by Bella James
She still wore the remains of the Plutarch's wedding dress.
Meeting their gazes, she lifted her chin. Fine. If they wanted to look, let them. She had a plan and it didn't involve staying in this cave.
Tia plopped down next to her on the bench, already mid sentence, and breaking off with the word, "Potatoes?" and then, "Oh, my."
This time Livy felt herself flush. "Considering where I was and what I was about to do when your lunatic launched himself at the horse I was on, I fail to see what's so amazing about what I'm wearing." She hoped her voice was as cold as she meant it. Maybe no one would hear the shake in it.
"Can't see why you'd be proud of that, girly," said the old man across from her, and rose with an expression of distaste, taking his dinner with him.
Helplessly, Livy looked around the table. The others were watching her, a family of dark skinned citizens from either south of Pastoreum or the border lands of the Forbidden Zone. An Icelander. A handful of rebels she couldn't identify.
The room began spinning crazily around her. All the other conversations had stopped. Everyone in the room was watching her, and starting to whisper amongst themselves.
Livy's breath started coming unevenly. She hadn't asked to be brought here! She hadn't asked for any of this! Besides, she'd been chosen, she was the Chosen One, the bride-to-be.
She stood up fast, the bench catching her on the backs of her knees because everyone else sitting there stopped it from toppling over. Sucking in her breath, she meant to shout at them all, that what they were doing wouldn't do any good, they couldn't overcome the military might and government intelligence from Arcadia, that she, Livy, had a place there and –
A bundle of gray shirt and desert-colored trousers tied with twine plopped onto the table just beside her plate. Livy flinched, reaching for it and not quite touching, then turning to see where it had come from.
Arash stood behind her, his dark brows lifted as he surveyed all the other diners. The expression on his face clearly indicated he thought they had other things to do than watch Olivia Bane.
"I should have brought these to you much earlier," he said in a voice pitched to carry. "I'm sorry. I got busy and you were outside all day. More than most people, that kind of endurance."
That made about half of them look away, back to their dinners, and the other half slowly looked away when Arash dropped into a suddenly open spot beside her.
"So, we should talk."
Livy shifted the clothes away from her plate. "I'm eating."
"Potatoes?" he asked mockingly.
"Not. Potatoes." She'd seen more than enough of them during the afternoon. "What do you want? When are you going to let me go? Do you know what the Plutarch and his army could do to you? Are you insane? Why did you do this?"
Arash waited for her to subside. In the dimness of the cavern, he looked at ease, his smile bright and his dusky skin a shade or two darker than the shadows. "I want to talk to you. I'm not planning to let you go, possibly not even if it's ordered. We well know what the dictator could do to us, that's why we took you." He looked her up and down. Big, dark eyes judged her.
It won't work. Whatever it is you want to do. It won't work because I'm not the only one. I was just the one for now.
So many changes she wanted to see go into place. The last time she'd dared to cross the ruler he'd nearly killed her but if she became his bride?
"I have my own plans. You're interfering." Simon had taught her to bluff. He'd taught her to fight, to defend herself, to break holds, to kiss.
To bluff. She didn't have any plans, nothing certain. Six months ago she'd been living in Agara, working in the fields. Six months of schooling hadn't changed her that much.
It didn't work on Arash. "Your plans are unimportant."
But her grandfather's death and her father's involvement in the rebel cause? That had changed her.
She looked at Arash and considered her options. Could she tell him about her father, about the bullets he said meant freedom?
If Arash wasn't who and what he said he was? She couldn't put her family at risk like that.
But she would learn everything she could.
"Maybe I could help you. If you didn't hold me prisoner."
He stood, surveying the room, but now he sat again and stroked her cheek. "You poor, sad little sand slitherer. What do you think you're doing if not helping us? You're the best weapon we've got." His eyes pitied her and Livy jerked away from him.
"Then you don't have much, do you?" she spat, rising. "I was not the only girl up there on the stage for the ruler to pick through. There were five others. Any one of them could have been chosen. I'm not so special. I could help you in other ways. My mere existence will not."
She crossed her arms over her chest and watched him.
Arash was unaffected. "Means nothing, Livy. Five other girls could have been picked. Five other girls weren't. You are special, whatever you think."
Livy pushed herself away from the table. "I'm not hungry."
"I'll escort you back to your room, then," he said, his unassailable calm grating on her nerves.
"My cell, you mean!"
Arash merely blinked. "Your cell, if you prefer."
And when she stalked away, he followed her, catching her easily in the first corridor and spinning her back in the other direction. "Don't feel bad. It's easy to get disoriented underground."
She whirled on him, furious all over again. "Then you've been underground way too long."
All Arash did was offer her the clothes again, silent.
"I don't want those."
"You do," he told her. "Maybe you don't understand how much. Those people in there?" He gestured back the way they'd come, at the enormous dining room. "They're not just staring at you because you're wearing a severely tailored wedding dress."
She didn't want to calm down, but she wanted to hear this. Livy waited.
"They're staring at you because you're wearing the Plutarch's bride's wedding dress.
Livy turned back to face him, now holding the bundle of clothing, uncertain when she'd taken it from him.
"They're not just staring at you. They're staring at the dress. And they're not just staring…" he continued. "They hate you, Olivia Bane."
CHAPTER 2
Back in the room where she'd wakened - spacious, carved out of rock by wind or maybe once there'd been water in this arid region - Livy sat holding the packet of clothes.
What if what Arash had told her was true? What if everyone in this place hated her? Livy couldn't remember a time she'd been hated.
Her stomach growled. She'd had water since she came, but very little food. Then after all that time peeling potatoes, she hadn't even eaten any, or anything else.
Suddenly standing, she started pacing wildly, throwing the bundle of clothes against the rock wall where the twine caught briefly on the craggy surface before it tumbled to the dirt. Livy's eyes tracked it, and saw the dusky hand that rescued the bundle, picking it up and extending it to her again.
Arash had followed her.
"What do you want? Why couldn't you have let me alone?"
Arash probably wasn't more than a couple years older than her, but for the moment when he sighed, his hands on his hips, head back as he puffed out air at the too-close cave roof, he looked as old as her grandfather.
"You're important to the world. You don't get that, Olivia Bane."
Growling, she threw herself down on the pallet of furs where she slept, picked up the bundle and started twisting the free bits of twine around her fingers.
"I guess I don't. Enlighten me."
Sarcastically as she said it, Arash took it as an invitation and sat down on some crates across from the space where Livy slept.
"You said you had your own plans. Maybe you did. There's a reason we've been watching you. Your… " He hesitated, suddenly not so much uncertain, she thought, as unwilling to speak certain things aloud. "There are reasons we feel you could
be very important for our cause."
"Right," Livy said. "So hole me up in a cave and leave me here to peel potatoes and rot."
He actually seemed amused. He was a thin young man, all wiry muscle and long, curling dark hair. A faint moustache tried to form on his upper lip but Livy bet it would be gone in the morning. Against the white clothes he wore, his skin was very dark, like beautifully turned earth in a field that had somehow escaped being overplanted. Comfortable on the crates, he pulled a long set of reins from a deep pocket in his white clothes and began mending them, cutting the leather with a wicked looking knife and braiding it, even as he explained.
"There are reasons you're the one for our cause." Before she could interrupt he held up a hand. "You said it doesn't matter that you're here, because the Plutarch had five other girls to choose from. You're wrong, Olivia Bane. It does matter. It matters because the Plutarch had made his choice. He had chosen you from amongst the other five girls. They are not equal to you only because he chose you. And because he chose you, even he doesn't have the luxury of letting your kidnapping go unavenged."
Livy jolted forward on her pallet, leaning over the bundle of clothes on her lap. Her mouth opened involuntarily. "You want to start a war with the Plutarch? Are you crazy? You'll lose!"
"Not a war, little one. We need the world to look again at this man. Too many citizens in their communities put their heads down and live their lives. They determine they will live their lives. They put up with starving, with sickness, with rumors of a plague that never seems to be realized but is terrifying to consider, a plague from which maybe, maybe Arcadia could save their communities."
"Arcadia would never save Beta villages," Livy snapped, forgetting again what she'd meant to do if she'd been allowed to marry her betrothed.
"Exactly," Arash said. "You said you had plans. You mean to work from the inside out? To try and use your influence?"
She glared at him, not answering.
"Olivia, you will have no influence. You will be used for breeding, as if the prospect of five or six more heirs of the Plutarch can change the world. As if anything that demon does could change the world for the better."
Livy shrugged her shoulders in close, huddling into herself. "You don't know," she said, quietly. "You don't know what I could do. He listened to me. He listened to me and he liked my spirit and he – he's going to come save me. The Plutarch will come and rescue his bride!"
Startled at her outburst, Arash began to laugh. "Not the great man himself, little one. His fools. His tools. He will send his army and they will fall."
"That's not the way!" she cried. All the history her grandfather had taught her rose up inside, choking her. "It will lead to war. You'll die! You're the one who doesn't understand – if the ruler can't let it be seen he was outfoxed by a bunch of rebels and his bride taken away, and then marry one of the other girls, there's no way he can allow the rebels to live after what they've done. He'll come after you!"
"We're counting on it," Arash said.
* * *
SHE PACED AFTER HE LEFT, ranging back and forth across the hard, cold floors. No matter how hot the day had burned outside, the stone floors were cold. The delicate heeled shoes she'd had with her wedding dress wouldn't work here. Livy went barefoot, ignoring the bundle of clothes on her bed.
How dare they? Hold her hostage? Use her to start a war! She'd been meant to marry power and be the change! Even at home in Agara she'd never felt as trapped as she was now. Pastoreum was an enormous land, spreading in every direction from her tiny village. She'd never felt claustrophobic, threatened with suffocation from nothing else but lack of room to breathe.
Abruptly she was in flight, running hard as she could, hoping to wear herself out. She fled along the rock-walled corridors, past families sitting together in fire circles, telling stories, past the dining area where Tia shouted at her to stop, to help them clear, it was her job, past Arash, looking initially confused and then grinning like a feral cat.
She ran until she had no breath left and stopped, too lost to even consider where she was.
"It doesn't matter!" she shouted. "It doesn't matter where I am!" The cave and the Void itself were her prisons. Livy sank down against the rock wall, her legs sprawled out, waiting for her breathing to return to normal.
When Arash showed up before she'd quite stopped heaving for air, she wasn't surprised. When he offered a friendly hand and hauled her to her feet, Livy let herself be drawn upright.
She stood nearly as tall as he was. She'd grown several inches in the last year since she'd been taken by the Arcadians and then by the rebels. Her auburn hair was wild, now down to the small of her back. No one had cut it while she was in her schooling. Those decisions came after graduation from the Institute. If she was chosen Gamma, sent to the pleasure palaces, she'd be made beautiful, more beautiful if she believed Simon, who saw something in Livy she didn't see in herself. Her hair would be cut stylishly, her makeup perfect, her clothes cut to fit. She'd have a trainer, the best food and never too much (but never, not like at home in Agara, too little). Everything would be done to enhance her value to the pleasure palaces where she'd live for nothing but to serve the Aristocracy's every desire.
Violet had run from the pleasure palaces when she'd failed at the Institute and been sent there. When she'd been caught they'd dragged her in front of an assembly of her former peers and whipped her until she lost consciousness.
If Livy had been chosen Beta, her head would have been kept shaved. She'd have lived a seamless, unexciting but safe life. If she violated no laws, did nothing to get herself branded traitor, she'd have lived in peace, at least, laboring for the rich.
But she'd been chosen Alpha, ruling class, free to work or not work, and she'd been Chosen the Mother of the Race, the Breeder who, with the Plutarch, would keep the government going. And because of that, she was here.
Arash didn't speak. He waited until Livy came out of her thoughts, until she could breathe again, then he took her by the elbow, starting her in what, to her chagrin, was the exact opposite of the direction she would have first tried, and led her back to the pallet where she slept. By the time they got there, her feet were bleeding and she was limping.
Arash helped her down to the pallet, then knelt in front of her, saying nothing as he took her right foot first, placing it gently in his lap. He'd already set a bowl of warm water, cloth towels, gauze bandages, and some kind of spiky plant near where he was kneeling. He must have somehow anticipated this.
"What did you hope to accomplish?" he asked.
Livy hissed as the water first touched her raw right foot, then sighed as the warmth spread pleasure through her. She'd run because she didn't belong here. She'd run because she'd had a plan, a place, and no chance to even find out if she'd been right. They'd taken all that from her and taken her family, as well.
But she'd run also because – "I can't breathe here."
He didn't scold or laugh or yell. He only gentled the water over her foot, over and over, until the tiny stones embedded let loose and the pain throbbed brighter before receding. "Normal."
She glanced at him, but he was looking at her foot. "What?"
He looked up and met her eyes. His were gentle. "That's normal. Do you think we all started here? All of us are from somewhere else. From Tundrus, Oceanus, Pastoreum, even from Arcadia. Very few of us started as untouchables living in the borderlands but we would have been thrown there if we hadn't run."
She looked at him curiously. "You chose this?"
He didn't look at her. Instead, he concentrated on breaking a spear of the spiny looking green succulent and using the gooey clear liquid from inside to coat the bottom of her foot. Livy sighed in relief. It was like putting ice on a burn. "The old ways. From the Before Times? Yes, they were world killers. They broke our world and left it for us to inherit and from those selfish actions came the first of the Plutarch."
That she knew. Grandfather Bane had told her the real h
istory, the history of freedom and the Before Times. She nodded, waited as he wound gauze around her foot and gentled it back into the furs on the pallet before holding out his hand for her to put her left foot into it.
Starting on her second foot, he said, "They were also free, brave, strong, true to themselves," and Livy startled a little, hearing her grandfather say again To thine own self, be true. "They lived blame filled lives but they lived them. They paid their taxes but they could rebel. They could protest. They had enough to eat and more. They were obese, huge people. They had entertainments and cars – everyone had a car, Olivia."
She listened, feeling soothed, because this was some of what her grandfather had told her, bedtime stories that sometimes left her screaming in nightmare. Her mother didn't understand. Her mother would get up and sit with Livy, muttering under her breath about the foolish old man who frightened her daughter with his tales.
But what frightened Livy was the longing. For something different. For something other.
For something these fewer than 100 people living in a cave would never manage. She waited until Arash finished bandaging her foot, then turned away. The rebels didn't have the answer to the damages done in the world and the abuses of the aristocracy. She wasn't stupid, wasn't raised only with the approved histories.
She knew a lost cause when she saw one. Or better yet, when one kidnapped her.
LIVY DREAMS.
Lying on the pallet, she dreams of her home. All around her there are explosions. The rebels have come to Agara and they've been followed. Now the Plutarch's Imperial Army is there, with explosives and tanks, things the villagers have no way to combat.
Everywhere near her, villagers she's known all her life, run, frightened, dying. The village burns. In the village square, a magistrate stands, declaring the virgins of the land are to be turned over to the army, where the Ruler gets his One, the men will get their plenty. He laughs, the sound like more explosions. Black smoke roils in the air.
