The Hidden Twin Read online

  “Ack. No. It’s quite all right.” I try to wave him away. I smile, or snarl—something involving lips and teeth, at any rate. Why is this so difficult? Jey knows how to talk to people. And this person is talking to Jey, not me.

  Funny how it feels like he’s talking to me.

  He looks over at Onna and holds out two brass cups, smiling. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

  I realize that Onna hasn’t said a word yet. Her mouth is open and her brown irises are ringed by white as she extends a hand to take one of the cups. “Thank you, sir,” she says in a shaking voice.

  The lawn-cutter smiles and holds the other cup out to me. “Tell me, have you ever had ice water?”

  I mustn’t make a friend, I tell myself. But all the same, I can’t stem my curiosity. “Is that a type of cold water?” I crane my neck just a little at the sparkling liquid in the cup. “My father says the Copper Palace has some taps that run cold.”

  “Yes,” he says, taking a step toward me. “And it has bits of real ice in it to make it even colder. You can’t imagine the sensation. It’s incredible. You can feel it going all the way down your throat into your stomach.”

  The cup chills my fingertips. Polished stones of white ice bump gently against the sides.

  The first sip makes me shudder. He’s right. I can feel the slice of the ice going all the way down. He laughs as I look at him with astonishment. “It’s exciting,” I say. And it is—the fragrance of the peonies, the magically cold water under this bright, hot sun, and a handsome young man looking at me as though I am the most delightful puzzle he’s ever seen.

  He gestures. “The peonies are something special, aren’t they?”

  A sip goes down wrong and I cough. “I like peonies,” I say. “Since you asked. I—” I am about to say, I’ve never seen so many, but I remember just in time that Jey sees them every weekend. I snap my mouth closed.

  Onna squeaks, “I—I can’t, sir, I mustn’t—it’s—you’re too kind—” She’s holding the brass cup out, eyes lowered.

  He turns to her. “Onna, is it?” He takes the cup and she blushes. “If you’re not thirsty, would you mind … dumping out these ash buckets on the other side of the wall?”

  “Yes, sir.” She grabs the buckets, scooping up as much of my spilled ash as she can, and hurries away across the sunlit lawn.

  Sir. That would explain why he’s out of uniform. Could he be a master gardener?

  Rasus’s bloody nubs, could he be Master Fibbori himself?

  My blood is sloshing around so much, it’s making my fingers numb. Whoever he is, he doesn’t seem to be treating me—Jey—like an acquaintance, so he is probably not Master Fibbori. I take a risk and ask, “Do I know you?”

  He smiles and tilts his head, a reaction I can’t interpret. “No, I don’t think we’ve met. I apologize.” He extends a hand, and I curl my fingers around his in greeting the way my sister taught me. “Zahi,” he says.

  “Jey. Fairweather.” It feels strange giving myself a name. I hope he doesn’t say it back to me. “Anyway, excuse me, but I’ve got to get back to dusting.” I pause and, taking another risk, add, “The grounds have to be perfect for Crepuscule, with the unveiling of the bonescorch. You understand.”

  “I do,” he says.

  A swell of boldness—or stupidity—rushes through me, and I add, “Speaking of the bonescorch, you wouldn’t happen to know—?”

  I’m interrupted by a tinny chime emanating from the pocket of Zahi’s waistcoat. He pulls out a pocket watch—expensive if it has a bell in it—flips it open, and frowns. “How the day flies.” He looks at me and winks. “Well, at least—here.” Now he pulls something long and silver from one of two identical leather sheaths at his hip. To my questioning stare, he says, “Mower blades. Never know when I might need them, right? It’s a big lawn.” Then, with a leisurely motion, he swoops a slice at the flowers, severing one fat bloom from its stem. He holds it out to me.

  My muscles go rigid. “You just cut one of the Empress’s flowers!”

  He tilts his head again, which is getting annoying. “So I did.”

  Papa still tells the story of the bloom he brought me, the one now yellowing in a glass bowl in the Dome. A careless mechanic had dropped an oilcan from his perch on one of the Copper Palace’s walls, and it snapped the head of one of the peonies below. My father desperately tried to save the flower, but it was a lost cause. However, the Commandant’s head attendant happened by and was impressed by his efforts, so Papa was allowed to take the bloom home.

  The mechanic was never heard from again.

  My eyes search the grounds frantically. No one. I snap at the lawn-cutter, “You—featherbrain! What if you had been seen?”

  His eyes widen for a split second, mischievous. “I would be in trouble, surely. The Empress doesn’t look kindly on those who disturb her gardens. So I suppose you could say I’ve just risked my freedom—perhaps my life—to give you a present. Now, are you going to take it? It’s really the least you could do.”

  He is still holding the bloom out, with an arrogant smile. My heart thumps. No one saw, I tell myself, trying to believe it. But I’m frozen.

  Zahi lowers his hand. “Well, that wasn’t very successful. I didn’t think you— Never mind. First girl I’ve ever seen who dusts without gloves, and shoves her face into the flowers like a glutton, and grins at the landscape as though it’s her best friend in the world, and what do I do? Make an ass of myself.” He sighs, and tosses the peony bloom into the row of plants, where it disappears among the leaves.

  I draw myself up. “Yes.”

  He gives me a weak smile. “I’m sure you’re giving me the most scathing look behind those goggles.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You should take them off so I may better appreciate your scorn.”

  Now I feel the danger. This lawn-cutter is too curious. That’s the problem with hiding—it makes one more interesting. “No,” I say. “Out of the question.”

  Zahi rests a hand on his hip. “So will you tell me what color your eyes are, then, or shall I just imagine them?” I think of the gaunt mechanics and hunched miners who occasionally pass my window in Saltball Street. He does not move like them. He is straighter, more comfortable in the air and the light.

  “They’re brown,” I say.

  He inhales, peering. “Are they, really?”

  I take a step back and awkwardly bring a hand to my face. “They’re brown.” He wouldn’t slice his mower blade through my goggles strap, would he? The panic that has been flirting with my heart lands heavily in my chest. I don’t know what unsettles me more, his sharp edges or his soft ones. Jey would know what to do with him. And I’m pretty sure he would know what to do with Jey. But a redwing?

  The tinny chime sounds again from his pocket and he sighs. “I have somewhere else to be. And it’s the end of your day as well, isn’t it?”

  The end of my day already? My father will be emerging from the private garden dome any moment, and I’m no closer to finding the bonescorch than I was this morning.

  Zahi gives an apologetic smirk. “I’m sure you’re very disappointed.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I hand him back the brass cup. Then I bow low, remembering what politeness looks like outside my own house. “Nice to have met you. Breathe easy.”

  He looks at me again with that delightfully puzzled expression, and for a moment, I feel like me and not her. “Breathe easy, Miss Fairweather,” he returns, matching my bow. Only I’m not breathing easy. My lungs are tight and my heart pulses in my ears, and I wonder for the first time if I’m capable of an expression as soppy as Jey’s.

  five

  The Others of legend are dazzling creatures. The stories tell us they are gone—wiped out by the monster Bet-Nef a thousand years ago—but we keep them close to us to this day in our temples and palaces and colleges. Ethereal, beautiful things, they stare silently from sandstone eyes, threadbare tapestries, and brilliant stained gl
ass. We carve them, paint them, speak of them as though they are listening, worship them in secret as much as we do the actual gods.

  And yet it’s said that, because humans are weak, it’s the Other parent who must deal with the arrival of a redwing. The Other is the one who puts the brand-new baby in a sack and holds it under the water until the wriggling stops. Others are beings of light and justice, so it is only natural they feel no remorse in destroying creatures of evil destined to seek the destruction of all humans—creatures who fought alongside the monster Bet-Nef when he battled Dal Roet in the War of the Burning Land.

  Not that I’d have the first idea of how to bring about the destruction of the human race even if I wanted to. Beside the fact that I don’t even know every human, I can’t imagine how I would go about killing them all. It would be such an undertaking. If I were Rasus, I could pop the humans out of existence one by one with my lightning bolts. As Mol, I could suffocate everyone in Caldaras with lava. With Ver’s insidious influence, I could send a plague and they’d all vomit themselves to death within a week. And if I were the Long Angel, I would just whisper their names as they drifted off to sleep, and they’d never wake up.

  My own fire is small scale; I know that. Singeing a couple of priests in an alley is hardly the sort of thing that could topple nations. For widespread slaughter, I think I would have to use poison. In the mist, maybe. It would have to be a new, terrible sort of venom; there’s poison enough drifting down from Mol’s Mouth already, and over the years, the inhabitants of Caldaras City have learned to breathe it.

  If I did have the powers of Rasus or Ver or Mol, I would probably use it to get rid of all this damned poison fog, not kill all humans.

  But I am not a god. Redwings are not gods. Only gods can get enraged on such a grand scale as to want to exterminate an entire species. I never get angry. Almost never.

  * * *

  Jey’s spare gardener’s jumpsuit is folded neatly in the trunk at the end of her bed, but up in the Dome, I have yet to put on my own worn tweed. I am caught—as I haven’t been in years—by my reflection. Beyond the black spiderweb cracks beneath the surface of the old mirror on my wardrobe door I see yet another spiderweb—a pattern of angry red ridges crisscrossing my back, as though I’d attempted to roast myself on a grate.

  Redwings bear the scars of their ancestors.

  According to legend, redwings in alliance with the monster Bet-Nef were the most brutal part of the War of the Burning Land. They systematically slaughtered Others—including their own parents—and when Bet-Nef’s armies reached Caldaras City, they struck down priests, civilians, and even children. Legends don’t do anything halfway, after all.

  Then Dal Roet came to the city’s rescue, riding in on some kind of magnificent beast, no doubt—maybe a flying stritch with flaming wings, why not? Bet-Nef was tossed into the lake, his terrible armies were driven from Caldaras forever, and Dal Roet himself gave each evil redwing one thousand lashes. From that day forward, one of the ways you could supposedly tell a redwing from a human was by the thousand red scars on his back. Is the story true? I don’t know. But the scars are real.

  Born with scars. Isn’t that a kick in the pantaloons, as Jey would say.

  I stare, transfixed by my own ugliness. My scars don’t hurt, but lately they are intensifying, their color becoming more vibrant. Is it because I am getting older? Or because the Deep Dark is approaching? There is no one I can ask.

  I don’t think there are actually a thousand scars there, but my neck is stiff from angling to look in the mirror. Once again, I give up before I can count them all.

  The face of the handsome lawn-cutter, Zahi, flashes through my mind. A human girl could have let him know with her uncovered eyes that she liked his uncombed hair and rust-colored waistcoat, could have smiled, flirted.

  But who am I trying to fool? I was unsupervised in the city for only two days, and on the first I almost killed two men. Two priests. Priests!

  “Soup, soup, soup, soup!” comes an off-key song from below. It pulls me out of my daydreams, and I descend to find Jey attacking some horrible tomatoes with a kitchen knife and singing all the while. The tomatoes from our house garden stare up at me from their basket like the tiny heads of sick old people, grumpy and brownish.

  She looks up, her knife clattering to the floor. “I think I’m getting the hang of cutting tomatoes!”

  “Excellent.” I retrieve the knife and rinse it off in the sink.

  The door opens and Papa stumps in, carrying the scent of the gardens with him. “Mmm. Soup!” Jey beams. Papa looks at me. “And how was your day, my girl?” He places his work boots on the grass mat by the door.

  “Fine,” I say, avoiding his eyes. He is already shuffling by me to change into his evening clothes, his metal leg clacking across the floor. On the way, he pats my head with a big warm hand.

  I open the spice cupboard and pull out a few precious glass jars, then examine the little pots of herbs on the windowsill.

  “Does this look right?” Jey holds up her dripping knife. Liquid of a suspicious color glints in the slanted light that pokes through our lace curtains. She tips the cutting board, and bits of tomato ooze into a big pot.

  “They’re … different,” I say.

  “They’re a little icky.” She sighs. “It’s the poison air. It gets in the soil.” And she’s right, of course. It is much more difficult to raise plants in the open air of Caldaras City than in a greenhouse. “What we ought to do,” she says, “is throw out the whole bunch of them.”

  Papa shuffles back into the kitchen in his comfortable old linen shirt, its smooth fibers a last remnant of the farm Jey and I don’t remember. “Throw out what? What are we throwing out?”

  We both know it’s hopeless. Not because we can’t afford to waste a few disgusting vegetables now and again, but because—

  “The salt miners in Drush would love to have those tomatoes, pretty or not,” Papa says, crossing his arms. “Whole families living on half a pound of salt a day.”

  A ludicrous story. Anyone on that diet would meet their bloated death far too quickly to be much use as a miner. But that’s the end of it, and we cook the soup anyway, Jey singing tunelessly and Papa trying with all his might not to offer too much advice. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what expression his tangled beard is hiding, but his eyes usually smile.

  Now the three of us sit at the table, trying to consume our creation as quickly as possible so we can forget it ever existed. The soup tastes like gutters and woe, like the disease-ridden end of the world. Jey thinks it’s hilarious. And it is rather funny, us sitting here eating this disaster like it’s any normal supper. I hold my nose and slurp. Jey bursts out laughing.

  “I will never successfully raise a plant,” she says.

  “Maybe you’ve cultivated an entirely new breed of tomato,” I offer. “We could call it the Brown Beauty.”

  Jey grins. “Or the Rotten Delight!”

  “Or the Caldaras Upchuck!”

  Papa’s beard shudders as he pours the brownish slime into his mouth. He snorts a chuckle. “This soup is nothing to be ashamed of. When you can raise red tomatoes on Saltball Street, you’ll be ready to garden for the Empress herself. And I noticed you did an excellent job with the peonies today, Jey.”

  The peonies. I remember their fragrance, an emotion more than an actual memory of the scent. I see the velvet bloom I refused to accept slipping out of sight among the leaves.

  A knock at the door freezes us.

  Knocks are never good. When it’s just Papa and me outside, even a friend might be convinced I am my sister if something seems suspicious. But in here, there are two of us. Twins, with no holy scars on our foreheads to mark us as human. There’s no explaining that away.

  Papa pauses with his soupspoon in the air. I am already throwing my half-finished supper in the mulch box next to the sink and scrambling up the ladder to the Dome, my heart hammering my insides.

  * * *


  I don’t usually have to hide long. The knocks are mostly Jey’s friends coming to collect her, or a delivery of new gloves or shears for our father. Still, a minute behind the false back in the armoire can feel like an hour. Pieces of panic sting my mind as I wait in the blackness, a hundred things that could have given me away. Reasons the knock below could be a guard come to haul me to jail. No—more likely, to the Temple of Rasus.

  How I fought the priests with fire.

  How I stared at the obsidian redwing.

  How I spoke to the Onyx Staff.

  The questions I asked Nara Blake.

  The way I smelled the grass.

  The way I loved the peonies.

  But as suffocating as the blackness is, I survive. I always do. Jey’s thock thock with the broom handle on the ceiling under my feet soon signals it’s safe to come out.

  She is running hot water from the tap into the sink when I descend. Papa stands by the door reading a message. It was a courier, then. Nothing to be alarmed about. Probably instructions from Master Fibbori.

  Papa’s face says otherwise, though. I pause behind the ladder to the Dome, its cool metal surface between me and the kitchen. He looks to me, then Jey. My breath quickens.

  “Well,” Papa says.

  Jey looks up, detecting the same unsettling note in his voice that keeps me lurking behind the ladder. “What is it, Papa?”

  Papa blinks slowly and folds the message up. “Jey.” He sighs like a rumble from Mol himself. “Sit down, my girl.”

  Jey lowers herself into a chair as I come out from behind the ladder and join them at the table. I keep my fingers tightly entwined on my lap, but Jey is not used to controlling her own body and allows her nervous hands to tap the rough wooden surface of the table.

  Papa sighs again, putting the folded paper down on the table. “Jey,” he says, but doesn’t seem to know how to continue. I try to keep my gaze steady even as my blood throbs in my ears.

  “Papa,” Jey starts, and I shoot her a warning glance. She shuts her mouth. If he’s going to accuse us, let him do it. There’s no need to volunteer anything until we know what’s in that message.