by D. S. Murphy
“I did,” I said. “Mostly.” My leg was throbbing painfully, and I had a feeling I might have broken it when I jumped off the citadel walls. It felt strong enough now, but my body ached for elixir, like the healing wasn’t finished or the bone hadn’t set right.
We passed through the security measures and I raised my arms for the screening and the blast of UV light. Jacob and Steve were waiting inside, but Trevor pushed past them.
“Give her some space,” he said. “She needs to rest. Shit Em, is that blood?”
“It’s not mine,” I said, glancing down at the dark stain across my chest. My stomach clenched as I thought about what I’d done to Mary. We’d been friends once, or something like it. But that could wait.
Jacob looked at me expectantly, so I reached into the folds of my dark leather cloak. My hands shook as I retrieved the ornate metal key with the red ribbon.
“You found it,” Jacob said.
I nodded. It wasn’t all I found, but we could deal with the rest later. First we had to know what was in the chest.
“No thanks to the rebels,” I said sullenly. “Did you know they were planning to attack the wedding? Or curate Marcus?”
“Not all the cells communicate with each other,” Jacob said stiffly. I noticed he didn’t explicitly answer my question.
“It would have been good intel,” Luke said. “We were completely caught off guard. We could have been caught, or worse.”
“You had no reason to go closer to the ceremony. If anything, it should have provided a useful distraction.”
Jazmine grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into the wall, which was impressive given her size.
“You bastard,” she said. “You would’ve killed civilians. Chosen.”
“They made their bed.”
“They didn’t choose to be there. Not really.”
“You escaped. They didn’t. They get what they deserve.”
“You should have waited,” Trevor said. “Until we got back.”
“If you came back,” Steve said. “We still don’t know what’s in the chest, and we don’t know this isn’t all some elaborate ploy. The wedding was an opportunity we couldn’t afford to miss. Not only to possibly take out a few elite, but also to strike a blow at the king’s rhetoric, to show them the dark and violent truth upon which the citadel is built.”
“What truth, that the outside world is dangerous and full of violence? What’s the point of that kind of carnage?”
“To send a message. Something he can’t cover up or gaslight.”
“It won’t work,” I said. “It’ll just make the public more afraid. They’ll view the rebels as violent extremists, which will make them less likely to side with us.”
“Then they deserve to burn with those filthy bloodsuckers,” Steve said.
“Not all elite are bad,” I frowned. “Not all deserve to die.”
“That’s an opinion we do not share,” he growled.
“There’s no point in arguing about it now,” Jacob said, interrupting us. “The others didn’t see what happened. Is the king still alive? How many elite did the rebels take out?”
My skin prickled and I bit my lip.
“Last I saw,” Luke said carefully, eyeing me. “Someone moved too early. There was an accident just before the bomb went off, a lantern spilled, caught shit on fire. They cleared the stage before the explosion.”
Jacob sat heavily, stroking his goatee.
“So the king’s still alive then.”
I squeezed my fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. If I hadn’t stopped it, we could have killed the king, the chosen, the prince… everything altogether.
Instead, my first instinct had been to stop it. To save the elite, the other chosen. I was exactly what the rebels feared, an elite sympathizer. I didn’t believe in their cause. What was I even doing here?
“For now,” I said finally, holding up the key. “But once we have the antidote, we can turn the king back into a human, maybe turn the other elite as well. And we can be strategic. We won’t need to resort to violence or terrorism. At least, it’s a start.”
It still didn’t explain everything I found in Damien’s study, or the notes about the purification engines. Even if we got rid of the elites, we’d still need someone to maintain the engines, or all the compounds would end up like Quandom. Killing all of the elites wasn’t an option.
“You’re still blinded by loyalty to your elite prince,” Steve said. “It’s to be expected. After all, you were groomed for the role your whole life. I guess we shouldn’t expect anything else from you.”
“And what’s your plan, make all the compounds move underground, live like this – instead of the citadel or the compounds? You think they’ll thank you for that, for bringing down their society?”
“Freedom is better than slavery.”
“Not for everyone,” I said. “And not without a choice.”
“Enough,” Jacob said, pounding the table with his fist. “This conversation is pointless until we open the chest, and see if the antidote even exists.”
We hovered around the wooden trunk. Years in the ground had given it a greenish hue. Jacob hesitated, and I noticed the others take a step back. Then he inserted the key carefully. I heard the tumblers rotate as the lock clicked open. Then there was a sudden pop and the lid opened a crack.
Jacob lifted the lid and let it fall behind the chest. I leaned forward over his shoulder, then froze in confusion.
“What is this?” I asked.
There were a few pages with scrawled notes and formulas, but what caught my eye was a family photograph. It reminded me of something I’d seen in Damien’s room.
Jacob sifted through the old news clippings, a handful of pages torn from a notebook, and paused when something rolled out from under the scraps of faded paper stuck to the bottom of the chest. He pinched it between his dark fingers, then held it up to the light: a small vial of clear liquid.
Otherwise, the chest was empty.
A few months ago I’d known exactly who I was, but I had no idea who I could become. I never truly imagined myself getting chosen and moving to the citadel of lights, like other girls, but I also didn’t picture myself growing old in Algrave, having kids, going to renewal once a week to share small town gossip. The fences around the compound were meant for our protection, but they’d always felt like a cage.
And now, I was practically buried underground. After revisiting the citadel, the differences were jarring. From marble streets and ostentatious wealth to this crumbling ruin of the Before. At least with the purified settlements, people could walk outdoors and lounge in comfort.
There were corners to explore, tunnels that led to cave-ins or deserted store fronts, with broken signs and empty display racks. But each time I reached a new dead end I’d have to turn around and face reality: that I now lived in the ruins of a crumbling human civilization; that I was one of the outlaws, the rebels, who used violence to cause anarchy against the elite masters. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I’d seen what King Richard was capable of, on more than one occasion. I knew he had to be stopped, somehow. But did that mean taking down all of the elites? I couldn’t stop thinking about Damien’s ice blue eyes, and the look of anguish when he’d seen me at the wedding, through the flames and smoke. Or our kiss in the abandoned cabin, stolen, as if we were illicit lovers instead of engaged to be married.
Part of me wished it could still work out somehow, and it was more than just missing the comforts of the capital or training with the other girls who had been chosen. I wished it could work out with him, that Damien and I could be together. Some part of me appreciated the symbiosis of it all: he needed my blood to survive, and the elixir in his made me strong enough to match him.
But there were too many humans: a drop a week for the compounds, and it had been enough, at the time. But now that I’d tasted more, each day without elixir I felt empty,
drained and weak. The aches and pains came back, including the leg that I was sure had snapped during my harrowing escape from the citadel. My thoughts were sluggish, my mouth dry, and my skin itched constantly.
Jacob said these were just normal effects of the thirst, and they would fade. But then what – I’d just be a regular human, meant to live and die underground, feeding on the pale vegetables grown in the UV light, and always worried about the elite tracking us down and forcing us out into the poisoned ash?
We were all killing time, waiting for April to try and reverse-engineer the cure from the fragmented research we found in the chest. Jacob got tired of me pacing and kicked me out of the lab; he said it could be days, or even weeks before she figured it out. Besides keeping myself busy exploring, Jazmine, Camina and I practiced sparring like we used to in Master Svboda’s class.
Sometimes the other inhabitants of Havoc joined in with the training – we taught them what we could. It might be useful someday, though even with a fair share of elixir, I knew they’d never be a match for even a single elite, and probably not even one of the king’s dosed-up guards.
Others were less happy to have us there. We could hear the men grumble as we passed, and the women watched us suspiciously. It was worse than how they treated the new recruits or people who had escaped the compounds. We were chosen. We’d lived in the citadel. We symbolized everything they hated about the elites, everything they’d taken from us. Everything that we’d freely given.
It didn’t matter than I’d never actually slept with Damien. I didn’t ask the others. I was still treated as a whore or a prostitute, which in a way I guess the chosen always were. Brides to pay for the deal that had been struck by our forefathers; or as I’d found out, a system completely fabricated by King Richard himself, a bargain struck with children who were too young to understand what they were committing to. The myth I’d learned about the covenant being signed by the survivors of the war, given shelter and peace in exchange for blood, was a lie. Children were caught and educated, implanted with a false history and a reverence for their captors.
The second night back, Marcus returned with a warrant for my capture. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the picture. It looked like one of the portraits from Damien’s study. Is that why he’d been drawing me, for my wanted poster?
“Dead or alive,” Jazmine read, “for crimes against the crown.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “I didn’t plant those bombs. I didn’t go after the wedding. It was the rebels. I didn’t even know it was going to happen, until too late.”
All I did was clear the platform and save lives.
“Nobody will believe that, now. You were seen at the event just before the bombs went off, but even if you hadn’t been, you make a convenient scapegoat.”
“He’s also trying to confront the sympathy.”
“With what, me?”
“To some, you’re a rousing story. The rebel princess, beautiful enough to get chosen, to infiltrate Richard’s kingdom and then sabotage the trials by trying to assassinate the king.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“It’s pretty close,” Trevor said.
I bit my lip. I wanted to argue, but the others didn’t know that I’d tried to stop it, in order to save Damien. Guilt twisted in my stomach.
“It doesn’t matter what really happened, people love stories, and this one in particular has a fierce grip. People are talking about it everywhere. Some girls are even painting their hands, like yours.”
My stomach turned. My birthmarks had always been a source of shame, an ugly mark on my pale skin.
“I saw that at the capital. The other rebels, the ones who planted the bombs, they painted their hands first. Trying to pin it on me.”
I hated the idea of being a symbol for rebellion. People shouldn’t risk their lives to play revolution. It was too dangerous.
We took dinner in private rather than joining the lines in the mess hall. Trevor got potato soup and bread for us. I kept asking to go outside and hunt. I needed the space and quiet, but Jacob said it was too dangerous in the woods right now, so soon after the attack. I realized I’d taken the sky for granted. Poisonous or not, it was better than this.
I knew I should visit Penelope, but I hated seeing her chained up in that filthy cell. When I met her in the citadel, she was breathtaking, so elegant and fashionable. Besides she wouldn’t recognize me anyway.
April joined us after dinner. She looked tired.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“I’ve followed the directions as best as I can. I believe it might work. It should be ready tomorrow, and then we can test it.”
“Test it?” I asked, but I already knew what she meant: test it on Penelope, the half-starved elite downstairs.
I wished I could talk to her first and ask her what she wanted. It felt wrong to make the decision for her. But it didn’t much matter. As an elite, she couldn’t stay here without being locked up; and she couldn’t go back to the citadel, now that the king had executed her for being a traitor. At least as a human, she’d have a place here. Plus, she hadn’t chosen to become elite, it was just the only way Tobias could save her. I hoped she wouldn’t mind becoming mortal again.
Trevor hadn’t tried to kiss me again since the last time I pushed him away. Part of me was grateful, I had enough to deal with without his hesitant glances, the looks of intolerable impatience, like he was frustrated with me for not being with him. I could tell he wanted to hold my hand, but was trying to give me space.
And I hated that when I was alone in my bed, I wanted to creep into his tent and sleep in his arms, like we used to when I was little and we fell asleep after a day of building forts or slaying imaginary slagpaw.
I still couldn’t get over what he was, what King Richard had turned him into. It seemed like both a terrible curse, but also a powerful gift. Slagpaw were the only things that could fight an elite; the only problem was, they were no use against a strong compulser like King Richard or Tobias. In fact they could be a liability.
I’d been able to compulse the slagpaw away from Tobias this time, but only because I was charged up on elixir and caught him by surprise. A regular human or chosen couldn’t do it at all. It must be because I was a renitent.
Thanks to John Patten’s genetic experiments on my mother, she was able to give birth to me, in secret. My head still spun with questions, but it didn’t matter where I came from. I knew who my real family was. I couldn’t save the woman who raised me, but I wasn’t going to let the king raise my siblings.
I had to get them away from him, but did that mean bringing them here, to grow up in fear, buried underground? I wasn’t sure I had the right to make that choice for them.
I was sure the king was even stronger than Tobias, which meant, if there was a battle, he could turn Trevor against me like he’d done in the trials; force him to kill me, just as he’d forced Tobias against Penelope, or Damien against John Patten.
No matter how I looked at it, it felt I was destined towards a future of betrayal and heartbreak. I finally slept for a few hours, rolling over on the sleeping bag and thin matt, the coolness of the concrete in the winter felt good against the muggy, humid heat that seemed to permeate the closed off structure.
Small vents let in filtered air from outside, but it couldn’t combat the hundreds of heavy mouth breathers and I always felt out of breath down here, like I was choking on carbon monoxide.
My dreams were scattered: blood, ash, a face that I knew was my mother’s, even though it was blurred out. Then I was being chased by a dark shadow, with long teeth and bloody claws. Just when I thought he’d catch me, he paused and turned, sniffing the air. Loralie and Jamie were standing in a meadow, holding hands, looking at me with sad, wide eyes.
“You left me,” Jamie whispered. “You left us.”
A tear rolled down Loralie’s face, then she screamed as the shadow lunged.
/> I jerked awake, panting for air and shaking.
I got up for a glass of water, my bare feet against the cold cement in the darkness. The kitchen and cafeteria was next to the dining area; what used to called the Food Court, according to the faded signs. We didn’t have enough electricity to power all of the appliances, but the knives were mostly still sharp and there were all kinds of plastic dishes and utensils.
Past the mess hall, the main hall of the shopping area was like an underground street, lined with shops – the rebels had filled the middle section with a garden, fruit trees, and flower beds. The effect was calming, even in the dark, and the air was rich and soothing.
Kids had drawn pictures on the smooth tiles in colored chalk. I picked up a piece and added a row of stars. I’d never seen them, but I knew their shape. I’d taught Loralie how to draw them a few years ago.
I took deep breaths until I felt my heart rate calm down. Then I decided to check on Penelope. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t just craving elixir; that I’d never feed on her blood without permission. Jacob had collected the unused elixir after the last mission, but I wished I’d kept some for myself.
The hallway was empty this time as I crept into the garage and lifted the door to the armored truck. Something moved in the darkness and I blinked. The shadows looked different this time, and that’s when I realized someone else was here, blocking my view. The dark figure was bent over Penelope, holding her wrist against their mouth. Her long, pale limbs twitched, and her eyelids fluttered as she drifted near consciousness.
I gasped as Camina spun around, her silver eyes wild, blood dripping down her chin. She growled at me like a dog whose meal had been interrupted. I stumbled backwards, falling out of the truck and banging my tailbone painfully on the concrete.
9
The next morning I missed breakfast. I’d run out of the garage after discovering Camina’s midnight snack, unwilling to confront her in the moment, and struggling to process what I’d seen. Part of me thought it was just another terrible dream. But now in the light of day, I knew it was real, and that I had to put a stop to it. I wondered how long she’d been feeding from Penelope. No wonder she always seemed so calm and put together, so energetic in the mornings.