Aralia woke with a start, in darkness—
—not the creaking womblike closeness of the Damselfly—
—nor the empty nightmare hollow of Hellebore—
A warm body stirred beside her and she exhaled as all the years and miles and memories rearranged into some form of sense.
Ellie slept soundly next to her. One of Aralia’s arms curled around the girl’s stomach.
They were in her chambers at Harmine, in the wide softness of her bed. Why had she woken?
Aralia squeezed her eyes shut. There…had been dreams.
This was why she feared sleep, after all.
She winced as memory flooded back, a jumbled mess that cycled ceaselessly in the theater of her mind.
~ ~ ~
In her bunk near the door of the ward, Aralia waits, her body coiled like a spring-loaded bear trap, for the night watcher’s breathing to slow, then stop, as her poison takes effect.
It has to be tonight. She’s waited far too long already.
Her heartbeat is a hammer in her veins. Months of painstaking preparation are about to be put to the test.
In his chair by the door, the night watcher’s breathing has begun to creak and whistle a little. He gives a last little gasp and goes quiet. Aralia imagines his pulse going from weak to thready, and then to nothing. Arranging him a personal, lethal dose of somniferant had been far trickier than poisoning Hellebore’s cistern.
Her only regret lies in giving him such a painless, easy death. He deserves so much worse. They all do.
The specter of her thirst burning in her mouth, Aralia counts off another minute, then rolls out of bed, and checks his wrist. Nothing.
She turns and sees Pasha already rising from his bunk, a few rows down. Good. They must move quickly, before—
“Aralia?”
Monarda, her bunkmate, has been woken by the watcher’s last gasp, and Aralia’s hasty movements. The nervous moon of her face peeks over the edge. Aralia swears under her breath, and goes to her, trying to summon a reassuring tone. She needs to be cool and hard, like stone. She cannot afford to feel anything, or she will falter, and fail, and then Pasha will—
“Hush hush, go back to sleep.”
“What’s going on? Are you leaving?”
Aralia’s mouth goes drier than it already is. Only a few years separate them, but it feels like decades. An unbridgeable gap. She has looked after this girl, won her trust and her loyalty and now she must betray her.
“You must trust me, Mona.” She cannot stifle a wince.
Pasha arrives at her elbow, silent as a ghost. And close on his heels, a new presence.
“What are you doing?” Emilia hisses.
This is all going wrong already.
Aralia narrows her eyes at the new girl. A few months ago, when Aralia arrived here, she would have given almost anything to have an ally like Emilia in this place. A comrade of her own steely caliber, with an unparalleled talent for confrontation, with fierceness and determination and unrelenting hatred for their captors to match. But the same qualities that make her invaluable might doom them all now.
Not to mention, the two of them hadn’t gotten off to a good start.
~ ~ ~
“The nation is as a body,” says Riker loftily, pausing in his pacing to lean against the lectern. “Parasites, disease, and rot must be fended off. Vital force and will power must be guarded! Discipline is everyone’s duty!”
He pounds his fist for emphasis, staring at the benches of stiff, rigid children.
“Discipline is everyone’s duty,” they recite back dully.
“That body can progress to a higher state of evolution, but it can just as easily degenerate and regress! For the good of the nation, therefore, and all within it, we must take pains to ensure that each and every person is doing their part to progress to the next stage of evolution, to be properly hygienic. A healthy cell in a healthy body. Clean mind, clean body, clean society.”
Riker frowns at the assembled audience.
“Clean mind, clean body, clean society,” they chant.
“Before you came here, your families on their islands no doubt filled your heads with all manner of lies and hysterical deceit regarding the deeper meaning of your lives. Without our timely intervention, they would have robbed you of your place within Mankind’s ascendant destiny!”
The hygienist is just beginning to work himself into his morning lather when the double doors at the back of the low-ceilinged hall bang open. Aralia whips her head around to watch as the warden beetles his way into the room followed by two marines dragging a girl between them, her freshly shaven skull red with welts.
Behind her, Aralia hears Monarda choke on a sob, quickly stifled.
“Roll call!” screams the warden, an officious little man with white flecks of beard on a pink chin.
In silence, the children jump up and hasten to form ranks. A pit of unease growing in her stomach, Aralia makes sure to stick close to Monarda.
During the call and count, she watches the new girl, whose body sags between the two masked marines but whose dark eyes are quick and fiery and searching.
Aralia sees those eyes recognize Monarda and widen. The new girl bolts upright, strains forward, calls “Mona!”
Monarda makes a broken keening sound that rips right through Aralia’s heart. She knows that sound as intimately as her own dreams, her own nightmares, and for this reason she is ready when the younger girl lunges forward, breaking ranks.
Aralia’s arm whips out, catches Monarda by the collar, drags her back into line, and backhands her across the face.
“Discipline is everyone’s duty.” Aralia snaps at her curtly.
Monarda stares back in shock.
“Repeat it,” Aralia hisses.
“D-discipline is everyone’s duty,” Monarda says faintly. Her hand touches the red and swelling imprint on her cheek. She looks at Aralia as if she has never seen her before, and this does things to Aralia’s insides that Aralia ignores with a desperate determination.
But at least Monarda seems to remember where she is, and firm up. Only then does Aralia release her.
The warden nods approvingly. Aralia keeps her face blank, but inside she feels a heavy spark of satisfaction.
Their captors are making their first mistake.
The new girl’s eyes flash at her with hot rage and Aralia returns her gaze stonily, willing her to understand. She has already deduced that this must be Monarda’s lost older sister, Emilia.
Well, Emilia doesn’t yet have a context for the games within games that are playing out here, and has clearly marked her as an enemy.
Aralia wishes she could explain that their captors are not simply jailers, but in fact see themselves as Technicians playing a grand role in a History of their own making, their devotion to an ideology of social purity so extreme that they have their own aesthetics, their own morality, their own metaphysics.
She wants to gesture to the ranks of children, the benches, the hall, the whole insane nightmare they are all locked in. Look, Emilia, she wants to say. Do you see? These are no simple janitors—they are remorseless organizers and rationalists. Their grand ambition is not merely to ‘sanitize’ their world, but to construct a social machine, a perfect system of discipline that is self-operating, self-perpetuating and self-administering.
They cannot resist the lure of the victory that would be achieved if they could but recruit their staunchest enemies into their design—if they could recuperate even the most steadfast expressions of defiance and resistance to serve their purposes.
In their infinite pride, they seek to remake the world.
Aralia has decided that the only way to escape this place is to use that against them.
~ ~ ~
Her first glimpse of the hated place, Hellebore, is from the deck of a frigate. The bright daylight is harsh after the dimness of the brig, and her eyes stream with tears as she is hustled to the gunwale by two marines.
Her hatred of them had lost none of its burning spite, but after a week in a cell belowdeck with a throat raw from screaming, splinters festering under her fingernails, weakened by subsisting entirely on a thin porridge of yellow meal, she has decided to save her energy. Dazzled, she cranes her neck, squinting.
The crenelated fortress walls and looming tower squat atop the sea cliffs like some malignant intrusion from a more brutal world. Aralia blinks away tears, trying to memorize as much as she can—harsh squabbling of gulls, white spray of waves dashing themselves to pieces against the rocks. On three sides is a sheer plummet to the sea, on the fourth is a steep descent of gnarled tanoaks, the distant slope brown with their fallen, bristly leaves.
Aralia’s survey of the rest of the island is interrupted by the exclamation of her name, in a voice she hasn’t heard for a week, followed by a cry of pain. She yanks around to see Pasha being dragged up onto deck. Vivid relief and acrid terror roll through her with equal strength.
“Pasha!” She lunges.
A brusque fist to her stomach doubles her over, gasping.
The watch officer storms over. “Why aren’t they muzzled and bagged? Who’s your corporal?”
A metal bit is forced in her mouth, a leather strap drawn tight around her head. It catches sharply in her hair. Then darkness, as rough canvas is pulled over her eyes.
Pain, jostling.
She struggles for a while, but gradually less and less.
Numbness.
~ ~ ~
Aralia can smell the lard that greases the wheel hubs, hear the crunch of hobnail boots.
She jounces in the back of a cart like a sack of potatoes, feeling every little pock in the road vibrate into her skull through hard wooden boards. Her teeth are numb with rattling.
Pasha is bouncing somewhere alongside her—of this she is desperately certain. Their occasional groans served to reassure each other.
The barking of dogs, quickly silenced by sharp commands.
Her body feels very heavy, her mind very light. Not much holding them together. Her certainty of Pasha’s presence beside her is the only thing keeping her from floating away.
In the brig, the turnkey who brought her water and porridge and who emptied her bucket told her with empty eyes and a hungry smile that the Damselfly burned to the waterline.
She has tried not to believe him but she does.
The taunting of her captors has been too genuine. They all give off the unmistakable air of victory after a long-suffering hunt.
Is Kalista still alive? Still free?
Is anyone else?
The doubt and fear intrude like slivers of broken glass into her mind. In order not to put weight on them, in order to avoid going mad, she eases her way around inside her own head, attempts to force her spiraling thoughts to lie still, like an animal hopelessly caught in the jaws of another, larger animal.
Not fast enough, she is learning how to cordon off whole swathes of herself and lock them away.
The cart’s wheels jolt from dirt to stone.
She hears the clatter of chains, the slam of iron, men shouting commands in clipped Dragonian. She smells kennel and stable. Rough hands drag her from the back of the cart, and the breath is driven from her as she lands over someone’s shoulder. She is carried like a sack of flour a short distance, through a doorway, then dumped onto the floor.
She lies there limply for an interminable period, her body a dull throb of exhaustion and pain.
Footsteps. Someone looms above her.
Aralia steels herself.
The bag comes off her head.
A pudgy, pallid man in a pale uniform with short-cropped orange hair stares down at her with cold, penetrating eyes.
She tries to match the disgust in his gaze and throw it back at him. If it weren’t for the leather muzzle, she would spit in his face.
He looks away and calls impatiently for shearers.
Two girls around her own age hurry in and kneel over her. Their skulls are close-shaven, their faces are as hollow as empty beggar bowls. Aralia tries to thrash away as their hands seize her head.
“Filthy mutt,” the man rasps. He kicks her in the ribs with the hard tip of his boot, and the edges of her vision blur dark with pain. “Hold still, or they may slip and take off an ear.”
The snipping begins. She can feel the tears but fights them back. It is a deliberate humiliation, of course, designed to mark her internally as well as externally. Aralia has always kept her hair short out of preference, but the process of being shorn still takes something, still makes her feel helpless. She tries to retreat inside, hold onto some string of herself.
Pasha is all that matters. Hold onto him. Keep him alive.
The girls pull on leather gloves and open a bucket, and Aralia’s nostrils wrinkle at the acrid stink.
Sheep dip? Aralia thinks incredulously.
They rub it into her scalp mechanically, ignoring Aralia’s winces as the chemical goo stings and burns.
The man’s cold-eyed state is unwavering, penetrating, violating. “You will learn hygiene here, above all else,” he sneers. “Thank the fates.”
Through a red fog of rage, Aralia decides she will kill him very painfully and very slowly.
She wants to shriek at him that she doesn’t have parasites, wants to scratch his eyes out, wants to run, wants to die. She wants Kalista, wants Jacynth, wants her kin and kith and her ship and home.
She gets none of it. Instead she shivers in pain and shock on cold flagstones, while the blanked and silenced girls cut her soiled clothes off.
She feels like a badger, trapped, killed, peeled.
There is grunting and scuffing at the door, and then Pasha is shoved into the room to sprawl next to her. Her heart pounding, Aralia turns her head and their gazes catch and hold each other. Desperate relief, desperate terror pass between them.
A young man with a hatchet face, wearing the same pale uniform as the first, ducks in.
“More degenerate deception, I’m afraid. This one is no male, but a female.”
Pasha groans around his muzzle, and Aralia’s hatred immediately redoubles.
“Their germ lines must be truly bereft of vitality, to turn to such sickness and mistake it for health,” says the orange man flatly.
Hatchet-face frowns sagely. “I contend, esteemed colleague, that the disease begins in the mind before infecting the organs of reproduction, and can thus be spread far more virulently than via biological inheritance. I implore you to consider the combination of the mechanisms, at the very least.”
“Blood begins everything, Ganlock” sneers the first. “As you would no doubt admit, if you had the claim to any that was of consequence.” He gestured imperiously to Aralia and Pasha without looking down. “That is why such mongrels as these are susceptible in the first place. It is their evolutionary regression that renders them so trainable, and your rubbish conjectures to the contrary are founded on faulty logic.”
Ganlock’s tone goes silky in a way that marks him to Aralia as the more dangerous of the two. “Your arrogance is matched only by your capacity to deny the evidence of your senses, Standish. The measurements do not lie—it is the strength of the conditioning that is the primary determinant of the response of the subjects. The tertiary round of experiments will confirm my conclusions to the warden’s satisfaction. With every new batch, we are doing less and less and the subjects themselves are taking on more and more. Soon, we will not have to do anything but watch the system work and occupy our place as masters of it—not by any feat of sorcery but because the subjects have been trained to inflict the rest upon themselves and each other. Perhaps if you were a merit appointment instead of a political—”
“Have a care, boy,” hisses Standish, stepping closer, “with what you say next. My line is older and more ornate with glory than you could dare to comprehend, and your easy spring of favor in the Ministry is a mere season, quickly passed and easily forgotten.”
He turned away dismissively. “Take these to the gymnasium for morning exercises when the introductory sanitation is complete. I have business with the warden.”
There is brittle hatred in Ganlock’s stare as they narrow at the other man’s back.
In Aralia’s mind, the barest tendrils of a plan begin to creep and unfurl.
~ ~ ~
In the ward, Emilia steps closer. “Tell me what you’re doing, right now,” she whispers fiercely.
Aralia laughs silently. “Or what? You’ll raise the alarm?” She is irate with thirst. She has no time for this.
“I’m no snitch,” the other girl snaps. “Unlike you.”
Aralia grits her teeth and muscles down the urge to argue that. Every minute is crucial. All her favors are used, all her bridges burning, all to mount this one attempt. It needs to be tonight. She needs to get Pasha out of here or very soon this place will kill him.
She gives Emilia a cold stare. “Get in our way or try to stop us and I promise you that the next time you go to sleep, you’ll never wake up.”
“Aralia, you’re leaving us,” Monarda whispers.
Aralia allows Monarda a regretful look. “I’ll be back for you, I promise.”
She has barely a chance with Pasha, and no chance at all with the two dozen girls in this ward alone. She cannot take more, not tonight. She has fallen asleep every night of the last few weeks swearing to herself that she will be back to destroy this place and free them all.
“Don’t bother with her, Mona,” interjects Emilia acidly, before turning to Pasha. “You can’t try to escape tonight. Any other night, fine, but not tonight.”
Pasha frowns at her. “Why not?”
“I can’t tell you that, fool. Just try to convince your mule-headed sister—you’ll die if you try.”
“Leave us alone,” Aralia snarls. “You’re wasting time.” She takes several steps towards the door. “Come on, Pasha.”
Pasha hesitates then follows, with one last look over his shoulder at Monarda, who is staring stricken after both of them.
Emilia turns away, cursing under her breath.
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