Of Beauty and Beast

I’ve always craved freedom more than anything else. Anything.

If even one citizen of the dome and one Monstrous can love the other more than they love anything else …

If I’m brutally honest with myself, do I really love Gem more than freedom? Have I ever loved anything more than that elusive, seductive unknown? If I had the choice—Gem or freedom, even the freedom that will come with death, when all my obligations have been honored and I’m free to exit on my own terms—what would I choose?

Gem is strong and brave and clever and good, and he makes me feel things I never dreamed I could feel, but he is also difficult and frustrating and impatient and … overwhelming. His arms feel like home, but he represents everything strange and uncertain and unknown. Loving him means gathering up all of those things, and carrying them with me. Forever.

Love means being vulnerable and beholden. Love means embracing the pain I’ve been holding apart from myself for all the months that I’ve waited for him. It means taking that pain and claiming it and knowing it might not be the last of the pain he’ll bring into my life.

Love is pain, and pain is the opposite of freedom, and freedom is all I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve never really stopped to wonder why. Why do I want my freedom so desperately? Why do I dream of the wind instead of something solid or permanent that I can hold in my hands, my arms?

Maybe I … Maybe …

“Isra! Isra!” Junjie is still shouting loud enough to rattle the door, but his cries seem muted, drowned out by the roar of the revelation taking place inside me.

“I had nothing better,” I whisper. Back in the time before Gem, back in the darkness, in my cage, in my narrow world with Death waiting with His arms outstretched and only my father to help me prepare for the long walk to greet Him, there was nothing better than the dream of having no ties to bind me.

But Gem, with all his flaws and complications and high expectations, is better. His love, his faith in me, his belief that I can be as strong and brave as he is … The way he makes me feel and think and try harder than I’ve ever tried …

All of it, all of him, is better than anything else. Anything at all.

I take a breath and let the pain and love and admiration and everything I feel when I think of Gem fill me up, soak into my soul, break my heart wide open. It hurts—so, so much—but it’s also a relief. It’s also warm and peaceful and safe. Beautiful. This kind of love is weightless, limitless.…

And almost exactly what I imagined freedom would feel like.

If only I’d known sooner. If only I could thank Gem for helping me find the only thing I’ve ever wanted as much as I want him.

26 GEM

I’M too late. Yuan is falling before my eyes.

Cracks as wide across as my body snake up the surface of the dome.

Stones tumble from the wall walks, making skittering sounds beneath the moaning of the buckling metal that once fused the glass to the rock.

Bizarrely shaped Smooth Skins unlike any I encountered during my captivity, partial mutants that I assume are the Banished that Isra spoke of, and a few starving animals stream away from the once-healthy city in a seemingly endless ribbon across the desert. The last of them emerged from the Desert Gate less than an hour ago.

Isra was not among them. But I didn’t expect her to be. There’s a reason the city is crumbling to pieces. Isra is gone.

Not gone. Murdered, and the city along with her, while you walked away. And stayed away, wallowing in your weakness. You might as well have slit her throat that first night. You’re the reason she’s dead.

Add another name to—

I begin to hum beneath my breath one of the songs Isra taught me, a complicated tune with as many ups and downs as the path over the mountains that brought me back to Yuan from the wilds where I had lost myself for months.

Singing drowns out the terrible thoughts. Sometimes I imagine I’m singing to Herem, the son I held for the first time the day I lifted him onto his funeral pyre. Sometimes I imagine Father singing along in the deep, steady voice of my childhood, banishing from my memory the confused whimpers of his last days.

By the time I returned, Father no longer knew me. He called me by his brother’s name. He asked where our sisters were. He smiled and told stories about his new mate, as if he were a young man and he and Mother just married. He cried like a child, begging me to bring a light into the hut because he was afraid of the dark.

He died in his sleep a week after I returned. I never got to say good-bye to the man I remembered.

Gare blamed me for that, too. He blamed me for Father’s broken mind. He blamed me for the twenty dead before I brought the food. He blamed me for the hopeless future when the carefully rationed provisions inevitably ran out. He said I should have taken the roses and Isra and made Yuan’s dark curse our own. He called for a war party to be formed to return to Yuan and capture the roses and the queen at any cost, to kill every Smooth Skin we could kill and avenge our tribe. Our usually peace-minded chief agreed, but the final decision for war is always taken to our people.

It failed by one vote. Meer’s mother said no. She said Meer wouldn’t have wanted to live if it meant binding our tribe to dark magic. She said Meer wouldn’t have wanted her son to be raised under the shadow of evil or for me to lose the woman I love.

I told my people what I felt for Isra. Most of them assumed my head had been damaged by my time spent under the dome.

I close my eyes now, and let my head fall back against the warm rock behind me. Isra. Thinking her name is enough to rip me apart. I was sure I was done with these feelings. I thought I’d known the worst pain any man could imagine, but I was wrong. There is still more pain. New pain. The worst pain. I am a broken man. Without Isra, I will never be whole again.

There is nothing left to hope for, no reason to keep living.

I imagined that the worst thing awaiting me in Yuan would be explaining to Isra why it took me so long to return, asking her forgiveness, hoping she could understand how lost I was. But this …

By the ancestors …

I should have known it was possible. I should have prepared myself.

You knew. You refused to prepare. Coward.

“I’m not a coward,” I whisper. I never betrayed her. I never lied, I never took the easy way, even when Gare, the last living member of my family, disowned me before the tribe, when he said a lover of Smooth Skins would receive no death wails from his throat, and vowed to let my body rot on the ground if I were foolish enough to die before he does.

He won’t give me the release of a funeral fire. He hates me that much.

I don’t hate him, but I would have fought him if he’d tried to hurt Isra. I would have killed him if I’d had to. My own brother. I’m no better than he is, but I’m—

“Not a coward,” I choke out.

“No, you’re not.” A soft voice. A girl’s voice.

My eyes fly open—some desperate part of me hoping I’ll see Isra, though I know her voice is deeper and richer than the one I heard. Instead I find Needle standing at the base of the rocks I climbed last night and haven’t bothered to leave all day. She looks up at me, her golden skin rosy in the fading light, her black eyes glittering with wonder. She looks … complete.

“I can speak.” She blinks, sending twin streams of water racing down her cheeks. “For the first time in my life. I was born without the parts I needed to make words, but a few minutes ago I felt …” Her fingers touch her