Koth groaned as he rolled away from me. “You are the most horrific abomination yet. You and your Sworn Enemy the Lord Sean are the most repugnant of atrocities. Lord Sean dies next.”
“Don’t you touch him,” I cried.
Koth sneered as he got to his feet. “You care about him, do you not? You think he cares about you. It is a lie that’s been bred into your foul genetics. It is another way to control you Sworn Assets. Expect to be destroyed.”
“Don’t you touch Sean,” I cried.
“Darcy! Darcy!” my mother shouted, her voice ringing across the lawn.
“Where are you?” my father cried.
Though Koth was unsteady, I could see from his aura that he was regaining his strength. Whatever these Tarkwins were, they were made of stronger stuff than the Original People. I tried to grab him and drain more of his energy, but he threw a swift punch at my face and knocked me down. Koth grabbed me and tried to drag me. I clutched his wrists and tried to drain him, but somehow he was blocking me. Once again he threw me down and clamped his fists around my throat.
Then the cold hand of logic put an idea into my fevered brain. Fear made me bold, and I opened the door to the horrors that I had been given by the souls in the bottles, souls from many varied species, those little butterflies of vitality. That energy was different. That energy had almost driven me mad. I grabbed Koth’s wrists and sent a surge of those terrors from my mind into my palms and through his skin. Koth froze before weakening. His shield against me briefly failed and I was able to drain some more of his energy.
Mom screamed and Dad shouted hoarsely as they rushed toward us. Dad tackled Koth, knocking him off me. I gasped for breath. Dad and Koth rolled a few times before Koth jumped to his feet.
“This is not over,” he bellowed.
Then he ran away across the lawn. I lay in Mom’s arms gasping while Dad gave pursuit. The neighbors from across the street, a man and his two teenage sons, heard the commotion. They armed themselves with golf clubs and a baseball bat and joined Dad as he ran after the Tarkwin. Though weakened, Koth still had a lot of fight left in him. He punched my father in the face and the neighbor in the stomach, then clutched the baseball bat when one of the teenage sons swung it at him. The two struggled over the bat while the second son rained golf club blows all over Koth’s back. Finally the Tarkwin shoved the young man down and started running down the dimly lit street. My dad and the other son gave chase, but the Tarkwin disappeared in the darkness. I could hear the sirens of police cars in the distance.
Mom led me back into the house. Once inside she almost went to pieces when she saw my torn and bloody shirt and shorts and the blood I had left on the stairs and the foyer floor. While she fussed, I pretended to be weaker than I was. In fact, thanks to pulling in some of Koth’s energy, I felt like I could run a marathon.
Mom sat me down at the kitchen island. When Dad came in, she fussed over him and got an ice pack for his face. The police came to question us, and Dad and the neighbors told them the attacker was a demented man wearing a bathrobe and dark pajama bottoms and should therefore be easy to find. In the meantime, Mom brought me a clean clothes and sent me into the bathroom to take off the shirt the Tarkwin had slashed. As I changed, I turned my back the mirror and was pleased to see that the gash on my back had healed to the point that it wouldn’t need stitches. Whatever type of energy I had gotten from the Tarkwin, it had certainly been healing. While I was alone, I sent a text to Sean to warn him about the Tarkwin. My heart was in my throat with worry for him. Thankfully he texted right back.
When Mom showed my ruined clothes to Dad, he went ballistic all over again. The police found Koth’s glass dagger and brought it inside to show it to me. Another asked to take a picture of the cut on my back, now little more than a bit a broken skin. Outside the police officers walked around the house with flashlights checking the windows to find out how the intruder had gotten in. After a few minutes, they showed Dad where the Tarkwin had disabled the alarm on one of the laundry room windows.
“He was probably watching the house and came inside when he knew the girl was alone,” one of the police officers said.
That went over badly with Dad. He began a rant at how anyone who had paid as much for an alarm system as he had ought to have a safe house for his daughter—his family—in a gated community, for heaven’s sake. Then Riley arrived home in the midst of all this. She and her insanely handsome boyfriend were frightened by the flashing lights of the police cars and the men with flashlights in the lawn. The police officers stopped to gaze appreciatively at the way she filled out her sparkly tank top and white jeans.
“Two attempts on her life in two days?” Riley said. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Maybe she has a stalker,” Riley’s boyfriend suggested helpfully as he opened the refrigerator and helped himself to a bottle of water. “Or this is a copycat crime.”
Riley narrowed her pretty eyes at me as she addressed our mother. “Those guys at school had glass knives too. Maybe this one came here to finish her off so she couldn’t identify them.”
“She’s scared enough,” our mother said with a note of warning in her voice. “Don’t make matters worse.”
“Really, Mother, even Darcy can see that this isn’t a coincidence. We’re just lucky that Dad and the neighbors weren’t killed.”
“I’m fine. Thank you,” I said sarcastically.
Riley scowled. “Shouldn’t somebody warn the boy that Darcy was with? If that’s what this is about, then he’s next.”
“I texted Sean already to make sure he’s okay,” I said as I tightened my fingers around my phone. I looked at her boyfriend in distaste, remembering what Leonie and Judah had said about him being a cheater. I thought that Riley was much too good for the likes of him.
Riley would have said more, but Parisa, Cosette, and Gail came in, escorted by their parents. I took my friends into the den and filled them in on how a lunatic had gotten into the house. As I told the story, they shook their heads in disgust at all the right places and applauded my bravery. It felt good right now to have these friends who would always be there for me, and I didn’t mind the Approvals so much.
“What’s Sean like?” Gail asked. “Everyone has been talking about the two of you.”
Suddenly I felt shy, as if talking about him was too personal. “He’s amazing. He’s the kind of guy you see in the movies that you always hope the girl will get in the end.”
At this moment it was comforting that my friends were glowing with the aura of the Approvals even though I wondered if they had been given the bodies of their parents’ children like I had or if their bodies had always been theirs. I wondered if they had spent time in the glass bottles in the First Mechanic’s cabinet. All of us were what the Original People had made us, and I felt a strong affinity with them. Either way, if their parents had known, I doubt that they would have minded. Geminay had given them perfectly behaved children who would never smoke, drink illegally, use drugs, or engage in unsafe sex. As my friends they would never abandon me or lead me astray, and they paid the significant cost of being my friends with their free will. I knew there were those who would likely disagree that this was a bad thing.
* * *
An Earth week later Sean and I lay in the sun on the same dairy farm we had come to after the clawman attack. We each held a crystal on our abdomens while our palms were turned up to the sun. It took about ten minutes to fill each crystal and change it from white to green. Some of these were for the House of Picard to use until they had a Sworn Asset to replace Sean. I had expected to feel exhausted when we were finished, but I stood up without the slightest weakness.
“But the crystals are still green,” Sean said, looking displeased. “His and Her Majesty wanted red.”
“If they want red, let’s give them red.”
“We can’t give them red without draining some strong emotion. I know that from when I was being held at the House of Picard. Without emotion, these crystals will stay green. Look what happened before.”
“As I said, we can give them red.”
Sean shook his head. “Not without draining and weakening our capacity for feeling. It’s the emotion that the Original People want. Without human emotion they’re like Tarkwins, rational and logical and heartless. They want what makes us human, because they want to feel something.”
“So let’s give them what they need. If anyone could use some heart, they could.”
“Giving them what they need will change us and not in a good way. It breaks off bits and pieces of our personality that we don’t get back. That’s one of the biggest reasons that no one in Geminay wants to marry Sworn Assets. In ten Earth years, we’ll be like robots—dangerous, psycho, fleshy robots.”
“What if there’s another way?”
“There isn’t.” Sean scratched his head, something he did when he was agitated. “I never told you this before, but when you healed my stab wounds in the vice principal’s office last week, you healed the essence of me too. Before that my emotions were flat, like I couldn’t really get very happy or very sad or loving or even very scared. It was like someone skimmed off the top of my feelings. But when you healed me that day, you gave my feelings back to me. And I don’t ever want to lose them.” He jabbed his finger at the crystals. “Every crystal we turn red takes from us something that we can’t get back. The process is like a dementia that eats a bit from our minds. And I don’t want to give up what I feel for you and only have a memory of what it is to be in love.”
There. He had said it. He had said the L word aloud. “Is that what this is? Love?”
“I fell in love with you from the first moment I saw you at that spring dance in that sparkly dress and shoes.”
“You loved the quivering puppy that hid in a janitor’s closet because she didn’t have the moral courage to tell her pig of a date to behave or she would kick his balls up through the roof of his mouth?”
Sean smiled as he smoothed my hair off my face. “I loved the girl who stood up against a master manipulator the only way she knew how. Maybe that night it was hiding from him, but you don’t hide anymore.”
“Naomi claimed that you found me attractive only because of us being creations.” I averted my eyes as I voiced this nagging concern. “She said we didn’t have a choice.”
“What did she know? She couldn’t have recognized a genuine emotion if one had smacked her upside the head.”
I bit my lip for a second. “She said it was our engineering and that’s why we were never supposed to meet.”
“She’s wrong. We always had a choice. You captivated me the first time I saw you at that ball, and that was before either of us had diamonds in our eyes. You didn’t know who you were that day and I didn’t know who I was.” Sean kissed me lightly. “And I don’t want to lose that girl, the one who hid in the closet and the one who would have given her life for me in the lava room.”
I pulled Sean closer and kissed him. “If you love that girl, then you’ll love this girl when she fills the crystals.”
“But I don’t want you to lose your ability to love. I don’t want to lose what I feel for you.”
“Then trust me,” I said. “Just trust me.”
I dropped Sean’s hands, picked up a crystal in each hand, and closed my eyes. Deep within my mind I opened the door that held the images of the souls in the bottles in the Mechanics’ building. Like when I battled the Tarkwin, I opened the door a sliver, but it was enough. The tidal wave of emotion given to me by the souls rushed down my arms and through my hands into the crystals, turning them crimson in the blink of an eye.
When I was finished, Sean narrowed his eyes at me as he checked my aura. “You’re not changed. How did you do that?”
“I used the energy from the souls we found locked in the First Mechanic’s cabinet. Those souls are pure emotion. They still have the joy they felt before their planets were destroyed by the Original People. They have every human emotion and some that I don’t understand or have a name for.”
“If that’s true, then why don’t the Mechanics just use them? Why do they need us?”
“Because they don’t have the ability to use that energy. We convert it into a form they can use. Don’t ask me how.”
“We should free those souls.”
The notion terrified me. “Free them to what? I don’t know what they are. Are they like ghosts who are trapped in those bottles because they were taken from their bodies? Are they some kind of entity that doesn’t need a body? How are we to know what those beings really are? Very few of them are human. Maybe some of them are evil and would harm us and that’s why the Original People keep them locked up. I can’t find that knowledge in the First Mechanic’s memories. It would be like opening Pandora’s Box.”
Sean picked up the crystals. “How long can you keep using the energy of those souls?”
“Forever, I think. They’re trapped, but they’re alive in the way they are alive, if that makes any sense.”
“What if someone asks where we got the emotions?”
“They’ll think we drained them from humans.”
Sean nodded. We gathered up the crystals and fell through, emerging in the fountain by our quarters. Since highborn people never carry anything, because carrying is Discard work, we waited for our footmen to pack the crystals in padded boxes for delivery to Sylvan. As Sean and I stayed out of their way, Circle stood by me in that silently insistent way she had.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“My lady, may this one have a private word?”
“Go ahead,” Sean said. “I can deliver these to Sylvan.”
I could sense Circle’s dismay about something. She led me to a corner of the courtyard where we wouldn’t be overheard. She looked all around us before she spoke.
“My lady, it’s Lady Leonie. This one believes your ladyship may want to know what she’s doing right now.”
Actually, I didn’t. There wasn’t anything I wanted to know anything about Leonie. Every thought of her had been a major buzz kill whenever I was with Sean. I didn’t bother to hide the resentment I felt at being reminded of Leonie’s existence because Circle could feel it already. “Isn’t she Sean’s problem?”