Now I understand. I know the real reason I’m locked away from my people.
“I may be tainted, but I’m not a fool,” I whisper into the too-tranquil air. It gobbles up my words and swallows them deep, smug in its assurance that the quiet order of the dome will never be disturbed. Seconds later, I bare my teeth in my most ferocious smile, and jump from the ledge.
The night comes alive. Cool air snatches my hair, lifting it from my shoulders, tugging at my scalp. It rushes up my pant legs, shivering over my belly and up my neck. My blood races, and my throat traps a giddy squeal.
The tips of my toes beat with their own individual heartbeats as they make contact with the curved edge of the first roof and I take a running leap for the second, deliciously alive with fear.
I’ve made this descent a thousand times or more, but still a taste of the original terror remains. The first time, my feet didn’t know the dips and curves and footholds for themselves. The falls—the six curved roofs below the tower balcony—were only a story told by Baba as we sat in the afternoon sun. My fingers and toes are my eyes. I couldn’t see the truth of my way out until I was already over the edge, dropping the ten feet to the top of the first roof. But it was there. Just as my father had said. As were the second and the fourth and the sixth, and the last tumble into the cabbage garden.
I plop down on the hard ground between the cabbage rows—no fertile patch of land is wasted in Yuan—and fold back into a crouch, staying low as I shuffle back and scatter the dirt with my hands, concealing the two deep prints from my landing. There is rarely anyone this close to my prison, but I don’t set off right away. With all the guards milling about, Baba surely has a patrol stationed near the tower.
I wait, squirming my toes, ears straining in silence broken only by the faint buzz of the hives at the bottom of the hill. The bees are quieter at night but still busy. I like the hum, the evidence of nonhuman activity. We used to have wild birds under the dome, too—all different sorts, some night singers, some day—but the last of them died years ago. Father said it was an avian epidemic.
“Why didn’t it take the messenger birds, then?” I asked him at the time. “Or the ducks and geese by the orchard pond? Why did only the wild birds die?”
“Wild things don’t always survive under the dome,” he said.
There was something in his voice that day.…
It made me wonder if he knows I’m not as biddable as I pretend to be, if he knows I’m wild, and doesn’t hate me for it. Or at least doesn’t blame me. It’s not as if I asked to be born this way, with a taste for defiance and a longing for the hot desert wind, the wind I felt only once, the day my mother took me for a forbidden walk outside the city walls.
I’ll never have that wind again—if I left the city for any length of time, I would die of thirst or sun poisoning, if the Monstrous didn’t get me first—but I can have my night runs. I can have the autumn smells, the satin of rose petals between my fingertips, and the sweeter sting of the roses’ thorns.
My mouth fills with a taste like honey and vinegar mixed together.
The rose garden. How I love and loathe it. How I need it and hate the needing. But still, I’ll go there first tonight. I want to see the color of the sky, know which of my moons hangs heaviest above the dome. I am efficient in my darkness, but how I crave the moonlight!
It’s hard to wait, but I don’t move a muscle, don’t twitch a nostril, even when my nose begins to itch in the way noses never fail to do when you’re not able to scratch them. Two minutes, three, and finally my patience is rewarded with the soft, rhythmic scuffing of leather boots on stone.
Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff. I am a soldier, this is my song, and I shall scuff it all the day long. I am a soldier and these are my boots, the biggest shoes for the biggest brutes.
My lip curls. Soldiers. Ridiculous. Yuan needs a third as many, and those should be stationed at the Desert Gate and Hill Gate and around the wall walks, where the rest of the city won’t have to bear witness to their strutting about.
Our only hope is to keep the mutants out. If they make it inside, the city will fall. If we’ve learned anything from the destruction of the other domed kingdoms, it should be that. The Monstrous are bigger, stronger, with poison seeping from their claws, and skin as thick and hard as armor.
They can see in the dark and live on nothing but a daily ration of water and cactus fruit. They are brutal beasts determined to destroy humanity and take our cities for themselves.
But our bounty will never be theirs. If they kill the keepers of the covenant, Yuan will turn to dust like the other cities and the land beyond our walls. Magic is loyal only to those who have bought and paid for it. With blood. Hundreds of years of blood, blood enough to fill the riverbed beneath the city and carry us all to the poison sea.
As soon as the soldier scuffs away, I scurry between the rows of cabbages on tiptoe, leaving as little sign of my passing as possible, counting the eighteen steps to the road, the four steps across it, the fifteen steps down the softly sloping hill—also planted with cabbage; oh, the cabbage I have eaten in my life—and into the sunflower patch. My fingers brush their whiskery stalks, feeling the heavy flowers bob far, far above me.
They are unusually tall this year. No matter how high I reach, I find only more prickly stalk and leathery leaves. I am nearly two meters tall, and my reach is another half above. They must be three meters, maybe more. I bet their heads are bigger than the moon.
“Moon. Moon, moon of mine,” I sing softly as I skip the thirty skips through the sunflower patch, up the rise to the city green where the children play. Seventy more steps—it is the widest green in the city, and the grass is still damp from the groundskeeper’s hose—and I am in the orchards that surround the royal garden.
Dried grass sticks to my wet feet as I carefully tread the last fifty steps that separate me from my destination. There are snakes in the orchards. They hide beneath the grass clippings, lurking in wait for the rodents that feed on the apples the orchard workers miss. More than once, I’ve felt a strong serpent’s body brush my bare foot, heard a rustle and a hiss as a viper slithered—
Shish. I freeze, ears pricking. My ears are very large, too. They hear more than average.
Yes … shish … a faint stirring in the grass to my right, but then nothing. Silence. After a long moment, I continue on my way.
Luckily, I’ve yet to step on any hidden squirmy thing. Snakes don’t strike unless they have no other choice. Given the opportunity to flee, they will, and so I force myself to move slowly, no matter how the roses’ perfume urges me to run. The smell is so strong, I can taste it, like the filling in the rose honey candies Baba brings me on the winter solstice. The sweets are terrible—bitter, and as enjoyable as sucking on a perfume bottle—but I eat them anyway. I save them up for treats on days when Baba is too busy to visit and Needle and I are alone and the silence threatens to drive me mad. The rose candies never fail me. I slip one into my mouth to melt, and taste freedom. Every time.
I pull in a breath and hold the sticky air inside me as I step onto the paving stones. The path is still warm from the sun. The stones kiss the bottom of my feet, whispering sweet things about how nice it is to see me again.