by Caroline Wei
“No,” I spat. “I’m glad she’s gone.”
I heard soft sighs, and then the padding of feet.
Clarice was quiet next to me, her arms wrapped around her knees. “You know—”
The walls around us shuddered.
I looked up, then back at Clarice. “What?”
“I thought maybe you should—”
The ground trembled.
I got up, slowly, spotting Malchin across the room, helping to bandage a little boy’s foot. His eyes connected with mine, and despite the situation, my heart gave a little tug.
The soil shifted around my shoes, rattling up and down, and the air vibrated. People around us, still sleeping, stirred.
Malchin’s eyes widened infinitesimally as the fire collapsed onto itself. “EVERYBODY UP! GET UP!”
I looked at Clarice, and she nodded. We both started yanking people up by their arms, shaking others awake. Galen stamped out the fire, and Adisa started grabbing objects left lying around on the ground.
“Leave it!” I yelled. “Get out of the house!” No sooner had the words left my mouth that something gigantic fell on the roof, making a booming noise. Everyone else startled awake.
“FOLLOW MALCHIN!” I screamed, pushing Clarice and the three girls she was pulling towards the exit. “Go!”
Disoriented people began holding on to each other, stumbling out of the house.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I mumbled. One by one, everyone—old, young, short, tall, plump, thin—filed out, some rubbing their arms, some already crying. I was sure the horror had barely begun. One boy, no more than eleven, sat by himself in the corner, sniveling into his sleeve.
I risked a look at the trembling ceiling and ran towards him, pulling him by the wrist.
“It’ll be okay,” I lied, “let’s just get you out of here before we’re both pancakes. What’s your name?”
The boy showed me his armlet. Oliver.
I paused as my vision clouded over with pianos, chandeliers, and playing cards gilded in gold. Nocturne in E Flat Major started playing in my head, the melody soft and haunting in my ears.
Now was not the time to have a memory.
“Come with me, Oliver,” I said firmly and practically dragged him out of Victoria’s signature house. The others were standing outside, gaping at the mass of snow on the roof.
The wind was blowing faster and faster.
“Are you sure this is still a Trial just about resilience to cold weather?” Clarice asked, her hair whipping around her face. Oliver buried his face into my stomach as snow started spouting at us from all sides of the invisible Cube.
“It’s fake,” I said, but realized I was wrong. Though simulated, the snow was very real—cold and sharp to the touch. And it was spewing at us like water from unseen showerheads all over the Cube.
The ground was moving back and forth, bucking like a wild horse, and I saw a mountain of white come rolling towards us.
“A snowball!” a toddler squealed behind me.
Oh
My—
“ALLE!” It was Clarice, her face flushed. “HOW DO YOU SURVIVE AN AVALANCHE?”
“Don’t run!” Malchin’s deep voice permeated the cold air. “You can’t outrun this. Try to swim with the current!”
It was like telling little kids not to go crazy in a candy store.
Everyone started running.
The Godzilla of winter came steamrolling in our direction, flattening the red plants underneath it. It was gaining speed now, and I couldn’t see anything that would save us. Malchin was right.
“Try to stay on top of it!” I yelled, repeating Malchin’s instructions, my sandpaper throat filling with wind. “Whatever you do, don’t go under!” The remaining people still listening were wide-eyed with fear. One woman had tears frozen to her face. The sight just about ripped my heart apart. How could anyone do this to us?
“Victoria, when I find you, I’m going to destroy you,” I promised to no one but myself as Malchin’s “BRACE YOURSELVES!” thundered in my ears.
The snow was soft at first, almost nice, rolling over my shoulders and tickling the tips of my ears. It enveloped me like a hug.
But then the hug turned tight. The tickling turned into stinging.
I. Couldn’t. Move.
The laughter of someone I used to know chased through the gale, accompanied by the crackling of a distant fire and the turning of crisp old pages. The whispered notes of a song. A banister, smooth and polished. The clicking of high heels. Crawling around inside a vent, spying on diplomats, listening to the violin.
I had to move.
I had to stay alive.
“Don’t let it get you down,” someone, like from a dream, said to me, the words quiet as morning.
I took a deep breath in through my nose and started fighting.
The snow was endless. I thrashed, my arms jerking out to stay above the flood. My legs kicked, fire burning along my calves, my face covered with cold. The tip of my nose barely stayed above the deluge.
I think there was screaming, but I couldn’t tell if it was from me anymore. It didn’t matter by then, because the snow was filling my mouth. I snapped my lips shut and tried to use the palms of my hands to push myself upwards. It was no use.
I closed my eyes so that my eyeballs wouldn’t get seared by a thousand tiny ice particles. The avalanche just kept coming, tossing my head and pushing at my arms and legs. I was practically a statue, unable to move, encased in my own stone facade.
This was the end of the line.
I was going to die.
Was I ready to?
My lungs burned. It would be so easy. To let the avalanche take me into its arms, to let the breath cease to move back and forth, back and forth. Then there would be no more Trials, no more pain, no more confusion over who I used to be versus who I was.
But who did I used to be?
No.
They wouldn’t take me like this.
With every single ounce of energy left in my body, I wrestled my way to the top, my head breaking through the surface of the snow, cold wind nipping at my face. Air rushed into my lungs, and I choked on oxygen and blood.
I was iron. I was steel. I was strength and courage mixed into one.
The snow had stopped moving, and the avalanche had lost its life. I struggled to push myself out of the still icefall.
It was just me.
There was no one I could see for as far as the white landscape stretched. Just little hills of slush.
“YOU!” I tilted my face towards the sky. “YOU ARE WEAK!” Breath ricocheted in my lungs, and my muscles were turning into rubber. “YOU WILL NEVER WIN!”
Five feet away, some of the snow shifted. I whipped my head in its direction.
More snow moved.
I scrambled over. “Hello? Is someone down there?”
A hand jerked out, grasping. I grabbed hold and yanked backwards, my arm and stomach screaming in tired protest.
A head of pale hair broke through, and then a forehead, then golden eyebrows. After that, a sharp nose and blue lips, shivering with cold. Victoria pushed herself up, snow dusting off of her clothes, her arms shielding a tiny child no more than three years old.
I scrambled away from Victoria, who was coughing now, little bits of white flaking off her chin.
The child’s arm swung limply, covered with burn marks from Trial One, still unhealed.
Victoria laid the child down, pressing both of her palms down on her little chest, pumping, pumping. She closed her lips on the girl’s and blew, and then went back to pumping.
The child didn’t respond.
I watched as Victoria went back at it, her compressions never faltering.
I stared.
The little girl began coughing, blood and ice slithering out of her mouth in rivulets. Her eyes fluttered open, and I realized they were a startling gold color. Relief came up in my chest to do battle with fury.
“Well, are yo
u going to start?”
I pressed my lips together.
“You know what I’m talking about, Alle. I’m the bad guy, aren’t I? I was gone before the avalanche for whatever suspicious reason. Now I’m here.”
She had been out saving a child.
One eyebrow arched, a gesture that seemed to me at once unfamiliar and familiar.
Victoria wrapped her arms around the girl, whose teeth were now chattering. “You can kill me if it would put you at ease, you know. Why don’t you?”
Two majestic thrones in a grand room flashed in my mind, one empty, one occupied by a phantom.
I swallowed my previous thoughts of revenge. “Why would you even suggest such a thing? That’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent.” I would not be like my mother. “Even if you are party to the perpetrators.”
“I had a memory too,” Victoria said.
A zephyr sang between us, in that way it does when nature is tired.
“I had a son. In the memory, he made beans on the stove that smelled like burned socks, and he needed glasses to read. He was no more than six, maybe seven, and he was too short to reach anything taller than a coat rack. But he was good at playing piano.”
I tilted my head.
“That piano sounded like the heavens had opened up.” Victoria’s eyes had fractured into nebulas, and her hands were fisted, whitening around the knuckles. “And I lived in a warm place. I remember that. There were gardenias that bloomed in the spring, and black-and-gold bees that would visit windowsills as dawn kissed the horizon.”
We both took a sharp breath in.
I peered at Victoria’s face once more. It was as razor-edged and pale as I remembered Mother’s to be, but there seemed to be something off, something different, that I couldn’t explain.
A hand shot out of the snow and grasped my ankle, and I screamed, falling backwards before I realized whose it was.
“Oh, no no no.” I grasped the wrist and pulled. Malchin grunted as he emerged, his black hair turned wintry. His broad shoulders strained the fabric of his shirt, his skin stained red, frosted over.
“Thank you,” he said roughly, his voice tattered. His hand brushed my face for a fraction of an instant before he pulled away. “We have to help the others.”
His words snapped me out of my reverie. “Right, of course.”
For the rest of the day, we tramped through the snow, looking for survivors. By the end, I was so exhausted I felt like a hollowed-out candle, wax and fire about to drip inside to every empty space.
There were so few alive.
Adisa clutched Anna to his chest, sitting next to Victoria and the girl she’d rescued. Beside them was a near-death Clarice and a woman trying to help an elderly man, who was barely responding to anything. There were no other children other than the boy called Oliver. No other people, either.
The creators of the Cube had managed to cut us down to ten. Bile filled my mouth.
“That wasn’t a surviving-in-the-wilderness test,” Malchin said, running a hand through his hair. “That was a natural disaster test.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know how we can prepare for any more Trials, Malchin.” Seeing the shivering, blue-faced survivors made any hope left within shrivel up. We were no match for them.
“One step at a time,” was his response, and he gently pushed my hand off of his shoulder. I stepped back, confused and a little stung. “Is everyone more comfortable? Do we need anything?”
Victoria murmured something about a fire, and before long we’d gathered what little fire fuel we could find. The sticks, broken off of plants, were too damp to really get anything going, so in the end I suggested body heat. There we were, huddled together in the wide expanse of nothing—waiting, waiting.
22
YALE
The palace was in a flurry of red, red, red. Crimson crowned every doorway, and there were gigantic, fake scarlet poppies in every vase. Even the maids were instructed to tie a red ribbon around their collars, the silk adorned with a bunch of tiny suns, the regalia of Rubrum.
Niveus couldn’t really afford to offend them.
I exited the palace through the servants’ entrance on the east wing, bypassing a few stable boys grooming horses. Mimi had sent me on an errand at the last minute because the incoming royals needed “real poppies at the table, not cheap red weeds.” There was a market square conveniently located close to the palace, filled to bursting with colorful vendors’ booths and busy shoppers. The closer I walked, the more I smelled the richness of vegetables, the tang of lemon juice, and the sharpness of cinnamon, all tossed up with the shouts of hopeful sellers. I sidestepped a pair of haggling women at a booth displaying an array of patriotic shawls, braided with white, blue, and silver cloth. There was even one with designs that looked sickeningly close to the Cube.
I stopped at the flower vendor’s shop, knowing the owner well. His name was Jordan, and he had served the queen for many years, trying to support his family. It was harder to grow flowers in Niveus than it was in other countries, given our frigid climate, but Jordan’s was some of the best in our nation.
“Yale!” he pushed a curtain aside and popped up in front of me, rubbing his grizzly chin with one hand. I could see the dirt packed underneath his nails, and I smiled.
“Hello, Jordan. Could I just get a bouquet? Poppies. Make sure they’re the biggest and reddest you have.”
“Sure thing—heard about all the festivities going on today. What’s the occasion?” He turned to signal to an assistant in the back, who nodded and ducked out of view.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said apologetically. The Rubrum royal family was here to speak with Adella Hernandez, but no one knew what the topic would be.
Jordan disappeared behind the curtain and came back with a flourish of vermilion blooms, wrapped in sparkly tinfoil. “You be careful in there,” he said jokingly, but his eyes held a note of warning. “Don’t want you getting in any sort of trouble, y’hear?”
I only returned a tight-lipped smile, giving a mock salute before easing back into the crowd. A nearby array of little frosted cakes beckoned, but I barely resisted. Such luxuries were not reserved for the palace staff to spend money on.
Someone bumped into my shoulder, igniting a trail of pain along my wounded back and nearly crushing the poppies in my grasp. I winced, adjusting my hold on them.
“Are those for the dinner tonight?” A girl with curly hair appeared in my vision.
“Amelia.”
“Well?” she attempted to grin, flaunting a basket of cleaning supplies. “You’re sure luckier than I am, Mimi never gives me those kinds of errands—”
“That’s enough.” I sped up my pace, not wanting to talk to her. The heavy weight of my outburst over the Experiment still sat between us.
“Oh, come on, Yale, I was just having a bit of fun—”
“Like you think everything is fun?” I whirled on her. “Even the serious things? The life-threatening things, maybe?”
Her bright expression faded into discomfort. “This isn’t about the poppies.”
“No, it’s not. Just—please don’t, okay? I’m confused and I’m tired and I’m scared all the time, and I don’t know what to do with myself. It makes me feel terminally ill whenever you or the other maids watch the Experiment like it’s a new drama series.” Amelia didn’t even know that I had recently crossed paths with treason.
“Okay, okay,” she said, putting her hands up. “I won’t watch it anymore, I promise. But tell me what happened with you and Prince Oliver that last time. What did he need you for?”
He was probably the last person I wanted to talk about.
“Nothing important,” I said, brushing it away. “We’re both going to be late. Hurry up.”
~.~.~.~.~
The royal family was having dinner in the main dining room, and only the best maids were allowed to serve them. Typically, Mimi would give me a break because of my back, but seeing as h
ow Adella Hernandez liked to make my injuries hurt a thousand times worse, she asked specifically for me anyway.
I winced as I balanced two trays of salads and a saucer of dressing, walking slightly hunched over to prevent the skin on my back from stretching. King Ichiro, a big man with fuzzy eyebrows, sat near the front of the table, next to his wife, Queen Meiyu. Across from them was Princess Malaya, known for her quiet beauty, wearing a pale pink hanbok, traditional dress from old Korea.
I slid the salads in front of them and placed the saucer in the center, where they could all reach. This dinner wasn’t half as bad as some that I’d attended before, when Queen Carlen was present. She could take my head for putting the forks and knives down after the salad plates.
I was glad that out of all the countries of the world, Rubrum was the one Niveus couldn’t cross. The royal family was famed for being kind and generous.
Just like Alle.
Just like Oliver.
I pushed both of them out of my head as a pang of guilt and anger seized my chest.
“Excuse me.” Queen Meiyu stopped me before I headed back into the kitchens. “Do you know when Dr. Hernandez will arrive?”
“Now,” boomed a saccharine voice, the double doors thrown wide open. Adella Hernandez appeared, wearing a floral gown under a white lab coat. Her hair was done up in a doughnut bun, glasses hanging from her breast pocket. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, most esteemed monarchs. Your Majesties and Highness.” She gave a low curtsy, and I heard her knees crack from across the room. Malaya, very indistinctly, rolled her eyes.
Adella pranced across the room and settled herself down right next to the princess, spooning a generous amount of dressing onto her salad.
“Did I mention how honored Niveus is to have Rubrum within her halls? I know it takes some getting used to—the cold, the food, the grandeur—it’s all so different. But I do hope all of you stay long enough to grow accustomed to our luxuries.” A Chesire cat smile stretched across Adella’s face. She must not have been punished so horribly by Carlen just yet.