Chapter Two
“As for the Culled: Go forth as beacons of light into the darkness without fear, for fate awaits you on the other side.”
Darius and I sat across from one another on our faded blue couches in silence.
I still wore the black skirt and tights from the night before, my white button up untucked and hanging loose, my heels nowhere to be found.
I blinked as I stared at the grains of wood in the coffee table, hardly daring to breathe.
Darius leaned back on the couch and stared at the broken lamp as the silence stretched on.
He wore one of his standard t-shirts with a pair of gray sweatpants but the normality brought little comfort today.
“It has to be a mistake,” I croaked through my dry throat. “There has to be someone we can go to. Maybe if we found some of the priests—”
“The brand is never given mistakenly, Adrian,” Darius replied, his voice low.
I stood and paced, biting the inside of my cheek as thoughts raced through my hungover brain, each worse than the last. I ran my shaking hands through my tangled hair.
The Culling had never happened like this.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Head throbbing, I cycled through these flawed notions, turning them into a frantic mantra.
A deep sigh snapped me back to reality.
Darius.
He perched on the edge of the couch now, eyes glazed over and hands folded in front of him as his jaw ticked a steady rhythm. Serious and still, he waited as I came to terms with the gravity of the situation.
I stopped pacing and turned to face him.
“What do we do?” I internally cursed at the smallness of my voice. Like crashing waves lapping at the shore, my fear threatened to overwhelm me. Frustration burned in my eyes, tears pooling but held back only by my fierce determination, or perhaps denial.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he answered, his dejection weighing heavily on the air in the room. “No one has ever escaped the Culling. The price has always been paid.”
“You’ve always been certain we would be the first in a thousand years to complete the Trials,” I deflected. “So who’s to say you couldn’t be the first to avoid the Culling, too?”
Darius had the grace to chuckle, a weak smile tugging at the corner of his lips. A fleeting reward for my efforts before resignation took over his face again.
“This is different,” he whispered.
In my heart, I knew he was right, but I stubbornly clung to hope. Sanctuary was cruel, a devastatingly brutal home for those of us living under the weight of the upper rings. But what was happening to Darius directly conflicted with all the rules we’d always been taught.
Before twenty-one, we were untouchable, even to the Geist. Or at least, we were supposed to be.
At twenty-one, we had the opportunity to participate in the Trials and had four years to get as far as we could.
Then, at twenty-five, that red bar tattooed in the center of our foreheads disappeared, barring us from admission to any more Trials.
And between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight, we could be culled.
We didn’t know why, but no one had ever been culled before twenty-five or after twenty-eight.
Until now.
The rules had apparently changed.
“Where do you think they go?” Darius asked quietly, as if he were afraid to voice the question aloud but needed to ask as desperately as he needed his next breath. “The Culled, I mean.”
I frowned. No one knew. Once culled, you disappeared forever.
There was the ceremony, of course, the ritual that some dusty old book in one of the major house’s libraries claimed helped to ‘ease the crossing’, whatever that meant.
But other than that, no one knew. And no one who’d been culled was ever seen again to ask.
I’d always assumed it was some sort of ritualistic sacrifice and that once they were culled, they simply…
ceased to exist. But looking at Darius, at the boy I’d been friends with since I was too young to remember having met him, I couldn’t believe that.
I simply couldn’t accept a world that he wasn’t in, a world where he didn’t exist.
Darius sighed and turned away from me to the window beside him.
He silently stared down at the eerily empty streets below.
When he eventually spoke again, his tone had changed.
There wasn’t a trace of the fear or the sorrow that had interwoven it before.
In fact, there wasn’t a trace of any emotion at all.
“Take care of Dahlia. I know she doesn’t think she needs it, but—”
“Darius—”
“Let me finish, Adrian. Please.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. I didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to listen to his last requests, his final instructions before he left me forever.
But I would. Because I had to. I owed him that much.
For the years between us, for the loyalty he’d always shown me, for the love I bore him.
I would hear him, and I would do anything I could, promise anything I had to, if it meant he might feel a shred of peace in his final hours.
I fought to keep the tears at bay just a little longer.
“Take care of her,” he repeated. His voice was composed, restrained, but there was a tension behind his tone as well, like a man standing in the eye of a storm, waiting for the splitting winds and drowning rains to take him.
“She’s strong, the strongest woman I’ve ever known, present company excluded, but she worries more than she’ll ever admit.
And my mom. It’ll kill her when she finds out. ”
“You should tell her.”
“I don’t want them to know. Not like this.”
I choked back a sob and waited for him to proceed.
“Don’t let it break my parents apart,” he continued, emotion lodged in his own throat, his mask of composure slipping slightly.
Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes and I fought, lips quivering, not to let them fall.
“I know you can’t stop that, not truly. But they’re shaky enough as it is, with my dad so bitter and my mom so devout.
I don’t know what losing me will do to them. ”
I sniffled. I couldn’t help it.
Darius finally turned away from the window and looked at me.
“You’ll take me, won’t you?” he asked.
“I really think your family should—”
“I don’t want them to see.” He shook his head as a tear rolled slowly down his cheek. “I don’t want them to remember me that way.”
Silence descended upon us like a thick fog. It threatened to suffocate me. I almost wanted it to. But it just became a haze and settled in my mind, so I could get through my next few movements without thinking about them too much.
I nodded, only vaguely aware of the motion.
Darius crossed the room and embraced me. I held him for a beat too long and a bit too tightly before he released me. Neither of us spoke as I slipped back into my room to change out last night’s clothes.
When I returned to the living room, he was already waiting at the door. He beckoned for me to join him.
My ears rang as we stepped out of the apartment and into the stairwell. It was early and quiet. No sounds could be heard from the units around ours, no neighbors up and about to meet us in the narrow halls. Even Rosemary Marin’s tabby was nowhere to be found.
A numb silence settled between us as Darius led me out onto the street.
The Fellowship was out in full force. The black uniforms of their armed officers littered the streets as people sank away back into their homes in an effort to avoid having their faith questioned.
The Fellowship always brought out their finest for days like this.
They were chosen by the Geist to enforce the will of the gods, to keep us all in our places, to ensure every Culling, every Oathtaking, and every Trial ran smoothly.
I glanced at the nearest one, who frowned back at me as his eyes flicked to the brand on Darius’s forehead.
I turned away from the officer to meet the stares of the few people still roaming the streets. Darius walked on as if he hadn’t noticed, but I knew he had. That was the point of the brand: you couldn’t hide it.
Darius pretended not to acknowledge the sympathetic gawking while I shot glares at the spectators and enjoyed a hint of satisfaction at the ones who turned away, mortified and repentant. But that fleeting sense of gratification dissolved the moment I recalled where we were going.
There was no point in delaying, and if we’d tried to remain in our apartment, staring at one another and prolonging the inevitable, eventually the officers would have arrived at our door and dragged him out anyway.
No one knew how the Fellowship found those who’d been Culled, but they were meticulous in hunting down the unfortunate souls and hurling them into the void themselves if need be.
And that wasn’t how Darius wanted to meet his fate.
He wanted to go with dignity. The least I could do would be to muster up some form of it myself.
I hid my shaking hands and bit my quivering lip as we walked slowly around the Third Ring, curving toward the nearest set of stairs that led down to the Deck and the twelfth tunnel carved into it’s stone walls. We took our time, neither of us in a rush to get where we were going.
The stares on the Deck were more pronounced, clearly full of fear and pity.
They greeted us the moment we descended and began the long trek around the eastern side to the tunnel at the north point of the city.
Children shrunk away as if brushing against Darius would curse them with the mark next.
Women bowed their heads as we passed, tears streaking down their dirty cheeks.
Men watched stoically, seemingly on the verge of fury at the unfairness of it all.
Still, we walked.