The Conspiracy of Us (11 page)

Colette peered over the crowd at Stellan, who was headed toward us but stopped halfway down the bar, looking at his phone. “He certainly does have ‘guns' . . .” She gave Luc a wicked grin.

Liam cleared his throat.

“What? Can't a girl look?” Colette batted her eyelashes and kissed him noisily on the cheek. Liam rolled his eyes good-naturedly.

“Did any photographers see you arrive?” Luc said.

“A couple.” Colette played with her pendant necklace, which I now realized was an aged copper version of the Dauphins' sun.

Luc's cheerful face clouded over.

“I like to live dangerously, Lucien,” Colette teased. “Anyway, Liam is only a second cousin of the Fredericks, and I'm the same to you.
You're
in more danger than we are.”

Luc raised a finger at a waiter for yet another drink. He turned to Liam, who was watching not entirely subtly while, next to our booth, a girl with a green pixie cut danced with a girl in a long pink wig, tracing a finger over the dragon tattoo covering her back.

“I hear one of your Keepers was terminated,” Luc said.

Liam snapped back around and frowned. “Yes. Xan was a good man. I wish my uncle hadn't needed to punish him so harshly.”

I looked around at all their somber faces. “What did he do?”

“Went against a direct order.” Luc swigged his drink.

I leaned my elbows on the shiny black tabletop. “They fired him for going against one order?”

A glance passed between the three of them. “Fired is one way to put it,” Colette said carefully.

Wait. They weren't saying the guy got
put to death
for going against an order? Before I could ask, Stellan emerged from the crowd. He nodded to Liam and Colette, then looked at the drink in Luc's hand when Luc hiccuped.

Luc narrowed his eyes and downed the drink in one gulp. “Gonna go smoke.” He slid out of the booth and flopped onto a stool at the end of the bar.

“What's wrong with him today?” Colette asked. “He's been acting strange.”

Stellan watched Luc light a cigarette. “He's been having a hard time with the babies coming and the mandate and all.”

The three of them started talking. At the bar, Luc rubbed a hand over his head, mussing his hair. I scooted out of the booth, too, pulling down my dress, which wouldn't stop trying to inch up, and slipped onto the bar stool next to Luc.

“Hey,” I said. He didn't look up, and I studied the sharp curve of his jaw, his angular, lanky frame. Besides the eyes, he looked nothing like me. But what if the Dauphins were my real family? If Monsieur Dauphin was my real father? That would mean Luc was my half brother. I felt a wave of affection for him.

“Everything okay?” I said. It was like the couple extra drinks had flipped a switch in him. He stared at his glass with big, miserable puppy dog eyes.

“
Cherie,
you're so lucky.” He wasn't even trying to talk over the music anymore. I could smell the sour liquor tang on his breath even over the cigarette. “You, Colette, Liam. You get the perks without the . . .
devoir.
Without the anxiety.”

“Are you worried about not being able to interpret the mandate?” I said.

“That, and everything.” He pawed at the back of his neck. “This thing. This tattoo.” He was slurring now, and pulled clumsily at the collar of his shirt. “This tattoo is so . . . heavy.”

I could see the edge of the sun, in the same place as Stellan's, at the top of his spine.

“Even more than my blood,” he mumbled, “this
thing
is the weight of my family—of our whole territory!—on my back. Literally.”

He snorted with drunken, derisive laughter at his own joke, but just as quickly, his face fell.

“What does it mean?” I asked gently.

He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray, and the last bits of smoke curled up toward the lights over the bar.

“Everybody in the Circle gets their family's tattoo on their seventeenth birthday. Family members, of course, but also the Keepers, the house staff . . . everybody.” He traced his tattoo with a fingertip, like he knew the lines by heart. “They are a physical sign of our
fidélité.
They mean unwavering loyalty. To the death.”

“To the
death
?” So I'd been right about the guy who worked for Liam's family.

He nodded blearily. “As in, we swear to die for the family, and we recognize that treachery can be punishable by death. When you hold as much responsibility as we do, there has to be incentive to stay in line. There are plenty of stories.”

I stared at the tattoo. Just like Stellan's. And Jack's. I thought of Jack, desperate for me to come to the Saxons. “Like what?” I said.

“All kinds of things.” A rowdy group of guys leaned on the bar right next to me, calling for drinks. I scooted even closer to Luc, who hardly seemed to notice. “Grant Frederick is not . . . tolerant. His Keeper might have refused a kill order, or he might just have talked back when he shouldn't've,” he said, starting to slur his words together. “And there're more. Like the Rajesh Keeper who leaked information to a media outlet we don't control. Or the Emir Keeper, who had a relationship with a family member. They got caught . . . you know.
Together
. He was terminated immediately.”

My thoughts flashed back to Jack asking me to prom. If being with a family member was grounds for termination, it
really
must have meant nothing.

“Some families are more harsh than others, of course,” Luc went on, “but you don't want to test it. And for family members, the tattoos are a constant reminder of our place in our family. And in the world.” Luc swirled the ice and lime wedges in his empty glass. “And yet, despite all that power, I can do nothing. Not to stop the Order, not to find clues to the mandate, not even to stop my new baby sister from being married off.”

“Married?” That was an abrupt change of subject.

Luc chuckled again, but it was a hollow sound. “Of course, no one finds it odd to be betrothed to an infant. They're all at our home groveling to my parents for the chance. I find it repulsive, but it's what the mandate says, so we will do it.”

I wasn't listening anymore. My heart pounded in my ears, off the beat of the music.

Married. The mandate. Betrothed.

The rightful One and the girl with the violet eyes.
Their
union.

Suddenly, Luc wasn't the only one swaying on his bar stool.

L
uc stared at me, waiting for an answer. “Because
union
in the mandate means ‘marriage,'” I clarified, hoping I'd misinterpreted. “Right? The girl with the violet eyes marries the One, once you figure out who the One is.”

“
Merde.
Why do I say thissthings?” Luc slurred. “I should not talk this way. The mandate, it is good. And, it is
destinée,
” he said, putting air quotes around the word. “‘Their fates mapped together.'”

Their fates mapped together. Another line of the mandate—it had to be. I'd been practically kidnapped and almost killed, all so I could be
married off
like a princess in a fairy tale?

I felt myself starting to shake again. It was like the shock had been waiting just under the surface since Prada, held back by a thread that had just snapped. I clenched clammy fingers on my bare thighs.

Luc belched and set his glass down. The music broke into a hard beat, and everyone on the dance floor jumped up and down in unison, hands in the air.

So I was to be married to whoever the Circle decided was the One. If they didn't figure out the mandate, it sounded like the Saxons would marry me to whatever son they had available. The Dauphins would choose someone to unite me with, if I was their family. If I wasn't, they might kill me so I wouldn't take their baby girl's birthright.

My mom had always known about this. Suddenly, I knew exactly how she must have felt. Trapped. Hunted.

I glanced behind me at the booth where Stellan still perched, talking with Liam and Colette. Colette gestured with a cigarette, her big sleepy eyes laughing like she didn't have a care in the world, even though they'd been talking about a staff member's “termination” a few minutes ago.

The music swelled too loud, and the cigarette smoke was too thick.

“Whasswrong?” Luc squinted one eye.

I scrambled off my bar stool. “Bathroom,” I said, and fled.

I shoved past bodies writhing on the dance floor, dizzy from the lights and the heavy bass and the heat. There had to be an emergency exit somewhere.

Stellan appeared by the bar, a head taller than everyone else.

In the second I stood frozen, watching his face come in and out of the lights, he turned and saw me. He must have read something in my face, because his eyes narrowed. I spun on my heel and darted toward the back door I'd seen earlier, shoving it open hard.

The steam hit me first, so heavy it felt like I could drown in it. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dim pink light. The room was a long, narrow cave with recesses along the wall. In each one, a steaming fuchsia waterfall splashed down in front of one of the dancing girls I'd seen from the bar.

A short woman with an earpiece and a scowl yelled something and grabbed my arm, propelling me to a waterfall that was missing a girl.

She thought I was one of the dancers, late for her shift.

I was about to rush back out and find a real exit, but the door opened. Stellan peeked in. I could go with him. Pretend I got lost on my way to the bathroom. But after seeing me run just now, he wouldn't let me out of his sight again.

I leapt onto the pedestal and caught my balance on the slimy stone wall. I let my hair fall in my face and swung my hips to the music, which was muffled like I had cotton in my ears.
Keep walking,
I urged him with my mind.
You were wrong about seeing me come in here. Just keep walking.

I hazarded a glance over my shoulder. Stellan strolled down the row, an outline in the steam.

Right behind me, his footsteps stopped. I glanced back once more, and his eyes bored into mine.

“What are you doing?” He reached for me.

The next song started, and a plume of sparks erupted behind me, blocking him. If I wanted to get away, it was my chance. I ducked through the waterfall, gasping as it doused my hair and ran down my shoulders.

I was standing on the end of the bar, hundreds of surprised faces turned up toward me. I dashed the water out of my eyes and looked around frantically, and, after a silent moment, whistles and catcalls erupted from all around. I tried to climb down onto a bar stool, and an overly tanned playboy type looked all too happy to set down his martini glass and grab me by the waist. He set me in the center of his group of leering friends, and I swatted a couple of grabby hands as I pushed out of their circle.

An exit sign glowed in a back corner. I dodged a waitress with a tray of shots and hurried toward the door as fast as I could without drawing even more attention. The door opened on a dark street, and cool air rushed over me.

I pushed it closed and ran. I bypassed hiding places that were too close and sprinted into a narrow alley across the street and around the corner. A nest of sleeping cats streaked away in flashes of gray and white and orange, and I huddled behind the Dumpster where they'd been, panting, dripping wet, shaking.

I heard an echo in the quiet night as the door opened and, a minute later, slammed shut again.

I let my head fall back against the cold brick wall and clutched my locket and oh my God the Circle and the mandate and the union and getting married and I was in so far over my head I could barely see the surface. I sucked in gasp after gasp of air.

A year and a half ago. I was fifteen and we were living in New Orleans. The emptiness was bad that year. Lane was a senior with blue-black hair and a lip ring he sucked into his mouth when he smiled. I was wary, sure, but I thought he was bringing me into his group of friends until he had me alone at his apartment and I said no, even though all the “army brats” were supposed to be slutty. He told me to let myself out. A year earlier, Kansas. Mila Anderson and her friends asked me to sit at their lunch table and invited me to a party and walked arm in arm with me down the halls until they finally ditched me at the liquor store in the middle of the night when they realized not every teenager from New York had a fake ID.

Way earlier. Five years old. Chicago. Two neighbors dared me to steal blue speckled bird eggs from a nest on the fire escape. I climbed out, they slammed the window shut, and it stuck. The ground was so far away, I hadn't liked heights ever since. I'd huddled against the stucco wall and clenched my locket in my fist, and then my mom was there. She scooped me up in her arms and saved me. I remembered exactly how she smelled that day, like lavender and sunshine. Like home.

Now I'd flown halfway across the world on a whim, like a gullible idiot, only to find out my family would take advantage of me in a second if they discovered who I really was. Even my own father probably would, if I could ever find him.

I took one last panicked breath, blew it out through pursed lips, and then let my locket fall out of my hand. I was alone, in a wet cocktail dress and stilettos, in the middle of the night, in Istanbul. Maybe giving in to the panic and running wasn't the brightest idea, but it was done. If I was going to fall apart, I'd have to do it some other time.

Across the street, an engine roared to a stop, and I pressed back farther into the shadows. Getting ready to run again, I peeked out and saw a motorcycle at the curb outside the service entrance. Its rider pulled off his helmet.

It was Jack.

M
y legs were carrying me across the street before I could stop myself.

“What are you doing here?” My hands still trembled, and now I'd added anger and wariness to the toxic brew.

Jack whipped around and took in my wet hair and what I just realized was a wet white dress. I crossed my arms over my chest. His eyes widened a little, but he didn't look as surprised as he should have.

“Get on.” He handed me a helmet and gestured to the seat behind him.

I pushed the helmet away. “You were planning to marry me off?”

He dropped his arm with a sigh and got off the motorcycle. “
I
personally wasn't planning to, but yes, that's what the mandate means. I was going to tell you, but you went off with Stellan after Prada.” He looked irritated, which made me even more irritated.

I pushed my damp hair behind my ears. “So are you here to kidnap me for the Saxons?”

“Avery, God, no.” He paused. “At least, not immediately—”

“Great. Perfect.” I stalked away into the dark, my heels clicking on the asphalt. Jack followed. “Leave me alone,” I said over my shoulder. Then I looked back toward the club, toward the dead end, toward the deserted, unfamiliar street. I swallowed.

“I know you're mad.” Jack held out his hands like a peace offering. “I'm sorry I couldn't tell you everything immediately. There was a bit of a time crunch, if you'll remember. But I'm assuming you came to Istanbul to find Fitz. That's where I'm going, too.”

He took one step closer, and I took one back. A garbage truck stopped down the empty street and lifted a Dumpster with its mechanical arm. “How did you find me?”

“With a tracker I put in your bag at prom,” he admitted without hesitation. “It's how I found you at Prada, too.”

I threw up my hands. “That's supposed to make me trust you more?”

He ignored me, glancing back at the club. “From the looks of you, I'd say you're trying to get out of here, so let's go.” He stalked to the bike and extended the helmet again. “I've already saved you twice when I should have been going straight to Fitz, so I'd really like to get there as soon as possible.”

I flinched like I'd been slapped. “Go, then. I never asked you to
rescue
me.”

Even as I said it, though, I knew it would be stupid to let him leave. Jack was by far my best chance of getting to Mr. Emerson.

He set the helmet on the seat of the bike and walked back into the halo of the streetlight. “Listen,” he said. “I'm sorry. This is difficult for both of us, but I am telling you the truth: I'm not going to force you to do anything. I still think going to the Saxons is the best plan, but . . .” He palmed the back of his neck. “I haven't even told them who you are yet. Okay? They still think you're distant family and that I'm currently retrieving you from a night of clubbing. For now I want you to come with me to Fitz's, make sure he's okay, see what he meant about you, and then we'll talk through the next steps. That's all.”

His boots echoed on the asphalt as he turned back to the bike. He hadn't told them? And . . . “Did Mr. Emerson actually say he was in trouble?”

“No. But he's still not answering his phone, and he left me some strange messages.” Jack's jaw clenched in the way I was coming to realize meant he was upset. If it really was possible Mr. Emerson was in some kind of danger, that had to take precedence.

“Tell me one thing.” I shifted my weight uncomfortably. “My father. You're sure you don't know anything about him?”

Jack hesitated. “I'm not sure of anything.”

He frowned in the direction of the club. I watched him tap his fingers on the motorcycle's ignition.

Going with Jack was the best of my limited choices. We'd talk to Mr. Emerson. He'd help me get back to Paris to find my mom. And maybe she'd be able to tell me something about my dad.

“I believe you,” I said. “I still don't trust you, but I believe you. I am only coming with you so we can make sure Mr. Emerson is okay, and so I can talk to him. Just so we're clear.”

“We're clear,” he said.

I took the helmet out of his hand, shoved it on my head, and climbed on the back of the motorcycle.

•   •   •

Istanbul at night was all color, like Mr. Emerson had said in his postcard. Bloodred lights along the river to our left, glittering streets rising to our right like the city was climbing a hill. The cold white gleam of a mosque's dome in the distance, neon storefronts not yet closed for the night.

Straddling the motorcycle in this short, tight dress wasn't easy, but Jack had shrugged out of his jacket and laid it over my lap. My hips pressed into his, and my arms wrapped around his waist, awkwardly at first, mostly because of the annoyance still lingering between us, but also because I wasn't used to quite so much Other Person's Body touching mine. I could feel the muscles in Jack's chest contract when he turned, and smell his boy smell between his shoulder blades. It made me think back to when he was just a boy I liked. That seemed so far away, and still too close.

Jack swerved around a truck piled high with fruit, and I tightened my grip. I'd imagined riding a motorcycle might be like riding a really fast bike, but it wasn't. Every time he accelerated, it felt like we might fall off, but I'd dig my fingers in and then we were flying, the rushing air around us dragging against my clothes, my hair, my skin.

We stopped at a light, and the smell of sizzling meat turning on a spit in front of a nearby restaurant wafted past.

“Why do they think
union
means ‘marriage'?” I said loudly. It was quieter when we weren't moving, but the helmets muffled our voices. “Could they be wrong?”

“They're fairly certain about the translation,” he said.

“‘Fairly certain' is not a good enough reason to ruin someone's life.” To ruin
my
life.

Jack turned around, and his helmet smacked mine with a hollow thump.

“Ow. Sorry.” I jerked back and so did he, and I was suddenly even more acutely aware of the ridges of muscle I could feel through his thin cotton T-shirt. I balled my hands into fists, but that was even more awkward, so I let my arms hover, not quite holding on, not quite not.

“Sorry,” he said again. I inclined the ear hole on the helmet to hear him. “I didn't mean to be insensitive. It's just that it's all been abstract before now. In the original Greek of the mandate, the word is
gamos.
It translates to ‘union' . . . but it also translates to ‘marriage.'”

Oh.

The light changed and I had to grab on to him again as we took off, flying down a wide street flanked by rows of shops and restaurants. At the next light, people strolled across the street, and I met the eyes of a girl in robes that covered her from head to toe, wrist to ankle, so just her glittering eyes showed. Then I saw the Louis Vuitton bag slung over her shoulder, and I couldn't help but smile at what to me seemed like a curious contrast but to her was just normal. Even more than Paris, being here felt
foreign.

Over the rumble of the bike and the distant low beat of drums and some kind of string instrument, I said, “Where exactly did the Book of Mandates come from?”

Jack leaned back, careful to keep his helmet away from mine. “Oracles were important in Alexander's time—like, have you heard of the Oracle of Delphi?”

I shifted on the seat, pulling down on my dress. “Yeah.”

“That oracle, others, various seers—they made hundreds of predictions,” he continued. “The ones about the future were collected and became the Book of Mandates.”

I looked out over the river, where two lit boats passed each other, their reflections rippling in the dark water. “What's the story of this particular mandate?” I said.

The light turned again before he could answer, but after just a few blocks, we got stuck in traffic at a busy intersection. The patio of a nearby bar was filled with well-dressed people laughing and smoking tall hookah pipes, and the sweet scent floated through the night air.

“Before Alexander died, he'd instructed the Diadochi to split his kingdom,” Jack called over his shoulder. I was starting to notice that he slipped into professor-speak when he talked about history, like it took effort for him to talk like a normal seventeen-year-old. “But he surprised them. Instead of declaring that he left it to all twelve of them equally, he said, ‘
Krat'eroi.
' In English, that means, ‘To the one who is the strongest.'”

The traffic moved a few feet, and the bike rumbled as Jack inched us forward. He raised his voice to be heard over a portly man in a long robe, selling the mirrored blankets draped over both his arms. “Since then, the Circle has ruled together, as a group of twelve, but the individual families have never stopped trying to determine the one who is the strongest.”

He said it like it had capital letters: The One Who Is The Strongest. And then it hit me, and goose bumps rose on my arms. “The One. Like in the mandate.”

Jack inclined his head. “Exactly,” he called.

“People as powerful as the Circle just don't seem like an ancient cult group who'd believe in a prophecy,” I said.

“We're not, exactly.” We hadn't moved in a couple minutes and Jack sat up taller to look over the traffic before settling back down with a sigh. “But we leave no stone unturned when it comes to new avenues of power, and finding this tomb would be more than anything we've ever had. It's supposedly far more than just wealth. It's what made Alexander who he was. Whether that means a weapon, or some kind of instructions from him—we don't know, but it's meant to be huge. And with so many of the mandates having come true, we have to try. Plus,” he went on, “fulfilling the union—being the One—is so significant, it'll make both the families a dominant force in the Circle no matter what, even if the tomb is never found. So if no one finds more about the mandate, the Dauphins will just pick somebody for a union with the baby girl and try to make everyone accept him as the One, so both families will gain that power.”

Like Luc had said. So even if they didn't figure out who was the One, it was true I wasn't off the hook.

The light changed, and we took off again. This time, we turned onto a less crowded street. Jack touched my hand like a warning, then sped up until the lights on the river smeared past. We didn't stop again until we'd pulled up at a block of apartment buildings.

Jack offered me his hand, and I slid off the bike as gracefully as I could.

He stashed both helmets in a compartment under the seat as I attempted to smooth my hair, and we crossed the street toward a modern white high-rise.

“Does the Order fit with the Alexander stuff, or are they separate?” I stepped over a cracked section of sidewalk, careful not to get my heels caught.

“They go back as far as we do,” Jack said distractedly. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked it, and we turned up the walk to the apartment building. “Alexander had a child who would have been his heir, but the boy died young. Some people—mostly those who were in cahoots with Alexander's mother, Olympias—thought the throne should be passed to a member of his extended family. They disliked the Diadochi, so they set out to take them down. They became the Order, and they've grown to hate us more than ever. The Circle do what we feel is best for the world. The Order thinks there should be more autonomy.”

As awful as the Order was, they might have had a point. Jack would never speak badly of the Circle, but the notion of such a small group of people controlling so much of what happened in the world still seemed wrong somehow. Probably. I still knew so little about them, I wasn't sure what to think.

Jack ushered me into a sparse but tasteful lobby, and my heels clicked hollowly on the tile.

As we headed to the stairwell, I looked around at the ferns, the seating area, the bank of mailboxes.

Mr. Emerson checked his mail here. Here and in Paris. My sweet pseudograndfather, who let eight-year-old me try on his reading glasses and spent countless flour-covered afternoons teaching my mom and me to make biscuits and cakes and homemade pasta sauce. Who talked with little Avery about books way too old for me, and never treated me like a kid.

Who had known what I was, and the danger I was in, for years. Suddenly, I was a little nervous about seeing him. What did it mean? And what had his text to Jack meant? I didn't doubt he had my best interests at heart, but I couldn't believe the first time I was going to see him in years would be in this context. Assuming he actually was here and everything was okay. I'd feel a lot better once we saw him, for a lot of reasons.

“You said he's your mentor?” We started up the stairs and I thought about taking my heels off—they were killing the backs of my feet—but it couldn't be that far.

“He's a tutor for the Keepers.” Jack paused one landing up to wait for me. “I keep forgetting you don't know any of this. Stellan and I are called Keepers. Technically, Keeper of the Keys. It grooms us to be Keeper of the Watch later. The Keeper of the Watch is the family head's right-hand man. He's security, he's an adviser, he helps run the estate.”

I nodded. And they were all men, as Stellan had said. In the world of the Circle, even though a purple-eyed girl was so valuable, women generally seemed to be good for marrying off, having babies, and being staff, unless they happened to be needed for something very specific, like Elodie was tonight.

Jack slowed when he realized I was falling behind. “Sorry, it's a fifth-floor walk-up. Anyway, each family has a tutor for their Keepers. That's what Fitz is, but over time he became more of a mentor to me.”

Knowing Mr. Emerson, I wasn't surprised.

Jack knocked at a door on the right side of the hall, and when there was no answer after a second knock, he produced a key, slid it into the lock, and swung the door open.