me. He offered a choice to my father: get out of the guns business, or he’d send me back to him in pieces.”
“Jesus,” I breathed out.
“Oh wait, it gets better.” Priyanka shifted in her seat. “The deadline fell on the same day my father was due in court for racketeering charges. Instead of responding to the message, or trying to renegotiate those terms, Mercer and I both watched on the news as my father walked up the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan in head-to-toe white. When one of the reporters asked him why, he explained that his beloved daughter Priyanka had died from IAAN the night before and he was in mourning.”
It actually took me a moment to remember how to speak. “What?”
“Oh yes. That’s how strong his sense of pride is. He refused to admit that Mercer had kidnapped his daughter, that Mercer had won and put him in a position of weakness, so he chalked me up as a loss and moved on. I was a problem to him, which meant I no longer had value. For him, I wasn’t enough.”
“That is disgusting,” I said.
“At the time, the bigger issue was what Mercer would do to me. I remember it so clearly—Mercer looked down at me and said, ‘Well, how are you going to be useful to me now?’ So I asked to join the other kids.”
I gasped. “Priya…”
She shrugged, clearing her throat. “Mercer is a sick son of a bitch, but my father is a coldhearted bastard. That’s the difference between them in the end. Lana isn’t wrong. Mercer did take care of us, in a way. When he turned his attention on you, it was like warm honey. It wasn’t until I was older that I saw how manipulative he is.”
“God,” I breathed out. “What about your mom’s family? Could you go back to them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I keep up my Hindi so I’ll be able to communicate with them to some degree one day, but it’s not like I’ve really tried to get in touch with them, even after we left Blue Star. Every time I think about it, something stops me. I tell myself that it’s because I don’t want Mercer to go after them, to use them to hurt me, but it’s more than that. I’m not even sure how to explain it….”
“Just try,” I said.
“One of the worst things about all of this is that I feel this strange disconnect with my wider family and culture. I still have my faith, my deep passion for malpua, and all these golden memories of living in Delhi with my mom, but…it feels like I got plucked out of my real life midstream. Does that make sense?”
“It does.” She’d put into words a feeling I’d never been able to articulate myself. When we’d gone to the camps, it wasn’t just our lives that had been interrupted, but our sense of self. It changed the trajectory of our worlds. For so long, our focus had to be on survival, and survival alone.
But that wasn’t living.
“I think that about sums it up,” Priyanka said. “I feel lucky in some ways, because Lana and Roman are more family to me than my father ever was. I never would have met them otherwise.”
Still…
She turned her wrist up, pushing the sleeve of her blouse back until it revealed the blue star tattooed on it. “I don’t know why I kept this. Roman burned his off a few nights after we escaped, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Roman said he hated feeling like he’d been marked as someone’s possession, but I never saw it that way—to me, it was always more of a unifying symbol. A sign that we were family. Now it’s a reminder that nothing is all good or all bad.”
My heart was exhausted. It just couldn’t handle any more. I pressed my hand to my eyes.
“Don’t start crying,” Priyanka said. “Otherwise I’ll start and won’t be able to stop.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. Sometimes it just feels like it’s too much, you know? I always thought the world would feel easier as I got older, but I’ve only gotten more practice at pretending it is.”
“It’s hard for people like us,” Priyanka said, leaning over the console to rest her head on my shoulder. I let mine fall against hers. “We feel everything.”
Outside, Roman appeared along the road again, his dark hair damp and shining in the sun.
“I’m sorry about Lana,”