I’m just some girl you barely know.”
“No, that’s not true,” he insisted. “You’re not just some girl. And you would’ve believed me. But I couldn’t … I couldn’t bring myself to see what was right in front of my eyes. I didn’t want to see that I was wrong, that I was capable of being wrong.”
“We’re all capable of being wrong,” I whispered.
“I didn’t want to be. I’m supposed to be better than that; otherwise what was all my training for?” He sighed. “I let you down. You deserve better.”
“So do you,” I said fiercely. I stood and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, pulling him close to me. I could smell the comforting piney scent of his cologne and feel a faint heat rising off his skin; his cheeks and ears were flushed, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to look directly at me, as if I was an eclipse, a dangerous celestial event. “You trusted them and they betrayed you. You would never have done that to them.”
He stared at me, struck dumb, then took me by my wrists and pressed my hands against his chest. “I’m taking you home,” he said, his voice hoarse. He looked as though he’d seen a ghost—he was pale, wide-eyed, trembling—but there was something building inside him, something strong and resolute. I imagined I could see it swirling in the darkness of his pupils.
“What? When?”
“As soon as possible. Tomorrow, if I can manage it.”
“Why now? We haven’t found Juliana yet.” I had a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Shouldn’t I have been excited to go home? Wasn’t that what I wanted? Yet while a part of me was excited, another part was full of dread.
“I don’t care,” Thomas said. “You’re not safe here. That Libertas bombing … if you had gotten really hurt, or God forbid
“How are you going to do it without the General finding out?”
“I don’t know. I’ll start by asking Dr. Moss if he has an extra anchor, or if somehow he can get me the remote that controls yours,” Thomas said. He was growing frantic now, which worried me. I’d never seen him this unspooled before. I was afraid he was going to do something stupid and rash. “I turned it in to the General when we arrived at the Citadel, but maybe Mossie can get it back under the pretense of having to fix it or something … I haven’t thought it all through yet. But I’m going to make it happen if it kills me.”
“No,” I protested. “No, I’m not going to let you do that. You’ll get in so much trouble.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Thomas insisted.
“How can you say that? How can you—?” The words stuck in my throat. “How can you think I’d go home and leave you to deal with the fallout?”
“You have to,” he said. “There’s no way for both of us to get out of this, and if one of us is going to get their life back, it has to be you. Don’t you see that?”
“I won’t go!” I cried, digging my nails into the fabric of his jacket. “Not until Juliana’s back. There are other lives at stake here, not just ours. You told me that.”
“There’s more than one way to stop a war,” he told me. “I’ll figure something out. You don’t have to be part of this. It’s not your world. It’s not your problem.”
“I can’t go home yet. I refuse to let you send me back.”
“For God’s sake, Sasha,
“Because,” I said in a near-whisper. “I’m not ready to leave you.”
The frankness of my admission seemed to catch him off guard, but I was tired of hiding how I felt, from him and from myself. He had a right to know, and I had a right to say it.
The shock of what I’d revealed wore off in seconds, and then I was in his arms. His lips fit perfectly against mine. The kiss was tentative at first, and we were both shaking. He started to pull away, but I grabbed him by the back of his neck and pushed myself up hard against him, tangling my fingers in his hair and letting my tongue graze his top lip softly, sending a shudder down his spine. Thomas held my head in his hands, cradling it like a precious object. His lips roamed the soft planes of my face, pressing against my cheek, my temple, the corner of my eye. He traced the ridge of my jaw with kisses. I arched my back, offering him the smooth skin of my neck to kiss, gasping, breathless, before pulling him back up to meet my mouth once again. The weight of him kept me from floating away, atom by atom, into the universe.
We came apart then, our foreheads and noses touching, as if we couldn’t bear to fully separate. We grinned at each other, both giddy with a sense of release.
“What are we doing?” he panted, happily bewildered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I don’t want to stop.”
“Sasha,” he breathed. I loved the way he said my name, like an incantation, like a magic word. “What are we going to do? We’re from—”
“I know,” I said, nodding frantically. “I know that this can’t go on forever, but I also know that I’m not ready to lose you, and tonight I don’t care what’s right or what’s not. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said. Then he kissed me again, harder this time, a kiss full of long-suppressed wanting that echoed my own.
In the middle of the night, I awoke to pounding at my door. I rose from a dreamless sleep, untroubled by visions of Juliana, with the imprint of Thomas’s lips on my own. I smiled as I went to the door, knowing that there was only one person who could be on the other side.
But when I opened it, I found myself face to face not with Thomas, but with Callum. He was so excited he couldn’t even stand still.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and dragging me down the hallway. “I have something I want to show you.”
“Callum, it’s almost dawn!” I hissed. “Where are we going?”
“Remember when we were talking about those things your father’s been saying?” Callum said, charging ahead.
“Yeah?” I rubbed my eyes, shaking off his grip. I was trying not to betray my annoyance, but it was proving difficult. “What about them?”
“I’ve been thinking about it ever since, how he kept saying ‘touch and go.’ It sounded so familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I woke up just now and I remembered.” He stopped suddenly. We were standing in front of a metal door that was out of place in Asthall’s otherwise old-fashioned interiors. It was the entrance to the KES situation room, and unlike every other door at the cottage it had an LCD lock. Callum pointed to it. “Look what’s written there.”
I crouched down and peered at the console. Sure enough, there were three words etched into the metal of the panel’s frame. “No way,” I breathed.
The label read TOUCH AND GO.
“It’s the brand name!” Callum cried, grinning proudly. “These are the same consoles you have at the Castle.”
I squeezed his arm. “Good job, Cal! I can’t believe you even saw that.”
He shrugged happily. “I guess all that paying attention to doors and windows has finally paid off.”
“It sure has. How much do you want to bet that one, one, two, three, five, eight is an access code?”
“Could be,” he said. “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, this is sort of exciting.”
“Although …” I chewed at my lip. “Like you said, all the consoles are the same. So the access code could be for any room in the Castle. There are hundreds of them! What are we going to do, go around to every single one and try it to see if it works?”
“I guess we could,” he said, less enthusiastic now.
“That might take days. And you never know—it could be the code to a room in the Tower, or anywhere in the Citadel for that matter. Someone’s going to wonder what the hell we’re doing long before we get to all of them.”
“Okay,” he conceded. “But don’t you think it’s more likely that the room the code opens has something to do with the king himself? If he’s trying to give you clues, he has to believe that you know which room, or could at least
