by Sarah Chorn
It wasn’t that simple. It would never be that simple, not to her. She couldn’t just walk away. She wasn’t wearing chains, but she’d always be a slave, always feel that leash tugging at her, always know that someday, somehow, Eyad, or one of his cronies, could show up again and take it all from her. She’d never have a life worth living if she spent all of it looking over her shoulder, filled with sick anticipation as she waited.
“Then go,” she said. “I don’t want to leave you again, Neryan, but I can’t walk away from this.”
“I can’t leave you,” he barked out a laugh. “Haven’t you figured that out yet? I can hardly stand being outside when you’re in that cabin. My water gets uncontrollable. We have to stay together. We can’t survive apart. I don’t like it. I don’t understand it, but that’s how things are. We need to agree on something, because there are two of us now, and our lives, for what they’re worth, have effectively merged with the connection of our elements.”
He wanted to negotiate with her, decide to do something else, anything else, and he wanted her to be part of that decision. He wanted her to be, if not happy, then satisfied. It was sweet, in its own way. There was nothing holding him here. If it wasn’t for her, he’d probably be halfway to the Desert by now, and didn’t she owe him that? He’d done so much for her and here she was, standing in the woods, nothing holding her down but her own desires. She could go anywhere.
But…
“I can’t,” she whispered. She saw him flinch. “I’m sorry, Neryan, but I can’t turn away from this. I will never be free, never be alive if I spent the rest of my days looking over my shoulder. That’s not a life. I’ve existed long enough, and now I want to live.”
He didn’t speak, just sank down onto the dirt and let out a sigh she felt in her bones.
“Do you remember when we were kids at the slave school and it was time to test us?” she asked.
“You were such a little shit,” he replied, but she heard the smile in his words. “I’ve never understood why you didn’t just sit down in that chair and take the test. You had to fight them every step of the way. They had to drag you in and tie you down and you screamed the entire time.”
“You yelled at me after. You were so mad,” she continued. They’d been ten. She’d been full of the kind of indignation only a child could feel.
“My test took ten minutes,” he reminded her. He glanced at her and smiled, a dimple flashing in his left cheek. “Yours took two days. Yeah, I yelled at you. I was sick of waiting and they wouldn’t let me do anything else. They kept me in the room, made me watch you howl, because they figured I’d make you submit faster.”
After finding out that Neryan could tap into water, the officials had been too afraid to beat them or whip them, as they had before. Once the test is taken, talent is unlocked, and they weren’t sure how Neryan would react to a beating or how dangerous that reaction would be. At that point, all they knew was that he had a very rare, potentially catastrophic talent. They hadn’t wanted to push him, or her, too hard until they could anticipate the fallout. So, they’d forced him to stand in the testing room, silent and still, hoping he’d be a silent threat. Hoping she’d want to make him proud, but that hadn’t worked. Neryan had water, but Seraphina, at that point, could already feel her fire. He might drown, but she could burn. So she sat in that chair and screamed, bit, and fought every step of the way; turning a ten-minute, painless test into an ordeal that took days.
“It didn’t work,” she said with a grin.
“No. Once you set your mind to something, you’ll die before you change it,” he replied.
“I didn’t like someone determining my value then, and I don’t like it now. I’m sorry. I know this is the most selfish thing I could ever do, because I’m giving you no options. You’ll end up paying whatever price comes of this, in full, but I can’t just walk away. I can’t build a boat and take to the sea. I can’t go to the Red Desert and change my name. I just can’t. I have to shut this door or I will never be free.” She licked her lips. “Have you thought about Mouse? She’s your daughter, Neryan. Her opinion should matter as much, if not more, than mine.”
“She’d come.”
“Are you sure? She seems pretty content here. Have you asked her?”
He flinched.
“You can’t just leave, Neryan. I know you want to, but you’ve got roots here. A life. A daughter that belongs here. No matter how much you want to run, this is your home as well as it is mine. Isn’t it worth fighting for? For your daughter, if for no other reason?”
“Damn you, Seraphina,” he hissed, suddenly surging to his feet. “If we go back to that city, we will die. You can’t face the Premier. No one can. He’s got the government, the army, the entire country under his command. You’re asking me to walk to my death so you can have some closure. No, you aren’t asking me, you’re commanding it of me. That’s not how life works. Doors don’t neatly close. Life doesn’t go on perfectly. You are here, now. You are free, now. You could go anywhere and do anything and you’re going right back—”
“Neryan—”
“No. You need to listen. I need to say it plainly so you know exactly what I’m hearing right now. You are asking me to die so you can have closure. Will it be worth it?”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she was. She was very sorry. Sorrier than he’d ever know. She didn’t want to do this to him, but they were connected. She felt the truth of it. Something had changed between them and now every time they were apart she felt like she’d burn brighter than the sun. He wanted no part of this, and if the world was fair and just, he’d have no part of it. She would prefer to let him go. He’d walk one way, and she’d walk the other, and maybe someday they’d meet up again. But the world wasn’t just. Life wasn’t fair and she had to drag him along with her because neither of them had any other options.
She couldn’t just run away. It wasn’t in her nature. Fire didn’t run, it burned.
She was trapped by circumstance. Caged by fate.
They both were.
“I love you, Neryan,” she said.
“Right now, I’m having a hard time believing that.” He let out a breath of air. “I’ve always followed you around, you know. You’ve always burned a path through the world. You’ve been ruled by your passions, and your temper, and I’ve trailed after you putting your fires out and cleaning up your messes. You aren’t giving me an option, Seraphina, because you know that, no matter what, I will always follow you. I will walk into Hell itself for you.”
“It’s not like that,” she whispered. Was this truly how he’d always seen their relationship? With her so selfish and him powerless to do anything but trail after her?
“I could refuse to go. I could say no, and just take off to the Desert and drag you with me, but I won’t. I’d never do that to you. I’d never take your choice from you. Choice is power, Seraphina, and we’ve both been powerless before. I wouldn’t want you to feel that way ever again. There are different kinds of slavery.”
“You aren’t my slave,” she protested. The very idea offended her. “You’re my brother.”
“If you force me to do this, then yes, I am your slave, and you need to face that. I’ve spent five years trying to free you, and now the first thing you want to do with your freedom is go right back to your master. Are you sure you don’t want to be on his leash?”
It took her a minute to realize what the loud crack that suddenly filled the darkness was. A moment longer before the stinging burn settled into her hand, while a red, angry print showed up on her twin brother’s cheek.
She’d never slapped him before. Never physically hurt anybody.
She felt like a stranger to herself.
He rubbed his cheek and stood glaring at her. “I’ll do this. I’ll go with you. I’ll support your cause. I’ll throw everything I have into this. I’ll help you close your fucking door and I’ll die alongside you. I’ll back you, Seraphina, because you aren’t giving m
e a choice and we’re bound, the two of us.”
“Neryan, I’m sorry,” she said.
“So am I,” he replied, before turning his back on her and disappearing into the house.
And then it was just her standing under a sky full of stars, emotions swirling and whirling inside her. Her leg ached along with her heart and she hobbled over to a tree and leaned against it. Nothing was how she’d imagined it. Truthfully, she’d never allowed herself to imagine this moment, but it certainly wasn’t how she’d expected it to be.
Her hand stung. She studied the cabin. Her fire burned, roaring inside her. It was hard being this far away from her brother, twenty feet maybe, but already she felt herself igniting. She’d need to go to him soon. Need to press her hand against his, feel his water push against her inferno. She didn’t want to face him. That one, simple yet necessary gesture seemed to underscore everything they’d just fought about.
She let tears slide down her cheeks while a lament filled her up inside.
Whatever happened next, this had been her choice.
Amiti
It was the whipping that hurt the most. Not the actual lash against his back, but the barbs that tore his skin away. That was the true pain, the feeling of flesh parting from bone and muscle. The way his body wept tears of blood. The unending, ceaseless shredding of everything that made him human.
Sometimes they shouted at him. Most of the time they just worked at him, like he was clay, and they were in charge of his shaping.
It was the shaping that was the torment.
He’d lost track of time, but he was pretty sure he’d come to Slotskaya a few weeks ago. They had separated him from his husband instantly, Kabir taken one way across the camp, and Amiti the other. He’d begged them to let him see his husband, and they’d just laughed. Eventually, they’d relented, and two guards took him by his arms, dragged him from the room they were questioning him in and into another, where they showed him his husband’s body.
He’d been dead a while; Kabir was stiff and gray. He’d been eviscerated, his guts laying around his body like fat worms. Blood had pooled, changing the color of his skin; pale on top, and dark below. His milky eyes saw nothing. The tattoo of the Three had been cut from his chest, leaving frayed skin behind, and a hole that showed naked muscle below. They’d probably killed him as soon as they’d had him.
There he was, the man who had meant everything to him. The only one who could make Amiti’s heart beat. Now he was dead. Lifeless. So much hacked-apart meat laying on a cold stone floor. At that moment, he knew what it was to be truly empty. His heart didn’t just break but explode, and he was left with a cold, black, smothering pit of nothing that ached so fiercely it nearly drove him to his knees.
Maybe that’s what pain was—a sudden loss of something as essential as air. A dull throb in the place where his heart used to be. Phantom sensations that couldn’t be seen or defined, and ached all the more due to that. It was a scream so loud, no one could hear it.
Pain was his husband, dead.
They’d watched him, the two guards assigned to him. They hadn’t touched him yet, just asked questions, kept him locked in a tiny, windowless room, probed him with their words. They wanted to know anything and everything about his life. No detail was too small. They were going to use him to ferret out the network that Vadden had worked through, but Amiti wasn’t speaking. Now they watched him stare at the body of the man he’d spent most of his life loving. Watched him, and waited for him to shatter.
He wouldn’t shatter.
That’s when he realized that none of this mattered. It had all been a carefully choreographed show. An exercise in breaking. Little did they know, there was nothing left in him to break. The fools. They had already lost, and they hadn’t even started playing the game.
Kabir wasn’t there anymore. Kabir was somewhere else, waiting for him. Amiti stared at the corpse of the man who had filled his life with such color and depth, and realized that he was already dead, his body just had to follow suit. They couldn’t have his soul. All they had was his skin.
He turned to his guards and smiled, a crack-lipped smile full of such mirth they each took a step away from him before resting their hands on their batons and whips. “Do your worst,” he said, his voice hissing and low. “Let’s put on a damn good show for our beloved Premier.”
They clapped him on his shoulders, and led him from the room.
And that’s when the torture began. When his days merged and mixed, one into another. Then they robbed him of everything. His pride, his humanity, and time.
The door to his cell opened with a groan, and the man whipping him paused, pulling Amiti from his pain-filled memories. “Comrade,” a stranger said. “We have orders.”
“Orders?” His torturer asked in a rough, deep voice. “We’ve killed the mutt,” he said, referring to Kabir and his mixed heritage, his wrong religion, and the slave in his blood. “What else?”
It struck Amiti then that he hadn’t heard his torturer’s voice yet. He’d been strapped to this post, getting whipped for what felt like years, and other than a few grunts the man had never said a word. In fact, after they’d showed him Kabir, they had stopped all questioning; like whatever he knew about the subversives didn’t matter anymore. All of this was just procedure, limned in blood. He realized with shocking, sudden clarity that they probably already had all the information he’d ever be able to give them, and now they were torturing him to fill time, or prove a point.
Maybe both.
He listened as the two men spoke, exchanging platitudes as though Amiti wasn’t tied to a post with the ropes that had rubbed his wrists raw days, weeks ago. Like his back wasn’t shredded and skinless; just muscles, bone, and blood. Listened, because their voices were bringing him back to himself. Reminding him where he was. Breaking through the fog so he knew why he was there, and why they were doing this to him. He thought of Kabir, and wanted to weep. A low, croaking growl flew past his lips instead.
“You killed the mutt?” The stranger asked.
“Two weeks ago,” his torturer replied.
Two weeks? Had it really only been two weeks since he’d seen Kabir’s corpse? It could have been a year.
“Good. The Premier has plans, and he thinks this one will get the best results.” Quiet fell and smothered. Footsteps. Boots on a hard floor, the soft suction as Amiti’s blood punctuated the man’s every movement. Finally, he appeared in Amiti’s vision, standing two feet away. Amiti tried to fix his eyes on him, but he’d been beaten too hard for too long, and his eyes were almost useless. His vision swam, blurry, black around the edges. He saw nothing more than a dark shape floating in a darker space. “You’ve really broken him, haven’t you? Can he stand?”
“No,” the torturer replied, sounding neither pleased nor displeased. More like he was surveying a work of art, and looking for imperfections. “We’ve spent the past two weeks working him over in just about every way imaginable.”
“Has he said anything?”
“No. He hasn’t spoken a word since we took him to see the mutt.” There was a pause. “We haven’t asked him any questions since then, either. We were told you already had all the information you needed. We were just to work him over.”
“The Premier and Secret Police Chief Samson have the necessary facts. You’ve done well.”
Amiti’s body was numb. There was a point when the pain became so intense he’d just given up feeling any of it. All he felt was a strange paralysis, a buzzing in his ears, and a world swimming away from him.
Fingers gripped his chin, strong, calloused, and well used. “Look at me,” barked the stranger. “Fucking look at me, you scum.”
Amiti blinked, tried to get his bleary eyes to track, and eventually gave up, his head sagging with a sigh. “Look at me!” The man shouted, his fist hitting him squarely in the face. If he’d had any teeth left, they would have been knocked out. As it was, the blow was enough to wake him up and bring him fully i
nto the moment.
He squinted at the man who carried such important orders. Tried to see this dark shape that gripped him like the coldest night.
“I’m going to kill you soon,” the man whispered, the words almost gentle. “I’m to take you to the Reach, and wait upon the Premier’s pleasure, and then, when he deems the moment right, you will be marched out to the main square and made an example of.”
It was almost a relief to know that he was near his end, that soon he’d be freed of all this pain and emptiness. “Thank you,” he tried to say, but the words tripped on the stub of his tongue and came out a mumbled mess. He tried to pour his heartfelt gratitude into his eyes, and hoped this stranger saw it.
“Your death is going to have a point,” the man hissed, his fingers squeezing Amiti’s chin painfully. “It’s more than you deserve. You’re a traitor. Your death should be as meaningless as you are, but the Premier wants you to be seen. He wants the entire city to watch you thrash around at the end of a rope. He wants me to make a big production of it so everyone understands what happens to subversive scum who work against the state.” He paused and spat on Amiti’s face. “So instead of being the trash you are, your end is going to mean something. How does that feel?”
How did that feel? Amiti hadn’t been able to feel much since Kabir died. Unbidden, another memory filled him. This time, he and Kabir were in the cart, staring at each other from opposite ends, the gates to Slotskaya open, waiting to swallow them whole.
“My love,” Kabir said. “life is but a small, short thing.”
“Kabir—” Amiti said, the finality in those words scaring him far more than the gates to Slotskaya.
Kabir licked his lips and closed his eyes, a tear slid down his cheek carving out a river of pain. “Whatever happens next, whatever happens once we pass through these gates, remember that I never regretted a second spent with you.”
