by Dylan Steel
Mr. Strick stepped closer to Lita. Staring unsympathetically into her eyes, he reached out his hand and brushed her hair from her neck. Sage could see her stiffen at his touch. He leered at her discomfort and slid a finger just below her collar, drawing his finger back with the necklace chain hooked over it.
Lita turned away, gritting her teeth as she stared at a spot on the wall beyond the three men.
A sick grin spread over his face as he tugged on the chain, revealing the rest of the necklace.
Mr. Strick leaned even closer, whispering in her ear loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “This isn’t yours.” His eyes narrowed. He gathered a fistful of chain and gave a quick sideways yank, breaking the clasp.
The necklace fell from her neck, leaving a red welt on the side of her throat. She swallowed hard.
Mr. Strick handed the necklace to Mr. Gaztok with a look of satisfaction.
“I knew it would work,” he said smugly.
“I just thought it was pretty,” she choked out. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to—”
“Now, Ms. Lita. Lying is unbecoming of a young woman.” Mr. Gaztok spoke again, his tone dripping with disdain. “It’s also insulting. I don’t appreciate when people think I’m ignorant. And if you have this—” he held up the necklace still in his hand, “—I’m sure you know enough about me to know I’m not ignorant.”
She snapped her mouth closed.
“Did you know, Ms. Lita, that the recent slew of relics in the cataloguing room were not truly from an old, benevolent estate owner?”
Lita stood frozen in place as a horrific realization swept over her.
“Yes, that’s right,” Mr. Gaztok said almost soothingly. “I can see by the look on your face that you are beginning to understand. Those items were not actually relics. They have no real historic value or significance.”
Mr. Strick sneered as he watched the hope disappear from Lita’s eyes.
“The fact that you took this one is exceedingly interesting. You know, we filled the room with several enticing prospects, but only a Lawless rebel in quite deep would find any use for an item like this.” Mr. Gaztok paused, studying her face.
Her jaw dropped. She lowered her gaze. She was defenseless unless she wanted to turn in Sage, and she’d already made her choice. Changing her mind now would only seal both of their fates.
“Yes, we too have heard the rumors about the gems. That they’re ciphers to the old journals.” He narrowed his eyes. “That’s a lie, you know. There is no need for ciphers because there are no journals. It’s a lie we began long ago to smoke out rebels.” He tilted his head back. “And it’s still working. Obviously.”
Mr. Gaztok nodded to the other two men. “We’re done here.”
A sudden boldness overtook her as she watched them make a motion to leave. “Is that it? You’re going to tell me all this and just go? You’re not going to do anything about it?” she spat.
Mr. Gaztok turned back around slowly. “Why, Ms. Lita, I’m quite sure there’s nothing we can do at this point, wouldn’t you agree?” He spoke deliberately.
“After all, you’re mere days from graduating. Shunning you would do nothing to garner your loyalty in that small span of time—no. No, your loyalty will never lie with Eprah. We won’t do anything at all. We’ll allow you to graduate. And then, I’m quite sure, nature will simply take its course. A rule-breaker like you will surely determine your own future quite quickly.”
It didn’t seem possible, but Sage was sure she saw Lita’s face turn a shade paler.
“You’re going to let me graduate.”
Her breathing was shallow. She lifted her chin, fear turning to anger. “And then? Are you going to do it yourselves or just enjoy watching me live in fear at the factory? Do I get a few days? Weeks? Or months, maybe? Surely, you won’t let me survive a whole year. You can’t risk a filthy Lawless rebel birthing filthy Lawless spawn.” Her voice cracked.
“Lita…” Mr. Strick’s upper lip twitched.
“No! I want to know! Tell me how you’re going to kill me! When you’re going to do it!” She glared at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “Don’t I deserve that much?”
“That is quite enough!” Mr. Gaztok’s order echoed across the room, commanding silence. He took a step toward Lita, his eyes piercing straight through her. She couldn’t stop herself from taking a step backward. Even the headmaster looked terrified.
He lowered his voice. “You, along with the rest of your class, will find out your assignment and pairing at graduation. You know how this works. You’ll be given Chances accordingly.” He raised his eyebrow slightly. “And there are so many factors that go into determining those things. I’m certain it’s more complicated a process than you’re capable of grasping.”
Lita clenched her fists by her sides.
“If you’re going to sentence me to death, the least you can do is tell me how it’s going to happen.” She gritted her teeth.
“Ms. Lita, I’ve already told you everything you need to know. I don’t see how continuing this conversation further serves Eprah, and as that is what I came here to do, I will be leaving now.”
Mr. Gaztok turned and walked back toward the door, the other men following closely behind.
“Cowards!” she shouted after them. “Mindless cattle!” The door clicked closed, leaving her insults alone with her in the room.
Sage waited a few moments, expecting Lita to tell her when it was safe to come out, but she heard only silence. She wiggled out from beneath the bed and walked over to her friend.
Lita hadn’t moved. She stood rooted to the same spot, a vacant expression on her face.
Her hand rested on her bracelet for a moment before she grabbed Sage and pulled her into a tight hug.
“You’ll have to tell him what happened. Everything,” she whispered. “They’re going to be watching me closely, and I won’t be able to get to him. Tell him I did what I had to. Tell him.”
She broke away, holding Sage at arm’s length as she continued to speak in a low voice. “And tell him you need Bruggs.”
Sage’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What?”
“Bruggs. Tell Mr. Walsh you came in here just before me. He’ll understand.” Lita looked Sage squarely in the eye. “Say it back to me.”
“I need Bruggs.”
Lita’s head bobbed up and down. “Good. Now hurry. You need to find him now.”
Sage hesitated. “Lita, what just hap—”
She held up a hand. “There’s not time to explain. If you don’t want to be shunned until graduation, you need to find Mr. Walsh now.”
“But—”
“Go. Now.”
Sage looked up at Lita with sadness. Her friend had a hardness behind her eyes that she didn’t recognize. She rushed out the door and didn’t look back.
24. SENTENCING
Headmaster Alexander’s forehead glistened under the lights onstage in the Grand Hall. The pride he exuded standing in front of a large crowd was unmistakable. He lived for this kind of attention—it didn’t seem to matter to his ego that no one was given a choice about being there.
“As for those who will serve Eprah in the most basic and yet necessary, vital way at the manufacturing plants, the following students are assigned…” His voice droned on down the longest list of vocational assignments yet.
Apparently, the demand for new workers in these roles was always high. Probably because they didn’t usually survive that long. They weren’t considered worth giving many Chances to since their labor didn’t require much skill. They were quite easily replaced with the expendable members of next year’s crop of students.
Sage wasn’t surprised to hear Lita’s name listed among those assigned to the factory work. A week ago, that assignment would have been unthinkable for such a bright and talented student, but after the confrontation in the dormitory, it was inevitable—though only a handful of people knew why.
The leadership of Eprah couldn’t
let an act of Lawless defiance go unpunished—even by someone too young to be held fully accountable for her own actions. Since jobs weren’t officially assigned until graduation, her new position couldn’t even be considered a demotion. They were simply saying that she hadn’t proven that she would be a worthwhile citizen of Eprah.
In a sense, they were correct. Lita had no intention of serving Eprah over the Lawless faction.
When Sage had found Mr. Walsh just after Lita’s confrontation with Mr. Gaztok and the others, he hadn’t said much. He’d asked her a few questions, checked to make sure Lita had actually said “Bruggs,” and then forced her out the door almost as quickly as she’d arrived, instructing her not to breathe a word of what had happened to anyone.
He hadn’t offered any explanations or condemnations, both of which Sage felt she deserved. They hadn’t spoken since.
The knot in Sage’s stomach twisted harder. Lita’s job—the smaller number of Chances she now held—it was her fault. If she hadn’t been so short-sighted in taking the gem from the Archives, Lita probably would have become an incredible asset to the Lawless. That seemed impossible now.
Numbness had overtaken her most of the morning. She stared at the ground, only half-hearing the headmaster’s speeches. She knew it was too much to hope that Lita would be spared—that she’d get a real chance to make a real difference in Eprah as a full citizen.
But she’d realized she’d been holding her breath—hoping for it anyway—when she felt the last spark of hope leave upon hearing Lita’s name called during the ceremony’s final assignment.
Sage realized she needed to steady her breathing. Her mind was racing with too many thoughts—too much second-guessing. Penelope shot her a strange look from the seat beside her, clearly holding back a question she wanted to ask.
She refocused her attention on the headmaster’s announcements once again, just in time to realize that Lita’s pairing hadn’t been changed. She was still stuck with the chauvinistic brute she’d bested in the Bokja tournament, Kardel Willems.
The administration must have assumed she would be miserable with him anyway—no sense in sticking her with a different option that might wind up being more pleasant. Everything about her graduation assignments was designed to be the cruelest unofficial punishment possible.
Even apart from Lita’s secret sentencing, the entire day was horrifying.
Sage watched as couples were ripped apart and forced to be with strangers. She watched as those being paired with benefactors waited to hear the specifics of their fate. She clenched her jaw when she heard another girl’s name called in conjunction with Edward Grayson’s. If Rosalind hadn’t made it through an entire year with the man, she doubted that this poor girl would fare any better.
She couldn’t wait for it all to be over, but at the same time, she realized how selfish she was being. When the bracelets flashed onstage, activating the graduates’ full citizenship, Lita was no longer protected. Her death sentence had just been enacted.
25. UNPROTECTED
Two days before she was to advance to Level Ten, Sage snuck out to the rooftop in the evening to be alone. She wanted to be able to cry without having to explain herself.
Penelope could see that something had changed—that something was very wrong—but she hadn’t tried to stop her when she left without saying a word. She couldn’t be sure, but Sage thought she’d heard her cover for her absence with another student when she slipped out of the Common Lounge.
What Sage hadn’t counted on was seeing Mr. Walsh already standing on the roof by the time she got there. She hesitated at first but then made her way to him, standing beside him without saying a word. A few minutes passed before he broke the silence.
“I’m sure you want answers.”
A tear fell down her cheek as she nodded.
“She’s as good as dead.” Mr. Walsh’s tone was weighty. “If she wasn’t killed as an example before they even made it to their housing assignments, she’ll almost certainly run out of Chances before she can get pregnant, so she won’t be protected.” He gave a slight, grim smile. “And I can’t imagine she’d let Kardel get near her.”
Sage pursed her lips, staring ahead as she blinked back tears. She couldn’t deny her role in Lita’s fate.
“I tried to keep you out of this world. I thought it’d be safer for all of us if you didn’t know.” Mr. Walsh paused. “I was wrong.”
He looked at her solemnly. “If I tell you what you want to know, there’s no going back. Your life won’t be the same. Your burdens will be much greater than they should be for anyone your age.”
“My life hasn’t been the same since the day I saw my parents dead in the street.” Her nostrils flared. “My life hasn’t been my own for a long time now.”
He shook his head. “It’s more than that. You just don’t know it yet.”
“I’m ready,” she said. “I’ve seen too many people die. All because Eprah thinks it knows better.” Her eye twitched. “All I’ve seen is how they’ve gotten everything wrong.” She looked up at her instructor, anger flashing over her face. “All they do is hurt people. They take everything from us.”
A silence fell between them. Once again, Mr. Walsh was the one who broke it.
“At the end of last year,” he said slowly, “I was under a great deal of suspicion—and so were you, in fact.” He sighed. “My arrest—it was a way out for both of us.”
Sage looked at him in confusion.
Mr. Walsh shrugged. “Your interest in things beyond Eprah didn’t go unnoticed. Nor did my allowance of it.”
He frowned. “I gave you too many liberties, and that’s on me. I placed a great deal of trust in you because I knew Ethan and Isabelle—I knew the kind of child they would have raised. The kind of beliefs you were likely to hold.” His eyes were full of sorrow as he looked at Sage. “They were wonderful people.”
A lump rose in her throat. He knew her parents.
“But I shouldn’t have allowed you to do what you did without telling you more. It put everything at risk, and I see that now. It was naive of me to think otherwise.” He dropped his gaze.
“It was important that I was arrested not because I had been found out—but because you turned me in. There was no other way to remove suspicion from you. And I owed your parents at least that much.”
Sage gaped at him, trying to process everything he was telling her. Why did he feel he owed her parents?
Mr. Walsh’s voice caught. “I didn’t instruct her to, but Lita was the one who left the sacrisvita message in the girls’ dormitory.” He let out a slow breath. “Doing so put her at great risk of being caught, but she knew how important it was that I be cleared of the charges against me.”
He stared over the horizon. “Whether I like it or not, I’m in a rather pivotal role here. It would be a great blow to the Lawless cause to lose their only instructor at the Institution.”
He lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper.
“Lita and I are far from the only Lawless activists here. I won’t endanger any of the others by sharing their identities with you, but I want you to know that you’re not alone. You’re not the only one that hates Eprah. A lot of us do, and we’re working with many outside these walls toward a change. And someday soon, I hope, that change will happen. But it will take time. And there is always a great cost.”
He hung his head. “Lita’s not the first person to find that out in the worst possible way, and she won’t be the last. In fact, Sage, you became familiar with the cost before you even knew there was a fight.”
Sage’s eyes widened. “Are you saying my parents were—”
“Lawless?” He nodded. “Absolutely. They were among the more key players, to be honest. Losing them was not only a tragedy for you and everyone who knew them, but an incredible setback to the cause.”
She felt her heart stop. All this time, she’d had her suspicions, but no one had confirmed it until now. She looked back up at Mr. Wa
lsh, eyes overflowing with tears.
“It’s ironic, really, after everything we’ve done to protect you…” his gaze seemed to pierce Sage’s soul. “But I suppose it was inevitable with everything you’ve learned. The question I have for you now is—do you want to risk your life, any chance of a future you have, to join the Lawless cause and be a part of bringing down Eprah for good?”
***
The story continues in The Estate: Sacrisvita Book IV. (Keep reading for an excerpt...)
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-Dylan
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THE ESTATE: Sacrisvita Book IV - Excerpt
1. TECH
“What was that?” Sage reached her hand out, stopping Penelope in her tracks. She jerked her head toward the room they had just passed. A familiar image had caught her attention as she was walking toward the Common Lounge with her fellow newly-promoted Level Tens.
Penelope raised an eyebrow and backtracked a couple steps so that she could see what her friend found so fascinating, letting the crowd of students pass by. She peered past the door, her eyes falling on the unusual interior.
The room appeared to be lined with the same material that their databook screens used. Writing and symbols scrolled across the walls. A large round table sat in the center of the space, a translucent scene floating eerily above it. The view changed every few seconds, sometimes splitting a large image into multiple smaller three-dimensional ones.
“Oh, that?” She seemed almost disappointed. “That’s nothing. Just a tech classroom. We’ll be in one soon. We’re just not old enough yet.”