by Audrey Grey
It takes a moment to spot Riser; he’s crouched, his entire body rigid like a cat about to pounce on a mouse, fixated on something beneath him—Cleo’s food dispenser. He’s too engrossed in whatever he’s doing to notice me.
In the pit, this small act of carelessness would have already gotten him killed. But I don’t want to kill him. At least, not yet. I want to study him without his highly perceptive gaze. To ferret out his weaknesses so when the time comes I can use it against him.
His wavy hair has already escaped its ribbon and fallen to the side, eclipsing part of his face. His lips, at least half of them, are pressed together in a thin line of concentration. I watch as he cautiously waves a finger at the bottom of the dispenser and it whirs, spitting out a dollop of cat food.
Riser flinches at the noise. By now the small brown balls form a spreading mountain on the floor. Pinching one mud-colored bit, Riser examines it, sniffs it, and then places it on his tongue.
Gross. Although just days ago I would have killed for that tiny morsel.
Riser straightens, pocketing some for later, and acknowledges my presence with an infernal look. Maybe he knew I was here all along and chose to ignore me. This infuriates me.
Next time you won’t hear me arrive, Pit Boy.
“Max.” Riser points to the picture of Max on the nightstand.
I concede with a look meant to freeze Riser’s soul. “Stop touching his stuff.”
“This thing.” Impervious to my glare, he nudges the cat food dispenser with his foot, his normally detached voice filled with awe. “It gives you food. Want some?”
“All yours, Pit Boy.”
Grinding the cat food beneath his teeth, he shrugs.
“Someone brought me food when I was in the tunnel. Scraps from the drop.” I bite my lip. “Why would they do that? Help me?”
Blue lights pulse across his cheeks and paint shadows in his eyeless socket. A knot twinges in his jaw. “They wouldn’t. That would be weak and stupid.”
Before I can respond, his interest flickers to the strobe cube whirling across the floor. He picks it up and presses a green square. An image projects onto the wall. It’s the park by my house. Max tromps through a carpet of orange and yellow leaves, his shaggy blond hair nearly to his shoulders—meaning my mother was already gone.
“There’s Max being Max,” an annoyed girl complains through the speakers. It takes a second to realize it’s my voice.
Max is sword fighting an imaginary foe, jumping and stabbing the air.
“Gabriel!” Max calls. He holds the plastic sword out in unspoken challenge.
I feel a surge of raw emotion as a man enters from the right. Although he wears the traditional Centurion garb—black tailcoat and brown leather riding boots—the golden phoenix emblem on his shoulder indicates he’s higher ranking.
Whipping out an imaginary sword, Gabriel engages Max in a duel that ends with Max stabbing his gut and the man making an elaborate fall to his death. The clip stops just as Max pounces on the Centurion and they go tumbling through the leaves.
“Turn it off,” I order, even though it’s now only a blank white projection splashed across the wall.
Riser sets the cube back on the bed, and the device powers down.
You were supposed to protect us, Gabriel.
Of all the betrayals, even my mother’s, our bodyguard’s may have been the worst of all. By then, the Fienian Rebels had already begun targeting Chosen children, so they gave us Gold Cloaks to keep us safe.
Gabriel was with Max and me always. Gabriel held my hand on the way to the park and didn’t tell my parents the time I spent part of our rations on toffee for Max. When the boy across the street started teasing me, Gabriel taught me how to throw a right hook.
I trusted him with my life—right up until the moment he helped the Centurions kill my father.
“Maia, are you okay?” Riser asks, and I’m thrust back into the now. He reaches a hand out almost as if to comfort me, but then his gaze flits behind me.
I turn to see Brogue coming up the stairs. He pauses on the landing just as the airplane dive-bombs his head. Clearly not a man to duck, it smacks his forehead with a dull thump.
He eyes the injured airplane wobbling at his feet. His focus dances from me to Riser to the cat food scattered across the floor. The sardonic grin Brogue flashes hints that he thinks we are both more than a smidgen mad.
“Biotech’s here, little ducklings,” he says in a gruff, gravelly voice. “Time to become swans.”
Chapter Eight
The only way to the basement is by elevator, another pre-Reformation Act invention. I’ve been down there exactly once: the night my father was killed.
I find the four bricks in the wall behind the stairs and push them. First. Third. Fourth. Second. The bricks yawn open, and lights flicker in the small steel rectangle hidden behind the wall. The elevator is a tight squeeze for two, which means all five of us are crammed elbow to elbow. Someone’s breath—Riser’s, by the cat food aroma—warms the back of my neck.
The Biotech and his assistant are plastered against the far wall. Slight and waifish, they sport crimson-streaked hair, smudged eyeliner, and countless red tattoos. Matching silver spike implants spiral over their cheeks, eyebrows, necks, and down their forearms and fingers.
It’s obvious they are close, maybe even siblings. And it’s just as obvious they are Fienian Rebels. Only a Rebel would dress this way and use the forbidden color red, the color of House Croft.
Confirming my suspicions, the girl turns her half-shaved head, exposing her neck and giving me a clear view of the red Fienian scorpion tattooed around her state-issued Bronze phoenix, its tail barb sunk deep into the bird’s breast.
Really, Nicolai, I think accusingly. I thought Mercs were bad, but Fienians?
There’s no answer, of course. Because Nicolai can’t possibly have a plausible explanation to have terrorists involved in our already overwrought plan.
They look extremely uncomfortable, especially the girl, who keeps glaring at Brogue with her wide pupils reconstructed into the shape of birds.
Brogue lobs the girl a sloppy wink, and she flattens herself to the wall, wrinkling her nose like he’s spoiled milk. She appears seconds away from impaling him on one of her spikes.
Fienians and Mercs, together. And they haven’t killed each other . . . yet. It has to be some kind of record.
The laboratory is nothing like I remember. Curtains separate austere white furniture and lab stations. An island of desks cluttered with metal gadgets and gears, microscopes, and other scraps is where I imagine my father worked most of the time. Poring over his slides and samples, scribbling maniacally inside his notebooks. Tinkering with the spare parts he was able to glean through the Fienian ran black market.
Brogue retreats to the corner, kicks his scuffed black boots up on a thin desk that looks as if it might crack under his weight, and loosens the brass buttons of his vest. The rest of us file around a circular white table.
Introductions are made. When the names Cage and Flame roll off the male Biotech’s studded tongue, I groan.
What’s the joke? How do you catch a Fienian Rebel in a crowd? Call out a one-syllable word. Hardy har. They’re all renamed after they convert. River, Fog, Blue, Chain. I once saw an alert for a Fienian Rebel named Post.
How do you get a Fienian out of a tree? Cut the rope.
What’s blue and red and rolls down the street? A Fienian’s head.
Why are all Fienians fast runners? All the slow ones are hanging.
Cage opens a metal briefcase and hands each of us an electropen and a white slip of electropaper to sign.
I scribble my name without reading the contract.
Riser fists his pen and frowns.
“Well, aren’t you a dandy?” Flame places her fingers over Riser’s, impervious to how he stiffens, and guides his hand to the paper. “Like this,” she says, peeking at him through wispy red eyebrows fringed with spikes.
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Winding up the other side of her neck are a flock of black ravens, hundreds of them, each one just a tad bit different. The last bird, a graceful bright-blue specimen, curves her jaw.
Momentarily, the savageness behind Riser’s eye seems to soften and his lips transform into a pleasant half-grin. “Thank you.”
His storm-blue gaze lands on me, and my toes tighten involuntarily.
“Yep.” Flame guides his hand over the row of spikes winding down her arm; each one looks sharp enough to draw blood. “There are ways to get close to me without the pain. Unless you like that kind of thing.”
Reclaiming his hand, Riser studies her the same way he did the cat food dispenser—as if she’s something to either love or kill at the first hint of danger.
“Gag me,” I mutter under my breath.
“Louder, Gold bitch,” Flame spits behind a tight smile. She thinks that because of the nice things around us I am like my mother.
“I was pretty clear, Fienian scum.”
Flashing me the Fienian sign—pinky finger and pointer finger splayed—she pokes her impaled tongue between her fingers and wriggles it lewdly at me.
“Charming. Blown up any innocent children lately?”
“Choked on any silver spoons?” Her scalding look says she can help me out in the matter.
“Put the claws back in, kittens,” Cage says, fixing Flame with a don’t-mix-with-the-natives look. “Business first.” Cage smiles, each one of his teeth glittering with a delicate diamond no larger than a grain of sand.
How’d the Fienian pay his tithes? With a tooth, of course.
“You do voluntarily consent to these procedures we are about to perform,” Cage says, “knowing they are binding and irreversible and understanding the risks stated in the contract you just signed, including potentially severe hallucinations, catatonia, deformity, coma, and loss of life?”
I cough. “Well, when you put it that way . . .”
Cage does not look amused.
I exhale. “Yes.”
“Yes,” Riser repeats, looking about as interested as a slug.
“Excellent.” Cage procures two vials from the briefcase and hands them to us. A bubbly green liquid swirls ominously inside. “To prepare your blood for the transformation.” The studs rimming his lips flash as he grins. “Bottoms up.”
The concoction fizzes all the way to my stomach and leaves a metallic aftertaste. The veins beneath my skin jerk taut. In the span of a breath, a warm tingling sensation bores through the top of my spine and screams all the way to my toes.
I touch the blue tangle of veins crisscrossing the back of my left hand; they’re cold and hard as if my blood has frozen into slush.
Right after Riser downs his, a static sound echoes across the room. We all turn to the glass wall where a bright rectangular screen wavers and then solidifies.
Riser is transfixed. Flame looks like she might throw something at it. “Royalist propaganda,” she explains, rolling her eyes at the rift screen. Every room of the house has one, but only the rifts in rooms with people will activate. They’re in all the public places. Factories, markets, even the parks. “They are about to tell us not to panic. It will all be fine. The Chosen are our saviors, blah, blah, blah. Now go to sleep like good little subjects.”
“Turn it off,” I say. No one moves.
“Not possible,” Brogue says, telling me what I already know. He has quietly joined us. “The Royalists play these clips morning and evening. We are required by law to watch them.”
“Well, that’s not entirely true.” A proud smile transforms Flame’s face. All technology is under strict Royalist control. On occasion, the Fienian Rebels managed to insert their own rebellious messages.
I know what I’ll see, but the images still send shockwaves through my core. Beautiful young boys and girls, dressed in Gold, smiling for the camera with their families. One porcelain-cheeked girl, wearing a supple green frock garnished with gold lace, gazes seriously into the screen as she says how privileged she feels to represent mankind. Her mother weeps proudly beside her.
A boy wearing a blue velvet top hat and stiff silver doublet with ornate gold buttons says he will do his very best to remember everyone left behind.
Lies, I think bitterly.
The screen cuts to fair-haired children playing in the grass while their parents look on. A calm, serene voice fills the room. “Mankind’s greatest hope, its very survival, rests on Project Hyperion. Five thousand of the empire’s brightest children, engineered to perfection, have been chosen to carry on our legacy until the earth is once again safe.”
“Lies!” Flame hisses.
Well we agree on that, at least.
Cage shushes her with a stern look.
Darkness fills the screen, followed by the images of Diamond Cities thronged with well-fed Bronzes. They smile gratefully and wave to the sky. I wonder how long ago this was filmed. Surely there are no cities left that look like the one pictured.
“Be calm, be productive,” the woman’s voice continues. “Live your end days with dignity and humanity. In four days’ time, the finalists for the Shadow Trials will arrive on the Island. One hundred Bronzes chosen by you. So have your Headboxes ready to upload. And remember, if you correctly upload to one of the four winning finalists, your Color will automatically be upgraded to Gold.”
It’s then I read the warnings ominously slinking across the bottom of the screen: Stay inside during Shadow Fall and past sunset. Do not incite panic or riots. Do not join gatherings of more than ten. You have five days to voluntarily upload. Anyone caught breaking the aforementioned rules or not uploaded after the five-day period will be summarily terminated.
Well, I think darkly, the drones are about to get busy.
The screen cuts away to a woman. If not quite beautiful by modern standards, she is interesting looking, with a practical, shoulder-length silver wig and sharp hazel eyes too big for her long, thin face. Two Gold Doves, the symbols of Aphrodite, fasten her blue cloak. The House Lockhart Sigil. Her presence fills the screen in a way I could never hope to do.
I’m supposed to hate my mother. I do hate her. And yet the first thing I feel as she begins to talk, her voice confident and warm, is a jolt of longing. Of course, this only makes me hate her even more.
“Do not worry, Citizens,” she is saying. “Emperor Laevus and I have done everything possible to make your upload a wonderful experience.”
Her hands are tangled together in her lap, her fingers twitching nervously. That’s not like her. I study her for signs that something is wrong, but other than her wringing hands, she is a study in composure and charm.
“After you choose your Avatar, you will be immersed in a world of refinement, beauty, and luxury. A world of order, where everyone not only knows their place but is content.” Her smile is captivating, and I want to believe her. “Please join us so that you may live on forever.”
The screen cuts away to a family sitting on a worn brown couch. The parents hold the hands of their three children: two young boys and a teenaged girl. Bronze brands flash on their necks. The parents smile as they strap the Headboxes to their children’s heads and place them inside their Caskets. The glass lids seal shut over them. Cold fog immediately crystallizes the glass.
The parents embrace and look at the screen. “We were afraid, at first,” the mother says, “but we knew that our children deserved a chance to become Golds.”
The husband nods and kisses his wife’s cheek. “I mean, what kind of parents would we be if we didn’t give them that?”
The last shot is the entire family resting in their Caskets, frosted by the ice fog. Blissful smiles adorn their white faces beneath the Headboxes.
The video ends with the Chosen Anthem, a chorus of young voices—hundreds of the highest-ranking Chosen—rising and falling in breathtaking harmony. “We are the few, we are the many; we lift our voices and sing for all the world to hear.”
It’s supposed to be upli
fting, but there’s a strange, unearthly sound to all those artificially perfect voices joined together. “Close your eyes and rest your head, Citizens, let us show you how beautiful it will be.”
Even though no one’s staring at me, my gaze finds my nails, and I’m thrust into the past. I was grateful when they finally sent me to Emerald Island. After all, I was a Bronze invited to join the Emperor and his court of high-ranking Golds at the most exclusive strip of land in the world, a playground for the Emperor’s favored. I felt Chosen for the first time since I had discovered the truth about my origin.
Then I met the other Chosen, and my excitement withered. They were tall, beautiful, exotic. They were perfect. But I clung to the hope that my differences weren’t noticeable when a willowy, blond girl named Delphine Bloodwood took me downstairs to meet her friends on the ferry ride to the Island.
She was a Countess, she explained in a bored voice, her father the Minster of Defense. They commented on my frizzy orange mane, and then, as if on a whim, Delphine ordered her friends to hold me down while she used the emerald-inlaid dagger she carried to shear my hair to the scalp, while she sang, “Little worm, little worm, why do you squirm?” in her perfect voice, and her friends finished, “Oh the birds will tear your eyes out, you poor little worm!”
I found my mother on the Island and begged her to send me away. Instead she took me to the Emperor, who smiled when I told him what the other Chosen had done. He examined me with his sharp, blanched eyes, as if sifting through me, and I felt my world shrink to almost nothing. “I see,” he finally said. “If the toe is gangrenous, you cleave it from the foot.” After that, I waited for my mother to come for me.
But I would never see my mother again.
Chapter Nine
The memory of my mother fades, and my eyes refocus on my surroundings. The video is over. I’m leaned over the table, my hands curled into trembling, white-knuckled fists.
Everyone is staring at me.
But for some reason it’s Riser’s face I’m drawn to. One sharp smudge of an eyebrow is lifted above his searching eye, and he gives me a soft, slow nod. I understand, Digger Girl, he seems to be saying. My soul is haunted too.
