Brave New Love (32 page)

Ma handed us each a headlamp. I hadn’t used one since explorer class when I was thirteen. I flipped the switch. A strong light beam shone back toward the community hall. I turned it
off.

We all put the headlamps on.

Everyone followed us to the big, bolted-shut door. There were many other blocked off tunnels around the edges of our living spaces, shafts we’d been taught to avoid, tunnels we might have
gotten lost in, distances we didn’t need. This door was taller than three people standing on each other’s shoulders, and wider than four people standing side by side with their arms
stretched out. Three large bolts held big padlocks that kept the door shut. We oiled these locks and the door hinges every week, but I’d never seen them open.

Bufo pulled three keys from a pocket and unlocked each one. They rasped loudly. The big door had gaps all around it and air flowed through.“We know the air is good; it’s what we
breathe,” he said. “We don’t know what other things you’ll find. If it looks too dangerous, come straight back. Piller will guard the door. I’m going to lock it after
you, but only one lock.”

“All right,” said Granny Tordis. She held a walking stick, thinner than Piller’s. I wished I had one.

Bufo pulled the locks from the bolts. Piller helped him open the big door. Beyond it was a black tunnel. Cold air rushed over us, a wind stronger than any I had felt before. My hair blew back.
Everyone’s did. I smelled new things. I didn’t know what they were, but some of them made my stomach growl, even though I’d just eaten.

Joy kicked alive. I felt as if I could float.

Ma kissed my cheek. “Good fortune go with you,” she said, and then she kissed Fingal and Arn, too. “Take care of them, Ma,” she said to Granny.

“I will.”

We all switched our headlamps on and stepped into the tunnel. The walls were worked stone, with some sheets of new, glistening calcite buildup blanketing them here and there. The floor was dense
with dust. Our feet stirred it up. The wind rushed toward us, until Bufo closed the door, muffling a cascade of good wishes from the others.

We stood in the dark, only our four light lances cutting into it, and I took a big breath.

“Let’s go,” Fingal said. “Let’s go.” He took my hand and Arn’s and headed up the tunnel.

“Not too fast,” Granny said, stick-walking in our wake.

But we couldn’t slow. We rushed ahead, up, up, always up, around several crooks in the tunnel, and then we saw light, bright and blinding, stronger than plantlights, so bright it hurt my
eyes to look, and we heard birdsong, birdsong! Something I’d only heard on puters before.

I switched off my headlamp. Arn and Fingal switched off theirs. We stood with our faces toward the Up, our eyes shut against the brightest light we had ever seen, and felt the first brush of
warmth that came from something other than heaters. So many scents! The air was almost muddy with them! The sound of wind moving through leaves—I had heard that in the few vids we were
allowed to watch, seen leaves moving and flickering. I wanted to see them for real.

Granny’s stick tapped up behind us, and we all moved forward. I opened my eyes into slits. Already the light seemed softer, but such white in the sky above! I had never seen such a glowing
ceiling!

We reached the outer chamber and looked out into the Up. There was so much open I got dizzy and felt like I would fall. Colors glared at me—greens, browns, grays, brighter than I’d
ever seen, and a rippling surface of water that stretched away and away without bumping into anything. The sky had changed from white to blue. All the angry light glared from one hot point low in
the sky. It pressed warmth into my face. I swayed, and Fingal caught me. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and bent his head down so his mouth was near my ear.

“Was it worth it?” he whispered. “Sabotaging the lights and sanding the generator?”

I wanted to drop the black bag my father had given me that tied us to the others, still, with untouchable threads of radio and words. I wanted to shed the watch he had buckled on my wrist, its
time synched to his. I wanted to tear off the bodysuit, still full of the scent and dust of Na Below.

It was too soon for any of those things, but I already knew I would do them. “Oh, yes,” I breathed, my hands over Fingal’s on my stomach.

C
ARRIE
R
YAN

The Cruce knows everything.

I should be in bed. Better yet, I should be asleep. I fist my hands in the pockets of my trousers, feeling the fuzzy slide of paper across my knuckles. The stupid note. Hunching my shoulders
against the darkness I use my elbow to push open the thick wooden door to the tower. The hinges creak too loudly, the noise escaping into the night. I stop and listen.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not the type of person who breaks rules and sneaks out, slipping into forbidden places. Going to see the Cruce without permission.

Your emotions are not your own. She has taken them from you.

The note had been wedged into a small crevice in the wall behind the door. I thought I’d been the only one who knew about the hiding spot. And maybe that was still true since the note was
written with my crooked lefty handwriting.

I shake my head. I don’t remember writing the note. I don’t remember sliding it into the wall. I don’t even know what the words mean and I’m pretty sure I should just
turn around and go back to my dreams.

Except that the note said something about the failure.
You
failed the Cruce.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I would have felt the need to tell this to myself in such a mysterious way.

Because if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that I’ve never failed at anything. I’m not that kind of person.

I creep through the main floor of the tower, dirty straw rustling under my feet. Two at a time I take the narrow winding stairs down to the basement. There are divots in the stone steps from so
many feet following this path before me. I think about my first time a few years ago: I was thirteen and thinking I’d be participating in some kind of grand initiation.

I snort in the darkness and trail my fingers along the crooked walls to keep my balance. Already my heart’s beating faster because this time I know what I’m about to see. I’m
prepared for it. Almost.

I have friends who’ve come down here since the Initiation—out of some sense of duty or morbid curiosity I guess. Not me. I had enough the first time around. I saw her, understood the
bargain she’d made, and have been just fine forgetting about her ever since.

The smell comes first, though you don’t really realize it because it’s faint in the beginning. Just a sort of heavy stench of rot that trickles in with the damp cellar air.
It’s not until you hear it—the keening—that you realize how much everything around you has changed. How tightly you’re breathing, how hard it is to keep your eyes from
watering.

The sound grows as you reach the basement floor and there’s still the hallway to travel down—the door’s at the far end, a guard sitting in a chair, hunched over with his head
in his hands.

In a city where there’s no such thing as misery, I wonder if his job is the closest anyone comes to being miserable. Alone here in the dark, listening to the Cruce and being surrounded by
her stench.

It’s at this point, staring at my destination, that I want to stop, just tear up the note and turn around and escape. But I don’t. Because that’s not the kind of person I am.
I’m not someone who gives up easily. I’m not someone who fails.

I push myself down the hallway, ducking my head under the shallow ceiling until I’m standing only a few paces from the end. The bottom of the door is made up of ill-fitted slats of wood
with haphazard metal bars along the top.

The guard glances up at me. I tell him I just want to take a look and he shrugs. He doesn’t care that I’m there at all, only cares if I try to touch the girl. And as far as I know,
no one’s ever tried to reach out to her—not that I’ve ever learned about at least.

I step past the guard and involuntarily close my eyes. I wish I could close off everything else. It really really stinks and the noise is nearly unbearable. It’s what I’d imagine a
cat would sound like if you slowly squeezed the life out of it while simultaneously shredding the flesh from its body.

But I have to see her. I have to know what this note means. Because it doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand why I would write a note to myself. Why I would hide it in a place where
only I could find it.

Why I can’t remember ever doing either of these things.

I lower my head to my chest and try to take a deep breath. And then I lean toward the gaps in the door and look into the room beyond. I look at the Cruce, a girl whose name I think I used to
know. A girl I think I grew up with.

There’s very little light—none in the room itself, only what ekes through from the hallway where I’m standing. I see her toes first, nails long and yellow, cracked around the
edges. Grime is caked into every crevice of her skin, streaking her with dirt. The room’s tiny, narrower than the hallway and barely long enough for her to lie straight so she’s forced
to curl around herself, no furniture anywhere.

A nightgown so filthy it’s falling apart along the seams sags from her body and her eyes are closed, fluttering under matted hair that falls over most of her face. Her skin’s wrapped
so tight around her bones that she appears almost corpse-like.

She wails, low and raw as she rocks against the earthen floor, her fingers clenching and unclenching at the ground. This is the Cruce, the holder of all misery.

I shudder but I can’t stop staring at the creature. I wait for the sear of bile in the back of my throat, for my stomach to heave and my throat to close like it did the first time I saw
her.

That this thing in the room had once been a child—a girl, a human being—is unfathomable. She’s wretched and gross and ugly and wrong. She reeks of her own stench, of breathing
the same air and lying in the same muck for year after year with no reprieve.

This is what my happiness is built on—what all our happiness is built on. This girl in this room in this tower. I watch her sleep, watch her body jolt and cry out as she prepares to enter
people’s dreams and pull their misery away, take it into herself.

Night after night, this is her duty: dispel misery, keep all evils at bay, ensure prosperity.

For a fraction of a moment I wonder what she’s seen in my dreams. I never remember anything in the morning—that’s the whole point.

I watch her twitch, trying to recall her as a child. I had to have known her because she’s my age. I had to have once chased her in a game of tag or pinched her or been partnered with her
in some class or something. Anything.

But all those memories are gone. Just like every other painful memory I’ve ever had. Eaten by the Cruce while I slept.

Your emotions are not your own. She has taken them from you. You failed the Cruce
.

I could call out to her. I could stretch my fingers into the darkness to offer her some small comfort. Some idea that she’s not alone.

I could ask her what the note means. What she knows about my failure because as far as I know, I’ve never failed. Just the idea of it causes the muscles along my shoulders and back to
bunch.

But that would undo the bargain. It would cause everything to crash down around me and, like I said, I’m not the type of person who does what’s wrong. I’m the type of person
who follows the rules and the rules are clear when it comes to the Cruce: leave her alone.

I turn away from the door and feel a little out of place standing next to the guard, as if I should say something. “Anyone else been down here recently?” I ask, nothing else I could
say coming to mind. He shrugs again and yawns. I wonder if when he sleeps the misery of his job is pulled away from his dreams—if when he tries to find memories of his past days they fall
behind him blank and circumscribed.

I stand there a moment longer, feeling awkward as the Cruce’s wailing drifts between us. “Good night, then,” I finally mumble and as I start up the stairs I hear him call out,
“Sweet dreams,” with a touch of sarcasm to his voice.

In the darkness of the twisty corridor I pull the slip of paper from my pocket again. I don’t need light to know the words written there. The too girly loop of my “y” and the
terrible slant of my “t” and “k.” The note doesn’t make sense. Why would I remind myself of the Cruce? Everyone over the age of thirteen knows of her, it’s part
of our duty as Alinians, it’s how we accept the Bargain of the sacrifice of one, for the happiness of all.

The imperfection of the moment is tight, squeezing at my lungs and making me uncomfortable. I’m not used to it, don’t know how to shuffle free of the new emotions. I feel stupid
waiting here in the dark as if I can learn something from silence. As if the tiny room with its pitiable creature below me in the basement holds some secret I was unaware of until now. But
it’s not true. The Cruce is as she’s always been: miserable and wretched. And I am as I’ve always been: happy, and without failure, no matter what a slip of paper insinuates.

To prove my point I shred the note, the tearing sound echoing in the cavernous vault of the tower. I let the balmy night air take the fragments of paper from my hand and scatter it across the
straw-covered floor. I’ve had enough of notes for one evening. It’s time for me to go to bed, to let the Cruce take over.

For a moment I wonder if this is one of the memories she’ll take away from me: standing here in the dark, the walls of the tower disappearing into blackness above and the sound of doves
roosting in old cracks between the stones.

I close my eyes, trying to imprint this moment. Just as an experiment. I even think of gathering back the scraps of paper and stuffing them into the tiny hiding place where I’d found them.
I almost laugh as I think about what tomorrow-me would think finding them there.

And maybe that’s why I put the note there in the first place. Next time I shouldn’t be so cryptic.