place. Four hours in an airplane, and it seems like I landed on another world. Into the tiniest airport imaginable. One terminal, twelve gates. Outside, it wasn’t much better. Too many trees, all still somehow green even though it was September. A hired driver in an old tweed suit drove me to the middle of nowhere and deposited me in front of a house that looked like a castle, though, complete with a drawbridge and two turrets and a mazelike rose garden in the back, built of gray stones and some recluse’s pipe dream. I came with my suitcase and nothing else. My driver pulled away without even a second glance. He left me to be murdered by goats or cows or whatever the hell is in the middle of farmland.
I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and squinted up at the place where I’d be living for the next few months.
“You can’t keep doing this, Vance,” my stepfather had said when he sentenced me here. “Maybe some time away will help you see things differently.”
And it just so happened that the director of Starfield: Resonance—my stepfather’s best friend—had a house she wasn’t using.
The front door was unlocked, so I let myself in and took my Lacostes off in the foyer. I was expecting swords on the walls and skeletons hanging, mouths agape, but the inside of the castle looked right good, really. The floors were a dark wood and while the walls were bare stone, they were decorated with paintings from IKEA and Better Homes and Gardens.
It would have to do.
“Elias, I’m here,” I called as I dumped my duffel bag in the hallway and made my way into the living room. It was wide and open, with two long couches and a TV, and in the corner there was a baby grand piano. The back wall was nothing but glass windows that looked out onto the hedge maze and a pool. I found the drawstring to the curtains and drew them closed.
The refrigerator was stocked, so Elias had to be somewhere. I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it as I wandered through the rest of the house. Bathroom, laundry room, abandoned study—
The last door on the first level was ajar, so I eased it open.
Shelves and shelves of novels lined the walls, those cheap dime-store extended-universe sci-fi books you used to be able to find at petrol stations and grocery stores. There must’ve be hundreds of them—Star Wars, Star Trek, Starfield, at a cursory glance.
A library.
Such a pity books were a waste of time.
Footsteps came from the hallway, and Elias, my guardian, popped his head into the library, brown-gray hair and a cheerful face. He threw his hands up when he found me. “There you are! I heard someone come in, but I thought for a moment it was a nosy neighbor or something—Sansa! No!”
Suddenly, a brown and black blur zipped past his legs. The dog leapt at me, pink tongue slobbering over my face. “Ooh, you missed me? You missed me, good girl?”
“She has not been good,” Elias pointedly replied. “She tore up three rosebushes already. Three!”
I scrubbed her behind the ears. “Why don’t we make it four, good girl? Huh?”
“Vance.”
“You know I’m having a laugh,” I told him, and then whispered to my sweetest thing, “Destroy them all.”
Elias rolled his eyes. “How was the flight?”
I shrugged. “Fine.”
Sansa went off to sniff around a box of even more books and snorted, as though it wasn’t anything of interest.
Elias folded his arms over his chest. “Fine, huh.”
“Oi, yeah, fine,” I replied, and pulled my hood up over my head as I left the library. “The bedrooms upstairs?”
“All three of them—Vance, it went viral.”
I paused. Debated my words carefully. “…What?”
“You flipped off every single journalist at the airport.”
“Oh, that.” I spun back to Elias and spread my arms wide. “Just appeasing my fans. And they were hardly journalists. All paparazzi from what I can tell.”
Elias massaged the bridge of his nose. “You can’t keep doing this—”
“Or what?” I laughed. “I’ll be banished to hell? News flash, I think we’re already there.”
“This isn’t hell.” He sighed. “It’s a charming little town, really, if you’d give it the chance—”
“I’m tired,” I interrupted, turning out of the library. I gave him a wave. “Nice chat,” I added as I left for the stairs. The flight had been long, and the car ride to my prison had been a good deal longer, and I was tired and