Chapter 22
Lila rolled onto her stomach and turned her nose away from the dingy gray mat. It smelled of sweat and unwashed bodies and a bit like blood. She lifted herself with damp palms and got to her feet for the hundredth time, glad that Connell wasn’t around to toss her out. Dixon had taken her to one of the shop’s basement training rooms that morning, the floor carpeted with thick mats for sparring. He had even locked the door from the inside so that she could remove her hood while they worked.
He hopped now in the center, barely tired or sore. Then again, he hadn’t spent much time being thrown onto the mats.
Lila had begun to hate the man.
She raised her padded fists and sank into a defensive posture.
Dixon tapped his chest for her to attack immediately. He’d signaled so often that he likely had a bruise.
It had only taken one sparring session for Dixon to figure out why she sucked so badly at fighting. She never actually attacked, not unless her trainer demanded that she parrot back one of a handful of scripted passes at her practice partner, just as Connell and Nico had done at the oracle’s compound. She performed moderately average under such conditions, but in a real sparring session—when Lila could pick from any move she’d ever learned—she was lost. She forever waited for others to bumble forward, trying to gauge their timing and rhythm. She feinted when she should spring forward and deliver a blow.
All her opponent had to do was rush her, and she’d fall on her ass. Staring and half-assed jabs never won real fights. Real fights ended quickly, especially against a bigger, taller opponent. She needed speed against brawn, speed she didn’t have because she zoned out and overthought, wincing at the idea that she should partake in any violence at all. Heirs didn’t lift their hands or raise their voices. Both were unseemly. Never before had Lila realized how much of a snob she really was, how deeply the highborn attitude had been buried.
She fell back again with a groan, spreading out her weight as she slapped the mat, coughing.
Dixon had swept her legs again.
“It’s my turn next,” she grumbled, knowing what he’d say. She didn’t have the reach to use a leg sweep in a fight. He’d swept, and swept slowly, so that she would hop over her leg and attack while he lingered off balance.
She hadn’t managed it successfully yet.
Dixon walked toward the side of the room, rummaging in his things.
“Are we done?” she asked hopefully.
He cut her a glance and shook his head, scribbling something on his notepad.
She already knew what it would say. Real fights aren’t tidy. They’re fast and brutal. Until you’re willing to do what the other person won’t, you’re never going to win. He’d written some variation of it several times during their session.
Dixon flipped over his notepad. Forget everything you know about fighting. Just imagine that I’m Tristan and hit me.
“What?”
Dixon tossed his notepad next to his water bottle and returned to the mat, shoving her shoulder while moaning lewdly.
“Stop it,” she grumbled, repulsed by the idea. She might lose her temper, and she kept that well controlled, just as a highborn heir—
“Oh,” she said as he shoved her shoulder once more.
Pursing her lips, she let her eyes lose focus. Tristan and Dixon did have similar bodies. They shared the same swimmer’s build, the same approximate height and weight. Only their faces had been carved differently.
He groaned again in a grotesque parody of sex, stepping forward to push on her shoulder.
“I take your point,” she muttered, batting him away. “You can stop with all the noise.”
But Dixon did not stop. He kept going and going, interpreting Tristan’s whole damn demeanor during their relationship, even during the last week. Always pushing, always poking, always going on and on about how nothing he ever did was good enough for either of them, always rolling his eyes at every highborn thing that she and Dixon ever did.
This time when Dixon strode forward, she shoved him back in annoyance, both hands on his chest, pushing him with all her strength.
She certainly hadn’t learned that during any of her training sessions.
Dixon nudged her twice in a row, just hard enough to knock her off balance. It occurred to her then that Tristan and Dixon had the exact same curve to their lips when amused.
Narrowing her eyes, she shoved him again.
Fuck him and his opinions about her damn reach. When he shuffled back, she dropped to the floor and swept his legs.
He slipped awkwardly, falling on his ass. His palms slapped against the mat with a thud.
“Are we done now?”
He shook his head, stood up, tapped his chest, and moaned.
All at once, Lila barreled toward him. She didn’t care about hitting or kicking. She just charged into his chest full speed, her shoulder smacking into his pecs.
Dixon fell back laughing, just as he’d rolled off the bed the night before.
“Stop it. You told me to forget everything about fighting. What do you expect?”
This time, when he stood up, she brought her foot up to kick at his groin. His eyes widened as the strike approached, and he turned his hips to the side.
His body off balance, she swept his legs again.
“How do you like me now?” She tapped her chest with a little thunk thunk.
Dixon got back to his feet and lifted his arm. Too late to realize he’d intended to clap her on the shoulder, she grabbed his arm, turned into him, and used his momentum to carry him over her body in the same throw she’d relearned with Connell and Nico.
He struck the mat with another grunt.
“I’m done for the day,” she said, uncomfortable with the stirrings inside her. She wanted to go back upstairs, take a long shower, and have a pot of tea.
She tugged on her hand wraps, but Dixon shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said, getting to his feet.
The rare use of his voice stopped her.
Dixon tapped his chest. For the next half-hour, her mind and body sloshed back and forth like a wave, sometimes bursting forth in anger the moment he signaled for her to attack, other times reining themselves in as a proper heir should.
After one last sloppy attack, Dixon finally called for a timeout. He led her to one of the heavy bags chained to the ceiling, then set his wristwatch with a feeble little beep. Holding the bag, he jutted his chin toward it.
Tristan, he mouthed, pointing at a face-sized X made from tape on the mat.
Lila punched until her annoyance wasn’t enough to carry her through, her strength flagging in less than a minute. Her arms became lead weights, each muscle sore and hot, like some invisible force had latched on to her elbows, pulling them down. By the time Dixon finally called time, she’d been hitting the bag with the force of a toddler.
Three minutes. She’d barely lasted three minutes.
Lila rested her hands on her hips, panting and staring longingly at the door. “Can we be done now?”
Dixon shook his head and gestured for her to start again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” She could barely lift her arms into position.
All at once, Dixon grabbed the bag, humping it while he moaned and groaned.
Lila raised her arms with effort, punching out with dead, sloppy arms, biting her cheeks as she hit the heavy bag.
After another three minutes, Dixon ended her torture.
“Thank the gods,” Lila grumbled, taking off her wraps at last. “No more today. I’m exhausted, and I have a lot of data to go through. Hopefully, I’ll still be able to type.”
While Dixon gathered up his things, she slipped on a borrowed hoodie, pulling it over her face as they trudged upstairs, each step creaking as her tired legs climbed. She kept her eyes on the ground, all to avoid curious eyes, but they met no one on the stairs. She checked her palm as Dixon led her down the fifth floor corridor.
She had no messages.
The fact did not surprise her. That morning, she and Dixon had driven to Bullstow. According to the militia at the gatehouse, her father was still in a meeting. Had he and the committee talked all night? Had they taken a break for breakfast? Couldn’t he have taken a few seconds to send her a message?
Dixon pointed again to a sentence he’d scrawled that morning. They probably took his palm away.
He opened the apartment door, both of them breathing a sigh of relief at the empty room. Tristan and Katia had vanished when they returned from Bullstow, and had not yet returned.
They hadn’t returned after Lila’s shower, either, nor when Dixon hopped in after, leaving her to roam freely around the apartment. When the water turned on in the bathroom, she slid into Tristan’s empty room, only one thing on her mind.
She opened the top drawer of Tristan’s bedside table with a little rattle, ignoring the half-torn sheet of condoms. Snatching Tristan’s brush, she carefully pulled out every strand of his hair and put them into the vial Helen had given her. She replaced the brush quickly and darted from his room, closing the door behind her.
She’d have her answer soon.
Tucking the vial in her pocket, she ordered pizza from a shop nearby, reading off the order exactly as Dixon had written it. On another day, ham and pineapple pizza might have been a culinary adventure. Instead, she barely tasted it while her eyes bounced between her palm and laptop.
Luckily, Dixon dozed on the couch, too tired to stay awake after a poor night’s sleep, an early morning, a long training session, and a full belly.
His gentle snores might have lulled her into a nap on any other day. Instead, she wiped her hands, tossed her palm on the coffee table, and took up her laptop, scrolling through the bios of those who had access to the oracle’s compound but were not on a Squab’s Sojourn. After reading through each entry, she took a quick break and peeked at the results of another search. A sea of workborn apartments stared back at her, nothing but anonymous off-white walls and grimy carpets, the price on even the smallest dwelling a shock.
She could swing it if she signed a contract with the oracle, helping Connell update the compound’s security systems. She could make similar deals with other oracles, too. With Italian mercs and moles on the loose, the oracles needed an experienced hand to guide them, or so they claimed.
Such an arrangement wouldn’t require her to become a purplecoat or live on an oracle’s compound, either. She could live on her own terms for a while, making her own decisions. Perhaps her mother would come to her senses, overturning her exile, recognizing she’d been wrong in how she’d treated Senator Dubois. Maybe the chairwoman would even do something to make his situation right, even if she didn’t send Jewel to the auction house.
Maybe Jewel would do something to set it right, too.
That was all Lila really wanted. Regret, responsibility, and compensation. Some small measure to make things right, some evidence that the chairwoman had changed, that Jewel had changed. If they could do that, maybe she could call herself a Randolph with pride again. Maybe she could return home without wanting to vomit. But until that happened, she refused to jump from one matron to another, regardless of how well the oracle had treated her.
Lila brought up the bios once more, scrolling to the next name in her list. Kara, the compound’s computer tech, hadn’t been born into the oracles. She’d gotten into bit of trouble with Bullstow in her late teens, the result of an unchecked gambling addiction, but she hadn’t had a single gambling charge levied against her since she signed her first contract with the oracles. She’d moved to New Bristol nearly three years later, changing compounds when Mòr needed a new security admin.
It didn’t take much digging to figure out why Kara had abandoned the rest of the world to become an outsider. Her father had been killed in a training exercise at Fort Rose when she was a little girl. A few weeks after her fifteenth birthday, a drunk driver killed her mother and brother. She’d lived with her older sister until the age of nineteen, when a violent lover had taken her last sibling’s life. It was a familiar story of many on the list, a history beset by tragedy.
With such a history, one either grew closer to the gods or grew to hate the world.
The admin had chosen the former, but it had taken a detour with alcohol and cards to get there. Unfortunately, she’d gotten lost again. Perhaps Kenna mistook her evasive return to darkness as the suspicious behavior of a mole.
Lila flagged Kara for deeper consideration and moved on, pulling the next bio on the list.
Camille Lécuyer.
Lila skimmed the first few lines of the young woman’s bio. She’d attended school in New Orleans from the age of—
Lila squinted at Camille’s childhood address, then pulled up a map. She’d enrolled in a high school close to her home, rather than one seven kilometers away, the one she was legally obligated to attend. Lila might not have noticed anything amiss if she hadn’t tarried so often on her family’s compound in New Orleans, dealing with her family’s militia and disputes with the city. She’d had to deal with the senate once after they tried to alter the boundaries of the school districts nearest the compound. The change would have altered the high school for the children of the workborn servants—most of whom lived in apartment buildings near the compound. They would have had to walk an extra two kilometers to a school with a poorer track record.
Access to good schools was a perk of working for the Randolphs.
After fighting over the boundaries with several senators from New Orleans the year before, she knew the boundaries. The school listed on Camille’s bio might have been closer, but it was out of district for the home she’d lived in.
The school never would have enrolled her.
Sitting up, Lila poked deeper into Camille’s official net ID, the ID that should have been created by the state when she first enrolled in school. Although Camille had been inserted into their database as a student, her official ID did not appear in any logs. It was as if she’d never done a single search or sent a single message during her entire school career. Only when Lila dug into Camille’s university’s logs did she find the ID in use.
Pulling up obituaries from the New Orleans Chronicle, she searched for Camille Lécuyer, already knowing what she’d find. The five-year-old lowborn girl had died, along with her family, sixteen years before.
Lila wrote a short piece of code, comparing the mole’s messages to Camille’s visitation records for the compound.
The records matched perfectly.