The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games #1)(46)

I felt like I’d just walked into NASA.

There were only two free seats. One was next to Thea. The other was as far away from Thea as you could get, next to the girl I’d seen in the archive. Her dark red hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her coloring was stop-and-stare striking—hair that red, skin that pale—but her eyes were downcast.

Thea met my gaze and gestured imperiously toward the seat next to her. I glanced back toward the red-haired girl.

“What’s her story?” I asked Xander. No one was talking to her. No one was looking at her. She was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen, and she might as well have been invisible.

Wallpaper.

“Her story”—Xander sighed—“involves star-crossed love, fake dating, heartbreak, tragedy, twisted familial relationships, penance, and a hero for the ages.”

I gave him a look. “Are you serious?”

“You should know by now,” Xander replied lightly, “I’m not the serious Hawthorne.”

He plopped down in the seat next to Thea, leaving me to make my way toward the red-haired girl. She proved to be a decent lab partner: quiet, focused, and able to calculate almost anything in her head. The entire time we worked in tandem, she didn’t say a single word to me.

“I’m Avery,” I said, once we’d finished and it became clear that she still wasn’t going to introduce herself.

“Rebecca.” Her voice was soft. “Laughlin.” She saw the shift in my expression when she said her last name and confirmed what I was thinking. “My grandparents work at Hawthorne House.”

Her grandparents ran Hawthorne House, and neither one of them had seemed overly enthused about the prospect of working for me. I wondered if that was why I’d gotten the silent treatment from Rebecca.

She’s not talking to anyone else, either.

“Has someone shown you how to turn in assignments on your tablet?” Rebecca asked beside me. The question was tentative, like she fully expected to be slapped down. I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that someone that beautiful could be tentative about anything.

Everything.

“No,” I said. “Could you?”

Rebecca demonstrated, uploading her results with a few clicks on the touch screen. A moment later, her tablet returned to its main screen. She had a photo as her wallpaper. In it, Rebecca looked off to the side, while another, amber-haired girl laughed directly into the camera. They both had wreaths of flowers on their heads, and they had the same eyes.

The other girl wasn’t any more beautiful than Rebecca—and probably less—but somehow, it was impossible to look away from her.

“Is that your sister?” I asked.

“Was.” Rebecca closed the cover on her tablet. “She died.”

My ears roared, and I knew, then, exactly who I was looking at. I felt, on some level, like I’d known it from the moment I’d seen her. “Emily?”

Rebecca’s emerald eyes caught on mine. I panicked, thinking that I should have said something else. I’m sorry for your loss—or something.

But Rebecca didn’t seem to find my response odd or off-putting. All she said, pulling her tablet into her lap, was “She would have been very interested to meet you.”





CHAPTER 42


I couldn’t get Emily’s face out of my mind, but I hadn’t looked at the picture closely enough to recall every detail of her features. Her eyes had been green. Her hair was strawberry blonde, like sunlight through amber. I remembered the wreath of flowers on her head but not her hair’s length. No matter how hard I tried to visualize her face, the only other things I could remember were that she’d been laughing and that she’d looked right at the camera, head-on.

“Avery.” Oren spoke from the front seat. “We’re here.”

Here was the Hawthorne Foundation. It felt like it had been an eternity since Zara had offered to show me the ropes. As Oren exited the car and opened my door, I registered the fact that, for once, there wasn’t a reporter or photographer in sight.

Maybe it’s dying down, I thought as I stepped into the lobby of the Hawthorne Foundation. The walls were a light silvery-gray, and dozens of massive black-and-white photographs hung on them, seemingly suspended midair. Hundreds of smaller prints surrounded the larger ones. People. From all over the world, captured in motion and moments, from all angles, all perspectives, diverse along every dimension imaginable—age and gender and race and culture. People. Laughing, crying, praying, playing, eating, dancing, sleeping, sweeping, embracing—everything.

I thought about Dr. Mac asking me why I wanted to travel. This. This is why.

“Ms. Grambs.”

I looked up to see Grayson. I wondered how long he’d watched me taking in this room. I wondered what he’d seen on my face.

“I’m supposed to meet Zara,” I said, fending off his inevitable attack.

“Zara isn’t coming.” Grayson walked slowly toward me. “She’s convinced that you are in need of… guidance.” There was something about the way he said that word that slid past every defense mechanism I had and straight under my skin. “For some reason, my aunt seems to believe that guidance would be best received coming from me.”

He looked exactly as he had the day I’d met him, down to the color of his Armani suit. It was the same light, liquid gray as his eyes—the same color as this room. Suddenly, I remembered the coffee table book I’d seen in Tobias Hawthorne’s study—a book of photographs, with Grayson’s name on the side.