Citizen

Chapter twenty-three

"Ethan?" she breathed.

Ethan's lips quivered as though he were trying to find the right words. "Before you say anything, I'm really really so-"

Kyra's fists against his chest cut off the rest of his sentence. He buckled under the wailing assault and slammed into the wall, arms raised to block her fists.

"Hey, Kyra, stop it! Stop!"

"What the hell Ethan! You scared the hell out of me!" She stumbled back as the knife slipped from her fingers, using her other hand to brush hair out of her eyes. "Why are you going through my dad's stuff?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you the reason." He grabbed the blade and placed it on the desk behind him, pausing to ensure it was out of her reach, before turning back to Kyra.

She raised a brow. "Try me."

"You want to know the truth?" Ethan threw his hands up in the air. "Fine then. Seven years ago my father left the city on a mission to the Outside. Ever since that night, there was this one star in the sky, one that always reminded me of him. It wasn't until I heard you thinking about it a few weeks ago that I got suspicious."

Kyra didn't know what shocked her more: that Ethan had seen the star, or that he knew she'd been thinking about it. It must have been from the night before the results ceremony where she'd sat across from James on their windowsills. It felt like a lifetime ago.

"I discovered that it isn't a star at all; it's a drone." Ethan swung the bag onto his hip and dug around, before pulling out a pile of papers and handing her the top one. It was blurry, but the image showed a white-gold orb, with strange markings around the bottom like an alien language. "You see that writing on that side? It's code, my father taught it to me. It says-"

"The Shadelands." It took Kyra a moment to realise she'd said the name. Her eyes widened as she looked between the paper and Ethan, and then back again. "My father taught me when I was a kid, but I didn't know it meant anything important; I didn't know I still understood it."

"Well it does mean something important. My father said that if I ever saw that word I had to find him. And so I started investigating. I broke into the Hall of Arbitrio."

A sharp breath escaped her lips. "That's impossible," she murmured. It was the room in the city hall that contained all of the city's files and history since before the society began; only the city council were admitted into the room. All others risked death to even touch the door handle.

Ethan didn't respond; he pulled the file out of his bag and dug through the papers for several minutes, before pulling out the correct one with a flourish. It was blank but when Ethan held it up to the light the white faded, exposing lines that slid away from Arabel like rivers. But they weren't; they were routes. Each one led to a different word scrawled in her father's familiar hand writing.

"Both of our fathers had these maps attached to their files. It gave me some possible locations, but nothing other than that. Guesses, possibilities - but I was still lost. That is, until the president walked in and started talking about some Outsiders they'd captured who were being held in the Control Centre. Outsiders, can you believe it?"

Kyra didn't have the heart to tell him she already knew Outsiders existed; but hearing someone other than James admit it, after all the lies he'd told lately, loosened the knot in her stomach. It was a blessing and a curse. The chance that her father was still alive was high, but so were the odds that Arabel would soon be under attack if what James said about the Outsiders' plans was true.