Rapture's Edge

by J. T. Geissinger

  He stepped closer, his voice beseeching, his brows drawn together. “This is why it’s so important the serum doesn’t fall into their hands. Why it’s so important we continue to fortify ourselves with weapons and keep hidden for now, until we have the stronghold built and we can invite the members of the other colonies who are tired of their own tyrants to join us. Then we can take revenge for what the Bellatorum took from us.” He lifted his hand, brushing his knuckles across her heated cheek. “What they took from you.”

  She swallowed hard. Her lashes lowered, and a slight breeze blew a stray tendril of hair across her cheek. Was it his imagination, or had she leaned into his hand? A surge of heat pulsed through his veins, victorious. Then her lashes lifted and she pinned him in her gaze, clear and cold as a dragon’s.

  “I definitely plan on taking revenge, Silas. On all my enemies, whoever they might be.”

  His hand on her face stilled, and he gazed back at her in arrested silence. Was she agreeing with him? Or was that a threat? She confused him even more with what she said next.

  “Thank you for what you did with Caesar this morning. He might have killed me. It kills me to admit it, but…you were right about him.”

  Now she sounded truly grateful, indebted even. “Eliana,” he murmured.

  “And you’re also right about children being blind. But I’m not a child anymore. Whatever the truth is, I’ll find it. Because real power doesn’t come from hatred. It comes from truth.”

  Silas almost laughed out loud at that. He had to bite his tongue to silence it.

  Power didn’t come from truth. Power came from the ability to manipulate outcomes to one’s own favor. Just as he had now done.

  She’d find out the truth about her father, and though she wouldn’t like it, he’d gain even more of her trust. Yes, killers did enjoy creating diversions. They did indeed.

  Poor, sweet Eliana. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

  He nodded solemnly, allowing his hand to fall from her face. Without another word she turned and walked slowly away, winding through the graves, dry leaves crunching like broken bones beneath her feet.

  It was something Mel said earlier that day that had done it. A simple story, awful but undoubtedly true, had made a tiny grain of doubt take root and push up an evil leaf.

  They were in the room where she slept—she didn’t refer to it as her bedroom, though there was a cot; it was more like a hotel room in purgatory, anonymous and cold—and Mel had been helping her into a new set of clothes after her bath. She’d napped for a while, but she was still exhausted, and her body was sore all over. Her ribs, they’d determined, weren’t broken from Caesar’s kicks, merely bruised. The bullet wounds on her hip and leg had already begun to heal.

  Eliana had recounted in unwavering detail all that had happened from the moment she was shot in the museum, and Mel had listened, unusually silent. When she’d finished with her story and sat staring at the old stone wall across from the cot on which they sat side by side, the last thing she’d said had been, “I keep coming back to something Gregor said, before we had to escape from his building.”

  “Which is?”

  “Assassins generally don’t have to perform surgery in order to get their marks to divulge information.” Eliana glanced at Mel. “Why would Demetrius take the time to do that? And why, when the rest of the Bellatorum showed up, did he let me go?”

  It was a long, long time before Mel answered. In the dim blue shadows of the room—there was no electricity in the building—her elfin face was very serious, almost austere. Finally she let out a small sigh, as if she’d come to some bleak, unwanted conclusion.

  “Do you remember the day we met?”

  This startled Eliana, it was so out of left field. She tried to think back, but couldn’t precisely recall. “Um…”

  “It was two days after the Christmas Purgare,” Mel continued, gazing around the room. “My twenty-first birthday.”

  “Birthday? I…I didn’t know it was your birthday.”

  She shrugged. “Why would you? You were the king’s daughter. I was a servant. A lowly handmaiden. It wasn’t important.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, both feeling the resounding truth of that simple statement. It wasn’t important. How things had changed.

  “I was terrified.” Mel laughed softly. “You were like this alien creature, so perfect and pampered”—she shot Ana an apologetic look—“and unlike anyone I knew. Six years apart in age, and worlds apart in every other way.”

  “You were very skinny,” Eliana gently teased, poking a finger into the firm, well-developed muscles of Mel’s thigh. “All knees and elbows.”

  “We were both skinny,” she agreed, nodding. “Skinny and innocent. Little skinny ducklings with our heads shoved so far up our asses we thought our shit was the stars.”

  Eliana laughed, a sound that seemed jarring in the cold, dusty room. “You really have a way with words, Mel.”

  She smiled. “It’s a gift.” She glanced sideways at Eliana, and her face grew serious again. “But I remember that day more for something else.”

  “What?”

  Mel looked at Eliana for a long, searching moment and then turned away, swallowing. She took a breath and in a low voice said, “It was the day my husband died.”

  Eliana started, shocked. “Husband? What—Mel, I never knew you were married! Why didn’t you ever tell me—”

  “No one knew. He was a half-Blood. Handsome as hell, with a great laugh and dimples you could get lost in. We weren’t supposed to be together, of course. I was a servant, and he was one of the best of the Legiones, being personally groomed by your father to enter the Bellatorum if he survived…” She trailed off into silence.

  “Oh no,” said Eliana quietly. “Oh, Mel. I’m so sorry.”

  “We had the same birthday. We never talked about it, the fact that I was full-Blooded and didn’t have to worry about the Transition, and he had a gnat’s chance in hell of making it through. We went ahead and got secretly married, both of us knowing we didn’t have long.” Melliane looked down at her lap. “I prayed so hard my Fever would come so I might get pregnant. So I’d have something to remember him by…” She swallowed and bit her lower lip. “But it never happened. At least we were together at the end, though. He said he wanted me to be holding his hand when…when…”

  She suddenly covered her face with both hands, and Eliana wrapped her arms around her shoulders. They sat like that for a moment, silent, still.

  “I never knew,” whispered Eliana. “You were so…composed when we met. You didn’t even cry. I never guessed you were going through that.” After a moment, Mel sat straighter and swiped at her eyes while Eliana crossed her arms over her chest and stared at her. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  Her face, always so lovely, hardened. She looked away. “Because your father ordered me not to.”

  Eliana gaped at her, astonished, but Mel just went on in this dead tone, avoiding her eyes. “He found out we’d gotten married. Of course he would, wouldn’t he? Never missed a thing, your father.” An edge of bitterness snuck into her voice, which Eliana didn’t miss. “He found me with Emil—that was his name, Emiliano—and made us swear to never tell a soul. He said we could stay together until…until the day came when Fate would decide if we should stay together or not. Afterward, only one thing kept me from killing myself.”

  Eliana’s voice trembled. “What?”

  Mel turned and regarded Eliana with haunted eyes. “Demetrius.”

  The blood drained from her face. She stood abruptly from the bed.

  “Not like that,” said Mel, guessing what her shocked expression meant; D was known to be a womanizer of the first order. Back in their old colony, he’d chewed through women like a termite chews through wood: relentlessly. “We were only ever friends. I know Emil never told anyone we’d gotten married because he knew the trouble it would cause, but somehow Demetrius got wind of it, or figured it out…I really don�
��t know. But after Emil died, he came to me every single day and held me while I cried. Just…held me. He never said a word the entire time, but knowing someone else knew how I’d felt about Emil helped in a way I can’t explain. He’d come to my chamber, and I’d cry on his shoulder, and when I calmed down a little, he’d leave. After weeks and weeks of that, I began to feel like I owed it to him to keep on living, like he’d invested so much time and effort in me it would be the lowest kind of selfishness if I repaid his kindness by slitting my wrists.

  “So I lived. And once he saw I was past the worst of it, Demetrius stopped his visits and never said a word about any of it, just nodded as he passed me in the corridors, like nothing had ever happened. But every year on the anniversary of Emil’s death I’d find a single white rose on my pillow, and I knew it was from him.”

  Eliana shook her head slowly back and forth. There seemed to be a weight on her chest, crushing her lungs, stealing her breath.

  “What I’m trying to tell you, Ana, is that man who handled me with such care, that man I barely knew who sat with me so patiently, that man who gave me so much comfort at the worst hour of my life is not the kind of man who would plot to kill the father of the woman he loved.”

  “He didn’t love me,” said Eliana instantly. “He used me. And you weren’t there. I saw him with the gun in his hand, Mel. I saw him.”

  “You saw him shoot your father?” Mel said quietly, looking up at her.

  Eliana’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t have to see that.” Color came flooding back to stain her cheeks. “I’m perfectly capable of putting two and two together when I see a…a body on the floor and someone holding a smoking gun. And don’t forget, Silas discovered his plot to take over my father’s reign—”

  “Yes,” said Mel bitingly. “Silas. That paragon of virtue.”

  “I know you’ve never liked him, but he’s been nothing but helpful, supportive. Even if he is a little”—she paused, remembering his calculated marriage proposal, the way he’d argued for her hand, all logic and no love—“astringent.”

  Mel shrugged, but her face was hard as granite. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I do know how he helps your brother with his little…problems, though. And I do know how he looks at you, E.”

  Eliana stared at her.

  “Like you’re dinner,” she said darkly. “A roasted pig, all trussed up and ready to eat.”

  Eliana’s skin crawled. Something about that sounded just right. She walked slowly back to the bed, sat down beside Mel once more, and leaned into her shoulder. Looking at the worn stone floor, the bare, shadowed walls, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Why tell me now?”

  Mel’s sigh was heavy. “Because you’d never have believed me, and I didn’t want it to come between us. What difference would it have made, anyway? Dredging up the past when nothing could change it? You and I have always been so good at leaving the past behind. But,” her voice faltered, and she glanced at Eliana, “now the past is catching up with us, and I think you should consider, really consider, the possibility that nothing is what it seems. And make your choices going forward accordingly.”

  Mel had left her after that, sitting alone in the middle of the empty room with memory and confusion a pair of snarling dark monsters inside her skull, one thing repeating itself over and over, relentlessly.

  Nothing is what it seems.

  To Eliana, that was the most frightening possibility of them all.

  This can’t be the right place, thought D, staring at his final destination from across the tree-lined boulevard. It can’t be.

  But, according to the dream he’d had, it was.

  The gothic Montmartre Cemetery, famous for being the final resting place of such luminaries as Degas, Nijinsky, and Zola, was built below street level in the hollow of an old quarry. The gated entrance to its sprawling twenty-five acres of tended gardens and tombs was on the quiet Avenue Rachel under the overpass of Rue Caulaincourt, where he now stood well hidden from the soft yellow glow of the streetlights in the shadows of a weeping willow. Perplexed, he looked up and down the street, hoping for more clues.

  The dream had shown the number two Métro stop at Place Blanche, the peep show hawkers outside the Moulin Rouge, the tiny guard shack beside the cemetery gate where visitors paid an entry fee of six euros to tour the narrow, cobblestoned walkways, gawking at the crypts and carved obelisks and blank-eyed marble statues and elaborate, crumbling monuments to the uncaring dead. In the deepening twilight of the hour past closing time, the guard shack was dark and deserted, the rusted iron gates locked.

  It had been just like this in the dream, down to every detail—him standing here under this tree with his hands shoved in his pockets, thin coils of fog snaking around his ankles, the sound of music and laughter from a bistro half a block away warming the quiet cool of the evening. But now that he was here, D had no idea what to do next.

  Accustomed to the capricious nature of this particular Gift of his, D decided to wait.

  He didn’t wait long.

  From down the street rumbled an ancient green Peugeot, belching smoke from its muffler in feathery blue plumes, one headlight flickering sporadically as if signaling in code. It neared and D stepped behind the gnarled trunk of the elm, watching. The car jerked and rattled to a stop at the curb and disgorged four young men, laughing and ribbing each other in expletive-laced French. They carried a strange collection of items: compasses, rubber boots, lumpy backpacks, flashlights, and a map they unfolded on the hood of the car that they began to peruse, arguing in a friendly way about some bet they had going.

  “I’m telling you there’s no way you’ll win, dude. You’ll just end up getting bitch-slapped and wetting your frilly pink panties.”

  A derisive snort. “Right, like I’m gonna let a girl beat me.”

  “That’s what Jules here thought, and he was limping for a week afterward.”

  A round of raucous laughter, to which the offended Jules responded, “I did not!”

  “Dude, you were totally hobbled.”

  “I tripped on a rock!”

  “Really? Was that before or after the Butterfly kicked your leg out from under you and slammed you on your ass?”

  “That was just a lucky hit.”

  “Yeah, she’s pretty lucky that way all right. You guys got your money?”

  Murmurs of assent were heard, boots and backpacks were donned, and the map was folded and put away. The men kept chiding one another as they locked the car and headed toward the cemetery, flashlights raking the ground in shaky yellow swaths. One by one, they leapt the low gate and were soon swallowed by darkness.

  “Well,” murmured D as he stepped off the curb and followed, “this should be interesting.”

  Friday night was fight night in the catacombs, and Eliana wasn’t about to let a little thing like bullet wounds, bruised ribs, and a rapidly deteriorating sense of reality deter her from participating.

  After all, she was the star attraction. And she really needed an outlet for the nuclear rage that had been building inside her all day.

  She hadn’t been able to find Mel after leaving Silas in the afternoon. The need to discuss what he’d said about her father was overwhelming, a gnawing compulsion that had her heart thrashing like a shark on a chum line inside her chest. Several things Mel had said—and her voice, eyes, and posture when she’d said them—had stuck with her also, irritating as a splinter under skin.

  Never missed a thing, your father.

  Because he ordered me not to.

  Made us swear to never tell a soul.

  Why? Eliana circled back to that one question, over and over. Why?

  Why had her father insisted Mel keep her marriage a secret?

  Why would Demetrius go out of his way to clean and stitch her wounds?

  Why were those assassins—who she’d honestly told Silas were not of the Legiones or the Bellatorum—trying to kill her?

  Could what Silas said abo
ut her father actually be true?

  Nothing added up. None of it. Uncertainty slithered, cold and reptilian, under her skin.

  By the time she entered the heated, cavernous enclave of New Harmony, she’d worked herself into an epic lather.

  The crowd was huge tonight. Bodies pressed against the bare stone walls, against one another, nearly everyone with a drink in hand, many laughing, dancing, shouting to be heard above the thumping bass and electronica music of a DJ who had set up a mobile turntable and speakers in one candlelit corner. It was nights like these—drinking and talking and being with humans—that made her believe all she and her father had dreamed was possible. No, they didn’t know the truth of who and what she was, the gritty details, but most of them seemed to know on some animal, primal level that she was different. That she was Other. They watched her, they moved aside to let her pass, they glanced away when her dark gaze met theirs.

  And still they came.

  They came to have fun and be entertained and escape the drudgery of daily lives spent at desks, in cubicles, behind windowless office walls. They came to lose themselves in darkness and adventure and the camaraderie of the underground. They came to fight. They came to dance. They came to play and drink and love.

  They came to live. And tonight, more than ever before, Eliana needed to live, too.

  A roar went up as she was spotted. She strode from the shadows of the connecting tunnel, her black trench billowing out behind her, a small, satisfied smile on her face. This was her home, and these were her people—related or not—and she loved it. She loved them all.

  “Butterfly!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd, and hundreds of voices took it up in a chant that swelled and crested like a wave. Butterfly! Butterfly! Butterfly!