mutated by the toxic new world, but the past two hundred years have been
the most devastating for the people living in the cities. All but three of the
original fifteen settlements have fallen to the monsters in the desert. The
messenger birds from the king of Sula and the queen of Port South come
less and less frequently. One day they will stop altogether.
Or perhaps our birds will be the first to have their freedom. Either
way, Yuan is living on borrowed time. Though probably not as borrowed as
mine.…
I wait a few more moments—until Needle’s breath comes slowly and
evenly—before slipping out of bed and eating up the thick carpet between
my bedroom and the balcony with eager feet. Seventeen steps to the
bedroom door; twenty-seven down the hall, past the sitting room, through
the music room, and out onto the balcony; then three more and the careful
fall to freedom. Careful, so I don’t follow in my mother’s footsteps. Careful,
so my escape is only for the night, not for forever.
I brace my hands on the balcony ledge and push off the ground with
bare toes, drawing my knees up to my chest, landing atop the parapet in an
easy crouch. My fingertips brush the cold marble; my cotton overalls draw
up my shins.
The overalls are an orchard worker’s suit with wide legs and deep
pockets. I stole them from a supply shed near the apple orchard two years
ago. Now the legs grow too short. I am seventeen and very tall for a person.
Very,
contact with the curved edge of the first roof and I take a running leap for
the second, deliciously alive with fear.
I’ve made this descent a thousand times or more, but still a taste of
the original terror remains. The first time, my feet didn’t know the dips and
curves and footholds for themselves. The falls—the six curved roofs below
the tower balcony—were only a story told by Baba as we sat in the
afternoon sun. My fingers and toes are my eyes. I couldn’t see the truth of
my way out until I was already over the edge, dropping the ten feet to the
top of the first roof. But it was there. Just as my father had said. As were
the second and the fourth and the sixth, and the last tumble into the
cabbage garden.
I plop down on the hard ground between the cabbage rows—no
fertile patch of land is wasted in Yuan—and fold back into a crouch, staying
low as I shuffle back and scatter the dirt with my hands, concealing the two
deep prints from my landing. There is rarely anyone this close to my prison,
but I don’t set off right away. With all the guards milling about, Baba surely
has a patrol stationed near the tower.
I wait, squirming my toes, ears straining in silence broken only by the
faint buzz of the hives at the bottom of the hill. The bees are quieter at
night but still busy. I like the hum, the evidence of nonhuman activity. We
used to have wild birds under the dome, too—all different sorts, some
night singers, some day—but the last of them died years ago. Father said it
was an avian epidemic.
“Why didn’t it take the messenger birds, then?” I asked him at the
time. “Or the ducks and geese by the orchard pond? Why did only the wild
birds die?”
“Wild things don’t always survive under the dome,” he said.
There was something in his voice that day.…
It made me wonder if he knows I’m not as biddable as I pretend to
be, if he knows I’m wild, and doesn’t hate me for it. Or at least doesn’t
blame me. It’s not as if I asked to be born this way, with a taste for defiance
and a longing for the hot desert wind, the wind I felt only once, the day my
mother took me for a forbidden walk outside the city walls.
I’ll never have that wind again—if I left the city for any length of time,
I would die of thirst or sun poisoning, if the Monstrous didn’t get me
first—but I can have my night runs. I can have the autumn smells, the satin
of rose petals between my fingertips, and the sweeter sting of the roses’
thorns.
My mouth fills with a taste like honey and vinegar mixed together.
The rose garden. How I love and loathe it. How I need it and hate the
needing. But still, I’ll go there first tonight. I want to see the color of the
sky, know which of my moons hangs heaviest above the dome. I am
efficient in my darkness, but how I crave the moonlight!
It’s hard to wait, but I don’t move a muscle, don’t twitch a nostril,
even when my nose begins to itch in the way noses never fail to do when
you’re not able to scratch them. Two minutes, three, and finally my
patience is rewarded with the soft, rhythmic scuffing of leather boots on
stone.
those should be stationed at the Desert Gate and Hill Gate and around the
wall walks, where the rest of the city won’t have to bear witness to their
strutting about.
Our only hope is to keep the mutants out. If they make it inside, the
city will fall. If we’ve learned anything from the destruction of the other
domed kingdoms, it should be that. The Monstrous are bigger, stronger,
with poison seeping from their claws, and skin as thick and hard as armor.
They can see in the dark and live on nothing but a daily ration of water and
cactus fruit. They are brutal beasts determined to destroy humanity and
take our cities for themselves.
But our bounty will never be theirs. If they kill the keepers of the
covenant, Yuan will turn to dust like the other cities and the land beyond
our walls. Magic is loyal only to those who have bought and paid for it. With
blood. Hundreds of years of blood, blood enough to fill the riverbed
beneath the city and carry us all to the poison sea.
As soon as the soldier scuffs away, I scurry between the rows of
cabbages on tiptoe, leaving as little sign of my passing as possible, counting
the eighteen steps to the road, the four steps across it, the fifteen steps
down the softly sloping hill—also planted with cabbage; oh, the cabbage I
have eaten in my life—and into the sunflower patch. My fingers brush their
whiskery stalks, feeling the heavy flowers bob far, far above me.
They are unusually tall this year. No matter how high I reach, I find
only more prickly stalk and leathery leaves. I am nearly two meters tall, and
my reach is another half above. They must be three meters, maybe more. I
bet their heads are bigger than the moon.
“Moon. Moon, moon of mine,” I sing softly as I skip the thirty skips
through the sunflower patch, up the rise to the city green where the
children play. Seventy more steps—it is the widest green in the city, and
the grass is still damp from the groundskeeper’s hose—and I am in the
orchards that surround the royal garden.
Dried grass sticks to my wet feet as I carefully tread the last fifty
steps that separate me from my destination. There are snakes in the
orchards. They hide beneath the grass clippings, lurking in wait for the
rodents that feed on the apples the orchard workers miss. More than once,
I’ve felt a strong serpent’s body brush my bare foot, heard a rustle and a
hiss as a viper slithered—
her arms held out and her head bobbing like one of the giant flowers.
I’ve never seen so many flowers. Flowers, plants, fruit, green things
bursting out all over. When we first crawled from the caverns, I stumbled in
the face of it. I fell, and my hands felt alien against the soft, wet grass. The
smells devastate me. I don’t have Desert People or Smooth Skin names for
them, can’t tell where one smell ends and another begins. The land under
the glass dome overwhelms with its life.
Fierce, vicious life. Stolen life. Paid for with the deaths of my people.
We’re starving. The children first. Their skin cracks and bleeds. They
cry until they have no strength left, and their silence is worse than their
moans. The tribal medicine men have become death dealers. Better to eat
poison root and have the pain over in an instant than to die slowly.
The autumn harvest of cactus fruit has bought the Desert People
time, but only a little. We must have the roses. According to our chief’s
visions, they are the key to the magic that keeps the land under the domes
flourishing and abundant.
“Take them at any cost,” Naira said when we left our camp a month
ago. “Die for them. Kill for them if there is no other way.” Our chief is a
peaceful woman. But these are not times for peace.
Or mercy. If the girl sees me, she’ll scream. The guards will come.
They’re everywhere. They were here a few minutes ago. I hid in the
orchard, but they’ll come again, and I might not be so lucky next time. The
moons are so bright, it’s practically daylight under the dome. I have to act.
If Gare were here instead of on the other side of the city, he would have
already slit the girl’s throat and wrested a plant from the soil, and would be
halfway back to the caverns.
It took generations of digging to build the tunnel down to the
underground river. It will take generations more to find another way in if
we fail, generations we may not live to birth. This path will serve us only
once. When the Smooth Skins realize what we’ve done, they’ll shore up
their underground defenses, build another impenetrable wall. They already
suspect an attack will come. Their guards shot arrows at our scouts as they
circled the city. This is our only chance.
.
I flex my hands. My claws grow loose inside the grooves above my
nail beds. There’s no choice. There’s no time.
I step from behind the thick tree, out of the shadows, into her line of
sight. I bend my knees and bare my teeth. My claws slick from their hiding