by Casey Hays
And what about Ian? If he’s not from the Village—which is marginally debatable—he can’t possibly understand our lives, our duties. And if he is not part of my world, I’ll never expect him to be my mate against his will, even if I finally give in to breeding, which is another highly debatable matter. If I can endure, I will never become what the Archer has destined. Never.
But if Ian is not from here, what possessed Mona to drag him into our way of life? To force him into the Pit, into this dank, cramped cave when he belongs elsewhere? How could she be so cruel as to tear him from all he knows and leave him here to be used—to waste away—for our sake?
I laugh softly and shake my head. How foolish. Mona did exactly what I should expect, and I should not be surprised. There is not one shred of mercy in her, and cost means little to her if it achieves the desired effect.
“Hey.”
Ian’s hoarse voice shatters my thoughts. I turn. He slumps over the mat, his eyes red and swollen. We stare at each other for a minute in silence before he staggers to his feet and eases down beside me. I tense inside, hoping his tantrum is over, but I don’t move away from him. I sit very still.
“I’m such a baby.” He shakes his head in shame, keeping his eyes glued to the ground. “Embarrassing. I guess—I don’t know. This place is just getting to me, that’s all.”
He lowers his voice to a whisper, and his eyes dart toward me. “I think I’m going crazy.”
I could have told him this myself. But I don’t say anything. Instead, I take a chance and hesitantly stretch my hand toward his. It’s the proper thing to do, and I know it the instant he eagerly grasps it and clings to me, entwining his fingers with mine.
It’s my first time to ever touch a male, and I cringe a little as his heartbeat thumps against my palm, warm and rhythmic. Hand-holding—a significant technique imposed on us by Madam Belle. Her words ring in my memory.
“The hand is very sensitive, full of many nerve endings that send sensations radiating throughout the body. This should always be your first step in physical touch. Always.”
She had smiled seductively as she’d taken Gwen’s hand and demonstrated, slowly and deliberately.
I don’t follow through with the next step, rubbing my thumb across the top of his hand before edging it softly into his palm. No. I hold uncomfortably still and count the pounding heartbeats.
“I’m glad you’re here, Kate.” His grip tightens and my pulse answers, a quickened thudding. “I guess I can mark lonely off my list. At least for the next three days, right?”
I meet his eyes and nod. He frowns, causing his blue eyes to crease at each end.
“Right. But Kate?”
I wait, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. I squeeze his hand until he looks at me again.
“Are you going to come back?” he asks.
I bite my lip.
Of course, I’m going to come back. I have no choice.
Smiling, I nod. “I’ll come back,” I whisper.
I don’t want to say anything more, but some greater impulse, perhaps the desire to assure him in some way that I am not his enemy—that I am not like Mona or the Council or the other breeders who visit the Pit—makes me say my next words.
“It’s part of the rules. I have to come back to visit you. At least once a week. Or more if . . . if I want to.”
Ian brushes a thumb across the top of my hand—technique number two—and I shiver as it sends an unfamiliar sensation up my arm. I feel a blush rising, red and hot on my face. I fight against the urge to pull my hand away.
“Do you want to come back more than once a week?”
His question rumbles around inside my brain. Do I? I really don’t know. My only thought has been to complete my three day punishment, get out of here, and think about everything else later. So I answer him with a question of my own.
“Do you want me to?”
He smiles and stares at the floor.
“Well, sure.” His blue eyes sparkle. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, though. I’m planning to bust this joint pretty soon. Who knows? Next time you come, I may be long gone. Whoosh!”
I laugh. Not at him, but at his sense of humor. He is truly funny when he’s not being sarcastic. My eyes rest on him. I haven’t quite deduced what defines him, but underneath all the anger and desperation, I see something worth exploring. Oddly, I want to know him. I want to understand this boy.
My mate.
Of course, Madam Belle never taught me how to do this—converse with my mate. This only wastes valuable time in the Pit she proclaimed on more than one occasion. But she did not know what I would meet in this cave, and how can I ignore it? It’s obvious Ian is not some general imitation, identical to every other stock raised in the nursery. But still, Madam Belle speaks to me out of a memory.
“The stock do not have personalities, unlike our complex gender. Therefore, do not attempt to find one. You will only be disappointed, and your mandatory time in the Pit will be unfulfilling and regrettable.”
Ian shifts, and his shoulder presses against me firmly. It sends a thrill dashing through me, skipping like rocks thrown across the river, and I know I will break this rule. I want to know him—even the parts of him that frighten me.
He sighs, stares out through the long, bamboo bars guarding his escape like wooden soldiers, and I feel it as if it’s my own long, desperate sigh.
“I never should have taken off after that stag. It’s the first rule of an expedition: Don’t stray from the group.” He shakes his head in despair; I merely listen in ignorance. I know nothing of expeditions. “I guess I learned the hard way what that means.”
I nod, stare at the bars along with him.
“Justin would never have been so stupid. He’s never stupid.” He laughs to himself, a gleam in his eye. “Everything he does, even if it seems stupid at first, always ends up being brilliant. I don’t know how he does it.”
“Who’s Justin?”
His eyes, blue as the sky, connect with me. “My best friend.” He raises a curious eyebrow. “You do have those here, don’t you?”
I smile at his implication. We don’t have parents; why would he have best friends?
“Yes,” I reply. “Mia is my best friend. But I have others, too. Diana. Layla.”
Meg. I don’t mention her name aloud. I have no need.
He smiles. “That’s good. I was beginning to think there wasn’t one single thing about your village that was normal.”
Normal. I ponder his suggestion.
“Isn’t normal whatever you devise normal to be? Is it not different for everyone?”
His eyes twinkle. “Well, sure. I suppose that’s true to a degree. But this place?” He shakes his head with a grim smile, as if to say I could never claim normalcy.
I don’t argue, but I have no clear definition for normal. The Village? It is the only normal I’ve known with all the ugly cruelty embedded in it. It is life.
But still, I ponder the idea of a different form of normal. How does it taste up next to my own version? The thought enraptures me for a moment.
“I have a couple of other good friends, too,” Ian continues. “Jesse . . . he’s awesome. Love that guy. And there’s Max. He’s kinda quiet, but once you get to know him, he’s one cool dude.”
“Are there females?” I ask, and his face flickers with a slight flame of agitation.
“Of course. There’s Bethany for one.”
“Bethany?”
“Yeah,” His eyes shade over, the blue deepening. “She’s a mess, though. My parents have big plans for us. I’ve tried, but . . . .” His voice trails. He sighs once. “That’s a complicated subject I don’t really want to discuss.”
I nod, not fully understanding. And I muse at this idea that Ian might be telling me the truth about this place called Eden. That there truly is a village with a thousand people and parents and no nurseries whatsoever. And if it’s true?
My mind scurries over my own village with its tiny
hogans and fire pits and paths branching in every direction toward the Great Hall and the Dining Hall and Mona’s cabin near the edge of the woods—everything I’ve ever known. If Eden is real, then the Council has lied to us all along, about life beyond our home. There is another way. Ian’s pulse rages against my palm full of another kind of life; a life that reaches out to me with longing that matches my desire to taste it, and I want to know more. I want to believe in Eden, and I’m filled with a terribly beautiful hope.
If it’s true, it changes everything.
Chapter 6
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9
For the rest of the morning, our conversation is sprinkled with long moments of silence. Ian spends part of it near the gate digging at the dirt around the base of the bamboo. The ground is terribly hard, and bare hands are not good tools for making progress. I watch him, and more than once, I feel obligated to tell him it is no use; that if he gets out of this cave, he still must find a way out of the Pit. But I keep quiet. I can’t bring myself to shatter his only glint of hope.
Once, a jailer trots by on her rounds, and he ceases quickly, hiding his dirt-encrusted hands behind his back. He pretends to bathe in the sun until she passes, and he can resume his work. Determination lines his face, and he doesn’t stop digging even when his nails crack and his fingers are streaked with blood.
When a lunch of bread and water arrives, we both eat ravenously. It is slightly better than breakfast was. At least the bread is fresh.
After lunch, Ian is full of questions. He wants to know everything about the Village and about the “rules” I mentioned. He’s completely sincere about the fact that he’s not from the nursery, and by now, I’m partially inclined to believe him. But only partially. It’s better than the alternative: that he’s delusional, creating his own little world in his mind just to cope with the Pit. But how he could have designed such a fantastical story behind the walls of the nursery is unfathomable. The possibility is absurd.
And yet, there is no other explanation really. Madness has taken hold of his mind.
And so I battle between these two possibilities. I am unsure which of the two is a better prospect.
“So each of you is assigned a prisoner to visit?” He drains the last of his lukewarm water and lets the clay cup clatter against the wooden tray. “How do they decide who you are assigned to? I mean, how did you get me?”
I’m very careful with my choice of words because the moment he took my hand this morning, I concluded that I never want Ian to find out what I am—ever. I’m not exactly certain why this is, but the compulsion grows inside me with every passing moment. He cannot know. He can never, ever know.
He takes my hand now, as easy as one plucks a daisy from the wild fields. And I relax into it. Holding hands is not as uncomfortable as I’ve imagined.
As of this very moment, Ian doesn’t know why I’ve come. Over the course of our scattered conversation all morning, it has become clear, and I am sure of it now. He knows nothing of our rituals, our faith, the selection process for the women—none of this has ever touched him. I wonder, fleetingly, if perhaps the stock don’t have lessons. It seems logical that they would not. Ian, at least, seems uneducated about our ways. And if he believes he’s from a nonexistent village, who am I to try to convince him otherwise?
“We have a council who decides everything.” I answer. “They run the Village. And we do what they tell us.”
Most of the time, I think.
“We are all given assignments. Mine, of course, is to come here to see you.”
“Well, what about all these prisoners? Are they criminals? Did they do some awful thing that put them here? Or are they innocent, like me?”
His voice carries a hint of bitterness that causes my insides to cringe, and my breath halts in my lungs. This is not a safe question, and I have no clear answer. The stock are not criminals. Not now. They would have been had they been free to grow into men like the ones who destroyed the world. That’s what our lessons teach: Men are a violent and crude species which must be controlled. And the Council found the solution. They are not criminals. No, not anymore. I wrestle with how to explain this to Ian before I realize my only recourse is to change the subject.
“What about you? What is your home like?”
Ian smiles, and his eyes flicker a little. He knows I’m evading, but he doesn’t press. He’s happy to talk about his own village.
“Eden is an awesome city now, not just a village. My people settled there a few years after the Fall.”
“The Fall?”
“Yeah, you know. The last war?”
I nod. The Fall. This is the first time I’ve heard the last war referred to by this name, but it is fitting. It happened long ago, one hundred and seven years ago to be exact. Everything fell during that time. Our lessons teach us this, too. Buildings and trees and entire cities became rubble. The war swept over the whole world like a giant arm of rage in the hearts of men until nothing was left. Nothing . . . but the Village with its few survivors. The Council has always referred to war in general terms, nothing as specific as a single war. But . . . the Fall. Yes. It is very fitting. I concentrate on him, soaking up his words like a single stream in a dry desert.
“. . . and we rebuilt our lives there. We have a long way to go, but we’ve been able to restore some things. We installed artificial light. Just flip a switch, and it’s as bright as daylight in the middle of the night!”
“Bright as day?” I’m astonished. Candles or torches are the only lights we have by night. “How does it work?”
“It’s called electricity. We reran the wires underground and across the sky, just like they used to before the Fall. It’s kind of sketchy, and we lose power sometimes, but we have scientists in our village who are trying to get back some of the technology we lost. It’s been hard. Most of the people who knew anything about technology were killed in the bombings, so everything had to be relearned. But after all these years, our scientists and engineers have things pretty much back to normal.”
I don’t understand much of what Ian is saying, but I’m fascinated none-the-less. Is there really such a place of wonder? I’ve read much. I even spent several nights a week hiding in the small off-limits library, taking in everything I could get my hands on until I read every book. So here I sit, thinking I’ve acquired a great amount of knowledge. But Ian paints tales of things I’ve never imagined even in the deepest parts of my dreaming world. I could listen to him speak about his city forever.
But we only have three days.
“Tell me more,” I say. Ian smiles, and it’s comforting. I don’t feel afraid when his face lights up and his eyes seem to glow with strange, warm sadness. When this happens, I do believe him. He misses this place called Eden.
I’m glaringly aware of the close quarters. So close that the heat of his body, the overpowering presence exerting from him with his every move in the confined space of which I take up merely a spot—a tiny blot in the dirt— is abruptly and alarmingly overwhelming. And yet, I long to bend into the warmth of Ian, bend into his words and his images of a place beyond the Village, like I bend into a sudden and unexpected rainstorm on stifling warm evenings. It is a strange feeling indeed.
My visit to the Pit is a welcome shower from the heavens. Is this how every breeder feels? Was I wrong about all of it?
“Well, we also have running water,” he explains, unknowingly continuing my rainfall analogy as if on cue. It makes me smile. “It comes right into our homes through pipes in the walls. You can even stand under this metal contraption called a faucet in a shower and wash your whole body at once.”
“A rainstorm,” I whisper.
I gawk at him in amazement until he laughs.
“Yeah, but inside . . . and man-made.” He raises an incredulous, blond brow. “Seriously Kate, I cannot believe you have never heard of any of this stuff.”
I just shake m
y head in disbelief.
“What about food?” I ask.
“What about it?”
“Do you hunt for it? You said you were hunting when you were captured.”
A scowl crosses his face. “Speaking of that, somebody owes me a bow.”
My eyes widen. “A bow?”
“Yeah, and it was a good one, too. I traded three of my mom’s real silver goblets for it in Jordan. She’d kill me if she knew. And now, it’s gone.”
I only nod. Ian shoots a bow, just as our hunters do. A male with a bow, just like the Archer. It’s inconceivable!
“We also have stores.”
I study him, confused, and he laughs.
“These are places where we can buy food that is already prepared. Some is frozen even.”
“Frozen?” I am unfamiliar with this term.
“Well, yeah. This is where something is made really, really cold until it becomes solid and you have to thaw it out before you can use it.” He shrugs. “Cold things last longer.”
I merely gawk at him, filled with wonderment as all these pictures roll around inside my brain: electricity and pipes and frozen things that must be thawed. I can barely wrap my mind around what any of this could truly mean. It’s a fantasy. A story of pretend.
I used to play such things in the nursery with the other girls. Magic things. We pretended we lived in a cottage outside the Village, and nobody else knew of it. Only me and Mia, Diana, and Layla . . . and Meg. And it was surrounded by a field flowing with molasses that never dried up. And we swam in it and drank it and ate it on anything and everything, and we never grew tired of it. And nobody ever told us we’d had enough.
This is what I think of when I imagine Ian’s world. A place of abundance.
“The weather used to get cold, they say . . . before the Fall,” he continues, and I focus on his words. “These things called snowflakes used to fall from the sky. They were cold. When it snowed, these flakes covered the ground until they piled up and turned everything white.” His eyes grow dreamy for a second. “That must have been something to see.”
“I don’t understand at all,” I sigh. He only smiles.
