Page 79 of Xantera
But everyone else is frightened, that’s for sure. Just like my own Choosing, a Guardian’s presence stills the crowd. Diggory’s daughter fidgets, her fingers curling and uncurling repeatedly… until the Fifth Guardian appears with a hum in his throat and a red-eyed stare that hammers her still.
“You are perfect.”
Diggory’s daughter reads his lips, her heart stops, and she’s yanked away before she can even remember to look over her shoulder for a last glimpse of her mother and father.
But she can hear her father’s scream behind her.
“SYLVIA!NO!PLEASE! TAKE ME INSTEA—!”
A sentry is already muffling Diggory’s voice, and the sound cuts off abruptly. With the Fifth Guardian still yanking her forward by one wrist, Sylvia throws her free hand behind her back and gives her father one last goodbye in the language they made together: “Stop making a fuss. I’ll find a way to talk to you.”
The memory fades to black, replacing itself with a new one—and this time, I’m staring into a pair of eyes that aren’t mine through a reflective surface.
It takes a second for me to orient myself, but finally it clicks. A mirror. The one that I ended up pulling from Diggory’s shower, to be exact.
Sylvia blinks at herself, angling the mirror to each side just as I did, as she takes in her features. Her hand drops to pick up the jewelry sitting on her dresser, the same piece I slid on my finger in Belinda’s shower, too.
I knew it,she thinks with disgust.I knew they don’t follow their own rules. If only the rest of Xantera could see all this wealth they keep from everyone else, they’d realize…
Her thoughts morph into an idea, and the room swirls into a new memory. Now, we’re on a balcony—reliving a long-ago Sanctuary Sunday.
Faces peer up at us from below, just close enough to make out their doleful smiles and waves. Diggory and Belinda are there, mimicking the motions of everyone else, but Sylvia watches the way her father’s hand moves through the air and deciphers the coded message.
“Are you okay?”
Sylvia leans over the railing, plastering on a face of happiness and exhilaration, while she waves her own arm regally and brings her fingers snapping down against her thumb. “No.”
Immediately, Diggory’s hand movements get sharper.
“What did they do to you?”
“Besides the obvious?” she signs, thinking about the puncture wounds that already litter her body, courtesy of the Fifth Guardian. “I’m not sure yet, but I know they’re not being completely honest with us. Here. I can prove it.”
“Prove it?” Diggory asks, his forehead wrinkling in confusion even from afar. Beside him, Belinda is blatantly gazing off into the distance, choosing to remain in ignorance rather than acknowledge that her partner is doing more than waving at their daughter. Or maybe she’s watching out for any sentries, making sure nobody else notices the strange exchanges. Either way, Sylvia chooses to risk it.
She reaches into her cloak, whisks out the mirror, anddropsit.
Diggory’s hand flashes out to grab the object before swiftly hiding it within his cloak, and Sylvia lets out a satisfied breath.
I catch her thoughts and feelings just as the memory begins to morph: a rush of adrenaline that she’s already addicted to. She’s going to do it again—find more evidence of their hypocrisy and give it all to her father. Just to defy them.
The memory swirls into another one. Now, my pseudo-heart is pounding nails into my ribcage. Sylvia looks over her shoulder,and I stamp the hallway into my brain, somehow aware that we’re entering the Eleventh Guardian’s bedroom, before she clicks the door shut behind her and turns around.
If a new Chosen One’s bedroom is massive, a Guardian’s is simply unbelievable. Spreading into more and more rooms, the place has to be bigger than a handful of housing units put together, brimming with furniture, drapes, decorations, and other gaudy, elaborate things that make the rest of Xantera look like the barest of bones.
But Sylvia doesn’t hesitate as she starts toward the bedside table by the colossal, four-poster bed filled with rumpled sheets. She’s been sneaking or sleeping her way into every Guardian’s bedroom over the last six months, and she knows they all have a key they keep beside them when they sleep. Just last night, she saw the Eleventh Guardian glance at his before he continued sucking on her neck, but she didn’t dare nab it. Not then.
Now, the Eleventh Guardian is off tormenting other Chosen Ones, and Sylvia sets her sights on the little open box where a key lays horizontally on a red cushion. So out in the open. So stealable. She doesn’t know what it unlocks, but she knows her father will figure it out when she drops it to him.
Her long slender fingers trace the heart-shaped end.
I jump when a door handle twists, a metal sound scraping my nerves. Whipping my head around, I realize it’s the memory, not reality. Sylvia snatches the key, drops to the ground, and squirms her way to a plank underneath the Eleventh Guardian’s bed.
Chest heaving. Heart hammering.
Two footsteps click inward. If the Eleventh Guardian realizes his key is missing, he’ll tear the room apart and find her trying not to breathe beneath his bed frame. Cursing herself for her stupidity, she clenches the key in trembling, sweaty fingers, feeling the Guardian’s presence pulsing like the opposite of a beacon. And then—
“Felix,you’re needed in the library.”
