Of Beauty and Beast

dreading the moment she’d open her eyes.

The only thing worse than hating Isra is … whatever this is.

Wanting her, wanting her to realize what a fool she is. Wanting all this to be over.

I want to go home. I want to be back with people I know, in a world I understand. I’m sick to death of this upside-down place, where I crave the touch of a girl who holds me prisoner, and every other word I speak is a lie.

Half the time I can’t even tell who I’m lying to. Her or myself.

I spend the day angry. At myself. At Isra. At the bulbs she insisted on fondling and sniffing before we headed down the mountain, at the rocks on the trail, at the sun and the wind and the dirt in my Smooth Skin shoes and the needles on every cactus where we stop to drink.

I am in a foul mood, made fouler by trying to hide it from Isra. The walk back to the dome has been torture. A part of me is eager to be back in my cell. At least there Isra can’t cling to my arm, or brush her body against mine, or sigh through her parted lips, or tilt her face up with that look in her eyes. The one that makes me want to strangle her. And kiss her. And strangle her some more. And maybe leap off a cliff after the strangling is done, just to put myself out of my misery.

“It won’t be long now,” Isra says, shielding her face from the setting sun with one narrow hand. “I can smell it.”

“Smell what?”

“The dome. I never realized it had a smell,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Like metal when it’s cold. And sour nutshells. Mixed together.”

I grunt in response.

“What do you think it smells like?” she asks.

“We’ll be close enough for the guards to catch sight of us soon,” I say, ignoring her question. I’m not in the mood to play her blind-girl games.

Not everything has a smell, and if the dome had a smell, it would smell like death. Slow, creeping, unmerciful death. “We should stop here. Wait for it to get dark. There’s a mound of rocks just ahead. It should conceal us from anyone using a spyglass.”

I don’t tell her that my people gathered those rocks, that we piled them high enough to hide a scouting party of two or three. I don’t tell her that I came here on my first scouting mission when I was fourteen and stood behind the rocks, seething hatred for the dome that festers like a boil on the horizon.

It’s strange, to stand now in this place where my younger self vowed to destroy my enemy at all costs, with a Smooth Skin queen clinging to my arm. I once thought I knew everything I ever wanted to know about the Smooth Skins. Now … I know nothing. With every passing day, I grow more and more ignorant. If I keep it up, by the time I return to my people, I’ll be as rattled in the head as the queen of Yuan.

“Gem?” She tugs lightly at my sleeve. “Gem?”

“Yes?”

She leans closer, hugging my arm to her chest, making me aware of her, no matter how much I wish I weren’t. I want to push her away. I want to pull her closer. I want to punch the pile of rocks until my knuckles bleed.

The pain would be a welcome distraction.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I snap, then force myself to ask in a gentler voice, “How’s your head?”

She tilts her head to one side and then the other, stretching the long column of her neck. “It still hurts,” she says. “I’ve never had a headache like this before. I don’t know. Maybe I just need something to eat.”

“Soon.” I stare hard at the horizon, willing the sun to sink faster.

“You’ll be back in your rooms not long after dark.”

She sighs, a mournful, defeated rush of breath, as if she is the one on her way to a cell. “I’ll miss this.”

“The desert?”

“Well … yes,” she says, sounding surprised. “I will. The wind especially, even though it’s cold. But …” Her fingers curl into my arm. “I didn’t mean the desert. I meant … I’ll miss being familiar. Being able to … touch.”

It’s the first either of us has said about that sort of thing all day. The closer we get to the dome, the more those moments by the fire seem like a fever dream. I can’t believe I tasted her, touched her; that I thought I could reach her with my words. That the real Isra and the real Gem might find a way to be allies. Maybe more than allies.

But Isra isn’t real. She’s a Smooth Skin. She was raised in an artificial world built on lies, bought and paid for with the lives of my people. The fact that I could forget that for even a moment proves how dangerously close I am to losing my mind. My purpose. My self. If only my father had left Gare instead. Gare would have already found a way to bring the roses home to our people. He would never have let his heart soften toward a Smooth Skin.

He would never have loosened his grip on hate.

“Gem?” Isra tips her face up to mine. The dying light catches her eyes and shrinks her pupils to specks of black, leaving nothing but green so bright, I can’t stop staring. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Liar,” she whispers, pinching my arm through my shirt. “It’s impossible to think nothing. Even when you’re asleep, you’re thinking something.”

I grunt.

“It’s true.” She closes her eyes, soaking in the last of the sun’s fading warmth. “How else would we dream?”

“My people believe some dreams come from the spirit world,” I say.

“That they’re messages from the ancestors.”

“Hm.” Her eyes slit and her brow wrinkles. “I hope they’re wrong.”

“Why? Are your ancestors unhappy with you? Sending you bad dreams?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I have this same dream …” A strong breeze ruffles her hair, and she huddles closer to my side. When she speaks again, I have to strain to hear her over the howling of the wind. “I dream about the night the tower burned. Over and over again. My mother died that night.

My father and I would have died, too, if the guards hadn’t reached us in time.”

For the first time since I awoke this morning, the tight, angry knot in my belly loosens. Fire is a terrible way to lose a life. And four years old is too young to lose a mother.

I place my hand on hers, warming her fingers. “That doesn’t sound like a dream from your ancestors.”

“No?” The muscles tighten in her jaw. “Maybe it is. Maybe the dream is my punishment.”

“For what? Did you set the fire?”

“No,” she says, voice breaking.

“Then stop blaming yourself. You were a child,” I say roughly. She seems determined to take on unnecessary pain. It’s incredible. Wasteful. It makes me angry at Isra on Isra’s behalf, which is just … confusing. “Your ancestors wouldn’t send a dream to torture you while you sleep,” I explain, trying to be patient. “Not without a reason.”

“That’s good to know.” She squints and rubs her fingers in a circle at her temple. Her head has been aching on and off all day. At one point, we had to sit down and rest until the pain passed. It’s best we’re nearing the dome. Isra isn’t made for the desert, no matter how much she enjoys the wind. “I had a strange dream last night. At least I think it was a dream,” she continues. “Before you found me on the trail, I dreamed of the fire again, but this time there was a face in one of the burning beams.”

“Whose face?”

“I don’t know. A woman. I don’t think I’ve met her, but her face was made out of flames, so … hard to tell.” She lifts her hand, tracing an image in the empty air in front of her again and again. Her fingers are graceful, and I suddenly wish I could see her dance the way my women dance around the fire on the night of the full moons.

“Did the woman say anything to you?” I push images of Isra—dressed in the clothes of my people, her long legs free to kick and leap—from my mind.