Forbidden (4 page)

Rom ducked to his left, around the house toward the workshop. With any luck they would pursue him out the front while he made for the back of the house.

Shouts reached him as he sprinted through the workshop door. Then he was inside and across the room, skidding and nearly going down as he grabbed the box from where he’d dropped it.

He regained his balance and ran out of the workshop. They were coming, rounding on him from the side of the house in the falling darkness. He wheeled left and ran toward the waist-high iron fence between his house and the neighbor’s. If there was any route of escape it would be here.

He vaulted the fence, landed with a skitter of stones, and sprinted across the narrow back lot—and the next one after that. When he reached the end of the third lot, he veered toward the lane and sprinted across the old cobbles.

A shout issued from the alley less than twenty paces off. Rom ran through the narrow file between two houses on the other side of the lane, out to the opposite street. Past house lots, past a copse of stunted trees to a path at the edge of a tiny neighborhood park.

The perennial clouds that obscured the sun by day obscured the moon most nights as well. But Rom would have found his way along this path in pitch darkness.

He could think of only one person who might help him make sense of his predicament.

Avra.

It took him ten minutes at a steady jog to reach her neighborhood, where he ducked around the corner of a small outbuilding. Hearing no sound, he ran, bent low along the rear walk of several row houses, to the fifth one. When he’d made his way to the back of the building, he stopped midway at a heavy door with a combination lock and listened for any sign of pursuit.

Nothing.

He entered the code and let himself into the building, but he did not breathe any easier.

Seeing his mother die so violently left him with no doubt as to his own fate. If they would kill her simply to put fear into his heart, they would think nothing of killing him.

He saw it again—the obscene gush of blood, the slumping of Anna’s body, the way she had collapsed to the floor.

In the Age of Chaos, before humanity had evolved out of its slavery to emotions, he might have suffered their debilitating effects. He remembered the word
sorrow
, whatever that was, and knew it might have rendered him a lump of useless flesh, in which case he would have been dead by now.

Then again,
fear
had nearly incapacitated him. Now he would have to control that fear if he hoped to survive.

He turned up a short staircase of decaying cement. The landing separated into two doorways. He entered the code into the left one and silently let himself in, wondering momentarily if he would enter another death scene.

The kitchen and living room inside were quiet, dimly lit by a single lamp.

“Avra?” His voice seemed too loud.

He hurried past the kitchen to the hallway that led to the only bedroom on the floor. The door pushed open easily.

“Avra?”

She bolted up from her bed along the adjacent wall. A book fell with a
thump
to the floor.

“Rom!” she breathed. “What are you doing scaring me like that?”

For a moment, he told himself it was all untrue. That it had not happened—the murder of the old man or of his mother. Here in the familiar clutter of Avra’s bedroom, unchanged in all the years he had known her, he could almost believe it.

But then he remembered the box in his hand, the ache in his fingers from his death grip around it.

And its death grip on him.

He would find no refuge here. They had found him at home; they would come to this place soon enough.

“I need your help,” he said.

She stared back with startled eyes so dark he couldn’t tell where the irises ended and the pupils began. At first glance one might mistake her for a girl younger than her twenty-three years. Lithe-framed and small-boned, she embodied youthful fragility, though she was stronger than anyone might guess.

“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”

They were running out of time. He looked around, found her shoes, and grabbed them. “We need to go. Quick. Put these on,” he said, dropping them before the bed. He blew out the lantern on the desk and then drew the curtain aside. “Hurry!”

“Hurry why? You’re scaring me!”

“We have to go.”

“What? Why?”

“My mother’s dead.” His voice was as empty as he felt.

“What?” She blinked.

He glanced at her from the window. “I saw a man killed today and I ran. He was killed for this.” Rom held out the bundle in his hand.

“What do you mean,
killed
 ?”

“Killed. Murdered. We have to go!”

“Go where? You’re not making any sense!”

He willed himself to talk around the panic rising up within him with each passing second. “The Citadel Guard killed a man for this. The man who gave it to me, they slaughtered him. With a knife. And then they came to my house.”

“What?”

“They came for this. And they killed my mother.”

She stared.

“I need your help. And you need mine. They came for my mother and they’ll come for you.”

“You think they’re going to kill me?” Her voice had risen in pitch.

Outside, a dog barked.

Rom peered back out the window into the darkness behind the building. Two forms passed the glow of a lower-level window. “They’re here!”

She sprang to her feet but then stood there, frozen.

“I don’t want my journey to end today,” he said. “But if I stay here, it will. And if you stay, I think yours will, too. If you’re ready for that, I’ll leave. But I promise, they’ll kill you.”

She hesitated only one more moment, her breath coming shallow and quick in the air between them. And then she shoved her feet into her shoes.

“Where are we going?”

This, he had already thought out. She wouldn’t like the answer.

“Do you trust me?”

“Yes.” She grabbed her cloak and threw it over her shoulders.

He took her hand. Together they ran down the hall. When she turned toward the kitchen, he pulled her the other way.

“No. Quickly. The front.”

He blew out the lone lamp in the living room. In the darkness, she unlatched the front door.

They waited. Rom blinked, strained to readjust to the dark.

When the dog began its manic noise again, he whispered: “Now.”

As they ran down the steps and out into the night, Rom sent a prayer to the Maker. He asked only one thing: that he not witness a third killing tonight.

E
lectric light
high inside the tunnel flickered through the windows of the underground train. It leapfrogged over the empty seats in stripes. It played through the auburn strands of Avra’s hair.

They stood together toward the back, Rom with one arm around the back exit rail, the other around Avra, who could not seem to still her trembling. He knew the reason. Avra, of all people, was not prepared to chance her own death. Though the pall of it had hung over her for years, she was less prepared than anyone for the inevitable.

Her hair caught in the day-old stubble against his chin. He closed his eyes, inhaled the soapy scent of it, and tried to imagine that it were any other day. That her breath against his collarbone was not uneven, the small fingers digging into his back were not ice-cold.

The box, that toxic bundle, was pressed between them, hidden inside the folds of Avra’s cloak where she’d shoved it upon sighting a compliance officer near the underground entrance.

She shuddered and he tightened his arm around her as the train lurched around a corner.

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Are you sure she’s dead?”

He thought of the gurgling gash in his mother’s neck, the way she had crumpled. The blood—so much blood—soaking into the floorboards. He thought of her terror, and his.

“Yes.”

He looked across the train car to its only other passengers: an older woman reading a paper, and a university-aged man who stared out the dark windows at nothing.

Rom wondered if he would ever again have the luxury of idle thought or random dreams. Somehow, he doubted it.

She turned her face into his shoulder. “I don’t see how I can help you. Maybe you should just turn yourself in.”

“I’m not ready to die.”

“But if it’s your path—”

“And what if it’s yours? Are you ready?”

She fell silent.

“I know I’m risking Bliss by running. I know. But I can’t go in. Not yet. I need you to help me think this through. And I can help you stay alive. Because I’m telling you, if they find either of us, we’re dead.”

“You said it’s a vial of blood,” she said. “Whose? Why would an old man say that about your father, and why does the guard want it? Why didn’t the old man just give it to them?”

“I don’t know. Shhh.”

Across the car, the young man glanced at them. The woman reading the paper had begun to tear one of her fingernails with her teeth. Rom was sure they hadn’t overheard, and that they had fears enough of their own to keep them occupied.

The train came into the station. “We get out here.”

She hadn’t asked yet where they were going, and he hadn’t told her.

They passed through the station toward the gate, their gazes flicking along the platform to the other end where two compliance officers stood in conversation. Ducking low, they hurried past the gate and filed up the stairs to emerge on the street. Lamplight reflected in yellow pools on the pavement. The air was heavy, promising rain.

“We’re going to the basilica, aren’t we?” she finally said.

He nodded.

“Isn’t there anywhere else?”

“Not at this hour. Which is why no one will be there.”

Overhead, the sky broke. Rain began to fall in light, smattering drops, and then in the onslaught of a downpour. Together they ran across the street, past the wan lamplight, through the darkness to the looming form of the basilica.

He still had the key from the funeral service earlier today; it was routine for him to pick it up in advance so he could come in early and practice. Sometimes, if he had extra time, he lit the candles upon the small aisle altar for Avra. The clerics would say the candles didn’t fulfill her need to attend services in person, and they were surely right. But he had done it now for years in secret because she’d asked him to. Besides his mother, there was no one he honored as much as Avra, for reasons that not even he understood.

They entered through the small wooden side door. Inside, the cavernous space of the basilica echoed with the sound of the groaning hinges. The stained-glass depictions of Sirin and Megas seemed oppressively bleak despite their clear eyes, recast in the last few years in the pale, icy blue coveted by the Brahmin royals.

He relocked the door behind him. The sound of the bolt sent a hollow echo like the closing of a vault through the cavern of the sanctum.

“This way.” He led her to a narrow door at the side, opened it, and flicked the switch on the landing. Electric light, sallow as the streetlamps and only half as strong, barely lit the old stairwell. They descended past the first landing and the second, and then into the basement corridor past an old service elevator. He stopped at a storeroom midway down. Any farther and they would end up in the ancient crypt. Avra would not be able to endure that.

For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure he could, either.

The room was long—long enough to have two doors on the hallway—and stored several stacks of folding chairs, spare seven-branched candelabras, boxes of candles. And there was the casket from the funeral earlier today. It lay atop its metal carriage against the far wall.

He turned away, unnerved by it now in the feeble light.

He dug several vanilla-wax tapers out of a box, set them in one of the candelabras, and lit them with one of the candle lighters from the corner. He flipped off the room light so that the coffin lay in darkness.

“Better?”

Avra stood in the circle of the candlelight, looking completely lost. Rom took a chair from a stack, set it down, and opened it for her. But instead she just stood there, holding the box with the blood.

“We can never go back, can we?”

“I don’t know.” He took the box from her and set it on a small table next to the candelabras, noting that her hands were positioned as if she were still holding it. A moment later, she lowered her arms.

Rom strode to the chair and sat in it himself, got up again, rubbed at his face, sat back down. Looked at the box.

“You’re making me more nervous,” Avra said.

It was everything he could do to remain calm. “Help me think. I can’t think.”

“You shouldn’t have taken the box.”

“I know. But the old man talked about my father. He told me to swear. And then…and then they killed him.”

She let out a shaky breath. “Anyone would have run. I would’ve.”

“Run, yes. But taken the box…”

“You shouldn’t have taken the box.”

“But I did.”

“We could leave the city, go to Greater Europa,” she said. “To my parents’—”

“No. They’ll turn us in.”

“We can’t stay here! Maybe your mother was right. Maybe we should just go to compliance.”

“Are you forgetting everything I say the moment I say it?” He jabbed a finger at the box. “They’re
killing
people connected to that thing. They killed my father!”

“You don’t know that! Your mother took him to the wellness center herself. He was sick with fever.” But she shuddered when she said it. Rom knew Avra would never go willingly to a wellness center.

“She was right,” Avra went on. “Your mother was a wise woman. She was…” She trailed off, staring at the box. “What about a priest? You could tell one of the priests. They should know what it is. They could take it.”

He hesitated, considering that. “The writing inside the box talked about death. Maybe a priest
would
know what to do.”

“Then that’s it, we’ll take it to a priest. The priest can turn it in.”

Rom got up and paced away, shaking his head. “I don’t know why, but I think they’d still come after me. They killed my mother and she hadn’t even seen it yet! No. They’re killing everyone associated with it. Which now includes you.”

“But I don’t have a clue about this box! I want nothing to do with it!”

“They don’t know that.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come to my house!”

“Even if I hadn’t, they’d assume you’d lead them to me. You’re not understanding the nature of this thing, Avra! They’ll
kill
you because other than my mother, you’re the closest to me.”

“But I’m not even your family!”

“We’re closer than family. No one else may know, but somehow they know.”

Indeed, Rom and Avra were like twin lungs, breathing the same breath for more years than he could count, through school and afterward. No one knew the secrets kept between them, though it was clear that secrets existed.

Avra went to the chair and sat down. The hem of her cloak pooled against the old stone floor.

“Maybe you should destroy it.”

“I thought about that. But they think I have it. No. I’m a dead man either way.”

“Maybe you could go to the royals.”

“Like who? Do we have Brahmin friends I’m not aware of?”

She fell silent. After a moment, she said, “The canyonlands. We could run to the desert. They say people live out there. Nomads, living beyond the reach of Order.”

“It’s a myth.”

“Are you so sure? People whisper. There are reports—”

“Even if it’s not a myth, who would want to live beyond the Order?”

For the first time he realized that Avra herself already did, in a manner of speaking. Of course she had thought of leaving. And he realized, too, the reason she had not.

She would never go without him.

“Think of it, Rom. No Order…no Honor Code. No citizens reporting one another for the smallest infraction, living every day in fear. It would be living. Just
living
, for as long as possible…”

“Outside the Order? Without a chance to attend assembly at all? We’d be damning ourselves!”

Avra was silent. They both already knew where Avra’s eternal destination lay.

She abruptly looked away.

“Avra…”

She bolted up and hurried toward the door, stumbling over the hem of her cloak. It pulled askew, dragging wide the neckline of her tunic beneath, exposing skin that was unnaturally smooth and too light. A scar, one giant raised welt, lashed toward her neck.

He remembered the first time he saw that wound, seven years ago. Raw, the skin already bubbling up and coming off where the lantern oil of a wall sconce had spilled on her and caught fire. She had come to him in shock and shaking, nearly collapsing on her feet. But she had not screamed until he called his father to help them.

The Order did not tolerate physical defects.

Somehow, Rom had known his father would say nothing. He had arrived in silence and shown Rom how to help her dress the burns in wet bandages, helping to hide them from the eyes of her parents and from Anna.

“Is helping Avra wrong?” Rom had asked.

He had never forgotten what his father had said.

“The Order honors life out of fear of death. We are commanded to love life, but what we call love, Rom, is the shadow of something lost. It is loyalty born out of fear. Fear and love, sometimes the two conflict. Helping Avra is its own kind of love. But now, you must keep what I’m telling you to yourself.”

He had thought about his father’s words many times after that—including the day his mother took him to the wellness center.

He never returned.

Today, Avra ran the family laundry and lived alone, her parents having moved to Greater Europa. She had not stepped foot in a basilica until this moment, fearful of discovery, as though a priest might surmise her terrible secret by the look in her eyes alone.

Her fear extended beyond the basilica to society at large. Though she appeared whole to everyone who saw her, she bore the knowledge that she was unacceptable, alive in this life only as long as she could keep her secret…and even then, living only toward an inevitable end. Order rejected her. And Order was the Maker’s hand. There would be no Bliss for her.

It had robbed her of her own betrothal. Marriage, for her, would be impossible. Her own husband would be bound by the Honor Code to report her the moment he saw her defect. And so she had rejected her own betrothal without explanation to her parents.

He hurried to stop her. “Avra! If you run now they’ll find you for sure. Both of us!”

She halted, shaking. He went to her, pulled the edge of her cloak up over her scarred skin, gently covering it. She tugged the fabric close around her neck with pale fingers. By the time he drew her back toward the chair, she had gotten hold of herself.

He had to think. They were losing precious time.

Rom crossed to the box and opened it. There had to be more. What had the vellum said?
Blood destroys or grants the power to live
. It had certainly destroyed. He had witnessed that firsthand, hadn’t he? But what did it mean,
to live
?

A rustle sounded from behind him. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.” He lifted out the vial, unwrapped it carefully, and set the ancient glass container down on top of the table. He smoothed the vellum open next to it. “See?”

She came to stand beside him. “What does it say?”

Rom read the verse aloud, straining to see in the dim light.

She pressed against his shoulder. “
Day of Rebirth
. What Rebirth? The inauguration?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like it.”

“
Beware, any who drink
—drink what?”

“
Blood destroys or grants the power to live
. Just looking at this. I’m guessing it means the blood.”

“That can’t be. You don’t drink blood.”

“But that’s what it says.
Beware, any who drink
.”

“Yes.
Beware
. As in don’t. It must be poisonous.”

“They wouldn’t have killed the old man for owning poison. People buy it all the time to kill rodents.”

She poked her finger at the words. “
Blood destroys
. It’s poisonous or diseased.”

“Then what does it mean,
or grants the power to live
?”

“It’s just religious speak.”

He laid down the vellum. Avra picked it up, her lips moving as she reread the lines of the only legible paragraph.