Free Icons by Margaret Stohl Page A

don’t have a mother, and I don’t have that problem.”
    Lucas’s face twists into anger. “Thanks for the forgiveness. You’re going to want to eat that apple now.” He motions down the hall, to the soldiers, and I feel my chest tightening as they move toward me.
    “Why? What is it?” I automatically brace myself, asI have for years. The moment I wake up, I check to see what new, terrible thing has happened. What disaster. What calamity. I feel it in the minds of the people around me, before I put one foot on the floor.
    “I came here to get you, Dol. The Ambassador has sent for you.”
    Color rushes into my face, and I want to run for it. Flee. Swim, if I have to. Every cell in my body is screaming at me to move, but I know there’s no point. I don’t stand a chance.
    “Now?”
    “It was going to be just the guards. I told her you’d rather see me.” He slides his hand into my pocket, letting his fingers brush against mine. Then he shoves the apple into my hand. “I hope I wasn’t wrong.”
    I shove the apple back at him, because he was. He is.
    He’s wrong about everything.

    “Lucas Amare.”
    The whisper spreads like a quiet ripple as we enter the large outer bank of Embassy office space. I don’t see who started it. It doesn’t matter. There are probably twenty heads bowed over twenty desks, and it could have been any one of them.
    I lean closer to Lucas. “Do they know?”
    He raises an eyebrow. “That I’m my mother’s son?”
    “No. The other thing.”
    His eyes narrow and he shakes his head.
    What about me? What do they know?
    But I can’t bring myself to ask, and instead I focus on suppressing the urge to touch his hand, to unlock more of what he’s feeling. I need to not know what he’s feeling right now. I need to not know what anyone is feeling. I need to be strong, and coming into that kind of contact with people—especially in the kind of world we live in now—it’s too draining.
    So I keep my hands to myself and nod back.
    We follow the whispering, past a line of administrators and bureaucrats outside the Ambassador’s office. For the most part, they don’t look up at Lucas, though I know they see him; it’s the not-looking that gives them away. I only see them staring at us when I glance back over my shoulder.
    There is no way not to feel them.
    I can’t avoid the sharp jags of their anxiety and need. The way they want to please him, to know him. They’d follow him into a blazing pit of fire. That’s what makes Lucas so dangerous.
    That’s why he’s an Icon Child who matters, I think to myself, in a way I never will. I feel things, sense what people are thinking, that’s all. I know what I feel, whatothers feel around me, but I can’t do anything about it. Lucas seems oblivious to all of it, to the riot he incites by being alive. I’m envious.
    It isn’t just his mother who makes them all cower when he walks by. I’d fear him too, if I was one of them.
    An outer door opens, then an inner one.
    Our feet make no noise as we move across the rich, soft rug that lines the foyer of the Ambassador’s office. Her own door is not open.
    Even her son knocks.
    Through the glass, I see the Ambassador look up from her desk. Her hair is silver-white, like the pelt of some kind of lost species. Maybe a mink, though I have only seen one in a book. It’s her eyes that convince me, not her hair. Her eyes gleam like those of an animal caught in a trap, the moment before chewing off its own foot. Anything to escape. Anything to survive. It’s the kind of madness that isn’t mad at all. It’s only logical, given the circumstance. You’d be mad not to feel it. Like everyone in this office, I realize. Everyone we’ve passed.
    I wonder if I have it, too. If I’m too mad to notice.
    Lucas pushes open the door and I follow him inside.
    “Darling. Thank you for coming. Both of you.” She nods at me and smiles at Lucas. I feel it in her, the surge he seems to cause in everyone who