Lotus and Thorn

by Sara Wilson Etienne

  Still, Oksun was right—my sleepless nights had resulted in one benefit. I did have a plan. Or at least the seed of one.

  “Do the Curadores ever celebrate any of the Pleiades’ festivals? Any loud, boisterous ones?” I asked.

  Oksun understood instantly what I was getting at. “Folks distracted on both sides of the glass? Something noisy enough to cover up an invasion, maybe?” She tucked her hair behind both ears and made what I’d started to think of as her “calculating face.” “The Kisaengs don’t celebrate the traditional holidays, but maybe it’s time to get back to our roots. Would Dia de los Muertos give us enough time?”

  There were less than two weeks before the celebration of the dead. “It’s not a lot of time to prepare, but it’d be perfect. Masks. Bonfires. Fireworks!”

  “Did you know that a few of the girls are familiar with explosives?” Oksun raised an eyebrow. “Used to be blasters out in the Reclamation Fields. Me too, actually.”

  “That I did not know.” And just like that, the seeds took root.

  • • •

  After almost a week of barely sleeping, I was delirious and desperate. Every day had been the same. During the day I was myself, strong and powerful. But at night, fear would creep in to sit beside my bed, holding my hand. Riya had said not to make room for fear, but I didn’t know how to make it leave. That night, I walked into the trees—the only place I’d ever felt safe inside the Dome.

  I hadn’t gotten so much as a glimpse of Nik—not since he’d run—and I worried I wouldn’t be welcome. Even so, as I entered the shelter of the branches, something loosened in me. The rich smell of moss and green coaxed a sigh from my strangled lungs. And deep in the night, I crept into Nik’s garden and collapsed next to the little waterfall that sang of comfort in the dark.

  • • •

  I woke with a blanket lying heavy across me and the sun bright in the sky. And a few meters away—weeding the garden—was Nik.

  “Sorry. Was I being too loud?” He dusted off his hands on his pants and came over. “I didn’t want you to wake up alone . . . in case you forgot where you were.”

  He seemed reserved, almost shy. As if we didn’t know each other. And maybe Nik had been right about that—maybe we didn’t.

  Nik’s outburst in the forest still hung in the air between us. Feeling awkward, I stood up and folded the soft blue cover. “Thank you for the blanket. I didn’t mean to . . . I just . . . I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “No! I’m glad you came.” Nik waved the blanket away, leaving me hugging it. “Sit down. Let me get you something.”

  I climbed up on a boulder near the waterfall and took a deep breath, trying to let the burble of the stream calm my jitters. Nik came back a few minutes later, carrying coffee and croissants. As he handed them to me, he said, “I really am glad you came.” And his eyes had genuine relief in them. “I’m glad you feel safe here.”

  He took a seat next to me on the rock and we sipped our coffee together. The silence was still full of unsaid words, but it was no longer awkward. Our hands lay almost touching on the stone, just centimeters apart. They were so different: his vast and callused, mine small and strange. But I liked the way they looked together, his purpley-black skin against my light brown. They looked right. The only thing ruining it was the scabs on my knuckles from Grimm’s talons. A painful reminder of him.

  Then Nik tore off a piece of croissant and I noticed something. I grabbed Nik’s hand, turning it over in my own.

  “What?” Alarm tinged Nik’s voice. But I didn’t answer.

  Nik’s palm was unblemished. His calluses were still there, but there were no scabs or scratches from the broken glass. No blood. Not even any scars. I checked his other one, in case I’d gotten them confused. It’d been barely a week since he’d cut his hand. Same as me.

  “Must be nice to heal so fast,” I said, showing him my own scabbed knuckles. “I suppose that’s a perk of being genetically engineered?”

  Nik looked perplexed for a second, flexing his hand. Then he checked it too, as if expecting to find traces of the wound. “Hmm . . . that’s new. I wonder—”

  The buzz of flys cut across his words. Instinctively, I scrambled off the boulder, crouching as a huge swarm flew over the clearing.

  “Did they see me?” I asked when the noise died away. Clearly, without my permission, fear had still made a home inside me.

  “Probably not.” There was sadness in Nik’s eyes as he helped me out of my hiding spot—like it hurt him to see me cower. “Even if they did, I doubt anyone was paying attention to their visual feed.”

  But I could see Nik’s own fears about my safety making him second-guess his answer.

  I returned to my place on the rock, but the calm had evaporated. My thoughts came back to the same problem I’d been turning over in my mind for days. “How good of an eye do the flys keep on things inside the Dome?”

  “Well, they’re not like Grimm.” And Nik’s forehead creased as he remembered Grimm was dead. “They can’t see much in the dark. And Ada and the Mothers have been systematically interrupting their video signals for a while now. Fuzzing what the Curadores can see and hear with static so the Mothers have some semblance of privacy and freedom. Edison and the others think it’s simply a result of the flys breaking down . . . and a lot of it is . . . but Ada’s definitely helping the process along.” Nik paused. “I guess what I’m saying is . . . it depends.”

  Then he went quiet. I took a sip of coffee, filling the pause, but I could feel Nik’s eyes on me. “You’ve come up with a plan, then?” he said. “To save your sister?”

  I nodded, but I wondered how much to say. Nik might not love what Edison or the Curadores had done, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be an active participant in the destruction of his own home.

  “Well, I’d like to get back out to Pleiades through the tunnel I found. If we were only trying to save Tasch, we could do it from inside the Dome, no problem. But if we want to save everyone, then . . .”

  “You’ll need outside help,” Nik finished.

  “Oksun mentioned Dia de los Muertos, and it seems like too good of an opportunity to pass up.” I kept my voice purposely light, tearing off a bit of croissant and popping it in my mouth.

  “What kind of opportunity?” Nik’s voice was cautious.

  I kept my answer vague. I wasn’t ready to risk Nik knowing the extent of our plan. And until I talked to Sarika, nothing was certain. “An opportunity for the Citizens to get our people and our power back.”

  “Well, if you’re going out there again, we should talk to Ada. She’s the expert at getting around this place unnoticed.”

  “But Ada hates me. I heard the two of you fighting.”

  “No. Ada hates Edison. She didn’t trust you because you were his Kisaeng. Your circumstances are different now. She’ll help.”

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause I’ve known Ada for a long time . . . pretty much forever.”

  “I thought you and Edison were mostly alone growing up.”

  “When we were younger, we got sent back to the Complex for a few weeks at a time . . . to ‘socialize’ us. Most of the other kids stayed away. But Ada was fascinated by us. She loves all things gadgety and when she found out about Grimm, she helped us with his control systems. Edison and I were great at creating artificial muscles or lightweight wings, after all we’d been basically raised in a biotech lab, but Grimm’s electronic hardware was a mess. Luckily, Ada’s genius with that sort of thing . . . taught us a ton.”

  “The three of you were friends?” After the venom in her voice, it was hard to imagine. “Then why does she hate Edison so much?”

  Nik didn’t answer. He put down his coffee and turned to face me on the boulder. “Listen, I have to tell you something. All I ask is that you stay and hear me out. Then you can decide if y
ou still want me to be part of this.”

  His tone made me nervous and I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup as if it could give me strength.

  “I didn’t know Edison was experimenting on your people, but I wasn’t surprised . . . because I experimented on them first.”

  “What?” I stood up fast, my coffee cup smashing on the rocky ground.

  “I was trying to help. Jenner had stopped trying to treat Red Death years ago and, intellectually, we knew Citizens were still dying from it. But when we sent Grimm out to Pleiades, we saw it. I’d spent my whole life hearing about Red Death, knowing it was why we were trapped inside the Dome, but seeing it . . . it was horrible.

  “I thought if we could just get near enough . . . if we could study the disease up close, then maybe we could find a cure for it. So I talked Edison into sneaking out with me in one of the magflys. We put on isolation suits, went into Pleiades, and collected one of the bodies for cremation. But instead of burning it, we took it to our lab to study.”

  “You stole a body?” And I was horrified, imagining the body left unburned, its soul locked away inside its bones. Nik and Edison slicing open the decaying flesh.

  “Yes. But its systems were already deteriorating . . . too badly damaged to teach us anything. We tried again, this time taking someone from quarantine who was alive but unconscious . . . the disease advanced enough for our deception.

  “Then we had the reprocessors replicate the equipment from Jenner’s isolation rooms, the ones he used with incoming Kisaengs, and hooked the patient up to it. The Citizen was already near death, and I told myself that we were merely prolonging his life. I became obsessed, chronicling the symptoms through Grimm’s observations in Pleiades, then studying them in the actual Citizen. And I studied the DNA of Red Death, discovering that the reason it was so deadly, the reason we couldn’t find a cure, is that it’s a hybrid. A mutant like Edison and me.”

  “You mean someone made Red Death?”

  “I’m sure of it . . . two different diseases spliced together. And when I understood that, I knew how to create the vaccine. For the first time in my life, I felt like the genius Jenner had created me to be! Godlike! My destiny wasn’t to save the Dome, but to save all of Gabriel. To bring an end to suffering.

  “I couldn’t wait to see Jenner’s face when he understood what his prodigy had accomplished. So the very next day I doctored a vat of chiken with the antigens and sent Grimm out into Pleiades to witness the miracle.” Nik’s face went stony.

  I had lived the next part of the story. I knew what happened. “But they died instead.” A numb horror crept over my body. “Hundreds of us died. My father . . .”

  “Yes.” The fear had left Nik’s eyes now. He had stopped hiding. “And your mother. I watched your mother die.”

  And a memory emerged—one I’d kept locked away—of that nightmare of a day. People had been getting sick all morning, but no one would tell me and my sisters anything. Sarika ordered us to stay inside the apartment, but I was determined to find out what was going on. I snuck out to the courtyard and waited for my mother to come home from the Reclamation Fields.

  I screamed when I saw her. She came staggering in through the gates, her eyes red. Face rashy and impossibly swollen. And I ran away from her, like a coward, leaving her to collapse in the dirt. And as I ran, Grimm was there. His shadow hovering over me. I remembered thinking he was protecting me. That he was the one that’d kept me from dying too.

  “No.”

  “It turned out there was a protein in the vaccine that was so similar to one inside the human body that it confused the immune system . . . it couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be attacking. Like a massive allergic reaction, the vaccine turned the body against itself . . . and left its systems defenseless to Red Death as well. The response was immediate and lethal.” There was such sorrow in Nik’s face as he spoke, but he was unflinching as he faced me. “I killed your mother. I killed all of them.

  “That was the day I walked into the forest and stayed. I hid away in here working on my plants. Trying to forget. Trying in some small way to make up for what I’d done. But I can never atone for that.”

  Grief was a tangible weight sitting on my chest and I reminded myself to breathe. It was like watching my parents die all over again. And in some ways Nik’s betrayal was worse than Edison’s. Because it was not complete. Because I could not hate him.

  “I stayed. I listened. Is that everything?” I asked.

  Nik nodded.

  Without a word, I turned my back on him and walked away.

  CHAPTER 37

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the Sanctum was filled with the rhythm of cracking sticks and shouting Kisaengs, but I wasn’t registering any of it.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Oksun asked after she knocked me off my feet for the second time.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, brushing dirt off my tunic. “Let’s take a break. I don’t know where my mind is today.”

  In fact, I knew exactly where it was. It was frozen in that moment by the waterfall—Nik telling me he killed my parents. The blade of it still cut into me. Not just because he was responsible for so much of my hurt. But because I’d convinced myself that somehow Nik was a refuge from all of this.

  “Good. I wanna talk to you about the explosives anyway.”

  “Explosives?” I tossed my fighting sticks onto the grass. Oksun had my full attention.

  “Right. I talked to the other blasters and we don’t think it’ll be hard to get our hands on the right ingredients. The reprocessors synthesize all kinds of chemicals for the labs and none of them are tracked very closely.”

  My mind was whirling to catch up. “You talked to the other Kisaengs? Do you think you can trust them?”

  “I thought we agreed.” Oksun seemed taken aback by my questions. “Yesterday, we said we’d plan the attack for Dia de los Muertos. I haven’t told anyone about the LOTUS wards yet . . . I was just feeling people out. And, of course, I only spoke to girls I trust.”

  “Infiltration and rescue,” I corrected. “Not attack.”

  “Leica, the Curadores have been infecting, kidnapping, and experimenting on our fellow Citizens. On our families. On your sister. They aren’t just gonna to let us grab our people and walk out of here. Either we do whatever it takes to get back what is ours, or we stay silent and do nothing. There is no in-between. If we do this, people are going to get hurt and no amount of semantics is going to change that.”

  While the Kisaengs punched and shouted and practiced maneuvers around us, my mind spun. “This is going to change everything, isn’t it? All I’ve been thinking about is the details. How do we distract the Curadores? How do we get Tasch and everyone out of the wards? I hadn’t thought at all about what happens after. It’s going to turn this place upside down.”

  Oksun nodded. “Not just inside the Dome. If we bring these Citizens back, if we fight the Curadores, the whole Pleiades system of reclamation and trading will fall apart.”

  “Can we really do that to our own people?”

  “Let me ask you something . . . the Abuelos called you Corrupted, they forced you to spend your life scouting in the Reclamation Fields; then they exiled you. What exactly about our way of life do you want to save?”

  I blinked hard. I had no answer for her.

  Oksun put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s put it back together better this time.”

  “I’d like that.” And I imagined the grove in the Indigno camp, thick with trees. Fruit heavy on the branches. But the only way to make that happen was to get to work. I focused on the explosives. “The way I see it, we need to limit movement in three key locations. The party will be the main distraction, but we’ll need a way to trap people inside the Sanctum once we get them there.”

  “Small detonations along the outer arm of the spiral should do the trick.”
r />   “Good. Next, we’ll need a way to shut down movement through the streets of the Dome so the Curadores have difficulty sending reinforcements.”

  Oksun grinned. “Easy. We’ll hit the magfly lines.”

  “And third, we’ll need to collapse the underground tunnels once the wards have been infiltrated and we’ve rescued the Citizens. We don’t want anyone trying to follow them out,” I said.

  “If we are going to be the ones distracting the Curadores at Dia de los Muertos, who’s doing the infiltrating?” Oksun asked.

  And I smiled. “Now, that would be my other sister.”

  If only I could get out of the Dome again to let her know about it.

  • • •

  It would’ve been naive to think Edison wasn’t keeping an eye on me—after all, he had flys, Kisaengs, and Curadores at his disposal. So even though the idea of sneaking out to Pleiades seemed like a huge risk, I could see no other option. For this plan to work, I needed to get to Sarika.

  But when I got back to my room that night, there was a note waiting for me.

  I don’t blame you. But please let me help. Ada is expecting you at the Complex at ten.

  • • •

  Riya and I walked arm in arm, chatting, trying to look casual. The Mothers’ Complex was impressive and a little ominous. There were at least ten buildings inside the walled compound and all of them were dark.

  “Tell me why I’m here again?” Riya asked. She’d started picking up habits from Oksun and now she gave me a wry eyebrow raise.

  “Moral support.”

  Suddenly, the gate leading into the Complex swung open. In spite of the lights that lined the sidewalk, I couldn’t see anyone inside.

  “Come in if you’re coming,” Ada’s voice hissed, “before someone sees you.”

  We hurried through the gate and it swung shut behind us. But there was still no one. Then I heard the voice again and spotted a speaker on the wall. “Walk straight up the path. Third building on your left.”