“And I think they were stealing my blood,” I confessed.
“Stealing your blood?” she echoed. “Like vampires?”
“No, they weren’t drinking it.” I paused, thinking. “I don’t know what they’re doing with it. Maybe drinking it, I guess. But they took it with a syringe. I don’t know if they took yours or not, but I have some scars on my left forearm.”
“I had no new marks on my arms, but I did have a three-quarter-inch scar on my right temple, a two-day-old bruise on my ribs, and a three-inch diagonal healing cut across my lower back,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“You sound awfully certain,” I commented.
“Elof and I did full-body exams for any new marks. It was the only way we could discern any abuse or violations.”
“And you didn’t see anything that could be a needle mark?” I asked.
“No, and we specifically checked for that. But Elof did find a pair of odd dots he thought might be from a psionic stun gun’s prong.”
“Sorry you guys went through that,” I said.
“You went through it too,” Dagny reminded me gently. “I’ll talk to Elof and see if he has theories about why they wanted your blood. I’m sure he’ll have questions. Is it okay if he calls you later?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“What are you going to do now?” Dagny asked. “Are you staying in Förening?”
“For the immediate future, I think so.”
Truth was that I didn’t know where else to go. With my internship gone, I was out of work, and I didn’t have a place to live. Most of my possessions—other than the boxes stored in the Holmes’s basement and what I still had in my duffel bag—were in the apartment. I’d have to go to Merellä to get my things soon, not just because I wanted my stuff but to free up the space so Dagny could find a new flatmate.
I told her as much, and I promised to square up the back rent as soon as I could.
“No need,” Dagny said. “Amalie and the board took care of it. Our apartment is paid through the end of September. She said we shouldn’t be punished for a crime committed against us.”
“That was very generous of them,” I said.
“Amalie has been quite magnanimous,” Dagny admitted. “Far more than other Mästares.”
“Why do you think she’s being so nice?”
“She wants to find out what she can about the First City. The other Mästares seemed more concerned with following the rules.” She sighed then. “So it goes.”
In the background, I heard a loud clatter, and Elof calling Dagny’s name.
“I have to go help Elof with something,” she said. “I’ll talk to you soon, though, Ulla. Stay safe.”
“You too,” I told her, and ended the call.
Then I lay back on the air mattress, and I stared up at the fluffy white clouds on the pale blue ceiling of the twins’ room, and I tried to figure out what I was going to do from here.
7
Binrassi
Niko had been the first one to sneak into the room, but I was ready for a reprieve from my growing anxiety. Everything felt so up in the air, and I was so untethered.
Not to mention the near boundless hospitality that Finn and his family had shown me. But I couldn’t possibly expect that to last forever. They had six children and Finn’s mother to worry about, plus Finn’s high-stress job as the minister of defense of the entire Trylle kingdom.
I allowed myself a few more minutes alone with Niko, reading him a passage from Sunny Plants for Funny Kids. It didn’t say much of interest. With petals of gold and nectar of red, this big flower smells of the dead. When I finished, I put it back on the shelf and scooped Niko up in my arms before heading downstairs.
I found Mia and Hanna in the kitchen, trying to make sweet-and-sour red cabbage with mushroom and quinoa sausage for supper with the twins crawling around. I managed to entertain the littler kids, keeping them out from underfoot while Mia sautéed and boiled in pots and pans at the stove, and while Hanna cut and prepped nearby and made quite the sous chef to her mother.
Hanna used the time to ask me a thousand questions, but she grew increasingly disappointed with my constant refrain of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember.”
“How long are you going to be here?” Hanna asked finally.
“Um, I’m not sure.” I sat cross-legged on the floor, with Lissa on my lap, leaning forward and using her pudgy hands to help her sister stack perilous towers of plastic cups.
Mia was sautéing the mushrooms with her back to me, and she looked over her shoulder at me. “You know you can stay here as long as you want.”
“I could kick Emma out, and you could stay in my room,” Hanna offered.
“Hanna, no,” Mia admonished her before Hanna got too carried away with fantasies of evicting her little sister. “Finn and I were talking, and we could empty out all the things we put in your room after you moved out. We hadn’t meant to turn it into storage like that, but my summer cleaning got away from me.”
“No, I don’t want you guys going to any trouble. I’ll be fine on the air mattress until I can figure out what I’m going to do next.”
“Well, there’s no rush. You’ve been through a lot, and you need time to sort things out. We all understand, and we just want you to be okay.”
“Thanks, that—” I was going to finish with means a lot to me, but at that exact moment, Luna decided to clock Niko in the head as hard as she could.
He immediately screamed, so Lissa started to cry, and within seconds, all the kids were having a meltdown. Hanna finished cooking while Mia and I dealt with consoling everyone else.
They calmed down in time for supper, but then everyone was talking, and the conversation never went back to me or my future plans. Which was fine by me, because I didn’t want to talk about it anyway.
The great thing about having ten of us in the house—five of them under the age of eight—was there was always so much commotion going on, and it was easy to get lost in it if you wanted to.
Despite my lengthy midday nap, I was exhausted by bedtime. Unfortunately, the twins weren’t nearly as ready for sleep as I was at nine-thirty P.M. After three rounds of their favorite lullaby, Luna finally went down, but Lissa was still fussing.
I’d tried everything I could think of, so I took Lissa from her crib, and I held her in my arms. I can’t say for certain that it worked for her, but within minutes, I was out.
And the next time I opened my eyes, I was in the dungeon again.
Not the prison cell, but the corridor outside of it. It looked the same as it had last time. Narrow and dark, although the stones seemed more rust colored. Or maybe it was just because it was brighter. All the lamps were lit, with one on either side every few feet.
The hallway ended in an almost blindingly bright light, and I shielded my face with my arm as I walked into the atrium. It was a tall silo of a room, with a stone staircase that wound up to the glass roof letting all the sunlight pour in.
A woman was standing on the stairs, a few steps up from the bottom, and she smiled serenely. Her long dark hair floated ethereally around her, and her pale gown adorned with flowers of goldenrod and poppy red seemed to be one with her luminous bronze skin.