I knew we should find a way to move out, but I didn’t know how to voluntarily give up the comfort of having other people around, the small, simple happiness of coming home to find dinner waiting or the television on. Penelope and Jarvis had never mentioned wanting their home back, never even hinted; they always acted as if they wanted us to stay forever.
“I’m sorry that I had to drag you away,” Penelope said as the car sped through the glittering streets.
“It’s no problem,” I said, and forced myself to smile. “Well, it’s my problem. I can deal with it.”
“You don’t have to deal with it alone,” Penelope told me. “Are you all right?”
“Never better,” I said, and kept my hand against the Light panel in the car door, the square of magic that would brighten when the car stopped, waiting for it to release.
I owed Penelope and Jarvis better than this. When the car pulled up outside the building, I saw the lights blazing in every window in their apartment on the sixth floor. I pressed the panel before it had woken into full light, hurled myself out of the car before it had quite stopped, then ran up the stairs and through the door faster than Penelope could follow me. This was my responsibility and not hers.
Dad was sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth. Light was cupped in his palms, building and building. The glitter of his rings had a sparking, restless quality, like electric wires gone wrong.
“Dad, I’m here. I’m so sorry I left you, but I’m all right. I’m absolutely all right.”
Dad stared at me, his eyes vacant but for the glitter of magic.
“Dad,” I said pleadingly.
Dad stared a little longer, then reached out and touched my hair, the shining golden length of it.
“It’s like her hair,” he said. “What is your name, sweetheart?”
“Lucie, Dad. It’s Lucie.”
“Oh,” Dad said, slowly. He lifted a hand to my face, and the rings on that hand burned brighter, brighter, so he could see me. My eyes stung, but I wouldn’t close them: I squinted and tried to keep my focus on him, past the harsh light and shimmering tears. Gold obscured my vision, the glitter of rings and the shine of magic on the walls, everything gold but my father’s hair. That had gone silver back when they put him in the cage.
“You remember me, Dad.”
“It was so very long ago,” Dad muttered, and his other hand clutched my hair, like a child clutching a teddy bear. “Lucie! Lucie, you have to help me find her. I have to go to her and help her . . . heal her. She needs to be healed. She went to heal someone. I need to heal someone.”
He’d had fits like this before, even while he was in his cage. I’d probably given him the idea. He wasn’t a fraud like me. He was really good, and he really tried. He tried to heal people as if he were still a medic. He’d put his hand out through the bars of his cage to heal people; he’d run up and down the train healing people when we were making our way to the Light city. He’d collapsed in public over and over in the first few months, but he hadn’t been like this for a year.
I’d thought he was better now.
It was my fault. I’d scared him, I’d reduced him to this state where he was fumbling after memories of a time when he’d been happy, when he’d thought he could help people and find my mother. We’d been idiots, once, fools in the dark together.
“She’s dead, Dad,” I said, and tried to keep my voice level. I helped him up from the sofa and kept his steps steady as we went into our room. I led him to his bed and made him lie down. His eyes closed as soon as his head touched the pillow, his body curled up in a trembling comma shape on the bed. I pulled the sheets over him and murmured, “She’s dead, but we’re alive. Don’t you want to live?”
“It’s been so long,” Dad murmured back. “I don’t know.”
Good people are always ready to die for a good reason. It’s only people like me who say, Yes, I want to live. Yes, at any cost. I had said yes for both of us, two years ago.
Dad’s eyes opened, then fluttered shut, then repeated the gesture a few times before he settled. His eyelids looked as thin and fragile as yellowed old pages in a book whose story would soon be over. He muttered in his sleep, like an unhappy child, and I hung over him, knowing that his sleep might be disturbed.
I did not let myself cry for my father who was alive, or my mother who was dead. I had things to do besides cry: I had debts to pay.
I waited until I was sure my father was slumbering peacefully, then left to visit the Strykers.
CHAPTER THREE
I didn’t begin this story right. Penelope told me that I should explain everything, because soon the world might be very different.