Promised

by O'Brien, Caragh M.

  Shock and loss stopped Gaia’s brain from processing any more. Her eyes took in Will beside her, and Myrna efficiently attending to Leon, and Angie hovering in the background, but her mind stopped understanding. Peter dead. Malachai, too. The words didn’t mean anything.

  But Peter still loves me, she thought.

  “He can’t be dead,” she said, but as she spoke, she finally believed it, and a crumpling sensation caught her heart. “Will,” she said, her voice hushed with grief. “I’m so sorry.”

  He shook his head, still hiding his face in his arm, but when she tenderly put a hand on him, he leaned his head against her shoulder. A broken, lost sound came from him. Gaia ached for him. She wrapped an arm around him as best she could, while a stubborn, protesting despair rose within her. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

  “I’m going to miss him so much,” Will said.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  She closed her eyes tightly, reaching her other hand to Leon, needing him. From the darkness, she felt Leon’s fingers tenderly encircle her own, weak but insistent, and her gratitude that Leon was still alive mixed inextricably with her grief over Peter, fusing deep in the loneliest place within her.

  * * *

  A bullet had penetrated Leon’s upper chest and lodged in his left shoulder. A second was buried in his side, lower on the right. A third had gouged a deep streak along his back, but he had stabilized, and Myrna was able to extricate the bullets and patch him up.

  “He needs more rest,” Myrna said the next day, as she checked his pulse again. She’d changed his bandages and was satisfied with his progress. “You think you can manage to keep him quiet?”

  “I will,” Gaia said.

  Gaia longed to take him down to her parents’ house on Sally Row where it was restful and quiet, but he was still too fragile to move and she herself was needed here, in the center of negotiations. He lay in a small, cream-colored guest room of the Bastion, one with a view overlooking the square and none of the history of his old bedroom. Both windows were open to the echoing, hammering noises of workers repairing damage from the battle of the day before.

  If only fixing the society would be as simple as mending a few walls. The Protectorat sat in the prison, officially deposed, and the new jockeying for power had begun. Mabrother Iris had been killed in the fighting on the terrace, accidentally or not Gaia would never know.

  She had spent hours that morning working with leaders from New Sylum, Wharfton, and the Enclave, sorting out the chaos of the rebellion and weighing whom to detain in the prison. She had teams trying to reestablish basic services of medical care, water and electricity at the same time that others were drafting a new charter that granted equal rights to everyone.

  Elections were scheduled to follow, and from there it would get even more complicated. Gaia was fully aware of the staggering amount of work ahead, considering she had recently gone through a similar process with the people of New Sylum.

  She shifted closer to Leon and studied his even features again. He turned his face, licked his lips, and kept sleeping.

  “How are you doing yourself?” Myrna asked.

  Gaia lifted her hands, examining the singed skin on her pinkytips where the electrocution clamps had been attached, as if they might provide a way to measure all her other hurts as well. The tenderness in her abdomen was about the same. The heightened sensitivity of her skin had faded, and a foreign quietness had settled over her body like a muffling blanket. It wasn’t simple fatigue from grief and blood loss. Neither was it numbness, because she felt as alert as she’d ever been.

  “I feel like I’m waiting, but waiting for nothing,” she said.

  Myrna laughed. “I was thinking more physically than poetically. Why are you still wearing that bracelet?”

  Gaia glanced at the glowing blue band on her left wrist. She’d paid enough for it. She held out her wrist toward Myrna, who cut it off with a pointy scissors.

  “Let me check your sutures,” Myrna said.

  When Gaia undid the waist of her skirt and loosened her bandage to show her the healing stitches from her surgery, Myrna approved.

  Gaia slowly retucked her blouse. “I’m glad we have Maya,” she said. With all the hurt and losses that others had suffered around her, Gaia hadn’t thought much consciously about her own blighted motherhood, but it was beginning to sink in. “There’s a chance I could still have my own children, isn’t there?”

  Myrna folded her arms across her chest. “How so?”

  “Sephie took my ovaries, but not my uterus,” Gaia said. “If we found some of my eggs, if I bought them back, couldn’t we inseminate them with Leon’s sperm and implant them in me? I could be my own surrogate mother.”

  Myrna began wrapping up her extra bandages and salve.

  “Couldn’t I, Myrna?”

  “In theory, with the right hormones, I suppose it’s possible,” Myrna said. “We’ve never tried it. I wouldn’t give you very good odds.”

  Gaia leaned a hip against Leon’s bed, hugging her arms around herself. “The Protectorat talked about using my eggs to produce dozens of children. It just seems Leon and I ought to be able to have one of them, don’t you think?”

  “It wouldn’t be Leon’s child,” Myrna said.

  “Why not?”

  “You really want to know this?”

  “Of course. Tell me.”

  Myrna moved before the window, where the diffused light dropped softly on her white hair. “Your eggs were claimed the minute Mabrother Rhodeski heard someone like you existed,” she said. “He had a list of fifty families all privately outbidding each other to buy your eggs. Sephie had everything ready to go as soon as they were harvested. Your eggs have already been inseminated.”

  “They aren’t frozen somewhere?”

  Myrna shook her head. “Eggs are more stable after they’re inseminated and start to divide. They’re being carefully tended in culture dishes. Each one is essentially priceless.”

  Gaia wanted to see. She wanted to take them all home with her, or else smash them all. Her conflicted, impulsive reaction bewildered her. Heartache was expanding within her so strongly that it was hard to breathe.

  “So my kids, mine and Leon’s, can never exist?”

  Myrna spoke more gently. “I’m sorry about it,” she said. “Truly, I am.”

  “I must be missing something,” Gaia said. “This can’t be the end.” It was such a strange, elusive loss, the vanishing of the hypothetical children she could have had with Leon, like losing a precious dream she’d hardly known she had.

  Weary, Gaia eyed the edge of Leon’s bed and decided that the space beside him was just wide enough for her to fit in for a nap. “I don’t think I’m going to make my next meeting,” Gaia said slowly. “Tell Will for me.”

  “You said yourself that you have Maya,” Myrna said. “And you can try to adopt.”

  “There aren’t enough babies, remember?” Gaia said. “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

  “You’ll still be a midwife,” Myrna said.

  Gaia let out a sad little laugh. How hard would it be to tend pregnant mothers when she could never have a baby of her own? “Yes. I suppose I can deliver other people’s babies, when I’m not busy with all the funerals we have coming up.”

  Myrna reached to gently squeeze Gaia’s shoulder. “It’s always funerals and babies, Gaia. That’s what it is.”

  “I know,” Gaia said. “I just never thought they’d be the same thing.” She slid onto the bed, curling up beside Leon.

  Myrna frowned. “I don’t think I like this dark side of you.”

  Gaia didn’t either. She closed her eyes and hoped Myrna would leave before she gave in to her grief. She heard the windows being shut, one after the other, blocking out the noise from the square, and then the door was softly closed.

  CHAPTER 24

  long shadows

  “SHE’S PULLING HER HAT off again,” Gaia said.

  Gaia itched to fi
x her sister’s hat and tidy up her soft, mussed hair, but her hands were full with a pot of fragrant herbs.

  “I’ve got it,” Leon said. “Here, Maya. Let’s see you.” He crouched down before the toddler and despite his right arm still being in a splint, he adjusted the ties under the girl’s chin. “Your hat stays on. See Gaia’s hat? And mine? Hold my hand.”

  When he straightened, the toddler lifted both her hands. “Uppy,” she said.

  He swung her up in his left arm, and Gaia watched the maneuver closely.

  His recovery had been slow, with the setback of an infection that had lingered, and Gaia knew Maya was heavier than she looked.

  Leon smiled at Gaia, his eyes amused.

  “Enough with the coddling, Gaia.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

  “Come here.” He pivoted Maya out of the way, leaned near, and angled the brim of his hat to give Gaia a kiss. “All right?” he asked softly.

  She nodded, smiling back. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Good. Maya wants a kiss, too,” he said.

  Gaia planted a loud smooch on the girl’s cheek so that she squealed. Leon did the same thing, making Maya squeal again, and then he aimed a grin at Gaia.

  What could she say? He pretty much slayed her.

  The three of them were heading toward the Wharfton quad, several weeks after the rebellion, and their late afternoon shadows stretched long before them onto the dirt road. As they came around the corner, the quad opened before them, and Gaia saw people meandering before the Tvaltar. Hammering rang from the blacksmith’s shop, and a boy dribbled a red ball around a group of pigeons, sending half a dozen into heavy flight. Up the hill, the dismantling of the wall had stopped for the day. Clear progress was visible in both directions from where the south gate had stood, though the demolition still had a long way to go.

  She nodded up at the deserted parapet. “Did you ever patrol up there?”

  “When I first joined, I did,” Leon said. “It seems like a long time ago. I’m going to need a new job now.”

  She tried to think what he could do.

  “You were good with the excrims,” she said.

  “I’ve thought about working at the prison,” he said slowly. “To be honest, I don’t want to be near the Protectorat.”

  She didn’t blame him.

  “We need someone to run the first responders in Wharfton and New Sylum,” she said. “Or there’s teaching. Kids always like you.”

  “Could you see me as a teacher?” he asked, his voice doubtful.

  She could, actually. Half his students would have terrible crushes on him. “Only if you want. You can think about it.”

  “Junie!” Maya squealed.

  Outside Peg’s Tavern, Junie and Josephine shared a table with Norris and Dinah. Others from Wharfton and New Sylum had gathered, too, filling more tables under the brown canvas umbrellas. Leon let Maya down again to run toward her friend, and Gaia’s gaze caught on the way he retucked the back of his blue shirt.

  “Come join us, Senator,” Norris said, lifting his tankard.

  Gaia smiled at her new title. She wasn’t used to it at all. “We will. We came to see Myrna’s new blood bank, but we’ll come right back.”

  “When are you two getting married, anyway?” Norris asked. “We could use a wedding around here.”

  Leon lifted his gaze, regarding her curiously.

  “Norris. Don’t be a pest,” Dinah said, rising to give Gaia a hug. “Pay him no mind. You just missed Sasha and her grandpa. Let me see you. You’re getting your color back. Nice herbs. For Myrna?”

  “Yes,” Gaia said.

  Leon was still watching her, idly pushing his shirt sleeve up a bit over his splint. She could feel herself blushing.

  “What?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Nothing. Dinah’s right about your color.”

  At another table, with their profiles aimed in concentration over the pieces, Pyrho was teaching Jack to play chess. Angie was curled up in a chair beside Jack, fiddling with the puzzle pieces of an intricate wooden sphere. Derek and Ingrid sat a couple tables over with their daughter, and Derek lifted a hand in greeting. As the piano started up inside the tavern, Gaia glanced toward the open windows, wondering if Will were inside with Gillian. Seeing so many friends, Gaia couldn’t help missing the absent faces, too.

  “I swear Maya grows bigger every time I see her,” Josephine said.

  “Can you watch her for us? We’ll be right back,” Gaia said.

  “Are you kidding? I’d be glad to,” Josephine said.

  With unhurried strides, Gaia started across the quad beside Leon. A light breeze drifted up from the unlake, cool along the back of her neck. She shifted the pot to her other hip, checking her skirt briefly to be certain none of the dirt had spilled on her. When they passed under the dappling shade of the mesquite tree, she instinctively took in a breath of the dry, piney air. Leon slowed to a stop.

  “You’re not eager to talk to Myrna, are you?” he said.

  “I know it matters to you,” she said. She didn’t care to think about her surgery or how she’d been violated. “It won’t change how I feel.”

  He gently tugged the pot of herbs out of her hands and set it on a bench under the tree. “But what if we could have one of your blastocysts?”

  She shook her head. “They aren’t mine.”

  “They’re half yours.”

  “That means they’re half not mine,” she said. “Our children are gone, Leon. They never existed. You can’t bring back something that never existed.”

  “I’d love any babies you carried just as much, no matter who the father was,” he said.

  “I know. You would.”

  “And you would, too,” he said. “We could push to get one of your blastocysts if you wanted.”

  She felt a fissure opening inside her. “Why are you doing this to me? There are costs to what we did. Why can’t you accept that?”

  He ran a hand back through his hair. “I’m just thinking about our future.”

  “So am I.”

  His eyes searched hers, and she knew there was no hiding the twisted mess inside of her. Any chance of carrying a baby was so impossibly slim. She didn’t think she would ever be ready to open up to the risk and hope of experimenting on herself.

  “I’m not trying to make it worse,” he said quietly, and pulled her near. “I only want you to know if you ever want to try to get pregnant, I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

  “And you won’t be sad if I can’t ever try?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” he said. “You make me unbelievably happy, Gaia. You know that.”

  “I feel like I’m stopping you from being a father, just because I’m messed up inside now,” she said.

  He lightly smoothed her hair from her cheek. “I’m Maya’s father, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  It was completely true. Her sorrow softened, easing the darkness within her. She smiled a little. I’ve noticed.”

  A bee skimmed through the shade with a zip of sound, then veered back into the sunlight.

  Leon took off his hat and dropped it casually beside the pot on the bench. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” he said. “Are you feeling settled yet?”

  Her heart did a zigzag. “Pretty much. Yes.”

  “I thought maybe so. Then when should we get married?” He shifted nearer and linked his arms around her.

  “Soon,” she said.

  “I’ve heard that before. How about tomorrow?”

  She laughed. Then she thought about it. Why not? “Okay,” she said.

  He beamed as he drew her closer still. “That’s more like it.”

  It meant all the more to her that their happiness was built on the genuine, intricate mix of heartaches they shared. She liked the way she only had to lift her chin and his mouth was perfectly near. When he laughed, low in his chest, she could almost feel it under her fingertips. She clos
ed her eyes, leaning into him, and met the light pressure of his kiss.

  Being married to him was going to be beautiful.

  “We should tell our friends,” he said, kissing her again.

  “Yes.”

  She shifted, bumping lightly into his splint as she slid one hand around his warm shirt. He tasted faintly minty, like the warm shade. She tried a new angle and he followed along. When his next kiss trailed to her neck, she ducked her chin and curled her fingers in his shirt. “Um,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, setting another kiss on her cheek and slightly loosening his arms. His eyes were darker when she looked up again. “I’ve been wanting to do that. You looked so sweet with that pot of flowers.”

  “Herbs.”

  “What do you say we forget about Myrna’s and head back home?”

  She laughed. “We can’t. What’s happened to my hat?”

  “It’s there,” he said, nodding toward the bench.

  She saw her hat on top of his and shook her head. “Smooth.”

  “A guy has to try.”

  She laughed again. “I’d like Evelyn and Rafael to come to the wedding. We should notify your mother, too, I think.”

  His smile gradually dimmed, and he ran his thumb over her red bracelet. “She was ready to stand there and watch me be executed,” he said.

  Gaia hadn’t thought of that. They had talked at length about the rebellion, Gaia’s surgery, Leon’s injuries, and the torture, which had included Pyrho and Jack, but new subtleties were still coming up, and it seemed like they would never be at peace with all that had happened. Gaia’s old nightmares of the Matrarc’s death had resurfaced, interspersed now with haunting fragments of the night Gaia had killed Mabrother Stoltz and imagined glimpses of a faceless corpse in the debris of the wall.

  Leon was troubled most by memories of Gaia’s torture. The first time he saw Mabrother Iris electrocute Gaia, Leon confessed about the explosives under the obelisk, cooperating to make Mabrother Iris stop shocking her, but the Protectorat had not been satisfied. The torture of them both had escalated through stages of questioning as Mabrother Iris fished for every tiniest detail, even when it became clear that Gaia knew practically nothing. Gaia found that Leon was prone to withdraw into a silent rage when he remembered, and it worked best then to set him caring for Maya, who seemed to pull him back to the present.