by Caroline Wei
“Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”
I swallowed. “Um, we need to figure out what to do. This is Trial Three, and it’s obvious they’re trying to starve us or freeze us or something.”
“Survival.”
“Right. What’s our supplies inventory?”
“Close to nothing.” Malchin looked like a worried father. “All we have are the clothes on our backs and the food digesting in our stomachs.”
IMMINENT DEATH crashed into my head before I kicked it out of my brain. Instead, I focused on the glass slippers.
“I wonder what they can do.”
“Put them on.”
I smiled at him. “Would you like to do the honors?”
Malchin got on his knees and held up the first one. With both hands, he carefully fit the slipper onto my right foot. I was focusing so hard on trying to make my toes look somewhat attractive that I barely noticed the jolt of power that screamed up my leg at first. Afterward, it was impossible to ignore.
My right leg shot out in front of me, like it was some otherworldly creature attached to my body. Although both my legs were weak, my right foot started trying to get me to run.
“Whoa, Alle, you good?” Malchin asked, but I was off. I was pretty sure the heel of the shoe stabbed at least three people’s hands as I hobbled uncontrollably towards the exit of Victoria’s magic house.
The unforgiving wind outside ripped at my cheeks, and the cold started filling everything inside, inflating me like a balloon. What warmth I had absorbed fell away immediately.
Malchin ran out after me and grabbed my shirt, dragging me back inside.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
“Running, apparently!”
“Why?”
“I can’t control it!”
Malchin reached down and yanked the shoe off my foot. I collapsed instantly. Malchin gathered me up in his arms, and despite everything, my heart slammed into my ribcage.
“Are you done making a fool of yourself?” Victoria’s voice. I braced myself before turning around and found a very annoyed Victoria, and behind her, an incredulous crowd of men, women and children. Embarrassment flooded my entire being.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
“The people here are depending on you to be a leader,” she said. Her white hair was stuffed into a ragged bun. “But maybe they made the wrong choice. You’re only seventeen, after all. Instead of looking to see to everyone else’s needs, you decide to put on shoes.”
I winced.
“Victoria, stop,” Malchin said behind me. “How would Alle have known how to use her signature then?”
“So that’s your signature.” Victoria’s eyes crystallized. “High heels that make you a track star, when what we really need are supplies vital to our lives! How do you expect to beat the Creators if you’re so selfish?”
So selfish…
Victoria and everyone else dissolved until my mother stood before me. Her hair, on the darker side of blonde, was twisted into a wreath, and a heavy diamond necklace rested on her collarbone. Her dress was pale silk and both hands were clasped tightly in front of her.
“How do you expect me to call you my daughter if you’re so selfish all the time?” my mother asked me. Her eyes were narrowed.
The walls around us were hung with expensive oil paintings of old monarchs in velvet and furs. Nausea surged in my blood, but grief was probably the strongest emotion of them all. I felt splintered, unable to be whole because I could never know my own mom like other girls knew theirs.
“I was just late to one dinner,” I said, looking down at my feet.
“Do you know who was there? The king of Caesitas and his entire family!”
I knew how important they were to Mother. She needed their land, because Niveus was melting, and pretty soon we would all have nowhere to live. Staying in power while getting the best piece of Caesitas was a constant source of stress to her. The truth was, I was so busy trying to pick out the perfect outfit to impress Ollie, I had lost track of time.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured.
“But you don’t mean it. You’re no better than a palace maid. Oh wait, you act like you’re one of them all the time.” Mother looked disgusted, her eyes two pieces of ice set into her face. “You can’t just think of yourself all the time. People like you are better off dead.”
A blur of red hair appeared to my right. “We deeply apologize. Can she be excused now, Your Majesty?”
Yale, said my brain. That’s Yale.
“You can have her,” Mother spat and stalked off down the hallway, already pulling out a touch screen. Her long nails tapped against the screen as she arranged for one of her half dozen meetings or negotiations.
Yale tugged me down a hallway and pulled a single rose out of her dress pocket.
“From Oliver,” she said conspiratorially. Her expression was sweet, cheeks sprinkled with freckles.
A burst of warmth bloomed in my chest. “For me?”
“Who else would there be?” Yale smiled as I took the rose. “And Alle?”
“Hm?”
“You’re not selfish.”
Gasping, I snapped back to the present, gaping at Victoria. She was still scowling at me.
“Now what did you go all blank for?” Her face was taut as a string.
“I—I remembered something,” I said. Her eyes sparked with surprise, and behind me Malchin whispered, “Again?” The people behind Victoria started murmuring amongst themselves.
I curled a hand to my chest. I had a best friend too.
Looking back at Victoria, a feeling of dread crept into my heart. She looked so familiar—the planes of her face, the pale hair, the cold eyes, the slender figure—
“Oh no,” I said under my breath, and stood up abruptly, grasping both my slippers in one hand. “You’re her.”
Victoria frowned at me. “What?”
Sadness and anger warred inside me, two different colors of paint mixing on the same canvas. “How could you?”
Victoria’s face tightened. “Alle, what are you talking about?”
Even the way she said my name sounded like a confirmation. “You’re my mom!”
I strode towards her and rammed my high heels into Victoria’s right arm.
“Ow! What is wrong with—”
“HOW COULD YOU? How could you do this to us? To yourself?”
Malchin’s warm hands wrapped around my wrists, but I was having none of it. “She’s the one who put us here! Victoria’s the one who ordered the creation of the Cube! She’s a queen!” I whirled around to almost collide into Malchin. “She made potestrine!”
Victoria had gone completely still, her face drained of color. “You...you…what?”
“I had a memory,” I said firmly, loudly. “Yes, you can have memories!” This time to everyone watching. “And you look exactly like my mother.”
“Your mother’s a queen?” someone asked.
“You got mad at me for being late to a dinner—” I gasped. Oliver. The boy with the talking tree voice, with the locket and my picture. “—and you—I loved you.” I had loved Oliver too. I risked a guilty glance at Malchin, who looked deeply troubled.
“Al, don’t jump to conclusions.” Clarice was suddenly on the scene. She wove her way through the crowd toward me, extending a comforting hand, her face red with frostbite. “Victoria has done nothing but help us.”
“It’s a trick,” I sputtered.
“Alle, we’re all really tired. It could just be—”
“No, wait. Stop.” Malchin this time. He put out his arm between Clarice and me. “Alle has had these memory lapses before, and they’ve proved true.”
“You’ve had more than one of these memories?” Victoria asked, her voice trembling. “How is that possible?”
I grabbed the collar of her shirt and yanked upwards, even though she was taller than me. Anger made me feel ten times bigger. “Tell us how to get out of here.
Now.”
This time it was Malchin who ripped my hand away. “Alle, you need to calm down. We’ll sort things out later. Please.”
Even though I thought delaying would only make things worse, I relented. Glaring at Victoria, I whisked myself away. Everyone needed to rest. There was no need or energy for a spectacle, no matter how certain I was of Victoria’s true identity.
Clarice and Malchin followed me to a corner of the house. I sat down with a defeated plop.
Clarice looked at Malchin, and Malchin looked at me. He appeared almost sad.
“Your memories,” he began. “You didn’t tell me everything that you saw, did you?”
Guilt pierced through the hard cube of fury. “No.”
Clarice sat down too, pushing her yellow hair out of her face. “Can you tell us now?”
I sighed, keeping Victoria well in the periphery of my vision. I didn’t trust her in the least. Well into the night, I told Malchin and Clarice about the Garden of Eden and my father with the dimple. I told them about my mother, the queen, and her love for daisies. How it seemed like she had changed between the time frames of what I remembered. I told them about her talking to chemists, about potestrine, about her punishment to the worker woman who had violated her interests.
“There was a friend, too. When I lived in the palace. She had red hair and her name was Yale.” Clarice’s eyebrows furrowed here. “She gave me a rose from…” I looked at Malchin guiltily.
He frowned.
Well, there was no way out. I would have to do it, after all.
“A Prince Oliver? Of Caesitas?” I was amazed at how much I had gleaned from the outside world from those few snippets of memory. “Aren’t you the expert in Latin?” I asked Malchin, trying to get him to remember the veritas lolly stick incident, and also trying to delay the inevitable.
“Not really,” he said slowly, his eyes on mine.
“What does it mean?” inquired Clarice.
“Blue, I believe.”
I laughed. “The prince from the blue country, then.” A tense silence.
“Who’s Oliver?” Malchin asked.
I cleared my throat. “I just remember that he had a locket with my photograph in it, and that...ah…”
“Did you have feelings for him?” Malchin’s eyes looked fragmented.
There was no point in lying. “Yes.”
Malchin looked away immediately.
“But not anymore! Not anymore. I don’t think.” I swallowed. “You don’t have to worry about it, Malchin…I mean, I don’t even know him.” I gave a half-hearted smile, but at this point even Clarice the Unflinching was looking awkward.
“But if your memories were given back—and I mean all of them—would you still say that?” Malchin waited a beat and then looked back up. It was impossible to hide from him, and he knew it. The truth was reflected in my eyes.
How would I know?
I called to mind the scruffy, brown-haired boy and the lopsided smile. With the thought of him came a rush of sunshine, music notes, and card games, stories that I had lived but didn’t know even existed.
The silence was confirmation.
“Alright.” Malchin got up. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Alle.” Then he walked away.
I followed him with my eyes until I couldn’t stand it anymore and turned back to Clarice.
“Well, you’ve really done it now, princess,” she said. “You should start a class about getting a boyfriend and losing one, all in two weeks! Let’s make it a buy one get one free deal, and sign me up, because there are a lot of eligible bachelors—”
I punched her hard in the arm.
17
Yale
“Yale, have you seen this?” Amelia, a fellow maid who worked with me, ran over, a touch screen in one hand and a feather duster in the other. Amelia was a happy-go-lucky girl from the country and had arrived at the palace only a few months prior. She talked often of her family and her two huskies, but more about all the back-breaking work she’d had to do at her family farm. We’d hit it off since she came, and I often thought Amelia treated work in the palace like a vacation.
I straightened from my task of scrubbing the floor with a sponge. A break was much needed.
Amelia brushed her curly hair from her face and showed me the screen. A reporter from a Niveus news company was on, a stack of papers in her hands.
“Good morning,” she said, nodding at the camera. It was another Amnesia Experiment report.
“Amelia, you know how I feel about—” I began.
“Just watch!”
The Niveus reporter adjusted her head set, smoothing down her already pristine hairdo. “We have with us today a very special guest—Adella Hernandez, head of the Amnesia Experiment.” The camera shifted to the stick-skinny woman with the plump face. She was dressed in a pale blue two-piece, a snowflake insignia on a sash across her chest. The smile she gave the camera made me regret eating breakfast.
“Good morning, Belle.”
“Good morning, Dr. Hernandez. Would you mind giving us a little intel on the leaderboard right now?”
“Yes, of course.” Adella adjusted her sash, and I squashed a surge of hatred for her stupid face and stupid sash and stupid job. A chart appeared behind them, displaying revolving names in red text and a points system with various categories. One was labeled ‘Tolerance for Pain,’ and another was called ‘Charisma.’ “In the lead right now is our very own Princess Alle. She’s doing very well, but the most honorable Malchin has just been demoted to third place. Replacing him is the esteemed Victoria, who is very close to taking first.” Adella giggled into her hand. “It’s all very exciting.”
I scoffed.
“That is very exciting.” The reporter turned back to flash a smile at the camera. “And we have a special clip for our viewers, featuring Princess Alle. If she keeps on displaying her leadership and wise decision-making skills, she may very well prove herself a worthy future leader of our great country.” Adella’s eyes folded into themselves, so brief I almost missed it.
The camera switched to a video, and my breath seized up in my throat as Alle’s face appeared. Her hair was windblown, her face bitten with wind, and she was instructing people in the Second Cube, talking about fire. She was still as kind and good as ever, but with a certain callousness to her that was inevitable to girls forced into her situation. Her eyes, though, had stayed the same, reminiscent of the soft-hearted girl I knew.
The clip changed scenes abruptly and now depicted Alle in a defeated heap on the floor, clinging onto Malchin, two glass slippers strewn on the ground. She was heaving from exhaustion, and Victoria was standing in front of her, hands on her hips.
“Are you done making a fool of yourself?” Victoria asked, her tone threaded with knives.
The video cut, and Belle and Adella appeared on screen again.
“Looks like Alle will be falling from grace before long,” Belle said. She winked at the camera, and a clip of two players in brown and white uniforms kicking a soccer ball flashed on. “Next up will be a play-by-play analysis of the match between The Blizzards and The White Griffins from last week. Tune in after this short commercial break—”
I shoved the touch screen away. “Amelia, please. Are you kidding me? I hate seeing that kind of stuff.” And yet I knew I couldn’t resist. I’d been keeping up with every single TV special.
“Okay, but this is sorta big, Yale. Don’t you have a favorite? The girls and I think Malchin, definitely, because he’s so dreamy—I mean, have you seen how his hair looks when it’s wet?”
“Can Malchin become king of Niveus? No,” I snapped. “The role has always been Alle’s. That’s the whole point of that dumb show.”
“So your favorite is Alle.”
“It’s not about favorites!” I yelled. My voice bounced off the walls, and I lowered it, whispering furiously. “I don’t care what the queen says. That’s my friend, and it’s horrible, what they’re doing.”
&
nbsp; Amelia’s eyes widened. “Yale, you need to be careful when you say things like that.”
A part of me was mortified at what I’d just done. Since being abandoned at the palace, Queen Carlen had been the only mother figure I’d ever known, though she’d changed with the years. Besides, speaking against Her Majesty could mean immediate execution, but what kind of person would I be if I just stood by and let this happen to Alle? What kind of person would I be if I agreed?
“You were Alle’s friend?” a voice asked behind me.
I froze, and Amelia’s mouth fell open. She hurriedly stuffed the touch screen into her apron and held out her feather duster like a weapon.
“I have a shift upstairs,” she said hastily, and scurried away.
I turned around and curtsied. “Your Highness.”
Prince Oliver straightened his cufflinks. “Yale Heinz, right?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“How well did you know Alle Frost?”
“We were very close.”
“There’s no need for that.” Oliver waved at me, still dipped in a curtsy. “Please.”
I straightened hesitantly. “We knew each other since we were babies.”
“You grew up with her?” Oliver asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Just Oliver is fine.”
I chewed on my lip, uncomfortable.
“Then you loved her, didn’t you? It was impossible to know Alle and not love her.”
“Yes. She was like a sister to me.”
Oliver stared at me for so long I started shifting on my feet. There was no telling where the cameras and microphones were in this hallway. Goosebumps pricked my skin as Oliver opened his mouth.
“Wait,” I said. “Whatever you have to say, you can’t say it here. Come with me.” I started walking down the hall, and I heard Oliver’s footsteps follow. I led him to the maids’ quarters, then hung a sharp left and walked outside. The air was crisp and cold, as it nearly always was in Niveus. In the distance were multiple buildings, propaganda and advertisements playing across their facades in bright, technicolor hues. The giant blue logo for a big company, Niveus Vitrics, flashed on, followed by a smiling civilian holding up a flag. Farther out, a school bell rang, the ringing sharp and clear. It was expected to snow tomorrow. Alle loved snow days.