Your One & Only(35)

“What did he say?” Inga asked. “What did he actually threaten to do to you?”

“What he said . . .” Nyla paused and closed her eyes, bringing up the scene. “He said he didn’t want to hurt me, which I took to mean that he was thinking of hurting me.”

Inga stole a glance at the other Council members. “Go on,” she said.

“Jack—the subject—left the room. I was bored stuck in there, and afraid he’d come back. After a while, I guess I fell asleep. When I woke up, the fire had started. I was trapped. I screamed over and over, and then the smoke came under the lab door. I guess after that, I passed out.”

Althea tried to swallow past the tightness blocking her throat.

That was what she’d missed. Jack and Nyla had Paired.

While Nyla gave her testimony, Jack never turned to Althea. His eyes were focused, staring at the floor. He remained outwardly impassive, with only the tension in his jaw betraying his intense concentration.

Althea’s mind wandered around the question of why she even cared about the Pairing. She gazed almost without seeing at the back of Nyla’s head and, before long, realized her hands were clenching the fabric of her scarf and twisting a thread through her fingers. The hem had frayed badly.

Dimly, she heard Inga say, “What was he emotional about?”

“I don’t know,” Nyla said, her voice raised in confusion. “He kept talking about my sister, Nyla-314, and he seemed upset that she hadn’t come to see him. He’d wanted to Pair with her, I guess. There was, I don’t know, something he wanted to say to her. But she was home, working on the hybrids for our apprenticeship.”

Jack blushed at the mention of Nyla-314.

So it hadn’t just been Nyla-313. Of course, that made sense. If Nyla-313 Paired with Jack, other Nylas would have as well. It simply made it awkward that there were only one of Jack and ten of them. If he’d had nine brothers, it could have all been accomplished in one evening, quite a bit more simply. Althea tried to relax her hands again. She smoothed the twisted fabric of her scarf. None of it should mean anything to her, after all. Yet even as she had the thought, an unpleasant warmth crept up her neck that reddened her cheeks like prickly wool just under her skin. With a deep breath, she tried to still her hands. She looked up to find Jack looking back at her. For the first time in the whole proceeding, their eyes met.

He was still so strange, that was the problem. Everyone in the room, all they saw when they looked at Jack were the ways he was unlike them. She stared at his face, examining those things that made him different. The planes of his cheeks, the pale, straight eyebrows, the broad, squared shoulders. The colorless ocean-gray of his eyes.

His eyes, she realized after considering for a moment, weren’t as strange as she’d first thought. If she looked closely at them, framed as they were by the foreign lines of his face, they now seemed rather familiar. They were bright and lucid, like the sky on an overcast day, or the mottled shadows along the path to the river, the one she and her sisters took to capture fish in woven baskets. She’d thought he was so different, but he wasn’t, not really. She’d never known anyone like him, but with an overwhelming clarity, she found she knew him. She could see inside him, and she knew him.

“He tried to kill me,” Nyla told the Council, and the Inga nodded as if she sympathized, while Samuel-299 rubbed the skin of his brow.

On the dais, Jack shook his head in frustration. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and then raised his hand instead, seeking the Council’s attention.

Inga turned slowly to him. “What do you want?”

“I’d like to speak,” Jack said quietly, apparently striving for calm. The Inga silently consulted the other Council members and then nodded. Jack said, “I never tried to kill Nyla. I’d never do that.”

“Well, did you threaten to kill her?” Inga said.

“No, never. I just wanted to get out of the room.”

“Did you threaten to hurt her?”

Jack hesitated. “No, I didn’t.”

Inga shuffled some papers on the table and picked one up, read from it. “Did you say to Nyla-313, I don’t want to hurt you?”

“Yes, but that’s not the same—”

“And you did seek to lock her in your room?” The question, ringing through the meeting hall, sounded to Althea like a decisive statement.

Jack struggled to frame an answer and then sighed. “Yes, I did,” he said finally. “I wanted time to get away without the Council knowing. I just wanted to leave, that’s all.”

After a long moment, the Inga, scowling, turned back to the Council members.

Well, Althea thought. That made things worse.

The meeting hall closed in on her, stuffy and hot. Sweat trickled down her back, and she thought about what Samuel-299 had said the Council would do when they changed their minds about tolerating Jack. The room was suffocating. A wordless sound escaped her, causing the Council members to pause and look up. They were all looking at her now, the Council, Samuel-299, Nyla-313, Jack. She clung to the bench in front of her and pulled herself to her feet. The Viktor at the door opened it for her. The floor wavered.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Jack take a step in her direction, as if moving to help, despite the guard.

“Althea?” Samuel-299 said from the panel.