Page 156 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

Twenty-Eight

Andreas

A t the sight of Riva sitting at the far end of the cafeteria, my heart just about leaps out of my chest.

I haven’t crossed paths with any of my fellow Firsts since Clancy gave us his little presentation two days ago, even though yesterday I agreed to go along with his mission.

The others must have too. I can’t imagine any of them consigning themselves to total isolation and torture instead.

At least this way we might have some wiggle room to decide our fate.

But I was starting to think he wasn’t going to let us mingle with each other at all anymore. Not on the island, anyway.

As I walk over, holding myself back from sprinting to her side in case that would provoke the guardians, Riva glances up from her plate and sees me. The brightening of her face washes away the stress of the past two days.

At the same time, my stomach dips. I glance around the room, noting the two guardians in their usual posts near the door.

Nothing about the cafeteria looks different. I can’t believe that Clancy is offering us this opportunity to talk out of the goodness of his heart, though.

The fact that he’s letting it happen means it could benefit him in some way. He’s got to be monitoring us even more closely than he was before.

We’ll have to watch every word so carefully. Not let a single hint of mutiny show.

A wobble of doubt runs through my pulse, and there’s an instant when I almost avoid Riva’s table altogether, as desperately as I want to bask in her presence. What if I’m misjudging the situation even with my sense of caution?

Wouldn’t it look more suspicious if I don’t even talk to her? Any problems we had in the past were nothing to do with things I said.

I shoot her a smile and a nod, passing by, and quickly spoon chili onto my plate from a tureen. The hearty, spicy scent does nothing to settle my nerves as I sit down across from her.

“It’s good to see you.”

Riva smiles back at me, but the corners of her mouth stay tight. “Same. You’ve been okay?”

She’s taking the same careful approach I meant to. Good.

“Yeah.” I dig my fork in among the beans and bits of ground beef. “I haven’t seen anyone except the younger shadowbloods until now.”

“Me neither.” She takes a bite from her mostly cleaned plate and scans the room warily. “I guess Clancy decided everyone here was better off if we still had some contact.”

“Everyone” as in him too. Yep, she’s definitely come to the same conclusions about his motivations as I have.

“Wouldn’t want morale to dip too low,” I say with forced wryness.

Riva’s head droops. She tears a chunk off her roll but then just holds the piece rather than bringing it to her mouth.

Then she drags in a breath. “I guess we’re stuck with this place. Might as well make the best of it.”

The strain in her voice and the quiver of anguish that touches my chest through my mark fill in the blanks in her words. She’s afraid of how true those statements might be.

A similar hopelessness swells inside me. I’ve been thinking it over since the moment I regained consciousness on the helicopter, heading back here—how could we pull off another escape?

No brilliant plans have occurred to me. Or even mediocre plans, for that matter.

Every spark of an idea that lights in my mind sputters out before I follow it more than a couple of steps from its instigation.

Clancy has too much power. He’ll have safeguarded all the weaknesses of the facility that we’ve discovered.

And the very fact of being on an island with little means to leave it limits our options to barely any.

“We’ll make the best of it,” I agree, attempting to push a little energy into the words. A nudge of encouragement that if there is an opportunity to turn this situation around, we’ll find it.

Riva aims another smile at me, smaller but softer, so I think I’ve succeeded. She pops the bit of roll into her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “Have you found out anything more from Clancy about his mission or whatever else he’s working on?”

Her wording and her tone give me the sense that she doesn’t mean finding out only by conventional means. She thinks I might have learned something interesting from his memories.

But I haven’t dared to sneak a peek inside the facility leader’s head since we’ve gotten back. I’ve only seen him briefly anyway, when he came to collect my answer yesterday.

I shake my head. “No. He hasn’t come around to talk to me.”

She hums to herself, her gaze going momentarily distant.

“I wondered a little about the older man from the Guardianship who talked to him when we got back. It sounded like he might have some say in the missions or other things.” She pauses.

“I guess you didn’t even see him to recognize him—they had your eyes covered at that point. ”

“I didn’t.” But she’s caught my interest. I did hear a fragment of conversation between Clancy and a gravelly voice I didn’t recognize.

Is there still someone else who has authority over Clancy himself? Could there be a weakness we could exploit not in the facility’s construction but in the hierarchy of the guardians?

“I’m not sure I could describe him all that well,” Riva goes on in a casual tone. “I’ve never been as good at bringing memories to life as you are.”

She flicks her gaze toward me, a meaningful look, and understanding snaps into place. If I wanted to search the other guardians’ memories for this man, I could get a solid impression of him by looking inside her mind first.

My spirits lift, but the rest of me balks with a twinge of uneasiness. I obviously don’t do a good enough job suppressing my discomfort, because Riva’s brow knits with concern. “What’s the matter?”

“I…” I grapple with the words and decide that it doesn’t matter if I express this regret. The past has already happened—Clancy can’t expect me to feel happy about how our escape fell apart.

Swallowing thickly, I meet Riva’s gaze. “It’s been bothering me that I didn’t figure out what was going on with Griffin in time. I should have been able to pick up on these things—I’m supposed to be good at reading people in all kinds of ways—but I totally missed something so important…”

The previous time we were caught, I missed recognizing that Griffin was there at all, pretending to be Jacob. This time, I missed what he’d picked up on: that Celine wasn’t actually happy about gaining her freedom.

That she was looking for opportunities to signal the guardians and screw the rest of us over.

I’d been searching his memories when I got the chance, checking for any sign that his efforts to help us weren’t genuine. My guilt about my previous lapse made me extra conscientious… but in the wrong way.

I know that his act in the end, when they caught us, really was an act. Claiming he’d called them in was the first lie he told through the whole trek.

But I was so focused on confirming his loyalty, it didn’t even occur to me to worry about the younger shadowbloods. I got misdirected all over again, and now I can only blame myself.

If I’d checked the kids earlier, if I’d noticed the signs of Celine’s discomfort, maybe we could have stopped her before she alerted Clancy. Maybe we’d have made it to the city, however things would have played out from there.

Riva doesn’t challenge my implying that Griffin was the one who betrayed us—for all I know, she thinks it’s actually possible. “It was a chaotic situation, and we were dealing with a lot. We all had the chance to notice that something was off, and none of us did. You can’t take the responsibility.”

That’s not what I’m really stewing over, though. I’m afraid that if I try to get us out of this mess again, I’ll miss yet another crucial detail.

But as Riva gazes back at me with the taint of sorrow in her bright brown eyes, a renewed sense of resolve grips my chest.

It’s better to try than to give up, right? We definitely aren’t getting anywhere if we all throw up our hands and roll over.

I want to turn the sadness in Riva’s expression into hope.

I reach out to take her hand, leaning closer as if with a lover’s intent. But really it’s to make it harder for any outside party to spot the ruddy gleam I know comes into my eyes as I slip into her memories.

She doesn’t have all that many of Clancy, considering we’ve only been here for a matter of weeks and his appearances have been sporadic.

I flit through the images that I know don’t match our arrival yesterday, wincing inwardly at a glimpse of a bedroom where Zian crouches with obvious agitation in a corner.

There. We’re walking down the main hall in a line, Clancy in the lead, me with the blindfold I’ve only worn one other time—when I first woke up in the facility.

I linger in the recollection, focusing as Riva did on the grim white-haired man Clancy pauses to talk to. Etching his doughy features in my own memory.

To look for him again, I don’t have to know his name. I only need a clear sense of his presence.

When I’m sure I’ve absorbed every detail, I pull back out of Riva’s skull, squeezing her fingers as I do. She returns the gesture, studying me.

“We still have each other,” I say. “That’s what’s most important.”

And we’ll keep working with each other to get away from Clancy. Let her hear that underlying message, the one I don’t dare say out loud.

Clancy makes no further appearances throughout the rest of that day and the next. When I’m ushered into my stone-walled bedroom in the evening, my stomach churns with impatient tension.

He expected to be sending us on his new mission within a week. We’re almost halfway through.

How can I get a glimpse inside his mind without him realizing that I’m up to something? If he catches me at it, I have no idea how he’ll punish me… or the others, knowing their torment will hurt me more.