My breath comes faster. Pain and fear and dread swell so big inside
me that it feels like my cracked skin will have to tear wide open to let it all
out.
I look up. I force myself to look to the top of each pyre, guessing at
the identity of each burning corpse. Any one of the adult-sized bodies could
be my father or my brother. My friends. Meer.
And that one, that tiny one on the right …
It could be my son. It’s a baby. A tiny spot of dense and dark at the
center of a fire too big for a person with so few memories to burn away and
no life magic to gift to those left behind.
My son. That could be my son.
My eyes squeeze shut.
breaking mourning tradition and wedding tradition, making it clear I
consider the ceremony the blackest of rites. Bo holds my hand during our
vows, but he doesn’t stay in the tower that first night, or the next, or any
thereafter. I understand that he means to keep his promise not to be cruel,
and am grateful for small favors.
I’m grateful for big ones, too. As the world beneath the dome begins
to fade and falter, I know Bo is all that stands between me and death. He
begs the advisors to give me more time to come to my senses.
I beg the desert to send Gem back to me before it’s too late.
Needle sneaks to the wall every night after returning my dinner tray.
She watches for a fire by the gathered stones, while I stand by the door,
waiting for news of Gem, hoping so hard, it hurts.
I am always disappointed.
Winter ends and the days grow longer and warmer, but the crops
refuse to grow. The cows cease giving milk, and—as our stores are used up
and milk is replaced with water and wine—I learn what has caused the sad
state of my skin. An allergy to the milk I’ve drunk every morning and been
bathed in twice a day, every day, since Needle came to care for me. She
blames herself for not realizing the milk and honey baths were hurting
more than helping, but I assure her I’m not angry. I’m elated. Gem was right
about that, too. I add it to my list of things to tell him, but weeks pass and
he doesn’t come, and things only get worse.
The chickens refuse to lay eggs, and half the livestock fall over dead
in the fields. The orchard flowers rain to the ground, but no leaves or fruit
grow in their place. Beneath Yuan, the underground river becomes a
narrow stream. Water is rationed and the city’s worry becomes an
ever-present, buzzing fear. I know what game the Dark Heart plays, but I
refuse to panic. Gem will come. He will come and we will end this madness.
Forever. We can do it. I’ve read the queen’s diary. I know the secret now.
For a month I believe.
And then the month becomes two months. More. I stop waiting by
the door, no longer certain the black night outside the dome will ever be
broken by the light of Gem’s fire. I retreat to my bedroom to sleep the rest
of my life away, to dream and keep on dreaming.
I dream all the time.
There is nothing to do in my prison but sleep and dream, wake and
dream, sit staring at the scrap of sky visible through the mostly walled-up
window in my room, and ache for my freedom like a missing limb, and
dream and dream.…
I learn to speak the language of midnight, to communicate with
phantoms. I have long conversations with the burning face in the beam, my
ancestor, Ana, King Sato’s third wife. Reading her diary has opened a door
between us, and now we speak freely, without needing sleep as a meeting
place.
She tells me of Yuan at the end of its first hundred years, before the
Dark Heart was forgotten, when every soul in the city knew the roses were
the teeth of the monster they had created. She tells me of growing up
yearning for the world outside, watching from the wall walks the giant cats
roaming the grasslands, and longing to run free the way they did. She tells
me of her fourteenth birthday and the meager meal she shared with her
family at the end of a summer when the crops had refused to grow, the day
it was decided that the queen must die and Ana’s father promised her to
the king.
King Sato was tired then, already finished with two wives, and
decades older than his new bride. The king promised Ana’s father that he,
the king, would take his turn under the blade when it became necessary,
and he and Ana were married. Years passed and three children were born.
Then, just before Ana’s thirty-sixth birthday, the crops once again began to
fail. King Sato was nearing his ninetieth year, but when the advisors agreed
the time had come for a sacrifice, he refused to go to the roses.
Ana was told to kiss her children good-bye and prepare herself for
the ceremony the next morning.
Terrified, Ana ran from the tower, through failing fields begging for
blood, to the King’s Gate and out into the desert. She hid in the tall grass
that surrounded the city in those days, praying she wouldn’t be found by
wild animals, hoping the king would take his own life within a day or two
and she would be able to return home.
It was there, sleeping in the grass with her cheek pressed to the
earth, that she spoke to the Pure Heart of the planet for the first time.
She’d been raised to fear the Dark Heart’s other half, the magical force that
had caused the deformity of most of Yuan’s citizens, but she found the Pure
Heart anything but cruel. It spoke kindly to her; it offered her life instead of
death. It told her how to break the curse and restore the health of the
planet and all the creatures living upon it.
Ana was transformed, frightened, but also filled with the certainty
that her people must change their ways and end the division of the world.
She returned to the city and to her tower, where she wrote her last
diary entry, the one explaining how to break the curse, and why the people
of Yuan must reach out to the monsters in the desert.
The diary ends there, but Ana’s spirit shows me the morning the
guards came to escort her to the royal garden.
King Sato and the heads of the noble families were gathered around
the roses. The royal executioner was already wearing his hood. Ana begged
the king to listen to what she’d learned outside the dome, but he wouldn’t.
No one would. Just as no one would remind the king that—according to the
covenant—his life would serve as well as hers. The king threatened to kill
Ana and marry another if she refused to offer herself to the roses, while,
beneath the soil, the Dark Heart called to her, promising her peace and
rest, assuring her there was no choice but death.
Finally, Ana gave up. She knelt down. She took the knife in her hand
and opened her own throat. The executioner ensured that her death was
swift.
After the ceremony, King Sato buried the covenant beneath a paving
stone in the royal garden and ordered all copies of the text burned, hoping
to ensure the ignorance of his fourth wife. Unfortunately, the king didn’t
live to enjoy his new wife for long. Only two days after giving Ana’s
bloodless body to the river, the king suffered a heart attack in his bed and
died. His new wife—barely twenty and unprepared to rule—married Ana’s
eldest son the next afternoon and went on to give the city many sons and
daughters.
Ana had died for nothing. Her soul lingered to see that painful fact, to
see her diary hidden away by her maid, and to see the truth of the
covenant and the dark magic it nurtures lost to the people living beneath
the dome. Her spirit lingered for centuries, reaching out to Yuan’s rulers in
their dreams, hoping one would discover her diary. She was a part of the
city, but a piece that didn’t fit, the keeper of a secret even more important
than the location of the covenant, the keeper of the truth about the Dark
Heart and the only way to end the nightmare of life under the domes.
Love. The secret is love.
A citizen of the domed cities and a man or woman of the Monstrous
tribes must love each other more than they love anything else. When they
do, the cities will fall, life will return to the desert, and every creature
dwelling on the planet will be made whole and strong. All it takes is love.
My mother must have also somehow discovered the truth. That
our family when she was locked in the tower and denied a way out of Yuan.
She wasn’t crazy. If she’d succeeded in burning the three of us to ash that
night, there would have been no blood for the Dark Heart. Murder would
have succeeded in destroying Yuan, but only love will heal our world.
I love Gem. I grow more certain of that every day. I also grow more
certain that Gem is dead.
He would have returned by now if he weren’t, I know he would. He
must have died out there in the desert, and now I will never be able to tell
him how much he means to me. At least, not in this life.
I ask Ana’s spirit if I will see Gem in the afterlife, but that is one
question she refuses to answer. She doesn’t want to believe I will share her
fate; she wants to believe Gem and I will end the curse, but I know better.
Yuan is failing. I awake each morning certain I’ll find Junjie and the guards
waiting outside my bedroom, prepared to kill me if I continue to refuse to
give my life for my city. Bo can hold them off for only so long. They will
come. Soon.
My time grows shorter than the thorns on the royal roses.
I tell Needle about the secret location of the covenant, but warn her
to stay away from the garden. Still, I’m not surprised when she returns one
evening with a scroll wrapped in cloth so ancient that it falls apart in my
hands.
I unroll the paper carefully. Needle reads and signs each word. I
follow along, flinching when she reaches the final line and I learn that Ana
was telling the truth. Our city’s bargain with the Dark Heart calls only for
the death of “one bound by oath of marriage to the first sacrifice.”
One bound by oath. Not a
good within the human heart. How could there be? If an entire generation
could condemn Yuan’s daughters to death because they found that
preferable to the death of Yuan’s sons?
What is there worth fighting for? Worth dying for? What have any of
my dreams ever been worth?
That night, I tuck the covenant beneath my mattress, lay my head on
my pillow, and dream of the day my mother took me walking outside the
dome. I smell the wild scent of the desert; I feel the sun hot on my cheeks. I
hear a whisper on the wind, a voice begging me to stand up
and
daughters, to save myself.
To be brave.
I wasn’t brave. I was as afraid of that voice as I was of death itself. So