by Audrey Grey
I retrieve Max’s flashlight from my pocket, twist the gears, spreading my hands out as I back up. A faint elliptical of light bounces across the faces of my tormentors. The wind lashes strips of my hair across my eyes. I vaguely notice that my shirt is ripped at the bust, exposing part of my white bra, which seems to glow in the darkness.
Another shirt, ruined. A hysterical laugh bubbles up my chest.
No, don’t panic. Panic is for the weak. Panic is for prey, and you are not prey.
They circle me until I cannot back up anymore. After my escape earlier, they are being extra careful. I get the feeling they are drawing this out. Enjoying it.
“Shouldn’t have run, my lady,” the leader says in a soft, menacing voice. Because of my appearance and dress, he probably assumes I am a High Color. “We was just going to have a little fun. But now . . .”
My heart clenches. The redheaded cretin is lazily stroking the half-a-dozen sharp nails sticking out of his club. He spits at my feet and laughs, a jumpy, high-pitched sound. The others join in.
I scan the trees. Where are they? The woods are quiet. All at once I’m flooded with doubt about my plan. I’ve made a mistake. A small, unforgivable mistake that will cost me everything.
Curl into a ball. Hide. Disappear.
No! I’m no longer Maia Graystone, the girl who hides in the tunnels. The girl who eats rats and cries in the darkness and is scared, always scared.
I’m Everly March—the girl who’ll fight back.
Hefting the flashlight into my left hand, I slide out the knife I have hidden inside my sleeve. It dances inside my fingers. Now I wish I’d found something larger. At least then they wouldn’t be laughing at me like I just told a joke.
But the leader isn’t laughing. His eyes linger on the blade. He thought I would not fight. His dark eyes catch my gaze, hold. I can tell by the cruel twist of his lips he does not like surprises.
Watch out for him.
“Looky here,” Mathias says as they close in. “Little Royalist bitch has claws.”
“Won’t be so funny when it’s sticking out your gut, will it?” I taunt him with a smile. Apparently Everly March has an impulsive streak. If I make it out of here, I’ll have to work on that.
The big one rushes me. I whip to face him.
Mistake. It’s a feint, I realize, as Drake lunges at my exposed back.
I instinctively cringe, pivoting as I do. But other than a quiet whoosh of air and rustle of leaves, nothing happens. There’s a sharp grunt and the sound of something being dragged quickly into the trees. Slippery shadows flick and dart in my periphery.
Drake is gone. The quiet stretches out then is shattered by a high-pitched scream.
And now there are two. So my plan is sound, after all.
My two former tormentors huddle close, their backs pressed together as they circle slowly.
A small shadow darts across the open space and hits the leader in the thigh. Childish laughter echoes through the trees. The leader touches his leg and holds his hand up. His face is blank with shock. Aiming the light at his palm, I see it drips with shiny red blood.
I fall into a quiet, loping jog. My flashlight bobs uselessly, so I put it away and concentrate on my knife and making sense of the darkness. Blurry bodies flash around me. A branch thwacks me in the cheek, but I’m too numb to feel it.
Part of me screams to go back. Find refuge with the others. I was better off with my tormentors, because three will always be better than one.
But I’m staking my life on the lesson I learned in the pit: When fighting over prey, the predators have to snuff each other first.
A small grayish sliver of light cuts through the pitch black. I’m out of the trees and running. Sprinting wildly. Now I can’t stop. I think I hear shouts and screams from the woods, but I can’t be sure. I have won. Have outsmarted the predators—and I didn’t even have to use my knife.
The marketplace is empty. I cut through two stalls selling medicinal herbs and brace my hands on my knees. Now that my adrenaline has worn off, my body is shaking, and I’m reminded that I still desperately need something to eat.
I should go back to the home-that’s-not-my-home. Judging by the shadow murk, Shadow Fall still has another half-hour to reign.
Go home, idiot. It’s just food.
Except it isn’t. It’s walking back inside that house empty-handed and having to beg someone else for food. It’s admitting that I am still the weak, scared Pit Leech living off others’ scraps.
The flashlight whirs as I wind it, and the half-moon of light bursts into a brilliant star.
It takes five more stalls to find something suitable. Apples, an entire bucket full. They are bruised and overripe, but they smell of heaven. I find eggs, too, although most have been cracked. There are even a few potatoes and a leaking, half-empty sack of flower. Everything goes into a frayed green quilt someone was using as shade, which I tie together to make a sack.
I am as quiet as possible. Last minute I find some perfectly ripe strawberries scattered on the ground. Their fragrant smell moistens my mouth. Dusting them off, I remember how much Max loves strawberries and smile.
“Should have kept running, my lady.”
A thin flap of flesh hangs from the leader’s cheek, like perfectly sliced deli meat. One hand is trying to press it back into place. Two of his fingers are missing, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
I feint right and twist to my left, ducking as I do. He catches me with an elbow to the cheek. Bright red stars. The ground smashes my face. I roll, kicking blindly. My heel smacks something meaty. He snares my leg and hooks his arm around my ankle, my foot now wedged inside his armpit. I cry out as his forearm slices into my Achilles tendon.
He’s grunting like an animal, his eyes bulging with rage. For a moment we just stare at each other. He’s making it intimate. Personal. He won’t just be satisfied hearing me scream. He has to feel my breath on his face, my fingernails scraping his chest as I die.
It’s now or never. If I don’t use violence, he’ll kill me.
I miss the knife until it’s right above me. It glints softly. Then it drives straight down into my abdomen.
I turn on my side and use my thigh as a shield. The knife glances off my muscle. He raises the weapon again, and we play a cat-and-mouse game where I move my knee in line with his knife.
Kill him, Everly, Nicolai orders. Kill him!
In the pit, I often dreamt the monsters were trying to hurt me, but when I raised my weapon, it was something useless. A shoe. A butterfly. Once it was even a banana.
That’s how I feel now, brandishing the tiny dagger from the padded room. The handle is slippery and light inside my blood-slicked palm, the blade no bigger than my pointer finger.
Just before I drive it up, in that long, stretched-out second, I see my mother’s face looking down. That’s my girl, she whispers.
Then her eyes become huge white saucers of surprise as the blade slips into her chest and sinks to the hilt. The grip on my ankle relaxes. My mother slumps, her head resting on my shoulder as her weight pins me to the cool earth. The warmth of her body seeps through my clothes and into my bones. Hot blood trickles down my neck and drips by my head.
I know it cannot be my mother lying over me. But I saw her. I saw her. Reconstructed hallucination. I gulp greedy breaths and tell myself what I need to hear. I’m not covered in blood. I’ll close my eyes, count myself to sleep, and when I wake up, I’ll be in my bed. This will be a nightmare. And I’ll be me again.
Except I can’t remember who that is anymore.
Everly, Nicolai says. You are Everly March. Accept it.
A choice. Be Everly March. Turn off my emotions. Finish my mission. Or be the girl I cannot remember. The girl afraid of her own shadow. The girl who would never take another’s life.
The girl who will let Max die.
I rise. The body slips away like an apron, and blood rivers down my arms and legs. It’s no longer warm.
But despite his gentlemanly trappings, his visage cuts to the bone, as if every part of him has been chiseled. Jagged widow’s peak. Arched, dagger-ish eyebrows. Razor-edged cheekbones I could slice an apple on. One eye is stark blue, the other a clear, riveting green. Both are framed in charcoaled lashes so thick it appears he’s wearing eyeliner. And both drink the new me in with unrepentant curiosity.
I suppose his features should be familiar, but it’s his countenance—the way he holds his head at a slight angle and rakes me with his gaze—that I recognize.
Riser doesn’t look corrupted. But I’m not sure what a corrupted person looks like. Certainly not that. Nicolai has given him a cruel, overwhelming sort of beauty that’s meant to unsettle, to burrow deep under the skin and wriggle around a bit.
The other Chosen are aesthetically pleasing by design. Their good looks a harmonization of complimentary, symmetrical features meant to convey perfect health and impeccable breeding.
I think of Caspian. If his physical traits are a calming salve, Riser’s are a crude weapon. But it doesn’t matter how much Nicolai improved Riser’s features because Nicolai could never completely erase the wild, predatory look that haunts Riser’s face and makes him appear seconds away from ripping something apart.
For some reason, I feel relieved that he’s okay and frown at the unwelcome feeling. My reconstruction must have softened my feelings toward Riser somehow.
The sun reappears, glistening off the pools of blood wetting the grass. I retrieve the strawberries, tie the blanket around them, and heft my loot over my shoulder. I’m surprised at how easy it is to ignore the body.
I hold up the bag. “Hungry?”
Riser’s mismatched eyes cut to the corpse, my bloodied shirt, my face. A frown twitches his lips. His teeth, I notice, unlike the rest of his face, are not quite perfect. Slightly crooked. A small chip in the left canine. Not enough to draw attention, but enough to notice.
“You are bleeding,” he points out.
“Obviously.”
He hesitates before taking a tentative step closer. “I cannot shake this feeling I should . . . I don’t know, help you, somehow.”
He shifts under my stare. Hard as I try, I can’t ignore the pity I feel watching him struggle with his newfound emotions.
But I quickly come to my senses. I am a monster now, just like him. A beautiful, vengeful monster. And in this game of monsters Nicolai has constructed, becoming something else, something that feels, means I lose.
I die.
I toss him the bag. “Ready, Pit Boy?”
Riser’s intense stare never leaves my eyes as his hand snaps out to grab the food. I ignore the storm cloud of emotions brewing in his face. “On your command, my lady.”
Bending down, he carefully retrieves my knife from the body, wiping the blood on his white handkerchief before handing it to me.
Between the fifth and the sixth intercostal.
A horrible, dark feeling comes over me as I realize instead of guilt I feel a sick sense of pride.
Chapter Thirteen
I know I’m having a waking memory. Even though I’m sitting on my bed, I can see my mother hunched over her desk as if she’s right in front of me. Her hair is snared in a limp knot, a blue silk robe swallowing her slight figure. She’s speaking to a hologram. I struggle to focus on my current surroundings, but my bed transforms into the scraped wood floor of my mother’s office. They’re discussing the low upload predictions. “Fienians are spreading rumors the upload is really a mass extermination,” my mother is saying. “People are scared.”
“Let the worms be scared!” Emperor Laevus hisses. There’s a loud boom as his fist smashes into something hard, and I grip my bedcovers, trying to blink the vivid images away. “Most are going to die, anyway, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why I’m trying to make it easier on them.”
My mother hesitates. “Perhaps we should consider brokering a truce with the Fienians.”
“How dare you speak of a truce with those worms to me! You remember what they did to Eleanor? My newborn daughter, Grace, barely past her name day?”
“She was my friend, Rand, of course I—”
“And she was my wife!” The Emperor leans forward, scratching his neck with his finger. “Why are you speaking of peace? Has there been talk of sympathy for the Fienians? What are the bloodsucking parasites at court saying?”
“No, my Emperor—”
“Perhaps it is time to cull the court again.”
At first I wanted out of my hallucination, but now, curious, I focus on my mother as she holds up her hands in a soothing gesture. “When the Shadow Trials begin, Emperor, the populace will rally behind the Bronze finalists because they can relate better to them, and the uploads will improve. You’ll see.”
“No worms can ever enter Hyperion.” He shakes his head to himself. “The finalists must be well bred and of noble blood, accustomed to court and our ways.”
“Of course, there are thousands of disgraced Golds from once prominent Houses who would jump at the chance to—”
“We must be careful that no worms slip through, Lillian. Once the finalists enter the Island, they must be mentored beneath Chosen so that we can monitor them. Now”—he steeples his hands together—“let’s discuss that droll little Bronze you insisted on marrying.”
The memory is beginning to fade, my mother’s desk melting into the walls of my bedroom, and I fight to see what happens next. My mother grows very still. There’s a sense of menace I don’t understand, and the idea someone could make the strongest woman I know practically cower forms a cold pit in my stomach.
“I’ve learned he’s been asking around about certain banned tech.” The Emperor’s sharp eyes glitter dangerously. “Do I need to have Victoria speak with him?”
“No! You will not have that—”
A knock on the door jolts me back into reality. Before I can recover from being thrust into the past, Brogue enters wearing a stained yellow apron with bright-purple tulips and smelling of something delicious. Bramble chirps at his presence and scampers to the edge of the bed to greet him. After a pause, Brogue crosses the floor and then sits on the bed next to me.
He clears his throat. Two-day old bristle shadows his jaw, and his eyes are tarred—shiny and loose. As he struggles with where to place his hand, I wonder how far gone he is. It’s hard to tell with tar. Twitchers can look fine one second and completely unspool the next.
“Flame bartered for meat,” he says, stroking Bramble’s smooth back. “That and what you nabbed, we got ourselves a fine meal.”
“Not hungry,” I lie, glaring up at the stars. Considering my arms have begun to itch like crazy, and my brain has decided to replay my memories with an invisible projector, my threshold for Mercs in silly aprons is rather low. I grunt as I dig my fingernails over my flesh in an attempt to curb the worms-under-my-skin feeling.
Brogue clears his throat. Again. Clearly talking to girls isn’t his specialty. “Got Simulations tonight. Need your strength.”
I scratch my neck. “I’ll survive.”
“Quiet out there.” The bed lifts as he stands. Crossing to the window, he raps the glass with his knuckles and frowns.
“Curfew.”
“Not for another hour.”
My stomach rumbles. “What’d she barter with, anyway? Not her charm, that’s for sure.”
“The little firebrand?” There’s a gruff chuckle. “Now that I got no idea about. Don’t think I care to, either.”
“Squirrel?”
“Meat, Lady March. Ain’t gotta know what kind.”
I roll to face him, grinning. “How do you know if a Fienian’s close?”
Brogue’s eyes sparkle. “All the cats and dogs go missing.”
“So you don�
�t mind that she’s a Fienian Rebel?”
“None of my bloody business.”
I cross my arms. “The Marquis Ezra Croft, he none of your business either?”
As soon as I mention the dead Fienian Rebel leader, Brogue’s entire body tenses. “Not anymore.”
Anymore? “But it was . . . once?”
He sighs. “Another lifetime ago. I was there for the bombing of Dominus during the truce agreement. The Emperor was a fool to think Fienians and Royalists could make peace and a bigger fool to trust Ezra, but he was just a pup then, a foolhardy Emperor who had to prove his father wrong. He even broadcast the truce agreement, as if he was some kind of hero.”
Emperor Rand III played the video of the event on the rift screens every morning for ten years afterward so the populace would never forget the Fienians’ atrocities. I can still picture the tiny furrow that would crease my mother’s forehead as we stirred our steaming oatmeal and watched the Emperor’s wife and child blown to bits.
I remember the first time I realized the girl in the front row of the ceremony was my mother. Barely twenty, she wore the long white wig popular then, a royal blue cloak cascading gloriously around her, hiding her scandalous pregnancy with me. She stood with several from House Lockhart and the other prominent Gold Houses at the time. Silvers packed the stadium in front of Laevus Square, Bronzes overflowing the streets to watch.
Emperor Rand Laevus’s family stood off to the side, protected by Gold Cloaks, the guards assigned to protect the Royal family. The lustrous cloaks they’re named for sparkled around the Royals like a ring of beautiful, deadly flames. Prince Caspian and his twin, Princess Ophelia, barely one, each held a guard’s hand while their mother, Empress Eleanor, cradled the newborn Princess Grace.
Ezra’s red cloak rippled across the podium as he exited, a bright spot in a sea of blue and black and silver and gold, and then red blood painted the rift screen, and a deafening shriek roared through the speakers. That’s what I remember.
Then the silence.
