Of Beauty and Beast

It could be my son. It’s a baby. A tiny spot of dense and dark at the center of a fire too big for a person with so few memories to burn away and no life magic to gift to those left behind.

My son. That could be my son.

My eyes squeeze shut. Oh, please. By the ancestors, please, let my son be alive, I beg, though I know my prayer is selfish. If my son is spared, then that means it is some other baby burning on that pyre. Someone’s baby is dead. Fourteen other mothers, sisters, brothers, lovers, fathers, are dead.

Why is this? And where are the rest of my people while their loved ones burn?

I emerge from the city of fire, and my question is answered. A line of my people stands before our healer, their heads bowed in defeat. I see the medicine man hand something to a young mother at the far end of the line, and I try to scream—

“Meer!” But my throat is raw from the smoke, tight from dread, strangled by terror. She doesn’t hear me. Her head stays down as she slips whatever the medicine man gave her between our listless child’s lips and rubs it back and forth across the baby’s tongue.

Instantly, I know what she’s holding. Poison root. Poison root. Poison root in my baby’s mouth.

“No! Stop!” The words explode from deep inside me as I scramble across the dirt on my hands and knees, the pressure inside my body threatening to make my heart explode. “Meer! Stop!”

Meer’s arm jerks, pulling the root from my son’s mouth. From somewhere farther down the line, a cry rises into the air. And then another, and another, but there is no hope in the sounds. No celebration. I’m too late. I know it; everyone knows it. Everyone knows I saw. I saw.

No. Please, no. I can’t have gotten here just in time to watch my son die for no reason. When there is food here on my back and hope so close.

“Meer.” I gasp, but she doesn’t respond. Her eyes are wide and empty in her painfully thin face, her jaw slack. Without emotion she watches me crawl toward her for a long moment, before her head snaps down and the arm cradling the baby lifts him closer to her face. She drops the root and pats his cheek. She smoothes his hair away from his face. She places one skeletal hand over his heart and holds it there for what feels like an eternity.

And then she screams. She screams like her heart is being cut out.

He’s dead. He’s dead, oh no, please, no.

A strangled sound bursts from my throat. I push to my feet, only to fall immediately back to the ground. No amount of will can make up for how broken my body has become. Broken. Everything broken. My tribe, my baby, my life, my heart.

Meer’s wail ends with a sob as she looks up, meeting my eyes with an expression so terrible, I instantly feel what she feels. The pressure building inside my chest and my head, crushing against the backs of my eyes, becomes unbearable. Meer. My friend. If I could spare her this pain, I would.

I’ll hold her and tell her I forgive her. I’ll tell her it’s my fault. I’ll—

Suddenly, Meer’s legs bend and her fingers reach for the dirt.

“No!” I scream, but it’s too late. The root she dropped is already in her mouth, her teeth are already biting down. She’s already falling to the ground, her eyes closing, her mouth falling open as her soul leaves her body.

I watch her fall. I watch the limp bundle that was my child roll from her dead arm, and then there is nothing but red.

Red behind my eyes as I scream and scream until my throat is raw and I taste metal on my tongue. Red as I pound my fists into the ground until my knuckles break open and weep blood onto the desert floor.

I howl until there is nothing left inside me. Until my head buzzes and my muscles lose the last of their strength and I collapse onto the ground with my too-late salvation still strapped to my back and the red world goes black.

25 ISRA

I am married. I wear a black dress and a black cap over my hair, breaking mourning tradition and wedding tradition, making it clear I consider the ceremony the blackest of rites. Bo holds my hand during our vows, but he doesn’t stay in the tower that first night, or the next, or any thereafter. I understand that he means to keep his promise not to be cruel, and am grateful for small favors.

I’m grateful for big ones, too. As the world beneath the dome begins to fade and falter, I know Bo is all that stands between me and death. He begs the advisors to give me more time to come to my senses.

I beg the desert to send Gem back to me before it’s too late.

Needle sneaks to the wall every night after returning my dinner tray.

She watches for a fire by the gathered stones, while I stand by the door, waiting for news of Gem, hoping so hard, it hurts.

I am always disappointed.

Winter ends and the days grow longer and warmer, but the crops refuse to grow. The cows cease giving milk, and—as our stores are used up and milk is replaced with water and wine—I learn what has caused the sad state of my skin. An allergy to the milk I’ve drunk every morning and been bathed in twice a day, every day, since Needle came to care for me. She blames herself for not realizing the milk and honey baths were hurting more than helping, but I assure her I’m not angry. I’m elated. Gem was right about that, too. I add it to my list of things to tell him, but weeks pass and he doesn’t come, and things only get worse.

The chickens refuse to lay eggs, and half the livestock fall over dead in the fields. The orchard flowers rain to the ground, but no leaves or fruit grow in their place. Beneath Yuan, the underground river becomes a narrow stream. Water is rationed and the city’s worry becomes an ever-present, buzzing fear. I know what game the Dark Heart plays, but I refuse to panic. Gem will come. He will come and we will end this madness.

Forever. We can do it. I’ve read the queen’s diary. I know the secret now.

For a month I believe.

And then the month becomes two months. More. I stop waiting by the door, no longer certain the black night outside the dome will ever be broken by the light of Gem’s fire. I retreat to my bedroom to sleep the rest of my life away, to dream and keep on dreaming.

I dream all the time.

There is nothing to do in my prison but sleep and dream, wake and dream, sit staring at the scrap of sky visible through the mostly walled-up window in my room, and ache for my freedom like a missing limb, and dream and dream.…

I learn to speak the language of midnight, to communicate with phantoms. I have long conversations with the burning face in the beam, my ancestor, Ana, King Sato’s third wife. Reading her diary has opened a door between us, and now we speak freely, without needing sleep as a meeting place.

She tells me of Yuan at the end of its first hundred years, before the Dark Heart was forgotten, when every soul in the city knew the roses were the teeth of the monster they had created. She tells me of growing up yearning for the world outside, watching from the wall walks the giant cats roaming the grasslands, and longing to run free the way they did. She tells me of her fourteenth birthday and the meager meal she shared with her family at the end of a summer when the crops had refused to grow, the day it was decided that the queen must die and Ana’s father promised her to the king.

King Sato was tired then, already finished with two wives, and decades older than his new bride. The king promised Ana’s father that he, the king, would take his turn under the blade when it became necessary, and he and Ana were married. Years passed and three children were born.

Then, just before Ana’s thirty-sixth birthday, the crops once again began to fail. King Sato was nearing his ninetieth year, but when the advisors agreed the time had come for a sacrifice, he refused to go to the roses.

Ana was told to kiss her children good-bye and prepare herself for the ceremony the next morning.

Terrified, Ana ran from the tower, through failing fields begging for blood, to the King’s Gate and out into