Inside, I found an ordinary ventilation shaft. It was too small to crawl through, so there’d be no movie-worthy escapes that way. As she’d told me, a small pipe was attached to the vent’s side, opening just behind the panel’s grates to feed its fumes into our room when the lights went out. Now I needed to block the pipe. I reached down to the bed, where I’d put an old sock retrieved from our room’s laundry hamper earlier. I didn’t put it past the Alchemists to take inventory of our clothing regularly, but I also knew when this was picked up, it was promptly dumped into a larger bin of clothes. If they noticed a missing sock, they wouldn’t know whose room it had come from. And surely even Alchemist dryers ate socks sometimes.
I crammed the sock into the pipe as best I could, hoping it was enough to keep the worst of the gas out. Behind me, under her breath, I heard Emma mutter, “Hurry.” My hands slick with sweat, I screwed the panel back into place and just barely remembered to move my bed before flouncing onto it with my book. The whole endeavor had taken less than five minutes, but was that enough?
Emma was fixated on her book and never so much as looked my way, but I caught the glimmer of a smile on her lips. Was that one of triumph over helping me achieve my goal? Or was she gloating at having tricked me into committing serious insubordination on camera?
If I had been busted, no one came for me that night. Our reading-time hour wound down, and before long, the lights went out and I heard the familiar click of the doors automatically locking. I snuggled into my sparsely made bed and waited for something else that had become familiar this last week: the artificially induced drowsiness brought on by the gas. It didn’t come.
It didn’t come.
I could hardly believe it. We’d pulled it off! I’d stopped the gas from getting into my room. The ironic part was, I could have used a little help in getting to sleep because I was so excited to talk to Adrian that I couldn’t calm down. It was like Christmas Eve. I lay in the dark for what had to be two hours before natural exhaustion won out and put me to sleep. My body was in a perpetual state of fatigue around here, both from the mental stress and the fact that the sleep we were given was just barely adequate. I slept soundly until the morning wakeup chimes, and that was when I realized the awful truth.
There’d been no dreams. Adrian hadn’t come.
CHAPTER 8
ADRIAN
I DIDN’T MEAN FOR THINGS to get so out of hand.
My intentions had been good when I came to Court, but after failing with Lissa and then learning about my parents, something snapped inside me. I threw myself back into my old life with a vengeance, losing all semblance of responsibility. I tried to tell myself that I was just having a little fun and finding a way to unwind while I was at Court. Sometimes I even told myself it was for Nina. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked in the first few days I was back, but after a week of almost nonstop revelry and parties, even she timidly offered a protest when I picked her up one night.
“Let’s stay in,” she said. “We’ll take it easy and watch a movie. Or play cards. Anything you want.”
Despite her words, she was still dressed to go out and live it up, looking very pretty in a periwinkle dress that made her gray eyes luminous. I gestured to it. “And waste this? Come on, I thought you wanted to meet new people.”
“I do,” she said. “I have. In fact, we’re starting to see the same ones over and over. They’ve all seen me in this dress already.”
“Is that the problem?” I asked. “I’ll lend you money for another one.”
She shook her head. “I can’t even pay you back for this one.”
After finding out about the lie my parents were living, I’d been tempted to make a statement and refuse the ample allowance my dad had regularly wired into my account. I didn’t have the same bills here that I had in Palm Springs, and I’d liked the idea of showing Nathan Ivashkov that he couldn’t buy off everyone in his family. But when Nina had casually remarked she felt underdressed at some of the royal parties we went to, I’d decided using my father’s money to fund a secretary’s wardrobe would be just as irritating. Admittedly, he didn’t know about it yet, but I took a lot of personal satisfaction from it. Nina had only agreed to the arrangement if it was treated as a loan, not a gift, but even she’d been taken aback when she saw the amounts I was throwing around. A small voice of reason warned me I was in danger of falling into some of the bad spending habits I’d had in my low moments in Palm Springs, but I shushed it. After all, I’d get more from my dad soon, and most everyone was pouring my drinks for free these days anyway.
“Well, it looks great,” I said. “It’d be a shame to hide such beauty away. Unless there’s some other problem?”
“No,” she said, flushing at my words. She looked me over, and I had the feeling she was reading my aura, which would have revealed—if other signs hadn’t already—that I’d done a little pre-party imbibing already. She sighed. “Let’s go.”
She can’t keep up with you, said Aunt Tatiana as we trekked across the Court’s grounds. Sunset was causing shadows to lengthen around us. But then, what girl can?
Sydney could keep up with me, I thought. Not in the partying sense. I mean . . . in life.
Her words brought that terrible ache that no amount of revelry could ever chase away. Sydney. Without her, I simply felt like I was going through the motions of life, creating a dreary existence made worse by my inability to find her. All I could do was my fruitless and increasingly sporadic dream searching. I hadn’t yet searched for her tonight and wondered if maybe I should heed Nina’s suggestion, if only to buy some brief sobriety.