Arch-Conspirator(3)
“Just in case.”
She leaned over the table, her wide eyes fixed on mine.
“Do you have any idea what it would do to me if I lost you?” she said in a harsh whisper.
“Yeah, I kinda do,” I said. “Same as what it would do to me if I lost you. And lately that seems more and more likely.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The thing about her was, nobody could hide from her, but she thought she could hide from everybody. Like she was some great actress. Like I wouldn’t notice my own sister going limp by fractions, all the fight gone out of her.
“Sometimes you stare into the future,” I said, “and you don’t like anything you see.”
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re doing this for me.”
“Not just you. God, how long do you think we can go on this way? Any of us?”
A city of seven districts. Kids chanted about it in the North: Seven houses crumbling on a Theban street. One’s got no fire, one’s got no heat. One’s got no water; one’s got no meat. Saw them once jumping rope to it; got scattered a few minutes later by the police.
Antigone touched the Extractor with just her fingertips.
“What if I don’t believe in this shit?” she said, nodding to the instrument. “What if I don’t think a person can be reborn?”
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, doesn’t really matter either way, does it?” I said. “I believe in it. And if I die, I want you to promise to store my ichor in the Archive. I want you to make sure I can be remade. Consider this my will and testament. Okay?”
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Promise?”
“My word is my word,” she said, scowling at me. “But yes, I promise. If you promise not to plan on dying.”
I smiled. “Promise.”
She closed her eyes as another wave of wind swept across us, dusting our coffees. Tears spilled down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with her scarf. By the time the air settled again, she looked unaffected. She sipped her coffee, dust and all.
“This coffee is shit,” she said.
“Everybody’s a critic,” I replied, and chugged the rest of mine.
3
Antigone
The Archive stood in the middle of the city, where the land sloped steeply upward into a hill that looked more like a shelf. It was a building of chalky beige stone, and the land surrounding it was the same, rough and bare. It had been so difficult to move materials up there, the story went, that no one had wanted to repeat the experience, so the Archive was a lonely place, a place for pilgrims.
I worked my way down narrow side streets, where my fine clothing drew the eyes of those who wanted to sell or pilfer, and my recognizable face sent those eyes away almost in the same moment. Still, wherever I went there was the jingling of change in cups, voices strained by coughing up dust asking me to buy, church tracts pressed into my hands that I let fall rather than grasp. I should have had an escort. I was viable and young. Like a crystal glass, fragile and precious and useful only for what I might contain.
All the buildings in this part of the Electran District were worn by weather and wind, but covered in colorful graffiti, some more artful than others. I paused by a scene of a boat in the midst of a stormy sea, a cartoon duo boxing in a ring with gloves made of rock, a woman’s face with a name and date scrawled beneath it. I walked past little shops with no signs: Hardware stores that were just rows of buckets with nails and bolts in them, electronics stores advertising access to the old Internet for ten spend a minute, bakeries stacked high with bread loaves behind bars.
I reached the steps at the foot of the hill, and waited in line to climb them. They were wide enough for one person going up and one person going down. My feet ached in flat sandals. I had not planned to come here. But with Polyneikes’ “just in case” Extractor weighing down the bag at my side, I had no other choice.
On the steps, the man in front of me was counting every time he picked up his foot. I wondered who he was going to visit—a spouse gone before him, or a child gone too soon. Or maybe he was going to prepare a place for himself. It was possible even for the poor to find a place in the Archive now. My father’s law, my father’s doing. I listened to the feeble voice in front of me saying, “Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two.” Immortality, I had once heard my father say, should be for everyone.
The back of my neck was slick with sweat by the time we reached the top, the old man’s counting now in the shape of a harsh exhale. The straps of my sandals had worn blisters into my heels and toes. There were people sitting on the rocks at the top, resting, staring out at the city—the dust-haze moved through the streets, the bumps of short buildings and the sheen of their windows and the rolling hills that surrounded us on all sides too distant to be clear. I could only see their faint ripple against the sky.
Beyond the hills was wilderness in every direction. I’d never been out there, but my father had told me it was exactly what I would expect: ruins.
From there I could see the High Commander’s house to the east, in the Seventh District, a grand, sprawling structure with an open courtyard that was a market, an oddity, a place of public pronouncements and demonstrations. Not far from it was the Trireme, our beacon of hope.