Arch-Conspirator(29)

I managed to see Let’s go, and he lifted me to my feet. I looked back to see Haemon swallowed by the raging crowd, and Kreon on the hillside, alone, and the streak of the Trireme in the sky.



* * *



For a long time, I was alone.

Nikias carried me like a bride back to the house. By that time, I had recovered enough to walk. I smacked his shoulder to get him to put me down; he wasn’t listening to me. I could hear my own voice, though it sounded far away. He led me by the hand to the safe room beneath the house. He sat me down there, on the low cot in the corner, and he gave me water, and checked me for injuries. I meant to thank him, but I wasn’t sure if I managed it or not. He left me, promising to get an update.

It felt like a long time before anything changed. My glass of water was empty. My feet were bleeding, and my body ached. The door to the shelter opened, and it wasn’t Kreon who walked through it. It was Nikias. His expression was blank. A studied blankness—the face of someone who didn’t want to give himself away. I stood, my stomach heavy.

“Which one?” I said, because I knew, I knew that someone was dead, and there were only so many people it could be.

In the moment before he answered, I prayed that it was Kreon. A woman can fall in love more than once, but she cannot replace a child. The thought felt almost brutal to me, but grief lays us bare, even to ourselves. I prayed that my husband was dead, because I knew how that would go: I knew where I would get the Extractor for his ichor, what I would wear to mourn him, how I would process through the streets with my son at my side to the Archive. All women in our city know the procedures for losing a spouse.

But there are no procedures for losing a child.

Which is why, when Nikias hesitated to respond, I felt it as a physical blow to the gut. I stumbled back and sat on the cot. No, I thought, and I stood.

“Show me,” I said.

Together we climbed the steps to the hallway above. It should have been in chaos, staff rushing everywhere, as it always was during emergencies. Instead it was silent. Everyone we passed avoided my eyes. I followed Nikias to the courtyard.

My son lay on the ground, and I thought of a particular memory. Haemon, age eight, on a clear night, asking me to see the stars. We had gone up to the roof of our building, then an apartment in the Seventh District. The moon had been a crescent—Like a toenail clipping, Haemon had said, and I’d laughed. We had lain down side by side on the roof and looked up at the night sky until the clouds blew in again and our noses were cold.

For just a moment, time fractured, and I saw him as that eight-year-old boy lying on the roof. And then time returned, and I knew this was his body, and my boy, my love, my dearest and most precious thing, was dead.



* * *



I was still kneeling there at his side when Kreon returned.

It was late afternoon, and I was numb. I couldn’t feel my feet or my hands. I couldn’t feel pain.

I looked up at the man, my husband, standing grief-stricken in the courtyard.

“Eurydice,” he sighed.

I pushed myself to my feet. My vision went black, just for a moment, as the blood rushed back into my extremities. When I saw again, he was reaching for me. I stepped back.

“Look carefully, Kreon,” I said, my voice still distant, and rough, as if I’d been screaming. “Because you will never see me again.”



* * *



At dusk, I carried my son’s ichor to the Archive.

And then I kept walking until I was in the wilderness.





16

Antigone




It is, I imagine, a little like the horror of being born.

We come into the world screaming, after all. There is warm and safe, and then there is motion, and pressure, so intense we can hardly stand it. And then everything is loud and bright and strange, and we can’t help but scream at the top of our lungs.

Ismene screams during the launch. I don’t blame her. It is a forceful, helpless feeling. Like being thrown, like dreams where I am falling and feel terrified of my own weight. Fear washes over me, prickling and stinging, and I grit my teeth against it. Ismene sobs as we break through the clouds. I want to be sobbing, but my body has become a prison, and I can’t move.

I watch through the porthole as Earth appears beneath us.

It didn’t occur to me until that moment that I had lived inside her. I always thought of my planet as something I lived on. But clinging to the straps that hold me in place, I think, no, I was within her. Folded somewhere between her atmosphere and her surface, as if between a mattress and a blanket. But there are depths to her I don’t know, and layers I never thought of. She is a complex entity that I know, in the end, very little about. I watch her become distinct from me, and it seems to me that gravity was a kind of umbilical cord that bound us to our planet, and that cord has been cut.

So of course I am afraid. Nothing is more frightening than the sudden realization that you are new.

I reach over to Ismene and grab her hand.

“Here I am,” I say, and it’s nonsense, just words to fill the space. But it seems to help her.

She turns her hand and interlaces her fingers with mine.

“Here I am,” I say again, this time to myself.





Acknowledgments


First of all, you can’t write a retelling of Antigone without acknowledging Sophocles. Hot damn, what a play. Secondary nods to Euripides and Aeschylus for their supporting material (though Euripides’s version of this play is, of course, lost to time). If you haven’t read the original, please do.