CHAPTER 28
Everyone wears a chain of weakness; some only hide it better than others. Find the chain, tug once, and the person will break.
—INSPECTOR CHRISTOPHER HALE,
The Brasscoat ranks are a steel trap. Not a single whisper about the Heretic’s identity leaks to the media or even to the Coppers.
The only thing we know for sure is that the Heretic is a Green.
And they won’t die here. They’re probably already being transported to Charleston City, where their death will be broadcast on every screen across the Civilized World.
I can’t sleep. My mind keeps turning, unraveling possibilities in the dark.
Is the Heretic a man or a woman? A first-year or a fourth-year?
Is it someone I’ve sat next to in class, brushed past in the hall, or laughed with at a club?
I twist in my sheets, eyes fixed on the ceiling, as if the answer might be written in the cracks.
A Heretic on campus isn’t uncommon, far from it. There have been others. But this is the first arrest of the academic year, the first since I arrived.
The Heretic’s time is running out. Tomorrow is Bloody Sunday. If the executions were taking place at Grandmaster, I’d be forced to watch, but since they’re not, I can get out of it, unless, of course, Edmund forces me.
By the time Charlotte and I arrive at his suite for a late breakfast, the ghost of the party at the Lotus Lounge still lingers in the air. The smell of stale cigar smoke and sweat-slicked revelry is woven into the boys’ clothes, their skin, and their sluggish movements.
Jack sprawls across the sofa, his hoverbike helmet tilted over his face like a blindfold. An empty espresso cup rests on his chest, rising and falling with each breath.
Edmund stands by a breakfront near the window, his back to us, the morning light tracing the sharp cut of his shoulders. A heap of vitamins sits on the oak surface, far more than I need to take each day.
He picks up a few pills, swallows them dry, then stops. His whole body goes still so suddenly I swear he’s fallen asleep standing up.
Dickie, somehow immune to the wreckage of the night, joins Charlotte and me at the table. His plate keeps piling up with each passing second as he works through a five-course meal like it’s a grab-and-go snack.
“The Heretic’s probably a first-year,” Jack mutters from beneath his helmet, reaching for his espresso. “The Brasscoats would’ve caught them years ago otherwise.”
“Not a first-year.” Charlotte tips down her sunglasses. “A sixth.”
Dickie taps his steak knife against his plate with a scoff. “How would you know?”
“Because the name just leaked.”
I throw down my napkin on the table. “Who leaked it?”
“The Tattler,” Charlotte says. “Don’t you guys read Tattletale?”
“I don’t need to read gossip rags, broad.” Dickie snorts. “I am the gossip.”
I pull up Tattletale’s website, kicking myself for not checking sooner. The Tattler always knows first, sometimes even before Benjamin Bogart.
Charlotte smirks at Dickie. “So, you don’t want to know who the Heretic is?”
“Not if you’re going to dangle the name in front of me like—”
“It’s Eve Weathers.”
Dickie drops his knife with a clatter.
Espresso shoots from Jack’s nose.
Edmund turns on his heel, snapping out of his daze like a machine powering back on.
I take a sip of my breakfast tea and immediately choke. The hot liquid burns as it goes down the wrong pipe. I hunch forward, coughing, and fumble to pull up the article.
Eve Weathers is our Grandmaster, overseeing all the first-years in the Green Fraternity.
When I locate the article, the headline, TO CATCH A TRAITOR, stares back at me, sandwiched between half a dozen articles about Edmund’s and Rosamund’s birthday party, as if Eve’s name is just another topic to gossip about over brunch.
I skim the article, which claims the Brasscoats are still working to confirm who Eve is working with.
They don’t know how long she’s been a Heretic, but they’re sure of one thing: she’s not alone.
The Brasscoats suspect an entire network of Heretics exists right here, on campus, moving through the same halls, eating at the same tables, slipping between us like shadows, and plotting the destruction of the Civilized World’s energy shield while we jot down our history notes.
“Know anything about Weathers?” Edmund asks Jack. The fatigue in his face has been replaced by a disdainful expression. I know he has reason to hate the Heretics more than most. His father was murdered by one.
“Only that she was hung up on a Purple,” Jack replies. “I’ll ask around for more.”
“Thanks.” Edmund grips a chair rail at the table, his fingers whitening against the wood, then activates his Bond. His left eye glows electric blue. As a high-citizen, he can likely access information that rivals Dad’s clearance level.
Jack checks his Bond briefly, then waves a hand at us. “Got an alert. The school board is recommending we all watch the execution tonight. Says it’s important for unity.” He glances at Edmund, the question hanging on his face.
“Good,” Edmund says, then keeps working.
“A fine plan.” Dickie raises his glass of chocolate milk and taps the rim with his knife like a toast. “There’s a Bloody Sunday viewing in the Blue student lounge every week. We could join.”
“Not exactly breaking news,” Charlotte says dryly. “We’ve all seen it before.” Her tone carries the same tired dismay I feel at the thought of seeing more decapitated heads.
I sink low in my chair, dread prickling along my skin. I don’t want to watch Bloody Sunday. Not again.
Executions on campus are brutal, but at least the deaths are stripped of spectacle; there’s no commentary or slow-motion close-ups.
Sometimes the condemned are too far away to see clearly unless you switch your Bond to a binocular lens, so you catch a flash of movement and then a distant fall, and that’s all.
Heretic executions are different; they’re theater, a blood-soaked stage with a host and a live orchestra tuning for slaughter.
Cameras track every twitch of fear, every tear, and every spatter of vomit that stains the guillotine bench.
The condemned are hauled out in handcuffs, trembling and half-broken, and the crowd roars at the sight.
The cheering builds before the blade falls and swells again as the head rolls into the grass below the platform.
Bloody Sunday is less punishment than pageantry.
I glance at Edmund, who’s still lost in his Bond, with blue flickering across his iris like light blinking through fog. I hesitate, weighing the risk, before I finally give in and send him a message through my Bond:
“I thought you didn’t like watching the executions.”
Edmund’s eyes shift as he reads my text, and a crease forms between his brows.
“I don’t,” he writes. “But with Heretics, it’s different.”
“How?”
“Because traitors deserve the death penalty.”
I pause, unsure what he means. “Only the Heretics? What about all the other executions? Don’t you agree with those?”
“I used to. Not anymore.”
I turn in my chair, surprised. I’d always assumed Edmund avoided the daily executions for some other reason, like the gore turning his stomach or simply being bored with wasting his mornings on the same routine.
When I look up, I find him watching me from across the room; the glow from his Bond cuts across his cheek, sharp as a saber scar.
“Why do you look so surprised?” he writes.
“I guess I assumed you agreed with all the executions because you’re a Blue.”
“And?”
“Most Blues agree with them. Or at least they claim to publicly.”
“Publicly, yes. If they disagree, they wouldn’t admit it. No one likes to be seen waving the wrong flag.”
Of course, that would be reckless. I already know high-citizens are tribalistic, loyal enough to help each other cover up a crime scene. And if I ever forgot, Hillaire would remind me.
“When did you change your opinion?” I ask.
“After I met Jack and Dickie.”
“When was that?”
Edmund squints, as if searching his memory. “Around eight years ago.”
Eight years? That would have made him only fourteen. I hadn’t realized that the three of them had practically grown up together.
I glance around the room to see if anyone has noticed us.
Charlotte and Dickie are locked in a debate over whether they’d take the neurotoxin pill or be brave enough to face the guillotine blade.
Jack is cleaning the visor of his hoverbike helmet with his shirt sleeve while talking to a student on his Bond, asking for information about Eve Weathers.
Two Pinkies sweep past with a trolley, collecting untouched trays of food.
The world keeps moving, loud and indifferent, yet between Edmund and me it feels like a quiet, hidden room.
“I’m sorry for making assumptions,” I text him.
He shrugs. “Sometimes assumptions have their merits. For example, I assume you don’t want to watch the Heretic’s execution with us, right?”
I suddenly realize how obvious my dread is. “Right.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t like watching people get executed, whether they deserve it or not.”
Edmund stares at my text, rubbing his eyebrow as if confused. Then he circles the table and settles into the chair beside me, his long legs nearly reaching the tabletop. “If you can’t watch other people die, how are you going to face your own death? Are you afraid of it?”
I turn away from him so it’s not so obvious to the others that we’re having a conversation. A Pinkie clears my plate, the clink of cutlery too loud in the silence between us. “Yes, I’m afraid. But more than that, I’m afraid of getting used to death.”
Edmund keeps his eyes forward, but even in profile, I notice the worn ease of someone too accustomed to violence, the look of a man who learned the value of time by watching it run out for others.
“All right, then,” he writes. “You can skip it.”
I look him in the eye for the first time since we started texting. “You mean that?”
“Yes.” He works on his Bond for a moment, then adds. “I also put your name on the exemption list. You don’t have to watch the campus executions anymore either.”
Gratitude floods through me so intensely that my legs tremble beneath the table. I stare at him, fighting the urge to hug him and even more, to cry. “Why?”
Edmund leans back against the headrest, his eyes drifting as he thinks of a reply. Then he looks over at me and smiles, a bright, slow lift that I can almost feel.
“Because I thought you’d like it.”
Snow drifts through the air in weightless spirals, melting on my flushed face as I glide back to the Green Dormitory on a hoverboard.
The streets are crowded with students absorbed in their afternoon routines, their voices rising above the jazz of holographic street musicians and the buzz of holographic ads showcasing the latest fashion trends and Bond upgrades.
I take a deep, fresh breath, tinged with melting snow, and as I exhale, relief and gratitude flood back in full force.
It feels as if a black hole in my mind has finally sealed, one that grew larger every time I was forced to watch the executions.
I don’t think Edmund fully realizes how thankful I am for what he did. As far as he knows, he offered a small kindness. But he doesn’t see the ledge he pulled me back from, the shadow that’s haunted me since I killed Charles Blackwell.
My old fencing instructor once said the best part of being skilled with a saber is that it helps you ward off death.
The more threatening you appear, he explained, the more violence you can avoid.
But the more you encounter death, the more you invite it in, giving it permission to possess you.
And if you’re not careful, death can claim your spirit long before you’re buried.
Only after killing Charles did I fully understand my fencing instructor’s warning.
A casual intimacy with death is corrosive, and death itself isn’t a sport.
I woke to the truth that celebration belongs to beginnings, to birth.
I knew that if it ever changed and I lifted my glass to death instead, something inside me would be broken, perhaps beyond repair.
I cut through the gardens outside the Green Dormitory, where snow clings to hedges and bare branches, weighing them down like chandeliers of white crystal.
As I return the hoverboard to a public rack, my thoughts drift to Edmund and to the moment he told me he disagreed with the standard, daily low-citizen executions.
He made his opinion sound like a minor admission, but it wasn’t.
Most Blues would never confess to something like that.
If Edmund’s opinion became public, he might even be ostracized.
It makes me wonder whether Charlotte was right when she said I could trust him.
Edmund wouldn’t be the first high-citizen to break the mold.
President Reeve is a Blue whom even Dad respects.
He’s courageous and principled, still trying to hold the cracked center of our world together, still striving to rule for something, not merely over it.
He’s proof that the current isn’t all cruelty and that not every wave is meant to drown you.
And maybe Edmund is like Reeve… someone I could meet at the edge of it all, in the shallows and still waters.
I inch closer to that line I swore I’d never cross: the idea of friendship, real friendship with a Blue. Letting Edmund in. Giving him a free hand and a free heart. A part of me.