Lodestar Page 21

  “Just the interrogations. And my head stayed mushy for those. The only thought I could hold on to was wait. I knew they’d make a mistake, and when they did, I’d have to move. It took hours and hours—but they finally burned one of my bonds. It didn’t sear all the way through, but it let me shift my hands just enough that I could wiggle my fingers into the secret pocket in my sleeve where I keep the crystal that takes me to see my dad. I think I broke my thumb trying to grab it—I heard a snap.” He held his hand up, frowning as the thumb seemed to work perfectly. “But it was worth the pain because as soon as I had the crystal in my hand I sparked a ball of light and leaped out of there.”

  Sparked? Sophie thought. Are you a Flasher?

  “Yeah. Same as . . .”

  Who? Sophie asked when he started trembling. Same as who?

  Wylie scratched hard at his neck. “They kept asking the same question over and over, no matter how many times I told them I didn’t know. Everything was about her.”

  Sophie was about to ask, Her who? when she figured it out on her own.

  Your mom?

  Wylie shifted back to surly teenager form.

  What did they want to know about her? she asked.

  “They thought I was with her when she made her last leap. I kept telling them I wasn’t, but they kept burning me over and over and telling me it would stop when I stopped lying. They didn’t get it. She died because I found her too late.”

  Tears streamed down his cheeks as he shifted to the present-day Wylie, screaming through the pain as his wounds reappeared.

  Fitz tried sending more warmth and energy, but it didn’t help, so Sophie tried inflicting. She couldn’t find any happiness, but she gave him a soft wave of hope, and Wylie’s breathing slowed to raspy breaths.

  “Sorry,” he told her. “I guess I’m not as strong as you thought.”

  You’re stronger, Sophie promised. You’ve been through so much.

  “Too much,” Wylie said. “I don’t know if I can take any more.”

  Maybe you won’t have to. Mr. Forkle and Granite are planning to erase the worst memories—

  “NO! They can’t!”

  I know it’s weird to imagine them rooting around in your head—but why live with the nightmares?

  “Because there might be something important! You can’t let them erase anything, Sophie. Promise me you’ll stop them.”

  Okay, she said when he kept repeating the plea. I promise.

  “You have to stick to that,” Wylie begged as he shifted back to six-year-old form. “You owe me.”

  I know, Sophie said. And maybe you should rest now. I think your mind could use the break.

  He faded into the shadows. “I’ll try. But I need you to do something for me. I need you to look into my mom’s death. I don’t think it was an accident anymore.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIS HAS EVERYTHING we know about the day Cyrah faded away,” Mr. Forkle said, holding up a golden orb the size of a gumball. “All the evidence we gathered suggested her death was nothing more than an unexpected tragedy.”

  He spun the top and bottom in opposite directions until they clicked like a combination lock, then handed it to Dex.

  Sophie and Fitz had brought everyone back to the boys’ old tree house to make sure their conversation wouldn’t disturb Wylie—and so Biana and Tam wouldn’t miss the update. Only Physic had stayed behind, wanting to run additional tests to triple-check that the pain they’d seen Wylie battling truly lived only in his memories.

  “Do you always carry that with you?” Sophie asked Mr. Forkle, wondering how he fit so much in his pockets—and why she’d never noticed him carrying so many weird things before.

  “Of course,” he said. “It’s similar to the Councillors’ caches, except it holds the things I need to remember, not the secrets I want to forget.”

  “So then, there’s probably all kinds of info about Sophie on here, right?” Dex asked.

  “There are files on all of you—and before anyone gets any ideas, let me assure you that I’m the only one capable of accessing that information. So can we focus on the fact that young Mr. Endal has given us an urgent project?”

  “Right,” Dex said, squeezing the top and bottom of the sphere to make a hologram flash from the center.

  Everyone scooted closer to squint at the projection, which started with a family picture.

  Prentice looked like he’d been midlaugh, his eyes focused on his wife—whose auburn hair glowed wild and red where it caught the sun. Between them was the same six-year-old boy Sophie had spoken to in Wylie’s memories, and now she could see what an even mix he was of both of his parents. He had his mom’s smile and a dash of her creaminess to his skin, and his dad’s hair and eyes and nose.

  “They were so happy,” she whispered.

  “They were,” Tiergan said, wiping his eyes.

  Dex twisted the gadget again, revealing a single document. “This isn’t much to go on.”

  “I know,” Mr. Forkle said. “Cyrah was alone for her final leap. Wylie found her sometime after, and it was impossible to tell how long she’d been there. She was unconscious. Barely breathing. Wylie hailed Elwin for help, but the damage was beyond anyone’s skills. By the time Elwin called Alden to search Cyrah’s memories, her mind had grown too weak to recover anything. The last of her form faded not long after. All they could do was watch.”

  Sophie blinked back tears as she imagined it.

  In order to light leap, their bodies had to break down into particles small enough to be carried by the light. And the only way to re-form was to hold the pieces together, either with a bracelet-style gadget called a nexus—which all younger elves were required to wear until their mental strength reached a proven level—or with the power of their own concentration. If you lost too much of yourself . . .

  There were worse ways to die, of course. In fact, out of all of Sophie’s brushes with death, fading had been the most pleasant. It started with shocking pain—but the agony soon eased, replaced with an irresistible rushing warmth that pulled like a gentle breeze, begging her to follow it to a world of shimmer and sparkle and color and freedom.

  But it was a death all the same.

  “Wylie tried to reach me after it happened,” Tiergan said, turning to stare out the windows. “He hailed me four times before he gave up and let Elwin hail Alden. Maybe if I’d answered, we could’ve recovered something from Cyrah’s mind.”

  “Do we know where Cyrah leaped from?” Sophie asked.

  “She told Wylie that she was going back to Mysterium—which matched what her registry pendant recorded,” Mr. Forkle said. “She went to take inventory of her stall.”

  “Cyrah had a small sidewalk booth where she sold custom hair ribbons,” Tiergan explained. “It wasn’t as fancy as the boutique she’d had before Prentice was arrested. But very few nobles wanted to support the wife of a criminal, so she’d moved to a working-class city.”

  “I went to that stall,” Biana said. “My dad took me when I was little—I still have the combs he bought. And I remember being surprised we went to Mysterium instead of Atlantis.”

  “Alden was always trying to find small ways to assist Cyrah,” Tiergan muttered. “As if buying hair clips could make up for destroying her family!”

  The words sliced through the room, too dull to draw any blood. But Fitz and Biana winced all the same.

  “I’m sorry,” Tiergan told them. “I just hate having to think about this again. Wylie’s been through so much—and I keep trying to make it up to him. But no matter what I do . . .”

  He pounded his fist against the window.

  Sophie crossed the room and rested a hand on his arm. Tiergan wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of person, but . . .

  He placed his hand over hers.

  She wished she could guarantee that everything would be okay—that they’d find a way to solve all of this. Instead she told him, “Wylie’s strong.”

  “He is. He has to be.
Just like you.” He squeezed her hand tighter before slowly pulling away. “I suppose the one small relief is that Prentice is unconscious through all of this.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Mr. Forkle said. “We cannot bring him back to a life where his son is in danger and his wife’s murder unsolved. He’d never survive it.”

  “Am I the only one who doesn’t understand how murder by light leap is possible?” Tam asked. “An accident, I get. But aren’t we the ones in control of our consciousness?”

  “That’s what I thought too,” Sophie admitted. “Otherwise, wouldn’t we wear nexuses our whole lives?”

  “We remove our nexuses because technology should never replace the natural power of our mind,” Mr. Forkle told them. “And because we’re supposed to belong to a society where people would never violate the safety of another. But the sad truth is, if someone were to cause Cyrah severe pain right as she was leaping, it could’ve broken her concentration during the crucial transformation.”

  “Or if someone shined a secondary light in her path,” Tiergan added, “her consciousness would’ve divided without her realizing. Part of her would’ve followed one beam—the rest, the other. And she wouldn’t have had enough of herself left in either place.”

  Linh curled her arms around herself. “That’s really scary.”

  “It is,” Mr. Forkle agreed. “Safety is an illusion. It exists only when we, as a society, agree to enforce it. But theoretically, any situation could turn violent if someone decided to treat it that way. During my time with humans, I witnessed many horrors that were the result of one individual—or a small group—choosing to violate the trust we all put in each other. The time is coming when we as a species will have to decide if we’re going to stray down the same dark path. But I think I’ve gotten off track. My point is that, yes, sadly, murder by light leap—and many other unimaginable means—is possible.”

  “Okay, but . . . the streets in Mysterium are always crammed with people,” Dex reminded them. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed something weird going on when Cyrah leaped?”

  “People rarely notice things they don’t expect to see,” Tiergan told him. “They’re too distracted by their own perception of reality.”

  “Did anyone see her final leap happen?” Sophie asked.

  “Not that I could find,” Mr. Forkle said.

  “So then she could’ve wandered to a more isolated place before she leaped away,” Sophie pointed out. “Maybe she had a secret meeting in the area where the Council stores my human family’s old things. It seemed pretty deserted when Councillor Terik took me.”

  “Or she wasn’t in Mysterium at all,” Fitz added. “We all know registry feeds can be altered. Did anyone actually see her there?”

  “They did,” Mr. Forkle said. “Several people saw her sorting stock in her stall.”

  “This list at the end here,” Dex jumped in. “Is that the people who saw her?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Forkle said. “Why?”

  “Marella’s mom is on it.” He pointed to the name Caprise Redek, glowing among a dozen other names.

  “Caprise was one of my more memorable interviews,” Mr. Forkle said quietly. “She seemed to be struggling quite a bit that day.”

  Marella’s mother had suffered a traumatic brain injury a few years earlier, and despite Elwin’s best efforts, she’d battled unstable emotions ever since. She took elixirs to manage the condition, but sometimes they weren’t enough.

  “What did she say?” Sophie asked.

  “Mostly she kept mumbling that Cyrah should’ve been more careful. I assumed she meant careful during leaping.”

  That did make sense, but . . .

  “Now that we know her death might not have been an accident, do you think she could’ve meant something else?” Sophie asked.

  “If it were anyone other than Caprise Redek, I might be ready to wander down that path,” Tiergan told her. “But I’ve seen Caprise on her bad days. It’s not her fault—and she tries her best. But reason and rationality abandon her. And when you consider that she would’ve been saying these things after hearing the devastating news about Cyrah, I think it needs to be taken with an especially potent grain of salt.”

  “I still wonder if Cyrah went somewhere after Mysterium and her feed was altered,” Fitz mumbled. “It just seems too random that she went to count hair ribbons and ended up dead.”

  “But who would’ve altered the feed?” Tiergan asked. “We know it wasn’t us. And Cyrah was a Flasher, not a Technopath. And if the Neverseen were involved with her death, why would they need to interrogate Wylie?”

  “Maybe she was working on something important for them, and they were hoping she might’ve shared certain key information with him before she died,” Tam suggested.

  “But then why go after him now?” Dex asked. “Why not interrogate him right after it happened?”

  “They might not have wanted anyone to know that Cyrah’s death wasn’t an accident,” Linh said.

  “Or, it could have something to do with whatever they’re planning through the Lodestar Initiative,” Biana mumbled.

  “We can debate theories all day,” Mr. Forkle told them, “But it won’t bring us any closer to the truth.”

  “So what’s your plan?” Sophie asked.

  “I . . . have no idea.” He sounded more tired than Sophie had ever heard.

  “Gethen might know something about all of this, right?” Fitz asked.

  “That’s true!” Sophie realized. “And after Wylie’s attack, I’m sure the Council is going to be very motivated to find out what happened, so—”

  “We’re not going to tell the Council about this,” Mr. Forkle interrupted. “They do not make wise decisions when they’re frightened. And learning that one of their citizens was captured and brutalized—from one of our world’s most secure buildings—will send them into a frenzy. The last time that happened, they declared us their number one enemy, instead of focusing on the Neverseen. And let’s not forget about the ability-restricting circlet they ordered Miss Foster to wear.”

  Dex winced. The circlet had been his invention—but he’d never thought the Council would use it on Sophie.

  “Working against the Council hasn’t gone well for us either,” Sophie reminded him. “And if Gethen—”

  “Gethen is not the grand solution you believe him to be!” Mr. Forkle snapped. He turned away, tearing his hands through his grayed hair. “I know you want to believe—”

  “You said he was a priority,” Sophie interrupted.

  “I did. But circumstances have changed. Now our priority must be protecting Wylie—and that includes sparing him the stress of becoming a public spectacle. Surely you remember what it felt like to be The Girl Who Was Taken. Would you wish that on him? After everything he’s been through?”

  “I’m sure the Council would keep this quiet if we asked,” Biana said quietly.

  “All we can be sure of, Miss Vacker, is that we can’t be sure of how the Council will respond. So we must err on the side of caution. We must regroup and strategize. And we must wait to act until we have a plan that is in Wylie’s best interest.”

  Sophie glanced at Tiergan. “You really think we should waste time sitting around, lying and hiding things?”

  Tiergan turned to the windows, staring at the gently swaying trees. “I think our next course should be up to Wylie. He’s the one who will endure the consequences.”

  Sophie headed for the door. “Okay, I’ll ask him.”

  Mr. Forkle blocked her. “We will not be troubling him with these questions until he’s fully recovered.”

  “But that could be days.”

  “In the grand scheme of things, that is a very small amount of time.” His tone left no room for arguing.

  “We have to do something,” Sophie insisted.

  Sneaking into Lumenaria without the Council’s permission sounded impossible—especially with how little they knew about the security in the
fortress. And she couldn’t imagine she’d be able to communicate telepathically with Lady Gisela in the ogre prison—or that Lady Gisela would actually tell her anything if she could.

  So where did that leave them?

  “Keefe’s trying to steal Fintan’s cache,” she said after a few seconds. “Do you think it might have any information on it about Cyrah?”

  “If it does, why would they need to go after Wylie?” Fitz asked.

  “And while we’re talking about Keefe,” Tam jumped in, his silver eyes focusing on Sophie, “I know you’re going to get mad at me for saying this. But before we keep trusting him, we need to find out what he knows—and I don’t just mean the little bits he tells you during your nightly flirt sessions.”

  “That’s not what they are,” Sophie snapped.

  “Maybe not for you. But I doubt the guy who calls himself the president of the Foster Fan Club is going to have a bunch of private convos with you and not use that chance to try to keep winning you over.”

  “Winning me—what?” Sophie asked. “That’s not—I—what?”

  “Not important,” Tam said. “But you know what is? Making sure he’s not involved with horrors like this. Can you honestly tell me you’re not worried he was somehow part of what they did to Wylie? Or that his whole ‘warning’ about the danger to your family was actually a lie to keep everyone distracted from what was really happening?”

  Sophie rubbed the knot under her ribs. “I know you don’t trust Keefe—”

  “And I know you do,” Tam interrupted. “I get that you two are really, really close—”

  “They’re not that close,” Fitz mumbled.

  “Uh . . . sure . . . ,” Tam said. “All I’m saying is, we need to know exactly who we’re dealing with—and not just what he says. We need to know what he’s thinking, and hiding, and planning.”

  “You want me to search his mind,” Sophie guessed.

  Tam nodded. “I know Telepaths have rules, but Wylie deserves protection way more than Keefe deserves privacy.”

  “But I don’t actually know if I can search his mind from far away,” Sophie argued. “Having a telepathic conversation is different from probing memories. For that, I usually need physical contact.”