The hour passed. I heard a bell ring from deeper in the school. The grigori, roused from his book, touched a machine on the desk in front of him and said, “Felicia Karkarov to Reception, please.” Then he looked at me and nodded, like he’d fulfilled a promise. I wondered where he was from. He was no Russian emigrant, and no English one, either. English wizards were flocking to the HRE because they wanted to openly practice their talent, forbidden at home.
In a minute or two, I heard footsteps in the hall that led back to (I assumed) the classrooms, and I stood.
I didn’t know her for a moment, though it had only been a few months. I’d last seen her on the train platform in Ciudad Juárez. Felicia had been grubby, and her hair had been a coarse black tangle. She had been skinny, like a bunch of slats tied together. She’d looked younger than her age.
Now she’d filled out and grown and groomed herself.
When Felicia saw me, her face blossomed with all kinds of emotions: she was relieved, she was glad, and she was angry.
My sister shrieked and hurled herself at me. I caught her. It was like we’d grown up together, rather than having known each other for two terrible days in the slums of Ciudad Juárez.
For the first time, I realized how hard it must have been for Felicia, hauled away from everything she’d ever known to a place where she knew nothing and no one. Because that was the way I felt now.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Felicia said. Her voice was all clogged up. She was on the edge of crying. She was crafty, but I didn’t think this was feigned.
“No tears, now, sister,” I said. “I know it’s a surprise, but here I am, ready to spend time with you. Can I take you out to lunch?”
“I have to go tell Miss Drinkwater.” Felicia raced away back down the hall into the depths of the school. I marveled again at how her body had filled out. Regular eating will do wonders for a half-starved girl.
The grigori had put down his book. “Felicia has the blood of our holy Father Grigori,” he said.
I nodded.
“But not you?”
“Half sister,” I reminded him.
I absolutely did have the right blood. We had the same father, a bastard son of Rasputin. I’d found that out only a bit more than a year ago. But not only did I not give a flip about the tsar, I figured he’d got one of us—he didn’t need both. Besides, I already had a job.
If the grigoris knew we shared a father instead of a mother, I’d never leave this place. Only Eli knew.
Then Felicia was back, and we were walking out of the big doors and through the gate. It was like getting out of prison, which reminded me of Eli. I wanted to fire questions at Felicia, but this was not the time or place. I had no idea where we would go to eat, and I had to ask her for ideas.
“I don’t get outside the school much,” my sister said. She kept glancing at me sideways, like I’d vanish.
We’d see a restaurant or soda fountain somewhere along the street, I figured. There were so many office buildings on the surrounding blocks, it stood to reason there’d be places for all these workers to get lunch. So we walked, and I looked at her, and she looked at me. Felicia had cheeks now, and they were rosy brown. Her black hair looked glossy. It lay down her back in a neat braid. She even made the school uniform, navy blue and yellow, look good.
“You look real pretty,” I said. “You’ve done some growing.”
“You look good, too. Your hair’s grown out a lot.” Felicia grinned at me, reached over to touch a curl.
“Last time I saw you was three weeks after I’d shaved my head,” I said.
“No wonder you …”
“Looked so awful?” I smiled.
“No!” Felicia said quickly. “So … different.”
I cast around for something else to say. “What about this place?” We went into the shop, a bakery. It smelled wonderful, like butter and sugar and baked meat. After looking at the chalkboard, I ordered a chicken potpie, and Felicia asked for a grilled cheese sandwich and some soup. The food came pretty quick, and we tucked in. It was good. Seasoned different from what I was used to.
Other customers were jammed in close to us. We still couldn’t have the conversation I craved.
“Tell me about school,” I said. Probably a safe topic.
Felicia didn’t seem to know where to start, so I primed the pump by asking her what kind of room she slept in, how having a roommate was, what classes she was taking. She’d touched on all this in her letters, but I wanted to know more. Once she opened her mouth, all I had to do was sit back and listen.
Felicia shared a room with Anna, a girl from one of the families that had fled godless Russia with the tsar. Anna Feodorovna already knew she was an air wizard, and she had long blond hair. They each had a bed. Anna didn’t snore unless she had a cold. When Anna was thirteen or fourteen, she’d go to the middle school to begin her serious grigori training. Now she was getting her background in all the same things Felicia was taking: English, penmanship, arithmetic, the history of (what used to be) California, Russian history, and the basics of magic.
Anna’s parents lived north of here, around Redding, so Anna only went home on the long holidays.
Felicia didn’t have a home to go to. I felt worse and worse, angry at myself.
“Does Anna already try out her magic?” I asked. I’d been watching Felicia’s expressions.
My sister’s eyes opened wide, all innocence. So Anna had been doing exactly that—Felicia, too, most likely. I was sure that was forbidden.
“No, of course not, that would be dangerous,” Felicia said with a great air of virtue.
“Do you … ?” I hoped she’d understand without me finishing the sentence. Our father (I never thought of him as “Father,” but that was who he was) had been a confidence man with some magic, just enough to make a living off other people. Maybe Felicia had inherited more of that ability than I had.
Felicia looked at me with wide eyes. “Of course not,” she said.
“Um-hum. We’re going to talk about that later,” I said.
Felicia did her best to look astonished.
She went back to telling me about the food at school, and how all the girls thought Miss Drinkwater was sweet on the mathematics teacher. We finished our lunch. Left to find a less public place, or at least a public place less thick with people.
I suggested the courtyard at her school, but Felicia said, “You can never know who’s listening there. Some of them can hear without being in sight.”
“I would not like that at all,” I said. Didn’t even have to think a moment.
“I wouldn’t, either.”
There it was again, the undertone of anger.
Finally, we crossed the wide street, dodging cars, to sit on a bench outside the Ministry of Finance, whatever that was.
“We got to talk about Eli,” I said. “But first, I got to explain to you. I’m real sorry. I didn’t expect to live.”
She looked down at her feet and didn’t say a word. She wasn’t going to make this easy. But why should she?
I took a deep breath. “When I put you on the train with Eli, I thought I was giving you a life. I thought of it as providing for you, since I didn’t expect to be around. Giving you a way to get an education, make a living. Until I saw you today—really, until I found out how scared I was to be in a city so far from home—I never imagined another way to look at it.”