Birthmarked

"They're the same on every baby?" he asked.

But before she could answer, Capt. Grey was moving.

He pivoted before her to sit on the boulder and propped his left ankle on his right knee. With one rapid movement, he shucked off his left boot. A black sock followed, and then, al' most savagely, he pulled up the black leg of his pants to expose his ankle.

There, faint but clearly visible, were three freckles arranged in a line, and a bit lower, to the left, was a fourth. Gaia stared, unbelieving.

"Fm from outside the wall," Capt. Grey said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

Her eyes shot to his and held. "My mother was there when you were born," she said. "She birthmarked you." Her mind scrambled to put it all together. Her mother had advanced Leon into the Enclave. "What's your birth date?" she asked.

He blinked slowly in her direction. "My birth date? It's April fourteenth, twenty three ninety," he said. "Why?"

She was both disappointed and strangely relieved. "You re not my brother," she said, and warmth tinged her cheeks. "You re the same year as Odin, but a different day."

He closed his eyes briefly. Gaia felt an overwhelming urge, a compulsion to trace her mothers mark, and she gently reached forward to touch his ankle. He winced back, looking up at her curiously.

"I'm sorry," she said, withdrawing. Her finger tingled from the feel of his skin.

"Do you realise what this means for me?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Do you have any idea who my parents are? My biological parents, I should say."

She shook her head again. "I'm sorry. No."

"The information wouldn't be in that ribbon, would it?" he asked.

"It could be," she said, hesitating. She locked pleading eyes to his. "I don't know the code," she said. "Why does it matter who your biological parents are? You were raised in here. You said yourself your father is the Protectorat. What could be better than that?"

He was putting his sock and boot on again swiftly.

"I'm sure you remember the Protectorat Family Special of How We Are Family," he said in a tight voice. "The Protectorat's first wife couldn't have children, so they adopted a son-- me." He stood to stomp the boot on. "Then my adoptive mother died, and my father married a second wife, Genevieve, a fertile woman who gave him three children of his own."

Gaia was thinking quickly. "So those women you called your mother and sister today. They're technically your step' mother and stepsister, through adoption. Right?" she said.

"Technically. But wave your magic wand, little Gaia. We're family" he drew out the last word, as if it were written all in capital letters with music in the background.

She drew back slightly, disturbed by his dark sarcasm. "I'm not sure you really know what a family is, Leon," she said quietly.

He let out a laugh. "No kidding. Thank you. And it's 'Leon finally. There's a breakthrough."

She drew her arms across her chest. "I don't understand you," she said.

He ran a hand back through his dark hair and frowned at her. "It doesn't matter about me," he said. "What you need to understand is that the freckles will only make them more desperate to decode the ribbon. The freckles are like a brand."

Gaia was shocked. "You're going to tell them?" she asked, incredulous.

He turned to face her, his eyes piercing into hers. "No. You are," he said.

She backed away from him. "I am not."

"You are," he insisted. "You have to convince them you're cooperating. You have to try to unravel the code. Don't you see it's your only chance? If you resist, they'll kill you. But if you help them, they'll see how valuable you are. Think of Sephie."

"What about Sephie?" she asked.

He straightened, his expression surprised. "They released her," he said. "Persephone Frank is back home with her family. She's practicing medicine as if nothing ever happened. Didn't you know?"

She let out a laugh of astonishment. "I don't believe you."

"It's true. I could show you, but we don't have much time."

But Gaia was stupefied.

"She told them to look for the tea and the motherwort," Leon continued. "She convinced them you have knowledge you re not consciously aware of yourself."

"She betrayed me?" Gaia asked.

Leon shook his head, trying to explain. "No," he said. "She cooperated. She cooperated, and they let her go."

Gaia struggled to see it from his point of view. "But you said yourself it's like a brand. If I tell the Enclave about the freckles, they'll be able to identify all the babies advanced by my mother." Something puzzled her. "But don 't they know that already? Don 't they have their own records?"

He shook his head. "They know which people are advanced, obviously. That's no secret. And they have their birth dates. But they don't know their birth parents, or what part of Wharfton those parents are from."

"And the people with the freckles?" she asked doubtfully. "Would it help them?"

He twisted a twig of pine from the tree above him, and fiddled with the needles. "I suppose they'd be even more careful not to fall in love with each other," he said.

"What do you mean?" she asked, affronted.

He shook his head, frustrated. "People here, inside, who were advanced from outside are discouraged from marrying each other. It's a kind of civic duty for an advanced person to marry someone who was born inside the Enclave, and in a similar way, advanced people have become desirable as spouses to the people born inside. Are you with me?"

"It sounds like you think people can control who they fall in love with," she said.

"It's not really like that. It's possible for two advanced people who fall in love with each other to marry, as long as the genetic screening shows they're not related, but it's considered a waste of their genetic diversity." He closed his eyes, shaking his head. "Our genetic diversity," he clarified. "I'm one of them. One of the advanced."

It sounded to her like he was still grappling with the basics of his identity.

"Didn't you realise you were from outside the wall?" she asked. "You knew you were adopted." She watched a faint ruddiness rise in his cheeks.

"Until five minutes ago, I thought I was my fathers bastard," he said. He twisted the pine needles into a tangle and let them fall.

"And was that worse?" she asked softly. "To be a bastard from inside the wall?"

He'd been looking away, but now she saw him refocus on her, and his lips curled in a kind of self mockery. "You don 't miss much, do you? It was worse. I'd by far rather be a legitimate nobody from the outside than be the Protecorat's bastard."

"And that's saying something," she said.

He let out a brief laugh, and looked at her, his eyes warming with wary gratitude.

"You could still be the Protectorates bastard, but from out' side the wall," she reminded him.

"Not if you know him. He would never touch a woman from outside the wall."

A breeze moved through the pine needles with a soft, rushing noise, and Gaia heard a bird make a clicking noise in the garden.

"Fm sorry," he said quietly. "That's how he thinks. Not how I do."

"It's all right."

She looked down at her hands, -wondering why she understood him, why it was becoming easier to talk to him, even about things that were intensely personal. He wasn't who she'd thought he was, not underneath.

"Why Orion?" he asked. "Why not some other constellation?"

She braced her foot against the boulder again and looked at the little marks on her own ankle. "Orion's my mother 's maiden name." She spoke slowly, pondering the design. "You could see the Orion tattoo there your whole life and never guess it means anything."

"Until you know," he said. "And then it means everything."

She nodded.

When she lowered her foot to the ground, she felt a strange tingling in her ankle, as if the freckles on her skin there were somehow aware of the matching freckles concealed again now on his ankle. Does he feel it too? She wondered.

"We need to go," he said. He lifted both hats from the ground and brushed the pine needles off before he offered hers to her.

"Thank you," she said.

He gave her a long, unsmiling look and spoke gently. "My pleasure."

An unfamiliar awkwardness gripped her, coupled with a tight tug in her lungs, and she reached instinctively for her missing locket watch. She found only the buttons of her dress and touched them self consciously.

"That reminds me," he said. He pulled her locket watch out of his pocket and held it toward her. "We're finished with this."

She frowned at the familiar object in his hand, hesitating. "You keep it."

"Why?" he asked. "It's yours. It still works. I kept it wound for you."

She shook her head. "It belongs to a free person. I have no use for it now. Besides-- " She couldn't say it, but the object was defiled for her, ruined by the unknown eyes that had examined and prodded it.

Leon slowly closed his fingers over the watch and slid it back into his pocket.

"Gaia," he began. "You told me once to be good, if I knew how. I wish-- "

She waited, unwilling to meet his eyes, hoping he would go on. When he didn't, the silence stretched between them like invisible cobwebs. In the dimmest part of her, she realized she might have wishes, too, elusive wishes that belonged more to a girl in a garden than they did to a captive.

Leon cleared his throat. "That baby," he said finally. "The one, you know, from the executed convict. I thought you d want to know. It turns out that baby made its way to the black market."

Gaia's eyes widened. Could he have arranged it? The significance of his news was not lost on her. If he had saved that baby, he had done so because of Gaia. For her. And it couldn't have been easy. "Thank you," she said.

He turned his hat once more in his hand, then dipped his head to put it on and started through the garden.

Gaia followed him out and waited as he carefully closed the gate, causing a light click. It meant a lot to her that he'd given the doomed baby a chance. And the orange. He had done what he could for her, just as he'd said he would, and even though he remained a guard and part of a corrupt system, she was grateful.

They were nearing the center of town when she stopped a moment to catch her breath. She glanced up to find him studying her, but with a new easiness. Gaia smelled freshly baking bread and instinctively turned to the alluring scent. She looked up a small lane, and there, hanging from an iron bar, was a wooden sign with a carved sheaf of wheat.

"Buy me some bread," she said quietly.

He slid his hands in his pockets and leaned back in a friendly way for a moment. "That, Masister Stone, is impossible."

Pleasure shot through her, and she saw he was almost smiling. She stepped closer to him, until the buttons of her dress nearly touched his chest, and when she tilted her face to look up into his, their hat brims all but met. She felt unbelievably bold, and she liked it. She heard him breathe inward. His pupils dilated, and he seemed to freeze for a moment, but he didn't draw back.

"Leon," she said softly. "I may go into that prison and never come out again. I want some bread."

His keen blue eyes narrowed slightly, and then she saw him lick his lower lip. She had trouble breathing. It struck her how handsome he would be if he ever allowed himself to smile, and then, naturally, she felt her own lips begin to curve, encouraging him.