Chapter 5
Immediately, my healer instincts kick in.
I zone in on every detail of Diggory as the sentries drag him toward the Blood Moon Palace, from his ragged screams to the trail of blood splatters he’s leaving in his wake to the crooked dip near his collarbone as the sentries tug even harder on his arms.
Guardians, they actually dislocated his shoulder.
I don’t hesitate this time. Several straggling passerby gawk at me as I sprint toward Diggory, but for once in my life, I don’t have time to assess whether my manners are appropriate or not. My focus is him and the way his cries of pain are shredding my insides apart.
“Hey. Hey! Let him go!”
The sentries crank their heads in my direction. Like every other citizen of Xantera, they wear badges pinned to the front of their cloaks, but unlike every other citizen of Xantera, they get helmets and weapons, too—not to be used against us, but against the Monster in case of a breach.
Now, though, I find my eyes shooting to the rapier swords sheathed against both of their hips as their eyes widen then narrow at me through the slits in their helmets.
“Back away. This man is a danger to society and must be—”
“No, no, no.”
I’m close enough that I can see Diggory’s face now. The bruises have yellowed slightly, but fresh cuts and scrapes glisten on his cheeks and forehead and…
“He’s one of our residents at the Healing Center,” I explain as quickly as I can, trying to fabricate a good enough story using what I think is the truth.
“He just has a concussion that I missed during my initial assessment. It’s made him loopy and disoriented, but I promise if you can just escort him back to the Healing Center, I’ll get some meds and fluids in him, and he’ll be good as new by next week. ”
At the sound of my voice, Diggory’s gaze travels to my face, blood vessels spiderwebbing in the whites of his eyes. They widen in recognition before glazing over, as if he’s straining to listen to something or someone beyond me.
The sentries only pause for a moment.
“Guardians’ orders,” one of them says firmly, and then they’re dragging him away again.
I watch them go, rooted in place and scrambling to come up with something, anything, to say to get them to stop. But a direct order from the Guardians isn’t exactly something you can argue with. I’d be better off stealing one of their rapiers and slicing off my own head.
Yet I can’t quit staring, evaluating every move Diggory makes and every move made against him, as if I can still fix this by writing a report on his health condition when I get back to work.
And that’s why I notice him scrabbling at his throat, tearing something from the folds of his cloak, and chucking it to the side in the midst of his struggle to resist.
The sentries don’t stop, don’t notice, but I follow the arc of the glittering object as it lands on the ground between the Production Factory and the Childcare Center.
Time seems to waver in the space between my breaths as I try to tell myself to leave it alone. To turn around and hightail it back to my housing unit so that I can eat dinner with Malcolm and tell him that my day was pleasant and ask “How was yours?”
But of course, I can’t. I stay glued in place as I watch the last of Diggory and the sentries fade into the distance, until they’re no more than three dots before the Blood Moon Palace. Only after the doors open up to inhale those dots do I jump toward the place where the object glitters.
It’s… I don’t know what it is.
I swear I’ve seen or heard of something like this before, but I can’t remember the name.
It’s a long chain weighed down by what looks like a solid miniature vial bracketed in elaborate swirls of gold.
The vial itself is red, as red as the blood moon, as red as the Guardians’ eyes, and I can’t help but think that it looks like it was cut from a heart that ended up turning to stone.
My fingers stretch out to touch it…
A noise to my left sends me into a flurry of quick movement.
I jerk upward. The Production Factory doors squeak open and a stream of manufacturers flows out.
One of them glances over his shoulder, eyebrows scrunching at the way I’m standing in the middle of the two buildings.
His eyes flick down to the space between my shoes.
“Good evening,” I force out with a fixed smile, breezing out of the rich black of the shadows and into the shallow gray of a dying dusk.
“Good evening,” he echoes with a smile just as wide.
I walk past him, eyes trained on the road ahead. It’s way past time for me to head back to my unit, but I force myself to move at a steady pace, to not attract attention, to not reveal how viciously my hands are shaking at my sides.
As far as I know, there aren’t any rules against picking up strange chained vials and stuffing them in the inside pocket of your cloak moments before someone spots you.
But I don’t want anyone to find out and tell me otherwise.
When I get home, Malcolm is already seated at the dinner table, waiting for me. To my surprise, he hasn’t dug into the chicken, rice, and peas that must have been delivered to our unit a good half hour ago. Both of our trays sit there, untouched and no longer steaming.
“Good evening,” he says.
“Good evening. I’m sorry I’m late. There was a commotion.”
I already decided on the walk over that half the truth would be better than none of the truth at all. Lying would be extremely rude, but my civil partner deserves at least some kind of explanation.
Once I’m settled in my chair and we’re both eating, therefore, I tell him all about Diggory and the sentries in between bites, and how I hope the Guardians don’t toss him to the Monster, and I wish I would have done something at the Healing Center to prevent this from happening, and…
“Are you even listening, Malcolm?”
I don’t know where my temper is coming from—maybe last night’s Choosing coupled with what just happened—but something is simmering beneath my skin.
Agitated. Angry. I’ve only been angry a handful of times in my life, and all of them involved other kids on the playground at the Childcare Center.
I’ve never been angry at another functional member of society before.
Today, right now, I’m angry at all of them.
“What?” Malcolm is saying, stray peas falling out of the corner of his mouth as he gapes.
I can still feel the weight of Diggory’s object in the inside pocket of my cloak, but the weight in my heart is even worse.
All I want is a civil partner who can pretend to care for even a fraction of a minute.
Malcolm waited for me to eat dinner, but the absent-minded wander of his attention is clear: our union is a routine for him. Nothing more.
“Would you have chosen me if the Guardians hadn’t picked me for you?” I dare to ask.
Tears burn against the back of my throat. Malcolm gawks at me as if he’s never really seen me before, his jaw slack, his pupils racing back and forth across my face.
“Well?”
“Saskia.” He clears his throat. “I can’t… this isn’t something we should be… the Guardians never choose wrong—they’re… they…”
“But say they do,” I blurt out. “Say that they do sometimes choose wrong.”
I bite down on my lip, even as more wicked thoughts race through my mind: say the Guardians choose wrong because they sit in their palace and view us through cameras and read their pairings through loudspeakers and never feel the actual spark—or lack of spark—between a couple and never realize that you, Malcolm, have always looked everywhere but at me.
“Saskia,” Malcolm says again, an ache beneath the admonishment in his voice.
And I know. I know right then and there, as if I’m making a clinical analysis, that Malcolm does not and cannot and will never love me. Not in the way I want him to. Not in the way that I could ever love him.
I stare at the grayish brown lumps of my uneaten chicken, my anger crashing back down into the pit of my stomach and shriveling up into something else. Something smaller and sadder.
“I understand,” I whisper.
“What? You—I…”
I look back up at him and gather a deep breath.
Refusing to glance at the camera above the screen in our living room, I lean toward him and whisper so quietly that nobody else would be able to hear if they decided to listen in to our individual unit in this exact moment of time, “We won’t be in the family-making stage for several more years, you know.
We don’t have to… be together on Sundays—not in that way.
There’s no camera in our joint room. Nobody will ever know if we just take a break from pretending and forcing ourselves.
” I try to gather the words in my mouth.
“We can just be friends behind closed doors.”
Malcolm tips his head like he didn’t hear a thing I just said. Like he’s in as much denial as I’ve always been. “Are you feeling okay? Did you pick up a fever from your shift today?”
“No,” I insist. “I mean, yes, I feel fine, and no, I don’t have a fever. Admit it, Malcolm.”
“Admit what?”
“That you don’t feel for me. Not like you should.”
“We shouldn’t think like that,” he replies much too quickly. “That would be irresponsible of us.”
“Irresponsible?” I laugh despite the sadness sitting in my chest. “It’s our private life, isn’t it?
No one else has to know what we do in our own home.
Maybe we can start as friends since we were never given the chance to get to know each other.
” I can’t help but glance at the camera this time, and now I lower my voice even more.
“Just one little difference behind the door of our bedroom. How would they know?”
Of course, what I’m asking of him is a lot more serious than ‘just one little difference.’ It’s the Cardinal Rule I hate the most, the one I’ve never been able to fully follow: Don’t keep secrets from authorities.
“As long as no one asks us,” I press, “then we’re not lying.”
I see the moment all pretense drops from Malcolm’s face, leaving nothing behind but that ache that echoes mine.
“Friends?” he says, tasting the word as if it’s something foreign that he can’t comprehend.
“Friends,” I whisper back.
Six long months seem to flash between our eyes.
Six months of him pumping into me while I stare at the ceiling and push moans out of my throat, wondering when it’ll start to feel good for me, too, or if I’ll always have to do it myself.
Six months of polite breakfast and dinner conversations that amount to nothing more than the same twelve words recycled over and over again until he’s more of a stranger than when we were first assigned to each other.
Finally, relief shutters in Malcolm’s eyes.
He nods.
I nod back and settle into my chair again.
Malcolm and I might be civil partners in the system, but we aren’t together like that within these four walls.
We’ll still have to spend a few hours in our joint room together on Sanctuary Sunday, but if we just lie there without doing anything…
well, what the Guardians don’t know can’t hurt them. Or us.
And for the first time in six months, Sunday doesn’t sound too bad.
After washing our dishes side by side, Malcolm and I bid each other goodnight with slight smiles on our lips and retire to our separate rooms.
I shed my cloak, hearing the small thunk as the thing inside it hits the ground.
But I don’t inspect that thing yet. First, I shower off the day’s events, letting the water blister my pores until my skin flares with patches of red.
When it automatically shuts off after five minutes, I take my time drying my hair, slipping into my nightgown, and pulling the covers up to my chin.
Then and only then do my thoughts explode.
Diggory. Oh, poor, poor Diggory.
What could he have possibly been thinking?
What could he have possibly been doing?
Did he really get a concussion, was he really loopy and delusional, or did he have another motive? Was he trying to break into someone’s unit? Did he succeed?
And what is that thing he threw as they were dragging him away?
I can’t resist much longer. I tip sideways, reaching for my cloak that I tossed onto the floor and dig for that chained vial in the inside pocket to inspect it.
As soon as my skin makes contact with the object, I yelp.
An electric current seems to shoot through me, there one moment and gone the next. I toss it onto my bedspread where I can observe it without touching it, a frown tugging on my mouth as I stare at it in the red-tinged light of my bedside lamp.
I don’t remember feeling that same electricity when I touched it the first time to throw it into my pocket. But I grabbed it by the chain then, and this time I swear my fingers skimmed the vial itself. Was the shock just a figment of my imagination, or…?
I touch the vial again, and that same electric shock flits through me, as if trying to connect with my pulse and make it skip a beat.
“What are you?” I marvel quietly.
The answer scratches at the inside of my brain. I have a very distinct feeling my old instructors taught us about these kinds of things in our history classes, that similar objects were used as decorative markers of power and prestige. Selfish. Greedy. Excessive.
So why do I want to put it on?
I close my eyes and throw my head back into my pillow, thinking, thinking, thinking.
Diggory had it around his neck, I’m sure of that.
He was clutching at his throat when he ripped it off, and while the folds of his cloak may have been hiding a majority of it at the time, I would have noticed it on him in the Healing Center.
Which means he found them after he ran away—both this strange object and a cloak.
Maybe he really was just crazy. A lost cause.
Or maybe if I mimic his last action, something will click in my brain to prove that he wasn’t.
Opening my eyes again, I sit up and grab the object by the chain. Careful not to touch the vial, I raise my hands slowly over my head.
Selfish. Greedy. Excessive. The words clang through me as the vial gleams right in front of my face, its golden bracket winking in the lamplight.
Then a familiar howl erupts from the distant night, jolting me from my trance.
And I let the chain drop around my neck.