Brave New Love (35 page)

I start to pull back but she holds me to her, moist soil sliding from her fingers along my skin as she presses her body to mine, shoving me back against the bench.

She’s smaller than I am, weaker. I could easily push her away but I don’t because I like the taste of her and the clean scent of her and the way she makes my body hum along with
every living thing surrounding us.

When she finally pulls away I’m panting, sweat beading my forehead, and she asks, “Could you love me?”

And I want to tell her
yes
but I remember how she looked at me when we first saw the Cruce and the tight pain of embarrassment clenches around my chest again. She is the only one in the
world who knows about my weakness. How could she ever want me?

When I say nothing she turns half away and stares down at the dirt smeared over her wrists.

I force myself to ask her, “Do you remember Initiation?”

Her eyes flare wide for a moment but she won’t look up at me and my stomach tightens. I could stop now, just walk out of the greenhouse and go about my day as if this conversation had
never existed. And then tonight the Cruce could take the memory of uneasy feelings from my mind and all will be right again.

But if the Cruce can take away the misery of this moment, I might as well ask the question I really want the answer to. “Do you remember what I said? What I looked like?”

She lifts her eyes, focusing on the distance, and when she moves her gaze to me she looks everywhere but directly at me. “Is that what stops you from loving me?”

I lift a shoulder.

She raises a dirty finger and trails it from my forehead down over my nose and across my lips. The taste of rich soil reminds me of her kiss. “No,” she finally answers. “I only
remember the Cruce. Nothing more.”

This time I’m the one to pull her toward me. I’m the one to seal my mouth to hers, a heat so deep inside it sets fire to my veins.

•  •  •

That night, the moment I remember how much I love the Cruce I feel a desperate twist in my stomach and fall to my knees. “Oh no,” I moan, shoving my fingers through
my hair as I remember kissing Lit over and over again through the afternoon.

I wrap my arms around the Cruce’s waist, bury my head against her abdomen and beg her to forgive me. “Take it away from me,” I plead. “Make me forget it ever happened.
Her, too. Make us both forget. You can take the memory from us. Please.”

She caresses my face with her fingertips and I flinch against the touch. “It doesn’t work that way, Went. I can only remove the misery, never the joy.”

I look up at her, feeling dry and empty. “Then let me leave a note for myself. Please. Let me just know that I can’t be with her.”

For a moment she ponders my request and I don’t wait for her answer before crawling to the table in the corner and scribbling the message.

You do not love Lit. You love the Cruce.

•  •  •

My days become ones of discovery: of Lit’s body, of her dreams. Each secret she shares with me I tuck away with the others, packing them together in my heart that grows
with every kiss and stolen moment.

I never knew such a love and longing could exist together.

This morning I whistle as I wander into the greenhouse and I find her bent over the row of pots arranged against the far windows. “Anything new?” I call out to her because
we’ve been trying to get something to grow in that dirt for weeks. The fact that they’re still barren is odd for Alini.

Lit’s shoulders stiffen and a small slice of unease wavers inside. I approach her hesitantly, noticing that even the air seems off and indifferent. As I draw near I see beyond her that the
pots are tipped over, and soil spilled over the table and floor. Spread among the debris are dirt-smeared scraps of paper that she’s diligently piecing together.

There must be dozens of the shredded puzzles, most of them already completed.

My eyes narrow as I recognize the handwriting as my own before I can read what the letters spell out. “Lit?” I ask because I feel unbalanced, the tension radiating from her wavering
in the air.

I read the first note I come to:
You don’t love Lit. You love the Cruce.

I read the next note and the one after:
You don’t love Lit. You love the Cruce.
Over and over again the same words. The same lazy tilt to the letters in my cramped penmanship.

I dash my hand through them, pulling the notes apart at the seams where they’d clearly been ripped once before. “What is all this?” I cry out in a rage, hoping
that anger can keep the truth from being known.

I wait for her to turn and look at me, expecting the same despair on her face that I feel in my own heart. But she just keeps arranging the scraps of paper over and over again, lining up the
words of my own betrayal.

“I don’t understand,” I tell her, pulling her fingers from the dirt and clutching them in my own. “I love you, Lit.
You
.”

When her eyes meet mine there’s no misery. No rage. Just a bland sense of obligation. “Ask her, then. The Cruce knows everything.”

Tugging Lit behind me, I stalk from the greenhouse and through the village to the tower. She doesn’t protest and no one thinks anything of the two of us walking hand in hand. If they
notice the tension in my face, in my every movement, no one comments as they nod hello and remark on the continued good weather.

In the distance I hear the call of bells signaling the start of a festival, the cheer of crowds watching horses race and the call of gulls banking lazily over the smooth stretched lake dotted
with pristine white triangular sails. Alini unfolding perfectly just as it does on every other day.

“Have you been back since Initiation?” I ask as I hold the heavy wooden tower door open, the darkness beyond cut through by slices of sunlight from slits of windows set high in the
stone walls.

She shakes her head. “You?” she asks and I tell her the truth.

“Never.”

The air is cooler in the shadows, becoming almost physical as we take the stairs down to the dungeon. Acrid smells assault me—dirt, decay, and the Cruce’s unwashed body. I want to
hide my nose in the sleeve of my shirt but I refuse to let Lit see such weakness and so I just push myself faster, hoping to get this over with.

The guard nods at our approach but I stalk past him and bang my fists against the door barring the Cruce. “Explain the notes to me!” I shout at her and the guard wraps his hand
around my arm, tugging me back.

“She’s not to be touched,” he explains.

I glance at him, disgust roiling through me at the smell and sight of the wretched girl sprawled on the other side of the door. “Who would ever touch such a creature?” I ask him and
to prove my point I spit at her.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t react, just curls tighter around herself, the ragged hem of her nightgown trailing over her dirt-encrusted legs.

When I turn to Lit I find her standing still in the middle of the hallway, her face pale and fingers trembling. “It’s okay, my love,” I whisper against her temple as I pull her
toward me. “I’m here. I’m yours.”

•  •  •

“Why do you do this to me?” I ask the Cruce that night after she’s filled me with my memories and allowed me to trail my lips along the edge of her shoulder.
“Why do you allow me to remember my betrayal and do nothing to fix it? Please,”—I’m on my knees, my fingers wrapped in the brilliant soft white of her nightgown, tugging at
the hem,—“let me take you away from the village. Let me remember how much I love you every morning when I wake up. Let me make you happy.”

She caresses her fingers across my forehead, down my nose and over my lips and I remember when Lit did this the first time we kissed and my stomach twists.

“You agreed to this Bargain like everyone else,” she says, voice noncommital.

“I didn’t know,” I tell her. “I didn’t understand what it would mean.”

“You’d make them all miserable?”

“I’d let them determine their own happiness—just to allow you the chance to find your own.”

She slips to her knees in front of me until we’re nose to nose. She smells like the dizzying, drowning downpour of summer rain. “You’d do that to Lit?”

And here my words catch large in my throat.

“You love her,” the Cruce urges.

“Only when you make me forget about you.”

The corners of her lips raise. “I never make you forget about me. You are always aware that I exist. You come and visit me every afternoon—but you always find me despicable
then.”

I grasp her hands in mine. “You take away my ability to remember that I love you.”

She looks past me, out the window and I follow her gaze. A short distance away Lit sits in her room, her face turned to the night. Starlight gleams from where tears slip from her eyes.

“She watches us every night, you know,” the Cruce tells me. “When I go to her she screams and fights against me. Tells me how wretched you are to betray her. She asks me to
take away any memory that she ever cared for you.”

My lips feel bloodless. “Why don’t you?”

She smiles. “I can only take the misery,” she reminds me.

“But you take all of this,” I cup her cheek in my hand, run my thumb along the lashes of her eye. “You take my love.”

She presses herself against me. “It’s a miserable kind of love.”

“Then why do you give it back to me? Every night you let me remember. Why not just keep it all?”

For a long moment she examines me, tracing every part of me. “Is that what you’d want?”

No
, I think to myself. “Yes,” I tell her. It is the most painful word I’ve ever uttered.

There’s silence between us and then she pulls back, going to stand at the window and gaze at Lit only a few feet away.

I stare at her back, wondering at what I’m giving up. How I could be so weak? I should be taking her away from Alini and up into the mountains. My love should be pure enough to rescue us
both.

But I’m too scared.

And I can’t do that to Lit.

The Cruce traces something over the fog on the glass and I turn away to grab a pencil from the table and scribble out a note, shoving it into a crack in the wall before I stand and go over to
her.

The Cruce knows everything. Your emotions are not your own. She has taken them from you. You failed the Cruce.

Maybe someday I’ll come across the note and I’ll go to see the Cruce and I’ll demand an explanation. Maybe I’ll be better in the future. Maybe I’ll be stronger and
wiser and I’ll figure out a way to put this puzzle together in a different order to form a new picture where everyone wins and no one loses.

“I love you,” I whisper against the Cruce’s neck.

She turns in my arms. “You always have,” she says, her eyes cloudy with tears.

“Why are you letting me forget?”

As she presses her lips to mine she smiles, “Because I love you.” And then she inhales, taking it all from me.

J
ESSE
K
ARP

On the three hundred fifty-seventh floor there was no nighttime. The diseased light that lit the stained, cracking concrete corridors often went into mad seizures of prolonged
flickering, a false promise to finally succumb. But in the end, the grim, bruise-colored illumination beat down like an eternal punishment. The bulbs were behind a clear shield that no amount of
hammering could shatter. Even in private rooms, where you could switch off your own lights, the alien glare crept in like a fungus under the door. Darkness, which could render the ruin and
desperation of everyday life invisible, was at a premium here.

Akil had a knack for darkness. As an orphan, he was seen as a resource drain and thus spurned. Show kindness once and the damned thing could grab hold of you and your family, suddenly swallowing
up entire shares of rations and supplies. Better to keep orphans away to begin with. Shout at them when they came too near, kick them if they didn’t go. So Akil, an orphan since he was eight,
had cause to find places away from the others and was willing to penetrate and explore where others wouldn’t—small, hidden places that the light, sometimes, didn’t reach. Darkness
within abandoned quarters, filled with must and filth and sometimes not really abandoned at all, but home to one of the silent, viper-cruel forgotten tenants. Or the darkness of the old shunned
hallway.

Through the twists and turns of the central quarters, on the outskirts of the maintenance and machinery zone, on the outside edge of 357, the shunned hallway curved around a bend that few had
ever seen the far side of. The lights here flickered constantly, the walls lined with a multitude of fissures and cracks like wrinkles on the face of an ancient man. Moisture filled those cracks,
dripped from the ceiling into foggy gray puddles on the floor.

They said that, years ago, on 358, the filtration and waste systems had undergone catastrophic failure and the halls of that level had slowly filled with fluid. Hundreds of bloated bodies,
dissolving in poisonous water and their own excrement, floated above. They said one day the ceiling of the shunned corridor would crack open and disgorge this torrent, meting out the same
inevitable fate to the tenants of 357: drowning in shit.

The truth was, no one knew. No one knew what happened on the floor above or even if there
was
a floor above at all. No one knew for a fact that they were on the three hundred
fifty-seventh floor. Only that the number 357 was stenciled in fading blue ink on every concrete corner of this place. If they
were
on floor 357, with 356 floors below them, then there may
just as well be more floors above.

Akil had, one day when he was twelve and being pursued by three boys who had accused him of stealing some scrap metal, ventured down the shunned hallway, where the dim light became little more
than a glimmer on the concrete walls that moldered and festered like open wounds from the constant exposure to moisture. Finally, pushing back toward a dead end of concrete, he found that the
lights had failed completely, leaving a patch of immaculate darkness.