Chapter 2
I can’t come.
Sex turned into an examination. I couldn’t feel arousal unless I thought about red heart-shaped sunglasses. It did not matter if I made love to my hand or someone’s six-inch tongue, the feeling of bliss climbed and drowned, suffocating me with frustration.
A woman who walked past me wore spectacles in bright red and that horrible craving hitched up between my legs. I searched for the bathroom or an inconspicuous closet as heat soldered up my inner thighs. I remembered the breathing exercises before I wasted my entire time with a hand between my legs.
They said the sunglasses fascination was a result of trauma. Years of therapy flung over my shoulder like an apple peel.
Nothing worked to stop that delirious ache until I had left myself panting and undone and cringing from loss of dignity.
When the ending built it lasted only half a second and was nothing but a little zap of electricity.
There and gone. Quickly forgotten. A very unfortunate result of those who did not have their Soulmate.
You can’t come properly unless you have your Soulmate.
I swallowed down the need and sifted through the crowd.
None of these people were my Soulmate.
My heart thrummed steadily without skipping a beat, no whiff of excitement made it move. I pressed my fingertips to my chest just to make sure it was still there.
Just to see if I were still alive.
The auditorium was plump with people my age, all probing through the disease of nametags, clutching their hearts and weeding through the crowd in search of the final piece of their soul.
Two women in front of me dove into each other’s arms, pressing their chests together, tears streamed down their face.
They pulled down their shirts, exposing the flesh over their heart and there the blood insignia bloomed through their skin in the shape of half-hearts, showing that they would be connected for all time.
Soulmates.
The entire crowd clapped.
I did too, smiling huge for their union, meanwhile inside myself I withered like a flower in winter.
Where was he?
Where was she?
Where were they?
It did not matter their gender, it did not matter their choice of toothpaste, it did not matter their education, it did not matter their family…I just wanted them.
The other half of my soul.
Every person was born incomplete. With only half of a soul, we had to search this bitter earth until we found the person that made our soul whole.
For most, it started at about eighteen years old.
That was when your heart begun its hard thumping, desperately plunging out of your chest, trying to reach the other heart it belonged to.
It guided you, moving your feet to where they were, even if it were across entire continents.
Your heart knew exactly where to go. The hammering did not cease until you finally found your person and pressed your chests together.
Once it did, and two people connected, our souls were puzzled in harmony for all eternity.
Conventions like this were popular. Thousands of people gathered in a single auditorium searching for their Soulmate. We travelled states, we travelled countries. Uandra sponsored it all. It was vital we found our person.
And if you did not find your person?
You were Soulless.
A Soulless person could not love, and no one could love them in return, because they were wicked. Their heart did not thump furiously because they did not have a soul.
My heart did not thump at all.
There was something wrong with me.
Since childhood, I knew I was odd. A girl who rarely blinked. A girl who did not care. A girl who could look at the corpse of an animal, bloating and bleeding, and find it interesting.
A girl who did not cry.
I closed those thoughts away and opened new thoughts.
I was not Soulless. I was a good person.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wrinkled piece of torn paper, reading over the address. When someone walked close, I hid it.
I had to sell my great grandmother’s emerald earrings to a man in a pawnshop to hold this piece of paper.
On the street outside, the city buzzed with a hive of cars and people, swimming in their lines of traffic all flowing with ease while I stood alone with my personal guard who glared at anyone who dared near me.
Far away someone took a snapshot of me.
It was no secret a member of the De Astor family was nearing twenty-five years old without a Soulmate. I was posted over social media more than puppies rolling over themselves.
Soulless people were the wicked of the earth. Uandra did not take kindly to wicked things. The only use of a Soulless person?
To be killed.
Steps away, through the ambush of people, an elderly woman lost her cane and toppled into a signpost.
I ran to her, catching her by the arm before she fell into the pavement. “Are you okay?”
“Oh!” She huffed out a blow of air and clasped my arm like a lifeline. “Thank you, Honey. I just—” Her lips turned down once she lifted her head to me. Her eyes narrowed in on my features. “You look familiar.”
My bodyguard picked up her cane and handed it to me. I nodded to him in thanks and offered the cane back to the woman. “There you go. Do you need any assistance?”
“I swear I know you from somewhere!” The woman was yet to accept her cane. “I seen you before—Oh, sugar! You're that De Astor girl. I seen it in the papers.”
“Yes, I'm—”
“You're gonna be Soulless.”
My jaw clenched. “No…I’m not Soulless. I’m a good person.”
She snatched her cane off me and smacked it against my heel. “You're gonna be Soulless scum.”
I rubbed at the stinging on my heel and watched her hobble away, my stomach sinking.
“Can you help her to where she needs to go?” I asked my guard. “I'm finished here anyway.”
I slid into the backseat of the car.
“Where to?” my driver asked.
The piece of paper in my pocket burned my fingers. I scrunched it down. “Home.”
He took off through the mess of traffic. Sinking into the polished leather, I inhaled the clean scent, calmed the quiver in my limbs and phoned my brother.
“No,” was all I said.
Magnus was quiet on the other end.
I swallowed. “Maybe…maybe…I could go over to Japan…”
“You cannot,” he said.
I already knew this.
In three days I was turning twenty-five which meant all outside travel was restricted. If you had not connected to another person by twenty-five it meant you likely never would. Most people tried to flee overseas to escape judgment.
“Duckie, my darling,” Magnus’s voice skimmed over the other end. “I’ll fix this.”
Our parents died when I was a child and being much older than I, Magnus had managed our family estate, taking over my father’s political career, and raised me.
He put Band-Aids over my scraped knees, lectured my tutors when I did not receive a fair mark on an exam and chained away masked men who climbed in through my bedroom at 2am.
My older brother was a constant warm blanket over my shoulders, hugging me away from the world.
But no person could escape judgement of being Soulless.
That judgement ended with a graveyard.
It was fair.
All Soulless people turned evil, it was best to nip them in the bud before the evil bloomed and weeded into the perfect garden of people with souls.
I needed to find someone here in Uandra.
I needed to find them in three days.
The gilded gates with my family name scrawled on top opened and the driver slipped down the driveway, pulling up just outside the manor’s entrance.
Cynthia stood over the tulips by the conservatory in her matching pressed powder blue set. The collar monogramed. Her white gloves virgin of dirt. The housekeeper planted tulips below her. Cynthia preferred being among the trimmed hedges than inside the manor haunted by my ancestors.
When she smiled at me it never reached her eyes. Instead, pain did. “You’re back early.”
“No luck,” I said.
I had a desperate urge to pull out the piece of paper in my pocket, holding it as others held prayer. I could not show it in front of Cynthia.
“I’ll die in three days.”
I should probably be scared. I should probably cry.
I just couldn't.
Cynthia continued to smile through whatever pain she seemed constantly subdued in. “Oh, that’s so unfortunate.”
Magnus and Cynthia had connected souls just before both of their twenty-fifth birthdays. A modern love story. A theatre made a performance of it. A wealthy distinguished young man brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth matching with a young woman who had grown up in the gutter.
I was a child when Cynthia and I first met and she moved into the estate. She bent down to hug me and told me we would be the best of friends and ever since she’s looked at me as if I were an insect.
“Magnus?”
Now she lost her smile. “My adoring husband is busy in his study.”
“Thank you.” I turned to leave.
“He’s very busy.” She warned. “I do not think he will have time to—”
“He will see me.”
This she knew and could not argue. She smiled, pain surfacing again.
Magnus was not in his study, but I stole his throne of a chair and sat behind the large mahogany desk that had once belonged to our father and grandmother and great-grandfather.
The very desk each of the De Astor family heads had used for generations in all their political careers.
Our family photo sat proud in a silver-rimmed frame.
It had once been of the four of us; my parents, Magnus and I.
However, Magnus said that was too depressing and so he replaced it with one of him and me.
I moved the computer mouse to see what Magnus was working on. I was currently deep into my fourth semester of studying political science. One day this would be my desk too.
A video played without sound.
On the screen a man lifted a machete and decapitated a woman in two swings.
My heart leapt.
I knew it was the eighty-fifth annual Execution Battle without needing to read the tittle.
This same scene had played out routinely on news channels and social media.
The man with the machete managed to slaughter twenty-three Soulless in the Battle and after he was famous for a while, interviewed from his prison cell until the next Battle, when he was slaughtered himself.
The Soulless needed to be executed.
But people with souls could not do it. People with souls were good people and could not stain their goodness with blood, and so to rid the Soulless from the earth, we used them to do it for us.
Every year we had the Execution Battle. All Soulless were taken out of prisons and placed in the arena and there they had a battle royal.
They killed each other.
Those who survived after the ten days were given better treatment, some even became celebrated. Meanwhile, the rest of the world got to watch.
When I was little girl, I had asked my brother, “Why? Why do we watch them do this?”
“To remind us,” he had said to me. “Of what they are.”
“What are they?”
He pointed to the screen where a woman dug a blade into a man’s throat. “Barbarians.”
These people were evil.
Throughout history this had been a common way to rid the Soulless. The Etruscans, Aztecs, Romans and Greeks all had their own version of gladiatorial warfare. Now, we had bigger arenas and cameras and advertisement breaks.
I leaned back in my brother’s seat, my eyes wide on the next video. The Battle from last year. Magnus had fast forwarded to a specific moment.
Dig Graves.
What a stupid name.
Dig Graves stood proud over a heap of bodies bleeding out from his victory. Clothed in all black with a hood over his head, he looked up to the camera, perpetually grinning. He lifted his blade toward the screen and blew the viewers a kiss.
The rims on his red heart-shaped glasses glinted.
He laughed.
Though it was on mute I could hear that laughter ringing in my ears.
I could smell leather and blood. I could feel him, those strong hands slapped over my mouth, that sculpted body pouring over my own in my bed.
His sharp jawline, his sweetly sloped nose, that flick of black hair across his forehead.
His deep voice, calling me Princess. Those slutty sunglasses.
My hand dove between my legs on instinct, arousal pooling and shivering me into delirium. I groaned and ripped my hand away, tightening it into a fist.
God damn, I hated this guy.
Seven years he had survived.
My brother and I watched with anticipation each year, waiting for the man who had slaughtered our guards and broke into our house to kidnap me to finally succumb to a gruesome death. Yet he survived—no, thrived. The asshole loved it in there. He killed more than he breathed.
I settled the rage in my chest.
In three days, I would turn twenty-five.
And a day later?
Uandra was hosting the ninety-eighth Execution Battle.
I took out my scrunched piece of priceless paper.