Daughter of Nothing Page 16

  Humphrey emerged from the darkness as he climbed the narrow ladder. His blue eyes peeped through the black grate. Enough sunlight shone through to show his mud-smeared face and the filth covering his soaked uniform. He gripped the grate, fingers black with grime.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Jacey,” he said in a raspy voice. A hollow look had replaced his usual mien of superiority.

  “Did you get any sleep?”

  “Not much. The water’s too deep for me to lie down. I’ve tried to stay on the ladder to keep my feet dry, but it cuts off my circulation. I can’t hold on.”

  “Have you eaten anything?”

  “Not since the hacienda. And I threw up all that in the bougainvillea hedge as soon as I left.”

  That meant Humphrey had gone the whole day before with no food. “And how about water?”

  He glanced down at bottom of the pit. “I’ve resisted so far, but . . .”

  Horrified, Jacey ran to the dining hall and grabbed some of the free-take food and a bottle of water. She rushed back to the pit. The grate was too narrow for the bottle, so she trickled a stream in. He drank greedily until he started to choke, and Jacey worried he’d fall from the ladder.

  She poked chunks of banana and celery through to him. “You shouldn’t do this,” he said with his mouth full. “What happens if you get caught?”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me.” She explained the other rules she had broken and how she hadn’t received any punishment. “I don’t know why.”

  “Don’t you?” he asked. The food and water seemed to sharpen his focus, but he wasn’t the same boy who’d sat across from her at Dr. Carlhagen’s dining room table. With all of his haughty superiority stripped away, Jacey saw him as he truly was: A frightened boy, vulnerable and immensely sad.

  “Dr. Carlhagen refuses to punish you because he’s in love with you. Or, at least, the idea of you.”

  “What are you talking about? He’s in his nineties.”

  “Who ever said an old man can’t fall in love? He gave you the gown, Jacey. Remember the necklace, and how he showed you to me and raved about your perfection?”

  Jacey shivered at the memory, as if Dr. Carlhagen’s gnarled hand still brushed her cheek. “But that was to humiliate you. It had nothing to do with me.” Even as she said it, she knew she was wrong.

  “You should go. If someone reports you feeding me, Dr. Carlhagen might be forced to punish you.” He stuffed the last bit of banana into his mouth.

  “Just as you were forced to run to Sensei and tell him Vaughan and I were alone in the bell tower together?”

  Humphrey stopped chewing and met her eyes. He swallowed. “I had no idea what would come of it. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “When Dr. Carlhagen told me that our futures were linked, he warned me that Vaughan would threaten that. He said that if I ever saw you two growing close . . . romantically, that it was my duty to report it.”

  Jacey exploded. “Romantic? Me and Vaughan? Are you insane?”

  “Far from it,” Humphrey said. “But if you couldn’t see Dr. Carlhagen’s feelings for you, then I suppose you couldn’t see Vaughan’s, either. . . . Or anyone else’s.”

  Jacey couldn’t believe she had such a blind spot. She’d always been able to read people, suss out their motivations and desires. She remembered then the surprise she’d felt when she realized that Belle loved Vaughan.

  Perhaps it did make sense. After all, she could only see things in people that she herself understood from experience. How would she know what love looked like?

  “Our futures are linked, Jacey,” Humphrey said, his voice matter-of-fact. “Dr. Carlhagen will decide what happens to us after graduation, and it’s clear he intends for us to be together. He warned me that if you and Vaughan grew too close that something terrible might happen, something irreversible. And I didn’t want that to happen. . . .”

  “So you lied to me,” she said. “After the Birthday celebration, when I talked to you about it, you said you didn’t know anything more than I did.”

  “What did you expect me to say, Jacey? That we would end up together? And that I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life? Do you really think I’d risk having you laugh in my face?”

  She struggled to find a response. “But you’ve never been nice to me. Why on earth would I believe that you wanted to be with me?”

  “I never said I didn’t resent you. And sometimes I think I’ve even hated you. But after what Dr. Carlhagen did to me last night, I figured something out. The only reason our futures could be linked is simply because Dr. Carlhagen wants them to be. He’s the one who decides where we go after graduation. He’ll assign us to go together. And now I know why.”

  Jacey stared at him, waited for him to continue. She couldn’t follow the track of his logic. She worried that the night in the pit had comprised his reasoning.

  “Dr. Carlhagen loves you, Jacey. I know it’s sick, but I think he realizes that he can’t have you for himself. So the next best thing is for me to have you.”

  “Have me?” The idea jolted her. “I’m not some object, some possession to be passed from man to man.”

  “I know that,” Humphrey said. He gripped the grate and pulled himself closer, eyes earnest. “Believe me, I know.”

  “So why you and not Vaughan or Elias or any number of the boys here?”

  “Because I’m Dr. Carlhagen’s son.”

  Her lips moved, but nothing came out. What should have been obvious was staring back at her through the steel grate. The resemblance between the two, the similarity in the shape of the nose. The smile, which Dr. Carlhagen wore frequently, but which Humphrey twisted into a smirk.

  “If you’re his son, why would he raise you here at the Scion School?”

  “Come on, Jacey, it’s obvious. The Scion School offers the best education in the world, the best chance anyone has to survive in the outside world is to start here. And all this drama started as we entered our last year here. Dr. Carlhagen wants to pair me up with the most beautiful, most desirable mate in the world so that his blood will live on.”

  It sounded so clinical to Jacey, but there was a cold logic to it.

  “Face it, Jacey, none of us are going to be given a choice about what happens after graduation. You and I are going to be assigned to be together. But after you recited Dante’s conversation with his father, it was Vaughan you embraced, not me. So I reported you.” Tears stood out in Humphrey’s eyes as he spoke. His knuckles went white on the grating as he pulled himself as close to her as he could. “I regretted it as soon as I did it. And if I’d had any idea what Vaughan’s punishment was going to be, I never would have said anything.”

  “I should go,” Jacey said. She stood and brushed off her uniform.

  “Jacey, wait. Tell me one thing?”

  “What?”

  “Do you love Vaughan?”

  “I can’t answer that,” she said. She didn’t dare answer it. She didn’t know how she felt about Vaughan or Humphrey or anyone else on campus, except for maybe Livy. And she also knew that buried in Humphrey’s questions was another question, which was whether or not she might love him.

  At that moment, she felt nothing but pity for him. And even that was dulled by the intensity of her anger toward Dr. Carlhagen.

  She couldn’t bear to have his eyes on her anymore. “I’ll try to bring you something later,” she said and walked away.

  She searched for Sensei, intending to ask him whether Dr. Carlhagen had ordered any food for Humphrey or not, but she couldn’t find him. Since she was already in the dojo, she stepped into the dance studio. Maybe reciting Socrates’s lines would help take her mind off her conversation with Humphrey.

  She got only halfway through the recitation when Madam LaFontaine appeared in the mirror. “I see you are back for more dance practice.”

  Jacey sighed but didn’t argue. She put on her leotard and pointe shoes and went through her stretchin
g and warm-up routine. By the end of the workout, she felt better, clearer. She didn’t know what to do, but at least she was putting the pieces together.

  As she was about to leave, Madam LaFontaine reappeared to inform her that Dr. Carlhagen expected her for dinner at the hacienda that evening.

  One thing was for sure, Jacey wouldn’t be accepting any more of Dr. Carlhagen’s invitations. If he wanted her there, he’d have to send Sensei to carry her. “Tell him I have another engagement.” She didn’t stay to listen to Madam LaFontaine’s response.

  For the second straight day, she waited for Belle to leave the dining hall before going in for lunch. Most of Belle’s Nine had believed Jacey’s story, and that had made Belle even angrier. Jacey worried she’d find a shaddle spider in her bunk or footlocker.

  She reported to the dojo for her afternoon workout, hoping that Sensei wouldn’t assign her another run. She didn’t think Belle would set another trap for her, but the thought of Horace and Kirk lying in wait somewhere on the trail made her stomach turn.

  Sensei did not send her on a run. Instead, he’d set up a weight circuit for her and the other Scions in her workout period. Each station had an array of kettlebells, a squat bar, or a medicine ball to throw.

  Sensei patrolled the circuit with a stopwatch, telling them when to switch and when to rest. He seemed to know she wanted to question him because he gave them almost no rest. It was all she could do to get her breath back between sets.

  But before she headed to the showers, she approached him. “How much longer will Humphrey be in the pit?”

  “I don’t know.” He stooped to grasp a kettlebell and move it to its spot among twenty others just like it.

  The other Scions had already hit the showers, so Jacey trailed after him. “You know that Humphrey didn’t steal that radio. Vaughan had it. It’s not right for him to be locked in the pit.”

  He set the weight down but didn’t turn to face her.

  Jacey stepped in front of him, refusing to be intimidated by the force of his presence. Or by the scowl on his face.

  “Humphrey confessed, Jacey. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said he’d go to Dr. Carlhagen if I didn’t report it myself.”

  “None of this would’ve happened if you would have taken the radio from Vaughan. If you can track their locations, you knew exactly where it was.”

  Sensei tried to step past her, but Jacey caught his sleeve. He snapped his arm free and continued to the back of the dojo.

  Jacey called after him. “You knew that Dante planned to broadcast what happened in the medical ward, didn’t you?”

  Sensei didn’t answer, which proved she was right.

  “Why would you allow that?”

  He glanced toward the locker rooms to make sure no one was within earshot before turning. “Because I wanted to know what happens to my students after graduation as much as you did.”

  “You didn’t know?” Jacey asked, astonished. “Were you listening too?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you know that the graduates met their parents.” Jacey drew closer to him. She was finally getting somewhere, so she had no intention of letting him slip away.

  “That was Dante’s interpretation.”

  “But you don’t believe it?”

  Sensei looked uncertain. “I didn’t see them, but it sounded like it might be true.”

  “Are they all still here?”

  Sensei shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s possible the visitors left during the lockdown following Vaughan’s punishment.”

  “What about Vaughan? Have you been in to see him yet?”

  “No. I still have not been admitted.”

  It made no sense. The martial arts master ran the school when Dr. Carlhagen wasn’t on campus. The idea that he could be barred from the medical ward was preposterous. And ominous.

  “Surely you can break in. Or are you afraid of Nurse Smith?”

  He straightened his gi and resumed his usual, intensely calm, demeanor. “Dr. Carlhagen specifically warned me to stay out of the medical ward.”

  “So what? He’s a feeble old man. He can’t do anything to you.”

  “Physical might is a crude measure of power. One defies Dr. Carlhagen only at great peril.”

  “Like the peril you put Vaughan in when you allowed him to keep the radio? The way I see it, you’re responsible for what happened to him and Humphrey. You need to do something.”

  “I wish I could help them,” Sensei said, “but I’m as much a prisoner as they are.”

  Jacey laughed, putting as much scorn into it as she could muster. “I seem to recall you have the key to the pit and the remote control for the front gate.”

  It was Sensei’s turn to step close. He put his thick hands on her shoulders. “Say I broke down the door to the medical ward and wheeled Vaughan out onto the quad. Say I let Humphrey out and opened the front gate. Where would you go with them?”

  He swung his arm out, taking in the whole island. “St. Vitus is not that big, and it is not hospitable. Or do you plan to just swim away?”

  “Supplies come from somewhere,” Jacey said. “There must be boat docks or an airstrip.”

  Sensei’s mouth clamped shut.

  Jacey pressed him. “You’ve already said more than you should, Sensei. I can tell that you want to help us. What’s holding you back?”

  Sensei spun and strode from the dojo, head down.

  Jacey wanted to shout after him but reined in her anger. It would do no one any good if she got Sensei in trouble. Instead, she whispered her final question, “What is Dr. Carlhagen holding over your head, Sensei?”

  Whatever punishment Sensei feared, it didn’t apply to Jacey. She’d proven that time and again in the days since Birthday. Perhaps it was time to test how far she could push it.

  22

  Hardly a Fighter

  When Jacey returned to Girls’ Hall, the rest of the Nines were still in afternoon sessions with Socrates or Sensei. Since she had time to kill, she decided to memorize the rest of Macbeth. Having reviewed the first few acts, she was curious to see how the story turned out. She also had a hunch that Socrates had chosen that specific play for a reason. What it was, exactly, she had no idea.

  She breathed her way into her memorization zone and listened as the reader played Macbeth. Her body responded to the story, though she didn’t comprehend what she heard. When the playback ended, she opened her eyes and found she was holding her elbows and shivering.

  Five minutes later, Wanda returned with Jacey’s Nine. Belle and her Nine appeared moments after. They had an hour of study time before dinner, so Jacey descended from her bunk and opened the front doors.

  She left them open and turned to face down the aisle of bunks. Lifting her voice, she addressed the girls. “I spoke with Sensei about Vaughan today.”

  All conversation stopped. Eyes turned toward her, full of expectation. Even Belle looked up, her pale blue eyes rimmed with red.

  “Sensei has been barred from the medical ward. He has not been allowed to visit Vaughan, and he knows nothing of Vaughan’s condition.”

  She let the murmurs go on for a few moments before continuing. “Is there any reason why we should be kept in the dark about Vaughan’s condition?”

  Heads shook. No one could think of a reason.

  “And can you think of any reason why we shouldn’t know about our parents?”

  Confusion showed on their faces. They didn’t see the connection. Jacey had counted on that. She had to show them the connection, and then they would follow her.

  “The reason that no one is allowed in to see Vaughan is because there are other people in the medical ward that Dr. Carlhagen does not want us knowing about. I believe that Dante, Ping, Sarah, and Vin are still there, and so are their parents.”

  The Girls’ Hall exploded with gasps and chatter. A few girls went to the front door to peer at the medical ward.

  “What is your point?” Belle asked
, voice flat and tired.

  “My point is that the answers to our questions lie just beyond those doors.” Jacey pointed behind her at the medical ward. “I propose we go en masse to see how Vaughan is doing and meet the parents of our graduated Scions.”

  Belle sneered and addressed the girls. “Do you think Nurse Smith is just going to let us pass? She’ll call Sensei and Dr. Carlhagen as soon as we arrive.”

  “I propose something bolder than that, Belle. We shall take the key from Nurse Smith, and, if necessary, physically prevent her from calling Sensei. Then we will unlock the door and we will go in.”

  A hush fell over Girls’ Hall as the magnitude of the proposal sank in. “There will be consequences for anyone involved. But remember what Dante’s father said. Dante’s education was the most expensive investment he’d ever made. Do you know what that tells me?”

  The girls stared back at her, but no one put the pieces together. Jacey let the silence simmer, knowing that the conclusion would carry more power if someone else got to it without her prompting.

  Belle stepped forward and studied Jacey. She pressed her lips tightly together, her whole body tense. Jacey stood her ground. She didn’t think Belle would risk attacking her without backup.

  The pale girl surprised her by dropping her eyes. “It means that no matter what we do, Dr. Carlhagen can’t kill us.” She spoke so softly, Jacey was certain none of the other girls heard.

  “Are you with me?” Jacey asked, also keeping her voice low.

  Belle swallowed with apparent effort. “I will help you, but I will never be with you.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Belle straightened and turned back to the girls. “Jacey is right. Our parents paid a fortune to send us here. That means that Dr. Carlhagen can only do so much to punish us. He cannot let us die, and I suspect he can’t even allow lasting injury.”

  “I’m sick of being lied to,” Jacey said. “It’s time we uncovered the truth.”

  Belle’s second, a red-haired girl named Leslie, waved at the younger girls. “It’s pointless for all of us to go. The younger girls will just be in the way.”