Tandem

“Don’t patronize me, Juliana, I’m not in the mood.” She looked tired and drawn; I couldn’t help feeling a measure of compassion for the queen, despite her incivility. “I have business to attend to in my study. Call me if something changes.” She said this to Thomas, looking me over once more before sweeping out of the room and disappearing down the hallway.

“Don’t let her get to you,” Thomas said. “She’s not as scary as she seems.”

“Really? Because she seems pretty scary to me,” I said. The queen had rattled me. I wasn’t used to being spoken to in such a petulant way by adults. Snotty girls at school, sure, but adults tended to love me.

I gazed once more around the room. The king was lying still; the only sign he wasn’t asleep was the manic fluttering motion of his right hand in the air.

“What’s the matter?” Thomas asked, picking up on my anxiety.

“I don’t like hospitals,” I told him.

“But this isn’t a hospital. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said. Thomas waited for me to continue. “It’s just—I went to the hospital the night my parents died. Ever since then, I can’t … I don’t like it. That’s all.”

“Come on,” Thomas said. His hand grazed my elbow and I started as if he had shocked me. He gave me a curious look, but was polite enough not to mention it. “This won’t be that bad. He’s just lying there.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I can do this.” The king looked so pathetic, alone even when other people were in the room.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Thomas assured me. “The trick to pretending to be somebody else is to do everything exactly the way that other person would do them, even when it feels unnatural, until you get used to it.”

“You would know,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I would know,” Thomas said. “When I was Grant, I ate peas, even though I hate them, because he loves them. I drank beer under the train tracks with that dumb friend of his, Ivan, because he would do that. I conformed to every aspect of his routine. Did you know he flosses his teeth three times a day? I read his books, I watched his movies, I listened to his music. I slept nine hours a night even though I haven’t done that since I was so young I barely remember it. And you know what? Nobody ever questioned me. Not even when I asked you to prom. I’m an expert at fooling people into believing I’m somebody else, so you might as well listen to me.”

I stared at him, my mouth agape. He had some nerve to bring up his performance as Grant to me. But he wasn’t wrong. He’d fooled me with his act. He’d fooled everyone.

“Fine.” I swallowed hard and approached the bed with caution. The king’s eyes were open, but he was just staring at the ceiling. His right hand grazed the air, but it only took me a few seconds to realize that it was repeating the same rhythm over and over again, his fingers moving in the exact same way every time, his wrist rising and falling in a precise pattern.

“He does that a lot,” Thomas said. “That hand thing. Ever since they moved him here he’s been doing it.”

“Why?”

“Not sure. The doctor said it’s nothing to worry about, just a compulsion. Like his brain’s stuck in a loop.” But the tone of Thomas’s voice said that it unsettled him as much as it did me.

I sat down in the chair the queen had recently vacated. “What do I do now?”

“Talk to him,” Thomas said.

“What do I call him?”

“Try ‘Dad.’ ”

“Hi, Dad,” I said hesitantly. The word sounded strange coming out of my mouth. I hadn’t called someone “Dad” in a very long time. The king showed no reaction. He didn’t even blink. I tried again. “Hi, Dad, it’s me—”

“Juli,” Thomas prompted. I nodded.

“It’s me, Juli. I heard you were asking for me. I’m sorry I was away for such a long time, I didn’t know … Well, I’m back now. Was there something you wanted to say to me?”

Still nothing from the king. I looked to Thomas for some advice, unsure of what I was doing wrong.

“Don’t be discouraged,” Thomas said. “He almost never says anything real. He murmurs a lot, nonsense mostly; sometimes he parrots what people around him are saying. But usually it’s just this. I know it’s weird, but try not to get too freaked out. He’s harmless.”

I watched the king, saying nothing for a while. The poor man. I didn’t know what sort of person he had been before he’d been shot, or how good of a king he’d managed to be to his people. But Thomas had said that he loved his daughter, and I believed that. It was hard to see a man with three children laid up in a hospital bed, tapping out meaningless patterns in the air. That wasn’t a way to live no matter who you were.

There was a book sitting on the nightstand. I held the volume up so that Thomas could see it. “The Odyssey? You have The Odyssey here?”

“We do,” he said. “It’s pre-LCE.”

“Right.” Still, it was odd, seeing the book there, as if it, too, was marooned in Aurora, just trying to get back home.

“Why don’t you read to him?”

I opened The Odyssey and found that someone—Juliana?—had already made significant progress. There was a bookmark on page 249, right at the beginning of Book Eleven: The Kingdom of the Dead. It seemed a little morbid, but it was nice to have something to actually do, so I began to read.

“ ‘Now down we came to the ship at the water’s edge,’ ” I began. “ ‘We hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first, stepped the mast in the black craft and set our sail and loaded the sheep aboard, the ram and ewe, then we ourselves embarked, streaming tears, our hearts weighed down with anguish …’ ”

“Juli!” the king shouted, the fingers of his left hand closing over my wrist. My muscles tightened as I tried to squirm away. I looked at Thomas in shock and saw it mirrored on his face.

“Touch and go,” the king muttered. He said the words with a mysterious sort of urgency, like they meant something. I called out for Thomas’s help, but he was already at my side, prying me out of the steel trap of the king’s fingers.

“Are you okay?” Thomas yanked me out of the chair and clutched me by the elbows. I shook my head. I wasn’t okay, I was nowhere near okay.

“Mirror, mirror,” the king said, still distraught. “Mirror, mirror.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Thomas said, tugging me toward the door.

“But what if he’s hurt?” I protested.

“I’ll call the nurse on our way out, come on.”

“Mirror, mirror!” the king shouted. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. What if he died and I was the cause? “One, one, two, three …”

“Come on, Sasha,” Thomas urged again. I froze. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken my real name out loud. I hoped no one had overheard him, but Thomas didn’t even seem to realize that he’d said it.

The king kept mumbling, but I couldn’t make out any of the words. Thomas slammed a large red button near the door with the heel of his hand, and in a nanosecond I could hear footsteps in the hall, the sound of voices. Two nurses in pressed white uniforms burst in, checking monitors and IVs before Thomas and I had even gotten out of the room.

As we hurried down the corridor, I heard the king cry out one more time, clear as a bell: “Touch and go!” 

FIFTEEN

Eloise Dash angled herself toward the camera and gave the invisible audience on the other side a winning smile. “Good morning, Columbia!” she said. “And welcome to the Dash Report on CBN News, hosted by me, Eloise Dash. Today I bring you a highly anticipated interview with our very own Princess Juliana, who is back fresh from her early summer holiday just in time for her wedding to Prince Callum of