychology of others.”

“Crazy or not, Nikola’s no idiot, either. How did he become Prince of Budapest, anyway? How does anyone?”

“A matter of connection and charisma.”

“All the Progeny have charisma,” I say.

“Yes, but the underground is the ultimate experiment in leadership. You know who the true leaders are—others talk about them in mythic terms. People follow them, if only out of curiosity. Why do you think I am here?”

“You said yourself: because of Katia.”

“For the excitement, no? We can’t all jump off high buildings,” she says wryly. “And everyone is talking about you for days now. We Utod have our own pop culture, being comprised mostly of young people. You are a celebrity.”

It’s true that Progeny culture—court itself—is practically a cult of youth. In that way, I suppose, the legends about Elizabeth Bathory have lived on—forever young, charismatic, beautiful . . . and just as walled up as ever.

“Nikola was nothing, once,” Jester continues. “But he was afraid of nothing. That will get you far at court. But it was becoming close to your mother that put him on the map.”

“How?”

“He became a zealot. Much as Amerie was rumored to have been. And zealots are idolized at court, because they are filled with passion. They are alive. They are out doing zealot things! Like having their memories erased.”

“If you’re here for fame by association, I strongly suggest you rethink your motives,” I mutter.

A blip sounds from Jester’s computer, and a large gold version of the logo she entered off my sketch balloons onto the screen.

“Aha,” she says. “Here it is.”

I had forgotten about the computer, searching in silence all this time. Now, at sight of the symbol, I think I might be ill.

Luka’s hand tightens around mine as though sensing the sick lurch in my gut. He’s been quiet, no doubt upset at what I said last night. Maybe even reconsidering his promise to protect me no matter what. And while I selfishly hope that’s not the case—would be lost, actually, if he left me now—a part of me can’t possibly blame him.

I also feel guilty for wanting him to stay when I know Ana is somewhere on this earth alone.

“This is the Glagolitic symbol for life,” Jester says with some surprise. “And . . . it is also the logo for Der Tresorraum in Vienna—a private vault unaffiliated with any bank.” She taps the screen and looks back at me. “How did you know it was Vienna?”

“Luka figured it out,” I say, glancing at him. But he is tense, and silent.

*  *  *

A
uerspergstrasse, Vienna, is lined with Baroque buildings, their columns set into outer walls, elaborate banisters trimming the roofs. Rich, yes. But not at all how I pictured the setting for a high-tech vault. I check my wig in the rearview mirror, make sure that a section falls over my face. It’s weird to have long hair, to be nearly my natural color again.

“This vault offers anonymous safety deposit boxes,” Jester says. “You cannot get this even in Zurich anymore. However long you took the box out for—one year, ten, thirty—it wasn’t cheap. But here is why you did it: There’s no identification required. Just your pass code and biometrics.”

“I don’t like this,” Luka says. “Nikola had no choice but to let you find it. He can’t fake your biometrics.”

“Which means I’ll be fine,” I say.
At least until I get in.

Piotrek looks into the mirror at me. “We will let you and Luka out on that side street and circle back in fifteen minutes, and then every five after that.”

“I’m going alone,” I say.

“You can’t,” Claudia says. “Luka, don’t let her!”

But he does not insist. An effort, I know, to try to prove his motives. But his jaw is twitching.

“We’ve already passed more traffic cameras than I can count,” I say. “And for all we know, Nikola’s got someone watching the building. A second person is just another opportunity to identify one of us. I’ll find a different way out, meet you there on the back of the block,” I say, pointing to Lange Gasse street on Jester’s screen.

“There’s a hotel on the corner,” Jester says. “We can meet there. You’re on your own till you get out; I don’t dare try to access their system while you’re in there except for emergency. Remember what I said about the cameras. Alter your stride if you can.”

“Call at the first sign of trouble,” Luka says, something frantic in his gaze.

“I promise,” I say, and mean it.

I slide on my shades as we pull to a stop and quickly get out, belting Claudia’s borrowed jacket around me. I can
feel
them pull away, leaving me strangely bereft and all too conscious of the fact that I am, for the first time in days, alone.

I turn the corner and walk past the Auersperg palace at a swift clip, pretend to answer a call, my hand cupped around the microphone, obscuring my mouth and cheek. The section that is Auerspergstrasse is only two blocks, but it’s part of a much longer thoroughfare regulated by cameras. The fact that Parliament is visible a block east from here just past a roundabout doesn’t help.

Der Tresorraum might as well be a bank or even a museum by the look of it, except for the modern glass front doors. Not what I would have expected for a vault. I carry on my fake conversation as I pass beneath the camera at the entrance.

The interior is sparse, at modern odds with the Baroque architecture out front. A receptionist sits behind a desk in an anteroom beside a large steel statue that looks vaguely like a spiral tunnel.

“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”
the man at the desk says as I pocket my phone.

“Do you speak English?” I say.

“Yes, of course. May I help you?” he says without smiling. I wonder if he can hear the pulse pounding in my ears.

“I’d like to access my box.”

He rises. “This way, please.”

He escorts me through a door, which he opens with a key card. Down the hall past several secure corridors, he admits me to a windowless chamber. It houses nothing more than a desk, the woman sitting behind it, and the unmistakable entrance to a giant vault set in the adjacent wall.

The woman gestures to a pad on her desk.
“Bitte,”
she says, and I assume by the outline on the screen that I’m supposed to lay my hand on it. I wonder if she sees that my fingers are trembling, the moist smear my palm leaves against the screen.

And then a lock clacks on the vault’s steel door, and she crosses the room to haul it open for me.

The “vault” is nothing but a large room housing two counters, each with a metal plate in the middle and a standing touch screen.

“There are two rooms in the back for your privacy,” she says, pointing like a flight attendant.

The skin of my neck feels clammy against the wig. I don’t take off my shades, having noted the cameras throughout the vault. So much for anonymity, I think, moving swiftly to the nearest counter as soon as the woman is gone. I select English, key in my code as it prompts me. Tap my fingers on the counter. Wonder, for the first time since Jester’s search, if the Glagolitic symbol for life on my spine was just that—a reminder to live. If the numbers above it mean something else, have no correlation to this place whatsoever.

The plate in the counter abruptly slides open. A biometric thirteen-by-fifteen-inch box arrives on an elevator platform. I stare at it for a long moment before picking it up. It is surprisingly light, but it might as well weigh a ton. It carries the mass of multiple lives and has cost me my past and possibly my future as well.

I carry the box to one of the rooms, which lights up as I enter, and lock the door behind me. Set the box on the table, remove my shades. Sink into the chair.

My mouth is dry as I press my thumb to the pad, and a part of me actually prays that it will not open.

But God doesn’t hear that one.

It chirps, flashes green.

I slowly lift the lid.

32

T
he oversize envelope inside is nearly two inches thick. I lift it out, fumble with the old-fashioned string.

A leather journal slides out on a stack of papers. The book is worn around the edges, the ties that bind it stiff from lack of humidity.

I know I should shove everything back in the envelope and go. But I also know it could be hours before I have any semblance of privacy; I can’t fathom processing any of what this is—let alone what it might mean—in front of an audience.

I coax the ties open, flip through the journal, which is nearly full. A small photo drifts onto the table, and I pick it up. A newborn in a yellow outfit. I turn it over. It’s marked
“Audra két napos.”

My breath escapes me as though I’ve been punched. I have never seen a picture of myself this young. Where did I get this, who took it—and where?

Photo between the fingers of one hand, I turn to the front of the journal.

The first twenty or so pages are a list of notes in my handwriting.