skin, somehow managing to work up a sweat despite the winter chill.
Frozen nose, damp undershirt.
.
“I’m going down the mountain for something to drink,” Gem says
tightly, making it clear he’s noticed that my nose is as far in the air as it can
get without tipping me over backward. He sounds even angrier.
Good. Let him stay angry. I’ll stay angry, too, and we’ll both be better
off.
“If you want me to bring some back for you, I need your shawl to
soak up the cactus milk,” Gem says. “I’d use my shirt, but I’m sure you don’t
want to drink from
Baba’s horror is no longer enough to banish the tingling at my fingertips. I
would like to see Gem’s chest with my hands. I would like to see his face
again, to find out if his hair has grown, and if it’s still as soft.
come morning.”
I reach for my shawl, but before I can hand it over—or tell him I was
only
“Ridiculous,” I mutter beneath my breath, but it’s hard to hold on to
my anger for long.
Baba and Junjie, and what the roses showed me of boys my age did little to
pique my curiosity about the rest of the male population. The soldiers were
self-important, and the idle nobles were overly impressed with themselves.
I knew Baba would choose a husband for me from one of the
founding noble families, so I took a closer interest when the roses showed
me those boys, but just close enough to assure myself the possibilities
weren’t too terrible. That was enough to put the business of boys and
husbands out of my mind. I knew love wasn’t in my future—not the
emotion, and certainly not the … other kind of love. I knew I’d have to
welcome my husband to my bed until a child was born, but I didn’t expect
to enjoy the process. It seemed best not to think of it.
Now I can’t
thinking about it. Even being frustrated with Gem
doesn’t banish the awareness of his smell, his touch. When he stood behind
me and cupped my hands in his—teaching me to drink from the cactus he’d
sliced open—it felt like my entire being was catching fire. It was terrifying.
Is it the tainted part of me that makes me ache for a Monstrous boy?
Does this mean I’ll never feel this way about Bo? That I’ll never learn to
enjoy his attention as much as the other women of court clearly do? The
thought of being with a man I didn’t desire was disturbing before I knew
what desire felt like, but now the notion sickens me. Soft hands on my skin,
instead of Gem’s rough fingertips. Thin lips on mine, instead of Gem’s full
mouth. My name whispered silkily in my ear, instead of growled against my
throat.
Sick.
thawing my fingers and nose. I don’t want to think about the future or my
duty or the fact that I am hours and
a way I haven’t in a long time.
Back home, I know the shape of my world. The tastes and smells and
textures of Yuan are familiar, and there’s only so much trouble a blind girl
can get into in a domed city. Not so out here. I might as well be on another
planet. A dangerous planet where millions of unseen things can kill me
before I
heat and I’m forced to venture away from the rock wall to hunt for more
fuel. I know Gem piled the wood close. I remember his repeated huffing
and the hollow sound of dry branches tumbling to the ground. But as to
where the pile lies …
I pat the ground on one side of the fire and then the other, moving a
little farther out each time, nerves electrified by every pebble and dip in the
dirt I come across, certain that at any moment I’m going to happen upon
one of the zions Gem warned me about.
I can’t afford a poisonous stinger in the hand or a slow death in the
desert. I must return from this adventure with spoils shoved into my deep
pockets and ensure the future of my people. I
And so, after only a few minutes of searching, I give up trying to find
the wood. I scuttle back to the place where Gem left me and press myself
against the rocks.
All too soon, the fire snuffs out and the wind picks up. Night falls, and
the temperature plummets. Within thirty minutes, my nose is as chilled as
it was before. Within an hour, the places where my underclothes were
damp feel as if they’ve frozen to my skin. My fingers and toes go numb,
then my arms and legs. The chill creeps into my shoulders, licking an icy
tongue down to tease at my ribs.
I begin to shake all over in what seems to be my body’s attempt to
warm itself, but I only grow colder. And colder. I have never been so
miserable in my own skin or so tired. Sleepy. So, so sleepy … My mind drifts
until I’m no longer sure if I’m asleep or awake, hallucinating or
remembering.…
One moment I’m alone in the desert, the next I’m back in the tower
as it burns. I watch the flames leap, and I scream for Mama while the fire
rages and my father beats at the door, begging her to let us out.
Mama. Where is she? Why did she lock the door? I can’t see through
the smoke, and I’m dizzy and sick and exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I can’t! I
have to find Mama. She and Baba and I have to get out. We have to get
out!
I look up and see a woman’s face in the burning beam above my bed,
watch her eyes go wide and her mouth move urgently, but I can’t hear her.
I can’t hear anything except terrible moans, as if every monster in the world
is crying out for my blood.
I open my mouth to scream again, and suddenly I’m back in the
desert, wandering along a rocky path without even my new walking stick to
guide me, shaking like a pan of popping corn, not sure which world is the
dream. With a strangled sob, I tear my shawl from my head and fling it from
me, gasping as the wind whips through my hair.
What are you doing, fool?
I don’t know. I know only that ridding myself of the thing clutching at
my head seemed the right thing to do at the time, and now I’m too
frightened to go looking for my lost shawl. I don’t know how close I am to
the edge of the trail. I don’t remember deciding to leave my safe place.
My thoughts are fuzzy. I can’t remember … I can’t …
My knees buckle. I collapse onto the ground and decide it’s best to
stay there. I don’t know how to find my way back to the rock shelter, and if
I keep walking, I’m sure to find trouble. But oh, it’s even colder here.
Wherever I am. So cold.
I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my shins,
wishing I hadn’t been such a coward. Now it’s too late. Even if I find my way
back to the camp and the pile of wood, I could never start a fire alone.
But Gem will come back soon. He’ll find me. I can’t have gone far.
Surely …
The wind huffs and puffs, its frigid breath making my bare head ache.
I curl into a ball around my legs, tuck my face to my chest, and bite my lip,
shivering as images from my brief sighted life bloom in the darkness behind
my eyes.
I see the pearl buttons on my mother’s dress, the ones that dug into
my cheek when she let me nap with her on the sofa in her chamber. I see
the cabbage fields and the orchards blossoming far below the tower
balcony, and the scarlet explosion of the sun setting outside the dome. I
see my own pudgy hand—not too tainted then, only dry and a bit
cracked—snatching a sticky roll from my mother’s tray, and I feel a giddy
squeal rising inside me as I sneak with it back to my room. I’d already eaten
my morning treat, but my appetite for burned honey icing was insatiable.
Mother always slept late and so soundly that not even little feet
scampering into her room would wake her.
I’d forgotten that about my mama. I’d forgotten most of those
memories. Their recovery warms me from the inside out, makes me smile
as I give in to the muzzy feeling tugging me closer to sleep.
I curl on my side in the dirt, arm pillowing my cheek—thinking of
those pearl buttons, and wishing I could remember my mother’s
face—while the cold pulls oblivion over my shoulders, tucks it around my
ears, and covers my sightless eyes. Before I consciously decide to go, I am
snapped away into something deeper than sleep, but I’m not afraid.
I’m not cold or lost or lonely anymore. I am not a princess or a queen
or a sacrifice or an abomination or a disappointment. I am nothing at all, a
cup swiftly emptying of all the Isra inside it, leaving nothing behind.
The place where the soldier’s spear pierced my thigh aches so badly,
it feels as though the bone there will split in half. A hollow in the ground
between two nearby Cross cacti looks more inviting than a Smooth Skin bed
of clouds. I think how good it would be to lie down there and stare up at
the million stars in the sky and be done with this day. But after a long drink
of cactus milk and a too-short rest, I start back up the trail.
As much as I’d like to leave the queen to her lies and trembling up on
the mountain, I promised to keep her safe.
Still, I don’t hurry. I
tonight, the better. I can’t remember being this angry since the day she
came to my cell and laughed at my starving people and cried her sticky
tears onto my chest. I would just as soon wrap my hand around her throat
and squeeze as sit by the fire with the queen of Yuan.
How dare she treat me like a comrade at shovel and hoe every day
we worked together, only to cower and quake the moment her guards are
gone? I’d believed the way she viewed my people had changed. I thought
she was different from the rest of the Smooth Skins. I thought she
considered me a … friend. I certainly worked hard enough to convince her I
was worth befriending. Even if every shared story and teasing word and
gentle bit of advice was deception on my part,
flash of her clever eyes and softly whispered reassurance about my healing
legs. She was only pretending to trust me, to feel affection for the beast she
kept in chains. I should have known she was false. In her eyes, I’ll always be
a monster. I suspected as much from the beginning.
So why does the proof of what I’ve known all along feel like a
betrayal? Why does the sight of her shaking hands make me want to hurl
boulders down the mountain? Why do I
with the tribe and watch the baby growing inside Meer be born into a life
of famine and pain. I was a warrior. I had a tunnel to finish digging, roses to
steal, Smooth Skin cities to worm my way inside.
But I wasn’t happy. There were days when watching Meer love
someone else more than she had ever loved me—seeing the casual
intimacies between her and Hant at the campfire, catching him with his
hand upon her swelling belly and a smile on his face—felt like dying. The
same way being captured by Smooth Skins felt like dying, and being
ordered about by my enemy felt like dying.
Isra has brought nothing but misery into my life, but when I arrive at
the remains of the campfire and see the flames out and Isra no longer
sitting where I left her, every hot angry thing inside me runs cold.
“Isra?” I circle the fire, panic sharpening my voice. “Isra!”
The air is too quiet. Even the wind has stopped moaning. It feels like
the night is holding its breath, waiting for me to discover the terrible fate
that has befallen the queen of Yuan. It has to be terrible. I left a blind girl
alone a dozen feet from the edge of a cliff. She could have gone to relieve
herself and fallen to her death. She could have decided to follow me and
taken a wrong turn on the path and wandered into a zion nest. She could
have been discovered by a hunting party and been taken prisoner.
I was certain there would be none of my tribe this close to Yuan, but
what of the other tribes? The Desert People from the north have been
venturing farther south since they burned the domed city of Vanguard two
years ago, only to find that its destruction did nothing to return life to their
own blighted territory.
Naira warned my father that if we failed to return with Yuan’s magic
roses, it might come to war between our tribes one day soon. We must
show the northerners that we have harnessed the Smooth Skin magic, and
share the power of the roses with them, before their chief convinces his
people that the only way to heal the land is to destroy every domed city
still standing. We cannot allow Yuan to fall, not until we have secured the
secret to their abundance.
Isra knows that secret. I should have been coaxing it from her, not
shouting and brooding like a child. I should have thought about my people
and my promises. I should have remembered how much Isra needs
protecting. The desert might be my home, but it isn’t hers. I was a fool to