Arch-Conspirator(12)

As it happened, I couldn’t bear it, but I did it anyway.

I said the prayer. I plunged the Extractor in.





8

Antigone




Rumor—passed along by the maid who came to change my sheets later that morning—said that Polyneikes’ body was on display in the street just north of Kreon’s house, guarded by soldiers. As of twenty-four hours after his death, his ichor would no longer be viable, and the body would be removed.

They unlocked my door and I walked to the north end of the house, where two walls separated me from my brother’s body. I thought about looking out the window to see the grotesque display, and my stomach roiled at the thought. When I left a few minutes later, I left through the back door and took the circuitous route, walking through the Ne?stan District to get to the North District. When I turned back to see if I was being followed, I could just barely see the glimmer of the Trireme, nose pointed at the sky.

I expected my head to be busy, maybe even frantic. Instead, I felt stillness. I saw the sagging buildings, the shops with their beat-up pots and pans stacked high on the street, the food carts with smoke hanging around them like a cloud, the children selling bouquets of weeds, the drunk men slumped in doorframes, the old women sitting on front steps to stitch old garments, and I didn’t think about my brother, about the Extractor in my bag, about his body as a crude monument to Kreon’s cruelty. I didn’t think about anything. I walked for the better part of an hour. The North District was the next one over from the Seventh, where I lived, but it was one of the larger ones; it spanned quite a few miles.

When I arrived at Parth’s door, he greeted me with a nod and let me in. His apartment was on the ground floor, so all the noise of the street filled it. He lived there with several others whose names I didn’t know and his mother, a wry, hunched woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair, who looked at me when I came in and said, “If I wasn’t already dying, that face would probably kill me, girl.”

“Don’t look at it, then,” I replied, and her laugh was like a wheeze.

Parth sat me down in his kitchen with a glass of water, and I waited for Ismene to arrive. I knew she would come, because I had asked her to, and Ismene always did what I asked her to. I was hoping that quality would extend beyond a long walk to the North District.

In the apartment above, someone was playing music. The bass rippled through the water in my glass, which sat untouched on the table. Some time passed before I heard Ismene’s knock, a faint tap. She came into the kitchen, her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were red with tears.

“Tig, what’s this about?” she said, and I felt a deep ache. That name. Pol was the one who gave it to me, when we were children.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” I said. “I just needed to talk to you someplace where I knew no one would be listening.”

We both looked at the door separating the kitchen from the living room.

“Where I knew Kreon wouldn’t be listening,” I amended.

Ismene sat in the chair across from mine. I slid my water glass toward her, and she sipped from it as I reached into the bag at my side and took out the Extractor.

I set it on the table between us.

“That’s one of Mom’s,” she said. Sharp-eyed as ever. She brushed it with her fingertips, reverent. “Where did you get it?”

“Polyneikes gave it to me yesterday,” I said. “‘Just in case,’ he said.”

She tugged her hand back like the Extractor had bitten her.

“You knew?”

“I didn’t know anything,” I said. “He wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Oh, sure. Our brother was worried he might die,” she said. “But why tell me? It’s not like he’s my brother, too, right?”

“I’m—”

“You’re not sorry,” she snapped. “The two of you have always been like this. As if swimming around in the same womb with him gave you a greater capacity to love him.”

I didn’t argue with her; there was no point. But the mystics believed that sharing a body with someone created a sacred connection, the bond of mother and child, the bond of husband and wife. Was it so difficult to believe, then, that sharing a body with my brother had forged a similar connection? As children, when he fell down, I cried. When he was ill, I vomited. What was I to do now that he was dead?

She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

“It doesn’t matter, now,” she said. “None of it. Kreon’s decree—”

“Fuck Kreon’s decree,” I said.

“You can’t possibly think…” She scowled at me. “You’re going to do it anyway?”

“We don’t exclude people from the Archive,” I said. “We don’t exclude murderers, or thieves, or rioters. We don’t deny anyone their chance at immortality.”

“They don’t believe we have souls, Antigone.”

“I don’t care. I do.”

“You don’t even believe in immortality.”

“He did.”

“You obviously haven’t been down to the street,” she said. “Because if you had, you’d know there’s nothing but space and guards around his body. There’s no way you can even get near it.”