After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Yvain had launched himself from the Nests, slid down the material awning of the sixty-ninth floor, snagged at the statue on the fifty-first to check his fall, grabbed at the iron pipe that ran around the thirty-seventh, landed on one knee on the balcony of the twenty-fifth. He heard the scrape of the balcony door and a shout, but he didn’t look behind him as he vaulted over the railing to the slanted little roof over the next balcony.

He’d landed on top of one of the market stalls, breathing hard and blinking sweat out of his eyes. It had stung like tears.

Once, long ago, criminals were hanged and quartered. In these more enlightened times, criminals were still publicly punished. That was a deterrent to other prospective criminals.

But the body parts weren’t wasted, as they had been in the past. Machines cut open the criminal and removed their organs, harvesting them for law-abiding citizens.

And the criminal was punished with a live dissection.

Yvain had sat on the stall and watched Persie die in the market square, blood vivid on screens set on various buildings around the square, his small bright-haired wife’s pain interspersed with advertisements for the latest virtual sports equipment.

All for asking around about a buyer for a sovereign.

That night, once harsh daylight and those images of blood were gone, Yvain melted down the sovereign in a glow of fire and bright metal. He saw his reflection cast in the shining surface of a skyscraper wall, saw the light of the fire make the tears on his face look as if they were burning, as if he were crying gold.

The sovereign wasn’t pure gold after all. It had all been a lie.

After Persie died, for the three years of nights between Persie’s death and the Trials, Yvain did not go to sleep watching the birds. He turned his eyes to the golden mountains where the queen lived in her palace.

Persie had been right. Yvain had been able to make some money selling the metal of the melted-down sovereign. Rosamond was worth something.

Not enough. Not anything like enough.

Roz could not leave the palace until the Trials, but she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted inside the palace.

She always asked to train in the Hall of Mirrors.

There were no mirrors in the hall, of course, for anyone but Roz. It was lined with pictures of all the Rosamonds who had ever been made.

It was also the place where she and Miri learned hand-to-hand combat—what to do if a man broke into the palace, how to use the things that surrounded them as weapons—where she and Miri had learned lessons they would probably never put into practice. Roz could do backflips down the hall, seeing her own image upside down and blurred, repeated a hundred times.

Rosamond: carefully constructed by the finest technology to be the most beautiful of them all. Every Rosamond who had ever lived, and she was just the Rosamond who was living now. The only Rosamond who was living now, since the old queen was dead.

Except no Rosamond had ever learned to fight before.

Roz had read the books. The city council had wanted to make a prize people couldn’t pass up: setting every young man in the city a series of tasks—the Trials—that, if won, would mean the kingdom and the hand of the princess.

This way, the numbers of disaffected young men on the streets of their city were slashed, and the population and the crime level were kept down. Although with so many early marriages, and the men of the Court keeping strings of mistresses in town, the population never went down too much.

All because of you, dear, Roz’s nurse had murmured to her while she was gently warning Roz against taking risks when she was playing, against the hideous possibility that she might one day be hurt and disfigured. All because of your face.

Even Miri and Dareus always, always remembered not to touch her face.

One could wish Dareus was as careful about her ribs, Roz thought as Dareus got a staff under them and sent her flying through the air and sliding across the marble floor, until she landed with a smack against the wall.

She gasped for breath and fought down the urge to be sick.

“My captain,” she wheezed, in a most ladylike fashion. “That is no way to treat your queen.”

“My queen,” said Dareus, turning his staff over and over in his hands. “That is no way to guard your left side.”

Roz concentrated on the ceiling, and on the suddenly difficult task of breathing in and out. She heard the soft sound of Miri’s footsteps, and the light tap and tumble of a staff against marble.

“I always get smashed to bits, and you always win,” Roz said, closing her eyes. “Because you’re a sneak, and Dareus plays favorites.”

“I don’t,” said Dareus, his voice a little sharp.

“I always watch for an opening and you always dash right in,” said Miri. “Which helps create my opening, mark you.”

Miri was Roz’s favorite lady-in-waiting. The Court sent its daughters to keep her company for a time—never long enough to form a real friendship. But Miri’s parents had died in an accident, and the Court had let her stay in the palace, murmuring that she was bound to be a good influence. Since she was so quiet and well-behaved.

Little did the Court know that it was Miri who had persuaded Dareus to let them learn to fight. Roz was the one who had wanted to, but Miri was the one who had made it happen. She had made it sound so reasonable, that if anyone were to break into the palace, the queen and her lady should know how to defend themselves.

It was not reasonable; Dareus should never have allowed it, and all three of them knew it.

Roz put a hand under her head and opened her eyes. Miri sat down beside her with Dareus’s staff in one hand, Miri’s crisp dark curls blurring at the edges in Roz’s vision. She looked over Miri’s shoulder at Dareus. He looked at them both with soldier’s eyes, proud of Miri’s prowess, assessing Roz’s injuries and coolly finding them negligible.

“Come on, back on your feet,” he said. “Your guard has all been killed, my queen, and a man is in the palace. A real man.”

He said it absolutely emotionlessly. Dareus’s uncle had taken him in, brought him up, trained him to be part of the guard, trained him so that when his uncle died, Dareus would become the youngest captain a Rosamond had ever had.

But no man was allowed to approach Rosamond except the champion of the Trials. Rosamond’s guards were all cut so they could not dishonor the queen even if they wanted to.

Roz was surprised that Dareus didn’t hate her, sometimes.

But he didn’t. He was her friend, before being her guard. He’d agreed to teach her and Miri how to train. He’d even agreed to keep it a secret from the Court.

Roz climbed to her feet. “All right,” she said, and took another deep breath, ignoring her ribs. “Come at me again.”

Roz was beaten down twice more, but she beat down Dareus once to make up for it. Neither of them ever got near Miri. She was sly. Besides which, Dareus totally played favorites.

Roz left the Hall of Mirrors, went to her own bathroom, and washed up, with Miri in attendance. She had nice bruises coming in on her ribs, but when she washed her face, she saw it was still clear and clean, pale and untouched as a pearl.

The perfect face, they claimed—not the flatterers, but books written a hundred years ago. Designed perfect, all in symmetry, with tumbling dark hair—bright hair made you look too flashy, pretty rather than beautiful—but of course, porcelain skin, and clear blue eyes.

Dareus’s eyes had flecks of black in the gray color, and his nose was too long. Miri’s teeth stuck out slightly, and she was much too short to be the ideal. Roz had always found looking at them so interesting, rather than looking at her own image, so familiar it almost seemed worn, passed down and down and down again as it was. Never changing.

The world had called them clones before it called them queens.

Other people might have thought it was vanity that made Roz train in the Hall of Mirrors, but the truth was she fought better there. She was angry there.