“Wait!” Tatum calls. “Please stop. What happened? Where are you going?”
I glance back but keep moving. He’s closer now. His pajama pants are ripped at the knees. He must have fallen down. His sneakers are untied.
“Leave me alone!” I cry, stumbling forward.
“Matilda, stop. Talk to me. What’s wrong?” Tatum’s breath is heaving as he catches up with me.
He reaches for my arm and I shake him off, but I turn to face him. “You know what’s wrong.”
“I don’t. Honestly.”
“Kingsley is upstairs. Locked up.”
Anguish crosses his face. “You went into the tower.”
“I should have gone a long time ago. Have you been up there?”
He nods, his lips pressed together and eyes cast down.
“Something’s dangerously wrong with him,” I say.
“I know,” says Tatum. “I know.”
“How could you not tell?” The rage explodes out of me. The rain is so strong, my shoes are soaked, and my legs, too. “How could you lie to me all this time? When you knew how badly I wanted to see him? When I was waiting and waiting.” I shake my head, piecing things together. “I mean, youallknew. Right? You’ve all known all this time.”
That’s why Tatum wanted to get me to leave Hidden Beach. So I wouldn’t find my father, in the castle tower.
“Yeah,” Tatum answers, his voice strangled.
I start walking.
“Can you let me explain?” he says, grabbing my hand. I pull it away and keep moving. “I’ve hated lying to you,” he goes on. “Please, please don’t leave.”
Every molecule inside me wants to bolt right now, but I don’t want to be a person who leaves. Like my mother. Like my father.
I stop.
“I didn’t want you here,” Tatum says. “Of course I didn’t. Because we were all hiding this terrible secret, and Meer was a fool to bring you. But he wanted you. He said he needed a resource, a person, so he’s not alone with all this. He knows I want to leave. And Brock won’t stay forever. Meer thought you’d be a comfort, a new perspective, someone who could be in the house and help us figure out what to do. I said we couldn’t possibly tell you and we didn’t know how things might combust if Meer brought you here, but he did it anyway.”
I shake my head. “You didn’t just lie about Kingsley. You lied about everything. Why you don’t have friends who come over, why you’re not going to college. Who youare.You lied about who youare.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Matilda.” His voice goes soft. “What I said about following you into battle was true. About you being a supernova of a person. I couldn’t stop looking at you. I still can’t. I want to listen to you talk, understand the way your mind works. I told you about June and the sedative because I couldn’t stand seeing someone so smart and full of life be sucked into this living purgatory we’ve all been in, this non-life where we do nothing but stay in service to the secret,where we’ve given up our friends and our futures because our king has ceased to govern us.”
I am shivering in the rain, despite my jacket. Tatum’s shirt is soaked. But I let him go on.
“Every time you’d tell us the story behind a video game, it was like I was actually playing it through. And I’d think how smart you were, to solve those puzzles. To persevere when they were tricky. You have this book full of wild ideas, all the weapons and maps. This violent, explosive imagination. Like your father. Like thebest partsof your father. And the more I knew you, the more I felt that you didn’t deserve us all lying to you about him. But it had gone on so long already.
“And you were questioning June, you were pointing out things about how we live that I never noticed. Her rules were just givens. Since I came to live here, I accepted them all. And you interrogated her. So I’d watch you and I’d think, this person knows who she is and what she values. I was already head over heels, but the night you sang with me, the Wooden Cage song, it was like something cracked apart in my chest. Like your voice reached into me and broke me open. I never felt like that before.”
Those are nice words, but I don’t care about them now. “Why is Kingsley locked up?”
Tatum runs his fingers through the wet strands of his hair. “He hates doctors, and Western medicine. So does June. So when he started to show signs of dementia, he made us all promise not to bring in anyone.”
“What signs?”
