by Matt Wallace
Lexi returns to her rooms. She strides past the fire still burning in the hearth, lit in the coldest part of the morning. She enters the bedchamber and carefully unpacks the items she’s sequestered from the garden, laying them out in a row on the foot of the plush feather-stuffed mattress. Examining each, she realizes the one item that is missing.
Lexi gathers up the hem of her wrap and begins tearing a long strip of material from the garment.
Daian fetches her every day around noon for a truly delicious and luxurious luncheon. Lexi cannot accuse her captors of being poor hosts.
She meticulously prepares the rooms that have served as her prison cell. The most important piece of the puzzle she constructs involves one of the many large, antique vases spread throughout the castle. Lexi pulls one down from its pedestal in her bedchamber. It takes her several minutes to administer to it before the vase is ready and suitable to her purpose.
There is a dressing closet standing in one corner of the front room, just down from the archway leading into the bedchamber. Lexi wedges it away from the corner just enough to allow her slender body to squeeze through. Before she does, she lifts the vase over the top of the closet and lowers the ceramic monstrosity behind the ancient piece of furniture, settling it gently on the floor.
Her final act is to open the doors of the dressing closet, exposing its barren innards.
Lexi slips into the empty space behind it and waits. She tries to think of anything except what will happen when Daian comes to get her. She tries to remember those unremarkable moments shared with Brio and Taru, moments of simple laughter shared between them, or the mere comfort of their presence. She finds she longs for those things the most right now.
Eventually, inevitably, she hears hundreds-year-old wood creak and equally aged iron squeal as the doors to her chamber are pushed open. She hears footfalls, gentle and steady at first, then hesitant as Daian fails to immediately spot her within the confines of the quarters.
“Lexi,” he calls to her, tentatively.
She holds her breath, terrified an errant gasp or brief catch in her throat will give away her position.
“Lexi!” Daian beckons, more forcefully. “I know you’re here. You may not be aware of it, but your door is kept under very attentive watch.”
He waits, silent, for several long moments for an answer that doesn’t come.
“I thought we’d moved beyond these games, especially after your trip down the plant’s gullet.”
For a single panicked moment, Lexi reconsiders what she is about to do. She knows if she comes out now, there will be no consequences. If she follows through with her plans, she may very well never leave this room alive again. Daian takes orders, but he is insane. Lexi knows that without any doubt. She also knows his is a cruel madness. He has reveled in killing the men he murdered right in front of her, just as he’d revel in killing her if she gave him the slightest reason.
She can’t see it, but Lexi can almost feel him smiling salaciously around his next words.
“All right then, Te-Gen,” he says with an almost melodious lilt, “if you want to play, we’ll play.”
The next thing she hears is several retreating footsteps, and then the sound of a metal bolt snapping home.
Daian has just locked the chamber doors, from the inside.
The next sound she registers is the unmistakable whisper of a dagger’s blade clearing the leather of its scabbard. It is followed by a dense thud, and she imagines him stabbing the blade into the surface of the round table that greets entrants to the front room with an assortment of flowers atop it.
“Let’s agree to keep this civil, yes?” he asks the rooms.
His footfalls mark him as walking to the hearth, and then back across the room. He takes his time, and each moment elevates the rushing of Lexi’s blood.
She waits for him to investigate the corner of the front room in which she’s secreted, but she never hears those footfalls approach.
Instead, from hiding she watches him pass into the bedchamber.
Lexi slips out from her concealment, desperately and quietly passing that vase once more over the top of the dressing closet as she does. It is not particularly heavy, but it is bulky and awkward, and her fear she’ll drop it and expose herself almost makes that worry come true several times.
In the end, she manages to free herself from behind the closet and bring the vase down into her grip without making a sound.
Lexi edges along the piece of wall around which he just disappeared.
As carefully as she dares, she peers into the bedchamber.
Daian has paused, his back to her, staring intently at the curtains gathered on the left side of the window. The curtains on the other side are wafting and shimmering in the breeze. Their fellows on the left, however, are still, as if they are being anchored in place. Those curtains are bulging unnaturally.
“This is a very bizarre, unbecoming game you’ve chosen,” he comments. “If you don’t mind me saying.”
Daian steps forward and rips away the curtains. The pillows Lexi bunched there passively meet his expectant gaze. Daian cocks his head, taking in the scene. “Huh.”
Lexi breaks cover with the vase clenched between her fists. She openly rushes him, raising her makeshift weapon and readying herself to smash it over his skull.
Daian turns and calmly raises his arms, easily blocking the blow. He catches the bulbous ceramic urn by its rim and base and instantly halts her strike.
Lexi feels an unyielding weight slam against the pit of her stomach. She’s knocked backwards off her feet and all the air in her lungs rushes out as Daian kicks her to the floor.
He wrests the vase from her grip as she falls. Daian holds it in front of him, a strange grin on his face.
Lexi practically slithers from the bedchamber, using her elbows to move her along the floor.
Daian pursues, in no particular hurry, exiting the bedchamber behind her. He idly turns the vase in his hands.
“So then,” he says in the exhale of a deep breath, “your master plan to overcome me was to bash me in the head with this?”
“Not exactly.”
Daian stares down at her curiously.
Lexi watches that curious gaze shift to the vase as he becomes aware that the ceramic is heating unnaturally in his grip. He turns it to peer inside the curved top of the vase, finding it has been plugged with wadded-up bedding from the chamber behind him. He can’t see the burnt fuse Lexi fashioned from the material of her wrap, the smoldering pig manure to which it was tethered, or the fire devouring what’s left of the air inside the vase.
Daian looks back at Lexi, opening his mouth to question her just as the vase explodes in his hands, peppering his face, chest, and neck with ceramic shards even as the concussive force sweeps him off his feet. His body is hurled against the wall, where the back of his head meets the unforgiving stone.
Lexi crosses her arms in front of her face as the ceramic flies, but she’s able to safely peer between her forearms and watch Daian collapse to the floor, rolling lazily onto his back, disoriented.
She stands, holding her throbbing stomach and aching and wincing slightly with every step. Lexi walks over to the round table impaled by Daian’s dagger. It takes her several moments and both hands to dislodge it.
Daian is scarcely moving, albeit breathing heavily, as she kneels above him, pressing the tip of his own blade to his throat. There are small cuts crying red tears all over his face and neck. His hands are even worse, each seeming to wear a crimson glove. His wide, vacant eyes stare up at the ceiling, blinking only occasionally.
“Can you hear me, Daian?” she asks breathlessly.
His voice is raspy and distant. “My ears are ringing and the world sounds like I’m underwater, but yes.”
“Can you feel the blade at your neck?”
“Everyone seems to want to cut my throat lately.”
“You would have to admit, you bring it on yourself.”
&n
bsp; He laughs hoarsely, convulsing from the chest as the laughter gives way to a fit of coughing.
Lexi waits patiently for the bout to pass.
“I want you to tell me how far we are from the Capitol,” she orders him. “How close and in what direction is the nearest town?”
His eyes roll toward her, though his head remains unmoved.
“And if I don’t?”
Lexi presses the tip of his dagger into the soft flesh of his throat. “A man who abhors boredom should fear death. Death is very boring.”
“And final.”
“Then I would answer my questions.”
Daian attempts to lift his head, and quickly gives up on it as the slightest motion causes him to wince terribly.
“You’ve never killed anyone, Te-Gen,” he states quite definitively.
Lexi says nothing.
“Fatally piercing someone isn’t as easy as it seems,” he assures her. “Particularly up close like this. You’ll misjudge the amount of pressure required. Odds are you’ll knick me just deeply enough to start the blood spurting. Once that happens, you’ll panic. You’ll withdraw the blade, and I’ll be flailing on this floor like a docked fish, spraying blood every which way. At that point, you’ll either have to start stabbing me, again and again, until I succumb, or run away. If I were a betting man—”
Lexi removes the tip of the blade from his throat and quickly and steadily draws it across his cheek, deep, slicing open his flesh.
Daian hisses painfully, shutting tight his eyes.
Lexi returns the dagger to his neck.
“I’m sorry to say I’m becoming accustomed to murder,” she informs him. “I’ve witnessed so many as of late. My hands don’t even seem to shake anymore.”
“I lament your lost innocence,” he says through tight, pain-strained lips.
“Answer my questions, Daian. I will not repeat them because I am certain you recall.”
“So you can dash away on foot? Why not take me hostage, as your guide? Are you afraid you couldn’t keep me subdued?”
“You are not leaving this room,” she says resolutely.
“Neither are you,” he calmly breathes.
Daian moves with a speed she wouldn’t have thought possible, considering the state of him. He slaps the dagger from her grip with a single swipe of his arm, and then backhands her across the face with frightening power.
Lexi’s cheek burns and her eye waters and swells shut. She doesn’t feel her body flying across the floor, or even the impact of hitting it.
The next moment of which she is aware finds her lying several feet away from Daian, a deep throbbing in her left side from the awkward landing atop the stone floor.
Daian rolls over and uses the archway leading into the bedchamber to pull his body up.
Lexi watches, dazed, as he claws his way along the stone like a mountain lion scaling a rock face.
He stumbles with his first few steps, clearly still affected, but quickly finds his footing. Daian scoops up his dagger from where it landed in front of the bed. He hefts it in his hand a few times experimentally, and then closes his fist tightly around the handle.
Daian’s eyes find her across the room.
Looking back at him, Lexi sees nothing of any version of the man she’s known in that gaze.
All that remains is a monster, something burning from the inside that will only be quenched by blood.
She turns and crawls weakly across the room on her hands and knees. It’s useless, of course. The only things in front of her are the dying embers in the hearth.
“Where would you go, Te-Gen?” he asks between hot pants of breath. “Would you crawl into the fire to escape me? Am I distasteful to you even when compared to burning? You seemed so fond of me once.”
Hearing those words, and remembering the tender moments she shared with his alter ego, Lexi stops, dropping her head and closing her left eye; her right has shut all on its own from the blow it sustained.
She turns from resting on all fours and seats herself on the floor, opening her eye and staring up at him with unmasked contempt.
Daian smiles down on her.
“Lady Burr is going to be so very upset with me,” he says, the implication clear.
Daian takes a final, menacing step toward her, and then falters.
Lexi waits, a steely calm spreading through her body, warming even the agonized parts.
He begins blinking rapidly, his eyes seeming to lose focus on her. Daian’s ragged breath begins catching in his throat, until he seems as though he’s suffocating.
“What is—”
His legs visibly shake before giving out on him. Daian drops to his knees. Lexi can hear bone cracking against the stone floor. The dagger drops from his limp hand.
“I told you,” Lexi says. “You are not leaving this room.”
“What… did you do?” he asks foggily.
“I coated the inside of the vase with juice from the lantern plant berries. You have been dead for several minutes. Your body is only now discovering it.”
Again, Daian laughs. This time, however, a ribbon of blood spurts in its wake, dribbling over his lips and chin to drip onto his chest.
“You have never been boring, Lexi,” he says, grinning grotesquely through the blood. “I’ll give you that.”
There is no humor in Lexi, dark or otherwise. She stares at him, fire in her single open eye.
“I don’t know what manner of thing you truly are, or what made you that way. I may not escape this place, but I will not allow you to be unleashed back on the world, either. Goodbye, Daian.”
He tries to speak more words, but only pushes up a sickly gargle from his throat.
Finally, he pitches forward onto the stone tiles, curling into an awkward ball and convulsing a few violent times before succumbing utterly.
Lexi waits until she is certain he’s dead. Forcing herself forward, she tries to crawl over to his body, thinking to retrieve his dagger and take it with her. Her insides feel like they’re on fire, as does the right side of her face. She begins to wonder if several of her ribs aren’t broken. Lexi manages only a few inches before the pain of moving overwhelms her, and she sinks onto her right side where the agony is the least.
She quickly loses any sense of time. At some point a wetness touches her wounded cheek, searing the tender flesh, and she realizes she’s crying.
Somewhere behind her, wood is smashed to what sounds like splinters as the doors to her rooms are battered open. There are half a dozen sets of footfalls this time.
They surround her, and for a brief while there is silence as those who have arrived take in the scene.
“Oh dear,” Burr says high above her, “this is a dismal sight, isn’t it?”
Lexi would laugh if laughter were a thing that still existed within her.
“Are you alive, my lady?” Burr asks her.
Lexi decides in that moment she would much rather pass out than speak with the odious woman, and so she does, gratefully.
DIVISION
“YOU MUST THINK OF CRACHE as a carefully maintained garden,” Trowel urges Dyeawan.
It is, by her count, his fifth explanation to her during this single meeting of the planners.
“Must I?” she retorts.
He ignores the barb. “Anything you extract from or introduce into the soil of one patch affects every other patch. We have designed this garden quite carefully, and every ounce of that soil is perfectly calibrated.”
“I definitely see where the fertilizer comes from, anyway,” Riko mutters to Dyeawan beneath a strategically placed hand.
Dyeawan is too weary to laugh, and she does not want to provoke more of Trowel’s bluster, besides.
Trowel is responding to a proposed measure introduced by Dyeawan to shutter the Selection arm of the Spectrum. Growing up in the Bottoms, Dyeawan heard tales of backrooms where surgeons tended to babes born with the sensitive parts of both a man and a woman, but she had no idea the st
ate sponsored an official service for such a procedure.
In truth, Dyeawan never had much contact, nor gave much thought, to the Undeclared, those citizens of Crache who refused Selection, refused to choose to be distinguished as either man or woman. The very notion that there is a classification for such people that separates them from the rest of the populace in that way is appalling to Dyeawan.
She discussed it with Riko, who wholeheartedly agreed the practice of and emphasis on Selection should end. She also agreed it is an outdated and barbaric process, and a poisonous attitude to cultivate among people.
Yet when Dyeawan asked her if an Undeclared has ever served the Planning Cadre, even her friend seemed surprised by the very idea.
That is how insidious such notions are, Dyeawan has come to realize.
She has to admit to herself that she possesses an ulterior motive for moving forward with the proposal. Selection seemed a good test case for her to introduce change to the other planners.
Apparently she underestimated the old guard’s attachment to resisting change of any kind.
It is the third meeting over which she has presided, and thus far it appears to be producing the same fruitless results as the two before it, consisting primarily of Dyeawan introducing a notion and Trowel bloviating endlessly about why that notion is ridiculous and impossible to implement.
It is, however, the first meeting Oisin has chosen to attend since Dyeawan faced off with the Protectorate Ministry agent during her ascension to head of the planners. He haunts the back of the meeting room, arms folded beneath his dark half-cape as he surveys the planners’ progress, or lack of it, silently and with what Dyeawan reads as a small measure of smugness.
Trowel continues his elaborate and nauseating analogy involving the various elements of effective garden tending, but she has finally stopped listening.
Nia, for her part, has yet to offer the table anything. She merely listens and observes passively, never making direct contact with Dyeawan’s eyes.
“The prejudice against the Undeclared is counterproductive to advancing the minds of the people,” Dyeawan argues when Trowel finally takes a breath.
