Promised

12:57. She’d lost a minute somewhere. She was getting light-headed and didn’t want to move.

“I wanted this to work,” she said quietly.

His eyelids twitched, and his gaze blinked open. “You were gone.”

Happiness warmed her. “I’m back,” she said. Her fingers were already on his arm, but when she tried to touch him more, she seemed to have no strength.

He turned his face to see her, and frowned in confusion. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“It’s a transfusion.” Her left hand fell heavily to her lap, but her needle stayed in her right arm without being held.

His gaze took in her posture, and traveled to her arm, and then to the bloodline.

“Whose idea was this?” he asked.

“Mine.”

“I don’t like it,” he said.

She smiled. Too bad.

His eyes locked with hers, blinking slowly from time to time, and for Gaia, it was enough to be near to him. 1:03. She was supposed to do something about the watch, she knew, but she felt rather sleepy. Foggy.

“Remember the lightning bugs?” she asked.

“By the winner’s cabin,” he said. “You know I do. I wish I’d gone out into the meadow with you.”

She smiled again. How pretty the lightning bugs had been. She could almost see the tiny green streaks of light in the darkness around her, and this time, he was with her and baby Maya.

We should go there again, she said. The words didn’t come out, but it didn’t matter. She knew he understood what she meant.

Chapter 23

under the arcade

“WHAT ON EARTH IS this?” demanded Myrna. Her voice sounded very far away. “Stupid idiot of a girl. If she dies of blood loss, I’m going to kill her.”

Gaia cracked open her eyes to find Myrna taking the needle out of her arm. Behind Myrna, Angie was anxiously watching. Will had come, too. Still farther back, through the arch of the arcade, sunlight was bright in the square, but here underneath, the shadows were deep and grainy.

“Did we make it back in time?” Angie asked.

“Hard to know. Let me see what I can do,” Myrna said.

She pressed a scrap of bandage to the bleeding spot and bent Gaia’s arm up. Gaia’s gaze flew to Leon, whose eyes were closed. His hand was wrapped in the IV line where he’d pinched it in a crimp to stop the blood flow from her into him.

“Leon,” Gaia said, nudging him. “Don’t be dead.”

He took a faint, visible breath. “Okay,” he said.

As Myrna began working over Leon, he opened his eyes with a moan. “Take it easy, there,” he said.

“Feel that, do you? Good,” Myrna said, and kept working.

Gaia looked up to Will. “Where’s Peter?” she asked.

Will shifted down beside her and drew her hand into his steady fingers. He kept his gaze on their joined hands. Gradually, she realized that Will was touching her for the first time, and as she studied him, his gentle, wordless silence began to last too long. She tightened her grip, waiting, unable to accept what she started to fear. And then she knew. It had to be Peter. He had to be gone.

Gaia felt a tightness crush all the air from her chest. “It isn’t true,” she said.

Will nodded. “I should know what to say,” he said. “He was my brother, and I have no idea what to say.”

“What happened?” she asked, her voice aching.

“He was shot on the gallows,” Will said.

“But I saw him and Malachai fall,” she said. “They both fell through the trapdoors. They were safe below.”

Will slowly shook his head, back and forth. “They did fall. Jack got their ropes free in time, but they were both shot before they fell. Malachai lasted a little while.” His voice trailed off. He let go of her and pressed his arm across his face. “My little brother.”

Shock and loss stopped Gaia’s brain from processing any more. Her eyes took in Will beside her, and Myrna efficiently attending to Leon, and Angie hovering in the background, but her mind stopped understanding. Peter dead. Malachai, too. The words didn’t mean anything.

But Peter still loves me, she thought.

“He can’t be dead,” she said, but as she spoke, she finally believed it, and a crumpling sensation caught her heart. “Will,” she said, her voice hushed with grief. “I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head, still hiding his face in his arm, but when she tenderly put a hand on him, he leaned his head against her shoulder. A broken, lost sound came from him. Gaia ached for him. She wrapped an arm around him as best she could, while a stubborn, protesting despair rose within her. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

“I’m going to miss him so much,” Will said.

“Me, too,” she said.

She closed her eyes tightly, reaching her other hand to Leon, needing him. From the darkness, she felt Leon’s fingers tenderly encircle her own, weak but insistent, and her gratitude that Leon was still alive mixed inextricably with her grief over Peter, fusing deep in the loneliest place within her.

*   *   *

A bullet had penetrated Leon’s upper chest and lodged in his left shoulder. A second was buried in his side, lower on the right. A third had gouged a deep streak along his back, but he had stabilized, and Myrna was able to extricate the bullets and patch him up.

“He needs more rest,” Myrna said the next day, as she checked his pulse again. She’d changed his bandages and was satisfied with his progress. “You think you can manage to keep him quiet?”

“I will,” Gaia said.

Gaia longed to take him down to her parents’ house on Sally Row where it was restful and quiet, but he was still too fragile to move and she herself was needed here, in the center of negotiations. He lay in a small, cream-colored guest room of the Bastion, one with a view overlooking the square and none of the history of his old bedroom. Both windows were open to the echoing, hammering noises of workers repairing damage from the battle of the day before.

If only fixing the society would be as simple as mending a few walls. The Protectorat sat in the prison, officially deposed, and the new jockeying for power had begun. Mabrother Iris had been killed in the fighting on the terrace, accidentally or not Gaia would never know.

She had spent hours that morning working with leaders from New Sylum, Wharfton, and the Enclave, sorting out the chaos of the rebellion and weighing whom to detain in the prison. She had teams trying to reestablish basic services of medical care, water and electricity at the same time that others were drafting a new charter that granted equal rights to everyone.

Elections were scheduled to follow, and from there it would get even more complicated. Gaia was fully aware of the staggering amount of work ahead, considering she had recently gone through a similar process with the people of New Sylum.

She shifted closer to Leon and studied his even features again. He turned his face, licked his lips, and kept sleeping.

“How are you doing yourself?” Myrna asked.

Gaia lifted her hands, examining the singed skin on her pinkytips where the electrocution clamps had been attached, as if they might provide a way to measure all her other hurts as well. The tenderness in her abdomen was about the same. The heightened sensitivity of her skin had faded, and a foreign quietness had settled over her body like a muffling blanket. It wasn’t simple fatigue from grief and blood loss. Neither was it numbness, because she felt as alert as she’d ever been.

“I feel like I’m waiting, but waiting for nothing,” she said.

Myrna laughed. “I was thinking more physically than poetically. Why are you still wearing that bracelet?”

Gaia glanced at the glowing blue band on her left wrist. She’d paid enough for it. She held out her wrist toward Myrna, who cut it off with a pointy scissors.

“Let me check your sutures,” Myrna said.

When Gaia undid the waist of her skirt and loosened her bandage to show her the healing stitches from her surgery, Myrna approved.

Gaia slowly retucked her blouse. “I’m glad we have Maya,” she said. With all the hurt and losses that others had suffered around her, Gaia hadn’t thought much consciously about her own blighted motherhood, but it was beginning to sink in. “There’s a chance I could still have my own children, isn’t there?”

Myrna folded her arms across her chest. “How so?”

“Sephie took my ovaries, but not my uterus,” Gaia said. “If we found some of my eggs, if I bought them back, couldn’t we inseminate them with Leon’s sperm and implant them in me? I could be my own surrogate mother.”

Myrna began wrapping up her extra bandages and salve.

“Couldn’t I, Myrna?”

“In theory, with the right hormones, I suppose it’s possible,” Myrna said. “We’ve never tried it. I wouldn’t give you very good odds.”

Gaia leaned a hip against Leon’s bed, hugging her arms around herself. “The Protectorat talked about using my eggs to produce dozens of children. It just seems Leon and I ought to be able to have one of them, don’t you think?”

“It wouldn’t be Leon’s child,” Myrna said.

“Why not?”

“You really want to know this?”

“Of course. Tell me.”

Myrna moved before the window, where the diffused light dropped softly on her white hair. “Your eggs were claimed the minute Mabrother Rhodeski heard someone like you existed,” she said. “He had a list of fifty families all privately outbidding each other to buy your eggs. Sephie had everything ready to go as soon as they were harvested. Your eggs have already been inseminated.”

“They aren’t frozen somewhere?”

Myrna shook her head. “Eggs are more stable after they’re inseminated and start to divide. They’re being carefully tended in culture dishes. Each one is essentially priceless.”

Gaia wanted to see. She wanted to take them all home with her, or else smash them all. Her conflicted, impulsive reaction bewildered her. Heartache was expanding within her so strongly that it was hard to breathe.

“So my kids, mine and Leon’s, can never exist?”

Myrna spoke more gently. “I’m sorry about it,” she said. “Truly, I am.”

“I must be missing something,” Gaia said. “This can’t be the end.” It was such a strange, elusive loss, the vanishing of the hypothetical children she could have had with Leon, like losing a precious dream she’d hardly known she had.

Weary, Gaia eyed the edge of Leon’s bed and decided that the space beside him was just wide enough for her to fit in for a nap. “I don’t think I’m going to make my next meeting,” Gaia said slowly. “Tell Will for me.”

“You said yourself that you have Maya,” Myrna said. “And you can try to adopt.”

“There aren’t enough babies, remember?” Gaia said. “Don’t try to cheer me up.”

“You’ll still be a midwife,” Myrna said.

Gaia let out a sad little laugh. How hard would it be to tend pregnant mothers when she could never have a baby of her own? “Yes. I suppose I can deliver other people’s babies, when I’m not busy with all the funerals we have coming up.”

Myrna reached to gently squeeze Gaia’s shoulder. “It’s always funerals and babies, Gaia. That’s what it is.”

“I know,” Gaia said. “I just never thought they’d be the same thing.” She slid onto the bed, curling up beside Leon.

Myrna frowned. “I don’t think I like this dark side of you.”

Gaia didn’t either. She closed her eyes and hoped Myrna would leave before she gave in to her grief. She heard the windows being shut, one after the other, blocking out the noise from the square, and then the door was softly closed.