Perilous Princesses

by Susan Bianculli

  * * *

  Morning came, and with it the confused babble of people, the barnyard cacophony of animals. I stood on my balcony and watched as people herded their households aboard the ships waiting at harbor. Atlantis was a small country, the ships I had provided them would be enough and more to serve for the great evacuation. It was best I had not told my father my plan; he would never have allowed it. But he had prayed and the goddesses had answered. I took that as a blessing.

  All day the ships loaded. As the sun sank, the movement of people from land to ship trickled to a stop. Silence fell as the sun splashed crimson and gold over the sea. I reached with my senses, sweeping over my homeland, searching for living things that should not remain behind. Only small things, insects and worms, remained. All else that breathed and moved was gone, settling in on the ships that had come to destroy them. I released those ties and pushed the ships away, away, filling their sails with wind to send them free and clear of the work that must be done.

  Once again, I lifted my hands to the sky. I sheathed my heart in ice again, thickening the shell. “This is my choice,” I said to the waiting goddesses. “This is my duty. This is my sacrifice. I bear the burden from now until time ends.”

  I reached down, down, deep beneath the earth. I found the crack in the stone column that thrust Atlantis above the sea. I widened it, turning stone to pebbles, sweeping them aside. Once started, stone cracked and shifted on its own. More swiftly than I had intended, Atlantis started to sink. Water spread over the beaches slowly, then faster. The sea surged to fill the space the sinking land left open.

  Down, down, down. My power guided my home. Protected it from the damage the in-rushing sea would have caused. Down, down, down, the land of wonder went. Into the dark, into the deep. A thin barrier of air, set in place by my will, held there by the goddesses, protected Atlantis.

  I was empty, depleted of all that I had. My head swam with exhaustion. As I sank to the deck of my ship, Liyana rose with the sea, and traded fins for legs as she went from water to ship. Her arms encircled me as the ice around my heart shattered. I wept, great heaving sobs that robbed my breath, deafened my ears, and weakened me even more.

  “Sister, cry. Cry and mourn for the now, but know also that one day, you will raise Atlantis again. The sun shall shine and the flowers bloom on your home. Until that day, my kind will guard it from harm.”

  “I have sunk Atlantis, home of beauty and light. I have sunk Atlantis and banished myself forever from any home. My power is too great; wherever I go, those around me will not be safe.”

  “Burden or sacrifice, sister?” Liyana asked gently.

  “Sacrifice,” I answered without hesitation. “The choice was mine, knowing the outcome. I would choose so again.”

  Together we watched the sun rise to the east, spilling across the still, shining water where once my home stood. The ships of our enemies floated in the peaceful sea, but I could feel the grief and fear beating at me from every heart. Fear, fear of me. Hatred for me. Blame.

  I would send the ships to safe harbor, on a land not so very far away. A land green and growing, much larger than Atlantis. They could take so little with them that they would have to begin anew. That which caused envy from others was gone. They would be safe. They would live.

  And I would stay and guard Atlantis, until the time came for it to rise and its heirs to return.

  * * *

  Ameria Lewis has enjoyed indulging in literary escapism since she first learned to read. Writing was the next logical step. She has stories published in Stepmothers and the Big Bad Wolf, and One Thousand Words for War. When not working, writing, reading, or binge watching tv, she spends her time caring for her 4 cats and fostering kittens for a local cat rescue.

  If it had been a vid, it would have been a man that woke me.

  Grandfather had called me Princess when he’d first shown me the pod and told me what I would have to do. “Our Sleeping Beauty, waiting for the right moment to wake.” I’d wondered, then, who would find me, wake me, let my purpose unfold like a flower.

  I was a little disappointed to see that it was a girl my age. Concern for me, a stranger, shone in her dark brown eyes. Not that I would have killed a man; allies are useful, and meat shields essential when you don’t know what year it is.

  And not that I wouldn’t kill her, if I had to. But only if I had to.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. The angels said that, in old stories, and parents to babies. Were the angels lying, too?

  “Where…” That wasn’t the question, of course, but it was a start. It gave less away than the real question.

  “You’re in New Washington, safe in a dome.” She touched my wrist, glanced at a screen beside me. “I’m Sabi Mirza. I’m trained as a medic.”

  There hadn’t been domes when I went under, nor a New Washington. “The others?” I asked, although I knew I’d been alone.

  She shook her head, eyes bright with a sympathy I could use. “There was only you when we dug out the passage.”

  I sat carefully, allowing her to help me. It was better to look weak. “When is it?” I asked finally, the only important question. “What year is this?”

  She hesitated a moment, and I met her gaze firmly. “2393,” she answered at last.

  I had been in cryo for over a hundred and fifty years.

  She saw the shock on my face, and I let her hold me as I cried. It wasn’t feigned, none of it was. Oh, everyone I’d ever loved had already been dead when I went into that tube, but it had been over a century and a half.

  Now the people who had killed them were dead, too.

  * * *

  “My name is Rose,” I said when she brought me clothes, took me to a shower that had actual warm water. “Rose Elizabeth Dorn.” There was no sense in lying about that. They ought to be able to learn my name with a simple retinal scan, and lying about it would make them distrust me.

  Sabi didn’t make any noises about finding my family, which was comforting. Even if any had survived—and I knew they hadn’t—their descendants would be as much strangers as she was.

  When I was clean and dressed in fresh clothes—a tunic and leggings in crimson and gold—I paused to study my rescuer. She was shorter than me, a little, with slanted eyes, brown skin, curly black hair. No particular ethnicity that I could detect. I wondered if everyone was indistinct in this century, if my blond hair and blue eyes would make me memorable.

  Memorable is bad.

  She smiled and gestured towards a hallway. “The others are waiting for you. It is supper time.” She walked beside me but did not touch me. “I am sorry; this will all seem strange to you. My greater-family has claim to this dome and the rubble beneath it. That you were found here means you are family-by-right and have a claim on our hospitality if you choose.” She looked at me earnestly. “You really must, until you are strong again. If there is elsewhere you wish to go, we will manage a dowry for you.”

  I hid my expression behind one hand, as if overwhelmed, and nodded.

  The hall opened into a large room with multiple tables. I counted nineteen adults, five children, and the two of us as we entered. Weapons were scarce—cooking knives, glassware that could be broken, pottery that could be thrown. One other exit at the far end looked unguarded.

  A tall man stood and bowed to me as I approached. “I am Mirza Hasan, first shareholder in this family. We welcome you into our home.” His brown eyes were like Sabi’s and just as kind. I smiled tremulously and glanced around the room. Not a single angry or suspicious face. If the gods had actually existed, I would have thought they had finally decided to favor me.

  “Your kindness soothes my grief,” I murmured, something my grandmother had taught me, before. Show appreciation, but always remind them that you are deserving of their pity. From their expressions, it was successful on both counts.

  “Come, sit, and eat. You are welcome here,” Mirza Hasan said gently, and I nodded, and sat.

  * *
*

  Sabi tried to explain the Fall to me, but she had duties. To my secret delight she logged me in to a computer system to search out the answers for myself. There were a few articles looking back, but the most useful things I found were vids for small children, explaining history. There had been wars, a few, and diseases, more than a few, but what had finally crushed humanity down to the domes was both simpler and more complex.

  Babies weren’t being born.

  In the domes, one out of every four to six pregnancies resulted in a live birth. Outside of them, essentially none. There were a lot of things in the atmosphere to account for it, but it wasn’t just one, or just two, or just a dozen. There were literally hundreds of chemicals outside, impacting this.

  The entire population of the world was down to a few million people.

  The records of my family were surprisingly intact. We were painted as the villains, as the losers of a war generally are. The rival family who had destroyed us, however, were eventually considered our murderers. Some few even went to prison. I stared at their pictures a long time, longer than at the pictures of my dead relatives.

  If our enemies had children, grandchildren … it would be great-grandchildren at least, with no memory of the generation who had turned my life into hell. There might be some justice in killing them, but there wouldn’t be any satisfaction. They wouldn’t know why. That, grandfather always said, was a waste of a kill.

  I turned the computer off and stared at the ceiling, wondering what purpose I could find here.

  * * *

  We went to the city a few days later.

  I had had a fairly isolated childhood, but the city still seemed ridiculously small, a dome of a few thousand people. Sabi and her family traded materials they had reclaimed from beneath their dome for food and cloth and other necessities, while some among them traded labor for less well-defined things—utilities?

  I helped Sabi carry a crate of materials from the truck, an enclosed vehicle that looked like a cross between an old-fashioned minivan and a futuristic tank. She knew everyone we encountered, which would have been strange in the cities I had visited in the past. She introduced me to everyone, and I smiled and nodded and pretended not to follow the names.

  The town had expanded downward, under the dome, and there was a warren of passage-ways below the surface. I helped her lug the crate through them, commenting on how impossible it was to know which was which while I carefully cataloged every turn and marking. Good humored incompetence, my grandfather always said, left people too self-satisfied to distrust you.

  Sabi smiled and chatted with everyone we met until we actually delivered the crate. Her chatter dried up, and her smile went flat, and she just nodded to the man working in the little factory room.

  “Mr. Anders.”

  “Miss Mirza.” He nodded back, a skinny man, pale as me, with tufts of brown hair and haunted eyes. There was a band across his forehead, metallic, looking like it was fused with his flesh or maybe with the bone beneath. He looked at me, caged wolf to free, and looked away.

  “We can leave them here, Rose. Mr. Anders will take care of them.” She seemed anxious to get away, and I followed her, remapping the path in my mind to make sure I had it memorized.

  She paused after a bit. “Mr. Anders is one of the altered. He was broken, and he—he hurt someone. He’s fixed now, so he won’t hurt anyone else.”

  I processed that a moment. “The band on his forehead?”

  Sabi nodded. “They were invented soon after you—a long time ago.”

  I nodded back, my mind working on possibilities.

  * * *

  There were seventeen altered in the New Washington Dome. Twelve were for repeated theft or simple assaults, and I ignored them. Two were for rape, two more for the murder of an adult … and Sabi’s Mr. Anders was for the murder of a child. Aaila Mirza, a four-year-old who must have been Sabi’s baby sister.

  The device claimed to remove the desire to commit the crime rather than volition or intelligence. I doubted that. Lack of desire wouldn’t have made Anders twitch like a caged beast.

  I switched the computer to other matters, reluctant to leave too much of a trail. I wasn’t going to get to avenge my family; it seemed only right that I instead avenge the family who had taken me in.

  * * *

  I was blessed with wide eyes, short stature, a soft voice. People trusted me easily, liked the way I made fun of myself for my poor sense of direction. Sabi’s family was already popular, and these people accepted me as one of them. It was almost too easy.

  I didn’t dare go after Ander’s first, with his connection to Sabi’s family. Instead I picked the woman who had strangled her neighbor over a fight about radishes. I could not imagine anyone killing for radishes, but as I was only killing her as a cover, I didn’t feel that I should judge. She was guilty, and that was more than enough.

  The market day I proved that I could (slowly and laboriously) follow the route between greenhouse and the dome’s gate on my own, I was finally left alone with an errand I could do in a quarter of the time expected. A quick detour to the canning room where the woman worked alone, a quick twist of wire, and I had plenty of time to bring my supplies (including the now clean wire) to the greenhouse and return with fresh vegetables to the gate. Her body hadn’t even been discovered when we left for home.

  I was startled to see Sabi crying about the death the next morning. “Was she a friend of yours?” I asked, mildly perturbed.

  Sabi shook her head. “I doubt if she had any friends. But she was alive, and now she’s not. We’re one life closer to extinction.”

  Soft hearted sheep are frequently incomprehensible. I patted her arm and said nothing.

  I waited a few weeks for the next target, a man who had beaten another man to death with a crowbar. He, too, seemed friendless. He, too, worked alone, sheering sheep. I brought him a drink of water, bashed his head in with the hilt of a sheering knife when he turned away, and then carefully cut his throat into the barrel he was using to wash the fleece. Wiping prints, I resumed my supposed path to a completely different part of the dome, being sure to stop and ask for directions in the area furthest from the sheering pen.

  There was an even greater distress over this death, which irked me mildly. If you choose to be sheep and not defend yourself against the wolves, why do you get so upset if someone else steps up to do so?

  I was, though, looking forward to Ander’s death. He had wronged Sabi’s family as surely as the rival family that killed mine had wronged me. I considered a thousand ways to kill him, discarding one after another—too melodramatic. Too painless. Too quick. Too messy.

  I waited for a trip where no one in the family had anything to bring to him, nothing to tie us to the vicinity. My poor sense of direction was still the subject of much good-natured teasing, but I was being allowed more and more on my own. It was easy to slip below to the tunnels, to follow that path, a ‘borrowed’ pruning knife in one hand. I turned the final corner … and stopped. Sabi was waiting outside his door.

  “You can’t do this, Rose.”

  There was such quiet sorrow in her voice that I stopped. “He killed your sister,” I said, not even pretending to misunderstand.

  She nodded. “He was broken, and he killed her. Killing him won’t bring her back … it only removes one more life from the world. We’re so close to extinction. ‘Save one life, save the world.’” She reached out a hand to me. “Your heart is good, Rose. We can help you. You don’t have to do this anymore.”

  I could gut her in seconds, knock out Anders, hang him like a suicide with the knife in his hand. It was the sensible thing to do.

  “You think I’m broken,” I said instead, surprised at the hurt in my own voice.

  “We can help you,” she repeated. “You don’t have to be a killer. You can be who you were meant to be.”

  I smiled, the knife cool in my hand. Two steps, thrust in and up. “You think the violence is like a tu
mor in me, Sabi, something that can be cut out. It isn’t. It’s what I am. It’s what I was born for.”

  I raised the knife, held her eyes with my own. “You don’t understand, and you never will. You choose to stay a sheep in this pasture you’ve made for yourself, neutering the wolves when they appear. I can’t save you from that, Sabi. But I’m going to give you a gift. I’m going to give you your life.”

  I heard her sudden cry, but the knife was already turning in my hand. Cold as fire, it bit into my throat.

  * * *

  Hope Erica Schultz writes science fiction and fantasy stories for kids, teens, and adults. Her first novel, the young adult post-apocalyptic Last Road Home, came out in 2015, and she co-edited of the YA anthology One Thousand Words for War. Her stories have appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines.

  A soft rustle pulled Cress’s gaze up to the moonlit sky. A large shape hurtled down, a dark smudge against the moon-silvered branches. Cress braced her feet on the uneven frozen path and drew her sword. She cut the creature out of the air before it could peck out her eyes, rending head from body, and stepped aside to avoid most of the gore. The crow’s feathers and blood painted the snow black.

  One feather shifted. Cress felt no breeze against her face, yet the feather flipped and spun. She stepped back, raising her sword. More feathers were moving now, dancing back to the crow’s body. Dark blood streamed back into its neck. Its head and body reconnected like some strange child’s toy with detachable pieces. The creature hopped onto its feet, feathers smoothed back in place, and looked at her.

  She didn’t wait to see if it would attack her again. Cress took one beat to get her bearings, sheathed her sword and raced along the path. Running uphill, weaving through thick undergrowth and between wide tree trunks, she put one foot ahead of the other until she could barely breathe. She stumbled into a small clearing. This had to be the one she had been hunting for.