will admit is about that bloody tattoo. I thought you could use some cheering up. But I was always going to ask you.”
“Why?” I ask, bewildered.
“Everyone should get to go to the zoo,” he says. “So do you want to?”
“Yes,” I burst out, my chest tightening with excitement, “thank you, yes, of course I want to go!”
“You’re not allowed,” Sean reminds me, “so it’ll be tricky. It’s more than an hour away on the train.”
I tip my chin, refusing to let such a consideration destroy this moment, this flare of hope that I may never have again.
“No one needs to know,” I say.
“Not the others,” he concedes, “but Mina knows. I asked her when I first came in today. It took some persuading, but she’s agreed. I think she wants you to get out for a bit. But only as long as I, and I quote, ‘don’t let you out of my sight for an instant.’”
“I don’t need looking after,” I say indignantly.
“You may be able to handle yourself in a scuffle, but you don’t know the first thing about the country beyond this town. If you got lost, you’d probably wander straight into a hunter. Wouldn’t that be the prettiest pickle?”
I point a dirty look his way, but I’m too euphoric and grateful to stay annoyed. A lock of hair falls over my forehead, feathery and wayward, and I blow it impatiently out of the way.
“Do we have to take the train through Lancaster to get to the zoo?” I ask eagerly.
“Yeah.”
“So can we stop off and go to your house on our way back?”
Sean gives me a strange look. “You want to go to my house? Of all the places—”
“I’m curious.”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, if that’s what you want, why not?”
I am so excited for the rest of the evening that Mina Ma says she has half a mind not to send me if I can’t act my age. When Sean says he could get a ticket for her too, she declines, announcing that she’s quite happy not to go “racketing about the countryside.” Yet this doesn’t stop her from muttering about “unaccompanied girls, with boys” and “zoos, of all things” and “if they find out.”
It’s the last bit that worries me, a knot of fear battling the excitement. What if the Weavers do find out? For me to actually leave town, go somewhere even with a guardian, is punishable. I am not allowed to leave Windermere. I am not supposed to spend time in busy places. Someone might see the Mark on my neck and recognize me for what I am.
“What will they do if they catch us?”
“I don’t know,” says Sean.
His voice gives nothing away, but I am looking at his eyes, which are honest and very green, and they’re troubled. I believe him. He doesn’t know what they’ll do to us. But he knows that because I belong to them, they have every right to dispose of me if I defy them.
Sean might not belong to anybody, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the clear. Guardians are not allowed to help us. To interfere with the laws. The Weavers can punish them, too.
“They won’t find out,” I say.
“Course they won’t,” says Sean. “So finish your broccoli, it’s good for you.”
I have trouble sleeping all night. Tonight my dreams are mine, which is not always the case. Sometimes I dream of things from Amarra’s life, bits of memories and emotions that slip through the cracks from her consciousness to mine. Like the time the dog bit her. It preyed on her mind for weeks, the memory of that terror. Or the time she had an enormous crush on a pop star and I dreamed of his face for days. Erik says it’s normal: when they made me, they had to put bits of her into me. This means that sometimes traces of memories and feelings cross over from her to me.
I dream of strange things—not of zoos, like I’d expected to, but of an abandoned carnival in a deserted dark city. Men and women in green, swinging back and forth on trapezes. Elephants rearing up on their hind legs. Brightly painted clowns. Each time I wake, my heart races with a mixture of fear and excitement. In my dreams, the clowns and the Weavers look eerily alike.
On the train the next day, I am too excited to sit still. I bob up and down in my seat, jostling Sean, who gives me a look that