False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(56)

Mia’s eyes widen at whatever the masked man whispers. “Which lost soul are you?” she asks, loud enough to be heard by the camera.

He doesn’t respond except to grab her face in his hands.

“I wanted to try and be good again. I suppose it was always too late.” She closes her eyes. “I forgive you.”

He breaks her neck. She falls to the ground. The man is gone. Mia is also gone, even if her body remains.

The image goes dark and I turn away. A round, heavy weight of dread and grief sits in my stomach. I cross my arms over my torso and hunch forward.

“I don’t want to push you, after just seeing that,” Nazarin says, leaning on the counter next to me. He’s close, but not too close. Perfectly trained. “I think there’s something in here that can help us. What do you think she meant, when she mentioned ‘lost souls’ just now, and when Tila mentioned changing faces in Mia’s dream?”

I lean closer, lowering my voice to a whisper in his ear. I feel him shiver. “Are you sure the government didn’t do this?” I ask. “Catch her lucid dreaming because of us, and snuff her before the Ratel found her?” The government being behind this would be marginally better than the Ratel, though still terrifying, but the real question simmers behind those words: is it our fault?

He shakes his head. “No. I have access to those records. Whoever this was, it wasn’t one of us.”

Unless they were off the books and they don’t want him to know. That’s always a possibility.

I furrow my brow. Changing faces. Vuk’s autopsy said he’d had lots of plastic surgery. Even changed the shape of his ears. Had she known him, somehow?

Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.

A horrible theory blossoms in my head. “Fucking hell.”

“What?”

“Turn on the wallscreen.”

The blank wall home screen appears in front of us.

“Bring up the list of Vuk’s suspected surgeries.”

He does, and I stare at them. Sure enough …

“Bring up his face.”

A photograph of him appears. I look closely, but at first it still seems impossible. The face is totally different.

“Give me the tablet.”

He passes it to me and I take the little stylus from the side and start to sketch. I’m a passable artist at best, but I focus on the shape of the eyes, the nose, the wide mouth. I draw him almost smiling, as if we’ve just thrown a grape at him and missed. I project the drawing of Adam onto the wallscreen, right next to the picture of Vuk. Maybe, just maybe. The jawline is the same. The eyes are the same color—that warm hazel I remember. I close my eyes and imagine that face I’d just seen in the dream. I open my eyes and look at Vuk. Yes. Yes.

“The missing link,” I say.

Nazarin catches on right away, which I appreciate. I can’t quite articulate my thoughts anyway.

“It’d be difficult, but with enough surgery, Vuk could be this boy, Adam.”

I shake my head. I’ve made the connection, but it still doesn’t seem possible. He’d had his left arm reconstructed. Underneath the synthetic skin, it had been as metal as my mechanical heart. “The boy I know was a fetal amputee. His arm ended at the elbow. But Adam died.”

“Did you ever see the body?”

“N … no.” There were no funerals in the Hearth.

What did they do with the bodies?

Adam was in the Wellness Cabin that first day, and he seemed ill, but not on the brink of death. And the next day he was gone. “Did he escape, like we did?”

“It’s possible.” He taps his fingers on the countertop. I think back. Escape for us was hard. Escape for us meant planning. Adam didn’t escape. I meet Nazarin’s eyes, knowing what he’ll say next.

“Or Mana-ma sold him to the Ratel,” Nazarin says.

Which lost soul are you? Mia asked.

Did that mean there’s more than one? Who else did we lose in the Hearth? Who else might be here?

“In the year before I left, at least three teenagers died. A cut that went septic. A flu that wouldn’t stop. And then they’d be gone. They were all men.” My stomach hurts.

“So you think your Mana-ma might have … sold Adam and others to the Ratel?”

“She might. She just might have. It’d mean money to keep us afloat and keep the Hearth solvent. We weren’t self-sufficient from trading our makeshift items and selling produce. A lot of us were raised to be pliant, to listen to those in charge. Despite that, though, I can’t picture Adam turning into a hitman. And why would she do it? It’d be against the morals she taught us, to sell Hearth folk to the Impure.”

Nazarin exhales. “Brainwashing can be very persuasive, if it’s done over years. The Ratel might have been able to break him, psychologically. And I don’t know. Maybe your Mana-ma wasn’t as holy as she led you to believe. In any case, this is circumstantial evidence on top of more circumstantial evidence.”

“Stop calling her my Mana-ma. She’s no such thing.” Not anymore. How could I ever have believed in her?

“Sorry. You’re right. I’ll send the sketch back to the station, see if they can make any matches.”

“My drawing might not be good enough. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs.”