Delilah gestures to the others. “Would you all mind giving us the room? Roxana and I need to speak to Taylor alone.”
Captain Finley gets up first. “All right, but if the goddamn assassin from the Order of Prometheus kills the boss, I am gonna say I told you so.”
Mason and Cassie leave after Captain Finley, but as Lucy reluctantly gets up, I place my hand on her arm. “Lucy stays.”
Roxana and Delilah share a glance before Delilah nods. “Very well.” Lucy sits back down, but we’re both on edge. “Taylor, as I imagine you have suspected, Roxana has a history with the Order.”
“You two know each other,” I venture. “As long as you’ve known Theia?”
Roxana smiles a little. “You did say she was perceptive.”
“Annoyingly so,” Lucy adds fondly.
Delilah doesn’t look as pleased. In fact, it is the most uncomfortable I’ve seen Delilah look in a long time. She has made a career out of being hard to ruffle. “It’s Roxana’s story to tell, but I must admit to you, Taylor, that I have been keeping information from you, at Theia’s behest.”
Her admission is met with silence and Roxana wearily settles on the edge of her desk. This information has sat with her for a long time, evidently. She’s looking at me with such intimate familiarity, far beyond what befits our previous interaction at the ambush. “Taylor, do you…do you know anything about your parents?”
It’s a struggle to keep my face neutral and I must let up some sign of weakness, because Roxana’s stare gets more intense. Intense, but also sympathetic. I don’t want her pity. “Why? Do you think you might have shot them too? Don’t worry, Theia took care of that for you.”
Roxana’s eyes soften and the stone-faced woman I met a few minutes ago melts into someone else entirely. “Is that what she told you? That your parents are dead?”
“I was led to believe for most of my life that I was abandoned. It was only recently that Theia admitted to having killed my parents.” Again, Lucy tenderly rubs my hand and entwines our fingers together. I look at Delilah, whose eyes shine with tears. “Is that the information that you kept from me? I assumed you knew and withheld it to avoid hurting my feelings.”
“No, darling, I’m afraid my deception is worse than that.” Delilah heaves a sigh, somehow packing in a lot of regret in a long breath. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean much to you now, but I agreed to lie to protect you.”
“You know I do not care for this bush-beating,” I reply shortly. “What is going on?”
Roxana reaches behind her and picks up a small, wooden photo frame from a bureau behind the desk. A natural wood, possibly hand-carved, soft from years of erosion rubbing against hands and bags. It’s a photo of what I believe to be Roxana in her twenties or early thirties. A man—tall, blond, and smiling—has his arm wrapped around her shoulders, and she leans into him affectionately. But what stands out to me is the background. It’s blurry, but it is undoubtedly the Order headquarters in Pennsylvania. I can see the peaks of the HQ building in the distance.
“This is HQ. How—is this you? Who are these people?”
“Those are your parents.”
I slowly look up from the photo.
“Taylor…I’m your mother.”
24
For the first ten years of my life, I often dreamt the same dream. In the dream, I woke up in a bedroom I did not recognize. A warm and cozy room, the walls painted sunflower yellow and the carpet a plush, white shag. I’d pad barefoot out into a hallway that seemed to stretch on forever with rows of closed doors on each side. At the end, a creaky wooden staircase led me down into the first floor. A clean home with simple lines—dark wood trim around doorways and big beams outlining vaulted ceilings. Noises from another room beckoned me, and I’d follow them into a sparkling white kitchen.
Nearly everything in the room was white, including the tables, chairs, and appliances. At the kitchen table, near a bay window letting in golden rays of sunlight, two people would sit and wave me over. I didn’t recognize them, but they were the same every time. In the dream, I knew them as my parents. They’d kiss me on the head and bring me a bowl of oatmeal. They said nothing but smiled at me, and it felt like home.
In real life, I’d awaken alone in the cabin. I told no one about my dream because it caused me so much shame. I’d been given the opportunity of a lifetime, been fed, clothed, and schooled,revered and respected by my peers. Feared by my enemies. But when the dream would recur, I’d wonder if maybe in that other life, I could’ve been happy.
The people in this photo don’t look anything like my dream parents. They do, however, look like me. I have his hair and her face, her eyes and his chin. I see them all over my reflection in the glass of the frame. It’s jarring. Most of my life, my reflection was as lonely as me.
“My father…is he?”
Roxana shakes her head. “No, that part of Theia’s story is true. She did execute him. He was a good man. We loved each other very much. His name was Paul.”
I can’t help but smile. Paul, like the protagonist of my favorite book. It’s hard not to let my imagination wander to a place where I had a dad who could read me my favorite book, give me too-tight hugs, and smelled like cologne. “Theia called you traitors.”
Her body sags as she glances to Delilah for support. “Jessa’s always been able to spin a good yarn.”
“Jessa?” It feels sacrilege to use a real name for Theia. “I never knew her real name.”
“Jessa, Paul, and myself joined OrPro in our teens. We’d been recruited out of a…” Roxana’s eyes shift away from me, clearly embarrassed. “A little gang. After, oh, maybe ten years of working beneath a bunch of do-nothings, we staged a coup d’état. The Order’s success is almost entirely due to our leadership. We started the infiltration of subregion leaders, we recruited from gangs and Underclass workers, we disseminated newspapers and trawled pubs and jails for new members. We worked day and night, but we had a lot of fun.”
