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Agatha said breathlessly. Her shoulders tensed, poised for
my reaction.
    I just
blinked. My silence seemed to fill Agatha with panic. She began
talking at a hundred miles an hour, her words running into one
another.
    “ There’s a city below this city. It’s been there far longer
than Los Angeles has. Below your feet are
cavernous   halls and tunnels   that stretch on for miles and
miles. There are the four quarters: north, south, east and west.
I’m from the north. They call us the Thinkers. Intellects. To the
east are the muses, the Creatives. The south are the athletes, the
Warriors. The western quarter is where the Architects come from.
They design, build and create everything within our world. At the
centre of it all is the Tower. That’s where your father lives.” She
finally took a second to pull in a shaky breath.
    Elliott Davenport. Alive. The concept wouldn’t sit right in
my mind. I’d spent my whole life living with the knowledge that he
was dead. And my life hadn’t been like some emo Hollywood movie
where I’d mourned not having a father figure. Where I’d dreamed
that he wasn’t really dead, but lost somehow and trying to get back
to me. He was just dead and that had been okay, because my mom had
been everything I needed. And now this small woman was telling me
the father I’d never needed had resurrected himself from the dead and smashed my
world into tiny, insignificant pieces.
    “ Your grandfather lives there, too,” Agatha continued. She
rubbed her neck self-consciously and lowered her eyes to the
compacted earth at our feet. It was mercifully still dry and
un-boglike. “He’s been there the longest out of the three of them.
The three… Reavers.”
    A
feather-light shiver raced up my spine and settled with a final
judder across my shoulders. “Reavers?”
    “ Yes. They don’t really have a name for themselves. We call
them Reavers. They…take things. Things that don’t belong to
them.”
    “ Like what?”
    Agatha shifted uncomfortably, tugging her thumbs on the belt
loops of her jeans. “I’ll get to that. First you have to
understand, the patriarchal line of your father’s family are the
rulers of our society. They have special gifts that set them apart
from everyone else. They can… do things. Things   that you and I can’t. From the
moment they’re born, it’s drilled into them that their biggest
responsibility in life is to produce an heir. It’s all very
old-fashioned, but it’s all they live for—the continuation of their
precious bloodline. Being immortal isn’t enough for them. They’re
paranoid. They believe that if they die, they must have a successor
to take their place. They aren’t even allowed to receive their
gifts until they sire a male heir. That’s when they go through
their rites and become a part of the sovereignty.”
    Something
bizarre was happening inside my head; it felt like a swarm of angry
wasps was trapped there, and they were determined to sting their
way out. My eyes were burning like crazy. “That doesn’t make any
sense."
    “ Of course it doesn’t. Why would it? You've never heard
anything about this before.” Agatha gave me a tight
smile.
    “ So, according to your story, I’m next in line to some royal
supernatural bloodline?”
    The smile faded from Agatha’s lips. “Not quite. It’s like I
said—they have to produce a  male  heir. Your father already
had a son. You…you were unexpected. He never knew about
you.”
    “ Wow. This just gets better. So I was an accident,
too.”
    “ No. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not explaining this very
well. It’s a lot of ground to cover in a short space of time. What
I meant to say was that the patriarchs of the bloodline have male
heirs, because that’s all they’ve ever had. None of them have ever
had a female child before.”
    I counted to
five. I counted slowly just to make sure, but when I reached five,
Agatha’s words still didn’t make sense. “Uh…biology’s