Smoke and Mirrors (43)

Forty-Three

Going the Distance

---

That night, my dreams were filled with Adrian.

By morning, I was exhausted, but I forced myself to bathe and change. I headed down to breakfast, where Sterling was chatting quietly with some of the servants.

They looked up as I entered and one of the servants pulled out a chair for me. I felt Sterling’s eyes on me and remembered how he’d hugged me yesterday—as if we were actually friends. Butterflies squirmed in my stomach at the thought.

Sterling cleared his throat. “We should be having a visitor today.”

My eyes widened. Seraphina. “Awesome.” I slipped into my chair and took an eager sip of tea.

After breakfast, Sterling, the Duke, and I retreated to the office to discuss our plan. The Duke opened the door, revealing a small office with a couple desks, a watcher owl and cage in the corner of the room, a window, and a few chairs.

—One of which was occupied with Seraphina.

“Your Highness!” the Duke exclaimed. “I was not told of your arrival.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Neither were your servants.” Her gold eyes swept over me. “Congratulations on your marriage, by the way.” Her ruby lips curled.

My smile faded and I shrugged. “Thanks.”

Sterling didn’t say anything, but instead shouldered past me and sat in the chair opposite of Seraphina. “Tessa and I have something to discuss with you. A plan to get your son back and shut down Adara’s group. Would you be willing to offer help?”

She watched him for a moment. “If it involves getting my son back and stopping my sister, of course. What plan do you have?”

I stepped forward, catching my foot on a rug and falling at her feet. Groaning, I pushed myself up and sat in the chair between her and Sterling. Her face was unamused. In fact, she looked like she hadn’t been amused in a very long time. Huge bags hung under her gold eyes, her hair was stringy and unwashed, and her face seemed to have aged since last I’d seen her.

Sterling and I glanced at each other. “Right now,” he started, ignoring my fall, “it’s only the rough outline of a plan. But we were wondering if. . .”

I turned to Seraphina. “—If there’s a possibility that I could pretend to be one of them. I could save Adrian and figure out what they’re doing ahead of time.” I inhaled. “We could stop them.”

Her eyebrows rose. “They’ll never fall for it. You’re prophesied to stop an unseen evil, which I’d say fits them pretty well. There’s no way they would ever be so naive.”

The duke piped up for the first time. “Unless they believe that having her on their side will stop the prophecy. If they think she thinks they’re good, perhaps they will be open to accepting her.” He shifted in his seat behind the desk.

Seraphina stared at the wall. “That’s a possibility. Not a probability, but a possibility.”

I swallowed. “Seraphina. . . I think I saw Adrian yesterday.”

Her eyes snapped to mine. “What do you mean?”

I picked at a scab on my thumb, avoiding her gaze. “I. . . had almost like a vision. I guess. But it wasn’t a hallucination or illusion. I’ve had that before and that was. . . different. This was. . . this was real.” My voice broke as I recalled the awful image from yesterday. “He looked dead, Seraphina. I know he wasn’t, but he looked it. If we don’t save him soon, he’ll. . .” I trailed off to keep myself from crying.

She inhaled sharply and whispered something under her breath. “We have to get him soon then. Tessa, if you’re willing to do this, I’m willing to help however I can.”

“Good,” Sterling said. “Then we need to make a plan.”

***

The next day I found myself crawling through the air vents of mom’s little clubhouse. I had no other name for whatever it was at the moment.

I had a feeling that air vents somehow worked differently here than they did on the Outside. Here, there were clear tubes running alongside me, and occasionally puddles of something that looked like water dotted the pathway.

A bag of tools was wrapped around my leg, beneath my dress. Each one was wrapped in cloth to keep them from making noise. I withdrew a screwdriver thingamajig and unwrapped it like a kid at Christmas. But quieter, of course. The end was in the shape of a triangle rather than a flat or plus-sign shape like the ones I used to see.

I unscrewed the paneling to a vent overlooking the leader’s office. No one was here, Sterling and Seraphina had made sure of that. This gave me time to slip down from the vent and use the massive wood desk as a platform. I tried to quietly climb down, just in case someone was here, but my bag of tools caught the vent and scraped it as I lowered myself. I hissed and hurriedly climbed down from the desk, then tip-toed across the floor to the cabinet in the corner of the room. If something was going to help me find Adrian’s location, surely it would be here.

I opened the doors and scanned the shelves. There were papers, blueprints for future prison cells, plans for world domination, and jars of poison. I’m totally kidding. Most of it looked like normal paper, which could have been plans for world domination, but I somehow doubted it. The bottles were full of pens, which likely were not poisonous.

—But then again, maybe they were.

I scratched my nose and shuffled through the papers. Several papers had various crayon scribbles on them, as if a kid or two had gotten ahold of them.

I skipped that cabinet and dug through the drawer of the desk.

There was a deck of cards, and a few other objects that I didn’t know the names of. None of them looked helpful.

I searched through a few more drawers and finally stumbled across an old, crumbling map of the building. I noticed right away that it was off by the location it said the main meeting room was.

I sighed and crumbled it up. They must have redone the rooms since then, because here it showed a meeting hall and a commons room, and mom had told me that had been combined into one many years ago. There were a few other rooms that should have been right next to each other, but I knew they were at opposite sides of the clubhouse–-or whatever they called their building. Maybe the map would be helpful somehow, but at this point, it didn’t look too trustworthy.

I stuck it in my bag of tools and, after digging through a few more drawers and coming up empty-handed, decided to crawl back into the air vent and go back before I was caught.

I crawled to the main meeting hall, which was entirely empty save for rows of chairs and groups of tables. I traced a finger along the tables and then seated myself.

Now all I had to do was wait.

I waited for what felt like forever. I picked at my nails, I scanned every area of the room for some source of entertainment to distract me from the nerves in my stomach, but all I found was a couple of spider webs and an old stain on the floor that looked suspiciously like coffee.

“Tessa?” Mother’s voice rang out from behind me.

My head snapped to meet her gaze. She wore a grey robe and hood, concealing almost all of her face, save for her eyes and mouth. It was nothing short of a cheesy halloween costume. “Mom?!” I don’t know why I was surprised. I should have known she’d be here. I just. . . wasn’t prepared to meet her so soon.

‘“What are you doing here?” she questioned, a hand on her hip.

I quickly stood, pulling my dress away from my legs to better hide my bag of tools. If I’d have thought, I’d have hidden them in the vent before I came down. Too late now.

“I–I want to join you.” The words spilled out of my lips like water. I didn’t even have to act to say them. A part of me truly did want to join her. To feel her love and closeness again like I once had.

She blinked from behind the stark white mask that stretched across her skin. “Join me?” Her eyes widened. “Do you really mean it?”

A sad smile blossomed across my face. “I miss the way things used to be. I want to be with you, and if that means joining the cause, then I absolutely will.”

She smiled. It was an unnerving smile that reminded me of a cat’s. I never remembered her smile being intimidating before. “I knew you would. You just needed that stupid husband of yours to stop filling your head with ideas. He’s not good for you; you could have had so much better.”

“Shi?” I asked. “He’s in love with Yinyue, and she loves him. They’re betrothed. Why would I want to destroy something so beautiful? No, I don’t like Sterling, but at least I’m not destroying someone else’s relationship to find my own happiness.” I wrapped my arms around myself.

She shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. “You’re just like your father. Furiously stubborn, the both of you.”

I chuckled. The lie rolled easily off my lips. “I’ve only known him for a little while. You’re the one I want to be like, you know that.”

Her ruby lips pursed. “There’s a process you’ll have to go through. You’ll have to prove your loyalty.”

“I’m prepared to do anything, mom. You have my loyalty.”

She sniffed. “But they don’t. You don’t know anything about the cause, the people, or why you need to join. And if you’re just joining based on emotions for me, that’s not loyalty at all, and you can be turned away as easily as you joined. You need a stronger foundation.”

I just stared at her. She had a point, but I worried about what it would take to prove that I was loyal. And what did gaining a stronger foundation mean?

Maybe I wasn’t as prepared for this as I thought I was.