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“What?” I ask, not sure who we’re talking about.
“Look.” He points at the flat screen.
Patton is shaking hands with a gray-haired man that I don’t know. I look at the screen, and underneath the image are the words “Patton Proposes Joint Venture to Test Government Employees at Summit with Governor Grant.”
“That’s the governor of New York. Do you know how much money I’ve donated to his reelection campaign? And now he’s acting like that lunatic has anything worthwhile to say.”
Don’t worry about Patton. He’ll be gone soon. That’s what I want to say, but I can’t. “Maybe Grant’s just humoring him.”
Zacharov turns toward me, seeming to actually be aware of me for the first time. He blinks. “Are you looking for your mother? She’s resting.”
“I was hoping I could talk to Lila.”
He frowns at me for a drawn-out moment, then points toward the sweeping staircase that leads to a rounded archway on the second floor. I don’t know if he remembers that I don’t know my way around or if he just doesn’t care.
I jog up the steps.
When I’m halfway there, Zacharov calls, “I heard that useless brother of yours is working for the Feds. That’s not true, is it?”
I turn back, keeping my face carefully blank, a little puzzled. My heart is beating so fast that my chest hurts. “No,” I say, and force a laugh. “Barron’s no good with authority.”
“Who is, right?” asks Zacharov, and laughs too. “Tell him to keep his nose clean. I’d hate having to break his neck.”
I lean against the railing. “You promised me—”
“Some betrayals even I can’t afford, Cassel. He wouldn’t just be turning his back on me. He’d be turning his back on you and your mother. He’d be putting you in danger. And Lila.”
I nod numbly, but my heart is skipping along, like a stone on the surface of a lake right before it drops under. If he knew what I’d done, if he knew about Yulikova and the Licensed Minority Division, he would shoot me as soon as look at me. He would kill me six times over. But he doesn’t know. At least I don’t think he knows. His expression, the slight lift of one side of his mouth, tells me nothing.
I resume my walk up the steps, each footfall heavier than it was.
There’s a hallway.
“Lila?” I call softly as I pass several glossy wooden doors with heavy metal trim on the hinges and knobs.
I open a door at random and see a bedroom, an empty one. It’s too tidy to be anything but a guest room, which means that they have enough bedrooms to have my mother in one and at least another spare. The place is even bigger than I realized.
I knock on the next. No one answers, but down near the end another door opens. Lila steps into the hall.
“That’s a linen closet,” she says. “There’s a washing machine and dryer in there.”
“I bet you don’t even need exact change to use them,” I say, thinking of the dorms.
She grins, leaning against the door frame, looking like she just got out of the shower. She’s got on a white tank and black skinny jeans. Her feet are bare, her toenails painted silver. A few locks of pale wet hair stick to her cheek; a few more stick to her neck where her scar is.
“You got my letter,” she says, walking closer. Her voice is soft. “Or maybe—”
I touch the pocket of my jacket self-consciously and give her a lopsided grin. “Took me a while to translate.”
She pushes the hair out of her face. “You shouldn’t have come. I put everything in the letter, so that we wouldn’t have to—” She stops speaking, as if the rest of the sentence has deserted her. Despite the words, she doesn’t sound angry. She takes another half step toward me. We’re close enough that if she whispered I’d hear it.
I look at her, and I think of how it felt when I saw her in my bedroom in the old house, before I knew that she’d been cursed, when everything still seemed possible. I see the soft line of her mouth, and the clear brightness of her eyes, and I remember dreaming about those features when it still seemed like she could be mine.
She was the epic crush of my childhood. She was the tragedy that made me look inside myself and see my corrupt heart. She was my sin and my salvation, come back from the grave to change me forever. Again. Back then, when she sat on my bed and told me she loved me, I wanted her as much as I have ever wanted anything.
But that was before we’d scammed our way into a high-rise and laughed ourselves sick and talked in the funeral parlor the way I’ve never talked to anyone and might never talk to anyone again. That was before she stopped being a memory and started being the only person who made me feel like myself. That was before she hated me.
I wanted her then. I wanted her a lot. Now I barely want anything else.
