Good Morning, Darlings!
I am ever so sorry for the delay that has come between chapters. This story is HARD to write, and sometimes, it takes too much out of me. I have to really ramp up to write some parts of it.
Anyway, I have a fully plotted outline for the rest of Part I, so hopefully it'll go up on our normal weekly schedule until the end!
Thank you so much to Mel, who takes my ramblings and makes them something legible!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bella
"Whatever's happened to you, however you're hurt, you've done it to yourself."
― V.E. Schwab
I'd never been someone who got in trouble. Partly because my mom was too scatterbrained to ever admonish me for anything, but mostly because I had too much riding on being perfect at school.
I couldn't afford to risk putting myself in jeopardy because I needed school to get me out.
I was not sure when that changed; perhaps when I found my way out of my mom's house, or perhaps it was when Edward had looked at me, the vulnerability he hid, shining in his eyes.
Maybe I was just long overdue for a little bit of rebellion.
I had to rope Alice into my plan. It was suicidal for me to attempt anything like this on my own, and Alice knew so much more about the school than I did. If I had even any hope of getting through this, I was going to need help.
I didn't tell Alice I was working for Edward, though. For some reason, that information felt important to keep to myself. But I needed an angle to rope her in on.
It didn't take long for me to come up with it.
"Alice?"
She looked up from her bed where she was writing in that journal again. We hadn't spoken much since we'd gotten back from dinner. I was trying to write a paper in Latin, and Alice was doing whatever the hell she did in her notebooks.
It seemed unlikely she gathered enough intel each day on the Sixteen to write so much, but what did I know?
Alice looked annoyed at being interrupted, so I hurried to keep talking. "What is your plan, with all the information you've gathered?"
Alice stared at me like it was the stupidest question she'd ever been asked.
"What would you do with it?" she asked finally, her pen tapping out an anxious rhythm on the edge of the notebook.
I shrugged. "I don't know," I said slowly. "I guess it depends on how much I knew."
At this, Alice's notebook slipped down farther into her lap as she sat up to really glare at me.
"What are you saying?" she asked, her brows creasing.
"I heard there is an archive…" I said, letting my voice trail off. "A secret archive. It's supposed to contain a history of the Sixteen."
"Sanctum sanctorum," she breathed.
I swallowed and nodded.
"How do you know about this?" she asked, clearing her throat. I watched her school her features, trying to look unimpressed when I knew she was dying to know more.
"You're not the only one who can uncover secrets," I said vaguely. Alice's eyes narrowed. "Anyway, there is a window of opportunity coming up that might be enough time to let us get in there…" My voice trailed off as I watched a flurry of emotions cross Alice's face.
"Where is it?" she demanded after a minute had passed.
"The entrance is located in the Headmaster's office," I told her.
She snorted a hard breath. "You're fucking suicidal," she said, shaking her head. I swallowed, turning my face back to my paper. It was foolish to hope she'd be as crazy as me. I'd just have to figure something else out… "I'm in."
My head snapped up, and I looked at Alice, my breath caught in my throat.
"Just like that?"
Alice nodded. "I've waited years for an opportunity like this. Whatever it takes, whatever the cost, I'm in."
…
Five days before the ball, Alice and I began putting our plan into action.
To my initial shock—though later, when I reflected on it, I wasn't that surprised—Alice had a copy of the Headmaster's keys already in her possession. When I had asked her about them, she told me she'd made a copy years ago, though why she'd done so, she hadn't shared.
In any case, her acquisition of the keys had helped to speed up our plans.
Alice was brilliant with computers, so she set to work, trying to hack into the school's security feed. I wasn't feeling all that hopeful, given that we were two teenagers and this place was clearly funded by the best of the best in the world, but Alice assured me that come time, she'd have it figured out.
In the meantime, I had other things to focus on.
I could occasionally feel Edward's eyes on me when we were in class or if his friends were passing me in the hall. He didn't glance my way a lot, but it was enough that it made me nervous. Did he have absolutely no sense of self preservation? Every one of my instincts was telling me I shouldn't have gotten involved with him, but now that I had, I should not let it be known in any way.
Edward seemed more careless in what he was willing to have known, and that recklessness scared me. It was only a matter of time before it burned us both.
I began avoiding him, trying not to seem obvious about it. I didn't want to risk him glancing my way in front of the wrong people.
In my effort to evade Edward and stay out of Alice's way, I spent way more time than even my usual in the library.
It was quiet enough, and sometimes when I wandered deep into the stacks, I felt like I was in another world completely.
The day before the ball, I was doing everything I could to ignore the mounting anxiety about the task ahead of me. I entered the library and searched for a new table, hoping to find distraction. There were plenty of options, but in the end, I found a small desk tucked into a nook on the second floor. It was wedged out of the way, like it had meant to be discarded but had since been forgotten about.
Setting my bag on the desk, I slumped into the seat and let out a long breath. I hadn't been sleeping well at all this week, and I knew that between that and the impending job I had looming over me, my nerves were shot.
I considered trying to take a nap at the desk, but the thought of letting myself sleep out in the open, even if I was tucked away, made me feel too vulnerable. I couldn't do it. I couldn't let myself relax that much.
Instead I let out a weary sigh and sat up, pushing my bag to the edge of the desk. I began working the zipper open when graffiti on the desk stopped me short.
There, scratched into the surface was what looked like it might have been a pocket knife was a name: Cordova '02. Beside the words was a rough sketch of an anatomical heart.
My pulse jumped, my breathing hitching as the pieces of what lay before me clicked together. Cordova. A heart. The Heart in the Garden. Eleazar Cordova. Could it be?
My fingers reached out, shakily tracing the heart. Had Cordova been to the Academy?
Vaguely, my mind recalled the chatroom thread I'd found shortly before coming here. What had that poster said?
Clumsily, my fingers reached for my zipper again, yanking my backpack open as I felt around for my tattered copy of El Corazón en El Jardín. It wasn't the one I'd come to school with. That copy had been stolen the night I'd been buried alive. I'd found this copy in the library and had been carrying it around as some sort of strange security blanket.
It was the English version, not the original like I'd been working my way through, but even with translation, it had become a book I'd grown attached to.
I flipped the old cracked spine open, not entirely sure what I was looking for.
The Heart in the Garden was haunting, a story about a woman's quest to uncover terrible family secrets and the madness that consumes her along the way, until the reader is left wondering if she was mad all along. There had been papers published, entire conferences dedicated to unpacking the layers and symbolism in the story. What had made it all more mysterious was that the author, Eleazar Cordova, had never come forth for a single interview or press junket. No one knew what he looked like, who he was, or even if he was writing under his real name. He produced a literary masterpiece and then vanished.
But if he'd been here, at the Academy, then it wasn't as simple as that. What if Cordova had known something, written something about the Sixteen? Had he disappeared of his own volition, or had he been forced into silence?
The pages slid apart, the book lying flat on the desk before me, and my eyes took a moment to scan the page. The book had fallen open to a passage when Carmen, the book's protagonist, was pulled out of sleep one night because she thought she could hear a heartbeat coming from the garden.
When Carmen was a child, she once found her papá in the garden, mud covering his normally pressed trousers. Carmen went to ask him what he was doing, but in his hands, he held a tiny bird. Carmen had never seen something so little, and her heart ached as she watched it shiver and cry in her papá's hands.
"What will you do with it?" Carmen asked.
Papá looked at her, his stern face shifting, growing ever so tender before the coldness came back and his hand squeezed, crushing the bird. "It is no service to this creature to pretend it has a life once it has fallen from its nest," Papá said. "Death is a mercy."
Carmen wept, the sound of the bird's brittle bones crunching in her father's hands a sound that haunted her for years. She had never truly feared her papá until then.
The memory of the bird faded from her mind as she grew, though the trauma of the lesson endured.
When Carmen was pulled from her bed that night and rose to gaze out the window at the gardens below, the sound of the bird dying came back to her. A crunching, wet sound that beat like a dying heart.
Carmen was powerless against its call.
I stopped reading, shivering as I recalled the horror the first time I'd read the book. I hadn't had an easy life, sure, but I'd never known open brutality.
Not like that. Not until now.
I looked up from the desk, my throat tight as I remembered the savagery of the students here. I was nothing more than that baby bird here, but tomorrow, that could all change. Tomorrow, I would finally have power.
…
The next day, the school was frantically making last-minute preparations for the ball. The staff were distracted and uncharacteristically unorganized, which allowed Alice to somehow finally hack the security network.
I was sitting on my bed when our door flew open and Alice came in, quickly shutting and locking it behind her.
"What's up?" I asked, looking at her to see she appeared slightly winded.
"I just snuck into the security office," she said, shaking her head. "We're set for tonight."
I gaped at her. "You snuck into the security office?"
Alice waved me off and moved from the door. "It was fine. Everyone's too busy worrying about people coming onto the campus tonight."
My stomach churned. "Do you think we'll actually be able to pull this off?" I asked, not sure what sort of answer I was hoping for from her.
Alice looked at me as she set her bag on her bed. "I wouldn't be going through all this trouble if I didn't think we could," she said finally.
I nodded, accepting her answer.
The day was spent in mostly silence between the two of us. Alice was busy getting everything sorted on the security feeds, and I spent what might be my last day of any semblance of freedom rereading The Heart in the Garden. I wasn't sure what would happen if we got caught, but I had to assume that jail time would be the least of our worries.
The less I thought about it, the better.
Around eight, Alice and I started getting ready. Earlier in the week, I'd gone back to the lost and found and had managed to scrape together two dresses. They weren't grand enough for a ball of any kind, but it would be a decent cover to make it look like we were trying to crash the party. If we got caught, I wanted us to seem as innocent as possible.
Under the dresses, Alice and I wore pants and t-shirts, something easier to move around in. I didn't know what to expect from the vault, but I knew I'd be nervous enough without trying to navigate it in a floor-length maxi.
When we were ready, Alice looked over at me. "There's no going back," she warned.
"No going back," I agreed.
Alice nodded and we slipped out of our room.
The hallways between our room and Valencia's office were surprisingly empty. Alice watched guard as I used the keys to unlock his door. Once we were inside, we reengaged the locks and made our way to the second door.
It took a few tries, finding the right key, but eventually, we got in. The door opened with a soft click, and Alice and I stepped into an empty narrow chamber, illuminated with bright white light.
At the other end of the chamber stood a biometric lock.
I swore. "I knew we couldn't pull this off." I groaned, shaking my head.
"Shut up," Alice snapped, making her way to the lock. She pulled out her phone and placed it near the keypad.
I watched anxiously as she worked, wondering what the fuck sort of crap she was pulling.
After a few minutes, there was a soft ding, and the door opened.
"How did you do that?" I demanded.
Alice looked back at me. "When I was in the security office, they had this file hidden away. You can't fake biometrics, but I was able to get a backdoor key through their system to bypass the lock."
I had no fucking idea what she was talking about, but she looked smug, and the door was open, so I shook my head. "Let's go."
We moved through the secure vault door into a vestibule with an elevator. Alice pressed the button, her eyes darting back to me as we waited. "What do you think will be down there?" she asked.
I shook my head. "Things no one should know," I muttered.
The elevator arrived, and we climbed in. There was only one button, something labeled V, and I reached out, pressing the button.
The doors slid shut gently and then we were being whisked away down farther than I would have expected. In the elevator, we both shed the dresses we were wearing, carefully tying them up to fashion makeshift backpacks. We didn't want to leave evidence of our break-in behind, and neither of us wanted to be encumbered by carrying around spare clothes.
When the car came to a stop, it opened to reveal large wooden double doors. Alice and I stepped out, and not seeing a keyhole, each reached for a brass handle. The doors were heavy, but the moment we opened them, we both let out tight breaths.
It looked like we had entered the library, only with a hundred times the books. There were thousands of volumes stacked on shelves, some spines ancient, others much newer. I couldn't see the full extent of the room from where I stood, but I got the sense that it was enormous.
We could be down here for days looking.
"Fuck," Alice breathed.
I looked at her and nodded. "Right." I cleared my throat. "I'm going to start with the newer books," I told her. Edward had said the rift had happened sometime in the last twenty years or so.
Alice shook her head, her eyes glazed. "Yeah okay," she said, sounding thoroughly distracted. We parted ways as I sought out anything I could find on this supposed divide.
It was overwhelming as hell. There seemed to be no sense of organization, though I knew that couldn't be true. I picked a book off the shelf and let out a long breath when I saw it was handwritten. It was one of the newer books, and I wondered if all the volumes were taken down without the use of a computer.
Most of the books I came across were ledgers, strings of numbers that made no sense to me. I tried to go deeper into the stacks and look for any sort of directory, but there was nothing.
Frustrated, I started picking up anything I could get my hands on.
Ancient histories, modern accounts, all sorts of books, all handwritten, all useless to me.
That was, until I picked up a smaller book, bound in black leather. I cracked it open and my heart nearly leapt from my chest.
El Corazón en El Jardín. It was a handwritten manuscript, the manuscript. I flipped a few pages, my eyes bugging out as I saw the looping handwriting of the author who put pen to paper. Cordova had been here. All those years ago, Cordova had been a student here. Maybe he had left clues about the school in his book. Maybe…
Far away, there was a shout, and my heart skittered in my chest. I froze, my ears straining to hear anything, when another shout rang out. Someone was here. Someone was coming for us.
Stuffing the book into my makeshift backpack, I started running, trying to make my footsteps silent.
The front entrance was probably blocked, but there had to be a second exit, right?
I could hear a commotion somewhere behind me, and I prayed Alice found her way out. No chance was I going back for her.
My heart was thundering in my chest as I pushed on, trying desperately to find a wall so I could search for a back way. I turned a corner and a body slammed into me, sending me spiraling. I gasped, my scream caught in my throat as I went tumbling to the floor. Beside me, I could hear Alice wheezing, and I scrambled to my feet.
"Come on." I groaned, hauling her to standing. She looked pale and shaky, but she got up and resumed running with me. "There has to be a back door," I said between pants.
"There!" Alice pointed toward a wall where a green exit sign glowed between two stacks. I was about to turn toward it when the sound of a gunshot nearly scared me out of my skin. Alice and I dove behind the nearest bookcase as another gunshot pierced the air.
"Shit," Alice wheezed. "They're trying to kill us!"
I shook my head. "Come on," I said, yanking her forward.
We wove through the aisles, diving behind shelves when we heard the guns go off again. My lungs were burning, my body aching, but fear was pushing me forward.
We made it to the emergency exit, bursting through the door to a long stairwell. Groaning, Alice and I started up, fear driving us faster and faster. I heard the door open behind us and knew it would only be a matter of time before whoever was pursuing us caught up.
My body was shaking from the exertion, my heart rate so scattered and sharp, I felt like I might just have a heart attack and die there on the stairs.
"Keep going," Alice cried as we started to slow down, fatigue coming for us. "We're almost there."
I looked up and saw that we were nearing the top. One more floor and we'd be out of the stairwell.
Behind us, the heavy boots were getting closer, and I swore, putting out the last burst of energy I could muster.
We cleared the last set of stairs, and both of us slammed into the exit, our bodies meeting resistance as the door struggled to open. We threw ourselves at it again, and this time it opened, the sound of tearing ivy meeting our ears.
We were outside, somewhere near the gardens. "Run," I wheezed to Alice. "We have to go separately."
She nodded and, without another word, took off to the South. I turned and bolted north, praying they wouldn't be able to catch both of us.
I heard the door open, heard our pursuers shout, and then gunshots rang through the night. I don't know if they were aiming toward me or Alice, but I pushed on, my body near ready to collapse.
As I rounded on the north lawn, I saw the ballroom come into view, its windows bright with yellow light that spilled out onto the gardens. Scrambling, I ducked behind a hedge, untying the dress and yanking it back over my head. The book clattered to the ground, and I picked it up, wedging it between two bushes. I got up and ran toward the ballroom, praying that I'd be able to slip into there and avoid detection.
"Stop!" A voice shouted behind me.
I picked up my skirt to run harder.
"I said stop!" The sound of a gun going off sent my heart flying, and I dove behind a hedge, my palms scraping against the gravel. I was just outside the ballroom now, so close to freedom, so close to…
"Bella?"
I looked up as I struggled back onto my feet, my anxiety tripling when I saw Edward standing on the terrace. He looked alarmed, maybe even scared as he ran toward me. "What's going on?"
He reached me just as the security guards did, their guns withdrawn.
"She was caught breaking into a secured area of the property," the guards said. "Mr. Cullen, please step aside."
I was done for. Edward wouldn't cover for me; he told me as much. I was going to prison, or worse.
"You're not taking her anywhere," Edward said, surprising the hell out of me. "She's been here at the ball all night until she stepped outside for some fresh air."
He was a shockingly convincing liar. I almost believed him.
The guards hesitated. "Sir, we ask that—"
"My parents are inside," Edward continued. "Would you like to ask them? I'm sure they would love to have their time wasted over your incompetence."
The guards looked outright scared at the threat. "No, sir, Mr. Cullen. You have a nice night."
Without even a second glance at me, they left, heading back down the lawn. I turned to look at Edward, who's brows were furrowed, his mouth twisted in a scowl.
"You better have something," he snarled at me.
I swallowed hard. "I don't," I lied.
Edward's eyes widened. "What?"
I shook my head. "I didn't have enough time. I couldn't find what you wanted."
Edward swore, his hands turning to fists as he paced away from me. "Fucking useless," I heard him mutter.
My back straightened, my eyes narrowing. "I'm not fucking useless," I snapped, fear and adrenaline colliding in me. "I'm a human fucking being, and I will never put my life on the line to sate your idle curiosity." I turned and stormed off, not caring if the guards came back for me now that I was out of Edward's protection.
I'd put my life on the line to help him, and it had all been for nothing.
Silently, I swore to myself I'd never help anyone ever again.
From now on, I was only looking out for myself.