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I breathe in the cool night air and leave the alley behind the house as fast as possible. Yoru follows me, darting from one hiding place to the next to avoid being seen by potential passersby.
The fresh air does me good and helps me switch off a little. When I get to the Starbucks, I can’t see Noah. A glance at my phone tells me I’m right on time. I have to wait over ten minutes before he finally shows up. His appearance shocks me a little. He looks incredibly tired, and I immediately feel guilty about dragging him out of bed in the middle of the night.
“Sorry,” I say. “I know it’s late. You look like you could use the sleep.”
He shakes his head. “I’m having trouble sleeping anyway.”
“I can tell,” I tease, then I switch to a serious tone again. “Is the Assembly still making your life difficult? Have things at least improved between you and your parents?”
He avoids my eye, gazing out into the night, and then says, “Let’s not talk about that. Why don’t you tell me what happened? Are you okay?” He slowly turns to face me again, looking me up and down to determine whether something bad has happened to me.
I swallow hard and then tell him everything. About Mr. Brian’s attack, Frida showing up, the other fallen, and finally the Council’s planned raid on the Noctu. I expected Noah to be pretty shocked by this news, but he remains surprisingly calm.
“The Tempes are constantly attacking us. And vice versa. These kinds of raids are nothing new. We know how to defend ourselves.”
I raise my eyebrows in astonishment. “That’s all you have to say? Your people are going to be ambushed. There’ll be injuries and deaths – on both sides. And you don’t care?”
“Tess,” he begins slowly, “you don’t understand. We’ve grown up with this conflict. It’s nothing special for us. Obviously, it’s bad when people die. But we all know the risks. We live with the threat of violence every day. What’s far worse is when things happen behind closed doors that destroy entire lives.”
“You mean Frances?” I ask. “Noah, it’s not your fault that she got mixed up with Alessandro. She was trying to help her brother and …”
“Exactly. And if we dealt with the fallen and the ovlems differently, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did,” he interrupts.
“That’s probably true,” I admit. “So what do you intend to do about it?”
“Something has to happen,” he continues cryptically without answering my question.
“Maybe we can help you. If you agreed to talk to Ayden, maybe you guys could start building bridges that may eventually end the conflict between the Tempes and the Noctu. That would make a massive difference.”
Noah raises his eyebrows. “Does he want to talk to me? He hasn’t shown his face so far. And honestly, I’m not too keen on talking to him either. What good would it do? It’ll rile the Tempes even more if they find out that the Noctu kidnapped me as a baby and murdered my biological parents. How is that supposed to improve relations between our two sides?”
“Is that what’s troubling you? Knowing what your supposed parents did?”
“They refuse to talk about it, and now they’re avoiding me. But it doesn’t matter. I know what I need to do.”
“Noah, what’s up with you?” I exclaim. “I know you have a lot on your plate. Let me help you. We’re still friends, and I want to support you.”
His eyes darken, and his piercing gaze cuts me to the quick. I can see the torment in his eyes, the disappointment, the hurt.
“I’m doing just fine. Don’t worry about me. Let’s talk about Frida. So, she’s alive?”
I don’t want him to change the subject, and I open my mouth to gently broach it again. But his eyes become so forbidding, so dark, that I decide to drop it. He doesn’t want to discuss it, at least not right now. Maybe it’s best if I accept that for the moment. But we’ll have to talk about it at some point.
“I’m going to go look for her in the Odyss after this,” I say. “Maybe she can find a way to communicate to me who my key once belonged to. I found it in her house after all.”
“That is a good question.” Noah extends his hand, and a door appears out of nowhere.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think? We’re going to the Odyss to look for her. I won’t let you go there alone. We can’t risk another teacher with a grudge hunting you down,” he adds with a twinkle in his eyes. Now he looks more like the Noah I know.
I’m reluctant to drag him into this, but in the end, I give in. He won’t take no for an answer anyway. So it’s not long before we land in the Odyss amidst all the countless doors. The doors have such varied shapes and sizes, fittings and handles, and some of them look really old. Everything looks untouched. I see no blood – although it would be hard to make it out in the gloom anyway. I even can’t work out exactly where the fight with Mr. Brian took place.
I wander around a little, in the hope of maybe spotting Frida somewhere or for her to sense my presence. But apparently, it’s not as simple as that.
“Maybe we should just wait here for a bit,” I suggest.
“Or we could speed up the process,” says Noah, holding his arm over his head.
