Rosabelle 7
Rosabelle
Sebastian releases a sigh, the sound returning me to this room, this chair, my broken face. When he lifts a hand toward me again I nearly flinch, but this time he takes my chin with a tenderness that’s dislocating.
I wonder what it’s like in his head.
I wonder how it feels to be shackled as he is to the synthetic mind.
Sebastian is no longer a person in a body; he’s many cerebrums in a cradle; he’s flesh and electricity; brain matter that doesn’t think for itself.
His thumb sweeps through the blood at the edge of my mouth, smearing it gently as he draws back.
His expression softens as he looks over my battered face, his eyes warming.
He seems sufficiently placated for now.
“Your hair is different,” he says.
I stiffen.
I lift a shaking hand to my loose hair before I think to police the movement. My reaction is unrehearsed; too self-conscious.
I never used to wear my hair down. I don’t know when I stopped tying it back in a harsh knot. I don’t know why I didn’t think to tie it back today.
James has caused me internal damage.
I can feel my heart beating again, pain flaring along my face where the bruises are beginning to bloom.
Die, I tell myself.
Die.
“I like it down like this,” Sebastian says.
He touches my hair as I did, then lightly draws his fingers through the white-blond strands, wrapping a length around his fist. A touch of color has flared along his cheekbones.
He tightens his grip on my hair until it hurts, then releases me without warning.
I sway slightly, grabbing at the wooden arms of my chair as he steps back. My face has a pulse.
“You’re so beautiful, Rosa.” He swallows hard as he looks me over, his eyes emptying out in a flash of hunger. “You’ve always been so beautiful.”
His heated gaze moves down my body.
He must be imagining something beyond my shapeless, unflattering clothes, because a slow flush spreads up his neck. I wonder how many times he’s seen my naked corpse on a metal slab.
“Sometimes I can’t even look at you,” he says, his expression hardening as he steps closer. “Sometimes it makes me angry.”
I resist another flinch as he draws the backs of his knuckles down the curve of my bruising cheek. I’m nearly shaking with the effort to hide my disgust.
“Sometimes,” he says softly, “I think I’d be happier if you weren’t so beautiful. We might not have all these problems. I might not get so angry all the time.”
I’m hardly breathing now.
I’ve spent years searching Sebastian for fault lines and frailties and I’ve always arrived at the same bleak conclusion: he can never seem to decide whether to crush me or keep me trapped under glass.
Sebastian has wanted me all his life but he’s repulsed by the magnitude of his own desire.
He hates himself for being so pathetic. Hates me even more for making him weak.
The first and only time he kissed me I told him I’d slit my own throat if he tried to force himself on me before our wedding night. His responding shock was so great it gave me hope.
I am, myself, my only leverage against Sebastian.
My empty threat to kill myself holds weight only because of the depth of his obsession. Rarely does he touch me now except to draw blood. Never is he kinder to me than when I’m freshly brutalized.
Always, he prefers me powerless.
He steps away from me without warning, averting his eyes. “I really thought I was going to have to kill you,” he adds on a rough exhale. He shakes his head, his face breaking into a startled, self-conscious smile. He draws a nervous hand through his hair.
Many years ago, our families were on equal footing.
Many years ago, when our betrothal was bound, our fathers were chief commanders and regents of neighboring sectors.
We ran in similar social circles and saw each other with regular frequency.
But after the fall and slaughter of our world leaders, the regime was in chaos.
Roles were reorganized; the movement was restructured.
Upon arrival to the island, my family was cast into the pit for treason.
Sebastian’s father was promoted.
The Rivers family had always been powerful; their lineage is ancient, long revered among the elite. So it came as no great surprise when the council elected a fresh leader for the next generation of The Reestablishment. A new supreme commander.
Alastair Lucas Rivers.
Sebastian’s father.
Sebastian was able to secure the vote necessary to honor our betrothal because of his name.
He was able to accomplish this despite the lifelong sanctions leveled against me.
Despite the traitorous existence of my own father on the mainland.
Despite my ailing sister, who’s deemed nothing more than a leech of resources.
Sebastian, as son of the supreme commander of The Reestablishment, enjoys power and privileges on the island that can’t be overstated.
“I didn’t know how to reach you these last few weeks,” I manage to say to him, though it’s an effort to speak. “I’m happy you’re here.”
Sebastian senses the lie.
I see it in the way he hesitates, the slight delay before he takes a breath. He moves farther away from me.
Slowly, he begins to pace the room.
“We parted on bad terms, Rosa,” he says. “I didn’t realize you might want to reach me.”
Sebastian’s violence, I realize, was meant to serve more than a desire to see me weakened: he intended to test the veracity of my statements about the lack of surveillance in his room; he was granting me evidence to support the premise that I’d turned traitor; and he knew it would be harder for me to lie to him if my head was only half attached to my body.
Right now, I’m having a hard time thinking.
The pain is peaking; the damage is bad enough that it’s beginning to demand my attention. I need a moment to collect myself.
I always intended to use Sebastian.
I don’t need to live forever. I just need to leverage his delusion to buy myself some time.
I need to last long enough on the Ark without a target on my back so that I can make my plans.
I need to drink the vial of earth and cast myself into the waters of Klaus’s synthetic mind, a mission that will require meticulous preparation. A titanic distraction.
A wedding would suffice.
A wedding to the son of the supreme commander. A wedding with the most influential elite in attendance.
A wedding where the bride never arrives.
Right now I need to tell Sebastian something real; I need to convince him I didn’t mean it when I openly insulted him in front of dozens of soldiers. I need to convince him, somehow, that I care for him.
Everyone already knows that Clara is my weakness, and I decide it will cost me little to admit as much again now.
“I was upset the day I left the island,” I say to him. “You lied to me about Clara.”
How’s Clara?
Sebastian stills, then turns to face me. His dark eyes narrow, catching a slant of light. Faintly blue. My sister has always been a contentious subject between us.
I don’t like it, Sebastian had said to me once.
He was talking about Clara.
I’d been in the pit for two years before Sebastian came to visit me for the first time. I’d naively hoped my family’s fall from grace meant I’d never have to see him again. I’d hoped he’d forgotten about me.
I hadn’t understood his obsession then.
“She’s nothing but a parasite,” he’d said to me, staring at Clara with disgust. “A waste of life. She should be in an asylum. Or an incinerator.”
I was twelve. He was thirteen.
Clara was five.
My mother had been dead two years.
Clara had been vomiting blood all morning; she’d only just fallen asleep. I’d been washing stained towels in the sink when Sebastian walked into our cottage without warning and settled into an armchair by the dead fire.
I’d turned off the water, grabbed a kitchen knife, and driven it straight through his hand.
It was the only time I ever got to hear him scream.
“Touch her,” I’d said calmly, “and I promise to become the monster you fear most.”
Of course, I was young then.
Too young to understand the importance of keeping my mouth shut. Too naive to know there might be fates worse than death. Too inexperienced to understand that a soul could be stripped from the body while the heart still beat.
I spent a week standing upright in isolation after that. Walls an inch from my head in every direction. Occasionally it would rain, water as cold as ice, providing hydration but never heat. Impenetrable darkness. No food. No light.
No space to sit down.
When I was finally returned to my cottage, I was no longer someone I recognized.
They didn’t heal me right away; they wanted me to live in my humiliation.
I couldn’t walk properly. I could hardly speak.
I’d died a death so deep it took me three days to remember my name.
Upon my return I’d found my five-year-old sister right where I’d left her: nearly dead in bed, marinating in her own blood and filth and vomit.
I have no idea how she survived.
Only then did I begin to truly understand what my life had become. What the rest of my life would be:
Nothing.
I was nothing.
For months after, I’d wake up paralyzed in the dark of night, my body seizing, my mouth wrenched open in a silent scream.
Later, I would learn the reason for Sebastian’s visit. Later, I would understand the depths of his obsession. His self-hatred. His need to kill his own need, to crush me so I couldn’t crush him. I’d exposed a useful weakness the day I drove a blade through his hand.
Clara’s rations were cut off.
She was, from that day forward, no longer classified as a living being.
She was formally listed as functionally dead: a drain on resources.
She would receive no aid, no food, no education.
Should I fail to manage her needs in a satisfactory manner, Clara would be sent to the asylum to die.
Should I make another mistake, Clara would be sent to the asylum to die.
I fed her out of my own rations; cared for her illness the only way I could; taught her to read and write with the limited resources available to us. In exchange, I delivered myself directly to my own knees. Bound my own shackles.
I became compliant.
That was the beginning of Sebastian’s role in my monthly interrogations.
He’d whisper in my ear as I bled out in mute terror.
He’d hold my hand as it shook.
This doesn’t really hurt, Rosa, he’d say gently, his eyes pinching in concern. You don’t know pain. This is nothing compared to what you put me through. What you do to me. What you force me to feel—
Sebastian takes a sharp breath now, his dark eyes pinning me back inside the present moment.
Blood is slick in my mouth.
My head seems to be going numb.