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Dinner is more like a festival. We dine at small tables in the main garden. Large solar lanterns strung overhead shine like small blue moons against the sparkling Interface.
I haven’t seen the Interface since we came here from the Icebox. The lighting system always masks it, creating the illusion of a real sky most of the time. But Jax has managed to dim the lights to near twilight, and now I can appreciate the Interface’s strange and terrible beauty as its rugged strands writhe above us.
There are toasts with champagne, and tiny bits of cheese passed on silver trays, but I’m heavy with thought.
“Are you okay?” Jost whispers at my side.
I turn on my best false smile—the one I perfected during my time at the Coventry. He doesn’t seem to notice, so while my face beams, my heart slips down.
Kincaid is surrounded by men and a few of the actors. None of the players bear wounds or bandages from the performance. The woman still wears Veronica’s face, but she smiles and laughs and hangs on the arms of a fellow actor. If they aren’t sad, why should I be? Kincaid took care of them. None of them seem to be in pain.
“We’ll do another,” Kincaid promises. “Perhaps Titus?”
A few of the men whoop in approval. Only the actress’s smile falters. The slip reveals her terror, but her mask is back on before anyone else notices. I hope she’ll leave, run away from the stage and Kincaid, but based on how well she plays her part now, I doubt she will. She’s acting again. It’s in her blood.
Valery is absent. I see Kincaid glance to his side a few times, but she’s not there. The play upset her enough that she risks Kincaid’s displeasure, or perhaps she knew he would be so wrapped up in his own ego that her absence would go unnoticed.
“You aren’t eating,” Jost says, pulling me toward a table laden with platters and plates.
“I’m not hungry,” I say. I loop my arm through his and press my face to his shoulder.
“You should eat,” he says.
The din of the party grows louder as a man demonstrates a dance. His hands flail out and he reaches for the actress. She spins gracefully into his arms.
I look at Kincaid. I imagine he’ll be bouncing in giddy beat with them, but instead he’s engaged in deep conversation with a guard. His fingers stroke his small false beard. He issues an order I can’t hear, and when he turns back to the spectacle, our eyes meet. He smiles, but his eyes stay hard, absent their usual sparkle. Unreadable.
Kincaid can act after all.
EIGHTEEN
I SLEEP SO HEAVILY THAT THE NEXT morning I have no memory of the prior night. When I look back at the time since Deniel’s attack, it seems like a dream, even though I feel far from safe. Sleep is the dark and lovely escape of my childhood, and nightmares are now an inevitability of my waking existence. They’ll come for me again and again, but in sleep, I’m finally free.
When I was little, I would lie awake and listen to my father checking the locks on our doors. The only thing I needed so I could drift away was the sound of locks clicking in place and if I heard them, I rarely had nightmares.
Once, soon after my parents starting training me to hide my gift, I dreamed I was tangled in a web, held captive by sticky strands that wound slowly around my short legs. They wrapped up my entire body until even my eyes were glued shut from the clinging fibers, and I waited to be devoured.
My father woke me that night, and I was still screaming even after he switched on the lamp that hung over my bed. Only cocooned in his strong arms did I calm down enough to relate the dream in choking, gasping sobs.
“You’re safe,” he whispered into my hair.
“But you weren’t there,” I sobbed.
He could have lied to me—told me he would never leave me—but instead he pulled away and took my trembling chin in his warm, rough hands. “When I’m not there, remember you have the strength to free yourself.”
“But I didn’t,” I protested.
“You will,” my father said, brushing back the wisps of copper hair caught in my tears.
I fell asleep in his arms and woke the next morning to find him sleeping in a crooked heap next to me. He’d stayed with me through the night. Looking back, it was almost as though he knew our time together was drawing to a close, as though he couldn’t bear to deplete my strength before I would need it most.
Now sleep asks no more of me than it once did. It is a refuge for me like it was when I was a child—perhaps the last refuge I have left.
* * *
My father is the first person I think of when I wake—my real father. The man who brought me up and locked the doors at night to keep me safe. I only knew him as a parent—someone who cared for me, providing food, shelter, and security—but now I know there was more to Benn Lewys. In the Coventry, I blocked the memory of my retrieval night, letting it fade into a fuzzy, Valpron-tainted recollection. If I didn’t think of it, it had never happened. The fact that I would never see my father again could burn out of my mind along with the other moments too painful to recall.
But now, knowing that Dante is my biological father and that Benn kept his own painful secrets tucked away, I want to remember. And for the first time since my retrieval, I have a conduit to my past.
