Page 24 of Arch Conspirator
“Pol did believe in it,” I said. “The last thing he asked me to do was to use that Extractor. So I did my best.” I shrugged. “Look at what came of that.”
The sky was getting dark. I had read somewhere once that in the dark, our eyes relied more on rods than on cones, meaning that night vision and color vision were incompatible. So I always thought of sunset as the color draining out of the world, like dye leeching out of a garment when you rinsed it. The little courtyard beyond my bedroom window was turning gray.
And then I couldn’t see even that, through tears.
“Sorry,” I said, choking.
Haemon put the Extractor down and took my hands in his.
“Don’t be,” he said. “I can go, if you’d like. But I thought maybe you’d prefer even my company to being alone.”
“Even yours.” I laughed a little. “If you knew what I was thinking about, you’d know why that was funny.”
“You could always tell me. Maybe I’ll laugh.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I was thinking about all the things I won’t do,” I said. “Won’t have a wedding. Won’t walk through the Archive. Won’t get crow’s feet.” I laughed again, and my laugh broke. “I didn’t want to be married, but I thought I wouldgetmarried. I thought Ismene would put flowers in my hair, and I would wear my mother’s dress, and I would have a wedding night and wake up and decide whether I felt any different. I didn’t want children, either, but I thought I would have them—thought I would walk through the Archive and find someone who looked like my mother, and make the best of the thing I didn’t want. I thought I would find the moments I loved among the moments I didn’t. I thought I would havetime.”
His hands tightened around mine. His hands were warm and I focused on that, the heat in his fingers, the heat behind my eyes, the blood and muscle of him, of me, the life in us both. Technically, there would be life in me for years yet. There were as many rations on the Trireme as the ship could hold, so it could broadcast from as far away from Earth as possible. And that was the worst part of it, that I would have to choose between taking my own life—driven mad by the isolation—and watching my food supply dwindle. That I would be both alive and dead at the same time for so long, cursed to hover between the two, unobserved.
“This morning it felt so easy to give all that away,” I said. “Pol, he was worried I wanted to die. Ismene, too. But I didn’t, I don’t. I just wanted to be done, and that’s not the same thing.”
“I know,” he said softly. “I know it’s not.”
I had imagined marriage as a cage. Even my mother, in love with my father as she was, hadn’t been able to escape that. People asking my father how he allowed my mother so much autonomy,as if he was her jailer. The way men wouldn’t listen to her unless he repeated what she said. And love was never going to be mine to claim, so I had imagined worse than that—an arrangement of restriction and demand. But I had never imagined Haemon, specifically. Thoughtful Haemon with his watchful eyes. Big and strong enough to be capable of violence, but I had never once seen him inclined toward it.
“You helped me,” I said. “We could have gotten married sooner, if I hadn’t delayed. We could have had good things together, I think. And now I’ll never have any of them.”
“I know,” he said again. My mother had always yelled at me for saying that,I know,even when I didn’t, just because I was annoyed with her for nagging at me. He didn’t say it like that. He said it more like an acknowledgment, heard and then understood. I wondered if he had thought about our marriage, what it would be like, how our children would be, what we might choose. A life after Kreon’s death. I could have asked. But I thought it might be worse to hear the answer.
“There are still good things you could have,” he said. “You need only ask.”
I opened my eyes. He was still on his knees—like a supplicant, his words a kind of offer.
I thought of his hands on me, and I wanted it.
I bent my head toward his, and our lips touched, just for a moment, like palms pressing together. It was like a test—is this all right, is this the kind of madness that makes a certain amount of sense. I decided it was, and I kissed him again, slowly this time, and though his mouth was spare and though I hardly knew him, it felt how I imagined it was supposed to feel, warm and lively as an exposed wire.
I pulled him toward me and we fell back against my bed, and I stripped him bare and I took my time looking at him and I took,and I took, and so did he. And there was no pain, only strangeness, and for a few hours more, at least, I was alive.
It was strange to sleep on the eve of banishment. In the moments before I drifted off, I thought that I should have been drinking in everything that I could, everything that I loved about this planet. It was not a lovable place in so many respects, but its gravity steadied me, its sky enfolded me, its scents instructed me, and none of those things would accompany me into the Trireme. But my body was still a body, and it still needed sleep.
I fell asleep with my head on Haemon’s shoulder, my arm slung around his waist. He was so warm I didn’t need the sheet that covered me. He didn’t snore, exactly, but his breaths were loud and slow when he slept. When I woke a few hours later, his fingers were still laid across my rib cage, but the loud, slow breathing had turned quiet. He was awake.
I lifted my head and looked at him.
Despite the fact that we were naked—despite the fact of what we had done together—it was still odd to be so close to him. I had spent the last year avoiding him, and all the years before that not seeing him at all.
“I can’t let this happen to you,” he said to me.
“I chose this,” I said. “The moment I requested a public hearing, I knew what would come of it.”
“You shouldn’t have to choose it,” he said. “Iwon’tlet this happen to you. I have to do something.”
He sat up, wrapping his arms loosely around his knees, bent under the sheet. I stood, and walked to the window. Goose bumps spread over my skin from the cold, now that I was no longer lying against him. The moon was shrouded in clouds.
“Your attachment to me will fade,” I said.
