Page 30 of Arch Conspirator
“You’re right,” he said to me.
It was as if my body had turned to water. Weak with relief, I clung to him. I smiled up at him and, for a moment, he appeared to me just as he had all those years ago, awkward and sweet.
It would be all right, it would—
A man broke through the barrier of soldiers and barreled toward us. Kreon turned to shield me, and the radio communicator flew out of his hand. It bounced on the platform and broke in half.
We both stared at it. I dove for the pieces, hoping it was just that the battery had fallen out, but it was split in half at its seam, the parts spread over the platform.
“Mom!” Haemon said. “Mom, you have to get out of here!”
I looked up at Kreon, who was staring with horror at the Trireme. I stood, leaving the radio communicator on the ground, and shoved him toward the edge of the hill. He stumbled off the platform, just barely keeping his balance.
“Go down there!” I shouted. “Go!”
Kreon took off running. I hadn’t seen him run like that in a long time. He tumbled down the slope as the crowd broke through the barrier. I heard a gunshot. Haemon grabbed me around the waist and hauled me off the platform, his hand on my head to keep it down. An elbow caught me in the cheek.
“Run!” Haemon screamed.
And then the platform exploded.
The sound—the sound,so loud it filled my head and rattled my teeth. The force threw us both forward, into a woman with gray, curly hair and a man wearing a bandana around his head to catch his sweat. Together, Haemon and I tumbled to the ground. Someone fell on top of me, their knees digging into my legs. I hit my head on the pavement, and the spray of shrapnel was sharp, stinging my shoulders and back.
I lifted my head just in time to see a ball of light expanding around the base of the Trireme.
Kreon hadn’t made it in time. The ship was launching.
Haemon screamed. I couldn’t hear him—everything was muffled—but I saw the anguish in his face, like kindling split by an axe. He stumbled to his feet, over the wreckage, to the edge of the hill. He must have known it was too late to do anything. I tried to go after him, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. A hand closed around my arm, a soldier pulling me up. I recognized him—Nikias, head of Kreon’s guard. He spoke to me, and I watched his mouth moving but couldn’t make out the words.
I managed to seeLet’s go,and he lifted me to my feet. I looked back to see Haemon swallowed by the raging crowd,and Kreon on the hillside, alone, and the streak of the Trireme in the sky.
For a long time, I was alone.
Nikias carried me like a bride back to the house. By that time, I had recovered enough to walk. I smacked his shoulder to get him to put me down; he wasn’t listening to me. I could hear my own voice, though it sounded far away. He led me by the hand to the safe room beneath the house. He sat me down there, on the low cot in the corner, and he gave me water, and checked me for injuries. I meant to thank him, but I wasn’t sure if I managed it or not. He left me, promising to get an update.
It felt like a long time before anything changed. My glass of water was empty. My feet were bleeding, and my body ached. The door to the shelter opened, and it wasn’t Kreon who walked through it. It was Nikias. His expression was blank. A studied blankness—the face of someone who didn’t want to give himself away. I stood, my stomach heavy.
“Which one?” I said, because I knew, I knew that someone was dead, and there were only so many people it could be.
In the moment before he answered, I prayed that it was Kreon. A woman can fall in love more than once, but she cannot replace a child. The thought felt almost brutal to me, but grief lays us bare, even to ourselves. I prayed that my husband was dead, because I knew how that would go: I knew where I would get the Extractor for his ichor, what I would wear to mourn him, how I would process through the streets with my son at my side to the Archive. All women in our city know the procedures for losing a spouse.
But there are no procedures for losing a child.
Which is why, when Nikias hesitated to respond, I felt it as a physical blow to the gut. I stumbled back and sat on the cot.No,I thought, and I stood.
“Show me,” I said.
Together we climbed the steps to the hallway above. It should have been in chaos, staff rushing everywhere, as it always was during emergencies. Instead it was silent. Everyone we passed avoided my eyes. I followed Nikias to the courtyard.
My son lay on the ground, and I thought of a particular memory. Haemon, age eight, on a clear night, asking me to see the stars. We had gone up to the roof of our building, then an apartment in the Seventh District. The moon had been a crescent—Like a toenail clipping,Haemon had said, and I’d laughed. We had lain down side by side on the roof and looked up at the night sky until the clouds blew in again and our noses were cold.
For just a moment, time fractured, and I saw him as that eight-year-old boy lying on the roof. And then time returned, and I knew this was his body, and my boy, my love, my dearest and most precious thing, was dead.
I was still kneeling there at his side when Kreon returned.
It was late afternoon, and I was numb. I couldn’t feel my feet or my hands. I couldn’t feel pain.
I looked up at the man, my husband, standing grief-stricken in the courtyard.
