Brave New Love (33 page)

I slip out of the tower and through the empty streets toward home. Around me most of the houses are dark and silent though behind some curtained windows I see dancing and hear laughter.
It’s the sound of Alini, the essence of joy, so familiar to me.

At home I strip to my boxers and burrow under the covers, twisting them around my body and throwing a foot off the end of the bed. I close my eyes, fall asleep, and wait for the Cruce, to do as
she might.

•  •  •

The quilt is heavy. Unbearably heavy. Crushingly heavy. I want to scream. I want to fight. I want to move but I can’t. I struggle. I gurgle. I put every ounce of effort
into opening my eyes and waking up but nothing happens. I heave the breath from my lungs to shout but there’s no sound.

She comes from the darkness bathed in white. Her arms are by her sides, fingers curled slightly. She looks nothing like she does in her filthy room. She’s strong as she strides to me, her
eyes almost compassionate in their rage. Her toes are pink and clean.

The guard from the tower stands by the doorway, casually leaning against the wall as if he’s seen this a hundred times and perhaps tonight he already has. Who knows where I fall on the
list of her duties?

I want to beg for help. For mercy. But the guard will do nothing to aid me. Everyone in Alini has struggled at some point and has been subdued. Everyone must face the Cruce, whether voluntarily
or not.

She comes for me in the black night as I struggle to shuffle free of sleep and stand before her. Some part of me knows what’s next. Has lived through this every night, some lost corner of
my mind. The part that’s howling at me in a terror so pure it’s deafening.

I want to fight her off. I want to raise my arms and beat against her chest. I’ve never felt the urge to hit a woman before. I’ve never felt the deep need for violence against
anyone.

Yes, you have
she whispers as she comes closer.

I’m not like that, I want to tell her. I’m not brutal.

Yes, you are
she says.

My eyes flick to the guard, wondering if he judges me as she does. He’s expressionless, almost bored.

She’s just in front of me now and I’m embarrassed to notice how the tips of her breasts press ever so slightly against my chest. The scratchy feel of her nightgown shifting over my
stomach. The fabric is a halo around her, almost translucent from a light source I can’t understand.

I want to slide my hand along her waist, let my fingers trail against her back down and down and down. Self-loathing explodes inside me, fresh hot waves unlike anything I’ve felt
before.

She smiles. Her lips are a glistening pink. Dark. A hollow of blackness peeping between them, the flick of her tongue.

Mercy, I want to beg. Please have mercy.

There’s no such thing
she says as she leans forward. As she presses those lips against mine and my body goes rigid.

The pain is so exquisite and intense that I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can barely exist.

Through my mind it all comes: the marching of horrors. Of every evil act I’ve contemplated or done, every petty desire, every loathsome thought or deed. The Cruce is breathing into me, her
breath a sickly sour taste of dry revulsion.

I can’t knock her away, her hands are tightly fisted in my hair, holding my mouth to hers as she exhales and exhales and exhales. First are the memories: my cat dying when I was twelve, my
grandmother’s passing when I was nine, the ashy pallor of her face as she wheezed her last breath.

I remember every nightmare, the stench of sickness, the desire to hurt and maim.

I remember failing. Day after day trying the same tasks and getting them wrong: trying to write with my left hand cramped around the paper, my fists clutching a rope as I tried to climb it, the
notes to a flute that sounded wheezy and dry. I remember girls turning their faces from me, boys mocking me.

I remember failed tests and my parents’ scorn.

And still the Cruce breathes it all into me and the taste of her mouth is nothing in the face of every other dark emotion coursing through me. Misery. Terror. As if everyone I loved has died a
grotesque death and returned to revisit the experience upon each cell of my body.

When the memories are done it is time for the emotions: desire, failure, depression, need, desolation, defeat, rejection, taunting, embarrassment. The feelings are so new, so sharp that I
don’t know how to corral them.

It’s too much. The sum of my failures and injuries and defeats. I’m drowning under it all.

Her lips curve against mine like a smile. She pushes her body close. Closer. For a moment I sense her desire to hesitate, a simple infinitesimal pause. As if she’s waiting for something,
but I don’t know what it is and so I stand there, captured in the thrall of the pain she’s vested on me, waiting.

The tip of her tongue touches the bottom of my lip. I’d have never realized it were it not for how dry my mouth tastes at the time, for how desperate I am for any comfort at all. My breath
catches, a heat exploding inside me.

“Will you remember this time?” Her voice aches.

Images flood through me, of us together and how I feel. My eyes open wide, my chest seizing. The strength of it is almost too much.

“I could never forget,” I whisper against her.

And then she inhales, pulling all of this from me. Stripping the misery from the molecules of my body. Last, I see her taking today: the confusion of finding the note in my own handwriting, the
worry that it might be true, that I might be a failure, the awkwardness of standing beside the guard, the uneasiness of watching the Cruce—
her—
in her room, the confusion of
leaving and tearing up the note.

She takes it all from me: every dark emotion, all worrisome thoughts. Anything negative that would spike against my enjoyment of life.

Finally she steps away from me. I feel a peaceful glow, a joy in existence.
Who am I? she
asks.

The Cruce
, I tell her, a sticky revulsion welling up from my stomach like bile.

Her eyes water. I wonder if she was expecting a different answer. I’ve never gotten an answer wrong in my life. It’s not who I am.

•  •  •

“You were talking to yourself.” Lit’s standing in the doorway, her dull brown hair pulled back in a tangled ponytail. Immediately I feel my cheeks heat up and
I turn away, back to a table full of empty red-clay pots waiting to be filled with moist soil. My fingernails are already black with dirt.

“I wasn’t,” I say.

Lit comes into the greenhouse. I sense the way she moves, the way the air shifts around her.

“I heard you.”

It’s already scorching in here, I should have raised the vents an hour ago but I’ve been trying to sweat out the confusion. I shift one of the pots on top of the note I’d found
that morning tucked beneath a loose brick under a stack of planters.

“I was talking to the plants. They grow better when you talk to them,” I offer, feeling lame. It’s a new sensation, this grasping for words. I’m not used to it, as though
suddenly this morning my tongue is too large for my mouth.

She walks down the cramped row of tables, peering at all the pots. “They’re empty,” she points out. “There’s nothing to talk to.” She stops next to me.
“Besides, it’s not like we have any trouble growing things here.”

I hunch farther over the workbench, fisting my hands in the soil and scowl. “What do you want, Lit?” There’s an edge to my voice. I take a deep breath, try to relax my
shoulders. I shouldn’t be rude to her, it’s not her fault she stumbled upon me at the wrong time.

She huffs out a sigh, shoving a frizz of hair from her face and I notice that the skin around her eyes looks dull. “I just thought . . .” Her voice trails off. She reaches a finger
toward the glass wall and as she begins to trace through the condensation a bead of water bends toward her wrist.

“What?” I cross my arms over my chest and lean back, pressing against the table. I’m being rude and I know it. It’s unnatural for me to be so terse and I almost apologize
but instead I press my tongue against the back of my teeth, trapping the words.

Her lips pinch tight together, making the scar that cuts across the left side of her upper lip glow white. “I didn’t sleep last night. I saw you going to the tower. I was just
wondering why.”

I inhale sharply and everything inside me stills. I have no idea what she’s talking about. “I never left the house last night,” I tell her evenly. “I didn’t have
any reason to.” I think about the tiny scraps of paper I found on the floor of my room this morning, how some of them clearly had my handwriting on them though I couldn’t puzzle out the
words.

None of it had been there when I’d gone to bed. Not that I could remember, at least.

I think about the note I’ve hidden under the flowerpot behind me on the table. Every part of my body focuses on it. I want to turn around. I want to flip the pot over, to see the familiar
writing. Instead I tighten my arms around my chest, the dirt on my hands rough against my skin.

“I saw you,” she says, leaning toward me. She hesitates before adding. “I’ve seen you do it before. Every evening to the Cruce.”

I force myself to inhale deep, letting the anger seep into the air before pushing it from my lungs. “You’re imagining things, Lit.” I try to sound nonchalant rather than angry
but I’m pretty sure I don’t pull it off. I’ve never lied before and I know I’m not good at it. I’ve never had a reason to lie before—a need to cover anything
up.

But I’m not lying, I remind myself, a tingle spreading down my arms.

She looks at me as if I’ve bruised her and for a moment I see the exhaustion on her face, the weight of her body as she stands facing me.

“You look exhausted,” I tell her, returning to my planting. “Maybe you hallucinated it.”

She looks at me and I raise my chin as if in a challenge. My systems are flooded with the desire to strike out, to protect myself, to run away. It’s a confusing mess and there’s no
way Lit can’t see it all.

Her gaze flickers away first, trailing down toward the empty pots sitting in front of me and up along the vines wrapping the window pulls. “Do you remember who she was before? When we were
little?”

I snort. Her question needs no elaboration and my answer comes easy. “The Cruce is no one.”

She seems to wince and I almost want to ask her about it but my mind wanders to the note buried under the pot and I press my lips tighter.

“And you think it’s fair?” she finally asks. “We get to be happy and she gets to be miserable?”

I look at her until she meets my eyes again. Before either of us was Initiated we would lean from windows and push our bodies out across the narrow gap between our houses and spend the evenings
laughing and trading stories. Today I miss those moments and wonder if I’ve missed them before and just don’t remember because the Cruce took the misery from me.

“She volunteered to take it on herself,” I remind her.

Lit raises one shoulder. “That’s what they tell us.”

A sudden jolt of unease hollows against my heart. “It’s what we
know
” I tell her.

Her smile is faint but when she grabs my hand her grip is insistent. “It’s what they let us remember.”

•  •  •

I should be in bed. Or I should at the very least be home or somewhere with friends—anywhere but striding through the tower and hovering by the stairs leading down to the
dungeon. Even though I haven’t been here since the Initiation my skin prickles with awareness of what waits below.

The horrible stench of the Cruce. The dark claustrophobic air.

I wouldn’t be here except for the note I found in the greenhouse this morning and Lit’s strange questions that have left unease running through my veins.

I tore the note up and dunked the shreds in water, watching the fibers of the paper drift apart. For most of the day I tried to forget the words:
You know the Cruce. You can love the
Cruce.

But still they won’t go away. I could wait until the night, wait for her to come to me and take the uncertainty from me but my legs won’t still, my mind won’t stop worrying
over what the note meant.

How anyone could love such a wretched creature is beyond me. She’s disgusting, horrible and cruel. It’s the one bad memory the citizens of Alini are allowed to hold as their own:
Initiation and the first introduction to the Cruce.

•  •  •

It was a beautiful sunny day, a perfect day, when the Architect led me and the other Initiates into the tower. We walked downstairs in a single line and I remember how those
before me began to wail as they each approached the doors.

We were unprepared for what waited for us.

Lit stood in front of me, which meant she could already see into the room when I couldn’t. I remember the way her eyes grew wide, her face white. The scar on her lip became a brutal red
slice as her mouth opened and she started to scream and scream and scream.

I knew at that moment that I didn’t want to see what lay beyond that door. That I wouldn’t see it. I tried to refuse but the Initiates behind drove me forward, no hesitation in their
steps.

I’d wanted to be brave—honorable—when I first saw the Cruce. She was the source of all our prosperity, the reason my life had unfolded so idyllically. I’d wanted to
somehow acknowledge her sacrifice and understand it.

But when I saw her I understood. She was the most horrible creature I could have imagined. It’s been several years since I saw her for the first—and last—time but I remember
how wretched and gross and wrong she was.

I remember Lit falling to her knees beside me, her arms wrapped around her body and her mouth open in a silent scream. In front of her a puddle of vomit spread over the ground, seeping between
cracks in the stones. Her eyes were screwed shut but I couldn’t stop staring at the Cruce.

What I couldn’t believe was that this was what our life was built on. That this miserable creature was the root of my happiness. That everyone else in Alini had seen this girl and accepted
her.