Promised

by O'Brien, Caragh M.

  “He wants my ovaries. He told me so. We’re working out a deal. Let me talk to him.”

  “He knows very well where you are right now. But you don’t need to worry about your health. What I do to you won’t last,” he said.

  She twisted her wrists to try to free them, but the cloth bindings only cinched tighter, and she had to relax against the armrests and flex her fingers to try to reestablish any looseness. Mabrother Iris paced slowly forward, studying her, and when he put out a hand to smooth her hair behind her right ear, she jerked her head away.

  “What happened to your cheek here?” he asked.

  “One of the guards struck me. Sergeant Burke.”

  She strained her face away as far she could, while he tenderly smoothed her hair back. Then, deliberately, his finger trailed lightly down her right cheek. She grit her teeth, bearing it.

  “So sensitive,” he said. “And your scar. Is that even more sensitive?”

  His touch skimmed her left cheek next, and she tried unsuccessfully to writhe away. Even after his fingers were gone, her skin still tingled.

  “You don’t care to be touched, do you?” he said. “Not even gently.”

  “Not by vermin,” she said.

  “Careful, now,” he said. He unclasped her necklace and set it aside on the desk. He touched her red bracelet, then left it. “Whose idea was it to blow up my chimney?” he asked. “Not a bad prank, that. Was that you?”

  She licked her lips. “Of course. I sanctioned it.”

  “It was more in the vein of Leon’s thinking, I expect. The fire in his father’s favorite grapes, too. That was pure Leon. There’s no point taking blame that isn’t yours,” Mabrother Iris said, and turned from the desk with a U-shaped bit of clear plastic. “Open your mouth. It’s for your teeth. So you won’t bite your tongue. Try it.”

  He pressed it against her lips.

  “I can shove it in and wrap a gag around mouth if you prefer,” he said.

  She let him stick it in. It tasted like wax between her teeth, and her mouth began to salivate. Swallowing caused a loud click in her ears.

  Next he smeared something on her right pinky finger and attached one of the clamps tightly enough that she couldn’t work it off with her thumb. He did the same to her left hand, and then stepped back toward the desk.

  “People are very upset about the wall,” Mabrother Iris said. “That was going too far. At least one man is dead. We need to be certain nothing like that ever happens again.”

  She couldn’t talk to him with her mouth full. He wasn’t even asking her a question.

  “I want to give you a sample of what’s ahead,” he said. “I don’t have time for more now, but this will give you something to think about.”

  He shifted the computer tablet before him and clicked at the keyboard. She waited, fear growing rather than lessening with the delay. She swallowed again around the mouth guard. Mabrother looked up at her, light reflecting off his glasses.

  “Ready?” he asked. “Five, four, three—”

  Lightning flew through her. The shock was so intense it left every muscle and blood vein seizing after it stopped, and she shuddered, shaking, appalled. Her teeth were clenched so deeply into the mouth guard that they almost met, and swallowing nearly suffocated her.

  Mabrother Iris came around the table, extricated the mouth guard from her lips and chucked it into a garbage receptacle. She gasped for air, still trembling, and tipped her head back against the chair while her arms and legs rippled in residual spasms. She was dimly aware that Mabrother Iris had opened the canister on the desktop. He took something out and set it on top: another mouth guard.

  “How was that?” he asked.

  She couldn’t make her throat work to voice any insult harsh enough.

  He reached for a tissue and wiped her eyes and nose for her, and when he lightly ran his finger down her cheek again, she jumped in her bonds. Her sensitive skin felt his touch now like feathered needles.

  “It’s a strange little aftereffect, isn’t it? Your nerve ends tend to get more sensitive, not less, as you might think,” he said. He stood back, observing her another moment. “I have to go see how your fiancé’s doing with his father. Those two have never had the easiest relationship, that’s for certain.”

  She could hear him move behind her, toward the door.

  “By the way,” he added. “In case you haven’t guessed, that camera’s live. Leon was able to watch us.”

  She lifted her gaze and scanned up to the corner of the ceiling where the white box had its red light steady on. Despair for Leon twisted through her. It was the torment he’d once imagined, coming true for both of them.

  “You can stay to keep her company,” Mabrother Iris said softly.

  The door closed. She didn’t understand his last words until she heard the snuffling of the little pig on the floor. Mabrother Iris would be coming back. She told herself she wouldn’t cry, that it didn’t hurt that much, that she couldn’t let Leon see her suffering, but she had never been so terrified.

  * * *

  Mabrother Iris came and went, sometimes shocking her, sometimes not. He wanted to know who had set the explosives in the wall, and who had managed the blackout to the Bastion and a quarter of the Enclave the night before. He wanted details about his chimney, the fire in the vineyard, the explosion at the mycoprotein plant, and half a dozen smaller bombs that had gone off around the city, disrupting water lines and the electrical grid. He pressed her for a complete list of sabotage targets, but she knew hardly any of them. Leon hadn’t told her. She only knew for certain that one bomb remained, but she didn’t know what it was or when it was set to go.

  She tried to tell Mabrother Iris nothing, but after a point, the shocks were so painful and discombobulating, she no longer knew what she was telling him. Ashamed, broken, she realized she would have told him anything to make him stop.

  Once, after a break, when Mabrother Iris didn’t even ask her a question before he shocked her, she finally realized that it didn’t matter what she said or didn’t say. What was being done to her depended on what Leon was or wasn’t saying somewhere else while he watched. She lifted her gaze to the camera, confused and hurt. How could Leon let this go on?

  Just give in, Leon, she thought.

  Slumped, limp in the chair, Gaia was barely conscious when she felt Mabrother Iris touch her cheek once more. He eased out her latest mouth guard. She worked her tongue around her mouth to swallow. Even her jaw was sore.

  “There,” he said gently. “How are we doing?”

  There was nothing she could say.

  Mabrother Iris reattached her necklace around her throat, adjusting it lightly over the neckline of her blouse. The cold, delicate metal burned against her sensitive skin. Gaia heard a noise behind her, and then a team of guards came in with a white medical stretcher.

  Hands shoved up Gaia’s sleeve, and a needle was inserted into the vein in the crook of her elbow. An IV was affixed to the needle and carefully bandaged to her arm to keep it in place. Still confused, Gaia looked up the length of IV tube to find Sephie attaching a bag of fluid like the one that had fed into Leon’s arm. She tapped the line and turned a valve.

  “One moment, please,” Mabrother Iris said.

  He produced a short, shimmering, slightly elastic cord. Gaia felt the binding pressure as he wrapped it around her left wrist to form a bracelet, crimping the ends together with a special glittering bead. A soft blue glow illuminated the band.

  “It seems fitting you should have this, like the other girls,” he said. “You aren’t strictly a vessel mother, but since your contribution is even more important, I feel you qualify for the honors.”

  Understanding brought her horrified despair. “No,” she whispered.

  Mabrother Iris smiled once more at Gaia. “That’s right. Harvest time.”

  CHAPTER 21

  noon

  WHEN SHE CAME TO, she was in a small, pale blue room, resting sideways on
a bed, with her locket watch ticking softly at her throat. Every millimeter of her skin felt acutely sensitive, while beneath the surface, her entire body felt like it had been shattered and jammed back together. The ends of her pinky fingers were singed and tender. Someone had bathed her and changed her into a white, filmy nightgown with eyelet lace edging the sleeves. She turned her head on the pillow, scanning around the unfamiliar room. A vase of flowers stood on a small table beside her bed, and shear curtains hung at the windows where a breeze of warm air drifted in.

  A tap came from the door, and Emily came cautiously in, carrying a white dress and a pair of white loafers.

  “How do you feel?” Emily asked.

  “Awful,” Gaia croaked.

  Emily handed her a glass of water, but as Gaia shifted upward to take it, she felt lines of pain along her abdomen. She set a hand over her stomach. A bandage there dumbfounded, then petrified her. She scrambled to pull up the edge of her gown and found a square of dressing carefully taped over her lower abdomen.

  “Don’t touch it,” Emily said gently.

  But Gaia nicked free an edge of tape and lifted off the covering to see a new, four-centimeter incision below her bellybutton. Precise, tidy stitches held it closed. They really did it, she thought, shocked. They took my ovaries.

  She lifted her troubled gaze to Emily.

  “I’m sorry for what they did,” Emily said. “The Protectorat went too far.”

  It was still more than she could take in. She’d never really believed it was possible. “Where are my eggs now?” She pulled hard at the glowing bracelet that bound her wrist, trying to work it over her hand, but it wouldn’t come off. Her red bracelet from Leon was loose by comparison.

  Emily handed her the dress. “I don’t know. My guess is they’ve been sold to the highest bidders. But that hardly matters right now,” she said. “You need to get dressed quickly. Half of the Enclave is calling for your execution for what you did to the wall last night. A man was killed at the south gate, and dozens more were injured. They’re calling you a terrorist. But Mabrother Rhodeski and the rest who back the Vessel Institute cut a deal for your life. They said if you survived your surgery, they would even honor their agreement to provide water for outside the wall.”

  Gaia struggled up. “Where’s Leon?” she asked. “Where are Peter and Pyrho and the rest?”

  “That’s why I came for you. They’re scheduled for execution.”

  “When?”

  “At noon today. The Protectorat wants you to stay away. He says the crowd might still turn against you if you’re there, but I thought you should know.”

  Gaia clicked open her locket watch: 11:47.

  “Help me,” Gaia said. Adrenaline overrode her pain and weakness. She pulled herself to her feet and hurried to change into the dress. “We have to stop them.”

  “It’s no use, Gaia,” Emily said. “Your friends are criminals. They’re the scapegoats. The Protectorat has kept the rest of your protestors corralled in the Square of the Bastion. They’ve been there overnight and all morning because there isn’t enough room in the prison, and he’ll only let them go after they’ve witnessed the executions. It’s your ringleaders, or everybody.”

  “We have to try,” Gaia said. “Please, Emily, you have to help me.” She shoved her toes in the loafers and flew to the door.

  “They have my boys,” Emily said. “I can’t go against the Protectorat. I’m not as brave as you. I never was.”

  Gaia couldn’t wait. She pushed open the door and hurried down the hallway. With her dress still unbuttoned, she clutched her sore belly and ran through the Bastion’s upper hallways and down the stairs. She finally skidded across the black-and-white tile floor of the foyer toward the big doors and lunged outside.

  Sunlight flooded the terrace, coruscating brightly among the white-clad elite who had gathered for the execution. They were chatting in small groups, and their air was so distinctly at odds with what she expected for an execution that for a split second, Gaia thought there had been some insane misunderstanding and she had stumbled into a party.

  She quickly worked the last buttons on the front of her dress and moved forward. Evelyn, with a steely expression, stood silently with her brother Rafael at the far left edge of the terrace. Sephie and several of her fellow doctors stood at the other end, not far from Mabrother Iris. A group of vessel mothers was gathered together. At the top of the steps, the Protectorat and Genevieve stood with their backs to her, talking with Mabrother Rhodeski and his wife.

  In contrast to the lighter mood on the terrace, the crowd in the square was sullen and tense. A barricade divided the square in half. To the left of the obelisk were Gaia’s friends from outside the wall, contained by a perimeter of armed guards. Strain and weariness were patently obvious in their anxious expressions. On the right, the merchants and working people of the Enclave had gathered, and farther to the side, behind the black fence of the prison, inmates had been lined up to witness the executions.

  A cloud shadow dropped into the square, deep and swift, and Gaia blinked upward to where clouds were moving in fat, piled lumps. The obelisk changed from white to gray. Angled to the right stood the hulking structure of the gallows. Two nooses were strung over the high wooden beam. The merchants shifted and then parted to let through a team of prison guards. Behind them came the bound prisoners: Peter, Pyrho, Jack, Malachai, and Leon.

  “Stop this!” Gaia commanded, striding forward.

  Those near to the Protectorat turned in surprise.

  “They’re terrorists,” the Protectorat said, scanning her from head to toe. “We found explosives planted under the obelisk. Right beneath this very square.”

  “But we didn’t set them off,” Gaia said. “They were just for a threat.”

  “A ticking time bomb is more than a threat,” the Protectorat said. Leon and the others were being marched up the stairs. Their faces were darkened with bruises and exhaustion. Under his disheveled dark hair, Leon’s eyes burned with grim fury, but then, as her gaze met his across the distance, his expression turned to yearning. The guards positioned Malachai and Peter under the nooses.

  “We never intended to hurt anyone,” Gaia continued insistently.

  “Not even Sephie? You killed Mabrother Stoltz yourself,” the Protectorat said. “Last night, you blew up the wall and killed another man. You’ve threatened the lives of hundreds more. It’s time for you people to understand, once and for all, that you cannot simply do what you want.”

  “Then kill me, not them,” Gaia said. She took another step forward, shouting toward the gallows. “Stop there! Stop!”

  The Protectorat grabbed her arm. “You were convicted, obviously. Your sentence was commuted, thanks to Mabrother Rhodeski. Be thankful now, and be quiet like a good girl.” He flicked a finger at her glowing bracelet and shoved her beside a guard. “Watch her,” he ordered.

  The guard took her arm.

  On the gallows, the hangman put a black hood over Malachai’s head, and as a second hood was lowered over Peter’s, Gaia’s heart clenched in panic. Peter!

  She urgently surveyed the crowd, both halves of it, and was shocked by their cowed passivity. Not one of them dared to speak out. She couldn’t find Mace in the Enclave crowd, or Rita, or anybody she knew. On the left side, even the miners held their tongues.

  “What has happened to you?” she asked, frustrated and broken-hearted. “This is wrong!”

  “You’re the problem, you and your terrorists,” said one of the merchants in the crowd. “Things were good until you stirred up trouble.”

  A woman spoke up beside him. “Mabrother Rhodeski there can give the new people a little water if he wants, like he says. That’s his business. But we want the rest of things to go back like they were.”

  “The way things were was bad!” Gaia said forcefully. She was undeterred by the guard’s tightening grip on her arm. “The rich people here are using all of us. They don’t even care enough about you to
let Myrna Silk run her blood bank inside the wall. They’re going to expand the baby factory to buy and sell babies, just for themselves. The Protectorat tortured his own son, and me.” She clutched a hand to her abdomen, and struggled to find words for what Sephie had done to her. “They’ve gutted me. I can never have children of my own.”

  The crowd began to shift then, and voices started up.

  “Enough! Remove her,” the Protectorat called. “The nooses! Now!”

  Guards looped the ropes around Malachai’s and Peter’s necks, cinching them neatly. A growl came from Malachai on the platform behind them, and Leon jostled forward, bumping Pyrho.

  “She’s right!” Leon called. “My fathers promises are lies!”

  “Wait! You have to listen!” called a new, high-pitched voice from the corner of the terrace. Sasha, her enormous pregnant belly swelling before her, strode forward beside a man in a cook’s apron and lifted the cut band of her bracelet. “They’re keeping vessel mothers against their will. Everything Gaia says is true!”

  Gaia jerked free from the guard who held her, dodged down into the crowd, and charged toward the obelisk. Despite her surgery pain, she clenched her muscles and hauled herself up onto the base to stand tall. “Look at your neighbors and search your hearts,” Gaia urged the people. She bored her gaze into face after face. “You know it’s time for a change. For fairness. This is about us,” she waved her arm toward the square, encompassing all of the people from inside and outside the wall, “against the few of them. Now is the time. We have to stop them!”

  “Guards!” the Protectorat ordered.

  “I call for the Protectorat to stand down!” Gaia called loudly. “It’s time to elect new leaders! Stand down, Miles Quarry!”

  A stunned silence immobilized the people.

  The Protectorat produced a pistol and aimed it at Leon. His voice came clearly across the square for all to hear. “Drop the convicts. Shoot Gaia Stone and anyone who tries to protect her.”

  Someone yanked Gaia down off the base of the obelisk as shots smashed into the stonework behind her. The explosion of a gun blasted on her left. Some of the merchants were shooting back at the guards. Gaia realized they’d been armed and prepared, vacillating, all this time.