Arch-Conspirator(27)

She cupped my face in her hands.

“What are the years worth?” she said in a whisper, her eyes fixed on mine. “Let me tell you a secret, Antigone, something I have never told anyone: I am glad the same blood runs in our veins. I’m like a bird that’s fallen in love with its own reflection; I am relieved every time I see myself in your face, and our mother, and our father. If I stay here without you, I will never be able to be what I should, I will only wear away at my time, waiting for the end.”

She smiled, and I realized my cheeks were wet.

“If I go with you,” she said, “we will have a beautiful, brief adventure. So let me give you this. Let me take this from you.”

I closed my eyes. My face was hot. I had heard, for just a moment, not Ismene’s voice, but the voice of our mother. And I wondered if maybe I was wrong—maybe immortality did exist, if my mother could speak through Ismene. If I could still hear her, even after death.

I couldn’t speak. I nodded instead.





15

Eurydice




That morning I looked at Kreon’s razor, drying on the edge of the sink, and thought about the day Haemon was implanted in my body. How I had, for an hour, thought about the end. Maybe it was natural to think about death when you were making new life. Maybe it wasn’t. Either way, procedure was what carried me through: I simply did what I was supposed to until the urge faded.

The Trireme was set to launch in late morning. It was poised at the edge of a clearing in the distance. The clearing abutted a gentle hill. A crowd waited at the top of that hill, in a bare patch of street hemmed in by buildings, not unlike the one where the whole nasty business had taken place the day before yesterday.

I went to the building that faced the Trireme and climbed up the fire escape to the balcony overlooking the square. I was careful to stand in the shadows where the crowd below couldn’t see me. They had already gathered. From a distance, it might have seemed like they were there for a spectacle. People had been gathering to watch executions since time immemorial.

I was sure that’s what Kreon would see. Just morbid curiosity, for most. For others, perhaps, pleasure. I knew the oddities that afflicted our species. Maybe that’s why my mother was convinced I was a prophet—because I saw things clearly.

But as close as I was to them, standing on the balcony right above their heads, I could tell that the people were not here for a spectacle. They shuffled, restless. Muttered. Pointed as they took note of the guards positioned at the perimeter of the square. Directly across from me, elevated a foot above the crowd, was a platform. It stood between the people and the hill that led down to the Trireme. The guards kept the people from climbing on it; it was where Kreon and Haemon and I would stand to watch the ship launch.

The ship was huge. Even though it was a ways off, across the square, down the hill, it loomed over us all. Bigger than most of our buildings. I had gone the night before with Kreon to make sure it was all in order. His instructions up until that point had been to ensure the Trireme was ready to launch at all times. He had never known when its launch would be most useful to him.

I had gone to persuade him that now was not the time. He had been angry with me for contradicting him in public, at the hearing, but his anger was a cold, lifeless thing. It made him into stone, and now he wouldn’t listen. I knew him, and I knew I had made him impossible to reach by daring to disagree with him at that pivotal moment, yet I still had to try. Not just for our niece Antigone, who I liked well enough, and not just for a young woman who had wanted to honor her brother—but for Kreon himself.

This crowd was not gathered for a spectacle.

They were gathered to see if the thing that horrified them would really come to pass.

And that was not a crowd that would favor Kreon.

“They told me you were up here,” Kreon said, his hand finding the small of my back. “What are you looking at, Wife?”

We were a love match. My father was too negligent in his duties—too lost in moonshine—to arrange a match for me. My mother, hanging on my every word, would simply do as I said. My cousin took me to a party, thrown in an abandoned building in the Ne?stan District. In those days people were dying faster than they were being born. A lot of buildings were abandoned. Empty. Crumbling. If we weren’t careful, analysts said, we would lose valuable genetic diversity and we would not be able to survive. That was why the compulsory child-bearing regulations began.

But the party—

There weren’t many girls there. It wasn’t what respectable girls did. But at that time, I was tired of being respectable, so I went. All the boys there were military. It was the only way to look clean-cut—the uniforms were better maintained than most people’s hand-me-downs and repurposed old clothing. Kreon was one of the only ones who looked like he needed to shave. His jaw was strong; so was his brow. When he met me, he bowed a little, like I was a queen. The others teased him for it, but I thought it was sweet. There was always something sweet about him in those days. Awkward. Sure of himself in his work, but with me, so careful, like he thought he might break me. It was nice to be taken care of. I had always done the caretaking. After all, I was the prophet of my house. God’s Chosen.

Now, I wished Kreon would see me that way, just long enough to correct his mistakes.

“I am looking at trouble brewing,” I said to him. One last try.