Blushing, Koen lifted a hand and touched his tangled hair. “Marry me?” he asked, his voice lifting weakly at the end.
“You don’t want to marry me, Koen. You don’t. I know you don’t.”
“But I do!” he protested. He held his hands out to me. “If we were married, then you wouldn’t . . . you wouldn’t have to marry Silvan. And, you know, do what the Children of Abel asked. Van would stop them from doing anything to you. He’d protect you, if you married me.”
I sighed.
“And then you can pretend like you’re a normal person. A normal boy. But you’re not, are you?”
The heat over his face was bright and high. His mouth formed a small, wavering line. “Maybe I’ll never be normal. But you wouldn’t be normal either. It would be okay, though. We could be friends. I miss—I miss being friends.”
Sometimes I missed it all too. Not only Koen but those meetings in the musty library, touching my hands to my heart and pretending like I was fighting for something pure and just. But the wounds were still there, raw and festering underneath my hard skin.
“I want to be friends too,” I murmured. “But I don’t think I can, not yet. And I know I can’t marry you.”
Koen stared down at the paving stones that lined Mara’s front walk.
“Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “I tried.”
“You did,” I agreed. He lifted his lips in a tiny, feeble smile.
“You don’t have to do it,” he said. “You don’t have to k—”
I shook my head. “No, I do. You said it once: These aren’t people you want to cross. There’s no telling what they might do. Besides, I want to. Silvan’s dad killed my mother. I need to set things right.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
Koen nodded finally, apparently satisfied. Without another word he started down the road toward his parents’ quarters, leaving the way he’d come. I watched him go. Then I opened up my sketchpad, scribbling hard across the page. I hoped to distract myself from the queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that just wouldn’t abate.
Because the truth was, I wasn’t sure if I could kill Silvan Rafferty. I really wasn’t sure at all.
Silvan wasn’t like Koen. He had no patience for evening strolls through the dome or holding hands. He demanded that I meet him in his room every night after supper so that we could talk about our wedding. But we hardly ever talked at all.
Instead we rolled around on his wide bed, getting all tangled up in the sheets, mashing our bodies together. I laced my hands through his hair, and his fingers, hot and clammy, worked their way over my belly. With his body heavy on mine, I didn’t think about my father. I didn’t think about Momma. I didn’t even think about Benjamin Jacobi or all the people who were counting on me. It was just heat, mouths, skin, lips meeting lips until mine were raw and peeling. Those nights in his bed brought me closer to my dreams than I’d ever been. Sometimes, when we rolled away from each other, I’d touch his soft hands and think about how they must be the hands I’d been promised.
Silvan, I thought, ignoring the ridges over his fingers, the long life lines on his palms, my bashert.
Did his parents know what we were doing up in his room at all hours of the night? They must have. I’d sometimes see them as I passed through their galley on the way to the stairs, and I blushed as I followed Silvan to his room. But they didn’t say anything. They didn’t even say hello.
I knew why. Plenty of kids messed around before marriage. But there were unspoken rules. Couples went for walks when they needed to be alone. They hid in the tall rows of corn or out in the alleyways between the shops. They didn’t burn off young lust under their parents’ roof.
The only thing that saved me from feeling terrible about the whole thing—feeling anything, really, other than the white-hot burn of lust—was the way that Silvan always pulled away at the last moment, before we went all the way. He’d squirm away from my hands or arc his body away from mine. At first I worried that he might be like Koen. But he wasn’t—he wanted me, I could tell. So when he’d lie in his bed, breathing heavily and smiling at me, when he said, “You really should get going. It’s getting late,” I thought that maybe he was just trying to be good. To wait until landing. To wait until we had our own home.
Exhausted after our trysts, I headed to Mara’s quarters under the gray light of dawn. The early morning was dim and cold; my hot breath fogged the air. For a moment, just a moment, the ship seemed to have taken on a new clarity. I could see every crack in the old metal pathways. I could hear the birds calling to one another. It was so cold. It seemed like there shouldn’t have been any birds. But there were, and I thought that maybe, for the first time ever, they were calling to me.
Then one morning I stepped inside and saw Mara sitting at her galley table, a deep frown wrinkling her face.
“You’re still up,” I said, pulling my boots off, ready to duck up to Artemis’s room to sneak in a few precious hours of sleep. Mara didn’t smile at me. She didn’t laugh.
“You were gone so long,” she said, pushing up from the table, “that I thought you might have forgotten your work.”
She took something from her pocket. A bottle made of amber glass, filled with white powder. Then she set it on the table.
“I thought you were going to give that to the rebels,” she said.
I took the bottle from her, staring down at its red-gold glass. My mouth groped for words, but Mara didn’t wait to hear them. She only rose wordlessly from the table.
“You need to be more careful,” she said at last, clutching the banister beneath her hand. “There are children in this house. If one of them got into that—” Her voice gurgled strangely, a strained sound. It was the only sign I’d ever seen her give that she cared about her children.
“I’ll be more careful,” I promised, clutching the glass bottle in my fist. Mara nodded once, twice. Then she disappeared up the stairs and was gone, and I was alone beneath the buzzing galley lights.
Before we set a date for our marriage, we needed to schedule a time to get our bloodlines checked. I mentioned it to Silvan in bed one night as his hand skimmed over my bare hip. We’d already tumbled away from each other. My body was spent, tired—but still responded to his touch like it always did. Goose bumps lifted over my arms.
“We need to make sure we’re not related, don’t we?” I asked. He smirked at me.
“I’m sure we’re not. I know your family has risen up in the ranks only recently.”
“So?” I said, feeling his fingers trace gentle circles on my thigh. “How do you know my great-grandma didn’t wear a gold cord? Maybe we’re distant cousins.”
“Terra, I would know if that were the case.”
“How?” I demanded.
Silvan gave his muscular body a twist, springing on me, grabbing my hands in his. He pressed my body to the mattress. His lips formed a toothy grin.
“I can tell,” he said. “It’s the way you walk, swinging your hips like a common girl.” He pressed his stubbly chin against my neck, leaving a trail of rough kisses on my throat.
“Besides,” he said, barely lifting his mouth from my skin, “it’s not as if it matters.”
I squirmed away from his kisses. “What do you mean?”
“The bloodlines are a farce,” he said. “You must know that already. We make our children in a lab. If they have any genetic flaws, we select out for them anyway. What would it matter if cousins married cousins?”