by Stacey Jay
I’m beside myself, outside myself. I watch my long body glide down streets filled with the twisted and the wrong, and everything is … upside down. Inside out. I look down, expecting to see the sky beneath my feet and my heart settled on the skin outside my chest, but there is only the shimmering green of my dress, tight at my bust, tighter still at my waist, but loose enough near the ground.
Loose enough for hands with missing fingers to reach out to brush the fabric as Bo and I pass by.
This particular hand belongs to a child, a girl with only three fingers, a wee thing with silky black hair that hangs over her face, partially concealing the fact that her nose is missing … pieces. Pieces of skin. Maybe bone. Skin and bone. I don’t know. I can’t look too closely. Not at her, or her parents, or all the others gathered by the side of the street to kneel as I walk by. I just can’t.
I lift my eyes and find a tiny rectangle of blue sky high above the laundry lines zigzagging between the intimidating buildings of the city center. These towers make mine look like a child’s toy. They are breathlessly tall, and each one overflowing with people. The people must live three or four to a room, at least, if the amount of laundry is anything to judge by. Hundreds of pants and shirts and dresses and overalls and underthings hang like uninspired flags, blocking most of the sun’s light, drooping limply toward the street, where their owners were ordered to assemble this morning to meet their queen and let her look upon them with her new eyes.
I demanded that the royal gong be rung and messengers be sent throughout the city. I insisted on walking through the city center, the better to see my people. I would not be swayed.
Now it’s all I can do not to turn and run back to my tower. I long for the comfort of my darkness, my ignorance. I want to go back and undo it all. I want to be the Isra my father worked so hard to create. If only I’d known how easy I had it in my cage, with my velvet blinders always in place …
My scrap of blue sky vanishes, and my gaze drifts down to the street ahead, where a woman without arms or legs sits propped in a chair beside several little boys. A mother who can never hug her sons or hold her babies. How did this happen? How …
A choked sound escapes my lips, bursting free before I can contain it.
“Are you all right?” Bo asks from his place beside me.
“No,” I whisper. “Of course not. Of course, of course not.” I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, stopping the stream of babble. I can’t lose control in front of my people. I can’t show them how unprepared I am. I can’t be like my mother.
“The tower. My mother.” I pull in a labored breath. “That’s … This is why.”
“Yes,” Bo says. “In her home city, the nobles lived within a second wall at one edge of their dome, kept entirely separate from the common people. She had never seen a human who was not of noble blood before she came to Yuan.” Bo’s hand is firm at the center of my back, guiding me relentlessly onward, through the city center to what lies ahead, to what I’ve demanded to see.
I want to twist away, to order him to keep his hands off me, but I can’t. His touch is the only thing keeping me going. If he withdraws, I’ll stop walking and be stranded in the middle of the nightmare.
Nightmares upon nightmares. I had the fire nightmare again this morning, saw the woman’s mouth opening and closing in the burning wood. But this time I listened harder, the way Gem told me to, and I would have sworn I heard her speak. She was saying something about the truth … about hope … something important.…
When I woke, I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d said, but I was bursting with happiness anyway. I could see the golden miracle of the sunrise shining through my window, the brilliant bleeding red of my quilt, and Needle’s tightly curled smile as she brought my breakfast tray. My life and my dreams were changing, and I was certain my city wasn’t going to be far behind. This morning, Yuan was a riddle I was confident I could solve.
But this is … a disaster. A tragedy. Hopeless.
“Now you see why your father felt he had to take such extreme measures,” Bo continues, increasing his pace until I have trouble keeping up. My dress is wider at the bottom than my other dresses, but it’s tight at the thighs. Still, I don’t complain. I don’t care if I have to wiggle and wobble down the street like a fool. The sooner we leave the city center and all the damage behind, the better. “He was only trying to protect you. He thought if you remained unaware of certain truths that you would be spared your mother’s madness. It was only after she came here that she became … strange. She grew even worse after you were born. At first the healers dismissed it as the sadness that sometimes comes over new mothers, but then she began talking of going into the wilderness to speak to the Monstrous. Father says she set the fire not long after.”
I don’t say a word, though I want to ask Bo if he knows why my mother wanted to speak to the Monstrous. I’ve always known Mother was Father’s second wife and foreign—a noble from far away who married my father to escape a city on the verge of collapse—but I’ve never heard anyone speak of her expressing the desire to make contact with the Monstrous. Why would she want to do that? I want to ask, but I don’t trust myself to speak without breaking down.
When Bo first told me it was my father who had ordered the poisoning of my tea, I nearly slapped him. I was certain he was lying. I refused to believe that my father would steal the sight from his own daughter, even when Junjie showed me the signed order bearing the king’s seal. I just couldn’t believe Baba hated me that much.
Now I understand. My father didn’t hate me. He was trying to spare me from the heartbreaking truth.
“I wanted to protect you, too,” Bo says, louder now that we’ve reached the edge of the city center and only a few citizens kneel at the sides of the street. “I planned for you to remain in the nobles’ village, where the people are whole. There was no reason for you to see this particular truth.” His hand slides around my waist, his familiar touch becoming openly intimate, making my breakfast gurgle angrily in my stomach.
I swallow hard and step away. “Yes, there is. I needed to know. I … had … to …” My words dribble away as we pass by the final knot of people.
Beyond them, the world opens up, the wide dirt road continuing on through the fields. I want to rush ahead into that open space, but instead I force myself to nod and smile a brittle smile at the subjects kneeling in the grass at the edge of an orchard of bare-limbed pear trees. There are three men and five women, all wearing orchard workers’ overalls, all with missing parts. They are ripped pieces of a dozen different puzzles that will never fit together, and I don’t understand it.
I don’t. I can’t … I thought …
“The Banished camp is … worse?” I whisper when we’ve finally passed the last woman. I find little comfort in the even rows of fruit trees on one side of the road and the perfectly ordered grape trellises on the other. Beyond these tidy fields, at the end of this road, lies the place where the Banished—the people deemed too grotesque to inhabit the city center—live out their abbreviated lives.
“Far worse,” Bo confirms, hesitating at my side. “We can go back to the great hall if you like. I can—”
“No.” I lift my chin, and move past him on stiff legs. “I need to know the truth.”
“I can tell you the truth. Let me do that for you,” he says, hurrying to catch up, what sounds like real compassion in his voice. He’s been unfailingly kind this morning—like the Bo I knew before last night—but I’m not fooled. I will never trust him. Not ever, no matter how helpful he tries to be.
“Thank you, but no.” I pull my shawl tight around my shoulders and aim myself toward the royal carriage waiting for us by the side of the road. The driver is an elegant old man with silver hair, supposedly a commoner like all noble servants, but without damaged parts—at least, none that I can see. His defects must be hidden inside, like Needle’s. Selfishly, I’m glad of it. I need a moment. Just a moment.
“Pleas
e, Isra.” Bo stops me with a hand on my arm. “Let me spare you any more of this.”
“Why?” I subtly shake off his fingers as I glance back over my shoulder, finally able to pinpoint what’s been plaguing my mind, now that I have some distance from the city. “Why are—”
“I care about you. I told you that last night.”
“No. Not that,” I snap, unable to bear talking feelings at a time like this. “Why are the people damaged? How has this happened? I thought the covenant was strong.”
“The covenant is strong,” Bo says. “It’s been this way since the beginning. You know the legend: those families who refused to sign the covenant did not receive equal protection from its magic.”
“I thought that meant they had fewer goods, smaller houses,” I say, voice louder than I mean it to be. “I didn’t think it meant they—”
“It means they suffered from this planet’s dark magic. They weren’t made Monstrous, but their humanity was not preserved in the same way that those of noble blood are preserved. They suffer from a different sort of mutation.”
My brow wrinkles, and for the first time in more than an hour, my thoughts begin to organize themselves. “But the Monstrous look nothing like that. What’s happened to our people isn’t mutation. It’s … something else.”
“Something like what?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Something …”
Something dark. Something unnatural.
Yearning for Gem grips me so fiercely it feels like my stomach is climbing up my throat. The thought of talking this madness through with him gives me strength and, more important, reminds me—
“I’m not sure.” I turn back to Bo. “But perhaps the covenant will offer some insight. I’d like it brought to my rooms this afternoon.”
He blinks as if I’ve snapped my fingers between his eyes. “The covenant?”
“Yes, the covenant,” I say. “Have it delivered to the tower immediately. I’ll be keeping it overnight.” That should give Needle and me time to sneak over to see Gem.
By the moons, I can’t wait to see him, to feel his arms around me, his chest warm and solid beneath my cheek, making the world feel steady and possible again. Night can’t come quickly enough.
“We should go,” I say. “The driver’s waiting.”
“But …” Bo’s mouth opens and closes as I circle around him and climb into the royal carriage for the first time in my life. I was looking forward to the ride this morning—the wind in my hair, the fields rushing past on both sides—but now I can’t imagine taking pleasure in simple things, not when there is so much suffering under the dome.
“Isra, I can’t have the covenant delivered.” Bo climbs up beside me, clearly deciding he deserves to sit in the carriage rather than ride on the step at the back with the other guards. “It’s impossible.”
“What’s impossible?”
“The covenant was lost,” he says. “Hundreds of years ago. Not long after King Sato died.”
“What?” I want to believe he’s lying, but he seems genuinely confused, completely at a loss.
Lost. The covenant is lost. How could that be? How could something so important be lost?
“King Sato hid the covenant for safekeeping,” Bo says, giving the signal for the driver to start the horses. The silver-haired man flicks his whip, and the buggy lurches forward, throwing me back against the seat. Bo steadies me with an arm around my shoulders. I’m too horrified to push it away. “He died before he could tell his last wife where it was hidden.”
“But that’s …” King Sato was our third king. That means … “No one’s read the covenant in six hundred years?” I squeak. “Or more?”
“It’s all right.” He has the nerve to smile. “Our history isn’t lost. There are other texts that tell us all we need to know, and the sacred words spoken at each royal wedding are engraved on a gold tablet we’ll hold between us on the day we take our vows.” Bo pulls me closer, until I’m wedged beneath his armpit, my spine crunched and my dress straining across my back. “Don’t worry. The covenant is strong. The damaged people have been that way for generations upon generations. They don’t suffer from it the way we would. They aren’t like us.”
“Then what are they like?” I squirm free, and scoot to the other side of the buggy.
Bo’s expression hardens at the sarcasm in my voice, but to his credit, he maintains his patient tone. “They aren’t Monstrous, but they aren’t human the way we are, either. They don’t know any other kind of life. They’re happy with what they have, to be a part of our city, to be safe, fed, and protected.”
He sounds like he’s telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean anything. He could think he’s telling the truth—the way I did every time I assured Gem I was tainted—and still be telling a lie. I know for a fact he’s wrong about my people’s suffering. I could see the pain in their eyes. I could feel the hard facts of their life weighing on me as I walked among them, dragging me down until it felt like my feet were moving beneath the surface of the ground.
“You said there are other texts?” I ask, brushing a lock of hair from my face, finding no joy in the wind that whips it back into my eyes.
“There are,” he says. “Would you like me to have those delivered to your rooms?”
“Yes, right away.” I try to feel optimistic about what I’ll learn in the texts, but I can’t. Something deep inside insists that all I’ll find in those writings are more lies.
I have to find the covenant. I have to discover where it was hidden so long ago, and I can think of only one place to look for help, one thing that’s been around for more than six hundred years and still has eyes to see.
The roses have deceived me as often as anyone else has, but tonight I’ll make it clear that I won’t tolerate lies. They will give me what I want—the truth and nothing but—or I will … I will …
Or I will refuse them their offering.
Even the thought is enough to make my head spin and my heart thrash against my ribs, but I can’t help but think …
What if the stories of Gem’s people are true? If so, wouldn’t my people be better off in the desert? Better off transformed than forced to live with missing pieces? The nobles and soldiers and some of the merchants are still whole, but the overwhelming majority of my people are suffering, not thriving, under the dome.
Maybe if Yuan is abandoned, if the other domed cities are abandoned as well … Maybe if we all go into the desert together …
Maybe I don’t have to die. Maybe Gem was right. Maybe there is another way.
The thought should renew my flagging hope, but it doesn’t. My entire life I have been afraid to die, but at least I thought I had something worth dying for.
Now I have … nothing. A terrible mess I don’t know how to clean up, and the certainty that I will find no help from those in power in this city. The whole have beauty, pleasure, comfort, and abundance, and they’ve convinced themselves they deserve it. Because they are more human than the people who suffer in the city center, or the Banished in their lonely camp, or the monsters starving in the desert.
I’ll never be able to convince them differently. Yuan will never change, not unless I can find proof that something is wrong with the city. The nobles are spoiled and soft and inclined to gossip, but they are not evil people. I must convince them that Yuan is rotten at its core. I must find the covenant and discover why it was hidden away.
BO
THE morning lasts forever. The afternoon is even longer. By the time I finally sit down on the carved wooden bench outside the court meeting chambers, I’m exhausted.
Isra insisted on seeing every part of the Banished camp—the shelters, the feeding troughs, the burial pit, even the trench filled with their bodily waste. It was … unspeakably repulsive.
The other soldiers stayed at the perimeter with the guards charged with keeping the Banished contained in their corner of Yuan, but I was forced to walk among them. I couldn’t leave Isra’s sid
e for a moment, not if I want to be seen as her equal, and, someday soon, her better.
Today’s insanity shouldn’t make that very hard.
What kind of queen willingly walks among the Banished? What kind of queen tries to talk to people who aren’t much more than monsters, and all of them out of what’s left of their minds?
Even Isra learned that quickly enough. By the time the fourth or fifth Banished ran, screaming nonsense when she tried to approach, she learned to keep her distance. Still, she refused to leave right away. She stayed and asked questions about their treatment, their feeding schedule, their living arrangements, and, finally, why the Banished weren’t allowed into the city center with the rest of the people, since many of them seemed less damaged, physically anyway, than the people she’d seen there.
I was shocked that she needed an explanation.
It’s obvious to anyone with eyes—even new eyes—that the Banished display Monstrous traits. They have patches of scales and huge teeth and hands with pieces of claws exposed outside their skin. They creep and crawl and cower like the beasts they are. They run from any whole citizen in fear, sensing, I suppose, in some part of their wretched brains, that we are their enemies. That they are our enemies, that the Monstrous they resemble want to destroy us, and our way of life, forever.
“They’re lucky we let them live,” I finally said, too astonished by Isra’s complaints about the mistreatment of the creatures to mind my tongue. “Other cities smother them at birth. Or put them outside the gates to starve. Or worse. We are the gentlest of the domed cities, Isra. We always have been.”
Isra went pale at that, as if she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible. She’s spent too much time with that creature. It’s more clever than most—it speaks our words and plays at being like us—but the beast is feral beneath the façade. It plots the downfall of our city. I can sense it. I saw it in his face last night on Isra’s balcony. He wanted nothing more than to kill me, the way his people have killed mine for centuries, though I have done nothing but treat him with a civility a prisoner scarcely deserves.