Of Beast and Beauty (42 page)

My monster. I wish Gem were mine; I wish it with everything in me.

“Your monster might be dead, but my father didn’t kill him,” Bo says, sending a shiver of relief through my body. My breath rushes out and my forehead falls against the door with a thud. “He did something worse. At least I believe it’s worse. Who knows what you’ll think, since you obviously don’t care for your own people anymore, but I—”

“I care for them more than you ever will. I’ve told you the truth,” I snap, sick to death of this same argument. I told Bo about the queen’s diary. I even tore out a few pages for him to look at—those I knew wouldn’t give the secret of the covenant away—but he refuses to believe in the Dark Heart. “The power sustaining the domed cities is evil. The people are better off.”

“You’re mad. At least half our people will die of exposure or Monstrous attack before they reach Port South. You’ve sentenced hundreds of innocents to death.”

“Better death than life paid for by the suffering of others.”

“The suffering of the Monstrous, you mean,” he says, bitterness

straining the words. “I almost hate to tell you what Father did. If you love them this much while you believe a monster killed the king, how much more will you love them when you know the truth?”

Despite the still, humid air in my walled-up room, I’m suddenly cold.

He can’t mean … He can’t …

“It was my father who killed yours,” Bo whispers. “He made it look like the Monstrous, but … it was him.”

No.
No
. I pull away from the door and step back, staring hard at the wood, half expecting it to catch fire and burn, showing me Bo’s face on the other side. I have to see his face. I have to know if he’s telling the truth.

I reach out and twist the lock, fling open the door. He steps back quickly, shooting the dagger in my hand a wary glance, but when he lifts his eyes, there is more shame than surprise in his expression.

“It was the only way for me to be king.” Even Bo’s soft voice seems too loud with the door no longer between us. Or maybe it’s the terrible truth in his words that makes my ears ache. “Your father wanted you to be spared. He was planning to marry again, the same widow I was going to marry tomorrow morning. She already has children. The line of succession would have been insured for another generation. So my father decided to dispose of the king before he took another wife. If the Monstrous hadn’t invaded the city, he would have found another way. I didn’t know about any of it until afterward, but … it’s the truth.”

I shake my head. Father was going to remarry. He wanted me to be spared the burden of being queen of Yuan. He loved me after all.

And Junjie killed him. He killed his king, his friend, a man who trusted him with every secret in his heart, with his life. With
my
life. Junjie would have taken them both if he’d had his way, all so that his family could have more power, more prestige.

I suppose I should be shocked, and in a way, I am, but deep down inside …

Isn’t this what Yuan is about? Killing for what we want, what we’ve convinced ourselves we deserve? The nobles living in obscene luxury at the expense of the common people, the common people clinging to their small comforts at the expense of the Banished, and all of us stealing life away from the land and the people outside the dome so that we can have feast days and harvest festivals and surplus and more and more and more when even half of what we have would be more than enough?

Junjie was only doing what the people of Yuan have always done. He was paying for what he wanted with someone else’s blood.

But not anymore. Not ever again.

“Thank you,” I say, feeling closer to Bo than I ever have. “For keeping your promise to the city.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? My father—”

“I understand.” I glance down at the dagger in my hand, grateful I didn’t get the chance to use it. I don’t want to know what it feels like to pay a blood price. “It’s all the more reason for this to end with us. I know you don’t believe what I’ve told you, but—”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” Bo says. “It was so clear before, but now …” He braces his hands on either side of the door frame, his head sagging wearily between them.

I glance at his bowed head, at the pale hairs weaving their way in among the black. His short time as king has taken its toll. Bo’s not a boy anymore. He’s a man, maybe even man enough to be trusted with the truth.

I’m parting my lips, debating whether or not to tell him the entire truth, when a great screech and a shattering fills the air, as if every plate in the royal kitchen were dropped at once. The tower walls vibrate, and Bo and I cover our ears with twin cries of pain. A moment later, a dull boom rocks the stones beneath our feet.

The floor tilts, sending me staggering back into my bedroom. My dagger falls from my hand and scuttles across the stones, only coming to a stop when it hits the far wall with a clank. My arms wheel and my feet spread wide to steady me, even as my heart screams that it’s pointless to fight, useless to resist. The tower will fall and I will fall with it. This is the moment I thought I was ready for.

But I’m not. I’m not! How could I be? How can anyone ever be ready?

Mercifully, after several endless seconds, the floor steadies and the stomach-flipping tilting stops. My breath rushes out and my heart pounds fast enough to make me dizzy as I turn in a careful circle, taking in the crooked new world left behind in the wake of the quake. My bed curtains list to the left, and my dressing table has fallen on its face, while the pictures on the walls hang at disturbing odds with the room, now that gravity has taken the room one way and pulled the pictures the other.

“Are you all right?” Bo asks, drowning out another faint but troubling

sound.

“Sh,” I hiss, ears straining. Outside, the air is still once more, but from somewhere deep within the tower comes a crumbling, crunching … loose sound. A faltering sound; a falling sound.

“Go! Run!” I shout, dashing on bare feet to the door, where Bo stands braced against the frame, wide-eyed and as panicked-looking as I feel. I duck under his arm, snatching at his shirt as I dash for the stairs, dragging him after me, praying the way out is still passable.

It’s one thing to say I’ll die with the city; it’s quite another to climb into bed and let the tower collapse beneath me. That’s too close to giving up, and giving up is too close to drawing a knife across my throat. I’ll fall with Yuan, but I won’t go down peacefully. I’ll go fighting for my life every second of the way. I am a warrior now. Gem made me this way, and I won’t betray him or myself by giving up without a struggle worthy of the last queen of Yuan.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE city is a monster, screaming and frothing and losing teeth in its frenzy to feed one last time.

The soldiers run like frightened children into the desert, dropping spears and dart blowers and swords in their haste to escape. The few still left inside shove each other as they fight to squeeze through the narrow opening that is all that is left of the King’s Gate now that the walls have all but collapsed. Even before I’m close enough to see the sweat and tears on the men’s faces, I can smell their terror, sour and filthy on the wind, tainting the fresh air crashing over the mountains like waves of redemption.

The men are so afraid of their city that they don’t notice their old monster running toward them until I’m close enough to kill them with a sweep of my claws. Two short, soft boys scream and put on a burst of speed, darting closer to the wall to get away from me, before racing back toward the desert, while the man wedged half in and half out of the opening in the gate cries out and lifts his arms in a desperate—and useless—attempt to protect himself.

If it’s necessary to kill him, he’ll be as dead with those arms up as down, but I’ll leave that decision to him.

“Leave now and I won’t hurt you. Stay to fight me, and you die,” I growl as I pull him through the opening by his armpits and fling him onto the ground. I wait half a second—long enough to see that he has scrambled to his feet and followed his friends—before turning back to the opening

and hauling at the rocks blocking my way.

I’m bigger than the men of Yuan. I won’t be able to fit unless I make the opening larger. I dig my fingers into the stone, until they bruise. I wrench at the rocks until my muscles scream with effort. I curse myself for allowing my body to grow thinner and weaker in my weeks wandering the wild. I dig in and dig down and give everything I have and more, but the last colossal stone refuses to move. Not a centimeter, not a fraction of a centimeter.

I grit my teeth and howl with effort, refusing to fail now. Above me, the city howls more loudly, twisted metal and crumbling glass wailing a miserable, selfish cry for blood and suffering and death. But beneath it all is the rush of the clean wind and, finally, a wondrous smatter-patter, the sound of raindrops on desperately dry earth, the remarkable rhythm of rain falling harder and harder until the drumbeat of hope pounds all around me.

The drops kiss my bare shoulders, soak into my skin, bringing me to life like a seed waiting for a miracle.

The stone gives beneath my fingers, rolling away, falling to the ground with a thud. Heart racing, I shove my shoulders through the opening and tumble into Yuan. I roll back to my feet and run, around the granaries, through the barren fields, past fallen trees and massive shards of glass, cresting the final hill in time to see the tower fall.

And fall … and fall, loose stones scattering like bones thrown from a medicine man’s cup, foretelling the death of anyone still left inside.

ISRA

BY the time we reach the base of the tower, my childhood home is crumbling all around me. With barely a moment to spare, I fling myself through the door to the outside world and out onto the path, with Bo close behind me. As I dash for the barren sunflower patch, my bare feet crunch through the clods of dirt that are all that remain of the cabbage field.

My breath comes fast and my arms pump at my sides; my lungs are raw, but the salty taste in my throat only makes me feel more alive. I’m alive. Still alive!

We’re going to make it out. We’re going to make it!

It’s my last thought before a stone fist punches me between my shoulders, knocking me through the air. I fly—a bird with broken wings and a belly full of pain—only to fall to the earth with a pitiful moan. My breath rushes out, but I can wheeze only a little air back in. It hurts to breathe deeply. There are too many sharp things inside me, fighting for a place to exist in this soft, bleeding body. My vision swims with red, my fingers flinch at my sides, instinctively grasping for things I’ll never touch.

I blink, pulling the world into focus, to see Bo standing a few feet away, staring back at me, hunks of rocks falling to the ground all around him. I try to tell him to run, but I can’t speak. Even if I could have made words, it would have been too late.

It’s a stone no bigger than a child’s ball that hits him, but it makes contact in the worst of places, colliding with his skull, shattering him in the blink of an eye. I see more red, and then Bo is facedown on the earth. Not moving. Not breathing.

My chest burns, and I know I would cry for him if my body weren’t full of knives made of broken bones. He’s gone. As gone as I will be soon.

Soon I will not be Isra anymore.

I could find peace with it, I think, some kind of peace, enough to close my eyes and move away from the pain, at least, but a moment after the last stone hits the ground, he’s there. He comes running through the wreckage, his expression as fearful and hopeful as I imagine mine was a few minutes ago.

Gem.
Gem
. Every part of my being screams his name.