by Caroline Wei
“Get to your senses!” It was Yale. She slapped me. “Alle, come on!”
I was sobbing beyond control, my entire body still in revolt. Yale felt around in my dress until she pulled out a pair of crystal slippers. Funny, I couldn’t seem to remember them being there.
“That’s from the Experiment—”
“Yes I know, Oliver, help me get them on her!”
I lunged at both of them, trying to get to Malchin. He was on the ground, surrounded by too many people.
Oliver slid one shoe on, and Yale the other, and suddenly I was running. It’s hilarious, I thought almost hysterically. This whole thing is too funny. One thing that I couldn’t control was overriding something else I couldn’t control.
I flew up the staircase and then down the hallway, trying to call to mind Clarice’s instructions to me before she was taken away by guards. Elevator, library, 1314, basement.
I couldn’t stop long enough to properly look for elevators, so I took more stairs. I was sure I would twist an ankle, but it was the least of my worries. I prayed that Malchin was still alive, hoping with all my being that it was true. What was I supposed to do with myself otherwise? What kind of rotten person would I be?
I slammed open a pair of doors, startling a servant, and sprinted past the music room, a study, and a conservatory full of plants before coming to the library in all its old, dusty magnificence. By then, I had enough wits about me to knock for hollow sounds, all while running around the room in circles like a madman. There was no librarian, but there were cameras. I threw books at their lenses until I was satisfied they were cracked enough.
At last, I pulled on a thin red volume in the shelves and something whirred deep within the wall. I had to run around two more times before there was a proper door, ejecting itself out of the wall, with a keypad right under the doorknob. At 1314, it flashed pale blue and I pulled down on the handle with all my might, nearly collapsing. A long dark tunnel awaited, and I barely had time to take a breath before my glass slippers made me take off again.
It seemed like forever was passing underneath my feet, a whole lifetime left behind. I could never go back to how things were before, because I remembered the timid girl I used to be. I remembered every frilly dress and diplomatic dinner, every romantic serenade from Oliver and every thrill when I was sneaking out with Yale. Could that Alle even fathom what I had done?
I didn’t even realize I was in the laboratories until I tripped over an electrical cord and face planted.
“What is this?” A man in round spectacles and a gray dusting of beard helped me up. “Young lady, I’m afraid you’ve wandered very, very far from the ball.”
I ripped uncontrollably out of his arms and ran myself into a wall, my legs continuing to kick. How was I supposed to explain to him that I needed an antidote if I couldn’t even talk? How was I supposed to know he was on my side?
A woman with midnight skin and hair tied back in a pouf peeked out from behind a computer, her honey eyes widening at the sight of me. “Oh my—Don, hold her arms and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.” She hurried off somewhere while I struggled.
“What is the matter with you?” Don inquired, his hands like manacles on my forearms. He was stronger than he looked, and I was thankful for it.
The woman came running back, and I almost collapsed from relief when I saw a golden vial in her hand. She dribbled the contents over my lips, and I sank to the ground, kicking off my shoes.
I felt like I could sleep a thousand years.
“Now, missy, this can only last you half a day, you got that, half a day—”
“I’m well aware,” I gasped. I straightened out my dirtied ball gown. “I was sent here by Dr. Ironstrike.”
“Ironstrike?” Don rolled his eyes, which were a startling blue. “She was supposed to help us negotiate for a pay raise months ago—”
“Clarice is currently in prison for helping me!” I shouted, enraged. “I need to get out of here.”
The laboratories had walls of concrete, and it was dull, undecorated, with bad lighting and a couple of black desks, computers, and those spinny chairs with wheels. It looked like they extended much deeper, into a wider network, but the front foyer, at least, looked mostly deserted except for Don and the woman. They looked completely shocked, as if coming to the same conclusion at the same time.
“Emilie, you don’t suppose—” Don started.
“She’s not—” the woman said.
“Princess Alle?” Emilie asked, running a hand through her curly hair. “Your Highness, please forgive us, we haven’t kept up to date with the Experiment, mostly we’ve just been down here—”
“Like a bunch of hermits,” Don added grumpily.
I stood up, trying not to act like the terrified little girl I was.
“Please help me find a way to escape.”
Emilie and Don looked at each other. Don was shaking his head.
“My lady, if Queen Carlen finds out we had any hand in this, our heads will be hanging in the dungeons soon enough. Now, we don’t know the circumstances for why you’re here, but this is treason you’re asking us to commit.”
“Is it still treason if it’s coming from a princess?” I huffed. “I’m sorry—there’s just no time. I’m a danger to the crown prince of Rubrum if I stay here any longer.”
“Malchin Rednic?” Emilie asked, fanning herself. “Why, I’m the president of his fan club online—”
“Not the time, Emilie,” Don cut in.
“So it’s true,” Emilie said, not missing a beat. “The Experiment really has ended.”
I was incredulous.
“You’re the queen’s chemists. Don’t you know everything?”
“Absolutely not,” Don said clippily. “The queen is a very secretive person, and we’re mostly behind developing potestrine. The higher-ups got the task of developing the Complex and the signatures. Mostly we just stay underground following Her Majesty’s orders.”
I stared at them both, dressed in white lab coats that reminded me so much of Clarice. I pushed the bile in my mouth back into my stomach.
“You work with potestrine,” I said slowly. “And your loyalty is with Queen Carlen.”
There was a moment of tense silence. Emilie looked very, very nervous.
“Princess Alle, you’re not quite what we remember,” she said cautiously.
“Don’t waste my time!” I yelled, emotion overcoming me. I took a deep breath. “Are you going to help me or not?”
They looked at each other, concerned.
“Of course we will,” Don said kindly, scratching his salt-and-pepper beard. “Yes, of course. You’ll probably need more of the antidote—well, it’s only half an antidote, the real one would last you a lifetime. The queen forbid that anything more than what we have be manufactured.”
Emilie took my hand.
“Don’t be afraid, Your Highness, you look rather flustered.”
“It’s not you I’m afraid of,” was all I said.
Don sat me down in a chair near Emilie’s desk.
“Have you come close to finding a more lasting cure?” I asked, peeking at Emilie’s computer. She shook her head.
“Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. The last ingredient is found in North America.”
“Why wait? You could probably fly out to Indicum anytime—”
“Oh no, no. Not Indicum, my lady, North America. The continents are decimated from the World War, it’s much too radioactive to be safe. Plus, we’re not even sure what we would be looking for, probably something plant-based. Anyways, by the time we found it there, our skin would have melted off our bodies.”
“Our eyes glowing green,” Don said goofily, pointing at his spectacles.
“I’m sure,” I said drily, but the sarcasm was only a cover-up for the despair I felt inside. Would I never be free from wanting to hurt Malchin?
I couldn’t ever be with him, not safely, anyway. Even with a lifetime supply of an
tidotes, what if one day I forgot and slipped up? Malchin would die.
He was already dead.
Tears threatened to choke my vision.
I was such a failure.
“What are these, anyway?” Don had picked up my glass heels and was holding the pair in his hand. An overwhelming fondness for them swelled in my chest.
“They’re my signature,” I said, holding them close to me. I was a cavern. I was a sinkhole. I was a ravine. “So there’s no way I can be permanently cured.”
Emilie paused in her mouse clicking.
“Well…”
“The way potestrine works,” Don said, pushing up his glasses, “is that the chemical is synced specifically to Queen Carlen’s brainwaves. Whatever she thinks, must be done, to whoever has ingested the chemical. Basically potestrine is based off of her thought process. There are different types of it, of course. We used her willpower to formulate potestrine that would induce amnesia for the Experiment, and we used another version of it in the second trial—”
“—the one that made people insane,” I said, shuddering at the memory. I remembered a wild-eyed Clarice, tied up in a room by herself. Then I thought about the diamonds and the potestrine that must have been in them, causing the consumer to bend to Mother’s will.
“Precisely,” Don said, going over to Emilie’s computer, “I always said that was a bad idea, didn’t I, I told them not to do it but Her Majesty wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“You did not,” Emilie argued. She typed something on the keyboard. “Honestly, you’re so pompous all the time…”
Their conversation faded as I made my way deeper into the laboratories, holding the glass slippers in one hand, my heart in the other. My feet dragged, my steps drunken. I could feel my pulse in my wrist, and I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.
The labs were dark and kind of creepy, with individual rooms full of computers with blinking lights. Other areas were sectioned off with hazard signs, and there were storage rooms full of safety equipment. I could still hear Don and Emilie’s bantering voices when I found a shelf jammed with curious objects. There was a rack of test tubes, a tray of goggles, and a stack of thick papers, bound in red ribbon. The color red immediately reminded me of blood, and I gagged before tearing my gaze away. There were a couple of haphazard pens, even someone’s phone. I touched the cracked screen, nostalgic and trying to focus on anything other than the monster that I was, other than Clarice alone in the dungeons and the sight of Malchin bleeding to death.
There was also a jar of dried daisies.
Seeing them reminded me of the Amnesia Experiment, of a dead boy I had to bury. Sabaa and her crimson-stained hair, her pregnant belly. Carmen and her lovely eyes. Galen. Anna. Green grass and then frozen tundra.
I picked up the jar of daisies. This cured Clarice’s madness.
The petals were paper-thin, translucent, the stems sickly green. There had no doubt been potestrine in the bee drones, Don had said so himself. If the daisies could help Clarice, couldn’t they help me?
Something crashed and Don and Emilie’s voices ceased.
“Where is she?” someone said, chilly.
I almost dropped the jar. Of course she found me.
“Your Majesty.” Don. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“Don’t play with me, Dr. Reese. You know where the princess is.”
There was a sigh.
“That we do. She just seemed so kind, my queen, we’d never really met her in person before—”
The sound of a hand cracking across a face. I flinched, fear seeping to my bones.
“Dr. Reese, irrelevant. I got the alert from you two only minutes ago; why did it take you so long to warn me?”
“Our apologies, Your Majesty.” Emilie’s voice. “She’s back in the labs, but we’re not sure what she’s doing.”
“You should have kept a closer eye on her! She could have escaped by now.”
My fingers around the jar turned white, but I couldn’t feel any pain. Clarice had said not all of the chemists were loyal to Queen Carlen. I guess I hadn’t found them.
The sound of Mother’s footsteps was what jolted me awake. I was pretty sure I had found a real antidote, and I wasn’t about to mess up my chance.
I reached up to the rack of test tubes and prayed there was some yellow liquid in them, like the sun shining through the darkness. They were empty. I darted down the hallway, peeking in rooms, cursing myself for forgetting where Emilie had retrieved the cure. The click of heels seemed to echo at me from everywhere, trapping me.
I reminded myself to breathe.
“I already see you, Alle,” Mother said from around a corner. I almost squeaked in fear. “It’s over.”
I threw open a door and cried aloud when I saw a rack of antidotes. I grabbed a random vial, uncorked it, and shook a daisy inside. Mother was already in the room, her face looking like it was drained of blood, ghost-like. She was holding her silver knife in hand, almost bored.
“Put down that vial, Alle.”
“Never.” I crushed the daisy with my fingers, hoping it was mixing well, hoping that I wasn’t mistaken in what I was doing. And yet, from the slight widening of Mother’s eyes, I knew I wasn’t. Excitement and panic mingled in my belly to shoot through the rest of my body. I was so close.
“Daisies were my favorite flower,” I said quietly, trying to be calm. “They are my favorite flower. You were the mastermind behind potestrine, Mother—so tell me, why did you make this the other half of the antidote?”
Her eyes flickered.
“That’s none of your business.”
“I think it is!” I pushed down my anger. “This is my business, because it’s flipped my life upside down.” I looked into the vial, and, satisfied, downed it with one gulp. A burden fell off my shoulders, an entire trainload, floating off into nonexistence, leaving me free.
Mother looked almost limp.
“So you’ve done it, then, haven’t you,” she said, barely a whisper. “You’re really good to go.”
“Why did you make so many of those little weapons?” I demanded. “The diamonds, the drones from Trial Two—was it all for power?”
“Not all of it.” The woman standing in front of me looked like a broken porcelain doll, her ball gown torn, her makeup ruined. She looked tired, not at all like the commanding presence she was just a short while ago.
Understanding suddenly hit me.
“It’s my father.”
Her head shot up.
“What—”
“I never knew what happened to him,” I said. “Not after he disappeared, and you didn’t tell me why. You left the whole world in the dark! You left me in the dark.” I wanted to hit something, throw something. My body felt like a balloon about to burst. “I have a right to know how he left! I’m as much his daughter as I am yours!” My voice was threatening to crack. “And you weren’t always like this. I remember now.”
The ground shifted beneath us, trembling, like a warning. I reached out behind me to hold onto a desk.
Mother’s lips looked like frozen roses.
“Your father was a commoner,” she said.
I stilled.
“He didn’t have one drop of royal blood in him. My parents didn’t approve, because they were prideful people. He owned a bakery with his family, and when I was younger, I’d always make an effort to buy from there. He was always dirty. Always dirty.” She laughed, a hurt sound. “He wore charcoal streaks on his sweaty face like it was a part of his everyday clothing. But I loved him, I really, really loved him.”
I felt like we were standing in a tunnel, and my mother’s words were echoing into my own life, reminding me of the thoughts I’d had about Malchin not too long ago.
“We decided to get married. By then, my parents couldn’t really do anything—I was the queen. It was freeing to hold that over them. It was a magnificent wedding, like you wouldn’t believe. I made sure everything that money cou
ld buy was there. He was crowned King Ravi, and I was his steady wife. There was no way I thought anything could change, not when happiness seemed like a permanent fixture of our lives.”
The floor underneath us shook again, with more force. The very earth Niveus had built her foundation on was telling us it was weakening.
“The Experiment wasn’t supposed to end like it did,” Mother said, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “We were forced to close it down because of the earthquakes. Even though everything was supposed to be under control.” Her eyes flashed. “I’ve had control over too little things in this life, Alle, and you’re not about to ruin it for me.”
The lights above us flickered.
“You’ve had control over everything since day one,” I said, angry despite the situation. “You were hungry for it.”
“That’s only what you see. You can’t control death. You can’t control emotions, you can’t control pain and fear.”
“You can control emotion!”
“You’re too young to understand it! Even after the Experiment, you can’t understand it. Ravi was sick, really sick, and he couldn’t get out of bed. None of the doctors knew what was wrong with him. He couldn’t talk, he couldn’t eat, he was just lying there, white as the moon and breathing fast. In the end he could only look at me with those torturous eyes, like it was my fault. Do you think I could control that?” Mother pressed something in her ear. “I’ve located her,” she said. “Prepare the cell.”
“No, Mother, wait,” I said, feeling like there was something in this story she wasn’t telling me. “Dad died because he was sick?”
She grabbed a monitor on a table and slammed it into the ground with such force, I nearly jumped.
“NO! Do you think something as stupid as an illness could fell your father? He was a hefty man, unstoppable, invincible!”
“Then what happened?”
“I killed him.”
There were people running into the labs, the sound of voices, the clanging of boots and armor, but I couldn’t hear anything. The ground quaked again, pushing me to my knees.
“I had to.” Mother was wild, pulling at her hair. “I had to. His eyes, his eyes—he had beautiful eyes, he was begging me, what could I do, he was in so much pain—I had a knife with me, I don’t know why, I wasn’t a violent woman—it was so clean, so quick!”