Arch-Conspirator(5)

It was even darker here, the channels cut in the ceiling farther apart. Each sample occupied a space the size of a book, making the library comparison even more apt. During the day, a dim light glowed beneath each one, to illuminate the name written on a label beneath. In a slot beside them was a slate with a description of their lives. I didn’t need the label to find my father and mother, settled next to each other in a place of prominence, near the front. Oedipus. Jocasta.

Oedipus, who would have been our first freely elected leader. Jocasta, who sought to give childbearing to everyone—thus freeing those who didn’t want it. A scientist in a city where only men were scientists; an impossibility of a woman.

Some people came to the Archive to grieve. I heard their whispers even then, like a distant stream. I wondered what they said to the dead. I didn’t come here to tell my mother and father my secrets, my sorrows, and my regrets. I came here because it was the only place where Kreon wasn’t watching. I knelt on the stone floor in front of my parents’ names, set my sandals down, and opened my bag. I took out the Extractor and held it up to the light.

It was one of my mother’s old ones, I was sure. We had so little of her, of him. Distributing their possessions was a rite of mourning, and we had not been permitted to mourn. The closest Ismene and I had come was preparing the bodies. I had stripped them bare; Ismene had washed them. Ismene had said the prayer; I had done the Extraction, plunging one instrument into my father’s body, two inches below the belly button, and another into my mother’s. It could only be done on the dead. I closed my eyes, and forced myself to imagine doing it to Polyneikes, but try as I might, I couldn’t envision him dead. He was only ever sleeping.

I put the Extractor back in my bag, and took a deep breath. The name “Jocasta” was scribbled in poor handwriting on the label. It took me a few seconds to remember that it was mine. Those days had passed in a fog.

“Hello, dear,” came a soft voice on my right.

I jerked to attention. Standing at the end of the short aisle was Eurydice, Kreon’s wife.

People called her the angel of Thebes. She was fine boned and delicate. Her skin was so pale that in sunlight, you could see right through it to the blue veins and straight tendons beneath.

“Hello.” I picked up my sandals and stood. There was dust on my knees, dust on my heels.

“I apologize for interrupting,” she said. “I came here to see my own mother, and thought I would say hello to yours on my way out.”

“Your mother is still here?” I asked. Though children weren’t permitted to resurrect their parents—it was considered incestuous, as well as selfish, not to contribute to genetic diversity—a prominent family like hers was a desirable one, in the Archive. I had assumed that someone would have brought Eurydice’s mother forth by now.

“My mother was a Follower of Lazarus,” Eurydice said. “She’ll be here until the end of everything. Or so she believed.”

Followers of Lazarus—we called them “Fools,” an easy nickname, hand delivered. They believed a creator would raise them from the dead via their ichor when the world ended, and as such, they requested that their material be used only if there was no alternative. It was noted on their placards in red. My mother had criticized them regularly, claiming that looking forward to the end meant no longer striving for survival, no longer valuing humanity. Despite that, I felt more kinship with them now than I ever had. Sometimes the end was all there was left to long for.

“But you don’t agree with her,” I said.

Eurydice smiled. “No. I believe in the enduring nature of the soul, as she did, but I don’t believe in the end.”

“I don’t think I believe in either,” I said, and in this place that so many thought of as holy, it felt like a confession. I touched my mother’s name with just my fingertips. “I don’t think if I used her ichor I would get her back. I think she’s gone.”

“Those two things do not have to coincide,” Eurydice said. “If a soul endures, then perhaps—it simply endures, no matter what we do. If not in ichor, then elsewhere.”

“How do you know a soul even exists?” I said.

“I suppose I don’t,” Eurydice said. “I simply don’t prioritize certainty.”

Her eyes were gentle. It was tempting to think of her as a flimsy thing. But no flimsy thing could have been with Kreon for so long and remained herself.

“Shall we go?” I said. “Or do you want a moment alone with her?”

I nodded toward my mother’s slot. Eurydice just shook her head, and we walked together down the aisle. I thought of the couple from earlier, finishing their perusal, talking about the kind of child they wanted. Once they made their selections, down the road, the Archivist would combine the cells they selected, the souls they selected, and implant them in one of their wombs. After that, I wasn’t sure. Maybe she would die in childbirth. Statistically, it was as likely as survival. But even if she did survive—women were protected by the home, and only men could move freely outside of it. Would those women raise a child with two men who favored each other? Would they try to scrape together a life on their own? The memory of them scolded me. What a small creature I was to fear and hate the thing they were risking everything for. But a small creature I was, and I could not be otherwise.

The air was hot outside the Archive, and it was always strange to go places with Eurydice, who was the closest thing to royalty that existed in our city. People gathered around her like supplicants, eyes sparkling, mouths smiling, hands reaching. She was overwhelmed by them, searching for exits, but I couldn’t help her. Their eyes skipped over me as if I wasn’t there. It was kinder than acknowledging what I was.