Page 27 of Arch Conspirator
My father was the High Commander of this city. The cornerstone. He was not the only one in power here, but all the others took guidance from him, sought his approval. Without him, everything would fall apart.
“You want me to kill my father,” I said.
“Now, I didn’t say anything of the kind,” Parth said. “But if we were to lose our cornerstone, there are a great deal of people poised to take advantage of the chaos that would follow.”
“Opportunists?” I said. “And would any of them be any better than the High Commander?”
“Some better, some worse,” he said. “But all committed to a free election.”
“And if the election turns out someone worse?”
Parth leaned forward.
“Then at least we would be responsible for our own doom,” he said, “instead of someone else deciding it for us. And really, isn’t that the most any of us can hope for?”
I wished I had asked for water. My throat was dry and I needed something to do with my hands.
The first time I saw my father’s cruelty on full display was during the riots, as he watched my uncle, Oedipus—the first and last victor of a free election this city had had—get struck down by soldiers. He did nothing to stop it; he just watched the man fall. I was only a boy at the time, still half convinced that my dad, a man I was afraid of, might have some good in him.
He never touched me, or my mother, only raised his voice to us a handful of times. But there was always danger in him, boiling just beneath the surface. It made my steps careful and my words guarded. It made me sneak into the kitchens to play poker instead of just going there. He didn’t have to shout at me or smack me around for me to know what wasn’t going to be acceptable to him. His shadow was long, and filled every corner of our house.
Still, the little boy who wanted to find something behind the fear lived.
Could I kill Kreon?
“How would this save her?” I said.
“She’s the figurehead of a resistance movement now,” Parth said. “For some reason, you talk to people about food shortages, power outages, contaminated water, the government disappearing people—you might as well be speaking another language. But if you tell them their High Commander wants to send a pretty young thing into space to waste away? Suddenly they’re listening.”
Parth leaned back and sighed.
“What I’m telling you is,” he said, “people all over this goddamn city are itching to keep that ship from launching. You just have to give them an opening.”
I thought of the monkshood blooming in our greenhouse, and the curve of Antigone’s hip in the moonlight, and the way my father had sneered at me as I argued for mercy. Somehow I didn’t feel like I was making a choice. I felt like he had already made all the choices, and I was just the response to his call, the effect of his cause.
“That’s what I’ll do, then,” I said.
14Antigone
What ought a person wear to go to their tomb?
I opened the doors of my wardrobe and stared. Just an hour ago, an aide from the Trireme office—a dusty, neglected place with a handful of employees, all of them engineers—had come to my door escorted by soldiers to tell me what to expect from the journey. I could pack a bag, he said, as heavy as I wanted, though I knew no one would offer to carry it for me. When he left, I had numbly filled a small sack with underwear and socks, comfortable pants and clean T-shirts, my father’s old sweater, my mother’s old necklace. I had bathed, meaning to savor the warm water for the last time. But that was the thing about last times—you kept pressing into yourself for a more pure experience, but the pressure made any experience impossible. I barely felt the water.
I stood naked in front of the wardrobe, my skin still drying. Did I feel different, now that I had been seen, known? Now that I had felt yet another thing my body was capable of doing? More than two decades on this Earth and my body still surprised me. Perhaps that was why some people were so eager to have children.They wanted to test the boundaries of what their bodies could do, enter into a mysterious state that was no less mysterious for being experienced by so many others. I would not feel those things—life stirring inside me, my belly swelling and hardening like an eggshell. I would never feel them. But not all things are guaranteed for all people. That is the way of things.
I took out the box from the bottom of my closet and opened it. Inside was my mother’s wedding gown. A simple garment, all things considered, with some beading at the bodice that she had stitched herself—I could tell by how crooked the threads were, when I looked closely. It was white, its brightness only a little faded by time. The fabric was so fine it felt like water in my hands. I shook it out, gently, and then unzipped the back and stepped into it. She was built a little narrower than I was, but also taller. The straps were set a little wider than my shoulders, and the train dragged on the ground by an inch or two, but it fit.
I felt wild, mad, as I twisted my hair up away from my neck. As I dabbed a red stain on my lips, so like blood, and smeared it into my cheeks to make them look flushed. I stood before the mirror, facing away from the room as a servant arrived with my lunch tray.
“Tig.”
I had not given the servant a second glance. She was dressed in the usual uniform, her hair pulled back so tight it looked painful. But as I looked at her in the mirror, standing with the tray in her hands, I realized she was Ismene. I turned, heat rushing into my cheeks as she saw me in our mother’s wedding gown.
“How did you get in here?” I said.
She set the tray down on my desk and rushed toward me, her hands outstretched. I took them in mine without thinking twice. Her palms were cold and trembling. Her entire body was trembling, her breaths shaking on the way out.
“I bribed the maid with coffee,” she said. “The guards didn’t recognize me.”
