Of Beauty and Beast

from this city again. The covenant will be broken forever. Forever!”

When the vines stop moving, there’s a thorn longer than my finger a whisper from my eye.

I force myself to face it, ignoring the sweat rolling down the sides of my face, the frantic racing of my pulse, the pitching of my stomach. “Let me go,” I say. “Let me go! You have no choice.”

But they do, it does, the Dark Heart. It could decide that one last meal from our city is better than none at all. It could take comfort in the fact that there are still two domed cities alive and well and filled with women willing to die.

Everything in my being screams for me to fight, to get away before it’s too late, but I can’t. The force controlling the roses will have to choose to let me go. There’s no way I can free myself without cutting my arms from my body. I’m already hurt badly. The muscles and nerves in my wrist are shredded, and my blood spills with a steady smack, smick, smack onto the dirt. I can feel how much the Dark Heart craves more of it. Its need echoes inside me.

If only I’d gone to Gem before coming to the garden. He could slice through the vines with his claws in an instant. But I was afraid he’d try to stop me, that he’d say it was too dangerous, now that he knows the truth about the roses.

Now I may never see him again. I may not live to tell him how much I care, how much I—

I gasp as the vines suddenly clutch more tightly, as if the Dark Heart can read my thoughts and disapproves of the way I feel for Gem, as much as any citizen of Yuan would.

Death, the Dark Heart whispers inside me, making me shiver and my arms go numb. My eyes roll toward the sky, but instead of the dome and the moons hovering above it, I find myself seeing through the roses’ eyes.

But this time they show me something new. They show me … fires.

Fires in the desert, scaffolds made of long-dead tree limbs holding the corpses of Monstrous men and women and children. There are a dozen of them, more than a dozen. Twenty. Thirty. Fires all around, and at the center of them, an ancient-looking Monstrous man shaking with grief. His shoulders convulse, his chest heaves, but no tears spill from his eyes. The Monstrous can’t cry, but they can obviously feel tremendous pain, pain that takes over and has its way with a body.

I watch him, feeling his agony as my own, and then suddenly I am somewhere else, in a time before the fires, standing beside the old man as he places a shriveled black root into the hands of devastatingly thin Monstrous people. Old men, young children with distended bellies, boys Gem’s age with their wide shoulders concave with starvation, girls my age with glassy-eyed babies clinging to their necks. One of the girls is even thinner than the rest. Her baby still has the strength to wail, to squeeze his eyes closed and scream as his mother slips the root between his lips.

He’s dead almost instantly.

“No!” Heat floods my face; tears spill from my eyes.

The scene changes again, going back even further, showing Monstrous men and women gathered around a fire. Their faces flicker with orange and red from the flames, but their backs are kissed by pale blue winter moonlight. It’s a night like tonight—it could even be tonight—and the people are thin, but not dying.

It’s not too late. It’s not too late to help them, to save them. Gem and I can go into the desert. We can bring food and—

A growl—loud and deep and fierce enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end—shatters the scene playing behind my eyes. I land back in my body with a jolt and wrench my neck toward the sound, a relieved breath already bursting from my lips.

Gem! He’s here. He’ll free me, and together we’ll—

“Ah!” I cry out as the roses jerk me closer to the flower bed, hauling me over the retaining wall and into their midst, surrounding me with thorns, crowding my eyes with blossoms fattened on centuries of blood.

23 ISRA

RED floods my vision. The smell of rot and metal and bitter herbs sweeps into my nose. My skin crawls as sharps mean as needles press at me through my clothes. I squeeze my eyes shut and scream as I cower closer to the ground.

“Let her go!” Gem shouts. I hear a whistling sound and a muffled thud as something soft, but heavy, falls to the ground. Before I can turn and see what’s happened, the roses are moving, their thorns piercing through my clothes, making me howl like a trapped animal.

“No!” I beg. “They’ll kill me! Don’t touch them!”

“I have to get you out,” Gem says, sounding so fearful and desperate that I know he cares for me. Now I have to prove I care for him as much.

“You have to go,” I say, panting against the urge to be sick. The pain is too much, coming from everywhere all at once. “Your tribe. They’re in trouble.”

“How do you—”

“I saw it. In a vision.”

“A vision.” He lets out a shaking breath. “From the roses? Were there—”

“Please, Gem. Half your tribe will die if you don’t go.” I grit my teeth, refusing to whimper, to do anything to make Gem feel compelled to stay with me. “Needle prepared a pack for you this afternoon. It’s waiting by the King’s Gate. Take it and go. Now.”

“I won’t leave you,” Gem says, voice breaking. “I can’t.”

“You have to,” I say, and then add silently, But you can come back.

Oh, please come back. Oh please, oh please.

If he comes back … If he cares enough to come back … maybe we can find a way to end this, to escape from the Dark Heart and make a better life for both our peoples.

The thorns press deeper, and I can’t keep a soft cry of pain from escaping my lips.

“Isra … they’re killing you.” His hand finds mine. I can’t turn my head to see him, but I know he has risked his life to reach out for me. I cling to him, selfishly needing to touch him one last time.

“They’re not killing me. They’re keeping me here. They know my thoughts. They know I wanted to go with you.” I close my eyes, memorizing the feel of his fingers threaded through mine. “They’ll release me when you’re gone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do,” I lie, knowing that Gem will refuse to leave unless I properly convince him. “They need a willing sacrifice, a suicide. They can’t murder me,” I say, hoping it will be enough to make Gem go before he’s caught.

“How did you get out of your cell?”

“I broke the lock on the door. After I …” His breath shudders out, and his grip on my fingers gets tighter. “I saw you coming into the garden and I tried to call your name, but—I felt something, a terrible magic.”

He has no idea how terrible, and I can’t tell him. Not now.

“There’s no time.” I release his hand, pushing him away. “Go. Run.

Hurry.”

I hear a rustle in the leaves, and when he speaks again, he sounds farther away. “I’ll come back as soon as I can,” he says. “If you’re not alive, I’ll burn this city to the ground. Starting with this garden.” The blossoms closest to my face rotate on their stalks, moving out of my line of sight as they turn to Gem.

I lift my head, meeting Gem’s worried eyes through a jumble of leaves and thorns. I want to tell him how beautiful he is to me; I want to tell him everything I’ve held back. I want to share everything that’s happened since he left the tower last night, because only after sharing it with Gem will it seem real.

I want to tell him that, too, but instead I say, “Please go.” He has to go. There’s no time. “I’ll watch for you on the wall walk. Every night. Set a fire by the gathering of stones. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

“You’re bleeding,” he says, throat working. I can see it, even in the moody blue light of my least favorite