King Among the Dead - Lauren Gilley Page 0,47

eyes stung again, and she blinked hard. “Of course.”

They lay down in his big bed, the cool sheets delicious against overheated skin. Faced one another, hands resting inches apart on the mattress.

“Goodnight, Rosie.”

“Goodnight, Beck.”

She drifted off looking at his face, and dreamed of blood, and the sharpness of his cheekbones, and the new-coin brightness of his eyes.

THIRTEEN

Rose woke the next morning in her own bed, all tucked in. She’d slept so soundly that she hadn’t felt Beck carry her there.

She dressed in a hurry, and went down to breakfast. A tray of berries and a dish of yogurt were already at the table, and Beck turned sausage links in a pan at the stove.

Kay sat on her usual stool, chain-smoking, and Rose met Beck’s gaze, briefly, as she approached the woman from behind. He offered a quick, upward tick with one corner of his mouth, wry but patient. Rose was ready, then, for Kay’s closed-off expression when she drew up alongside her.

“Good morning.”

Kay didn’t respond. Didn’t even glance toward her.

“Would you get the plates, Rose?” Beck asked, and she was glad of an excuse to turn away from Kay’s cold indifference.

“She’ll come around,” Beck said an hour later, when they were closeted in the library together. “She’s very tolerant of my – lifestyle – ordinarily. It was once her lifestyle, too. That’s how we first met. But then she’ll have a spell where she wants me to give it up. It’s too dangerous, she says, and not worth it.” He crossed from the shelves to the table and set down a stack of books. Lifted a single brow with faint amusement. “I think she’d hoped you would be a good influence on me, rather than the other way around.”

“I’m not being influenced,” Rose said, reaching for the topmost book. It was a thick, joyless tome about the Atmospheric Rift, the kind with tiny print and grainy black-and-white photos.

He chuckled. “Perhaps not.” He took his usual seat across from her. Folded his hands together. Cocked his head to the side. “Now. You were eavesdropping last week outside my bedroom.”

She stilled.

“When Kay was questioning what I’d seen the night I was hurt.” His head tipped a fraction more, hair sliding over his shoulder. “You heard all or part of that exchange, yes?”

She bit her lip – but he didn’t sound accusing. And he’d told her his real name; had killed with her, buried bodies with her. She squared up her shoulders and said, “Yes.”

He nodded, and looked pleased. “What do you know of conduits?”

“Only what they told us in school. Most of my teachers thought they were urban legends. Something made up to scare people into going along with the governmental takeovers.”

He nodded again, and flicked a tiny smile. “They’ve become more mythic the farther we get away from the Rift. Start there.” He motioned toward the book, and she opened to the early chapters; to the grainy photos of a shape like a fixed jagged lightning bolt in the sky, and security camera footage of men and women glowing.

“The first reports of the Atmospheric Rift – before it was called that – came from a pair of British airline pilots flying over the Atlantic,” he said, voice taking on a melodic, professorial tone. He was a good teacher; he would have been a wonder at a college, she thought. “The co-pilot radioed it in, and three hours later a scientific vessel had moved into position and began taking photos.”

One of them was the first one in the book, above the chapter heading; credit had been given to a British scientist aboard the Darwin, which had been tracking the migration patterns of right whales.

“Over the next twenty-four hours, the rift grew,” Beck continued. “Reports started cascading in from American and European coasts: it could be seen by the naked eye – it could be seen growing.

“And then came the pulse.”

They’d watched a video on it at school, a documentary cut with shaky cellphone footage – screams and shouts of alarm in the backgrounds of each – of people across the globe reporting one massive power outage. The cell towers hadn’t worked; the videos had all been forwarded to news stations a few hours after the event, when the power had flickered back on in sporadic bursts.

“When the lights came back up,” Beck said, “We weren’t alone anymore.”

Photos of humans glowing: a glowing woman with an arm raised, staring at a burning house. A glowing man hovering ten feet off the ground, his