by Anna Day
“Now you’re just showing off,” I say.
“Maybe.” He places his hands on the branch and lets his body unfold, landing on his feet with a gentle thud.
We pass beneath the trailing wisteria and enter the orchard. I glance nervously at the spot where I spoke with Willow. That guilty feeling worms around in my gut again. Ash squats down and whacks a black cube with the side of his fist. A bulb flickers into action like an old movie projector starting up—a portable floodlight coating the orchard in a sticky white light. He grabs a wicker basket, his arm sending a giant shadowy butterfly wavering across the trunks.
We start picking apples from a nearby tree—they make a soft thump as they hit the bottom of the basket, chucking up dust and releasing their sweet, earthy aroma. This scene mirrors canon very closely—Ash and Rose picking fruit together—but the conversation differs dramatically.
“It’s all very strange, Violet.” His words interlace with the beat of falling apples. “I save you from getting hanged, then you turn up in my orchard. Are you stalking me or something?”
“No, ’course not.”
He smiles his lopsided smile. “I was joking. You were practically drooling over that Gem … Willow.” He sticks out his hip and bats his lashes. “You look like a Willow—tall and lanky.” He mimics my voice and bites into the skin of an apple with relish. This Ash is so much more vibrant than canon-Ash.
I throw an apple at him. It explodes against the bark and releases a fine spray of juice that catches in the floodlight like beads of glass. “You can’t blame me, he looks like an angel … a demigod.”
He places another apple in the basket. “He’s about as far from God as any creature could be—all tweaked and fake.”
“I didn’t say he was a demigod, I said he looked like a demigod.”
“Well, aren’t we the superficial one?” The trunk forms a divider, shielding his expression, but his voice sounds small and a little hostile.
I push my hands between the leaves in search of fruit. My fingers find only twigs. “I can’t help who I’m attracted to. You said it yourself, we’re all just animals.”
“Yeah, well, they’ll hang your animal ass if they find out you’ve been canoodling with a demigod.”
“We were just talking.”
“He was undressing you with his eyes.”
My hand finally locates an apple—I snap it free almost triumphantly. “Are you jealous?”
“Of course I bloody am.” He laughs, but I see a fleeting glimpse of that vulnerable puppy dog. I was wrong, he doesn’t disapprove of Imp-Gem relationships; he disapproves of me with somebody—anybody—else.
I resist a little smile. “Look, Ash …” But I don’t know what to say. I study his slightly asymmetrical features for a moment.
“What were you and the kid doing?” he asks suddenly.
“What, you mean my brother, Nate?”
“Yeah, the kid. You were reciting lines or something, right before the demigod turned up.”
“We were just messing around. Sibling stuff.”
He passes an apple between his hands. Back and forth like it’s too hot to hold. “It was like you were rehearsing for something, and then the demigod actually said some of the things the kid said.” He raises his eyebrows expectantly.
I can’t tell him the truth, so instead I change the subject. “I never thanked you properly for saving me and my friends, back in the city, I mean.”
He picks up the basket and moves to another tree. “That’s OK. Couldn’t very well let ’em hang you, could I?”
I follow him, partly because he has the basket, and partly because I feel lonely, just me and the shadows. I stand beside him and notice the hairs on his forearms, dark against his skin and raised in the cold.
“Well, you saved our lives. Thank you,” I say.
He screens his eyes with his heavy lashes, which seem even longer than usual, extended across the pink of his cheeks by their own spidery shadows. He suddenly looks very sad. “I just can’t believe you want a Gem, after how they treat us, what they do to us.”
I recall my face pressed into the acrylic screen, the crumpling paper chain, and I feel like I might cry. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the images from my brain. “But it isn’t Willow who does those things. You can’t blame him for the sins of his people.”
He raises his gaze. His irises, so pale they look like glass in the floodlight, his pupils, two intense dots. “Who, then? Who do you blame? Nobody else is going to rise up and stop the barbarity against the Imps if it isn’t the Gem people.”
I wish I could tell him everything, but it’s too risky. Besides, he would probably think I’m mad. So, I steady my voice. “Maybe he will, one day, if he falls for an Imp. Maybe he will make a stand.”
“What do you mean?”
I realize I’ve already said too much and return to picking apples, pretending those frosted blue eyes don’t pierce my skin as they study my profile. At this point in canon, Rose was making up some crap about having worked in the Pastures before. Just small talk, really. Polite answers, eager nodding, puppy-dog eyes. I wish we were back on-script again—this is way too hard.
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
“Just don’t get killed, OK?” He scoots up the tree so he can reach the fruit on the higher boughs.
I strain my neck to look up at him, and he drops a couple of apples into my outstretched hands. “I’ll do my best,” I lie.
“Because I didn’t save you from one noose just to see you wind up hanging from another.” He drops an apple straight into the basket. “Bull’s-eye,” he shouts.
Ash returns home on the Imp-bus that morning. I watch him shuffling up the line and climbing the steps, adopting his subservient Imp pose, so at odds with the squirrel I witnessed earlier in the night.
I slump into the bunk above Nate.
He pokes his head up so it’s level with mine. “So, how did it go with Ash?”
“Rubbish. I think he may hate me.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter whether Ash likes you or not. He’s just a side character; it matters whether Willow does.”
I know Nate’s right, but it kind of matters to me that Ash likes me. “I guess,” I reply.
Nate pats my arm. “Get some sleep, heroine extraordinaire, gotta look your best.”
It makes me smile when Nate goes all nurturing on me, like he’s the older sibling. “Thanks,” I say.
He bobs back down, and I soon hear the rhythmic pattern of his breath as he falls to sleep.
The Day-Imps begin to arrive, and their movement, combined with the light seeping through the cloth dividers, keeps me awake. Plus, my mind is just a whirl of conflicting thoughts and emotions: I think of Katie, back in the bell tower, at the mercy of a patch-wearing sociopath with a bit of a crush; I think of Alice, wherever she may be; I think of Ash and those winter eyes; I think of the way Dad always touches Mum’s hand as she pours milk on his cereal; and finally, I think of my feet, dancing midair, searching desperately for solid ground, never to find those ruby slippers and return home.
In five days, I will hang.
I roll into the fetal position and imagine all these thoughts pooling in the side of my head, seeping into the pillow below. Finally, I fall into an uneasy sleep, punctuated with twisting shadows and screams and a feeling like I want to move but can’t, like rope binds my limbs. The dream changes, and suddenly I can move again. I feel surprisingly free, like all of the weight has been lifted from my chest. It’s summertime—the smell of lupins and freshly cut grass, the sound of children playing mixed in with birdsong.
I’m seven years old, standing in my parents’ garden with Alice and Nate. Alice looks so young—her feet not yet crammed into heels, her hair free to kink around her face. And Nate, he’s only four years old. His legs still have that lovely, chubby fold at the ankle and the knee, and his shorts drown his petite frame. I’m blowing bubbles, watching them sprout fro
m the wand and float into the air, perfect spheres shining in the sun. Alice and Nate run this way and that, trying to catch them, squealing as they pop in their cupped hands. More, Nate cries, more bubbles, Violet, more bubbles, please.
I aim the wand upward and spin in a circle. The bubbles fly high into the sky, hovering just out of reach, carried by the breeze and catching on the tops of the buddleias. Too high, Alice cries. Too high, Violet. But I keep on spinning, keep on blowing, spurred on by their laughter and the sense of freedom. Suddenly, Nate screams, Look, Violet, look! Alice and I freeze and track the invisible line traveling from his finger. A single bubble survives the buddleias, climbing higher and higher, bobbing over the garden fence, beneath the telephone cables, up, up, and over the tops of the sycamores.
We watch that bubble until it is no more than a tiny dot, floating into the horizon. Nate turns to me. He grins so wide I can see all of his baby teeth, all pearly and wet. Will it land in the stars? Alice and I laugh. Yes, Nate, it will land in the stars. And that’s when I hear it, the rhythmic pip of a hospital machine, like the ones you hear on Holby City. Pip. Pip. Pip. The scent of antibacterial soap and detergent replaces the perfume of summer.
Alice turns to me. What’s that noise? We look across the lawn, under the flowers, behind the wooden bench. But we can’t find the machine. Pip. Pip. Pip. Nate nuzzles his head into my stomach. I don’t like it, Violet, make it stop. I climb on the stones, peer into the neighbors’ gardens, check the windows into our house. But still no machine. That sense of freedom makes way for a growing sense of dread. Pip. Pip. Pip.
The pips begin to mutate, changing into the hollow tap of knuckles against wood. I wake to Saskia’s stern face, her fist rapping against the edge of my bunk. “Come on, Violet. You need to use your charms on that useless hunk of a Gem.”
I’m covered in sweat, my pulse banging repetitively in my ears. “Willow,” I say, my voice muffled with sleep.
She frowns. “Yeah, I know his name.”
I blink the grit from eyes and tell myself those pips were just the sound of Saskia’s impatient knocking, or my own blood gushing through my body. There’s no other explanation.
I SHOVE SOME TASTELESS gruel down my throat and grab another shower, almost enjoying the way the cold hammers into me—freezing the anxiety, transforming it into a shimmering block I can step away from and leave behind.
I walk to the manor with Saskia and Nate. I can feel the worry taking over—the next part of the story requires more than just reciting lines and avoiding farting. This is when I really fall short of Rose’s ghost, because the next part of the story requires physical activity. And there’s a reason I’m always the last one to get picked for the basketball team.
“So how are you going to get lover boy to notice you this time?” Saskia asks me.
“Last night, he asked me my name. Tonight, I’m going to show him.”
She raises an eyebrow so it meets the dark stain on her head. “What d’ya mean, show him?”
“I’m going to leave a rose on his windowsill,” I reply.
Nate pulls a rose from his overalls and hands it to me. The plumpest, reddest one he could find in the rose garden earlier that evening. I take it from him and rotate it in my fingers. We both look at Saskia, awaiting her excited response, the one she gave Rose in canon: That’s a brilliant idea, lure him out of that bastard manor house. But instead, she scrunches up her face like she’s just smelled something really bad. Maybe I did fart.
“That’s effing ridiculous,” she says. “Leaving a rose on his windowsill! Where do you two come up with this shit?”
Nate and I exchange a little smile.
“It’ll work,” Nate says. “Just you see.”
Saskia snorts. “Well, it’s wrong if you ask me, calling yourself Rose. It’s disrespectful of the dead.”
“Thorn said I should keep her name,” I reply. “To remind me of her bravery and to keep me on course.” Thorn didn’t say this, but I hoped if I took on her name, I would somehow take on some of her beauty and daring. Besides, a mess of viola flowers sprawled across a windowsill wouldn’t look nearly so romantic, as Nate so keenly pointed out earlier in the day.
“Thorn ain’t always right, you know,” Saskia grumbles, brushing her fingers against the scar on her collarbone.
The manor falls into view. It looks similar to the building used in the movie; stately and grand, with two parallel towers puffed out like the breasts of a peacock, and so far removed from the Imp city it may as well be a painted backdrop. It always struck me as strange how the Gems, with all their technological advancement, should choose to live in such classical-looking environments. I know the exterior of the manor is merely an illusion and inside there exists every futuristic gadget imaginable: artificial intelligence; matter-transporting drains; simulation pods; I could go on. But I could never work out why the Gems chose to modernize original Imp buildings, why they didn’t just build from scratch. Now, living as an Imp, gazing at this beautiful Georgian hall, I finally get it. They did it to piss us off. To remind us that they won—they’re the superior race. They live upstairs, we live downstairs. They stole our beautiful Georgian halls.
Bastards.
I try and cleanse my brain of such thoughts. Anger toward the Gems won’t help me lure Willow. Instead, I focus on the grass yielding underfoot as we creep across the lawns, the grip of Nate’s fingers around mine, the taste of smoke and cold on my tongue. We circle toward the back gardens, nearer and nearer to Willow’s window. I notice the light in Willow’s room remains off—third floor, fourth from the left.
We huddle beneath a large oak, the one Rose shimmied effortlessly up, bloom poking from her cleavage. I swear this tree is bigger … meaner.
“So, you’re going to climb that huge tree?” Saskia says.
I begin to tuck the rose down the front of my overalls, imagining how awesome I’m about to look. But instead, my lack of cleavage lets the stem wilt to one side and the thorns stick into my chest like the little bastards that they are. I am so not Hollywood. But I force a little smile, pride getting the better of me. “How hard can it be?” And if I say it, I might believe it.
She shakes her head and links her hands together to form a stirrup. I place my foot in it and grip the lowest branch. The bark scrapes my fingers and the bough flexes beneath my weight, yet somehow I manage to haul my body into a sitting position. I’m no higher than the top of Saskia’s head, but I still don’t dare to look down; it freaks me out that I could just lean back and topple to the ground.
I honestly don’t know what I thought would happen. I knew I wouldn’t magically transform into Rose and scoot up a giant oak with ease, I knew the spirit of Katniss wouldn’t suddenly possess me, allowing me to scuttle into the treetops while shooting a bow and arrow. But I didn’t think I would be quite so devoid of upper-body strength. I take a few deep breaths and let my head fill with images of Katie and Alice and Nate. I have to do this. I have to complete the story so we can go home.
I stand carefully, hugging the trunk like a koala, my feet splayed across the bough. Another branch lies within reach on the other side of the trunk. I flail through the air and end up straddled between two branches, acutely aware of the fact only air and wood separate my body from the ground.
“This is going to take all bloody night,” Saskia says. I can hear the pleasure leaching into her words.
My fingers slip, scraping across the bark, and when I finally risk looking down, I get this giddy feeling. But when I look up, I see only branches and leaves and twigs—the window seems unreachable. So I finally utter the words I’d been secretly avoiding. “Can someone get Ash?”
“Ash?” Saskia says. “He’s not part of this, you know? He’ll start askin’ questions and if word gets out we’re, you know”—she lowers her voice—“rebels, it won’t be safe. Not all Imps are trustworthy, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Well, it’s Ash or a broken arm,” I say, hysteria rising in my
voice.
I hear Nate pleading below. “Yeah, come on, Saskia, Ash isn’t going to tell anyone. He fancies Violet way too much.”
I hear a reluctant sigh from Saskia, and I look down just long enough to see Nate dashing from view.
By the time Ash arrives, I’ve returned to the first branch and I’m back to hugging the trunk. I’m just so relieved he’s back from the city—if he’d taken the later bus I’d be screwed. I glance down and see his massive grin. In the dusk, it’s pretty much all I can see.
“You enjoying yourself up there?” He’s unable to mask the laughter in his voice.
“Yeah, it’s great up here … the views are stunning … lots of bark.”
I feel the tree shudder as he hauls himself onto the branch opposite. I can’t see him, but I feel the warmth of his hands as they cover mine. I suddenly feel very safe. He sticks his head around the trunk and smiles. The compassion in his face pushes away any doubts I had about requesting his help.
“You OK?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He smiles. “When you’re a beginner, you should only ever have one limb free from the tree at a time. Got it?”
I nod.
“And always test a hold before you put your weight on it. Because if you commit to a weak branch, you’re only going one way.”
“That’s really helpful, but I was kind of hoping …”
“I’d climb it for you?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“So why exactly am I climbing this tree?”
I risk freeing a hand, and I pull the rose from my overalls. It looks more like a wilted strip of seaweed.
He takes it from me and frowns. “You want me to put a rose … where exactly?” He looks up and must figure it out because he makes this “ah” noise.
“Third floor, fourth from the left.”
“And why should I help you with this … whatever it is … daft idea?”
