“I mean, he left an hour ago to retrieve Gregor,” she said, bending close to her work. “If he’s made the crossing, they’ll be back soon. Otherwise they’ll wait for dawn.”
I bit my bottom lip, wishing I’d gotten to see Warren one more time before he’d left. I could’ve shown him this note. And with us linked the way we were, he’d have known what happened to me in Greta’s office as soon as he saw me. With just a look, one sniff, he’d know I was someone he could trust. We could have figured this out together.
Instead, I stood in frustrated impotence before Vanessa, all the newly acquired power and energy swirling in my bloodstream, flowing in my bones, straightening my spine…and with nothing to do with it. I sighed, attracting Vanessa’s attention.
“You look different,” she said, peering up at me as she picked up the large nail file. “Did you do something with your hair?”
I shook my head, and glanced toward the door. “He’s really going to leave the city without protection?”
“Warren?” She shrugged, looking down, and pressed a button I hadn’t noticed before. Five steel claws burst from one end of the bar. She began sharpening them with the large file. “That’s what he said.”
“But what about all the innocents? What about the city?”
“It’ll just have to survive without us.”
“It’s Las Vegas,” I said, drawing the words out.
“I know.” Vanessa rolled her eyes as she tossed her rag back into the locker. “Kinda makes you wish you were born in Kansas, huh?”
I forced thoughts of Warren, and trust, aside and tried to decide on the most logical next step. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “So what do we do now?”
“Nothing to do but wait,” she said, standing and moving a safe distance away. With a deft flick of her wrist the steel bar arched open, a yawning half smile followed by the curling claws. It was a fan, similar to the kind used in the Victorian era, but far more deadly. She fanned herself delicately and glanced at me from behind it. “My conduit. You like?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, allowing the touch of jealousy I felt to tinge my words.
That stunning smile lit her soft, round face as she flipped it closed, pleased. Then she snuck another glance up at my face, and cleared her throat. “Listen, a few of us are meeting over in the cantina for drinks. Want to join us?”
I wrinkled my nose. “A cantina? You mean…like a superhuman kegger?”
She laughed at that, flipping her fan open and closed, slicing it through the air in a deadly dance of familiarity. “Yeah, I guess so.”
I hesitated. I certainly didn’t want to walk into a repeat of the day’s earlier performance, me against them…because even though I sensed mistrust swirling between them, they were still unified in their uncertainty about me. Then again, going would give me a chance to study each of them individually. Nobody knew about my note from Tekla…or about my session with Greta. Vanessa was right. Why wait for Warren?
“You did really well today,” she said, glancing over at me as I continued to remain silent. She put away the file in a large tool chest, and tucked the fan into the small of her back. “Not just against Chandra, but Hunter too. Most people find him too intimidating to effectively spar against.”
“He was intimidating,” I said, not adding: Right up until the moment he pissed me off.
“Well, you didn’t look intimidated,” she said, then paused. I could feel her choosing her words carefully. “You looked powerful. Frightening.”
And there it was, out in the open. She shut her locker door, turning to me, and unlike in Saturn’s Orchard, she met my eye. “Look, today, when we did nothing…I just want you to know we’re not like that. We protect our own. We stick up for one another. We were just reacting, or not reacting, to the Shadow in you. I’m sorry things got out of hand. We all are.”
I glanced at the double doors Chandra had just disappeared through and made a disbelieving sound.
Vanessa answered it with a sigh of her own. “Look, Chandra’s one lifelong ambition has always been to serve this troop as the Archer. Every child of the Zodiac grows up dreaming of what it’s like to be an agent of Light.” She touched my arm, willing me to understand. “Your arrival here was a big blow to her, but she’ll come around in time.”
I remained unmoved, refusing to look her in the eye as I said, “She wants to vote me out of this troop. She called me a…an independent.” A rogue agent.
Vanessa’s impatience got the best of her and she snapped, “Yeah, and in doing so revealed her greatest fear. Because if you’re this generation’s Archer, what does that make her?”
I opened my mouth, before closing it again. Vanessa was right. Chandra might have the trust I so coveted from the rest of the troop, but she’d never be the person she aspired to be as long as I was living. I knew what that was like, not getting to be who you truly wanted.
I looked down, finding I was unconsciously rubbing at my arm. The puncture marks from Hunter’s whip could still be seen there. Injuries from conduits, I remembered, always scarred. “I don’t know if I can handle too many more training sessions like that,” I said, letting a trace of my own vulnerability show through. It’d be interesting to see what Vanessa did with it. Interesting…and telling too.
“It’s not just you, okay?” Vanessa glanced at the door to make sure Chandra had really left and no one else had arrived. “Things have been boiling over for weeks, months now. It’s never been like this before, we were all raised together, and we keep putting on a front like everything’s okay, but it’s not. It’s just…not.”
“Because Tekla said there was a traitor?”
She hesitated before nodding. “And no matter how much Warren denies it…well, look around.”
She gestured at the dormant glyphs, and the feeling of emptiness reached out to snag my attention again.
“Look, just come to the cantina,” she said, voice soft and imploring. “Let us start over.”
I’d have liked to have just said yes, but I had to wonder why she was being so open and friendly. I’d probably have jumped at the chance if only there wasn’t one big question mark surrounding her. Could she be the traitor?
Only one way to find out, I thought, and because of that I gave her a nod that had her smiling as she led me from the locker room.
“What are you guys celebrating, anyway?” I asked, our heels clicking in tandem against the stone floors.
“We’re not,” she said. One hand on the frosted double doors, she sighed, and turned her head to stare past me, back into the cavernous room. Her gaze landed on the dead Scorpionic glyph, so dark her eyes were almost smudged. “We’re remembering. It’s been six months to the day since Stryker was killed.” And she pushed open the door and disappeared.
The cantina was probably the most surprising room in the sanctuary so far, with couches in cubes of midnight velvet clustered around silver tables, the silver accenting echoed in the corner bar. As Vanessa made herself at home behind it, I looked up to find a ceiling glowing with stars, and shapes in the form of constellations—the Big Dipper, the Little, and others I recognized but couldn’t name.
There was a fish tank spanning the length of one wall, its occupants floating around in colorful, blissful ignorance. The opposite wall held a flat screen television. Sting was crooning softly about watching every step I took, and I smiled as the steel candles on each table shot to life as Vanessa pushed a button. It was more ultralounge than cantina, I thought, sinking into a velvet chair and the feeling of being enveloped in a futuristic womb.
“The four elements,” Vanessa said, gesturing around the room. “Fire, earth, water, air.”
I frowned. I saw the air amid the stars above, fire in the slim candles, and water, obviously, represented by the fish tank. But earth? I looked to Vanessa.