by Jack Alden
“You said there wasn’t a way.”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Tempest.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugs it off, fights to keep his voice steady. “No, D. I promised I would protect you. I meant it.”
It comes out like a prayer, an edge of pleading in his voice, but no one prays anymore. No one teaches religion. There are stories in our history books about all the religions that used to rule the world, but that’s all they are. Stories. In this world, basic human rights are denied. We don’t have votes. We don’t have art or open expression. We don’t have free will, not really; only the illusion of it. If a God ever existed in this world, he’s long gone by now. He can’t hear my brother. He isn’t listening.
Tempest’s voice doesn’t spark confidence or hope. Every second we sit here, my chest feels like it will cave in on itself, because I know he won’t succeed. We can’t fight the president. He knows about me now.
I am a rarity, the last remaining vessel carrying an invaluable genetic code believed to be extinct. GM20, the common name given to the genetic mutation associated with the twenty assassins of POINT. My father murmured it under his breath the first time he let me use combative weapons in training, staring at me in awe as the dagger sank into the target.
I don’t argue with my brother. I don’t tell him he’s wrong or that he’ll fail. I don’t tell him anything. I keep quiet at his side, both of us still seated on his bedroom floor, and let him believe he can change the way the world works, because right now, he really needs to believe in something. Something other than hopelessness, even if we both know hopelessness is all we have.
The Sanctioning Squad will come. They’ll take me to some research facility in The Dome. A team of doctors will drill my body for blood, for samples of anything they can find useful. My DNA will be manipulated, experimented with. They’ll harvest my skill directly from my veins. I don’t know when, but I do know they’ll come. They will take me, and they will kill my brother for treason.
I lock our fingers together. Squeeze as tightly as I can, tight until it hurts. This is how I tell my brother I love him. This is how I tell him it’s okay, even if I don’t believe it. And maybe, this is how some small part of me says goodbye.
***
What feels like an hour later, the tiniest knock on Tempest’s door rouses us from a stupor. Beck’s voice penetrates the silence. “Tempest?” He knocks again.
Tempest looks up at me. “We’ll find a way out of this, Dagger,” he says, giving my hand a final squeeze. “I promise. But we have to act like nothing’s wrong, keep Mom and Beck in the dark. You understand?”
I nod, and Tempest tousles my hair as if to say everything is fine.
When we open the door, there stands my little brother, skinny as a rail and naked except for the fuzzy, red boxer shorts Mom made him. His dark hair sticks up on one side, and his big, gray eyes stare up at us, wide and curious as always.
In one quick swoop, Tempest picks Beck up and pulls him tight to his chest. “There’s my big guy. I’m sorry, buddy. Let’s get you some clothes.”
He carries Beck to the bed, keeping his bare feet off the cold floor. It would be a tough road if he were to get sick. There isn’t much access to medicine in the Gutter, and winters here make it difficult to recover even if you do have medicine and a fireplace to keep you somewhat warm.
“Temp, will I ever be big like you?”
“Big like me? Oh, I don’t know,” Tempest says. “Dagger, what do you think? Will Beck ever be big like me?”
“Even bigger!” I plaster on the most normal smile I can manage.
“I don’t know,” Tempest says. “You’re kind of a shorty, Beck, like Mom, and you’re skinny as a pole. Flat as a wall. I bet if I turn you sideways, you might just disappear!”
He grabs Beck and flips him on his side, tickling him all the while. Beck giggles hysterically then slaps a hand over his mouth to keep quiet. As soon as he does, Tempest gasps and looks around.
“Beck? Where’d you go?”
Beck bursts into laughter and rolls onto his back.
“Oh! There you are!”
He’s easy to entertain, having lived a fairly sheltered childhood. Tempest and I have done everything possible to spare him the pain we dealt with as kids. And we needed to, because he’s different, our brother. Though smart and, in some ways, incredibly mature, he has the mindset of a five-year-old most days. He’s easily amused with childish games, which makes it easy for us to keep him happy, but also makes him vulnerable, and it isn’t just his mentality. Tempest was right, whether or not he was teasing. Beck was born severely premature, and he’s always been short and scrawny, nowhere near the height we were at his age. If something were to happen to us, he’d be unable to fend for himself. Untrained, unable to fight, unable to care for himself or our mother. The thought crosses my mind now because it has to. Something happening to Tempest and me is no longer a mere possibility. It’s a guarantee.
We never took Beck to the cave, because we thought we were protecting him. What if we weren’t? What if we were endangering him? We’ve left him completely defenseless and alone at only nine years old. What have we done?
The repetition of my name brings my focus back. Beck is staring at me as if I’ve suddenly gone deafer than him. “Sorry, what?”
“You have to leave now,” Beck says with as much authority as his tiny voice can muster. “No girls allowed, ’member?”
“Okay, I’m going.”
I turn to head out the door, but Tempest stops me, crossing the room in two giant steps. He whispers under his breath. “You okay?”
I don’t make eye contact with him, can barely bring myself to look up from the floor. “Not even close,” I say, and as soon as the words leave my lips, I’m out the door.
I take a breath in the hall outside my brother’s room. A deep one. My stomach stirs, nauseated, but I hold it down. There’s no room for fear. The past has already been paved. We should have been training Beck all this time. We should have been teaching him how to care for himself, defend himself. We should have done better, but we didn’t, and we can’t go back now. Beck needs us more than ever, so there’s no room for fear. No room for guilt. Do whatever it takes to protect him.
Simple as that.
***
The smell of roasted chicken and garlic washes over me, an aching reminder that I haven’t eaten since early this morning. Now, my gut is grumbling. I guess Mom hasn’t been cleaning after all.
I hesitate just inside the kitchen doorway. The large, wooden dining table my father made is set with my grandma’s nice china dishes and silverware. In the center of the table is a feast. My nose was right. Roasted chicken and garlic. But that’s not all. Sweet potatoes and squash. Honey rolls and sweet peas and creamed corn, too. I feel like I need to wake up, like I must be dreaming, must be seeing things.
My mother would have had to barter six months’ worth of knittings to make this kind of meal. She isn’t the impulsive type. She doesn’t even manage the money. Tempest and I do—we work for every penny and buy the goods Mom can’t barter for. Rarely does she even touch a penny of the family fund, and there’s hardly a day that goes by when she isn’t harping at us on our way out the door. “Be frugal!”
So, why the grand supper? What am I missing?
“Mom?”
She stands by the fire, warming some tea. She doesn’t look up at me. Doesn’t acknowledge me at all.
“Mom?” I move a bit closer. “Is everything okay?”
Still no response. I start to get nervous. First the meal, now the silent treatment. She’s never silent. I put a hand on her shoulder and start to speak again. But then she looks at me and the words choke in my throat, slip back down, and burn.
There are tears in her eyes. I haven’t seen her cry in years. Years. She picks and nags and pushes, but she never cries. For years, she’s held it all in, held it down, but right now, she doesn’t. Maybe she c
an’t. Something has pushed her over the edge, and the thought scares the hell out of me.
I grab one of her hands. “What is it? What’s wrong, Mom?”
To see her cry is heart-breaking. For most of my life, she’s been anxious and over the top, and maybe she hasn’t always been the best mother, the kind of mother we’ve needed, but she’s never been weak. You can’t lose your parents, your love, your child. You can’t keep standing after that, keep carrying it with you every day of your life, and ever be accused of being weak. Maybe I don’t know much about my mother, because she keeps a lot of herself on the inside, but I do know how strong she is. She’s the strongest person I know.
“Don’t speak to me as if I’m some sort of fool, Prudence.”
I reel back as she pushes my hands away.
“I know what you’ve been doing, you and your brother,” she says, wiping her hands across her wet cheeks. “Running off every day, dressed in all that ridiculous black.”
“Mom, I—”
“I was married to your father for fifteen years, Prudence, and I turned a blind eye with him, too,” she says. “I let him do what he believed was necessary. Training. Teaching my children how to kill. I didn’t agree with all his choices, but I trusted him to be smart. To be safe. And he was. But you, Prudence. You and your brother, you have no good sense in you. And now! Now, you—you—”
She’s frantic now, hands flying in the air, head shaking, tone steadily growing in volume. And I’m frozen stiff, shocked. All this time, she knew about the cave, about the training. About us. Yet she never said a word. Until now.
Gerta. She must have warned her the same way she did Tempest and me. Of course. It’s the only logical explanation for the outburst.
Guilt lodges itself in my throat, a lump so hard I can barely breathe around it. I never once imagined Tempest and I might be one of the many reasons she never sleeps, but here we are. The truth is bare on her face. I try to make my voice work but no sound comes out. All I can do is choke on the lump and gape. My stomach lurches. The room spins around me, and I’m steadied only by the large hand that settles between my shoulder blades. Tempest.
“Take a breath, Dagger,” he says. I force myself to open my mouth and suck in a blast of air, then another and another until my head feels less fuzzy and the pressure in my chest subsides.
My mother’s expression eats at me. She looks terrified, but more than that, angry. I imagine she probably feels betrayed, betrayed by her own children who would rather risk their lives and the livelihoods of their mother and brother than give up throwing daggers and building guns. The thought of it all sickens me.
I guess when you find something you love, something you’re good at, it’s difficult to find the flaws in it, especially something you’ve been doing your entire life, or most of it. I’ve been throwing daggers for nine years. Everything about sinking a blade into a target feels right to me. It’s a part of me, and maybe that’s why I’ve never considered the extent of what it could lead to, not once since my father died. Even if I had, would I have stopped? Would I have denied myself the only thing that makes me feel truly alive? The guilt, still stuck in my throat, tells me I wouldn’t have, and that realization brings tears to my eyes.
Tempest nudges me toward a chair at the table. I sit. Silent. What can I say? I can’t go back. I can’t change anything. I don’t know how to soothe my mom or even myself, because right now, I have nothing. Nothing but fear. Nothing but doubt. Everything I thought I knew feels twisted and tangled inside me, and now I can’t stop thinking that maybe we were wrong. Maybe we’ve been wrong all along.
“So, you know about the cave then?” Tempest crosses his arms over his chest. “That we’ve kept up with training since Dad died?” There isn’t even a hint of surprise in his voice, as if some part of him always suspected she knew.
Her voice strains like it might fail any minute. “I’ve always known,” she says. “I wasn’t happy about it, but your father believed it was for the best, and I trusted him.” She shakes her head. “After the bombing, when I realized you and your sister were going back to that ridiculous cave, I wanted to forbid it. I wanted to keep you here, safe and alive, far from that mess. It was a deathtrap, and I knew it. I knew what would come of it. But your father’s voice was in my head, telling me to trust your instincts the way I trusted his.”
With a deep breath, she glances toward Tempest, then me. Her gaze feels heavy, pressing into me, then she shifts and fixes her eyes on the wall as if she can’t stand to look at us. “So I kept quiet, and I hoped you were more than just a spitting image of him,” she says. “I hoped you had his brains, his wit. But son, you have been so careless.”
Tempest stiffens. His hands curl into fists, curl the way my stomach curls.
“Running around in broad daylight in that.” She waves a hand toward Tempest’s weapons vest. “Dealing illegally on the black market.”
“We did what we had to.”
“What did you think would happen? That you would never get caught? That you could drop your guard? Stop paying attention? Stop keeping to the rules your father taught you and never suffer the consequences? There are a million different ways the Elders can spy on you, and you don’t even take basic precautions anymore!”
“We’ve been careful!”
“You’ve been a fool!” Every word gushes across her lips as if some invisible dam in her throat suddenly broke. “You and your sister both. How could you be so careless with your lives? With Beck’s and mine? Did you learn nothing from your father?”
“What do you want from me?!” The words roar from my brother’s mouth, shocking, and steal the breath from my lungs. Until this moment, I’d never actually heard Tempest yell at anyone, especially not Mom. It’s always eggshells with her. He does his best to keep her content, but not right now. Right now, he’s the young boy he never got to be, the boy without a father, the one whose mother can hardly stand to look at him.
“I get it,” he says with a bitter laugh. “I’m not Dad. Don’t you think I know that?”
“Tempest,” I say, “maybe it—”
“No, Dagger.” He holds up a hand, silencing. Keeps his gaze on Mom. “I know you think I’ve failed horribly at trying to fill his shoes, but there’s been no one here to teach me. Dad is dead. Juden is dead. And you? You don’t even know I exist, except when I fail. And yeah, I’ve failed a lot, but I’ve also done the best I know how.” His voice cracks, a terrible sound that bounces between my ribs. “But I’ve taken care of you. I’ve taken care of this family. I’ve been the best man I know how to be.”
By the time he finishes, he’s stooped to her height, face a mere three or four inches from hers. He waits for her to look at him, to acknowledge him, anything; just once. She doesn’t.
Tempest lets out a sigh, hands trembling, and heads for the door. We lock eyes for a split second before he disappears into the Gutter, leaving only the loud reverberating slam of the door to fill the growing silence.
3
The instant Tempest is gone, my mother’s focus shifts. She doesn’t cry or curse, doesn’t even take a moment to reflect on what just happened. Her reaction is a wordless fit; one deep, sharp breath, then she begins bustling about the kitchen. The feast she prepared makes its way to the trash, dish by dish, several months’ earnings made waste in seconds, and all I can do is sit there and stare.
With every trip she makes, her silence cracks and crumbles just a bit more until she’s mumbling under her breath. The mumbling grows louder the longer it goes on until I can hear every word. Every pointed rant about her ungrateful, foolish children; her selfish, selfish children who couldn’t be bothered to consider the pain and hardship our actions would inflict on her. No one appreciates her. No one notices or cares how hard she works to keep the house clean and keep us fed and clothed.
I restrain myself from correcting her, from butting into her bustling tirade to tell her it’s actually Tempest and I who do the majority of the wo
rk. What good would it do? She’s never acknowledged her shortcomings as a parent, the way she curled into her grief and left us to pick up the pieces and make our own way in the world. She isn’t about to start now. It’s too easy to shift the blame and focus on our errors instead.
Just as what looks to be the last of the uneaten feast hits the trash, Beck appears at my side. I hadn’t even heard him come down the stairs. He slides his little hand into mine, and I instantly want to cry. The thought bubbles up without consent or restraint, the thought that this might be the last time I hold his hand. Or one of the last.
He glances across the kitchen, follows our mother back and forth, once, twice, then turns back to me. Likely sensing her mood, he doesn’t speak. Instead, he signs.
Shortly after the bombing, when we found out most of Beck’s hearing was gone, Tempest and I hunted down resources—books to help us communicate with him better. That’s how we learned about sign language. Sense impairments hadn’t been an issue in decades, nearly every condition having some form of treatment for correction, but we couldn’t afford those procedures. We didn’t even have access to them. Sign language was dated but effective. It filled in the gaps, and Beck developed his own special style of mixed speech and signing.
Did you forget to wipe your boots again?
His smile adds a hint of humor to the question. We all like to joke about Mom’s obsession with cleanliness. It’s really the only way we can keep a light heart about it, especially when she’s harping away at us about how filthy or disrespectful we are.
If only it were that simple, buddy.
I can feel the truth lodged just behind my tongue, ready to spill out, and part of me wants it to. We’ve hurt Beck enough already, thinking keeping him in the dark would protect him. It won’t, and at this point, I’d rather give him what time I can to prepare for what’s coming than wait and see the panic in his eyes when the Sanctioning Squad shows up at our doorstep, demanding our heads on a platter.