Arch-Conspirator(14)

“Are you waiting for me?” I said.

“You left,” he said. “I suppose I was … concerned.”

“I needed some air,” I replied. “I was in no danger.”

“It’s customary to take an escort.”

“I like to walk alone.”

“Hmm.” Haemon set his jaw. “So you and your sister independently decided to walk alone at the same time?”

I tilted my head and studied him for a moment.

“Did your father send you to question me?”

“I am not nearly as much his errand boy as you suppose.”

“I’m not sure you have any idea what I suppose about you.”

“I know you think of me with dread,” he said, and his eyes were sharp enough to cut me to the bone. “And I know you have no reason to. I do not keep hostages.”

“No, perhaps you don’t,” I said quietly. “But you don’t release them, either, do you?”

“If you’d like me to escort you out of the city and into the wilderness,” he said, “I will. But I don’t think that’s where you want to be.”

We had been told that this city was founded here because of its comparatively low radiation levels—that when our ancestors all had fled their homes, they had been armed with nothing more than a Geiger counter, and most of them had died on the journey. I might not have believed this, if my father had not been outside the city. Every politician was required to go out there at least once, to see firsthand what it was like. My father wasn’t afraid, so he had gone often. He had shown me his hazmat suit once, and the device he had used to measure radiation levels—someone checked them every year, to see if they were decreasing, if there was a chance the planet was healing itself.

Eventually, it will, he had told me. The only question is, can we survive long enough to see it?

And that was the whole point of it all—the Archive, the gene editing, the compulsory reproduction, and even Kreon’s obsession with stability. We just had to hang on until the rest of the planet was habitable again. The Trireme, gleaming in the middle of the city like a fallen star, was meant only as a desperate backup plan: send a signal begging for help, see if anyone answers. And it was not the one that most people put their faith in.

“No,” I said. “Funnily enough, I would rather my insides not be devoured by radiation.”

A hint of a smile passed over Haemon’s lips.

“We are all hostages here,” he said. “Held at knifepoint by our own planet. But we can make the best of what we’re given, you and I. And I don’t intend to cause you any more misery than you’ve already endured.”

Haemon had never lied to me, had he?

But there was always a first time. One day soon, he would have more power over me than anyone. And it took a singular man not to misuse power. How singular was Haemon?

“Prove it,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“Prove it,” I said again, and I stepped closer to him. “Help me.”

He frowned. I reached into my bag, and took out the Extractor, just enough for him to see what it was.

“Help me,” I repeated.

I watched him calculate. He looked up at the hazy sky.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “Meet me here at midnight.”

“That’s cutting it close,” I said. Pol had died just after one in the morning. We only had until one o’clock tonight to perform the Extraction.

“It’ll be enough. I need to prepare something first.”

All I could do, for a moment, was blink.

Then I nodded.



* * *



The Extractor was a marvel. Most people regarded it as they would have a magic wand or a cursed amulet—as if it wasn’t to be touched carelessly, as if they needed to pray to it, worship it, to make it do its work. Even my mother, so determined that we should know the proper names for things, hadn’t been able to simplify its processes enough for me to understand. I relied on figurative language instead.

In the low belly was where it needed to go. I had practiced on Ismene once, when we were small. Laid all four of my fingers beneath her belly button to mark the place, and then jabbed her with a stick, harder than I meant to, so she had leapt up and slapped me in retaliation. When she had lain back down, I’d wriggled my fingers in the air over her pelvis, to signify the microscopic bugs that wriggled through her body in search of her ovaries. My teacher had called them that, reminded us that a mosquito could smell carbon dioxide from thirty feet away, so was it really so strange that the Extractor could seek out the right cells?

After it found them, it wrenched the ichor from the body, leaving destruction in its wake. An Extractor was too brutal in its work to be used on the living. It left bruises on the surface, and greater damage within.

After making my bargain with Haemon in the courtyard, I lay down on the bed with the Extractor in my left hand and felt beneath my belly button with my right for the place. I positioned the point of the device against my skin. This was how it would look to Polyneikes if he was still there, his soul trapped in his body, living on in his cells.

I prayed for cloud cover, because a darker night meant concealment, but the sky cleared while I ate dinner at my desk, and by the time midnight came the moon was bright enough to read by. Still, I dressed in my darkest clothes and tucked the Extractor into the waistband of my trousers, covered by a jacket to disguise its bulk. Satisfied by the quiet press of my feet on the stone, I walked to the fall of ivy where Haemon was waiting.