CHAPTER 32
Everyone was made to see the world, but some of us were made to see it from the sky.
—ERNEST PREW
In early March, an angry blizzard blows down from the northwest peaks, stripping the campus flowers to naked stalks.
For nearly a week, the streets are buried under so much snow that the Pinkies only plow the routes to the Lecture Halls.
Benjamin Bogart calls it “the last cold front before spring,” bright and chipper, as if he’s announcing a holiday, but few of us manage to smile through our chattering teeth.
The streets empty out. Students stop studying in the rose gardens and on cafe patios, and even the horn-heavy beats from the nightclubs fade. Most of us only venture out for class. The rest of the time, we hole up somewhere warm and pretend it’s spring.
For Charlotte, Jack, Dickie, and me, that’s Edmund’s suite.
It becomes our hideout, the kind you tiptoe through at first, too stunned by the grandeur to sit without worrying you’ll leave a mark or a wrinkle.
From floor to ceiling, it shines brighter than Vivian on her date nights with Harrison.
The crown molding curls in hand-carved flourishes, and the hearths crackle with tidy red flames that never spit or smoke.
Pinkies glide in and out of hidden doors, delivering trays of velvety espressos and replacing dirty ashtrays without a word.
Meals appear like clockwork on gold-rimmed plates in a dining room that smells faintly of cigars and fresh beeswax polish.
When the snow falls sideways and the wind claws through the chimney flues, we draw the drapes and turn up the jazz in the bar.
Music sounds better in here, somehow realer, as if it’s being played live just down the hall.
Sometimes I tap dance with Charlotte; other times I shoot pool with Jack or play video games with Dickie.
All the while, I do my best to avoid Edmund.
I’ve always been good at lying. Dad says I could bullshit my way past President Reeve’s security detail.
But hiding how I felt while thanking Edmund for the seashells, telling him the pretty pink one I saw was among them, took enough effort to hurt.
My feelings for him keep growing, tangling inside me like a wild, unruly tree I never meant to plant.
By now, the roots feel too deep to tear out.
So, instead of trying to kill my feelings, I redirect them.
I slip into the exercise room in Edmund’s suite, pull on a pair of boxing gloves, and square up to the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling.
Without a thought for form, I throw a hook that lands with a thud, sending the bag lurching sideways.
The chains shriek overhead as I hit it again and again, my guard dropping carelessly between blows.
I pivot late, twist too far through my hips, and throw another cross that rattles up my arm and into my shoulder. The bag swings wildly, crashing back into my chest, but I meet it head-on, my fists slamming into the worn leather to drain my energy and leave me too tired to think about Edmund.
It doesn’t work.
Why shouldn’t I be allowed to feel this way?
I understand that some love is impossible.
A bird can’t love a fish. But Edmund and I are a design choice rather than a law of nature.
The system deliberately engineered this distance between us.
It took power it had no right to take and made decisions about our lives it had no right to make, dividing us by blood color and calling it order.
Edmund up there. Me down here. As if love cares about high and low.
As if desire checks our Blood Rings before it burns.
I know I’m not the first. I know others have stood exactly where I am now and paid for it with their reputations, futures, and lives.
The thought makes my fists hit harder. Each punch carries the same reckless fire that rages through me whenever I think of Edmund.
It started with his kindness, the way he can be as gentle as a horse nuzzling your hand unless provoked.
Then it spread to his rougher side, the wild, fiery energy that got us off on the wrong foot when we first met on the Regal Express.
And now it’s reached his face. His body.
I’ve been attracted to men before. I had a crush on a slightly older Green at my fencing club when I was sixteen.
But never like this. Seeing Edmund walk into a room is enough to set my heart pounding as if it’s trying to give me away.
Looking isn’t enough anymore. I want to touch his hands, the thick, dark hair that falls over his forehead, and feel his body pressed close to mine.
Most of all, I want to touch his face. I imagine tracing the hard curves and lines, feeling the warmth of his skin under my fingers.
Just thinking about it makes my self-control stagger.
I hit the bag harder and faster, my punches losing all rhythm as sweat stings my eyes. I swing long past sense or form, until the impacts blur and all that exists is noise and motion and the raw, violent need to do something with what’s inside me.
Finally, when my arms ache too much to lift, I peel off the boxing gloves and collapse onto a weight bench, wiping sweat from my face with a towel. The training isn’t a release. I don’t want Edmund any less. I’m just exhausted, so spent that there’s barely any energy left to think about him.
So, I make a habit of it. Whenever resisting Edmund gets too difficult, and I reach the limit of my ability to be in the same room with him, I slip into the exercise room and punch the bag until my heart pounds harder from exhaustion than it does for him.
All the while, I remind myself that blue is the sky and green is the grass. We exist together in the same world, but we are never meant to touch.
Aside from boxing, I spend much of the week exploring Edmund’s suite while we’re trapped there by the blizzard.
It’s enormous, nearly as large as Waldsten Mansion.
On my first day of wandering, an embroidered day robe loose at my waist, I discover that almost all the doors are sealed with biometric scanners.
On the second day, the sauna and exercise room are left open.
On the third day, I find an unlocked music room hidden behind what looks like an ordinary stretch of wall, where instruments rest in velvet cradles, most untouched except for an accordion that Jack plays only when Charlotte asks him.
On the fourth day, I end up in the library, where old volumes still line the shelves.
I stretch out on the windowsill and leaf through histories of the Shield War until my calves go numb.
At this point, I’m starting to wonder whether Edmund has seen me wandering and whether he’s the one leaving the rooms open. The thought is comforting, as though, for once, my curiosity is welcome. But the feeling only lasts until the fifth day, when my curiosity takes me a door too far.
It’s Saturday. The storm is finally beginning to break, but the wind still rattles the windows, their panes so thick with ice that the view of the Guillotine Yard is distorted.
Charlotte is asleep in the salon, curled under her favorite fox-fur coat.
Dickie, who’s still licking his wounds after the Orange girl turned him down for a date, disappears into the library to lose himself in Highball, an online card game he swears is more addictive than Bliss.
Jack and Edmund are dueling in the fencing room, their styles so distinct that I can tell exactly whose blade strikes at every clash.
After boxing until my knuckles hurt, I wander across the north side of the suite, still sweaty and drinking heavily from my canteen.
I pass the exercise room and the sculpture gallery, which also functions as a virtual-reality chamber, then down the west corridor, where the lights dim with each step.
And that’s where I find it: Edmund’s bedroom door, unlocked and ajar, with a beam of light slanting across the hall.
When I place my fingers on the handle, I can almost feel the suite gather itself and tense around me.
I know I shouldn’t go in. Mom says prying leads to regret, if you’re lucky, and to ruin, if you’re not.
Then another voice cuts through hers, insisting that if Edmund wanted to keep the room private, he wouldn’t have left the door open.
So I step inside.
The room is blank, almost jarringly so, like Edmund walked through once, nodded at the walls, and let his Pinkies handle the rest. Dark wood panels rise to meet a vaulted ceiling, distant somehow, as if it’s forgotten how to echo sound.
The velvet curtains hang half-parted, letting in a narrow wash of light that reveals nothing apart from how spotless the floor is.
In the center, the canopy bed is made so tightly it looks embalmed.
Along the walls, portraits peer out in stilted silence, the same kind of decorative filler you’d find in a jazz club.
Despite the lavish furnishings, the room feels deeply impersonal… all except for a single detail.
In the far corner, on a raised platform, stands a life-size statue of Ernest Prew. The Hellion. And it’s much more than a slab of bronze.
The statue is dressed in Ernest’s uniform, though, apart from the badge and boots, it’s not the one he died in.
There are no bullet holes in the tunic, so I surmise that most of the clothing came from another uniform Ernest wore during the Shield War, preserved and displayed down to the frayed seams.
I set my canteen down on the dresser and drift toward the statue, my eyes roaming over the scorched chrome of the helmet and the dull glint of the epaulets still etched with the Vanguard crest. The tunic is torn, its slate-blue wool slashed clean across the ribs.
The boots are still scarred with grit, hydraulic stains, and heat-burned leather, as if they were pulled off the day Ernest died and never cleaned.