Queen. Aimee Carter

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СКАЧАТЬ his eager voice filtering over the clatter of dishes, and for a moment I let myself be carried back to the countless evenings we’d spent in the kitchen of our group home, helping Nina with dinner or washing up after. The cold marble of Mercer Manor fell away, replaced with wood and brick and heat from the fireplace. I would have given anything to go back there, even for just a day, and have Benjy look at me like I was me again. Maybe I was imagining it, but now that I saw him like this—with someone else, when he didn’t know I was watching—it was clear that there was something missing from the way he talked when we were around each other. An easiness to our banter, jokes that made us both laugh, the way we used to tease each other without wondering if it was the last conversation we would ever have—even though I couldn’t name it, I knew it wasn’t there anymore. Maybe he was the one who felt he couldn’t wholly be himself now that I wasn’t completely me.

      After I’d been Masked, we hadn’t had much time at Somerset to be together, and any time we did have was spent worrying that someone would catch us. In Elsewhere, before the battle, we’d been separated—and, for several days, I’d thought he was dead. That all-encompassing grief had turned into unbridled joy and relief when Knox had revealed Benjy was, in fact, alive—and the weeks we’d spent together since had been comfortable and more like a taste of home than I’d thought I would ever have again. But maybe that was an illusion. Because we weren’t home; we would never go home again. Benjy was the closest thing I would ever have to home again, but as I watched him turn to ladle gravy onto a plate, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was, yet again, holding him back.

      He caught my eye, and something in his expression changed. Once upon a time, seeing me would have sparked joy, and to some extent, it still did. But it was tainted with something else now, and I couldn’t blame him for it. As much as I knew he loved me, I was also tied to the worst memories of his life, and I didn’t know how many more he could stand before he cracked. I’d lost count of the number of times he’d nearly died because of me, and each one was another lifetime of guilt looming over me, knowing I’d never be able to make any of this up to him. We’d been here before, with me holding him back—when I’d achieved only a III on my test, and he was bound to get a VI. I would never be good enough for him, and the more I tried to hold on to him, the harder his life would be. The more his smile would fade every time he looked at me.

      “Kitty—are you hungry?” He quickly finished preparing the current plate before grabbing another. “Chicken, right?”

      “Two. One for Knox, too,” I said, moving forward to help him. The portions were meager at best, but they were exactly what the former prisoners ate, too, and after today, I had no complaints. “How did everything go with Strand?”

      “We’ve brainstormed a few ideas that we can implement starting almost immediately. It won’t be easy, but nothing worth doing ever is, right?” He grinned. “Rivers told me about the tunnels. If they really do extend as far as he thinks they do, that will make our jobs infinitely easier.”

      “Yeah, well, let’s hope he’s right,” I said. It was hard to say when he’d never tried to explore them, but then again, with the guards keeping such a close eye on the prisoners, I wasn’t sure how he ever could have slipped away long enough to do so.

      “He said you’re going to start mapping it tonight—do you mind if I join you?” added Benjy, and I blinked. With the news of Celia’s plan to attack Somerset, I’d completely forgotten.

      “Actually, do you mind taking my place? I—” I hesitated. “I’m going to spend the evening with Knox.”

      Internally I winced, knowing how it must have sounded to Benjy, and sure enough, his hand stilled in the middle of placing a piece of chicken on a plate. “Oh. I thought we could spend some time together tonight.”

      Guilt twisted in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t tell Benjy the truth about why I wanted to stay with Knox, not without revealing Celia’s call, but I owed him some kind of explanation. “I need to talk to him about everything going on with Lila,” I said as steadily as I could. “If we don’t come up with a counterattack soon, we’ll lose any ground we gained this morning.”

      Benjy eyed me, and I could sense his uncertainty. I gave him a questioning look.

      “What?”

      “Nothing,” he said, and he finished preparing our plates. “If you finish early, come find me.”

      “I will,” I promised, and taking the plates, I forced a smile before heading back to the office, feeling worse with each step I took. I hated keeping secrets from him, but the more time I spent as Lila, the more of a habit it became.

      As I walked away, able to feel his gaze burning into the back of my skull, I made myself a promise, too. After this war was over, there would be no more secrets between me and Benjy. Even if it meant telling the whole ugly truth, at least we would be honest with one another.

      Knox and I settled in on the sofa, him sitting rigidly while I propped my feet up on a footstool. Every screen in his office displayed a different news channel, and together we watched as the anchors droned on and on about acts of terrorism that hadn’t happened and shortages that didn’t exist. Whatever Daxton’s game was, it involved feeding the public lie after lie about our campaign. With communication between cities nearly nonexistent, few had any way of disproving the news channels’ claims. Or any reason not to believe them.

      “How can you stand watching this?” I said as I ate the last bite of hard biscuit. “It’s all lies. Everything they say is just a bunch of propaganda for Daxton and the Ministers.”

      “I remind myself that out of all the crimes the government commits, lying to the public is pretty low on the list. Every government does it, no matter how good their intentions are or how much they care about their people.” He glanced at me. “We’re doing it right now, to our little part of the world.”

      I scowled. “That’s not what I—”

      “I know what you meant, Kitty. And I gave you my answer.” He leaned back, his posture still stiff. “Once you accept that everything that comes out of a news anchor’s mouth is propaganda, it gets easier to read between the lines. And that’s what I’m listening for. The things they aren’t telling us.”

      I fell silent for several minutes, listening to a man drone on about how the Hart family was holding together during this difficult time, in the midst of such terrible and hurtful accusations from someone they had treated like family. It was easy to sniff out the real story when I already knew it, and I waited for another to come on.

      “How did you get started with the Blackcoats, anyway?” I said. “I know you knew Celia through Lila, but—what, did the three of you have dinner one day and decide to start a revolution? How did that happen?”

      “Something like that,” he muttered. “Celia’s never been particularly subtle about her political ideology. I sought her out, and the rest fell into place.”

      “Wait—was your relationship with Lila an arrangement, then?” I said as a piece of the puzzle clicked into place. It made sense—Lila and Knox had never seemed to get along. “Was it a way to spend time together without being discovered?”

      “Yes,” said Knox, his tone growing shorter. “If it’s all the same to you, I’m not in the mood for conversation right now.”

      It wasn’t all the same to me. I still had a million questions to ask, ones I’d gathered every minute of every day we’d been forced to play pretend. But tensions were high enough right now, and I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ