Traitor Born

by Amy A. Bartol

  Reykin matches my smile with his own. “What’s so funny?” he asks.

  “Nothing. My life is utter hell.” I sigh, and then laugh harder.

  The technician winks at him before reclaiming her seat at the controls. The laser moves, emitting a precise beam. I don’t care. I feel like I’m floating. “I didn’t know this could be painless,” I say. “No one ever told me when I had this done before.”

  Reykin frowns. “Dune was probably trying to prepare you for the life of a Transitioned soldier.”

  “Nothing could prepare me for that.” I laugh lightheartedly, even though I mean every word.

  The laser moves around, fusing cracks in my bones. My skin and muscle will be repaired after the bone is set. The smell is atrocious, but even that doesn’t matter.

  Reykin leans near my ear. “Roselle, what do you want?”

  “Want?” I smile dreamily. “I don’t know. What do you want?” He’s silly. No one ever asks me that.

  “You can tell me. What’s your greatest ambition?” His aquamarine eyes shine like light on water.

  “Middle age,” I mutter with more giggles. The room spins. I close my eyes.

  “What else?” Reykin touches my arm. I open my eyes again.

  “A puppy,” I whisper. “I’ve always wanted a puppy. Isn’t that a strange word? Pup-pee . . . pup . . . pee . . .”

  “Anything else?” A faraway voice asks, distracting me.

  “Hawthorne . . . not to hate me.” My eyelids are too heavy to keep open. “Someone . . . who will . . . sticketh . . .” I feel him take my hand.

  Someone squeezes my shoulder. I open my eyes, squinting and tearing up in the white lights. Turning my head, I find Reykin beside me. “How do you feel?” he asks.

  “Thirsty,” I reply, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.

  Reykin hands me a small cup of water. I take it and drink it all in one long swallow. He takes the empty cup and thrusts an armload of clothes at me. “Get dressed. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “For what?” I look down at myself. All my bruising is gone. My skin is smooth.

  “I found your father’s body. They’re going to transport him to Swords soon. We have to hurry.”

  In stunned silence, I rise and change into slacks and a loose-fitting top. Reykin turns his back and waits by the door. I don’t know whose clothes these are, but they’re comfortable. My ribs no longer ache. I can breathe deeply, without pain. Bending isn’t a problem either. I slip on the shoes Reykin left on the chair.

  He opens the door and waits for me to pass through. “This way.” He directs me to a stairwell at the back of the medical facility. Descending several flights, we stop at a red hatch-like door. Reykin uses his moniker to infiltrate a program into the Halo Palace’s operating system. In seconds, the hatch pops open. I pass through.

  The corridor is cold and empty, but when voices sound from the junction up ahead, Reykin jerks my elbow and pulls me to a nearby doorway. We flatten against the wall. I glare at him. “Didn’t you clear this?”

  “Not exactly.” His jaw tightens. “There wasn’t time. They’re shipping him to Swords in a couple of hours. It was now or never. I don’t know the state of his body, Roselle.”

  The corridor quiets. Reykin grasps my hand. Our fingers thread. We hurry to the last door on the end. Checking his moniker, he says, “This is it.” He unlatches the door and opens it.

  The morgue contains long steel tables with shiny surfaces. Long hoses hang from the ceiling like tentacle arms of a monstrous sea creature. Fluid congeals inside a swollen sack suspended from above. The air reeks of it. And of death. I hold my fingers to my nose. Reykin closes the door behind us.

  No one attends the bodies. Every table has a corpse on it. Most of them are Sword socialites still in their god or goddess costumes. A few are assassins. I pause by one of the Death Gods. He doesn’t have a moniker. It was either cut out and repaired extremely well, or he never had one?

  I scan the room for my father. At the far end of the morgue, high above one of the tables, a levitating transporter pod waits to be lowered over a supine corpse. I move toward it, weaving through victims, trying not to look at them. I shudder when I see it’s him, and a small gasp escapes me. His pieces have been fused back together. Someone took their time with him, cleaning him up and dressing him in a plain white outfit.

  His eyelids are closed. He looks peaceful. Streaks of tears drip from my chin, spattering on the metal table. Reaching out, I touch his hair, smoothing it back. I don’t ever remember touching it before. Did he ever hold me? Did my chubby baby hands ever touch his face?

  “I can’t change this,” I whisper. “I can’t fix anything.”

  “No, you can’t change this,” Reykin replies, “but you can change the world, Roselle—the future.”

  “Why bother? No one’s worth it.”

  “You’re worth it. Do it for you.” I wipe my chin and cheeks with the back of my sleeve, sniffling. “Do you want a moment alone?” he asks gently. I nod, and he walks away to give me some time.

  When he comes back, I know it’s time to go.

  I dry the tears from my cheeks with the backs of my sleeves. “I’m ready.”

  Reykin slips the pinkie ring from my father’s hand. It has an embossed golden halo on it. The ring has been in his family for generations. Kennet loved to wear it because it’s Virtue-Fated, not Sword-Fated.

  “Here,” Reykin says, “take this.”

  “What are you doing? Put that back!” I whisper-shout. “It’s Gabriel’s now.”

  “Gabriel has everything—a palace full of your father’s things. What do you have? Fused ribs?”

  “I don’t want it.” I move toward the door.

  “Maybe not, but if you take it, that means your mother won’t get it. You can bury it wherever he asked you to take him, as a symbolic gesture.”

  I pause. “Is that what you did?”

  “I buried all their favorite things together.”

  Turning toward Reykin, I hold out my hand. He drops the ring in my palm.

  Suddenly a door swings open. Reykin and I both crouch to the floor like criminals. I peek from between the tables and see a pair of black boots. A voice says, “It wasn’t easy extracting the horns from Kennet Abjorn’s cranium. Whoever did it must’ve really wanted him to keep them.”

  The voice of Agent Crow barks with laughter. “If you asked most people,” he replies, “they would swear the horns of The Sword’s husband were real!”

  This elicits more cackles from them both.

  “I had the room secured for your visit,” the technician says. “No other personnel have attended the bodies but me.”

  “Show me all the corpses without monikers,” Agent Crow orders.

  They walk from assassin to assassin. As they move, Reykin and I crawl along the ground, trying to make it back to the door unseen. My heart thumps in my chest when Agent Crow pauses at a table a few feet from us. I hold my breath.

  “They don’t appear to have had monikers, wouldn’t you agree?” he asks.

  “That is my conclusions as well!” the technician says proudly. “It’s astounding.”

  “Quite,” Agent Crow agrees.

  They wander toward my father, and Reykin and I scurry for the open door. In the empty corridor, I get to my feet and hug the wall. Reykin is beside me in seconds, breathing hard. We hurry up the hall, exiting the morgue the way we came in.

  “That Census agent is everywhere,” Reykin mutters.

  “You have no idea,” I reply with a shudder.

  After backtracking through the medical center, I breathe easier. We take another air lift. My father’s ring is heavy in my fist. “You’re on lockdown until further notice,” Reykin orders softly. “Don’t even think about leaving the Palace grounds.” I don’t answer him.

  The elevator doors open. “They didn’t have monikers,” I mumble. “What does that mean?”

  Reykin’s expression is grim. “I don’
t know.” He follows me out of the lift.

  “I know my way from here.”

  “Get used to me, Roselle. I’m not going anywhere.”

  When we get to my apartment, I find a half dozen security stingers hovering around by it. I glare at Reykin, but he merely shrugs.

  Once inside, I close the door immediately. Phoenix’s clanging steps ring out in the foyer. I smile, despite everything, and kneel to greet it. “Hey, I missed you, Phee. I have something important. Can you hold it for me?” The mechadome’s red lenses nod. I hold up my father’s ring. Phoenix lifts its vacuum arm and sucks the ring out of my palm. It disappears inside the squat bot. “Thank you.”

  Reykin is already in the den after securing the apartment with his whisper orb. He sits on the sofa, leans his head back, and closes his eyes. I cross my arms and rest against the doorframe. “No one touches Hawthorne.”

  Reykin doesn’t open his eyes. “Not your decision,” he replies, his jaw tight.

  “It is if you ever want my help with anything in the future.”

  “We have your friends.”

  My eyes narrow. “We’d all risk our lives for Hawthorne—and he’d do the same for us—so he won’t talk. Tell them what I just said. Make Dune and Daltrey understand that this point is nonnegotiable. You kill him, I kill all of you.”

  Reykin opens his eyes and lifts his head. “They’re going to want to use him.”

  When Hawthorne was secondborn, he hated the way things were. Now that he’s firstborn, I don’t know what he’ll do. He says he loves me, but he’ll think that joining the Gates of Dawn is treason. This is going against everything we were raised to believe. Breaking that kind of indoctrination doesn’t happen overnight—if ever. “I’ll see what I can do to explain things to him, but I can’t promise anything. He has fought against the Gates of Dawn in active combat. It’ll feel like he’s betraying the soldiers he commanded.”

  “Tell him his life depends on it—no—tell him your life depends on it.”

  “Does it?” I ask.

  “All of ours do, Roselle.”

  My plan to sneak into Hawthorne’s room shouldn’t terrify me, but it does. Under the cover of darkness, I pad softly out onto my balcony. Scaling the ornate stonework of the building, I climb several stories to a ledge wide enough to walk on. My footsteps don’t make much noise as I hurry across the outside of the Halo Palace. The balmy breeze carries the scent of roses from the garden below. I’m turning frosty from the phantom orb in my pocket, which masks my body temperature from the stingers. The swatch of lead covering my moniker does the rest.

  Having memorized the route, I’m almost 100 percent certain that the balcony below me is Hawthorne’s newly issued suite, granted to him while he answers questions about the attack against the social club. He has a sea view, like me, but on the other side of Grisholm’s residence.

  I scale down and pry open the glass panel doors. No lights are on, but my night-vision glasses compensate. For a moment, I worry that I have the wrong apartment, but then I recognize the Trugrave crest on the fusionblade locked in the weapons vault in the wall. My heart races. He should have his sword with him. I could be an assassin.

  I tread softly up the stairs. At the top of the landing, something doesn’t feel right. I pause and listen. The soft sounds of sleep-breathing rasps from the other side of the bedroom door. Gently, I ease it open. It’s dark. Hawthorne is burrowed under his blanket. Moving forward, I just about make it to his bed when a lamp turns on. My hands go up to shield my eyes as the night-vision glasses adjust.

  I lower my arms, my heart beats like that of a leveret’s before a coyote. Hawthorne is seated in the chair in the corner with a fusionmag in his hand. He’s dressed all in black, like me. Devastation ravages his face. He raises a remote and cuts the fake sleep sounds coming from the area near the bed.

  “I prayed it wouldn’t be you,” Hawthorne says sorrowfully. “I figured Winterstrom would try to do it himself.”

  “What are you talking about?” I whisper. I take a step in his direction. He holds the fusionmag a little higher.

  “How were you going to do it?” Hawthorne asks, choking on emotion.

  “Do what?”

  “Kill me.”

  “I could never!” I say in a rush. “How could you think that? I’m here to talk. I swear! I’m unarmed.” I hold up my hands and turn around slowly.

  “What’s in your pocket?” he asks suspiciously. I reach in slowly and pull out two orbs. “This is a phantom orb. It masks me from the stingers.” I hold up the other. “This is a whisper orb. It forms a perimeter around us so we can’t be overheard.” I trigger the whisper orb, and an iridescent bubble billows outward.

  “Set them on the floor.” He motions with the fusionmag.

  I do, slowly.

  “You came here to talk?” he snarls. “So, talk.” The pained look of having been betrayed etches every line of his face.

  It breaks me. I feel a tear slip from my eye and wipe it away. “Hawthorne—” I struggle for the right words.

  “Are you . . . are you a Fate traitor?” Sadness frays his voice.

  I move a step closer. He holds the fusionmag a little higher. I stop. “It’s not what it seems, Hawthorne.”

  “What is it, then?” he asks bitterly.

  “Have you ever let yourself think that maybe every Fates Republic secondborn is on the wrong side?”

  “Never!” Rage transforms his face. “Were you in the same war as me? Didn’t you see them sending us back in body bags?”

  “Yes, I saw! I also saw the Gates of Dawn body bags, and the way we slaughtered their wounded without mercy. And for what? So the Fates Republic can tear us away from our families, enslave us, and send us off to die while they attend balls and soirées and watch us kill each other in sadistic games they create in the name of entertainment? I’m tired of being on the wrong side, Hawthorne. I can’t justify what they’re doing anymore.”

  “I don’t even know you, do I?” he seethes.

  “You know me,” I reply with a note of desperation. “And you know your friends—the ones who love you unconditionally. They’re Fate traitors, too.”

  “Because of you,” he accuses.

  “I did what I had to do to save their lives. I’m not going to apologize for it.”

  “How long?” he demands.

  “How long, what?”

  “How long have you been the enemy?”

  “I’m not your enemy!” I insist. “I made a deal for Edgerton’s and Hammon’s lives. You were gone. No one else could help them. But there was no going back after that . . . I just didn’t know it until now.”

  “How does Winterstrom play into all of this?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “I won’t.”

  “He’s firstborn,” Hawthorne says. “How do you know that you can trust him?”

  “He has plenty of reasons to hate the Fates Republic.”

  “It’s not too late, Roselle. Whatever you’re mixed up in, we can get you out. Salloway will help—I’m sure of it.”

  “Don’t involve him. Please, Hawthorne. He’s more dangerous than you know.”

  “He wants you to rule Swords. Once you do, you can make the kind of changes that matter.”

  “You want me to be The Sword?”

  “I want you to live!” he retorts. “The Rose Gardeners will make you the Clarity of our Fate. You’ll be powerful.”

  “You want us to live as firstborns while our friends are hunted by Census? Let’s say I agree to all of that. One day we’ll have to give our secondborn child to a system that will brutalize her until the day she dies. Now who’s the traitor? We’d be betraying our child like our parents betrayed us. We’ve been brainwashed for so long that it’s hard to see the truth, Hawthorne, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. Anything less than freedom for all secondborns is unacceptable. Anything less than life for thirdborns is murder.
When you accept that, you won’t be able to go blindly along with the Fates Republic anymore—you’d rather die for freedom than live one more day without it.”

  “You will die if you keep this up, Roselle.”

  “It’s only treason if I lose.” I take a step in his direction, and when he doesn’t shoot, I take another, and another, until I’m close enough to reach for the fusionmag. “I’m still the woman you shared a million kisses with.” I touch the cool metal of the barrel. “It’s still me.”

  Hawthorne groans, relinquishing his weapon. “If you’re going to kill me, do it fast.”

  In seconds, I disassemble the fusionmag and set the pieces on the side table. I stare down into his eyes. His hand lifts to the back of my neck. He pulls me nearer until my lips meet his in a ferocious, all-consuming kiss.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asks.

  “Because it’s right—like you and I are right. We can save them, Hawthorne—this isn’t unfaithfulness to Sword secondborns. It’s loyalty. We can change their lives for the better. Don’t decide now. Just think about it. I’m only asking you to continue to protect Hammon, Edgerton, and me with your silence.”

  Hawthorne pulls me down to him. I straddle his hips. His hand cups my jaw. His thumb traces my cheek. His sorrow burns away in the heat of his desire. The yearning that always accompanies his touch destroys my resolve. As his thumb slides over my bottom lip, I shiver, craving more. I wish he could hold me until I die.

  My hands slip under his shirt, feeling his muscles beneath my fingertips. I push away the black fabric. He grasps the hem, lifting it off over his head and dropping it on the floor. The sight of him makes me long to be his again. I wish he were still secondborn. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. He was mine then. I want him back.

  His hands thread through my hair, pulling it from its knot. The strands unfurl around my shoulders and down my back. His expression turns fiercer, and he tugs off my eyewear. With his hands under my thighs he picks me up. I wrap legs around his waist and my wrists around his neck, drawing his mouth to mine. We kiss as he carries me to his bed and sets me down. My back touches the blankets. His knee digs into the mattress beside my hip. Long fingers splay in my hair. Firm lips hover above me.