Arch-Conspirator(16)

A strong hand wrapped around my wrist and wrenched it back. I swung with my other hand, the needle held out like a weapon. The guard who had stopped me twisted my arm behind my back, and I saw stars. The Extractor fell to the ground next to Polyneikes. I found myself begging.

“Please,” I said. “He’s my brother. Please.”

“Sorry,” he said in my ear as he dragged me away.





10

Antigone




“If you were a man,” Polyneikes had asked me once, “what would you be?”

The question had annoyed me at the time. We had been sitting on the front steps of our parents’ house, teenagers, passing a lit cigarette back and forth. None of our cigarettes were tobacco, anymore—tobacco wasn’t useful for food, so it wasn’t worth growing. Instead we smoked corn silk rolled in flimsy paper. It was nothing but an idle activity, something to do with your hands while you talked.

I had replied, smoke spilling out of my mouth, “Someone whose gifts aren’t wasted for no reason.”

I didn’t want to change my body. I liked the rhythm that it gave to my life, rising and falling, swelling and shrinking, aching and releasing, with every cycle of the moon. And though I knew there were some men—the state didn’t call them that, but my mother had—who could still bear children, I wasn’t one of them, either. People know themselves, my mother said. Not fully, not ever, but they know enough. She was right. I didn’t long to be a man. What I longed for, instead, was the freedom to follow my inclinations. The first time Polyneikes went to a meeting of rebels, sneaking out of the house in the early hours of the morning, I was angry that I couldn’t go with him. I knew my value. I knew my strengths. The rebellion would be better off if I joined them, too. My absence was to their detriment.

But the womb that gave my life its ebbs and flows made my body sacred to the state, and therefore particularly subject to its might. My mother called this nonsense. She said that protecting a thing was just an excuse to control it. She dedicated herself to freeing people from that control. Technology can be used for liberty as well as domination, she wrote, when she petitioned the state to allow her to develop the artificial womb. Let me prove it to you.

That was how my parents met.

My mother had been able to make a place for herself in a world that refused to give her one, because she was simply too brilliant to ignore. Because of her genius, she was allowed to occupy spaces that no other woman could. It was the great disappointment of my life that I was not excellent enough to do the same.

I was to be protected, Polyneikes said when I complained of the waste of my gifts. It was the first time since we were children that I shoved him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Locked in my bedroom now, waiting for dawn, I realized that all that protection had been for naught. Kreon had ordered execution for anyone who tampered with Polyneikes’ body, who tried to collect his ichor. So what good had it done, to guard my womb? I would die anyway. My body was forfeit.

I chewed my fingernails and watched the sky lighten.

Did it have to be?

My mother was a scientist. When my first cycle began, at the age of thirteen, she explained every part of it to me, how my organs knew the steps of an intricate dance, the same one they had been doing for all of human history. I had cried, because I knew something would change—something I had not then been able to articulate, that the world would treat me as a woman then, instead of as a sexless and genderless being of endless potential. I would become subject to a household, guarded by men. She had wiped my tears and told me that plenty of power was still within my grasp, but I would have to learn to wield it, and wielding it was an art. There are always ways, she said, to get your way. Easy for her to say, I remarked at the time. Not everyone was like her.

But perhaps she was right.

Could my body not have one final purpose?

My body, the same body that Polyneikes had denied my usefulness to protect, the same body that made my consciousness unimportant to rebels—it would outrage them, to see it sacrificed so carelessly, and all for the crime of loving a brother.

I could become something greater than my body simply by allowing myself to use it.



* * *



I felt time slow after that. I filled the bathtub and it took an age to undress, the fabric chafing my skin as I peeled it away. I sat in the lukewarm water for too long, as the sun slanted over the ivy outside. I put on a black dress, my funeral clothes. When the lock turned, I was ready.

Flanked by two of Polyneikes’ least favorite guards, I walked to Kreon’s study. I passed Ismene on the way, taking her morning tea with Eurydice, and didn’t spare her a glance. In truth I wasn’t sure I could bear to see her expression, whether full of apology that I would not accept or, worse, empty of it.

Kreon’s study was on the second floor, overlooking the courtyard. The door was closed. One of the guards knocked for me, and I stared at the wood as I waited for it to open, polished as a mirror. I had been here only once before, when he had summoned me to inform me of my engagement. It was the only place in the city that was not dusty.

Kreon’s assistant, the worm Flavian, opened the door for me and gave me an imperious look. In truth, I wasn’t sure Flavian had any other kind of look. I moved past him and into the room. The tile floor had been freshly swept; it didn’t have the gritty feeling of the stone in the hallway. Two bookshelves framed Kreon’s wide desk, made of the same polished wood as the door. He sat with his body angled toward the window and didn’t stir. It was as if I hadn’t entered.