center. These towers make mine look like a child’s toy. They are
breathlessly tall, and each one overflowing with people. The people must
live three or four to a room, at least, if the amount of laundry is anything to
judge by. Hundreds of pants and shirts and dresses and overalls and
underthings hang like uninspired flags, blocking most of the sun’s light,
drooping limply toward the street, where their owners were ordered to
assemble this morning to meet their queen and let her look upon them
with her new eyes.
I demanded that the royal gong be rung and messengers be sent
throughout the city. I insisted on walking through the city center, the better
to see my people. I would not be swayed.
Now it’s all I can do not to turn and run back to my tower. I long for
the comfort of my darkness, my ignorance. I want to go back and undo it
all. I want to be the Isra my father worked so hard to create. If only I’d
known how easy I had it in my cage, with my velvet blinders always in
place …
My scrap of blue sky vanishes, and my gaze drifts down to the street
ahead, where a woman without arms or legs sits propped in a chair beside
several little boys. A mother who can never hug her sons or hold her
babies. How did this happen?
“Are you all right?” Bo asks from his place beside me.
“No,” I whisper. “Of course not. Of course, of
tongue to the roof of my mouth, stopping the stream of babble. I can’t lose
control in front of my people. I can’t show them how unprepared I am. I
can’t be like my mother.
“The tower. My mother.” I pull in a labored breath. “That’s …
people. She had never seen a human who was not of noble blood before
she came to Yuan.” Bo’s hand is firm at the center of my back, guiding me
relentlessly onward, through the city center to what lies ahead, to what I’ve
demanded to see.
I want to twist away, to order him to keep his hands off me, but I
can’t. His touch is the only thing keeping me going. If he withdraws, I’ll stop
walking and be stranded in the middle of the nightmare.
Nightmares upon nightmares. I had the fire nightmare again this
morning, saw the woman’s mouth opening and closing in the burning
wood. But this time I listened harder, the way Gem told me to, and I would
have sworn I heard her speak. She was saying something about the
truth … about hope … something important.…
When I woke, I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d said, but I was
bursting with happiness anyway. I could see the golden miracle of the
sunrise shining through my window, the brilliant bleeding red of my quilt,
and Needle’s tightly curled smile as she brought my breakfast tray. My life
and my dreams were changing, and I was certain my city wasn’t going to be
far behind. This morning, Yuan was a riddle I was confident I could solve.
But this is … a disaster. A tragedy. Hopeless.
“Now you see why your father felt he had to take such extreme
measures,” Bo continues, increasing his pace until I have trouble keeping
up. My dress is wider at the bottom than my other dresses, but it’s tight at
the thighs. Still, I don’t complain. I don’t care if I have to wiggle and wobble
down the street like a fool. The sooner we leave the city center and all the
damage behind, the better. “He was only trying to protect you. He thought
if you remained unaware of certain truths that you would be spared your
mother’s madness. It was only after she came here that she
became … strange. She grew even worse after you were born. At first the
healers dismissed it as the sadness that sometimes comes over new
mothers, but then she began talking of going into the wilderness to speak
to the Monstrous. Father says she set the fire not long after.”
I don’t say a word, though I want to ask Bo if he knows
Father’s second wife and foreign—a noble from far away who married my
father to escape a city on the verge of collapse—but I’ve never heard
anyone speak of her expressing the desire to make contact with the
Monstrous.
When Bo first told me it was my father who had ordered the
poisoning of my tea, I nearly slapped him. I was certain he was lying. I
refused to believe that my father would steal the sight from his own
daughter, even when Junjie showed me the signed order bearing the king’s
seal. I just couldn’t believe Baba hated me that much.
Now I understand. My father didn’t hate me. He was trying to spare
me from the heartbreaking truth.
“I wanted to protect you, too,” Bo says, louder now that we’ve
reached the edge of the city center and only a few citizens kneel at the
sides of the street. “I planned for you to remain in the nobles’ village,
where the people are whole. There was no reason for you to see this
particular truth.” His hand slides around my waist, his familiar touch
becoming openly intimate, making my breakfast gurgle angrily in my
stomach.
I swallow hard and step away. “Yes, there is. I needed to know.
I … had … to …” My words dribble away as we pass by the final knot of
people.
Beyond them, the world opens up, the wide dirt road continuing on
through the fields. I want to rush ahead into that open space, but instead I
force myself to nod and smile a brittle smile at the subjects kneeling in the
grass at the edge of an orchard of bare-limbed pear trees. There are three
men and five women, all wearing orchard workers’ overalls, all with missing
parts. They are ripped pieces of a dozen different puzzles that will never fit
together, and I don’t understand it.
I don’t. I can’t … I thought …
“The Banished camp is … worse?” I whisper when we’ve finally
passed the last woman. I find little comfort in the even rows of fruit trees
on one side of the road and the perfectly ordered grape trellises on the
other. Beyond these tidy fields, at the end of this road, lies the place where
the Banished—the people deemed too grotesque to inhabit the city
center—live out their abbreviated lives.
“Far worse,” Bo confirms, hesitating at my side. “We can go back to
the great hall if you like. I can—”
“No.” I lift my chin, and move past him on stiff legs. “I need to know
the truth.”
“I can tell you the truth. Let me do that for you,” he says, hurrying to
catch up, what sounds like real compassion in his voice. He’s been
unfailingly kind this morning—like the Bo I knew before last night—but I’m
not fooled. I will never trust him. Not ever, no matter how helpful he tries
to be.
“Thank you, but no.” I pull my shawl tight around my shoulders and
aim myself toward the royal carriage waiting for us by the side of the road.
The driver is an elegant old man with silver hair, supposedly a commoner
like all noble servants, but without damaged parts—at least, none that I can
see. His defects must be hidden inside, like Needle’s. Selfishly, I’m glad of it.
I need a moment. Just a moment.
“Please, Isra.” Bo stops me with a hand on my arm. “Let me spare
you any more of this.”
“Why?” I subtly shake off his fingers as I glance back over my
shoulder, finally able to pinpoint what’s been plaguing my mind, now that I
have some distance from the city. “Why are—”
“I care about you. I told you that last night.”
“No. Not that,” I snap, unable to bear talking feelings at a time like
this. “Why are the people damaged? How has this happened? I thought the
covenant was strong.”
“The covenant is strong,” Bo says. “It’s been this way since the
beginning. You know the legend: those families who refused to sign the
covenant did not receive equal protection from its magic.”
“I thought that meant they had fewer goods, smaller houses,” I say,
voice louder than I mean it to be. “I didn’t think it meant they—”
“It means they suffered from this planet’s dark magic. They weren’t
made Monstrous, but their humanity was not preserved in the same way
that those of noble blood are preserved. They suffer from a different sort of
mutation.”
My brow wrinkles, and for the first time in more than an hour, my
thoughts begin to organize themselves. “But the Monstrous look nothing
like that. What’s happened to our people isn’t mutation. It’s … something
else.”
“Something like what?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Something …”
climbing up my throat. The thought of talking this madness through with
him gives me strength and, more important, reminds me—
“I’m not sure.” I turn back to Bo. “But perhaps the covenant will offer
some insight. I’d like it brought to my rooms this afternoon.”
He blinks as if I’ve snapped my fingers between his eyes. “The
covenant?”
“Yes, the covenant,” I say. “Have it delivered to the tower
immediately. I’ll be keeping it overnight.” That should give Needle and me
time to sneak over to see Gem.
By the moons, I can’t wait to see him, to feel his arms around me, his
chest warm and solid beneath my cheek, making the world feel steady and
possible again. Night can’t come quickly enough.
“We should go,” I say. “The driver’s waiting.”
“But …” Bo’s mouth opens and closes as I circle around him and climb
into the royal carriage for the first time in my life. I was looking forward to
the ride this morning—the wind in my hair, the fields rushing past on both
sides—but now I can’t imagine taking pleasure in simple things, not when
there is so much suffering under the dome.
“Isra, I can’t have the covenant delivered.” Bo climbs up beside me,
clearly deciding he deserves to sit in the carriage rather than ride on the
step at the back with the other guards. “It’s impossible.”
“What’s impossible?”
“The covenant was lost,” he says. “Hundreds of years ago. Not long
after King Sato died.”
“What?” I want to believe he’s lying, but he seems genuinely
confused, completely at a loss.
lost
signal for the driver to start the horses. The silver-haired man flicks his
whip, and the buggy lurches forward, throwing me back against the seat.
Bo steadies me with an arm around my shoulders. I’m too horrified to push
it away. “He died before he could tell his last wife where it was hidden.”
“But that’s …” King Sato was our third king. That means … “No one’s
read the covenant in six hundred years?” I squeak. “Or more?”
“It’s all right.” He has the nerve to smile. “Our history isn’t lost. There
are other texts that tell us all we need to know, and the sacred words
spoken at each royal wedding are engraved on a gold tablet we’ll hold
between us on the day we take our vows.” Bo pulls me closer, until I’m
wedged beneath his armpit, my spine crunched and my dress straining
across my back. “Don’t worry. The covenant is strong. The damaged people
have been that way for generations upon generations. They don’t suffer
from it the way we would. They aren’t like us.”
“Then what are they like?” I squirm free, and scoot to the other side
of the buggy.
Bo’s expression hardens at the sarcasm in my voice, but to his credit,
he maintains his patient tone. “They aren’t Monstrous, but they aren’t
human the way we are, either. They don’t know any other kind of life.
They’re happy with what they have, to be a part of our city, to be safe, fed,
and protected.”
He sounds like he’s telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean anything.
He could think he’s telling the truth—the way I did every time I assured
Gem I was tainted—and still be telling a lie. I know for a fact he’s wrong
about my people’s suffering. I could see the pain in their eyes. I could feel
the hard facts of their life weighing on me as I walked among them,
dragging me down until it felt like my feet were moving beneath the
surface of the ground.
“You said there are other texts?” I ask, brushing a lock of hair from
my face, finding no joy in the wind that whips it back into my eyes.
“There are,” he says. “Would you like me to have those delivered to
your rooms?”
“Yes, right away.” I try to feel optimistic about what I’ll learn in the
texts, but I can’t. Something deep inside insists that all I’ll find in those
writings are more lies.
I have to find the covenant. I have to discover where it was hidden so
long ago, and I can think of only one place to look for help, one thing that’s
been around for more than six hundred years and still has eyes to see.
The roses have deceived me as often as anyone else has, but tonight
I’ll make it clear that I won’t tolerate lies. They will give me what I
want—the truth and nothing but—or I will … I will …
Or I will refuse them their offering.
Even the thought is enough to make my head spin and my heart
thrash against my ribs, but I can’t help but think …
What if the stories of Gem’s people are true? If so, wouldn’t my
people be better off in the desert? Better off transformed than forced to
live with missing pieces? The nobles and soldiers and some of the
merchants are still whole, but the overwhelming majority of my people are
suffering, not thriving, under the dome.
Maybe if Yuan is abandoned, if the other domed cities are
abandoned as well … Maybe if we all go into the desert together …
Maybe I don’t have to die. Maybe Gem was right. Maybe there
entire life I have been afraid to die, but at least I thought I had something
worth dying for.
Now I have … nothing. A terrible mess I don’t know how to clean up,
and the certainty that I will find no help from those in power in this city.
The whole have beauty, pleasure, comfort, and abundance, and they’ve
convinced themselves they deserve it. Because they are more human than
the people who suffer in the city center, or the Banished in their lonely
camp, or the monsters starving in the desert.
I’ll never be able to convince them differently. Yuan will never
change, not unless I can find proof that something is wrong with the city.
The nobles are spoiled and soft and inclined to gossip, but they are not evil
people. I must convince them that Yuan is rotten at its core. I must find the
covenant and discover why it was hidden away.
BO
THE morning lasts forever. The afternoon is even longer. By the time