Of Beast and Beauty - Jay Stacey - Страница 3

mutated by the toxic new world, but the past two hundred years have been

the most devastating for the people living in the cities. All but three of the

original fifteen settlements have fallen to the monsters in the desert. The

messenger birds from the king of Sula and the queen of Port South come

less and less frequently. One day they will stop altogether.

Or perhaps our birds will be the first to have their freedom. Either

way, Yuan is living on borrowed time. Though probably not as borrowed as

mine.…

I wait a few more moments—until Needle’s breath comes slowly and

evenly—before slipping out of bed and eating up the thick carpet between

my bedroom and the balcony with eager feet. Seventeen steps to the

bedroom door; twenty-seven down the hall, past the sitting room, through

the music room, and out onto the balcony; then three more and the careful

fall to freedom. Careful, so I don’t follow in my mother’s footsteps. Careful,

so my escape is only for the night, not for forever.

I brace my hands on the balcony ledge and push off the ground with

bare toes, drawing my knees up to my chest, landing atop the parapet in an

easy crouch. My fingertips brush the cold marble; my cotton overalls draw

up my shins.

The overalls are an orchard worker’s suit with wide legs and deep

pockets. I stole them from a supply shed near the apple orchard two years

ago. Now the legs grow too short. I am seventeen and very tall for a person.

Very, very tall. I am taller than Baba, taller even than Junjie, whom I’ve

heard called “an imposing man.” I am long and tall, and my skin is coarser

than any other I’ve touched. Even Needle’s work-roughened hands are

softer than mine, the princess she bathes in cream, washes only with honey

soap. My rough, peeling flesh was my greatest clue, back when I was still

sorting out the mystery of myself.

Now I understand. I know the real reason I’m locked away from my

people.

“I may be tainted, but I’m not a fool,” I whisper into the too-tranquil

air. It gobbles up my words and swallows them deep, smug in its assurance

that the quiet order of the dome will never be disturbed. Seconds later, I

bare my teeth in my most ferocious smile, and jump from the ledge.

The night comes alive. Cool air snatches my hair, lifting it from my

shoulders, tugging at my scalp. It rushes up my pant legs, shivering over my

belly and up my neck. My blood races, and my throat traps a giddy squeal.

The tips of my toes beat with their own individual heartbeats as they make

contact with the curved edge of the first roof and I take a running leap for

the second, deliciously alive with fear.

I’ve made this descent a thousand times or more, but still a taste of

the original terror remains. The first time, my feet didn’t know the dips and

curves and footholds for themselves. The falls—the six curved roofs below

the tower balcony—were only a story told by Baba as we sat in the

afternoon sun. My fingers and toes are my eyes. I couldn’t see the truth of

my way out until I was already over the edge, dropping the ten feet to the

top of the first roof. But it was there. Just as my father had said. As were

the second and the fourth and the sixth, and the last tumble into the

cabbage garden.

I plop down on the hard ground between the cabbage rows—no

fertile patch of land is wasted in Yuan—and fold back into a crouch, staying

low as I shuffle back and scatter the dirt with my hands, concealing the two

deep prints from my landing. There is rarely anyone this close to my prison,

but I don’t set off right away. With all the guards milling about, Baba surely

has a patrol stationed near the tower.

I wait, squirming my toes, ears straining in silence broken only by the

faint buzz of the hives at the bottom of the hill. The bees are quieter at

night but still busy. I like the hum, the evidence of nonhuman activity. We

used to have wild birds under the dome, too—all different sorts, some

night singers, some day—but the last of them died years ago. Father said it

was an avian epidemic.

“Why didn’t it take the messenger birds, then?” I asked him at the

time. “Or the ducks and geese by the orchard pond? Why did only the wild

birds die?”

“Wild things don’t always survive under the dome,” he said.

There was something in his voice that day.…

It made me wonder if he knows I’m not as biddable as I pretend to

be, if he knows I’m wild, and doesn’t hate me for it. Or at least doesn’t

blame me. It’s not as if I asked to be born this way, with a taste for defiance

and a longing for the hot desert wind, the wind I felt only once, the day my

mother took me for a forbidden walk outside the city walls.

I’ll never have that wind again—if I left the city for any length of time,

I would die of thirst or sun poisoning, if the Monstrous didn’t get me

first—but I can have my night runs. I can have the autumn smells, the satin

of rose petals between my fingertips, and the sweeter sting of the roses’

thorns.

My mouth fills with a taste like honey and vinegar mixed together.

The rose garden. How I love and loathe it. How I need it and hate the

needing. But still, I’ll go there first tonight. I want to see the color of the

sky, know which of my moons hangs heaviest above the dome. I am

efficient in my darkness, but how I crave the moonlight!

It’s hard to wait, but I don’t move a muscle, don’t twitch a nostril,

even when my nose begins to itch in the way noses never fail to do when

you’re not able to scratch them. Two minutes, three, and finally my

patience is rewarded with the soft, rhythmic scuffing of leather boots on

stone.

Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff. I am a soldier, this is my song, and I shall

scuff it all the day long. I am a soldier and these are my boots, the biggest

shoes for the biggest brutes.

My lip curls. Soldiers. Ridiculous. Yuan needs a third as many, and

those should be stationed at the Desert Gate and Hill Gate and around the

wall walks, where the rest of the city won’t have to bear witness to their

strutting about.

Our only hope is to keep the mutants out. If they make it inside, the

city will fall. If we’ve learned anything from the destruction of the other

domed kingdoms, it should be that. The Monstrous are bigger, stronger,

with poison seeping from their claws, and skin as thick and hard as armor.

They can see in the dark and live on nothing but a daily ration of water and

cactus fruit. They are brutal beasts determined to destroy humanity and

take our cities for themselves.

But our bounty will never be theirs. If they kill the keepers of the

covenant, Yuan will turn to dust like the other cities and the land beyond

our walls. Magic is loyal only to those who have bought and paid for it. With

blood. Hundreds of years of blood, blood enough to fill the riverbed

beneath the city and carry us all to the poison sea.

As soon as the soldier scuffs away, I scurry between the rows of

cabbages on tiptoe, leaving as little sign of my passing as possible, counting

the eighteen steps to the road, the four steps across it, the fifteen steps

down the softly sloping hill—also planted with cabbage; oh, the cabbage I

have eaten in my life—and into the sunflower patch. My fingers brush their

whiskery stalks, feeling the heavy flowers bob far, far above me.

They are unusually tall this year. No matter how high I reach, I find