Page 17 of Arch Conspirator
“I’m fully capable of watching a dead body,” Haemon said. “Go!”
I started toward the square, cautious at first, and then as the guards took off in the direction of the explosion, I burst into arun. I tripped into the square and fell to my knees next to Polyneikes’ body.
Time slowed as I looked at him. I heard my heartbeat, the twin thuds distinct, valves closing, valves opening.
Thump, thump.
He still looked like himself, but his body was covered in a layer of pale dust. His arms rested at an awkward angle across his torso, as if he had been dragged out here and then dropped without ceremony. His shoes were gone. His shirt was soaked with blood.
Thump, thump.
I reached for him, unable to stop myself. His wrist felt wrong, too cold and too stiff. I choked on a sob as I lowered his arm, tucking it close to his side. His skin was discolored, from his imminent decomposition or from the moonlight, I could not tell.
I had not said the prayers over my parents’ bodies. Ismene had done that. It was, of course, women’s work. Usher in life, usher in death. But I found I had the words memorized anyway.
Thump, thump.
I mouthed them over my brother. We did not beg for things in prayers—that was for Followers of Lazarus. Ours were a list of demands.Make his rest easy. Weave his soul into his body, to be preserved and renewed. Keep the best of him and let the worst slip away.
I had to hurry, but I felt like I was moving through water as I pulled the Extractor from beneath my jacket. I wrapped both hands around it. A shout rang out across the courtyard. Someone charged toward me. I pressed a button in the side of the Extractor, and a needle extended from the bottom of it, so it looked like a giant syringe. I held it over my brother’s stomach.
A strong hand wrapped around my wrist and wrenched it back. I swung with my other hand, the needle held out like aweapon. The guard who had stopped me twisted my arm behind my back, and I saw stars. The Extractor fell to the ground next to Polyneikes. I found myself begging.
“Please,” I said. “He’s my brother. Please.”
“Sorry,” he said in my ear as he dragged me away.
10Antigone
“If you were a man,” Polyneikes had asked me once, “what would you be?”
The question had annoyed me at the time. We had been sitting on the front steps of our parents’ house, teenagers, passing a lit cigarette back and forth. None of our cigarettes were tobacco, anymore—tobacco wasn’t useful for food, so it wasn’t worth growing. Instead we smoked corn silk rolled in flimsy paper. It was nothing but an idle activity, something to do with your hands while you talked.
I had replied, smoke spilling out of my mouth, “Someone whose gifts aren’t wasted for no reason.”
I didn’t want to change my body. I liked the rhythm that it gave to my life, rising and falling, swelling and shrinking, aching and releasing, with every cycle of the moon. And though I knew there were some men—the state didn’t call them that, but my mother had—who could still bear children, I wasn’t one of them, either.People know themselves,my mother said.Not fully, not ever, but they know enough.She was right. I didn’t long to be a man. What I longed for, instead, was the freedom to follow myinclinations. The first time Polyneikes went to a meeting of rebels, sneaking out of the house in the early hours of the morning, I was angry that I couldn’t go with him. I knew my value. I knew my strengths. The rebellion would be better off if I joined them, too. My absence was to their detriment.
But the womb that gave my life its ebbs and flows made my body sacred to the state, and therefore particularly subject to its might. My mother called this nonsense. She said that protecting a thing was just an excuse to control it. She dedicated herself to freeing people from that control.Technology can be used for liberty as well as domination,she wrote, when she petitioned the state to allow her to develop the artificial womb.Let me prove it to you.
That was how my parents met.
My mother had been able to make a place for herself in a world that refused to give her one, because she was simply too brilliant to ignore. Because of her genius, she was allowed to occupy spaces that no other woman could. It was the great disappointment of my life that I was not excellent enough to do the same.
I was to be protected, Polyneikes said when I complained of the waste of my gifts. It was the first time since we were children that I shoved him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Locked in my bedroom now, waiting for dawn, I realized that all that protection had been for naught. Kreon had ordered execution for anyone who tampered with Polyneikes’ body, who tried to collect his ichor. So what good had it done, to guard my womb? I would die anyway. My body was forfeit.
I chewed my fingernails and watched the sky lighten.
Did it have to be?
My mother was a scientist. When my first cycle began, at the age of thirteen, she explained every part of it to me, how my organs knew the steps of an intricate dance, the same one they had been doing for all of human history. I had cried, because Iknew something would change—something I had not then been able to articulate, that the world would treat me as a woman then, instead of as a sexless and genderless being of endless potential. I would become subject to a household, guarded by men. She had wiped my tears and told me that plenty of power was still within my grasp, but I would have to learn to wield it, and wielding it was an art.There are always ways,she said,to get your way.Easy for her to say, I remarked at the time. Not everyone was like her.
But perhaps she was right.
Could my body not have one final purpose?
My body, the same body that Polyneikes had denied my usefulness to protect, the same body that made my consciousness unimportant to rebels—it would outrage them, to see it sacrificed so carelessly, and all for the crime of loving a brother.
