Vengeful

The sound of cracking eggs.

The hiss and snap of bacon in a pan.

Sydney’s parents had never made breakfast. There was always food—or at least, there was always money for food, in a jar by the sink—but there were no family meals—that would have required them to all be in the house at the same time—and unlike in the movies, no one was ever woken by the smell of breakfast, not on Christmas morning, not on birthdays, and certainly not on a random Tuesday.

Whenever Sydney woke to the sizzle of bacon or the pop of a toaster, she knew that Serena was home. Serena always made breakfast, a veritable banquet of food, way too much for them to eat.

“Hungry, sleepyhead?” Serena would always ask, pouring her a glass of juice.

And for a groggy moment, before the details of the room came into focus, Sydney almost leapt from the bed to ambush her sister in the kitchen.

Sydney’s heart quickened. But then she saw the strange apartment walls, and the red metal tin on the unfamiliar nightstand, containing all that remained of Serena Clarke, and the reality came rushing back.

Dol whined softly from the edge of the bed, obviously torn between his loyalty to Syd and his canine love of food.

“Hungry, sleepyhead?” she asked softly, rubbing him between the ears. He gave a relieved huff and turned, nosing open the door. Sydney followed him out into the apartment. It was a rental, the eleventh one they’d stayed in, the fifth city. It was a nice place—they were always nice places. They’d been on the road—on the run—for nearly six months, and she still walked around holding her breath, half expecting Victor to send her away. After all, he never said Sydney could stay with them, after. He had simply never told her to leave, and she had never asked to go.

Mitch was in the kitchen, cooking breakfast.

“Hey, kid,” he said. Mitch was the only one who got to call her that. “You want food?”

He was already dividing the eggs onto two plates, three for him and one for her (but she always got half the bacon).

She plucked a strip from her plate, split it with Dol, and looked around the rented apartment.

She wasn’t homesick, exactly.

Sydney didn’t miss her parents. She knew she should feel bad about that, but the fact of the matter was, she felt like she’d lost them way before she disappeared—her first memories were of packed suitcases and long-term sitters, her last were of two parent-shaped shadows leaving her behind in the hospital after the accident.

What she had now felt more like a family than her mother and father ever had.

“Where’s Victor?”

“Oh . . .” Mitch had that look on his face, that carefully blank look that adults got when they were trying to convince you everything was fine. They always assumed that if they didn’t tell you a thing, you wouldn’t know it. But that wasn’t true.

Serena used to say that she could tell when someone was lying, because all those unsaid things hung in the air, making it heavy, like the pressure before a storm.

Sydney might not know the full scope of Victor’s lie, but the wrongness was still there, taking up space.

“He just stepped out for a walk,” said Mitch. “I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

Sydney knew Mitch was lying too.

He pushed his empty plate aside.

“Okay,” he said, producing his deck of cards. “Draw.”

It was a game they’d been playing since the first few days after Merit, when the need to keep a low profile clashed with the urge to go out, and Victor’s absences meant Syd and Mitch spent a lot of time together (and the good-natured ex-con obviously had no idea what to do with a thirteen-year-old who could resurrect the dead).

“What would you be doing,” he’d asked, “if you were . . .” He let the question trail off.

Sydney knew he was thinking home but she said, “Back in Brighton? I’d probably be in school.”

“Did you like school?”

Sydney shrugged. “I liked learning.”

Mitch brightened at that. “Me too. But I never got to stay in one place long. Foster care and all. So I didn’t care much about school . . . but you don’t need that to learn. I could teach you . . .”

“Really?”

Mitch colored a little. “Well, there’s lots I don’t know. But maybe we could learn together.” That’s when he drew the deck from his pocket. “How about this—hearts will be literature. Clubs is science. Diamonds is history. Spades is math. That should give us a good start.”

“And face cards?” asked Syd.

Mitch flashed a conspiratorial smile. “Face cards, we go outside.”

Now Sydney held her breath and pulled a card from the center, hoping for a king or queen.

She got a six of clubs.

“Better luck next time,” said Mitch, pulling his laptop over. “Okay, let’s see what kind of experiments we can do in this kitchen . . .”

They were halfway through creating a homemade lava lamp when the door swung open, and Victor walked in. He looked tired, his face tight, as if he were in pain. She felt the air go heavy on her shoulders.

“You hungry?” asked Mitch, but Victor waved him away and sank into a chair at the kitchen table. He took up his tablet and began absently swiping through. Mitch set a cup of black coffee at his elbow.

Sydney perched on the counter and studied Victor.

Whenever she’d resurrected an animal, or a person, she’d done it by visualizing a thread, something floating in the darkness. She pictured grabbing that thread and pulling it toward her, drawing them back into the light. But when it was done, she never really let go of the thread. Didn’t know how, really. So she could feel it now when Victor was home, and when he was out pacing the city, could feel it still, no matter how far he went, as if his energy, his stress, vibrated up the invisible rope until the tremor reached her.

And so, even without the heavy air, the way Mitch looked at Victor, the way Victor didn’t look at her, she knew that something was not right.

“What is it, Sydney?” he asked without looking up.

Tell me the truth, she thought. Just tell me the truth.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked.

Victor’s cold blue eyes drifted up, meeting hers.

His mouth twitched into a smile, the way it did when he was lying. “Never better.”

XIII

THREE YEARS AGO

CAPITAL CITY

SYDNEY wove around the base of the tree, sunlight dappling her skin.

She’d drawn a face card—the queen of diamonds—but the weather was so nice she would have played the spade Victor had slipped her just to get out of the apartment.

Victor.

Behind her eyes, Sydney saw him buckling against the door, saw him fighting back a scream as his body curled on the floor. There had been pain, too, a jolt of something straight through her chest, and then darkness, but that part didn’t haunt her.

Victor haunted her. His pain haunted her. His dying haunted her.

Because it was Sydney’s fault.

He had been counting on her, and she’d let him down.

She’d brought him back wrong.

Broken.

That was the secret. The lie.

“It feels like dying.”

Sydney kept her eyes on the mossy ground as she paced. If anyone looked her way, they would probably assume she was searching for flowers, but it was late spring, the time when baby birds flung themselves out of the nest and hoped to fly. Not all of them made it. And Sydney was always searching for things to revive. Subjects to practice on.

Sydney already knew how to reach inside a body and pull it back to life. But what if the thing had been dead for a long time? What if the body wasn’t all there? How much did there have to be, for her to find the thread? How little?

Dol snuffled in the grass nearby, and across the field Mitch leaned back against a slope, a battered paperback open on one knee, a pair of sunglasses perched on his nose.

They were in Capital City, as hilly as Fulton had been flat, a place with as many parks as skyscrapers.

She liked it here. Wished they could stay. Knew they wouldn’t.

They were only here because Victor was searching for someone. Another EO. Someone who could fix what she’d broken.

Something cracked under Syd’s foot.

She looked down and saw the crumpled body of a young finch. The bird had been there awhile, long enough for its small body to sink into the moss. Long enough for the feathers to fall away and a wing to come detached, the brittle bones shattering like an eggshell under her shoe.

Syd sank to her knees, crouching over the tiny corpse.

It was one thing, she’d learned, to breathe life back into a body. Another thing entirely to rebuild the body itself. You only got one chance—Sydney had learned that the hard way, threads unraveling, bones crumbling to ash under her touch—but the only way to get stronger was to practice. And Sydney wanted to get stronger—she needed to get stronger—so she curled her fingers gently over the bird’s remains, and closed her eyes, and reached.

Cold rippled through her as she searched the darkness for a thread, a filament, a wisp of light. It was there somewhere, so faint she couldn’t see it, not yet. She had to go by feel instead. Her lungs ached, but she kept reaching, knew she was almost, almost—

Sydney felt the bird twitch under her palm.