by Audrey Grey
I think of Max. All those times I had to swim out past the buoys and drag him to shore after he floated out too far. Max was like that. A dreamer, head buried in the clouds.
No, not was. Is. Max is still alive, so get your shit together, Graystone.
I nod to Riser, telling myself I am swimming out to save Max one more time.
A tiny flash wriggles across my periphery. The screw’s stun baton spits sparks, a jagged blue line buzzing from its two points. “Over here!” the screw yells, his gaze rolling to the woods as he pokes the baton at Riser. “I—I found them!”
In the span of a second, Riser sidesteps his reach, snakes behind him, and shoves.
The screw careens over the cliff, his arms windmilling comically. Two seconds later, there’s a thud against the rocks below. Blue sparks jump from the baton where it hums in the grass.
He didn’t even blink.
Our eyes meet. I begin to tremble as Riser appraises me, much like he did the screw.
Am I an asset or a liability?
I nod, never breaking eye contact. With a grim smile, he clamps a strong hand on the back of my neck, guiding me to the very edge. I notice a small gap between the rocks. Riser points to it, says, “Follow me if you want to live,” and steps off the cliff.
The blackness swallows him. Counting in my head, I get to eight before the ocean spits him back out.
My turn. Fear invades every cell in my body. I close my eyes. Take a deep breath. “For you, Max.”
My plunge isn’t nearly as graceful as Riser’s; I somehow go horizontal right before slapping the water. Then white-hot pain slams into my body, followed by numbness.
I am underwater. Tumbling. Sinking.
Something has wrapped itself around me. Our bodies struggle with the sea and each other. My head breaks the surface, and there’s a sweet release as my lungs fill with air. Cool wind stings my face. Waves tug and claw at my dead limbs, jerking me in multiple directions as saltwater burns my throat.
The thrust of hard wood against my back knocks air and seawater from my lungs. My eyes scrape open. The water sloshing against the boat’s sides is oily with blood.
My blood.
You probably need that, Graystone.
There’s a scrabbling-scraping sound against the side of the boat. Something scurries over the side, clinging to Riser’s oar to keep from getting wet. Bramble! Riser tries to dislodge the sensor, but I moan for him to stop.
“Please, let him be.” Wasted from this small effort, I curl onto my side.
Riser allows Bramble to scamper to higher ground. Bramble tweets angrily at him, shaking a leg in protest, circles twice, then folds into a metal ball.
Our little boat skims the water, ricocheting from wave to wave, spinning and weaving. Each wave snaps my head and hollows my stomach. To steady myself, I look up and find the cliff we just jumped from. Something catches my eye. Despite my daze, it takes only a second for me to recognize the ghostly wig blowing in the wind, cape whipping behind her like a shape-shifting demon.
The Archduchess.
Her cruel eyes follow me as we surrender to the sea. I think a small, brutal smile quivers across her lips, but I could be wrong. I could be.
Riser drops an oar at my feet. “Row.”
I glare at him. His drenched gray lag uniform clings to his body, revealing starved, ropy muscles that strain with every thrust of his oar.
An ice-cold wave smashes into the boat. We teeter sideways. I watch the sea snatch the oar from my dead fingers.
A lunatic smile finds my face. “Oops.”
Riser shoots me a ruinous glare. His first real emotion. So Pit Boy is human, after all. A murderous, bloodthirsty one, but I’ll take it.
There’s a gentle period of gray nothing. I come to shivering so violently that my jaws clack together and my head rhythmically taps the boat’s side. I can see Pit Boy cutting his eyes at me every so often. Finally, he pulls something from the black bag Nicolai gave him and tosses a coarse blanket at my face.
“If you can hear me,” Pit Boy says, “wrap yourself in that.”
“H-How . . . g-gentlemanly . . . of . . . you,” I croak through clacking teeth.
“If you can’t do that simple task, there’s no point covering you.”
“I’m . . . not dying, Pit Boy. Not . . . N-Not here with . . . with you.” Somehow I manage to drape the heavy blanket over my legs and left hip. I find a cool blue star in the sky, the Dog Star. Focus on it.
Do not close your eyes, Maia Graystone. Focus. Prove him wrong.
Somewhere inside, I know my mind is wandering because the blood that’s supposed to be nourishing my brain is floating in the water around me instead.
I am dying.
My gaze keeps tearing from the sky, to the sharp, melancholy form of Riser. Like a rabbit, unable to take its eyes off the wolf. The muscles in his neck strain as he rows even harder.
My eyes close. Just for a second.
“We will be there soon.”
I come to with Riser adjusting the blanket to cover my upper body.
“Cypher?”
He nods without looking at me; his gaze, I notice, is constantly flickering to the sky, the sea.
“Do you even know what that is, Pit Boy?”
“Yes, Digger Girl. The place we need to be.”
I start to wonder what Pit Boy knows of the outside. “Do you know about the Everlasting War?”
He looks out to the sea. “The outside was never important.”
“My tutor said the factory workers and miners in the south revolted against the wealthy factory Barons in the north.”
“Factory?”
I blink at the sky, remembering the Bronzes who passed my window after their shift, shoulders hunched and heads too tired to do anything but stare at their feet. “We make things for the Golds. Baubles, silks, and linens, you know. Stuff.” I cut my eyes at him. “But the workers didn’t want to make their stuff anymore, and they used the technology available then against the Barons.”
“What happened?”
My throat scratches into a rasping chuckle. “The entire world nearly died.”
I’ve seen archived videos of pre-Reformation Act life. Bombs exploding in marketplaces and festivals, cratering entire cities. Hospitals packed with mangled bodies, the hallways smeared with blood. Schools reduced to ash. I shudder, trying to imagine a world with so many bombs, so much uncertainty and death.
Technology is dangerous. The few remaining Fienian Rebels have proved that over and over. Most Bronzes I know agree with the Reformation Act, even if they despise the Emperor.
I wrestle with the water-soaked blanket and manage to shift onto my side. I know Cypher is waiting for me, rising from the waves in all its towering glory, its million solar-powered lights like stars in the sky. A sharp ache fills my chest. It’s all I have ever wanted. To see Cypher again.
And now I’m going to die minutes from its shore.
“Will you dump my body in the ocean?” I whisper. I have stopped shivering. Surely a bad sign. “It has to be where the water is that impossible shade of blue . . . kind of like your eyes . . . I mean eye.”
Riser regards me quietly as I am overcome with hysterical, silent, choking laughter.
But I’m not all crazy. I can’t let the Archduchess find my body. She’ll dismantle it piece-by-piece, tweezing through organs and bone until she finds what my father so carefully hid.
Another peal of lunatic laughter bursts out of me. “And don’t eat me, either, Pit Boy.”
Pit Boy pins me with a deadpan stare. Muscles grind in his jaw. Slowly, a jagged smile tears his lips. “Don’t worry; you’re not my type.”
I swallow down more crazy chuckles. A bunch of comedians, we are. Unless, of course, he’s being serious.
It’s hard to tell.
Riser resumes rowing, his oars depositing cool drops of water onto my face. The sky is smoky gray and laced with thin, stringy clouds. Behind us, near Rhine Isla
nd, where the clouds are still bunched like dirty blankets, traceries of bluish light laser the sky. They are searching for us.
We need to hurry.
“I’m not a Pit Leech.” At first I think Riser is speaking to me, but he’s gazing at the horizon. I get the feeling he’s talking to the guard he killed. “I’m not a Pit Leech,” he says again. His voice trembles with rage as he murmurs, “Neither was she.”
She? For the first time, I wonder if there’s someone Riser had to leave behind. Except he said was.
So someone he lost.
More silence. His eye keeps flicking to the ocean. “If you were born in the pit,” I muse aloud, “how did you learn to swim?”
Riser doesn’t take his gaze off the water. “Nicolai gave me a memory.”
“With a handheld Uploader?”
No response. Of course he has no idea what that is. He’s probably more concerned that the memories are temporary, lasting no more than an hour.
Which means that if the boat capsizes, he drowns.
The wind comes in petulant bursts. It rifles my hair and twirls our boat, bringing with it an oily, burned smell laced with traces of rot and chemicals that sting my nose. A smoky curtain blackens the sky.
Objects begin thumping our boat. Bramble lets out a string of surprised chirps and shifts nervously as the pungent, eye-watering stench saturates the air.
Grunting, I struggle to my elbows and lean over the side. The water as far as the horizon glistens with dead, rotting fish, bits of trash bobbing among the bloated silver bodies.
I follow Riser’s gaze to the city. For a second, I can’t tell what I’m seeing; the smoke is too thick, mixed with tendrils of white, curling fog.
But then it parts, and I make a horrible wailing sound.
The beautiful shimmering city of my childhood is a charred, mangled landscape, flooded with rancid seawater and clogged with dead fish and decomposing dogs and other putrid, unidentified things. Seagulls, their feathery bodies stained gray from the smoke, swoop and dive through the jagged skeleton of the broken metalwork factories like flies swarming a corpse. The enormous golden body of the pier bridge has snapped and fallen into the ocean.
And the giants fall one by one, to fill the cup of Rot and Ruin. A city laid waste by the feats of man, never to rise again.
Stolen words from my mother’s poems. They eddy inside my head like the filth outside our boat. That’s my mom for you. I’m dying and there she is, reminding me that she’s always right. That she’s a super genius who also happens to have lyrical talent.
“Go to hell, Mother,” I rasp as my body gives out. Just quits. And I collapse headfirst into the poisonous water of dead things and memories.
Chapter Six
A jagged scream tears through my chest, scaring away my nightmare. Light diffuses softly across the room. Dust motes whirl with my every breath. My neck aches and burns. I stretch my entire body out, curling my toes inside the cool sheets of my old bed. Soft, supple flesh has replaced the wound on my side. Reconstructed. Meaning Fienian Rebels are close; only the Fienians would dare touch the banned nanotech.
Looking around, I see my teal lamp on the nightstand where I left it. The golden stars my mother helped me paint when I was seven whorl across the ceiling—one of the few good memories I have of us together.
“Lights,” I rasp. The room fills with cool white light. “Brighter.” The light surges, worming through my half-closed eyelids until I command it to a soft glow.
I know I am dreaming because this is the room I grew up in. There’s even the crooked crack in the corner and yellow handprints from when Max and I stole my mother’s paints and marked the walls.
Except I can’t be dreaming. Because when I try to stand, the line attached to my arm dislodges, blood splattering my fresh yellow sheets. The tiny oozing hole in my skin causes real pain. The other end of the line dangles from a machine that churns with thick, black-red liquid. It begins to beep in alarm as I cross the floor to the large bay window.
Someone has taken all the silk pillows that used to line the window seat. Old ashes smudge the floor where my telescope used to be, along with broken glass and rusty tar-needles. A smoky breeze lazily curls through the starburst hole in the glass, the smell hinting at chaos and death.
Cypher stretches out below me, hauntingly beautiful in its decay, smoldering and brittle and ruined. What the flooding didn’t destroy, the fires burned. But I was wrong: Cypher isn’t completely lost. Parts of it remain, little enclaves of life in an otherwise dead city, like maggots stirring a corpse to make it seem alive.
Hovels infest the winding streets and bridges, and desperate voices quiver through the rubble. A drone buzzes somewhere close by.
Below my window, I see that my childhood park has been destroyed by fire. Now it’s a makeshift market with tents and sluggish rivers of people. No one looks up. I do, though, and discover that today She is about the size of a walnut. Her edges burn orange, her center black, giving her the appearance of an eye.
My heart sinks as I realize my favorite trees have been burned too. They were centuries old and tall enough to scrape my bedroom window during the spring storms. Max and I used to watch them in the evenings, making up stories about nymphs and fairies that lived in their gnarled branches.
One day my mother scolded us for playing near them. She explained that during one of the Fienian uprisings before I was born, our part of the city was Fienian controlled, and they hung the captured Centurions from their boughs. Sometimes entire regiments swung from those beautiful, ancient trees.
There was even a Fienian song about them:
Dandy Apples, Dandy Apples, smell like roses in the fall.
When they’re swingin’ and they’re screamin’,
Ain’t they the dandiest sight of all?
So maybe it is a good thing about the trees, after all.
I am intoxicated with light. Drunk on its warmth, its fragility, the way it splashes across the walls and smears the floorboards. It is not enough to have a windowfull of it; I must turn on every light in my room.
But the light also forces me to acknowledge how much I have changed. Gathering a breath for courage, I brave the dressing mirror in the corner. The girl inside the steel frame is a wraith draped in papery skin that looks about to rip over her sharp bones. Her skull droops beneath the matted, muddy orange carcass of hair, and two enormous, sunken eyes bulge from shadowy eye-sockets.
She tries to smile, but her cracked lips can’t seem to remember how. Most of her teeth are in various states of rot.
Her freckles, though, the perfect coppery pinpricks formed to mimic her parents’ favorite constellations, are still there, peeking beneath the muck. Which in a way is ironic, since that was the thing she most hated about herself.
For some dumb reason tears burn the back of my throat. I’m a monster: a slimy thing that yearns to slither back under her rock and hide.
Even though I haven’t seen my mother in years, I can imagine what she’d say. Do you think pity will save you, Maia? And she’s right; one of the first lessons I learned in the pit was that pity is a useless emotion. So I tear myself away from the hideous creature in the glass, swallow back my tears, and begin to assess my surroundings. There is one way to determine if this is a Simulation or real. Something Nicolai wouldn’t know about. Crossing the floor, I slide open my nightstand drawer and carefully remove the fake bottom.
The tiny ornate frame of Prince Caspian Laevus sits right where I left it, its glass smudged with my fingerprints and dust. I peer down at the champagne-colored eyes and tousled flaxen hair in the photograph. Countless nights I stared at that perfect face, trying to decide what he was like as questions swirled inside my head.
Would he like me? Hate my freckles and bright-orange hair? Was he staring at my picture, thousands of miles away, thinking about me too?
I didn’t quite understand, then, the significance of being matched to the Crown Prince. Me, a Bronze. I sent him a
poem once. We were supposed to write something about ourselves, but I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say, so I scribbled a hasty twelve-line poem about the stars instead. Two weeks later, a smooth blue envelope with the House Laevus seal—a Sphinx—arrived at my house, carried thousands of miles by Royal messenger.
Now, my hands tremble as I set the frame face down and fish out the blue envelope. The crude charcoal sketch still rests inside, obviously drawn from the picture he had of me, my lips teetering on the mysterious smile I get from my father. He hadn’t changed my nose to better fit my face, which I liked. And every freckle is accounted for. But there is only half my face against a charcoal black background. And meticulously engraved where the other half of my face should be are perfectly rendered constellations to match my freckles.
My throat burns. What did they tell you, Prince? That I was dead? A traitor’s daughter? That there had been a mistake with our matching? My lips tremble as I imagine his relief at not having to marry the ugly Bronze girl from a Diamond City.
Gouging at my watery eyes with my knuckles, I move on to the large book at the bottom. The old leather tome is heavy, and my knurled fingers have trouble turning the pages, but I don’t really need to. I know every inch of these pages. My mother’s slanted, scribbled inscription. The beautiful illustrations gilded in gold.
It’s a book of stories about the gods. My mother gave it to me on my seventh birthday, right before she left for good. I can’t even imagine how much it cost her on the black market; as far as I knew, all the old Pre-Reformation Act books had been destroyed, and only Golds were wealthy enough to own sanctioned texts–not that my little book is even close to sanctioned.
The book falls open to the page I used to read the most. My eyes flit past Aphrodite to the two doves resting on her shoulders. Those same two doves make up the Sigil for House Lockhart, the Gold House my mother hails from.
My body sags. There’s no denying Nicolai brought me to my childhood home. An incredibly smart or incredibly stupid decision.
I can’t decide which.
Considering the Archduchess and her Centurions are searching for you two cities over, a voice buzzes in my head, I would go with incredibly smart.
