City of Savages (24 page)

Exactly where I told her I’d be.

I close my eyes and try to collect myself before I head back into my room. I look at the sign once more and pick it up to inspect it more closely. Something’s odd about it—it’s stiff, and much heavier than I thought it would be, almost as if it’s made of rock instead of paper. It takes some finagling, but I finally manage to squeeze open the laminate and dislodge the handwritten sign from its grasp.

But there’s not just one piece of paper—there are many stuffed in there. Maybe ten or more:

924, 1025, 842, 934 . . .

A deep, petrifying truth starts to sink in and settle.

They didn’t just move a few of us last night.

They’re swapping and switching all of us, renumbering the rooms, the floors, this whole hotel. A panic rips through my abdomen, reverberates through my whole frame.

How are we going to find one another in this hotel if there’s a shifting blueprint?

33    PHEE

I’m standing in front of room 825. But I don’t enter for a long time, just pace under the dim lights of the hall, in front of Ryder’s doorway. I’m more nervous now than I was before the street-fights, than I was when the whorelords caught us on the roof. Than I was when Sky and I were dragged to the castle and we lied right to Rolladin’s face. It all seems a million years ago, bush-league stuff, nothing compared to the anxiousness I feel tonight.

Ryder and I alone.

Ryder and I in a hotel room.

Ryder with his hands in my hair, his lips on my lips
 . . .

I finally work up the courage and knock on the door softly, once, twice, then push the door open.

Ryder’s got a few candles lit, making the whole room feel soft, romantic, like a scene right out of one of Sky’s lame romance novels. I wonder how he could have gotten them. Jealousy pinches me when I think they could’ve been a gift from his escort who caught us in the bathroom.

Brainwashed psycho. Desperate Wren groupie.

I’m so focused on mentally bullying this girl that I don’t notice Wren and Robert sitting on the bed, as if they’ve got nothing to do but wait for me to show.

“What are you doing here?” I say, after I recover from the shock of seeing them.

“My dear Sister Phoenix,” Wren says. “We should ask you the very same question. Robert told me he made it quite clear that you weren’t to leave your room tonight.” He stands and hovers over me.

Technically, it’s true. After Francis dragged me back to my room, Robert stopped by to tell me that he’d heard about my outburst at dinner. That Master Wren was going to be watching me very closely. That it was important that I exercised restraint, and control, or else they’d be forced to use other measures.

“I’m quite positive he mentioned that solitude is mandatory at the Standard,” Wren bites, “as is obeying orders. The Standard is your home, Phoenix. You need to start abiding by its rules.”

But I ignore Wren. “Robert, please,” I say. “You were friends with my mom and dad. At one point, you were a normal person—”

Wren brings his hand down across my face and slaps me, hard, against the jaw. “Don’t you dare speak to Elder Robert that way—”

I rub my cheek, but the words keep gushing. “Robert, we don’t want to be here, okay? This place is freaky, and we’re alone, and I don’t think my dad would’ve wanted any of this. So even if you meant well or whatever, you’ve got to let us go.” I take a step forward, hell-bent on convincing him. “You’ve got to let us go.”

Robert just backs into the corner, while Wren grabs my shoulders to pull me back.

“Robert, my mom
trusted
you,” I talk past Wren. “She doesn’t trust anyone, and she trusted you. And you’re going to leave her here? Leave all of us to rot in this psychotic hotel?”

Wren slaps me again, but I shrug it off. “Robert!”

“Sister Phoenix, this is all part of God’s plan.” But Robert’s eyes won’t meet mine—they’re still cast down to the floor. The coward doesn’t even have the guts to look at me as he’s signing our death sentence. “Your family was meant to find the Standard.”

Wren leans over me, shaking my shoulders. “That’s right, Sister Phoenix, you’re part of a divine plan.” He thrusts his face into mine, forcing me to look at him. “A plan set in motion by your father. I am your savior, child, and you
will
obey me.”

“You’re no savior.” I think about all those numb, mute kids at the Standard dinner tonight. “You’re just a guy messing people up. Wearing them down till they eventually just . . . throw their hands up and listen to your bullshit.”

Wren gives a sharp laugh. “Like you’d know. You’ve never sat in a dark, dank conference room for months, wrangling chaos, shepherding hundreds away from madness. You’ve never begged God for the world’s second chance as its skies tumbled down and this city dwindled to nothing. You have no idea, the heaviness of the burden on my shoulders,” he tells me. “I am responsible for this entire community. All these lives, all these souls, are in my hands.”

I try to back away, my shoulders aching from the pressure of Wren’s hands, but he keeps me close.

“So don’t you dare question me. Don’t you even speak to me.” Wren grabs my wrist and tugs me towards the door, past Robert, down the hall into darkness. We go up and up, until the stairs run out and dead-end at the top floor. He whisks me down the hall, stops at a door at the end, unbolts a chain on our side, and throws me into the room.

I try to claw my way back out of the darkness, shout with all my might, but he shoves my hands, kicks at my stomach, and closes the door with a
BOOM
.

“LET ME OUT!”

“You will stay here, Sister Phoenix, until you learn your place. Until you accept the gift that I am offering you,” Wren barks through the door. “Redemption.” Then, more quietly, “For all of us.”

34    SKY

I don’t see Phee in the mess hall for community breakfast, and I can’t spot her in any of the classrooms I pass on the way to my mandated “lessons” for the day. I didn’t sleep at all last night, between being worried that Wren found Phee trying to find me, and driving myself crazy that she and Ryder met up in this maze of a hotel. Or worse, that Wren decided to “seal” them. I shudder, still not able to shake Wren’s
union for the heavens
comment.

I study the Standard kids as I float down the hall—young men and women with their eyes cast to the floor, little children as silent as ghosts. So respectful, so quiet. So barely present. As I look closer, I realize how many of the young girls are pregnant. Some of them are my age, but most are even younger. And each one is escorted by a young man. It makes me think of my own designated escort, Quentin, who I can’t seem to shake. Thankfully, he had Hunting Training with “Elder” Robert outside the hotel, so my arm is free for the moment.

A middle-aged woman who introduces herself as my “headmistress” finds me amid the crowd, then gently grabs my wrist and pulls me, along with a few others, into a small glass room with a few round tables. She motions for us to find seats and returns to the hall to pluck out the rest of her students.

I sit in a chair in the far corner, next to a girl about my age, her stomach so wide and big that she sits a good foot or two from the table’s edge. She has a nice face with small features, and thin, translucent hands that reveal a patchwork of veins running underneath them. I’m so lonely I’m bursting to talk to her.

As the rest of the class settles around us, I lean in to whisper, “I’m Skyler.” The sound of my own voice shocks me—it’s the first time I’ve spoken all day.

“I know who you are,” my seatmate whispers. But she doesn’t elaborate.

“Oh.” I think back to last night’s dinner, and whether I saw this pregnant girl at Wren’s welcome soiree for Phee and me. She wasn’t there, I’m sure of it. “How?”

“Everyone knows who you are. You’re one of Elder Tom’s daughters. You’re here to fulfill Master Wren’s divine plan.”

Her words prick the back of my neck, rush over me in a cold fever.

“He’s been waiting a long time, for God to give him an answer.” She looks at me with guarded eyes. “You’re his answer.”

“Wait, what—what are you saying? Why? What do you mean?”

But the teacher settles at the front of the room before I can push my seatmate any further. Then it’s so quiet, you could hear monkeys howl from Wall Street.

The teacher launches into her lecture—a regurgitation of Wren’s
The Standard Works
, a manic sell that God ended the world to give us a new Standard, a promise that one day we’ll all see the heavenly blue.

But I barely hear her over the beating of my heart. My seatmate has just confirmed my greatest fear, the thought that has kept me up at night, tossing and turning and reeling until morning:

We’re never getting out of here.

The walls of the classroom start inching towards me, demented in their slow march, intent on closing me in.

Without thinking, I shove my chair back from the table and stand.

“Sister Skyler,” the headmistress admonishes. All eyes in the room fall on me, surround me like a swarm. “Please sit down.”

“I need”—I barely hear myself over the staccato of my heart—“I need to use the restroom.”

“Your escort isn’t here today, and I clearly can’t send someone else’s escort with you. You’ll need to wait until I can bring you myself.”

“It’s all right, I can find my own way,” I tell her. “I’ll be right back.”

As I walk towards the door, four young men near the exit stand like a wall to block me.

“Sister Skyler,
please
.” The headmistress gently grabs my elbow. “We believed that you were open enough to accept group lessons. If that’s not the case, we shall arrange for other measures. I can speak to Master Wren.”

I look behind me for some reason, to my seatmate, who’s clutching the table so fiercely I imagine her fingers pressing right through the wood. She gives me the smallest nod, her eyes saying what her lips can’t:
Don’t be foolish. Sit down and do what they say
.

“I’m so sorry,” I mumble. “I didn’t realize the rules.”

“That’s quite all right, Sister.” The headmistress exhales as the four door guards sit down in their seats. “Class, where were we?”

Our teacher jumps back into her lecture, but I catch only bits and pieces: divine unions sanctified by Master Wren, the importance of obedience, the need to repent and show God we are worthy in the wake of so much disaster. I fade in and out of focus, and the same is true for the next day, and the next.

I become a shadow, a ghost, trying to blend into backgrounds and fade into walls, listen with dull eyes to my lectures all day. I keep mute during meals, where I’m attached to Quentin like a duped fly to a spiderweb, wriggling carefully, trying to pick up some clue as to where they’ve put my mom and Phee, and where Ryder, Trev, and Sam are being stored in this madhouse.

But no one gives anything away—it’s as if they never existed.

At night I’m left alone in my room, with nothing but the view of the city and my backpack. One night I burrow through my bag, desperate for Mom’s words, even if her journal has done nothing but raise ghosts and cut us on its sharp and jagged secrets.

But the book isn’t there.

“No,” I say. “No, no, no, no, no.”

I fly through the room, tearing off the bedcovers, fumbling through the drawers, combing the bureau, the bathroom. “Where is it?” I demand of the room. “WHERE IS IT?”

I run to the room door and thrust it open, not caring for a second what Standard devotee might see me. I tug at the laminated room sign, pulling out the thick wad of false room numbers, and quickly sift through them. I’ve been trying to note my room every time I enter and leave, trying to piece together the shifting blueprint and keep track of it all. But the changes are haphazard: Sometimes I’m shuffled once a day, sometimes every time I leave. Mom’s journal might be in any room in any hall, forgotten under the bed or accidentally left in the washroom by one of Wren’s shuffling minions.

I look down the empty hall.

I’m tempted to run.

I could make it to the stairs, maybe even across the lobby and out the door before anyone would be the wiser. I could hole up in this city, or find my way to Brooklyn, and sail far, far away from this wretched island and the monsters living in its shadows.

But it’s a tease, an empty option—not a real choice. I could never,
ever
leave without Mom and Phee. And the truth keeps me chained to this damned city, to this dark and shifty hotel.

I shut the door.

Then I break down. I cry messy, fractured sobs until my head feels like it’s been cracked open and my throat is scratched and sore. For my family, for the journal. For everything.

I sink into a deep, dark river, and each day I feel more disoriented. Like even if I wanted to swim to the surface, I might not know which way to come up for air.

*   *   *

It’s not until days later that any hope appears.

The hope comes and goes so quickly, I’m almost unable to see it through my fog. It happens one morning as our headmistress funnels children into different rooms. Ryder passes by the door and spots me in my classroom.

He appears like a mirage, his edges fuzzy and smudged, as if I’ve literally painted him from memory, wished him real. My stomach climbs to my ribs, and I stand instinctively.

Ryder doesn’t hesitate.

Before the headmistress can grab him, he darts across the room, his hazel eyes wild, his blacktop hair sticking out in all directions, arms propelling him forward.

“Brother Ryder!” the teacher snaps as he runs. “Brother Ryder, get back here! Brothers, help me, please!” Ryder slips around the conference room table and into my arms. “This is not the way of the Standard!”

Ryder’s arms tighten around me, and even in my dark well of despair, I know he’s no mirage. I take in his smell and thrust my face into his neck. “Ryder,” is all I can manage, before Quentin and two other boys grab his forearms and pull him away. Ryder struggles against their grip, wriggling like a fish on a hook, then leans into me and whispers in his gravelly voice, “The lobby stairwell. Midnight. Five knocks.”

That’s all.

He’s pulled out the door, all the while apologizing, laughing for his stupidity—walking the same thin line, I suppose, between survival and submission. “Sorry, blokes.” He shakes his head as they paw and thrust him out the door. “My mistake. Thought she was my escort.”

“Never again, Brother Ryder,” our teacher scolds. “Go to your classroom down the hall. Brother William shall take you. Now.”

“Yes,” I can barely hear Ryder whisper. “Sorry, Headmistress.”

She shuts the door behind Ryder and his temporary escort, sealing us in our prison. Then the headmistress collects herself before beginning to repeat what she said the day before.

But in these moments, something else besides Ryder has escaped. Out of the corner of my mind, a fast and brilliant form emerges—a butterfly fluttering from a gray abyss. No more illusions, switching rooms and tricks and lies. I will meet him. I will have him. I will hold Ryder tonight.

The lobby stairwell.

Midnight.

Five knocks.

I’ve never been more excited for anything in my life.