“I asked some of the other staff,” she goes on, “and they told me to talk to Willow. So I did. And she told me it was all true. That she meant to tell me earlier, on the first night; that she told everyone else. And that’s why everyone’s just going around like everything is normal. When there’s people downstairs with scales on their cheeks.”
I take a deep breath, a tentative relief starting to unfurl in me. “So you know about the realms? And you don’t think we’re all batshit crazy?”
She shrugs, a deceptively casual gesture. She paces toward me and sits on the edge of her bed, the old mattress creaking beneath her. The lamplight does nice things to her face, easing the sharpness and the shadows.
“I have a twin brother,” she says softly. “Terran. When my parents died, we were split up and put into different foster homes. I haven’t seen him since I was four. But I remember the stories he used to make up.”
I open my mouth, about to say something trite like I’m sorry, but Taya shakes her head at me to let her finish. “He always talked about a place like this, a palace that held doorways to a million worlds. So when I read those papers … I don’t know, it seemed like fate or something.”
She smiles ruefully, like she expects me not to believe her, when I’m the one holding my breath, riveted. “Ever since Roswell, I always figured we aren’t alone in the universe.”
She quirks one eyebrow to show me she’s at least half-joking. And I feel myself smiling back through the tears drying on my cheeks.
“We’re definitely not,” I say after a moment of contemplative silence. “Except I guess it would be the multiverse, not a universe.”
“Semantics,” she says, but she smiles. “What I’m saying is that if you’re crazy, I am too. I believe you.”
And it’s that easy, that simple to share the truth of the Adjacent Realms with another person.
I think of all the hours I spent as a little kid trying to explain it to my dad, and knowing he just thought I was making it all up. Now a weight seems to lift off my chest, just a little. It’s good to be believed. To be understood.
“So now we’ve established that, wanna tell me what’s wrong?” Taya says. She moves to sit cross-legged on the bedspread, the smile fading off her face.
“It’s a long story.” I swallow down the sudden lump in my throat. “Can I sit?”
Taya gestures wordlessly toward the armchair in the corner; I sink into it and draw my knees up to my chest. I tell her the SparkNotes version of everything that’s happened since we arrived at Havenfall, leaving out most of the strands I still don’t understand—the disappearance of the Silver Prince’s manservant and Brekken. I tell her that there’s a world full of monsters, the long-dormant door to that world cracked open again, and something got through.
Her eyes flicker, unreadable through it all, but she doesn’t speak. Not until I tell her about the Silver Prince seeing Brekken in the tunnels.
“What if he was wrong?” she asks, resting her chin on her folded hands. “Or lying?”
I blink. Of all the questions she could ask, I wasn’t expecting that one. “About seeing Brekken? Why would he lie, though?”
She shrugs. “Dunno. But you said you’ve known Brekken forever. I just heard a bit of your talk with this Prince guy in the reception room, but he seemed kind of pissed about the Fiord princess being there.”
“Fiorden,” I correct. I fiddle with a hangnail, tugging at it until it hurts. “Clearly I have a habit of trusting the wrong people. Maybe I should just assume that to be the case, going forward.” A bitter chuckle escapes my lips, and a question rises in my mind: do I trust the Prince?
The truthful answer is I don’t know. He’s charming, a little too much so. Slick. But he saved his people. He leads them. If the Byrnisians trust him, what business do I have questioning him? I don’t have any reason not to trust him.
“Okay, here’s the thing.” Taya speaks after a long moment, sounding suddenly, strangely uncomfortable. She looks between the papers and me, as if deciding whether to share something. “I read up on Solarians a bit.” She reaches down and opens the nightstand drawer to reveal a book, hidden where the Bible would be if this were a regular hotel. It’s leather-bound, yellowed, the embossed title reading A History of the Solarian Realm.
“There’s nothing in there about eating people,” she says. “Sucking souls, yeah, but nothing about—you know.” Her nose wrinkles in distaste. “Does it make sense that there would be nothing at all left of the Prince’s bodyguard guy?”
“There was a lot of blood,” I say automatically, thinking about the horrible stickiness on my hands and clothes. But then I remember—it was blue blood, not red. Was there red anywhere? Maybe Sal or Graylin or Willow cleaned the worst of it up before I got to the tunnels?
A shudder rips through me at the thought, as I imagine red blood staining Havenfall ground. Red like in the kitchen that night. We never found Nate’s body either.
I take a deep breath, picturing clean air filling me and shoving the gruesome thoughts away. “The Silver Prince has more reason than anyone to want to find the truth,” I say, maybe a little too fiercely. “Bram was his friend.”
“Okay, it was just a thought.” Taya slips off the bed to pace in front of the window.
“Brekken stole my keys,” I point out.
“We don’t know that for sure.” She gazes out at the mountaintops. “You had them and then you didn’t.”
“And then they were in the Heiress’s room.” I feel my mouth tug down, remembering.
Taya perks up. “Maybe you just dropped them somewhere, or she took them in the ballroom.” She pauses, her eyes far away. “Do you think she opened the door to Solaria?”
I shrug. “I don’t know how she could have. I thought only a Solarian could do it. But it seems like she’s involved somehow.”
And why would she be? Academic curiosity? Some kind of vendetta against Marcus because of whatever they were fighting about last year?
Fear settles cold into my insides, bringing with it the threat of memory—bloody kitchen, broken glass. I don’t want to get sucked in, so I make myself get up and move to the bedside table, where I leaf through the papers we stole from the Heiress’s room.
“Did they say anything else?” I ask, turning to Taya.
Taya raises her eyebrows at me, as if to say, obviously. She perches on the windowsill, her back to the moon and the mountains, her legs swinging off the edge. “I think the Heiress is smuggling something between the Realms.”
I feel colder. “What do you mean? What would she be smuggling?” But the images from inside her room stick in my head. The piles of trinkets, several college educations’ worth of silver just lying around. And the drawers full of cash.
Taya comes over and taps her fingers on the top page of the papers we stole. It looks like something torn out of an old-fashioned ledger, with descriptions of objects written in the Heiress’s careful writing.
Silver teapot with vine handle.
Pendant with silver chain and Byrn-diamond stone.
Plain silver ring.
And so on, with eye-popping amounts of money corresponding on the other side.