Chapter 3
3
Marcelis
“He’s coming around, Your Excellency.”
Someone patted my hand. It wasn’t my sire. He’d never touch me like that.
Still, I fought the light. The darkness hadn’t been all bad. Just this vast sea of… nothingness. And in my thirty years, I’d never been anywhere better.
My eyes fluttered open, and I squeezed them closed against the bright light. The monitor beeped by my ear, a steady counterbeat to the one in my chest.
The beat…
It was… different.
I didn’t know how I could tell, but I could. I’d spent my whole life plugging my ears and listening to it in the quiet darkness of night, wondering which beat would be my last.
“If we could get on with this,” my sire said. “I have a meeting with the commander of the chancellor guard.”
I laughed. It came out as a whoosh of air. I tried to swallow but couldn’t around the tube in my throat. My sire’s meetings with the commander involved paid women and men and mulled wine. I’d never heard them talk about anything of consequence in those meetings.
“Patients wake on their own time. It cannot be rushed.” The person speaking then added a hasty, “Your Excellency.”
My sire grumbled but didn’t press. I’d prefer he leave. That way, I could wait for my new heart to finish growing in relative peace. It shouldn’t be that long now.
“How long until we know if the new heart will take?” My sire sounded more annoyed than concerned.
“It’s already working beyond our expectations. His Grace’s perfusion is already better than ever, and his kidney and liver function are near normal.”
Normal? I hadn’t had a normal kidney or liver function test since the doctors had started tracking my health. And wait… ‘It’s already working?’
I fought the brain fog, clawing my way to full consciousness. How much time had passed? I remember the darkness closing in. Remember thinking I’d never make it until my new heart finished growing.
But somehow, the doctors had pulled off a miracle. A miracle even for a settlement as prosperous as Toonu. They’d kept me alive long enough to get my new heart.
When I opened my eyes again, I squinted against the light and kept them open. I tried to talk, but I couldn’t with the tube. The woman beside me, my cardiologist, Dr. Phan, held my arms down to keep me from ripping out the tube.
“Don’t move, Your Grace, and I will remove the tube.”
I relaxed and exhaled when she told me to. It felt like she’d tried to rip my lungs out with it, but when she pulled the tube free, my lungs stayed with me.
“Better?” she asked.
The hoarse, yes , I’d uttered came out splintered.
“Right,” my sire said as if he’d made a decision. “Now that he’s awake, I have my meeting to attend.”
My sire left Dr. Phan with her mouth hanging open. Mine didn’t do that anymore. I was used to his callousness.
When the door closed behind him, she turned to me and rearranged the pillow under my head. “I’ll send the nurse in to check your bandages soon. We gave you Zypan for the pain. For now, your job is to rest and recover.”
“What day is it?”
Her thin brows furrowed. “Wednesday.”
“I’ve—” My voice cracked. I could gladly pour a gallon of mead down my gullet, but I didn’t waste my words asking for a drink. “I’ve been out for over a week?”
The doctor rolled her lips in, then answered, “No. You arrested yesterday. We took you straight to surgery.”
But my new heart wasn’t ready. I remember Solomon from Reparion saying that. I tried to sit, but she put a staying hand on my shoulder, and I relaxed into the mattress.
“But my heart — ”
“Your heart is doing a marvelous job. No more questions. Rest now.” She backed toward the door. “I will check on you later tonight.”
The Zypan controlled my pain, but it made the walls warp and sleep run up and hit me. My head lolled to the side. The Reparion sign in my line of sight tilted, those two flashing words changing between you and new .
As the drugs pulled me under, I wondered what the doctor wasn’t telling me.
Toorin
“Oi. Get off me cart.”
The cart man pulled on my arm. I screamed. It hurt.
Every.
Fucking.
Thing.
Hurt.
Bodie eased himself up, though he had to hurt as badly as I did. He patted my shoulder. “Toorin. Get up.”
“Shoulda left ye for dead,” the old man said.
Bodie locked wrists with me. “I’ve got him.”
I moaned as Bodie lifted me enough to put his shoulder under my arm. When we’d woken in the radioactive exclusion zone of the badlands, I thought I hurt then. It was nothing compared to how I hurt now. Between whatever drugs they’d given us wearing off and the brewing infection, the word excruciating couldn’t begin to cover it.
At least I was too focused on the pain to notice that after four days, my stomach was trying to digest itself and that the ensuing dehydration from walking through the badlands had nearly solidified my blood and turned my skin to hide.
Bodie managed to wrestle me out of the cart. He swayed as his legs took nearly all my weight and his. We weren’t far from the wharf—and our dinghy if it hadn’t been stolen.
But we couldn’t go back to the Lark yet. We needed pain meds. We needed antibiotics. We’d die on the boat without them.
“The chip,” the dung driver prompted.
Yep, you heard that right. Dung driver. We rode for two days in the back of a camel-dung cart. So, if you ever wake up in the Exclusion Zone with your vital organs stolen, thinking things couldn’t get worse… they could.
We would need what few chips Bodie had hidden in the heel of his boot before we’d left the Lark to buy the black market drugs, but we’d never have made it back to Toonu if the dung man hadn’t picked us up.
Bodie toed off his boot and handed over our best chip as promised. The man grinned the toothy grin of a man who’d taken pliers to his mouth when his teeth hurt too bad to take the pain anymore.
With a disingenuous salute, the man climbed into the cart, kissed to the camel, and drove away.
We stood in the middle of the rutted street. People walked by, not giving us a second look because people on the fringe minded their business.
“You’re gonna have to walk,” Bodie said. “I’d carry you if I could, but—”
“I’m fine.” I panted as I took all my weight onto my legs. I swayed, and Bodie stabilized me when I swayed.
“Take this.” Bodie held out his hand, and when I put mine beneath his, half of a yellowed pill dropped onto my palm.
If I thought he could catch the pill, I would have chunked it back at him. “That’s yours. You should have taken that a long time ago.”
“Take it.”
I didn’t argue. I swallowed the partial pill. The lower dose dulled the pain but didn’t kill it. I managed to take a few steps without collapsing in agony and slowly followed Bodie into the alley, hoping to change some chips into drugs.
One of the bad things about the black market on the fringe is having to skulk through all the back alleys searching for what you needed. It wasn’t like the drug guys stood on the corner with a sign in their hand. And while there was no law outside the settlement, we were close enough to the walls of Toonu that sometimes the chancellor guard would try to recover high-value items, like drugs.
Not because they were illegal but because the Primos, the people in Toonu with all their power and privilege, would pay top price.
If the guards had to beat you or run you through to get the drugs back, it didn’t matter much to them. So, yeah, the drug men were more skittish than cats on roundup night.
And no matter what anyone tells you, cats don’t taste like chicken. At least, that’s what I’d been told. I had never seen a chicken, so I had no first-hand knowledge. Besides, after every cat roundup, the rat population skyrocketed. I don’t know how big those fuckers were before the war, but rats would fill you up and tasted great with a little red cudweed sprinkled on top.
The alley and the rest of the fringe had a particular odor—rotting fish, urine, feces, body odor, and that sickeningly sweet undercurrent of death that never disappeared, even after an infrequent rain. It hung in the air and clung to the shacks and the trampled dirt under your feet.
The smells only worsened the deeper into the maze of alleys we went. Some of the shacks were nothing more than rocks and dirt piled up and scavenged plastic sheets for roofs. Sure, the sheets had cracks and holes, but it didn’t rain much anymore to matter.
A voice cried out from the alley on my right, which wasn’t unusual. Bodie kept going, and I hobbled along behind him. The intermittent thud of my rebar hitting the ground had a hypnotizing rhythm. I almost didn’t look right but did at the last second.
That’s when I saw her. The girl from the bar who’d run out with my chip and the nearly full bottle of moonshine. My momentum kept moving me forward until I realized what I’d seen.
It wasn’t only the girl from the bar. Someone had her by her hair. And you don’t have to live on the fringe to know that that’s not a good thing.
I stopped. Bodie continued for a few steps before noticing I wasn’t following.
“What?”
“It’s the girl. The one from the bar I told you about. Juniper. She’s in trouble.”
Bodie looked me up and down. “She’s not worse off than you are. She has her heart.” He continued down the alley but turned around again when I didn’t move. “We should mind our own business.”
“We might not be standing here, missing three vital organs between us, if maybe someone else had stepped in when we needed help instead of minding their own business.”
Bodie’s head dropped between his shoulders, but I knew he’d given in. “This is probably a big mistake.”
“Probably.”
Bodie shrugged. “Your funeral.”
Not that we had funerals out here. If you were lucky, someone would drag your body to the burn pit before you smelled too bad.
I turned, causing my sternum to shift. I hissed at the bright flash of pain and caught myself on the side of the shack before the pain could take me to my knees.
“You all right?”
“Dandy,” I gritted out between my teeth.
We worked our way down the alley, the man’s back to us as he hauled Juniper around by her hair. She fought and kicked and cussed, her blade swinging wildly, but he tossed her into the wall and knocked the blade out of her hands.
She made such a racket that he didn’t hear the thump of my rebar hitting the ground behind him as we closed in. We didn’t call out. We didn’t want him to know we were there. We didn’t stand a chance of winning a fair fight or mismatched one.
Good thing I didn’t care about fair.
The man wrestled Juniper to the ground. Her yelling and screaming hadn’t attracted any attention even though people in this area were packed nearly on top of each other.
Now was my chance.
I raised the rebar over my head, cutting off my scream of pain before it could escape my throat, and smashed it against the man’s head. I fell to my knees, and Bodie swiped the rebar out of my hand. I don’t know what happened after that because the darkness closed in, not gradually, but like a switch.
Marcelis
I looked out my bedroom window in the tower of the chancellor’s residence to the far reaches of Toonu. If I stood on my toes, I could see over the wall demarking the settlement from the fringe. Sometimes, at night, I’d lay with the window open, and the sounds from the fringe would find their way to my ears. There were screams. Always screams. And yelling. But I’d also heard laughter. Something I heard so infrequently in Toonu unless it was the pretentious laugh of a Primo at the expense of someone less fortunate.
The Lowers rarely laughed. They had little reason to. They carried on with their tasks day after day after day. After all, someone had to cater to the Primos and perform all the work that made a settlement run.
The Lowers weren’t prisoners—not that the post-war world needed prisons when banishment eliminated the problem. The Lowers could leave the settlement anytime they wanted, but most preferred a life of servitude to what awaited them beyond the walls.
And as each day ran into another day—while knowing full well I had vast privileges others could only dream of—my laughs grew bitter with my disillusion. Yet, I had the same options as any Lower… accept my fate or take my chances on the fringe.
Being Toft’s spawn, I didn’t kid myself. I knew what awaited me if anyone recognized me without the protection of the guard… certain death. It wouldn’t be painless, but at least it would be quick.
Out the window, I often watched people walking outside the wall, and I always wondered about their lives. Short, no doubt, considering the lawlessness. And they didn’t have the riches of the settlement to provide food, clean water, and life-saving medical care like I’d received a few short days ago.
But if you weren’t free, if you had little choice, no autonomy, no say, would living longer mean your life was better? I’d often wondered that as I did the bidding of a man who saw me more as a means to an end than his spawn.
Moon and mars and the stars forbid I have a say in my life.
Maybe when I became chancellor, things would be different. Maybe I could improve things on the fringe. Maybe I would have compassion for someone who wasn’t a Primo. After all, being rich didn’t mean you mattered more.
But try telling that to my sire.
If I couldn’t abdicate the chancellorship, I could at least die knowing that after my sire passes, I will undo all the injustices he and his sire and his sire before him brought to the province.
I’d heard my sire approaching long before he spoke. That’s one of the reasons why I’d chosen the tower for my room. The stealthiest person couldn’t hide the echo of their footsteps on the tread of the narrow circular staircase.
“Why aren’t you in bed?”
I turned from the window, my cane thumping on the floor as I adjusted my balance. “The doctor encouraged me to get on my feet as soon as possible.”
My sire’s jaw sawed back and forth, and I stared while awaiting the real reason he’d made an effort to come to the tower. Usually, he sent his lieutenant, Keon, to do his bidding.
“I need you rested. I need you better so you can continue your training.”
By training, he meant my indoctrination into how to do all things the Toft way. Then, he’d know that the province was in good hands should he die. Or should I say callus hands? After all, the Tofts didn’t rise to power after the war by being soft.
“Planning to die anytime soon?” Normally, I wouldn’t dare talk back to my sire, but I’d seen the darkness. I was no longer afraid.
“No.” He stepped back when he looked like he wanted to step forward and take a couple of swipes out of my hide. “I’ll talk to the doctors about your medications. They’ve made you insolent.”
“All I take are the pain meds and the special vitamins. They don’t affect my words.”
My sire stepped closer, the red rising in his face. Where I used to cower, I now stood tall—or at least as tall as I could with my cane and a chest full of sutures. At this point, he needed me more than I needed him. “If you weren’t recovering, I’d—”
“You’d what?” I didn’t quite know where this bravado of mine had come from, and though I was putting my new heart into overdrive standing up to my sire, I refused to back down.
He swallowed whatever he’d been about to say. Then I heard footsteps on the risers in the stairwell a second before Keon said, “Your Excellency. You’re needed in the great hall.”
My sire spun on his heel without another word. I blew out a breath and held my hand to my chest as my new heart raced. At least it worked.
I stared at my bed but couldn’t bring myself to lie in it. I’d spent too many years of my life conserving what little energy I had, and now that I had my new heart, the restlessness refused containment.
The first stabs of pain started radiating across my sternum, and I reached for the container with the pain medication. I took one, replaced the lid, and rattled the remaining two in the tiny tin. I could order one of the Lowers who worked in the residence to get me more or ask my nurse when he came to check on me, but I needed to get out of the tower.
With my cane, I took my time navigating the stairs. I was sweaty and out of breath by the time I got to the bottom, but instead of returning to my room, I leaned against the wall until I caught my breath and continued on.
I left through the side entrance, where the rikshaw boys with the carts waited—or, in Thyle’s case, the cart man. He had shockingly light hair and paler skin that never tanned in the brutal sun, covering a body that was more sinew and bones than muscle.
I hoped I’d tan on the fringe instead of burn. I had never been allowed outside the residence long enough to find out.
Thyle jumped to his feet when he saw me and helped me into the seat. He’d run my cart since before I could remember.
To help keep Toonu clean, my grandsire had long ago banned camels from the settlement’s narrow streets. Instead, Lowers pulled the carts. Considering the Lowers outnumbered the Primos, my grandsire had decided there were enough Lowers to go around.
“Where to, Your Grace,” Thyle asked as he strapped into the yoke.
“Hospital.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Can you call me Marcelis?”
“No, Your Grace.” His face reddened, and he looked away. We both knew why he couldn’t do that.
For once in my life, I’d like to be a nobody. I’d like someone to not move out of the way as I walked by. I’d like someone to look me in the eye when I spoke to them. I’d like someone to treat me as a peer, not as the chancellor’s spawn.
I braced myself as the cart hit a rut. The pain brought water to my eyes, and I swallowed the groan. Not long after, Thyle pulled up outside the hospital, set the front of the cart on the curb, unstrapped, and helped me out.
“Thank you,” I said as he handed me my cane.
He ducked his head and did the bow thingy that always made me feel like twice-warmed camel shit, but my sire encouraged it.
Once inside, I had to stop three times to rest on benches on my way to refill my medication. I left with a small pouch of pills to put in my tin at the tower. Instead of returning to the chancellor’s residence, I headed down the hall across from me.
I passed through the Reparion labeled door and kept going. At least behind that door, people were in their labs, doing their work, and didn’t notice I’d walked in, so I avoided all the bowing and adverted eyes. I stopped at the third lab on the right at the door labeled Organ Regeneration.
I needed to see Solomon, the one person who treated me like a person and not a special entity. At least he did when no one was around. He was the closest thing I’d ever had to a friend, and I wanted to thank him for all his hard work in getting my heart ready so quickly for my transplant. After all, hearts don’t grow themselves. They needed skilled growers like Solomon to make it happen.
I entered the lab and found Solomon with his hands and arms threaded through the gloves of a growing chamber. Early on, he’d let me thread my hands through similar gloves on my growing chamber and hold what would become my heart. That that mass of cells now beat in my chest blew my mind.
“Did I come at a bad time?” I asked.
Solomon whipped his head toward me, and the broad smile that spread across his face warmed the new heart in my chest. That smile. That was for me . He glanced around the room to make sure we were alone as he worked his way out of the gloves. “Marcelis. What… what are you doing here?”
He looked surprised as he came over. Like surprised surprised. Like I’d awoken from the dead. Which was probably closer to the truth than I was willing to admit. He put his arm around my waist and assisted me to one of the benches, though, all in all, my stamina wasn’t too bad for a guy a few days out of surgery. One thing about the post-war provinces, they’d perfected pain medications. That time, when my healing sternum shifted as I sat, I barely felt it.
“What are you doing out of bed? I wanted to see you, but I’ve been so busy here that I couldn’t get away.”
“It’s okay. I’m back at the residence now anyway.”
“Wait.” Solomon dropped onto the bench beside me and swiped a lock of black hair out of his eyes. He was a thin man with brown skin and the deepest, brownest, kindest eyes I’d ever seen. “Why are you there?”
I found his confusion and concern endearing. “Because I can heal better at the residence where it’s quiet. But don’t worry. My sire has ensured a nurse checks on me daily.”
He looked unconvinced that the doctors knew what they were doing, which wasn’t a first. Then he must have caught onto the word nurse . “Is he cute?”
“He’s old. And bitter. Even by pre-war standards, I’d imagine.”
Solomon’s lip curled, and he shuddered. “That’s disappointing.”
Solomon had a thing for the next new, shiny thing. That included people. I guess that’s what you get from a man who spends his days and nights growing something from nothing.
“I still don’t think you should be out of bed, but…” Then he clapped his hands, and the pure delight on his face made me smile. “You’re here, so you have to come see.” He stood. “Do you need help?”
I mock glared at him, and he held up his hands. “Sorry. I know you hate it when people dote on you. You refuse to let anyone help you.”
It wasn’t exactly true. People helped me all the time. I just liked doing stuff for myself if I could. I went to stand, and as relatively good as I’d been feeling, I’d misjudged how much the trip to the hospital had taken out of me. The wonders of medicine in some of the provinces couldn’t mitigate all of that.
I struggled to get to my feet, and Solomon had to bite his lip and lock his wrists behind his back to keep from helping. I managed to stand on my own, only a little winded from the effort.
He guided me back to the section of the lab housing the heart-growing chambers. On my previous visits, I’d nearly been overwhelmed being in a space where the combined beating of all those new hearts made me feel as if I were back in my surrogate’s womb, protected from the world beyond.
“We moved it,” Solomon said as he led me to a smaller chamber than the one my heart had been in the previous time. “The last few days of growth, we move them in here, bath them in autoserum to prepare them for transplant. It’s almost time.”
I glanced inside the chamber at what looked like a perfect heart, not one with thin walls and malformed valves I’d been told my original one had. It had a strong, steady beat, and whoever it had been grown for would be as relieved to receive it as I had mine.
“That’s amazing.”
Solomon looked at me with an expectation I couldn’t understand.
Maybe my response had been underwhelming. “What?”
He chucked as I shifted more of my weight onto my cane. It took a lot to stay standing. But I wouldn’t admit that to him. “I don’t know. I thought you would have been more excited about your heart being nearly finished growing. They’ll probably schedule your transplant for the beginning of the week.”
I laughed, but it died on my lips. What was Solomon playing at? “That’s not my heart.”
“Yes. It’s your heart. It took longer to start growing initially, but it matured faster than expected these past few days.” He took his scanner from the ever-present holster at his hip and shot a red beam at the lines and squiggles on the label on the upper left-hand corner of the chamber. The scanner beeped, and Solomon showed me the readout: Toft, Marcelis , the scan read, followed by some numbers and symbols that meant nothing to me. “See. Your heart. I know it’s hard to believe. You’ve been waiting so long and—”
I swayed on my feet, and Solomon looped an arm around my waist so I didn’t fall. There were no benches in this part of the lab, so Solomon gently lowered me to the floor.
What was happening?
“What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Hold on,” Solomon said as he started to stand. “I’ll call—”
“No,” I reached out to stop him. “I’m okay. It’s okay.” When really nothing was.
He dropped back down. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“That makes two of us.” I pulled up my shirt from the bottom, exposing the freshly healing wound up the center of my chest where they put something that wasn’t my heart into it.
Solomon squatted and flicked the hair out of his eyes. “But…” He shook his head. He had no other words.
“I died. Tuesday. I arrested, and I woke up the next day and found out I’d had a transplant.”
“No—no one told me. How did I not hear about this?”
“My sire is good about ensuring only the information he wants the people to know gets out.” But why? It’s no secret that I have— had— a bad heart. Why would he want to keep this a secret?
“Then who’s heart do you have?”
I leaned against the base of one of the growing chambers. The exertion must have gotten to me because I could barely keep my eyes open.
Solomon patted my cheek. “You’re scaring me. Maybe I should get your doctor. I don’t want to be the one who let Marcelis Toft die.”
I scoffed. “I’m not dying. I’m exhausted and—” I let the rest of the sentence drop. I didn’t know what else I was. Shocked, maybe. Confused, certainly.
It made sense when I thought about it because I’d died before my replacement had been ready. Why didn’t your sire say anything about it, then? Why did he let you believe you’d received your Reparion heart?
“Do you have a stethoscope?”
“Yeah. Hang on.”
While Solomon searched for a stethoscope, I closed my eyes, plugged my ears, and listened to my new heart. It had that same steady beat that I’d woken to after surgery. I listened carefully. Listened for what I would think would be the telltale whir of a mechanical heart, but I couldn’t hear anything remotely mechanical. But the technology had improved. The war had necessitated it.
Solomon’s shoe scuffed on the floor beside me. I opened my eyes and squinted at the light. I held up my shirt as Solomon sat and listened.
And listened.
And listened.
He frowned.
“What?” My hand tightened on my shirt as I waited for his reply. I babbled to fill the uncomfortable silence. “It must be one of those new mechanical hearts Reparion has been working on, right?”
Instead of answering, Solomon pulled the stethoscope out of his ears. “What meds do they have you on?”
“Not much. The stuff for pain and a special vitamin.”
Solomon’s eyes narrowed. “Special vitamin?”
“That’s what I was told. But maybe it’s something to counteract my enzyme problem that makes my blood corrode non-corrosive materials. That’s why—”
“Marcelis.”
“… we went with heart regeneration in the first place, and maybe they put a mechanical heart in temporarily until my heart was done growing—”
“Marcelis.”
“… and now that my heart has finished growing, they’re going to go back in and—”
“ Marcelis .”
“Sorry. Verbal vomit.”
“Is the vitamin orange and oblong? With a bullseye pattern stamped on the side?”
I sat back. My head thumped against the chamber’s cabinet. “How did you know?”
Solomon jumped to his feet and started pacing. With some effort and cursing, I got to mine. I stepped in front of him to get his attention because he’d all but forgotten I was there. “Tell me.”
Solomon pulled up short and grimaced as if it would hurt him to say whatever he had to say. “That’s not a vitamin. It’s anti-rejection medication. Your heart isn’t mechanical, and it’s not from a lab. It’s from a donor.”