Perfect Lies

For Noah

My past, present, and future

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Fia: Every Day

Annie: Four Months Before

Fia: Five Days Before

Annie: Three and a Half Months Before

Fia: Four Days Before

Annie: Three Months Before

Fia: Three Days Before

Annie: Two and a Half Months Before

Fia: Two Days Before

Annie: Two and a Half Months Before

Fia: Thirty-six Hours Before

Annie: Nine Weeks Before

Fia: Thirty-two Hours Before

Annie: Six Weeks Before

Fia: Twenty-eight Hours Before

Annie: Six Weeks Before

Fia: Nineteen Hours Before

Annie: Five Weeks Before

Fia: Eighteen Hours Before

Annie: Four Weeks Before

Fia: Twelve Hours Before

Annie: Twenty-eight Days Before

Fia: Eleven Hours Before

Annie: Seven Days Before

Fia: Nine Hours Before

Annie: Fourteen Hours Before

Fia: Six Minutes Before

Annie: Ten Minutes Before

Fia: Two Minutes Before

Annie: After

Fia: After

Acknowledgments

Also by Kiersten White

Copyright

About the Publisher

FIA

Every Day

ANNIE.

Annie.

Annie.

Annie.

I can’t think about her, not ever. It isn’t safe.

But when I’m asleep, no one can listen to my thoughts. I’m still afraid to sleep—too many ghosts peering creeping condemning. Sometimes though, the good times, I get Annie.

It’s always the same.

Phillip Keane is gone, his webs destroyed, everything smoking and charred in beautiful ruins around me. We’re safe. It’s over.

But my hands are red, they’re still so red I can’t look at them, can’t see them, can’t breathe.

And then Annie is there. She’s too young. I know she doesn’t look like that anymore, but her face is open and innocent and clean. She wraps her hands around mine, so that I can’t see the red anymore. We’re together, and when we’re together, all these things I’ve done, they don’t matter anymore because they were worth it.

If I were Annie, I’d know whether this was a real future. All I know is it’s the only one I want, the thing that keeps me going.

I will make that future happen.

ANNIE

Four Months Before

SHE DIDN’T KILL ME.

I was ready for the knife. I’d made my peace with whatever Fia needed to do to be okay. But … she didn’t kill me. I try to keep my breathing shallow and hidden, try not to flex my fingers over the phone, though I want to.

Fia didn’t kill me!

She must have come up with something else, some way out of this. I knew she would. I knew she would fix everything, I knew she would find a way to our future.

Two minutes ago I knew she was going to kill me.

After all this time, I can See and know everything, and still know nothing at all.

How long am I going to have to lie on the ground? Is she coming back yet? My hip aches where it rests against the concrete, and people must be staring. I can hear them around me, footsteps, voices. Someone has to have noticed.

I hear the thud of hurried footfalls, then feel someone kneel next to me and let off a string of whispered profanity, soft and sad like a prayer.

A warm finger brushes against my neck fearfully, then puts firm pressure over my pulse. This time he swears loudly in surprise and … anger? He’s mad that I’m not dead? “Are you okay?” he asks.

Hoping, trusting that this is part of Fia’s plan, I move my lips as little as possible. “Shh,” I whisper. “I’m dead.”

There’s a pause, and then arms go under my knees and behind my shoulders. I try to keep my body limp as I’m lifted into the air and cradled against a chest. I let my head and arms loll, still cradling the phone in the hand that’s wedged between my body and his. I’m embarrassed about how hard I must be to hold, but I’m not breaking Fia’s request until she tells me otherwise.

I need you to be dead.

I’ll be dead, Fia.

“It’s okay. My sister’s epileptic. She’ll be fine,” I hear him say. I wonder who he is, where he’s taking me with such a determined, slightly uneven limping stride.

He carries me for what feels like way too long, the warm sun playing on my skin cut through with an occasional breeze. Then I feel the whoosh of artificial air as we enter a building.

Without a word he lowers me to the floor. I rub my neck where it’s cramping from hanging in a weird position.

“Where are we? When is Fia getting here? What’s the plan?” I lean forward expectantly.

“You tell me,” he snaps.

I flinch away from his tone. Fia’s cell phone rings and I fumble, unsure what button to push. With a huff he takes the phone from my fingers, then shoves it back.

“Fia?” I’m trembling and out of sorts beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. I got up this morning expecting to die. Now I’m somewhere I don’t know, with someone I don’t know, and all I have is a phone.

“Who is this?” a soft, male voice asks. A voice I instantly recognize from one of my visions.

“Adam?”

“Yes?”

I put a hand to my mouth. Adam. I’m on the phone with Adam, the guy I personally arranged to have killed. The guy Fia spared. The guy who, according to my vision, is now in cahoots with the Lerner group. Fia delivered me to Lerner, the same group that drugged and kidnapped her. After shooting her in an alley.

Fia has perfect instincts, I remind myself. I shouldn’t have an easier time believing that she’d kill me than I have believing that she knows what she’s doing handing me over to these people.

“Umm, hey.” How does one start a conversation with a guy she tried to have murdered? “This is Annie? Fia’s sister?”

“Oh.” There’s a pause, and then he says, “Oh! It’s Annie. Fia has Annie!”

A soft voice, a woman’s, murmurs in the background on his end. “Where are you?” Adam asks, brimming with happy excitement, unlike my angry companion. “We’ll come get you two!”

I lower the phone and talk in the general direction of the guy who carried me here. “Where are we? They want to come get us.”

“Give me the phone.”

I hold it out and feel it once again snatched from my fingers. His voice gets quieter as he walks away but retains its low intensity. I stand, trying not to feel awkward, wondering where we are. The doors open and someone walks past with a quiet “Excuse me.”

I back up a few steps, hoping that I’m not in the middle of some hallway, and increasingly annoyed with Angry Guy for abandoning me here.

“Sorry, sir,” a woman says over Angry Guy’s continued hushed conversation. “You can’t use your phone in the library. Please step outside.”

“I’m done,” he snaps.

I hunch my shoulders and shove my hands into my pockets, hoping they’re not both looking at me. I wish I were wearing my sunglasses. Where are you, Fia? Hurry up so you can explain what’s going on and what we’re doing next.

“Here,” he says right next to me, making me jump. “Here.” The second time he says it a little softer and I finally clue in and hold out my hand. He gives the cell back, and I stick it in my pocket. Then … nothing. He says nothing.

“So. Umm.” I wait for him to fill the silence.

“They’re coming.”

“Fia’s meeting us here?”

“No. Fia is not meeting us here.” His words have a strange quality, like they’re being forced through clenched teeth.

“I’m sorry,” I say, glaring because I’m not sorry, I’m frustrated. “I’m not up to speed on what’s going on, and I’d really like to be clued in.”

“I can’t help you with that.”

“But you’re helping Fia.”

“I am not helping Fia.”

My heart thuds fearfully in my chest. “But … I thought … I mean, you were part of it. You picked me up.” Oh, no. Oh, no. I gave him the phone. For all I know, he was delivering a threat or a ransom demand. All Fia did was give me the phone, which was meant to connect me with Adam. Not whoever this is. Tears brim in my eyes.

No. Think like Fia. What would Fia do?

Besides stab the guy.

“I’ll scream,” I say, standing straighter and facing him. “You shouldn’t have brought me to a public place. Leave now or I’ll scream.” I pull the phone back out of my pocket and feel for bumps on the buttons, hoping the call feature will be prominent and that it saved Adam’s number. “I won’t be leverage, not for you or anyone else.”

He swears, then grabs my fingers. I nearly shout until I realize he’s pressing my index finger onto a button. I hear a number dialing.

“Crazy must run in your family,” he says.

“You do know Fia!” I blurt, then bite my lip. He exhales in a silent laugh at my immediate association of crazy with my own sister.

“She stabbed me in the leg.” Well, guess I was right about what Fia would do. “Then I shot her. Then I helped bring her in, against my better judgment, and let her see what we do. And then I followed her after she attacked me and ran. I got to watch as she murdered an innocent girl because I didn’t stop her.”

I hear Adam saying “Hello?” but don’t put the phone up to my ear. This guy’s anger makes no sense. If he’s with Lerner, and that’s where Fia wants me, why is he so mad?

“But she didn’t. Murder me, I mean. I’m still alive.” Obviously.

“Not for the minute it took between watching you fall and finding your pulse.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” I mean it. I wasn’t thinking about what it must have been like for him. “If it makes you feel any better, I thought I was dead, too.”

“Why would that make me feel better?”

The sliding of glass doors precedes Adam’s voice. “Cole! And you must be Annie?”

Hearing Adam in person is different from on the phone. I’m flooded with memories of the visions I’ve had of him—the one where I saw girl after girl with abilities being brought into the light and then disappearing into darkness, while Adam’s name bounced around my skull, ricocheting painfully. And the other one, later, where I saw his face. I am meeting a guy whose name and voice I can put a face to. Other than James and his father, that has never happened to me.

It’s too much, all of it. I don’t know how to feel, what to think. I’m not with my sister, who I thought was going to kill me today. Instead, I’m with the guy I tried to have killed. The guy who spells disaster for hundreds of girls like me. The guy whose voice is kind and whose gentle face I will forever be able to see.

An arm comes around my shoulder and I jump.

“It’s okay,” a woman says. “You’re safe.”

“Where’s Fia?” Adam asks.

“How do you all not know?” I ask. “I thought she had a plan. You are the plan. Right?”

“She didn’t tell us anything,” the woman says. “Do you have any idea what she’ll do next?”

I shake my head. Fia’s future is always a mystery to me.

FIA

Five Days Before

“MISS FIA, YOUR SHOULDER—” THE SECURITY GUARD says, eyes wide.

Ignoring him, I skip inside, the opulent, open lobby of the school swallowing me whole. James turns a corner, his suit all well-tailored lines of professionalism, sleek and slippery and mature. I hate it when he wears a suit. When he wears a suit he is Mr. Keane. His easy smile freezes before it can touch his eyes. He’s scared for me.

It’s adorable.

“What happened?” he asks. Ms. Robertson (I hate her I hate her I hate her I hate her) is behind him, a sheaf of papers clutched to her starched chest.

I shrug—it hurts—then flop onto one of the leather couches. I’ll get blood on it. I’ve poured a lot of blood into this school, but it’s still thirsty, it’s always thirsty.

“Ran into an old friend. And his knife. Why do so many of my old friends have knives?”

Ms. Robertson stomps toward me, glaring at my arm like it’s personally offensive. “My office. We’ll see if we can patch you up without stitches. Who did this?”

I smile at her. Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris! Hello, Doris!

She glares at James. “Make her stop.”

James raises an eyebrow at me. “Fia?”

“What? All I said was hello. It’s polite to say hello. Hello, Doris.”

Huffing, she leaves and I stand, slightly woozy, to follow her. “Who was it?” James whispers.

“Dmitri. Russian mobster? He was mad that I stole millions of dollars from him. Silly man, doesn’t he know money is imaginary?” It’s paper that turns into numbers on screens. It’s there, then it’s gone. I put it places, I take it out, I move it somewhere else. Imaginary. Most things are imaginary, when you think about it.

Sometimes I think I’m imaginary.

“Dmitri,” he growls, nodding. “If I had been there …”

“I still would have fought him and won, but then I would have had to worry about you, too.”

James gives me a wry half smile. “At least let me pretend I can defend you sometimes.”

I pat his cheek. “You’re so cute when you’re delusional.”

“And you’re sexy when you’re on a post-fight high.” His eyes search mine, more serious than his tone would indicate, and I know he’s looking to see whether or not I’m falling apart. He doesn’t need to.

I’m better than I was a month ago. A week ago, even. It was bad, but James held me together. He whispered dark, secret things to me and helped me escape myself with promises of flames and freedom. I narrow my eyes but smile, to let him know I know what he’s looking for and that he won’t find it.

“Don’t tell Doris about Dmitri. I’ll be there in a minute.” James brushes a kiss along the top of my head. I lean into him, breathing in, wanting to lose myself there, needing to lose myself there. “Where were Johnson and Davis?” he asks.

I take a step back. “How am I supposed to know? It’s not my fault if my shadows can’t stay attached to me. Call Wendy Darling. Maybe she can sew them to the bottoms of my feet.”

He swears, pulling out his phone. “They’re there to protect you.”

“Do I look like I need protection?” I hold out my hands, one with streaks of blood on it, and give him my best crazy crazy crazy crazy grin. “You know, I like Dmitri. I crippled him, but I like him.”

Whoever he’s calling picks up and he starts yelling about doing a job and consequences and cleaning up messes. I wonder if the Russian guy is the mess or if I am. There’s a smear of blood on James’s suit jacket from where I hugged him, and I think it looks nice there, like it belongs.

I leave him and make my way to Ms. Robertson’s office. She’s already got a massive medical kit out on her desk and I sit, peeling off my shirt. It’s hot in here, the heater in the corner working too hard, drying out the air and making everything feel small and scratchy.

“What did you do this time?” she asks through gritted teeth, fingers surprisingly gentle as she cleans the wound on my shoulder.

“Someone took my parking space.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“That doesn’t mean I should let someone take my parking space now, does it?”

She tears off strips of medical tape, lining them up to pull the edges of the cut closed. “Why don’t you tell me who did this?”

Do you really want to get into my head? I think. It’s not a friendly place. You’ll regret it.

She sneers. “Are you going to kill me?”

I twist away from her, ripping open a package of gauze and slapping it over my arm. “Is there a reason I should?”

“I don’t know. Was there a reason you killed Eden?”

I tap tap tap tap against the table, then use my teeth to tear off enough tape to keep the gauze in place. I hated Eden. I hated her. I can’t think about it, can’t think about what happened, won’t think about what happened. “She deserved it.” I look at Ms. Robertson with the full force of my baby-blue eyes. “Do you deserve it?” They’ll let me, I think at her. They’ll let me do whatever I want, and we both know it.

“And your sister? She deserved it, too?”

I explode out of my chair, inches away from Ms. Robertson’s face, which is no longer sneering. “She was in my way.” Ms. Robertson is standing between me and the door, and I look pointedly at it. “You are in my way.”

She moves.

As I walk past, her voice shakes with anger or fear (I can’t tell, I’m not Eden, Eden Eden why’d she bring up Eden?) as she says, “And Clarice?”

I pause, my hand on the doorway. “I just didn’t like her.” Letting my mind go blank, not thinking anything at all, I turn and smile pleasantly at Ms. Robertson.

In the hall I nearly bump into a girl. She does a double take. “Fia? What happened? Where’s your shirt?”

I glance down, my black bra in stark contrast to my pale torso, then laugh. “I knew I was forgetting something!” I try so hard not to remember their names, so very very hard, but I can’t sleep because I see their faces. Mandy. Twelve. From New Orleans.

I wash myself clean of guilt, of pain, of fear, of emotion. I am the ocean. I am empty. I am nothing. Mandy lets out a little sigh of relief. She loves being around me. Silly Mandy.

“I cut my shoulder and there was blood on my shirt. I was going to find another one.”

“You can borrow one of mine!” She holds out her hand, smiling shyly. I take it and let her lead me to her room, and I do not feel anything, not a thing, not a thing about this life or this girl or working in the school that I will burn to the ground.

When it gets to be too much, I picture the flames, imagine their heat. The noise they’ll make as they devour everything Phillip Keane has built. It’s better than the ocean for calming, and if any Readers look at me funny, I add marshmallows to my thoughts and am just a girl in want of a campfire.

I am a girl in want of complete destruction. But I am patient.

James finds me thirty minutes later, lying on my stomach on the floor of the main dorm common room, looking at fashion magazines with a gaggle of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds around me. They all jockey for position, each trying to slide in next to me, be close to me, be near me, because these girls know nothing.

They know nothing.

I think happy thoughts and feel happy things and I do not let myself near the swirling black edges of the hole that is my soul when I look at them.

I try not to spin. In third grade we did an experiment where we rubbed a needle on a magnet, then dropped it onto water. The surface tension let it rest on top of the water, and the magnet sent the needle spinning.

I used to be a compass, trained on the true north of protecting Annie. Without her I lost my north.

But James is my north now. The flames are my north now. Our dark secrets are my north now.

I tap tap tap tap on the magazine. Annie. Annie. Annie. Annie.

Don’t think about Annie.

James holds out his hand to help me up and I take it, squeezing harder than I need to, willing it to be my anchor. This is what I chose, and I always choose right. James saved me. He’ll always save me.

“Are you leaving already?” Mandy asks, a whine creeping into her voice. “You never stay!”

“That’s my fault,” James says, giving the girls his winningest lie of a smile. “I’ve got to take Fia to New York.”

“New York?” I ask.

His smile goes deeper, sharper. “My father wants us working there. With him.”

I don’t know what to do with this sudden flood of uncontrolled emotion. Finally. Finally. All the things I’ve done, all this blood and betrayal and wrong will be made right. We have a plan (don’t think about the plan, never think about the plan). It will happen now.

It is happening.

James pulls me close, his arm around my waist holding me up. I am dizzy with anticipation. The beginning of the end.

“Will you come visit us?” Mandy asks. “You said the school will always be your home.”

I try to smile, but my eyes dart around the room, tracing the contours of the walls, my finger tap tap tap tapping on my leg. Always.

“Take me away,” I whisper to James, and he does.

ANNIE

Three and a Half Months Before

I PULL THE PHONE OUT OF MY POCKET, TAP IT ON THE table. The noise reminds me of Fia. Who hasn’t called. It’s been two weeks.

Two.

A throat clears. “Hey, Annie.” Adam always announces himself when he enters the room. I appreciate it.

“Can I sit?”

I nod and feel the motel couch give under his weight. Without a word I hand the phone to him. He’s been as anxious about getting word from Fia as I have; he’s the one who tracked down a charger so the cell wouldn’t die.

“No missed calls or texts,” he says, stating the obvious.

“Who’s ready for some lunch?” Sarah chirps, bringing with her the scent of grease. My stomach turns uneasily. I hate myself as soon as I think it, but I really miss the Keane school chefs. I also miss my own cell phone, with raised buttons so I could use it without help. And my white cane that folded neatly into a purse. And my braille display for my laptop.

And … I miss knowing where I am. Being stuck in the school for so many years has turned me into an unwilling agoraphobe. I spent all that time either knowing the exact confines of my space or out with someone I trusted completely. Being untethered is kind of terrifying.

I miss Eden.

“Where to today?” I ask, needing distraction. We’re all staying in a suite in some motel outside Denver. Our travel pattern deliberately makes no sense. Cole decides on the spot where we’re going, and we never stay anywhere for long or plan more than a few hours in advance. Sarah says it’s the best way to avoid anyone on the lookout for us, though she seems confident no Seer is going to have an eye out for me.

I’m dead, after all. So is Adam.

“Do you want me to cut your food for you?” Adam offers, and I shake my head. He’s constantly trying to help me. I wondered at first if maybe he had a crush on me, but it doesn’t feel like that.

Then again, how would I know? This is the most I’ve been around guys close to my age since I went to the school.

“I have good news,” Sarah says. “I haven’t seen anything. I think we’re safe to go to home base.”