“Final chance to rethink me going with you,” Athena said. “We could leave the last word to Natalie.”
Lucy managed a smile. “Natalie doesn’t do manual labor, remember?”
“Yeah, well. I could make an exception this one time,” Natalie said. “But you seem pretty sure.”
“Sure as I’ve ever been,” Lucy said. She hoped that it was justified.
As they stopped in front of the entrance to the tunnels, Athena took Lucy’s free hand. “I trust you.”
Lucy squeezed before she let go. “What’s important now is that you trust Hiro. He’s going to be listening for my signal. And once he gets it, it’ll be down to him and you.”
She could feel Athena’s eyes on her as she shifted Mila’s bow to grab the doorknob. It was a little warm under her fingers, like someone had just been holding it. “How didyouknow to trust him?” Athena finally asked.
Lucy paused. The way ahead still sat in her palm, as warm as something alive. Athena had said earlier that she didn’t know if Lucy had been right or not about vampires. By the cold light of day, Lucy didn’t know, either. She’d felt so sure, in the wake of Whitney’s death, but part of what Athena said rang true, too. Vanya, Laurentius and Hiro, Sadie and Addison, even Whitney in her short second life—none of them thought exactly the way people thought. It could have been their new instincts, like Athena theorized. Or maybe it just changed a person, when life had no end.
But there were also things their nature couldn’t explain. Complications and contradictions and attachments. A self-ishness that could only be human. So Lucy knew how to answer Athena’s question. Probably not an answer that would satisfy her scientific mind. But an answer that satisfied Lucy now.
“The same way I knew to trust all of you,” she said. “I didn’t know. I just tried.”
She opened the door, and allowed the sounds of the earth to envelop her completely. She took one look at the two of them before she turned the corner, out of sight. Their faces were already indistinct shapes in the hazy basement light.
The steam tunnel was dark enough that Lucy’s eyes saw it in crisp detail. The pewter and bronze pipes ran in thick bundles along the wall, decked with yellow caution stickers. Everything else was bare, cold concrete: the walls around her, and the way ahead. It was the kind of place that might have been eerie, had Lucy not found much better things to scare her as of late.
She moved briskly, as if she’d think better of all this if she gave herself time to. But there was no going anywhere else now. There was just her, this tunnel, and Mila. And, of course, the vampires.
So she let down her guard, and let the world in. Natalie’s blood had long drowned out the red voice. But if Lucy was quiet enough, she could hear the imprint of it on her mind. A subtler series of directions.
Holding Mila’s bow tight to her chest, Lucy allowed herself to be guided home.
She could tell immediately when she was getting close, even before she noticed the tunnel was widening. Even before she felt Addison or Sadie, or the presence of the man who had brought them all there, she heard a single beating heart, slower and deeper than the hearts of the rats and the worms. Mila was there. Not far at all now.
Lucy wouldn’t dream of keeping a pretty girl waiting.
She slung the bag over her shoulder, turned the corner, and held up both her hands to send the signal that she wasn’t a threat.
They were gathered in an open space. A sort of atrium, where different pipes met and branched out: There were four different paths out of the room, probably leading all across the campus. Lucy saw Mila first. She stood as if at attention, staring ahead with the same horrible flat eyes as Natalie had in Lower Alton. Sadie was on one side, whispering in her ear. Addison was on the other, smiling like a child on Christmas.
And then, of course, there was Vanya. He looked to Lucy first. Then to the bag slung over her shoulder.
“Uh-oh.” He laughed and raised his hands, like she’d just pointed a Nerf gun at him. “Don’t shoot.”
“I didn’t bring it to shoot…Mr. Volkov, sir,” she said. It was what Addison had called him back in the dorm. She could see the way it brightened his eyes a little to hear it. “It’s not loaded. I left the quiver back in her dorm, see? I just…wanted to give Mila a parting gift.”
Vanya walked in a wide arc around her, as if to observe for himself. When he spoke, his voice was unconcerned. “Go ahead and take that, Addie.”
“Of course, Mr. Volkov, sir.” For someone who’d just crossed the room in the blink of an eye, Addison was so gentle when she took the bag from Lucy’s shoulder. Lucy smiled at her as they made eye contact. And in response, Addison glowed.
“I knew you’d come,” she said. “Sadie wasn’t sure.”
Next to Addison, the look on Vanya’s face was all business. He sized up Lucy like he was taking inventory. “My voice is no longer in your ears,” he said. “But you decided to come anyway?”
“Yes, sir,” Lucy said.
“And yet you come here empty-handed.” The casual, modern cadence of his voice shifted into something colder. This, Lucy imagined, was the aristocrat. He was probably never far below the surface. “You call that bow a parting gift. So without holding up your end of the bargain, you expect me to let the girl go? I imagine you didn’t get into such a good school without learning how to do your homework, did you?”
She looked at him calmly, even as she choked on her own rage. All that he had done to her. All that he had done to all of them, and he was making a little joke. He had torn her life apart out of boredom. He still had a spot of Lucy’s blood on his collar. And he thought he was funny.
She was going to kill him.
