by Pintip Dunn
My breath hitches, and Carr stumbles. My father catches his hand and draws him up, so that they stand together, straight and proud.
And I understand. I understand everything. The last-minute change, the decision to have this private conversation in front of the rest of the colony.
The King has followed Carr’s life too closely not to be aware of his family situation. When he learned Mr. and Mrs. Silver wouldn’t be attending the ceremony, he must’ve decided to give Carr the next best thing. A father figure who loved him, even when he received nothing in return. Someone who was willing to help him in the past, with no credit at all.
The King wanted to honor Carr, and this was the best way he knew how.
The bot rolls back to center stage, bearing a crown of ivy and holly. Back on Earth, crowns were made out of metals and jewels. On Dion, a crown is constructed out of the most valuable, the most precious of our resources. The living plant.
My father picks up the crown, panting a little with the effort, and places it on Carr’s head.
“With this crown, Carr Silver, I name you as the Fittest, the candidate who is more than fit to die for the King.”
Never, in previous ceremonies, has the King put that spin on the description. More than fit. What does that phrase mean? Is he implying Carr shouldn’t be dying at all? Or are the words merely a slip of the tongue?
“I welcome you and your sister Astana into the shuttle.” He stops and takes a shaky breath, his stomach ballooning out with the effort. “Not as guests, but, if you’ll accept it, as members of your true family.”
Carr nods, his eyes glinting under the sun lamps. Thunderous applause erupts. I leap out of my tree-chair and smash my hands together. Never have I clapped so hard for anything in my life.
The King embraces Carr and then turns to salute the crowd. My skin prickles, recognizing before my eyes that something’s wrong. Is my father swaying? What’s going on? Some kind of orbquake?
Like a data feed, images of the last few minutes flash through my mind. The sheen of sweat on my father’s forehead. The small pant from picking out the crown. His body working overtime in order to breathe.
With a shout, I break out in a sprint. Before I can reach him, however, my father flings his hands out as if he can grab hold of the air.
And then he pitches face-first off the stage.
Chapter
Thirty
I rush forward to break my father’s fall, but of course it is too late. I see, rather than hear, the sickening crunch of his bones as his body smashes into the ground.
Someone, probably Master Somjing, issues a command, and as I stand, looking at what could not possibly be real, the bots load the crumpled heap of my father onto a stretcher and take him away.
The railing splits, and people spill onto the stage, shouting, screaming, jabbing fingers at Blanca and me.
“What happened to the King?” A man with a tattoo stretching across his cheek shouts in my face. “Where are they taking him?”
“Has he been ill?” A flagpole of a woman yanks my sleeve.
“He’s going to die. I know it.” A girl with twin braids bursts into tears.
Normally, Blanca takes charge of this kind of situation. I remember stuffing my knuckles inside my mouth when I was nine, as hands grasped my cheeks and pinched at my clothes. Even though she’d been bawling a few minutes before, my sister shoved me behind her back and said, with an authority she had yet to earn, “We are grieving our mother. Please respect our privacy.”
I wait for her to speak now. But she just wraps her icy fingers around my wrist. “Noooo,” she whimpers. “We can’t lose him, too.”
My intestines tie themselves into a knot. She saw him as invincible, and so did I. The King has a million resources at his disposal. People lined up to give him their healthy organs. Nothing has ever happened to him that can’t be fixed.
At least up until now.
Fear claws its way through my torso, slashing through my kidneys and lungs. But I don’t have time to be scared. Carr does his best to hold the people back, but they continue to push, to demand, to cry.
“Stop!” I pull Carr’s collar toward me, since I’m not mic’d. But I’ve never spoken to a crowd this size, and the platform tilts wildly. But Carr looks into my eyes and nods. The nearness of his skin centers me, and the dizziness melts away.
“That was shocking for all of us to see,” I say into Carr’s microphone, amazed at how strong and certain my voice is. I sound like I know what I’m talking about. I sound like I don’t have worms wiggling in my stomach. I sound like Blanca.
“Rest assured, we have an excellent medical staff. The King will be under the best possible care. We will update you as soon as we have any information. But for now, my sister and I need to be with our father.”
I drape my arm around Blanca and push my way through the mob. Carr steps in front of us and clears a path with his body.
“Take your time,” Master Somjing says as we pass. His hand is pressed against his earbud. “The King is with the medics now. He’s alive, but it’ll be a while before they know anything.”
We make our way across the courtyard. The crowd disperses, but we’re still hounded. The difference is, I’ve known these people all my life. I can’t brush them off. I have to stop and smile and accept their condolences.
“Your father saved my job,” one of the royal guards tells me. “I would’ve been fired as a trainee because I missed too many shifts. But your father listened when I said I had to visit my sick mother, and he got my boss to give me another chance.”
“The King is as kind as they come,” a food prepper says a few steps later. “I’ll never forget the time he gave the entire cooking staff the day off to celebrate the New Year with our families. ‘You’ve fed us so well the rest of the year,’ he said. ‘We can fend for ourselves for one day.’”
Another few steps, and an Aegis presses my hand. “Your father once saw me in tears, after my boyfriend dumped me. Even though he had better things to do, he listened for ten whole minutes to my tale of heartbreak.
Over and over again, people give me examples of the King’s kindness. I usually love hearing stories like these. But not today. Because these people are acting like the King’s already gone, and that’s not the case. I have to believe he’s going to be okay. I have to believe he’ll be our king for many years to come.
We finally arrive in the wait lounge, the same one where I passed a dreamless night on the concrete floor.
“Oh good, you’re here.” A medic enters the room, moments after I deposit Blanca on a tree-chair. “Mistress Barnett would like to speak with you. She has news about your father.”
My kneecaps evaporate, and my body shakes, a marionette without a master, and then I feel a hand on my back.
Carr. He’s still with me. Through all the people and all the words, he’s still here.
“You can do this,” he says, and I hear the echo of his words from so many years ago. This pain, too, will pass. Just hold on, and life will get better. It always does.
As much as that advice has meant to me over the years, it means so much more today, now that I know it belongs to Carr.
“You’re strong. Strong enough to steal my sister a meal. Strong enough to forego the veto. You’re the strongest person I know. You can do this. You can do anything.”
I don’t feel strong. But this is Carr’s gift. He gives other people power by the force of his vision alone.
I glance at my sister, who’s curled into the curve of the C-trunk. “Watch after Blanca?”
“As if she were my very own sister.” His eyes find mine. I don’t know to which family he’s referring. My father’s offer of a true family? Or something more permanent between us? How do I even begin to hope when his life might end in two months?
“Go. I’ll be here when you get back.”
I nod, grasping his hand for one last shot of courage. And then I follow the medic out of the room.
The head medic’s office is a simpler version of the Royal Office. The mural displays a single panel of the serpent’s story, the one where it whispers in the woman’s ear, its tongue forked and pointy. A glass desktop covers one bank of computers, and the chairs are half the size of the King’s throne.
I sit on the living wood, bracing myself to hear the bad news. My dad’s heart is giving out. His lungs punctured, his appendix burst. Any and all of his internal organs failing in a body too worn out for a transplant to save.
“Your father’s been poisoned,” Mistress Barnett says instead.
My clasped hands break apart, and the air leaks from my mouth. Nothing seems real. I feel like I’m in an abstract painting from Earth, about to melt off the canvas. “Poisoned?”
“Yes. Most likely, it was ingested. It could’ve been an insect bite, but the point of entry is usually obvious—swelling, discoloration—and there are no marks on his body.”
“But he is so loved.” I think of the waver in the food prepper’s voice as she told her story. The gratitude on the royal guard’s face. “Who would poison him?”
“I don’t know.” The head medic fidgets in the tree-chair. Her long silver hair gleams underneath the sun lamp, and she’s chewed off her lip paint, so only the red outline of her mouth remains.
I try to swallow, but my mouth is a child’s sandbox. “Will he get better?”
She straightens, as if relieved to get a question she can answer. “I don’t think the poison was meant to kill your father. The dose was too small. There’s the risk of cardiac complications, but at the moment, his main symptoms are vomiting, dizziness, loss of coordination, and muscular weakness. Those will subside in a few days. More worrisome are the two ribs he cracked in the fall. He’ll heal, but it may take months.”
I can’t breathe. The serpent laughs at me from the mural, each jab of its forked tongue a strike against my wounds. My dad has an enemy. Someone who wishes to hurt him. Maybe even kill him.
But for now, he’s going to be okay. That’s what’s important.
A few breaths later, I no longer feel like someone’s stuffed crickets under my skin. “When can I see him?”
“As soon as he wakes up. We’ve given him a sedative so he can rest.”
She walks me to the door, squeezing my shoulder in what seems like true sympathy. And yet, she voted against me in the Successor ballot. Every council member did. Can I trust her show of support?
Some people would say her previous vote no longer matters. My father overruled, and I was given the chance to prove myself.
But now that the King’s in the medical facility, with broken ribs and an unseen enemy, I think the past does matter. It matters more than ever to know who’s on my side.
…
Blanca’s sitting up when I get back to the lounge, her knees tucked into her chest in a vertical fetal position. The C-trunks bend their leafy boughs over her head, providing shade even though there are no sun lamps inside. “Well? How is he?”
“Not good.” I tell them everything I know, which isn’t much.
Carr puts his hand on my shoulder. “Why would someone poison the King?”
I shrug, and his knuckles brush against my neck. I want to shrug, again and again, so that I can feel his skin on mine. I want all of this to be a nightmare. I want to go back in time, a year or two or ten, to a past where no one I loved was sick or poisoned or dying.
But there’s no past like that, at least in my lifetime. As long as I’ve been alive, people have been sick and dying. Their deaths might be slow, like the Aegis’, or fast, like the Fittest candidates’. But until we get outside these bubbles and eradicate the need for the genetic modification, I’ll never know how it feels to live in a healthy world.
“Why would someone poison the King?” Blanca echoes. “Lots of reasons. Because they want his throne. Because they think the new Successor will have more favorable policies.” As she talks, her voice grows stronger, until she sounds like her old self again. “Or maybe because they don’t want Carr to die, and if there’s no ailing King, then there’s no need for a Fittest.”
She stares pointedly at Carr.
I gape. “Are you accusing him of poisoning our father?”
“No, not Carr. But maybe somebody close to him.”
My mouth opens even wider. “Astana, then?”
I want to tell my sister she’s wrong. The Astana I knew wouldn’t hurt an insect. But I can still feel the scratches on my face. I remember her hand reaching up for the latch to the bee cage. And I can’t dismiss anything.
Blanca tilts her head, looking at the leaves as if searching for answers. “Anyone could be responsible. The motivation could be anything—greed, jealousy, lust, hunger.”
“Maybe not.” A broad palm leaf flutters out of the tree, and I catch it in the air. With my other hand, I take Carr’s fingers. Luck and love, and those two things might not be enough to fight what I’m up against. “Today isn’t the first instance of treachery. If the same person has been sabotaging the trials, we can narrow down the motivation to something political. Something directly related to the Fittest task.”
The three of us look at each other, a round robin of stares that keeps our eyes bouncing from one person to the other. This is the first time I’ve brought up the sabotage in front of Blanca. The first opportunity I’ve had to gauge her reaction.
“Master Somjing mentioned some weird things were happening.” She flips her hair over her shoulder. “It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I have no idea what to think. Blanca is the consummate actress. Her denial doesn’t reassure me in the slightest.
Carr clears his throat. “Maybe we should figure out how the King got poisoned. I could talk to the royal cook, get a list of everything the King’s eaten in the last day.”
I turn to him. “Good idea. The list won’t be very long, since he’s given up his meals for Blanca’s patients, but he may still be eating snacks. You don’t have to involve yourself, though. This crime is more our problem”—I gesture between Blanca and me—“than yours.”
“I’m part of the royal family now, remember?” He extracts his fingers gently from my grip. “The two of you need to wait here in case your father wakes up. I might as well make myself useful.”
“He’s right.” Blanca’s voice is soft again, as though she’s remembered why we’re here. “You should let him go.”
“Okay.” My fingers thick, I unpin the personal insignia from my chest and hand him the gold-dipped rose, along with my unlocked handheld. “Take these. That way, they’ll know you’re acting under the authority of the Princess.”
Carr’s eyes flash. He swoops down and presses his lips against mine for one hot second.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says against my mouth. And then he is gone.
Blanca gives me a sideways glance. “Did you know that when an Aegis gives someone her personal insignia, she’s declaring her undying devotion to him?”
I did know, actually. I know that very well. I rub my fingers across my lips and wonder if Carr knows it, too.
Chapter
Thirty-One
Blanca and I wait in silence, as if we’ve exhausted our allotment of words for the day. But the silence is companionable rather than strained. Restorative rather than exhausting. Hanoi stops by briefly, to bring us our lunch and to give each of us a sympathetic hug. I’m not surprised by her embrace. The little I know of her suggests that she is a warm, loving person who communicates through her touches. But my jaw hangs open a little when she moves from me to my sister.
“Hey,” she says, squeezing Blanca’s shoulders. “Your reserves are waiting, underneath that steel. All you have to do is gather them.”
“I’m not very good at gathering,” my sister mutters with a vulnerability I’ve never before witnessed.
“You are,” Hanoi says. “I’ve seen you. When you thought nobody else was looking. I’ve seen
who you are then.”
She leaves soon after that, but I continue to stare at my sister. Who did Hanoi see that I haven’t? Is this person a stranger—or is she the old Blanca that used to play space explorers with me?
We still haven’t spoken when Miss Sydney shows up in the lounge an hour later. She wears her signature blue sash, but the arms that usually carry a basket of food are empty. In addition to the last meal of the day, her access to the food supplies have also been cut as part of my deal with the council.
A surge of guilt moves through me. Miss Sydney loves nothing more than experimenting with her recipes. But I had no choice.
“How’s the King?” Her words are hesitant, as though she’s not sure where we stand.
I’m not sure, either. I thought she was my friend, but an unknown enemy lurks in our colony. Until we find him—or her—everyone is a suspect.
“The King’s recovering.” I shoot a glance at Blanca. She nods, as if approving my vague word choice. “We haven’t seen him yet.”
“I won’t keep you.” She shifts from one foot to the other. “Cyprus Mead told me the King fainted because he was giving up his own meals. Not one meal every evening like the Fittest families, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Is that true?”
I nod. “That’s not the reason he collapsed, but yes, he’s been nutritioning with pills instead of eating real food.”
“I need to apologize, then,” she says. “I didn’t believe you when you said the food couldn’t come from anywhere else. But if the King himself is sacrificing…” She straightens, and her sash swings like one of the flags on the space shuttles. “I’ll help Cyprus talk to the other families. Some of them are so furious they’re forgetting themselves.”
So furious they would sabotage the Trials? Forget themselves so much they would poison the King?
Before I can ask, Miss Sydney and her sash back out of the room. I unfold my legs, which have gone numb from their criss-cross position. Blanca leans her head against the trunk and closes her eyes once more. Did she understand the importance of Miss Sydney’s offer?