Toxic Heart (13 page)

“If you say so,” she says softly. She cleans the razor and mutters, “None of my friends are going to believe this.”

I make two fists. I’m ready for something new.

“Hey!” someone says to my left. I turn my head and see Turk cutting in front of an older guy and stealing his spot on the stool next to me. “What’s the rush?” Turk says, shooing him away. “It’s just a haircut.”

“What are you doing?” I ask, staring at his beautifully crafted Mohawk, his identifying feature. “Are you insane?”

“I’m not going to let you do this alone,” Turk says. “It’s that simple.” He reaches out his hand, and I grab it. “Oh God,” he says out loud. “What in the Aeries am I doing?”

“Close your eyes,” I say. “It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Turk says, turning to the nurse at his side. “Just do it.”

Turk looks totally different. Younger. Sweeter. You couldn’t help but stare at his hair when you first met him—the sharp black spikes, the intense, hard edge the Mohawk gave him.

But now he doesn’t look all that intimidating. Well, minus the piercings and the multicolored tattoos.

He looks good.

“It feels funny,” I say, rubbing my hands over the soft fuzz covering my scalp. My head tingles—it feels pounds lighter without the hair, almost like a balloon full of helium that could pop off and drift away at any moment.

“I want you to remember that I did this for you,” Turk says glumly. “Remember for the rest of your life.”

Someone passes me a tiny wooden hand mirror.

I stare at my reflection. It’s my face, only different. The brown locks are gone, and the buzz cut accentuates the shape of my skull—my cranium is pointer than I would have guessed, egg-shaped; my ears are more pronounced without my hair to hide them, my brown eyes more piercing, my dark eyebrows more severe. Everything is exaggerated. I don’t look like the privileged daughter of one of the richest men in the Aeries. I look like a girl who has seen hard times.

I stand up and immediately the crowd of people waiting in line erupts into applause. I feel myself go red with embarrassment.

“Aria! Aria!”
People are chanting, people who have just gotten their heads shaved, people who haven’t, men, women, and kids, mystics and nonmystics. Even some of the nurses are clapping and laughing.

I feel like one of them. Accepted.

Just then, a new image flashes on the JumboTron just outside the square.

It’s Kyle. My brother.

I haven’t seen him since the night my father invaded the underground. He’s wearing a navy suit and a tie, his hair parted neatly on one side. He stands behind a podium making a statement to the press, seeming much older than his twenty-one years. My mother and father are behind him, both looking proud. Seeing them is like an electric shock to my entire body: rage and fear mingle inside me, together with flashes of other emotions from when I was much younger—love, maybe.

“We will not rest until every mystic is found and destroyed,” Kyle announces. People around me begin to hiss and boo, cursing at the screen. My brother looks up from his notes and stares directly into the camera. “And I am holding myself personally responsible for making sure that the Aeries are resurrected to their proper heights. The
true
Rose family has never disappointed this city, and we will continue to see it prosper and prevail.”

Kyle
. A fresh face for a troubled time. This must be a publicity stunt. My father has never trusted Kyle with much responsibility before now. No doubt Johnny Rose is still pulling the strings behind the scenes.

As Kyle continues to speak, I realize that he’s actually quite poised. Passionate. Charming, even. I wonder if he’s still a Stic junkie or if my father made him kick the habit.

Behind him, my mother purses her painted lips. She’s wearing a white blouse with a black pencil skirt, her hair dyed blond and blown out so that it falls past her shoulders. She looks so put
together. So elegant. I highly doubt that anyone would guess she had me handcuffed to my own bed, made me a prisoner in my own apartment.

“Your brother is such an ass,” Turk says. “No offense.”

“I know. None taken.”

I scan the screen and see another familiar face: Elissa Genevieve. The supposedly reformed mystic who works in my father’s office, who befriended me only to betray me.

She’s at the edge of the screen, wearing a cream-colored suit with a soft-pink blouse underneath. Her blond curls are pinned back, and she has an easy smile on her face—pretending to be nice when she is anything but. Seeing her reminds me of how I trusted her, how she stood up for me when Patrick Benedict and my father were giving me a hard time.

I thought she was my ally.

But it was all an act. Some sort of sick game. Benedict was the one looking out for me—I just didn’t know it then. Elissa was two-timing me, pretending to be on my side when really she was my father’s secret weapon. I think about how I brought her along with me and Turk the night my parents abducted Hunter, how she shot Turk and stole the passkey to the underground, betraying her own kind to my father.

Pretty much everyone I hate most is being displayed on this screen. I look away.

Turk sees her, too, and lets out a sharp hiss. “I
hate
that woman,” he says. “She’s a vulture. A traitor. A mystic who used her own energy to make the bomb that caused the Conflagration—she told us that night! She’s—”

“Terrible,” I say, placing a hand on his shoulder. “I know. We both know.”

“If I ever run into her …” Turk makes two fists. “She’ll be sorry.” Then he lets out a deep breath and rubs his palm over his head, letting some of his stress dissipate. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to not having
hair
. Come on.” He rubs his finger over my scalp. “Fuzzy,” he says, then laughs. “Let’s get back to the others. I’m sure they’re wondering where we went.”

“I doubt Shannon cares.”

Turk takes back his hand. “She might surprise you, Aria. Shannon is a woman of mystery. But she has a good heart.”

“Okay,” I say. “You keep telling yourself that.”

Turk says something in response, but I can’t hear a word.

Because my ears are filled with a bomb blast.

Noxious gas is everywhere.

The toxic mist fills the square, creeping into my chest and making me cough viciously, like I’m hacking up a lung. I close my eyes but it’s too late—they’re burning, leaking tears.

“This is a safe zone!” one of the nurses screams. “A medical zone! Leave us alone!”

People rush past me like confused cattle, and I don’t dare open my eyes for fear of the blinding gas. “Here,” Turk says. He stuffs something thin and papery into my hand. “It’s a surgical mask. Put it over your mouth.”

I do as he says. The mask snaps around the back of my head. I inhale cautiously. My lungs are still raw, but at least I can breathe. “What’s happening?”

“Tear gas,” Turk says. “Not sure why.”

An amplified voice pierces the din.
“Aria Rose is here.”
The voice is channeled through what seems like a dozen speakers ringing through the triage area.
“We want her.”

“We’re supposed to be safe here!” a woman hollers. People are
pushing blindly through the crowd, some crying, “Aria Rose! Turn yourself in before we’re all killed!”

“Don’t listen to a word those fools say,” Turk says, grabbing my arm. “Turning yourself in is the last thing you should do.”

My eyes are still tightly shut against the tear gas. “Maybe I should,” I say. “Maybe that would—”

“Win the war for your brother, that’s what it would do.”

Someone shrieks and falls into my back, nearly knocking me over. I open my eyes, and for a second I see the entire square in chaos: hundreds of people swarming together with nowhere to go, thanks to the crisscrossing of silver electrical wire that has quickly been put up around the perimeter.

Masked guards dressed in black are flooding the square now. A glowing red rose is stitched into the backs of their uniforms.

I recognize the uniform immediately. These are my father’s men.

Then my eyes begin to burn and tear again, and I close them. All I see is black.

Somewhere nearby, I hear a painful howl and the smell of sizzling flesh. It reminds me of the attack at the mystic compound, the fire.

“Do not touch the blockade,”
the amplified voice says overhead.
“The wires are live. I repeat, Do
not
touch the blockade. You
will
be electrocuted.”

I can’t believe my family is going to all this trouble to track me down. They don’t love me, not since I betrayed them and chose Hunter. And yet they’re looking for me. They think I’m going to help them win the war, that they can brainwash me or threaten me and make me their figurehead.

I will never support them. Too many fingers have already been pricked by the Roses’ thorns.

By now, the worst effects of the gas have worn off, and we can open our eyes.

The square is stuffed with people. The tents have been emptied, and everyone has been divided into ten lines of probably more than a hundred people each. Some of the injured can’t even stand, let alone walk, so the healthier people are carrying them. Two lines down from me, I see three men with gaunt eyes and crooked legs leaning against a nurse wearing a mask and gloves and holding two babies, one in each arm.

My father’s soldiers spread out. Some stand facing us; others fan down the lines, making sure people stay standing. “Every single person needs to be checked,” I hear one of them saying.

Another soldier chuckles. “Even the babies? And the men? Obviously
they’re
not Aria Rose.”

The first soldier growls. “Who knows what they can do with their mystic voodoo powers. Aria may have disguised herself.”

“But if she’s disguised herself, then how will we find her?”

The first solider smacks the other one’s cheek. “It’s amazing you can even talk, you moron. Her eyes will be the same. Look at the eyes.”

On the JumboTron, the live footage has been stopped. Now there’s a picture of me that takes up the entire screen. It’s my senior picture from Florence Academy. My hair is down, framing my face, and I’m wearing a simple navy dress and the teardrop diamond necklace my parents gave me for my seventeenth birthday.

I am grinning like an idiot.

I think back to when the picture was taken—the beginning of the last school year. Almost an entire year ago. I hadn’t met Hunter yet. Or Thomas. I didn’t know anything about mystics or the Depths. My biggest problem in life was being photographed and speculated about on gossip blogs.

“Keep your eyes down,” Turk whispers. “And don’t say a word.”

Soldiers are pushing people forward, up to the line of guards who are comparing each person to my picture. “Come on, come on!” one of them shouts at an old woman whose right leg has been amputated below the knee.

“But I’ve lost my other crutch,” she replies, sobbing. “I only have one—”

“One’ll do,” the soldier says, pushing her forward. She loses her balance, and the crutch slips out from under her. She falls to the ground. “Get up!” the solider says, kicking her in the stomach. But the woman doesn’t move.

“Aw, Christ,” the solider says, cupping his hands over his mouth and calling out to one of the other men. “Someone come here and help me, would ya?”

Another soldier rushes over. I can’t see his face, only the shiny red rose on his back. He takes out a pistol and shoots the old woman in the head. People in the line start shrieking, and one man steps out, fists clenched, mustache twitching, looking ready to attack the soldier.

The soldier shifts his pistol to the man. “Take one step closer and I’ll blow your brains into the canal.”

The man shakes his head and steps back in line.

Nobody even bothers to clean up the woman’s body. She’s just
left there on the ground, and people step over her as the line surges forward.

Ahead, all I hear are rounds of “Next!” as the guards compare the people in the square to my picture. The people who pass inspection start filling up the empty tents. A dozen or so bodies still cling to the electric fence—people who tried to escape the blockade and were burned to a crisp.