Wayfarer by Alexandra Bracken
Etta turned, gripping her elbows, trying to fold in on herself. Disappear.
She killed Alice.
Had she watched Etta go through the passage with Sophia? Had she smiled, knowing she’d won that round, too? All Rose had to do was pretend to believe in her, just one time, and Etta had let her shape her future.
She left Alice to die alone.
Her eyes pricked with shame and a humiliation that would not quiet. She’d been so proud of herself, so defiant, so ready to show everyone in this hidden world that Rose’s daughter could be just as strong and sharp and cunning as the woman herself. But she wasn’t Rose’s daughter—she was her tool. Years spent fighting for her love, her praise, for some kind of acknowledgment…
“You—” she choked out. She pressed a hand to her eyes, felt the fat, hot tears spill over her fingers. Look up, Etta ordered herself. Look and see who she is. Who she’s always been. “It was you—”
Rose met her gaze. Defiant.
Denying nothing.
It was Alice’s face now that she saw, freckled and young, in the uniform that brought her so much pride; in her apartment on the Upper East Side, smiling as Etta learned her first scales; upturned in the audience, as she watched Etta perform from the front row. Her life.
I was raised by a stranger. The words roared through her mind, barbed and scalding. I never meant anything more than what I could do for her.
Maybe this was the reason her mother hadn’t told her about their hidden world, about her father—because she knew Etta’s soft heart would twine her together with the Thorns, and she would lose the best hope she had of seeing this fantasy through.
No more.
Alice, the woman who had raised her, who had given her love, attention, focus, everything of herself—Alice had been her true mother, and this was the woman who had taken her from Etta. Murdered her.
She straightened at the sound of pounding feet, and looked up in time to see two figures in black cloaks race down the edges of the hallway, long, curved daggers in their hands. Rose spun, swore viciously, and without a second’s hesitation raised her gun and fired. The attacker on the right dove into a marble table to avoid it, but Rose fired again, and this time did not miss. Her aim, as always, was perfect.
Until she ran out of bullets. She fired again at the other attacker, but the gun clicked in her hand, the chamber empty.
Henry watched, riveted, still trying to summon his strength to rise. His mouth was moving, he was saying something, but Etta couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own furious heartbeat, the static of the blast.
Rose threw the gun aside and charged the remaining attacker, slamming him to the ground. When she rose to her feet again, the man sprang up as well, his blade arcing up as if to pierce beneath her chin.
Etta kept her focus on the soldiers charging down the hall, the footmen that rushed in behind them. By the time they were within reach of the dining room, Rose had already run past her, shoving her aside as the attacker leaped forward to follow.
The impact of slamming into the wall jarred the grief from Etta’s mind, leaving nothing but pristine, pure hate. Fury would have to be enough to carry her for now.
“Etta—” Henry was trying to sit up, choking on his own breath. She could barely hear him over the ringing in her ears, as he was surrounded and lifted by four of the soldiers. One tried to grab her, but she slipped away again and again, pulling out of their reach. “Listen—listen to me—!”
This has to end. If her mother had started this, then Etta, the only other living Linden, would take the responsibility of righting it. Any doubt she’d had was gone now, blasted away. The original timeline had to be restored. It was the only hope she had of salvaging everything, possibly even the lives that had been taken.
The choice was offered to her. It should have been frightening, the weight of it, but as Etta shook off the past, the unbearable questions and the uncertainty, it freed her instead.
She looked at Henry and made a promise. “I’m going to finish this.”
“No—no!”
She tore herself away from Henry, from the soldiers, and bolted down the wide hall, until only a trail of bloody footsteps on the carpet was proof she had ever been there at all.
Reaching down, Etta gripped where the hem of her dress was torn, ripping it further to give her legs a better range of movement. She made a sharp left around the next corner. Her ears had begun to pop and crackle in a way that frightened her, but the ringing was fading enough to give her a warning.
Her feet slid to such a sudden stop that the Oriental runner bunched beneath them. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of people were charging down the narrow hall toward her, chanting, shouting in fragmented Russian—“Ochistite dvorets!”—over and over and over. The man in front held a bloodred flag in one hand and a gun in the other. Behind him, a variety of tools and weapons were waving in the air.
They’re taking the palace, clearing it out. Etta struggled for her next breath, limping heavily. Ironwood’s plan here went beyond mere assassination. No doubt his men had been here all along, sowing the seeds of discontent, greasing the revolutionaries’ wheels before setting them on a path toward violence. Had he known Henry would come with the other Thorns? Had he ordered them to wait for his arrival?
She turned and doubled back the way she had come, taking a left rather than a right. Etta couldn’t stop herself from looking back over her shoulder one last time. But she could not make anything out through the heavy cover of smoke.
A hand reached out, snatching her arm. Etta felt a shriek tear out of her throat as she was yanked off-balance and dragged through a doorway. She kicked, clawing at whoever had grabbed her. The door slammed shut and she was slammed up against it, knocking the breath out of her again and smearing black over her vision.
“—ta, what’s happening? Etta!”
She jerked away from the hands holding her in place, rubbing at her eyes.
“What…that…can…me…?” The words were broken up by the pulsing in her eardrums. Etta looked up, surprised to find Julian’s face tight with worry as he touched the side of her cheek, his fingers pulling away red with blood.
“Explosion!” She had to shout the word to hear it herself. Julian cringed, nodding.
“Thought as much.”
Etta pulled away from him, going for the door again. “Attackers!”
He said something that might have been “revolt” or “revolting.”
“Run,” she told him.
“Where are you going?” he shouted back, finally loud enough for her to understand.
“Search the palace—find astrolabe—”
“It’s not here!” He grabbed her shoulders, turning her back toward him. “They found his body—stuffed in a bloody wardrobe, no astrolabe in sight. They were going to tell your father after dinner—”
If Etta had taken a knife and stabbed it deep into her belly, it would have been less painful than this. He’d killed his enemy; he’d taken what he wanted most. Her mind shaved down each of her wild thoughts, until only facts remained: Ironwood has it. Need to find Ironwood. Need to finish this.
Julian opened his mouth to say something else, but Etta pressed her finger to her lips and opened the door a crack, peering out of it. There was a dull roar coming from down the hall, but she couldn’t pick out any one word. Satisfied that the men and women who’d flooded the palace were heading toward the dining room, Etta grabbed Julian’s arm and pulled them both back outside.
Even before she began to run, she felt him dig in his heels, resisting. Etta sent him an incredulous look over her shoulder, which was met, to her surprise, with genuine fear. Julian seemed flummoxed by what was happening—at least until a man at the edge of the crowd turned and shouted something at them that made the others turn as well. Then survival instincts kicked in, and suddenly he was the one running, the one dragging her.
Etta wasn’t sure it mattered whether or not he knew where he was going. T
“Cripes!” Julian yelped.
How did anyone ever find their way out of this place without help? She blew the loose hair out of her face, trying to assess her options. They needed an exit, any sort of exit—a door, a window that could be smashed, a sewage pipe, she didn’t care, as long as it was in the opposite direction from the mob. Neither did Julian, who had taken to running blindly forward, his arm thrown up over his head like that could somehow protect him.
There were hallways that served as large arteries to the palace, but those seemed to be clogged with soldiers, staff trying to flee, and the plainclothes people who’d come storming in from the outside. Right now, the only thing guiding Etta’s steps was silence; she found herself searching for it beneath the throbbing and whistling in her ears, reaching for some part of the palace that was still, that hadn’t been engulfed by the fury pouring through its gilded veins like acid.
Revolution. Her mind spun the word out, with all of the disaster and destruction and promise it encompassed. In a different year, in a different form, but revolution all the same, this time stirred up by the Ironwoods.
She drew them around a corner and, in the next instant, felt a blow to her chin, a knee to her leg. The breath wheezed out of her, and when she finally inhaled, dazed and on the floor, there was the smell of laundry and starch. A young girl, a maid, was sprawled out on the floor in front of them, her uniform ripped at the skirt and slightly askew from where she’d slammed into Etta.
Julian had managed to stay upright and say something to the maid in halting Russian. The maid pointed, her whole arm shaking, toward a door at the end of the hallway.
The maid took the opportunity to scamper off, picking up her small valise and all but running down the hall in the opposite direction, her blond braid streaming out behind her. It was the last clear sight Etta had before the electric lamps around them surged with brightness, and, with a hiss, flashed out completely, leaving a few scattered candles in sconces to light a hall bigger than Etta’s whole apartment building in Manhattan.
“Well, that was bloody ominous. She said to go this way,” Julian told her, jerking a thumb up ahead, to where the small hall dead-ended at the nondescript door Etta had seen before.
“You speak Russian?” Etta asked as they began to run again.
“Er, just barely. She either said this was some sort of inner servant hall, or their quarters, so I guess we’ll be in for a surprise, won’t we?” Excitement bubbled out of him, giving him a slightly breathless quality.
The door flew open then; the sudden light momentarily blinded Etta, who threw up an arm to shield her eyes. The silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway, a box-shaped flashlight in his hands—it wasn’t until he made a noise of surprise and turned the light away that Etta saw it was one of the men who had met them outside, still wearing the palace’s ornate livery. He adjusted his grip on the light so they could see him press a finger to his lips and wave them forward.
Etta and Julian exchanged a look.
“What are the chances…” he began.
“…we’re about to be murdered?” Etta finished as they made their way forward. “The better question is, what do you have on you to defend yourself?”
“Um…besides you? Did I need something else?” he whispered. “You won’t let them take us alive, will you, kiddo?”
At any other moment Etta might have laughed, but the truth of it landed hard: there was only so much Julian could do to contribute to their survival. If it came down to it, she would be the one fighting. And she had no doubt that if things went badly, he’d leave her to deal with the mess.
But she also knew that if anyone was going to help them get back to the passage in the woods, it would be him.
In exchange for something else, I’m sure, she thought grimly. Not for the first time, she felt her heart crimp at the thought of how much easier this would be, how much safer she would feel, if it were Nicholas at her back. Even if neither of them knew where to go or how to find the passages, there would have been an equality between them. The thought of putting herself in the hands of a born-and-raised Ironwood again, even temporarily, made her feel sick to her stomach.
“Come, come, this way—” the man said in heavily accented English. “This way—”
Julian’s pace eased off long before Etta’s; she reached the man first, her fingers curled into fists at her side, trying to read his face in the darkness. The man studied her with open horror. “Is he dead?”
Etta hesitated before nodding. The man closed his eyes, turned his face upward to steal a calming breath. Then he stood at his full height and pressed the handle of the flashlight into her hands.
“Follow this hall to the end,” he said haltingly. “There is a window left open. Go now.”
“Wait a tick—” Julian started, but the man pushed past them both, and went the opposite way.
“All right,” Julian said after a beat of silence. “Have to admit, I’m still waiting for the firing squad to spring up and take us out, Romanov-style.”
“That is not funny,” Etta said sharply, stalking down the hall.
“Lighten up, Linden-Hemlock-Spencer,” he whispered back, jogging to catch up to her. The inner hall muffled the chaos outside of it, but only just. The gunfire was endless, blurring into thunder. “Maybe we should just hide—stay here until the trouble passes?”
“Until someone finds us and finishes us off?” Etta said, catching the first hint of the open window’s freezing draft curling toward them. The way they probably grabbed Henry. Every time she blinked, the explosion seemed to set off again behind her eyes, blinding, disorienting, incinerating her from the inside out.
Did I really leave him?
With a start, she realized she was crying.
Did I leave him there to die?
“Come now, old girl, it’s not as bad as all that,” Julian said. “We’ll be fine. I can get us out of here in a jiff. There’s a passage at the Imperial Academy of Arts, just across the Neva River. How do you feel about sunlight and warmth and a charming lack of Gatling guns?”
FROST COVERED THE WINDOW; at some point, the dark sky had begun spitting down snow. Some of it had blown inside through a small crack, leaving a mess on the floor. A few different sets of footprints were already pressed into the slush, leading away from the window—clearly, others had taken the chance to leave.
Outside, she heard that same phrase being chanted in the distance: “Ochistite dvorets!”
Etta got her hands under the window and tugged it up high enough to slip through. The chill cut straight through her flimsy dress and the silk slip beneath, but it was a good sort of cold—it lifted the mental fog, sharpening her thoughts.
“Up you go,” Julian said, offering his hands to hoist her up. Etta ignored him and pulled herself through, despite the pain that lanced through her shoulder and bare feet at the impact on the hard stone path below. Julian landed just as roughly behind her.
The palace sat close to the river, separated only by a small street and embankment. There was no one around them that she could see, but Julian heard something. He reached over, switching off her flashlight, and held out an arm to keep her in place as a car raced down the road, slinging mud and slush up into the air. Julian let out a noise of protest as it splattered onto the front of his otherwise pristine trousers.
Etta scanned the street and river for any way across both. There seemed to be a bridge in the distance, but between it and them was a mass of humanity making its way down the street. She wasn’t about to stick around and see if the marchers were soldiers or more of St. Petersburg’s—Petrograd’s—unhappy population.
Julian darted across the street to the
Etta limped over to him, peering through the darkness to see what was below—a boatman, as it turned out, in one of three rowboats tied up to the small dock, smoking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The trail of smoke curled up toward them, a wriggling wisp of white.
Julian’s face was outraged when he looked at her. “He wants over seven thousand rubles to use one of his damned boats. Said the other servants were willing to pay for him to ferry them. I don’t have that kind of money, do you?”
After everything that had happened over the course of the last hour, Etta felt a strange, unnatural calm settle over her. Improvised explosives were a problem. Fleeing a furious mob was a problem. Greedy boatmen were not.
“May I have the flashlight?” she asked, holding out her hand.
He passed it to her, but tried to tug it back at the last second. “What are you planning? You’ve got that deranged look in your eye—”
Etta yanked it out of his hand and sidled up over the wall, then down the short hill that brought her to the wooden dock.
“English?” she called out.
The boatman stood up, stepping out of the boat, a leering smile on his face. His eyes skimmed over the place where the strap of her dress had ripped, exposing one shoulder. “Little English for little lady.”
Etta mentally gagged as she returned his smile with one of her own and said, in what she hoped was a sweet tone, “Yes, little lady in desperate need of help. Will you be a hero and help a girl out?”
“You’re flirting with him?” Julian called down in disbelief.