Green Jack

by Alyxandra Harvey

  Chapter 16

  Jane

  Jane came to so quickly she leapt to her feet before she realized she was too dizzy to stand. Searchlights blazed and curfew emergency lights flashed red, adding to the disorienting chaos. She couldn’t see the transport, or her friends, or even her guard. Chaos boiled in the street.

  Her mind went black, trapping her there until someone slammed into her. She fell, a boot slamming down on her hand. Pain stabbed into her fingers as someone else kicked the side of her knee. When she finally got to her feet again, she tripped over a sprawled body. There were raw bite marks on the back of his neck.

  The crowd surged forward, carrying her along. Fires burned above, dropping embers onto their heads. She didn’t know the geography of the Core, only knew one direction: out. The sky tower of the Directorate headquarters stabbed at the stars, but it was too far away. Mounted soldiers plunged between the protesters gathered in the centre of a crossroads, heedless of skulls and spines. A wall of tear gas drew inexorably closer. She had to find a place to hide until the riot was contained, someplace better than behind a maple tree.

  And then all she could see were brittle leaves, slapping at her face and scratching at her arms as she was pulled between the branches. Her head bumped against the trunk, vines curling around her throat.

  Jane had managed to get herself taken by the only ones worse than the Protectorate and the rioting Elysians: a Dryad.

  She hung from her ankles, using some kind of braided rope and vine as a lasso. Her irises were a strange acidic moss-green and her hair was mostly tangled leaves and branches, woven with what looked like finger bones. The branches were strewn with more bones, the remains of anyone who had dared stray too close to her tree nest. Jane wasn’t entirely convinced that the red glistening rope further up wasn’t made of human intestines. She tried to speak through the pressure of the vine across her windpipe. “I meant no disrespect.”

  The dryad hissed. She was beautiful the way nightshade, henbane and mistletoe berries were beautiful; dangerous and deadly. Jane could only think of the Garden, of being forced to breed little Green Jacks, with no guarantee that they wouldn’t turn Dryad. She could almost imagine she was right now being hanged by her own daughter. She was dimly aware that she was gasping for air, that the lack of oxygen must be meddling with her thinking.

  Either way, this was the City— where everything and everyone was food.

  And everyone, Directorate included, was always hungry.

  The riot continued to roar below them. Protestors dropped in their own blood, rare bullets flying like the plates her mother used to throw at her father. That was before he’d died of a fever, before they’d moved deeper into the Enclave, before they’d climbed the shining and slippery social ladder. Before Jane died in a maple tree, her skin used as streamers. Dryads might not eat their victims, but they definitely used them as cautionary decorations.

  She was losing the thread of coherent thought again. Her throat was on fire, her lungs so empty she was deflating. Choking was a remarkably slow process. Time turned to honey, sticky and stiff.

  Focus. There were the usual prayers for rain, for good crops, trancework for omens, the symbols in tarot cards, colours, plants. She had to sift, dig deeper. Her professors taught that numen came from the earth, that it traveled though her, up her spine, to send images into her brain. Her neck ached and burned, cramping under her tattoo. The pink moon, blue eyes between branches, a wooden floor with light shining between the slats.

  “Numina,” the dryad said, suddenly curious and interested. Not a great deal of an improvement, actually. Usually dryads spoke their own language, sounding like twigs clacking together. Slow as sap, she leaned closer, smelling of mud and moss. Her teeth were too sharp and a she wore a necklace of beetles. Everything about her was suddenly hungry.

  She licked the side of Jane’s throat. Jane should have been scared but she didn’t have the energy. She slumped, breathless, vision greying. When the dryad bit down, Jane jerked violently into consciousness. Pain stabbed at her, flesh tearing. The dryad reared back, teeth bloody. “No!” she shrieked. She rubbed Jane’s blood off her tongue so aggressively, the vines loosened abruptly.

  Jane dropped out of the tree, hitting the branches as she fell. She hit the ground as the riot broke open like rotten fruit.

  She didn’t know how long she crouched there until she managed to drag herself into a doorway, until Protectorate soldiers found her covered in soot and scratches. They escorted her to the train, the streets echoing with the night’s work. Bodies lay where they had fallen, drawing flies and coy dogs, and bonebirds overhead. Anything of value had already been scavenged, leaving some corpses entirely naked. A raccoon chewed on a bloody foot and Jane looked away, gagging.

  Her mother was waiting for her in the wayfarer’s cella inside the parapet. “Kiri?” Jane asked. “And the others?”

  “They’re fine.” There were bags under her eyes, dark enough that she’d tucked an orchid from the hothouse in her hair to distract from them. She hadn’t even done that for her own wedding day. “They were starting to suggest you’d run away, Jane.”

  “Sorry the riot interfered with your political aspirations,” Jane said tiredly.

  “Don’t be smart. And you survived, didn’t you?” Amaryllis stated, eyeing her clinically. Her rose and lilac perfume overpowered the smell of smoke from Jane’s burned dress. “Good. You’ll do the family proud.”

  “Wonderful. How obliging of me.” She was too tired to care.

  “There’s no need for that attitude. If you do well, I will be promoted. Portia might train with Cartimandua herself.”

  “I nearly died. Dozens did die.”

  “But you didn’t.” And that, as far as her mother was concerned, was that.

  Jane was trapped between a useless scream and a woman who wouldn’t hear it anyway.“ Shall I drop you at the Collegium or would you rather clean up at home?”

  “The Collegium.” The riot hadn’t been doused after all, it had only been transplanted. It reverberated inside of Jane, battling against her bones, burning in her brain. Her thoughts whirled, desperate and impossible to catch.

  “Yes, that’s no doubt best,” her mother wrinkled her nose at the dried mud clumping off Jane and onto the rickshaw cushions. “You will do what is required of you,” Amaryllis said curtly. “And you will make this family proud.”

  Jane was abruptly exhausted. “I’ve heard this speech before, Mother. And I’m really not in the mood.”

  “This is serious.” She reached out, digging her fingers in her arm. “For once, you have the power to be a true help to the family. Don’t ruin it.”

  Jane scrubbed her hand over her face, trying to erase the vision of identical houses on platforms and identical cribs behind identical windows. Of the dryad’s too-sharp teeth and the bones in her hair. “You don’t even know.”

  “This isn’t the first Program,” her mother added coldly. “And you ought to be grateful. We were given cots in a locked room in the basement of the compound. You get a house, a village. Luxury.”

  Jane stared. “You were in the Program?”

  “How do you think you were conceived?” she asked. “And why do you think you were chosen for this? Honestly, think, Jane. Why else would it be you?”

  “I… but….my father wore the mask?”

  “Don’t be silly. It wasn’t him. As if he’d have been strong enough. I married him for other reasons.”

  “But Green Jacks aren’t born, not like that.” And the glaringly obvious: she wasn’t a Green Jill. Though it might explain the dryad’s violent reaction to her blood.

  “No, but there’s still so much we have to learn. And there is some progress. Numen for one, has many secrets. The more we study and experiment, the better we can understand.”

  Jane might have laughed that she and her mother finally agreed on something. Numen. This had to be the reason numen stabbed at her, like an Elysian push
ing against the Wall. She wanted to ask about her headaches, but she didn’t dare.

  Her father had worn a leaf mask. They must have been watching her all this time. Her mother would have filed reports, growth charts, observations. She was nothing if not thorough. Their move had nothing to do with inheriting a house, Jane realised. When she thought about it, it had come too soon after she had first shown an aptitude for being an Oracle.

  “Is he still alive?” She asked. “My… biological father?”

  “Of course not,” Amaryllis waved that away. “The leaf mask was too much for him. It always is. There are no miracles, Jane. But he did his duty. We’d hoped for something more when you were born.” She shrugged. “But progress is slow. It’s enough that we don’t give up. And that I now work for Cartimandua.”

  Of course. She was stupid not to have realized it before. “You sold me.”

  She should be shocked. Startled, at least. But she felt nothing but mild curiousity and a kind of recognition of a truth she should have guessed before now.

  “There’s no need to get dramatic,” Amaryllis sighed. She looked briefly animated, as if she had regular emotions like regular people. “It was her idea, you know, the first breeding program. She was only sixteen at the time. She’s brilliant.”

  Jane wanted to be anywhere else. “I have parapet duty in a few hours. I need to rest.”

  Amaryllis nodded, annoyed. “Don’t disappoint me.”