Tell the Wind and Fire Read online

  Instead of explaining that he’d sought my mother, I said my father had been arrested because he was looking for a neighbor he pitied but whom I hardly knew. I said it whenever I was asked why my father had been arrested. I said it again and again. I called my mother a stranger. I denied my whole family. I never spoke their names. I never asked for justice for my mother. I never said that she had been taken by the Light for doing nothing but helping people. I never spoke of her murder or how our family had been devastated. I never even said her name. I let the Light get away with her murder. I let her be forgotten, I let her be lost. I lied and lied, and it never crossed my mind for a moment to do otherwise.

  After every performance, I went home and slept, for thirteen hours, fourteen, eighteen. I slept like a dead thing.

  Light citizens did not usually live in the Dark city and were almost never sent to the cages. Nobody was used to seeing a Light citizen in a cage, and they were even less used to seeing an innocent girl suffering, a girl golden with rings, an image of the Light city the way the Light people liked to think of themselves. The Light did not think people like them should suffer—only people who were different.

  I looked like the symbol of what all Light magic should be. I looked right, and my image was captured on dozens of cameras. The Light Council could not get rid of me, not when the world was watching.

  People started to say I was an angel. There were pictures of me all over the Dark city and the Light, pictures of a golden-haired child with a sweet, sad face and hands that were always bright. There were a thousand interviews. In the end, I talked to anyone who would ask me, talked and talked and never cried too much.

  They called me the angel in the park, the angel of my father’s house. They called me the Golden Thread in the Dark.

  I said I just wanted to help people, to ease their suffering, but that was a lie. I didn’t do it to help anyone but myself. I wasn’t showing real compassion for strangers, I wasn’t showing what I really felt. Real grief is ugly and uncomfortable. People look away from grief the same way they look away from severed limbs or gaping wounds. What they want is pain like death on a stage: beautiful, bloodless, presented for their entertainment.

  My aunt and I came up with the plan, of what needed to be done, and I did it. I didn’t care that nobody else could have done it, that nobody else had the privilege of being a Light citizen or the power of the rings. All I wanted was my father back, and I knew that I could make it happen.

  My father told the truth and was punished. I told a lie and was richly rewarded.

  There were riots in the streets of both cities protesting my father’s arrest and my pain. People even called for the cages to be cut down.

  I had become a symbol, and so the Light city decided to make me a symbol of the Light’s kindness, of their mercy. I made the image and they used it, used me as proof that the right kind of people would not be victimized.

  They let my father go. They gave us two passes to the Light city. I didn’t stay to help anyone. I stood in front of all those cameras and never said a word about injustice, about torture, about my mother. I said thank you instead. I turned my back on the Dark and left.

  I saved my father, but Ethan saved me.

  When we came out of the Dark city, I found myself a celebrity in Light New York. In the early days, I had photo­graphers dogging my steps and disturbing my father. I had a hundred interview requests a day. I also had a scholarship to the Nightingale-Evremonde School, the most exclusive place of education in the city.

  I didn’t want to go, but we didn’t have a lot of options. So I took the scholarship, the uniform, the charity . . . and, of course, the note in every newspaper article about me that the city had granted me this great benefit.

  My father’s friend Penelope Pross and her husband, Jarvis Lorry, and even their little girl, Marie, had welcomed us into their home when we came from the Dark city. I was so grateful. I hadn’t known what we were going to do. My father’s body and mind were so broken, I did not know if I would ever succeed in putting the pieces of him back together into anybody I recognized.

  They were so kind, but I missed my aunt and uncle so much, I could barely stand it. Light New York was not my home then, and I was sickened by the endless scintillating wash of illumination from people’s rings, since the shine of rings used to only ever mean me or my father lighting our way home in the dark. I felt blinded by the brightness of people’s clothes, the expensive array of colors worn—neon pink and virulent green and searing yellow, more vivid than any back in the Dark—and jewels, and the great stones set in the metal façade of Stryker Tower, which seemed as bright and as hard to look upon as the sun.

  I felt every moment as if these strange lights were scalding me, as if I were always burning.

  Every time I forgot, let myself breathe a little easier, I was caught unaware by a camera blazing at me going home, on the streets, on the steps of my new school.

  A lot of people tried to be my friends at first, insistently asking about the Dark city, about how horrible my home had been, about the experiences of the last few weeks that I never wanted to relive.

  Ethan never did. I noticed him, of course, because he was one of the Stryker boys: James Stryker and Ethan Stryker, each an only son of the Stryker brothers Mark and Charles, the leaders of the Light Council. Jim Stryker made a pass at me in the way many of the arrogant boys at Nightingale-Evremonde did, and he seemed enormously offended and not even slightly hurt when I turned him down cold.

  I was offended that they were asking. They didn’t know me, didn’t want to know me. They only wanted to have the briefly famous and strange girl on their arm, to borrow some shine from the gold hair that had come out of the dark.

  The gold hair seemed to be the one thing about me that was not changing, back then. I felt as if I was having an allergic reaction to this glittering city, when the truth is I was just growing up so fast, it felt like suffering: my face changing, chest swelling, my body as unfamiliar as the city, my nightmare- torn sleep disturbed by the shooting pains in my legs. Even if it had not been for my desperately hurt father and the savagely strange land, I would not have been looking for love.

  At the end of one school day, I opened the door and went from a dim hallway to the scorching-bright flash of a camera: it made me stagger, but I didn’t fall. Someone caught my arm and helped me stand up.

  I blinked hard against the cruel light and looked into Ethan’s kind, dark eyes.

  “I’ve got you,” he said.

  I shook off his hand. “I’ve got me,” I said, and hurried away through the city of blazing lights.

  I didn’t look back.

  But I did notice him, then, as more than just one-half of the most richly shining duo of them all. He sometimes sat with Jim while Jim was holding court, but he was also involved in the Junior Council’s charity work, and involved in the drama club for what seemed to be fun. I remembered the way he had caught me. His hands were bare of rings—he had no Light magic of his own—but they were steady and capable. He tutored a couple of the younger kids, but he didn’t offer to tutor me, even though I was pathetically far behind the Light kids. Many other people had offered. Many, many other people.

  Ethan gave me what no one else gave me: he gave me my space.

  And that was why, one day at lunchtime, I walked over to his table and cleared my throat. But I wasn’t the first one to speak.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ethan.

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Nope, it’s definitely me who should be sorry,” Ethan told me. “I know that everyone watches you and tries to be close to you and that it bothers you. I know you’ve been through something that neither I nor anyone else here can imagine, and that you obviously don’t want to talk about it—so I’m also very sorry that I’m talking about it. I tried to take a table that was pretty far away and not to look too much. Because you clearly don’t need anyone else staring, even if you’re beautiful. And it’s not just
about that: you’re brave—you did something really amazing. Obviously I looked once or twice, and I wasn’t as subtle as I thought I was being. So, I’m sorry.”

  He spoke as if he felt bad for upsetting me more than he felt anything for himself.

  It was weird, having someone say something like that to me, and having it seem genuine. But it was almost nice, and there hadn’t been a lot of nice things in my life, not for a long time. I liked that he had called me brave instead of good. Everyone called me good.

  I knew neither was true, but it was still a nice change.

  I cleared my throat again. “I was going to say that I know you tutor a couple of the younger kids, and I’m finding it really hard to catch up. I was wondering if you had a tutoring spot open.”

  “Oh,” Ethan said. “Right.” He rumpled his thick dark hair back with one hand, and I saw the tips of his ears go pink. “I can do that. I do have a price, however. I will require that you immediately self-induce amnesia about the last five minutes.”

  I held on to the back of the chair opposite his, and he was quiet. He gave me all the time and space I needed to decide.

  I sat down opposite Ethan and said, “I can do that.”

  Ethan taught me how to catch up at school, taught me how to live in the Light city. He never took any payment. He never had a reason to do any of it, except that he had decided to care about me, and that he would keep caring about me no matter how I felt about him. When Penelope’s husband, Jarvis, lost his security job, Ethan made sure his father gave Jarvis another one working in Stryker Tower itself and making plans for where best to deploy the Light guards throughout the Dark city. Ethan did it to make me happy: he did it because he knew I owed Penelope and Jarvis, and my debts were his.

  I was a bad girlfriend. I don’t say that because I felt guilty about it or like I owed Ethan. When you are broken and someone puts you back together, there isn’t any way to repay that. I woke up screaming in Ethan’s arms, lashed out to hurt him when I felt trapped or angry.

  I didn’t grow to love him because I was grateful. I loved him because he was the best and sweetest thing in my life, because being with him was always something I could look forward to, and because he made a new life for me and gave it to me as a gift, for no reason other than that he loved me back.

  Anyone would love him, but I do not know if anyone could love him as much as I do.

  I saved my father, and Ethan saved me. Maybe that is the only thing I have ever learned about love: love is when you save someone no matter what the cost.

  Now that I knew Ethan had a doppelganger, I knew that someone had paid any price to save him once already.

  I’ve heard the process of making a doppelganger explained like this: Human souls are made of light. It is what makes people able to feel, to love and pity each other, and if there is an excess of light, it is what enables people to do Light magic. If a soul is slipping into the dark, the dark will give the light back . . . if the light gives the darkness form.

  One goes into the shadow of death, but two come back: the real person, and the other, a creature made in the person’s image, but out of darkness.

  People are frightened by the idea of them, of something that looks human and is all darkness. Doppelgangers used to be slaughtered with less of a penalty than you received for killing a family pet, until thirteen years ago, when Charles Stryker, Ethan’s father, changed the laws. Officially doppelgangers were human now, and it was murder to kill them. Still, we all know of doppelgangers murdered as soon as they were created, found in the Hudson River with their telltale faces destroyed, or beaten to death by people who hated them for their hoods alone.

  The law says doppelgangers must wear hoods to hide their stolen faces, hoods fastened with collars that only someone with Light magic rings can take off. Nobody would ever change that law. Real people needed to be protected from the soulless.

  My mother and father never believed any of it. They supported doppelganger rights, thought they should be able to vote and be allowed to live with faces open to the light.

  Even in the Dark cities, doppelgangers were a little apart from us. There are very few doppelganger children; I never saw one. I saw their hooded figures on the street, ordered coffees from them, smiled reflexively at them in the grocery store and never knew whether under the shadow of their hood they were smiling back.

  I was secretly afraid of them, though I would never have told my parents that. But at least I had seen a doppelganger before. Up until that day, I would have sworn that Ethan never had, not up close.

  He was a golden boy in every sense of the word, untouched by darkness or suffering. I would have sworn that was true, and I would have been wrong.

  There. That’s it. That’s everything I knew, back then. That is the world we lived in, with bright cities and dark twins.

  That brings us up to that moment on the train, with the boy I loved and the stranger who had saved him.

  Now you know everything, except the story of what happened next to all of us: Ethan of the Light city, Carwyn of the Dark, and me, who was born with a foot in each.

  This is the tale of who I was able to save.

  Chapter Four

  THE STRYKERS DID NOT ACTUALLY LIVE IN Stryker Tower, because it was a place of business, and it would be difficult to sleep in a building that lit up everything within a three-block radius bright as day. They lived in a different building, this one on the south side of Central Park, with a carved stone entryway that reminded me of a museum’s and a doorman who had scared me at first. I’d seen that doorman escort out people whose names Ethan’s cousin Jim had decided were no longer on the approved list.

  This was such a bright place, a center for glittering luxury. Death and doppelgangers and darkness were all things that I had thought I’d left behind long ago.

  Ethan had put me on the list and would never have taken my name off. I had run through this echoing marble hall as if I belonged here a hundred times, hand in hand with Ethan, in from the park wearing a bikini top and shorts, bundled up in a winter coat and laden with presents.

  Everybody here thought of me as belonging to the Light, as if growing up in the Dark had not affected me, as if the shine of my rings had made me immune to my surroundings. But I knew who I had been in the Dark, and remembered those I loved in the darkness. I remembered it all even more vividly that day, when I had been so close to someone from the Dark like me. I felt out of place passing the doorman, as if he might stop me, read the darkness on my face, and have me thrown out into the street. I glanced up and saw my own golden head in the mirror-like surface of the ceiling as I went through to the elevator.

  When I knocked on the door, Charles Stryker answered it: Ethan’s father. Normally, it was the housekeeper or Ethan himself. Ethan’s dad must have been in a state of some distress to actually open his own door.

  Charles Stryker and his brother were alike, but Charles was older than Mark and he looked like the sketch before the oil painting: Charles’s features a little more uncertain, blurred, the line of nose and jaw less decided and his eyes smaller, hairline humbly receding, while Mark’s would never retreat.

  I liked Ethan’s dad more than his uncle, but I had never liked either of them much.

  “Lucie,” said Charles, who did like me, and he took hold of my wrists, his rings cool against my pulse points. He pressed a kiss as cold as the rings onto my cheek. “Very nice to see you, as always, especially after . . .”

  Charles often abandoned sentences.

  “Ethan will be so pleased.”

  “You know it,” said Ethan, behind his father.

  He clasped Charles’s shoulder—he was always the one showing his dad affection rather than the other way around, and Charles always seemed puzzled but pleased by it—and his dad smiled at him, a smile weak as lousy tea, before he slipped away.

  I stepped up to Ethan, arm around his neck, top lip pressed against his bottom lip, in my place, the perfect place. His body was solid
against me, the curve of his neck pressed into the inside of my elbow, his breath warm against my cheek. The planes and curves and heat of his body all adding up to sanctuary.

  Even when I felt like I didn’t belong in the Light, I knew I belonged here.

  “Hey,” I murmured into the corner of his mouth, “where is he?”

  Ethan flinched, making a tiny space between us where all the cold could rush in. I drew back, into the dark, silent hall.

  “Ethan, where is Carwyn?”

  “I did the best I could,” said Ethan. “Uncle Mark was not pleased to meet him. Dad’s in a lot of trouble right now, and I don’t have any say because of the whole being-accused-of-treason thing.”

  I could not suppress a shudder. Treason. The weight of the accusation, the knowledge of all it could mean, forced the breath from my lungs. We needed to make a plan to deal with the accusation, to figure out who would make up such a wild and terrible lie, but first we needed to repay the one who had saved him from the accusation.

  “Where is he?”

  Ethan paused, then took a deep breath and answered. “He’s in a hotel.”

  I took another step backwards. “Did you guys have him in the house a whole five minutes before you sent him away, for the second time in his life? Or did you not let him cross the sacred Stryker threshold at all?”

  “Look, Lucie, he’s got what he wanted. I made sure that Uncle Mark arranged somewhere nice for him to stay and gave him a lot of money. He can go out on the town now. There’s even a pass sorted out for him—he can stay for a week.”

  “Oh, a whole week? That’s so generous of you both. What about the pass he had that meant he could stay for real?”

  Ethan looked frustrated. I knew the feeling.

  “Uncle Mark would never let him live here. It would only be a matter of time before his face was seen. Besides, he doesn’t want to stay. You heard what he said about crime. All he wanted was an adventure. Well, he’s got one. With Uncle Mark’s money, he can get all the booze and dust and girls he likes. What else did you expect me to do for him? What else do you want from me?”