Tell the Wind and Fire(5)

“There,” I told him.

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m supposed to thank you. You saved his life and I love him, so I owe you more than I know how to repay. Thank you . . . what’s your name?”

He hesitated. “Carwyn.”

“Carwyn,” I said, still kneeling, staring up into a familiar face with a strange name on my tongue. “Thank you. Buried how long, Carwyn?”

That was what citizens of the Dark city always asked each other when we met. That was what we called living in the Dark city: being buried.

He hesitated again, but when he spoke there was weight to his response, as if he had come to some decision. “Thirteen years, but I’m out now,” said Carwyn. “Buried how long, Lucie?”

So that answered that: he had recognized me.

“Fifteen years,” I said. “But that was two years ago. I’m out now.”

“They’re still talking about you in the Dark city,” Carwyn said.

I picked up the dress that was on the floor and pulled it over my head as quickly but with as little fuss as I could manage, lacing up the front. Ethan grabbed a fresh shirt out of his bag.

He came and sat with me on one end of the bed, taking my hand again, and I curled into him, chin tucked against his shoulder and my hand pressed in a fist against his chest. As if I could protect him, as if I could keep his heart beating.

“I didn’t know how to tell you, Lucie,” said Ethan. “About him.”

The train was in motion again. I leaned against Ethan, but I did not look at him or at the stranger who wore his face. I looked out the window. The train was speeding along the slender bridge that the Light Council had built fifty years ago, toward the Light city of New York. I saw the tall, bright columns standing in clusters, the Chrysler Building with its prismatic triangle of lights at the top, blazing like a beacon, and Stryker Tower, a steel line studded with huge stones shimmering with Light power and crowned with a spike.

We were almost home, my new home full of Light, the home where I had learned how to be happy. I did not jump in front of blades there. I did not see blood or horror: I was not that person, not anymore. All I needed to do was keep my head down and my life could continue the way it was now, the way I had made it. I could be safe.

I remembered how I had felt on the train platform, knowing for the first time that someone could hurt Ethan.

I said, “So tell me now.”





CHAPTER TWO


Both boys were silent. Carwyn just sat on the other end of the bed. I knew his eyes were the exact same as Ethan’s, but they looked different to me, darker, almost black, with no depth in the color. I thought of the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul: no lights shone in Carwyn’s windows. He was looking at me, but his gaze was almost challenging, and I did not know why.

Ethan was much easier to read. He looked horrified and guilty.

“You knew he existed,” I said to Ethan. “When was he made? Why didn’t you ever tell me? I told you . . .”

Everything, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t told him everything. He still thought I was brave and good. I had told him more than I had told anyone else in the world though, and he had kept this huge secret from me.

I could have accepted it from anyone else, but I had been so sure that Ethan was open and honest, the one person in the world with no secrets and no shadows. I’d built my new life on that certainty.

“Lucie,” said Ethan, “I didn’t know how to tell you. I was ashamed. It’s a crime to create them—I couldn’t turn in my own father. And I was afraid you’d look at me differently, knowing I had one of . . . of them.”

When someone young was dying, a Dark magic ritual could save them, but the ritual created an exact double. I had heard the horror stories, heard people say that the ritual gave Death itself a young, sweet face and let it walk among us.

Someone with a doppelganger was not just complicit in a crime. They carried a reminder of mortality on their shoulders, carried the shadows of doppelgangers on their souls. It was said that looking into a doppelganger’s face would doom the original soul, that the doppelganger would hunt the original down so it could take their life and their happiness as well as their face. It was kinder to let someone die, people said, than create a doppelganger to save them.

I looked over at Carwyn, who was fiddling with his collar and looking supremely uninterested.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Carwyn. “Continue with your relationship drama. It is fascinating.”

I rolled my eyes at him and turned to the boy I loved. “Ethan. Look at me.”

He looked at me. I had always thought his eyes were different from anyone else’s. I still believed it. Nobody else looked at me like that, light and warmth in their eyes because I was there. There was gold in his brown eyes. There was light here, in Ethan, for me.