“I think it’s safe in here.” Nevertheless, his eyes flickered over to the king and he lowered his voice. “Now, what’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t. He couldn’t fix the problem, couldn’t un-lie. He couldn’t go back in time and never pretend to be Grant, never bring me here. He couldn’t un-be his father’s son. We were who we were, and we’d done what we’d done, and nothing was ever going to change that or make it better.
“It matters to me,” Thomas insisted. “Look, if you don’t trust me, you won’t listen to me. And if you don’t listen to me, you could get hurt. Remember the Tattered City?”
“How can I trust you when all you do is lie to me?”
My accusation took Thomas aback. “What are you talking about? I’ve never lied to you.” I rolled my eyes and groaned. How could he even bring himself to say that to me? I couldn’t believe his nerve. He conceded the point. “Okay, I let you believe I was Grant Davis. But other than that, I haven’t lied to you, not once this whole time. I don’t lie. Not unless I absolutely have to. It’s just not in my nature.”
“A spy who doesn’t lie? Useful.”
“I’m not a spy,” Thomas told me. “I’m a soldier. I’m a bodyguard. I’m an interuniversal transporter. There’s a difference.”
“I don’t care what you are,” I said. “To me, you’re nobody. You don’t even really exist.”
“What did I lie about that’s got you so worked up?”
“You told me your parents were dead,” I spat. “And yet, I found out last night that the General is your dad. You’ve even got a mother on top of that! Alice? Is that her name? Oh, and a brother, too. You’ve just got a whole crap-ton of living relatives, don’t you?”
“Who’d you hear all this from?” I noticed he didn’t deny it.
“Straight from the horse’s mouth,” I said. “In fact, I think he enjoyed it. He knew I didn’t know. He knew you’d lied.”
Thomas shook his head. “My parents are dead. My biological parents. They died when I was five, exactly how I told you before. I didn’t lie. I just … omitted the fact that, a couple years later, the General and his wife adopted me. That brother you mentioned? His name is Lucas. He’s the General and Alice’s real son.”
“Adopted?” I had no idea what I expected Thomas to say in defense of himself, but this definitely wasn’t it.
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and looked over at me tentatively. “Do you want to know how it happened?”
I nodded. I did want to know. Here was my chance to find out something real. His story. How he’d come to be who he was.
“Other than my parents, I didn’t have much family—nobody close, nobody who could take in a five-year-old kid. So I got processed by the government, and was placed in an orphanage in New Jersey Dominion called the Princeton School for Boys. I didn’t think I’d ever get adopted,” he admitted with a small shrug. “Older ones almost never do. So it was kind of a shock that I was—to me, and to everyone else.”
“How did the General even find you? Was he just in the market for a new son?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never asked,” Thomas said. “What? Someone offers you a new home, a family, after three years of being completely alone in the world, you don’t question it.”
“So you were eight?”
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes trained on the ground. “The General was at the orphanage on behalf of this military school, Blackbriar. The General is an alumnus, and he does voluntary recruitment for their scholarship program. He came on Field Day, where we did all these sports and activities. I wasn’t great at sports, because I was too small—back then,” he added, catching my dubious look. There were a lot of words I might use to describe Thomas, but “small” wasn’t one of them. “But I was a fast runner. The fastest in the whole school. When the General picked me out, I thought I’d be getting a Blackbriar scholarship, but it turned out I was too young to go there. Instead, the General had decided he wanted to adopt me, officially, and I ended up going to Blackbriar anyway, two years later, as his son.”
“Are you close, then? You and the General, I mean?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Thomas told me. “Lucas—my brother—thinks I’m the General’s favorite, and I guess, from all outward appearances, I must be. But I’ve never thought that. He treats me the same way he treats everyone else. It’s not like having a real father. I know what that’s like, and it’s not like that at all.”
I realized I’d been holding my breath and finally let it out. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Thomas said. “I didn’t tell you.”
I nodded.
“But you should know,” Thomas continued, shifting his chair so that he was facing me directly. “I’m not going to lie to you. This situation is so weird and I realize that it’s a struggle. Believe me, I’ve done it. Stepping into the life of your analog, even for the right reasons, isn’t easy. It makes you doubt all kinds of things you thought you knew about yourself. What you’re willing to do. What you want. Who you can trust. I don’t want you to feel as lost as I did as Grant. You have no idea how many times I wanted to tell you who I really was. I wanted someone to know.” I stared down at my hands in my lap. I couldn’t look into his eyes. I knew what I’d find there, and I couldn’t see it, couldn’t acknowledge it in any way.
“I know who you are,” he told me. “And I want you to feel like you can trust me, because I know how much that means.” He sat back, his speech finished.
It took me a few moments to figure out what to say. “Can I … do you mind if I have a few minutes alone?” My voice cracked. It felt like I hadn’t spoken in days.
Thomas indicated the king with a slight incline of his head. “He’ll be here.”
I let out a breathy laugh. “That’s okay. He doesn’t talk much.”
Thomas nodded, getting up and putting the chair back where he got it. “I’ll be right outside if you need me,” he promised.
“I know you will,” I said. “And thanks. For what you said.”
“I meant every word,” he told me.
When Thomas was gone, I went back to reading The Odyssey out loud to the king. I just didn’t know what else to do. I hadn’t wanted him gone so that I could think. Thinking about Thomas was the last thing I wanted to do. I needed something else to focus on, and took comfort in the familiar act of reading. There was something about saying the words aloud that was meditative and soothing. I let the cadence of my own voice, speaking words that were written thousands of years before, wash everything away like a receding tide.
“ ‘But once your crew has rowed you past the Sirens, a choice of routes is yours,’ ” I read. “ ‘I cannot advise you which to take, or lead you through it all—you must decide for yourself—but I can tell you the ways of either course.’ ”
The king muttered something unintelligible, startling me. I looked up at him, but his eyes were still closed. I wasn’t even sure that he’d said anything at all.