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garden soon. I have to wait.
I stand at the window, wondering how she plans to reach my
cell—through the main entrance or by climbing through the window down
the hall the way I did when Needle returned me to my cage. I expect her to
hurry down the path toward the barracks, but instead she stops on the far
side of the roses, near where the vines have crept from their bed. She goes
utterly still for a moment before her hand darts out, reaching for one of the
low-hanging vines.
Above her bowed head, the roses rustle awake, rotating their
obscene blooms to peer down at the queen.
I open my mouth to howl her name, but something stops me—a
sudden throbbing in the places where my skin tore above my claws, a pain
that shoots up my arm and into my chest, squeezing my heart, heating my
blood, making the room spin and the blue night pulse before my eyes.
I try to step away from the window, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
I can’t scream, even when the night air comes alive, whipping in to beat at
my face, stinging at my skin like sparks from a funeral fire, hot and full of
magic.
I fall to the floor, gasping for breath, and begin to crawl toward the
door.
Something is happening in the garden. I have to get to Isra, before
it’s—
ISRA
—TOO late. It’s too late to pull away, even if I wanted to.
“What happened to the covenant?” I demand, fighting to keep fear
from my voice. I’ve never felt such a powerful presence in the garden
before. It feels bigger than the roses, older and darker and deeper, a cold,
unblinking eye staring straight through my skin. “Where is it? Show it to—”
My words end in a pained cry as fire courses through my fingertips,
shoots through my arm, trapping the breath in my lungs, making my ears
ring with the sound of a thousand voices screaming at once. Agony
explodes on either side of my head, and my eyes roll back.
The thorn in my finger digs deeper, while another darts out to stab
my arm, jabbing deep. Something primitive inside me snatches control of
my muscles. My legs push away from the flower bed, but when I move, the
thorns move with me, digging into my skin. The roses are hungry, starving,
they—
No, it’s not the roses who hunger. It’s the other thing—the ancient
presence coiled like a snake beneath the flowers—that is hungry. Gem was
right. There is something else. The roses are only the teeth that creature
uses to chew its food, a mouth that will pull me into the belly of the beast.
Come to the Dark Heart, girl. The voice in my head is a tongue made
of ice licking at the frantic pulse at my throat. Come to the Dark Heart and
join your mothers and grandmothers. There is peace in sacrifice.
The Dark Heart. That is its name.
I go utterly still, overwhelmed by the vastness of the being speaking
in my mind. It is bigger than I first assumed. As tall as the mountains
beyond the dome, as deep as the violent ocean the roses showed me on
my thirteenth birthday, as big as the planet itself.
It is a god, and I am only one small person, so briefly alive that my
death is practically not a death at all. I should be content to lie down in the
fertile soil, to join myself with the Dark Heart, to give my blood to the one
who sustains my city.
The roses’ gnarled stalks and their thorns—as big as my hand, bigger,
how could I not have noticed how deadly they could be—reach for me,
ready to pull me into their embrace, to the center of their bed.
To my death.
The haze clouding my thoughts departs in a frantic rush of blood.
“No!” I pull away, but the roses loop a toothy arm around my wrist
and squeeze tight. Smaller thorns slice through my skin, creating a bracelet
made of blood, igniting my body with lightning flashes of pain.
“Help me!” I scream, hoping the guards will hear. I bat at the flowers
with my fists, kick the vines that snake close enough to snatch at the legs of
my overalls. “Help me! I’m in the royal garden!” I scream, but no one
comes. The one time in my life I’d be breathlessly grateful to see a soldier,
and none can be found.
And the thing controlling the roses, the Dark Heart, knows it. Of
course it does. The Dark Heart knows everything that happens under the
dome, and it knows that I’ve learned too much, that it must take me before
I ruin it all, before I steal the lifeblood from the splintered, wicked thing my
ancestors have fed for generations.
But my ancestors weren’t murdered; they were willing sacrifices.
Even my mother took her own life when she jumped from the tower. But
I’m not going to lie down and die. I won’t!
“I don’t give myself to you. I don’t!” I shout as I knock a vine away
with the back of my hand, earning myself another deep scratch. I pause to
survey the damage for less than a second, but a second is all it takes for a
vine to snap around my other wrist, as quick as a whip. I scream and tug on
both arms, but the vines only squeeze more tightly.
“I’m not a willing sacrifice,” I sob, heart racing as the thorns get
closer and closer to my face. “I’m not married. I have no children or
brothers or sisters or anyone.” I feel the vines’ death grip loosen the
slightest bit, and I know I’ve hit upon the only thing that might save my life.
The Dark Heart is starving, but it doesn’t want me to be its last meal. “If you
kill me, you will never feed from this city again. The covenant will be broken
forever. Forever!”
When the vines stop moving, there’s a thorn longer than my finger a
whisper from my eye.
I force myself to face it, ignoring the sweat rolling down the sides of
my face, the frantic racing of my pulse, the pitching of my stomach. “Let me
go,” I say. “Let me go! You have no choice.”
But they do, it does, the Dark Heart. It could decide that one last
meal from our city is better than none at all. It could take comfort in the
fact that there are still two domed cities alive and well and filled with
women willing to die.
Everything in my being screams for me to fight, to get away before
it’s too late, but I can’t. The force controlling the roses will have to choose
to let me go. There’s no way I can free myself without cutting my arms from
my body. I’m already hurt badly. The muscles and nerves in my wrist are
shredded, and my blood spills with a steady smack, smick, smack onto the
dirt. I can feel how much the Dark Heart craves more of it. Its need echoes
inside me.
If only I’d gone to Gem before coming to the garden. He could slice
through the vines with his claws in an instant. But I was afraid he’d try to
stop me, that he’d say it was too dangerous, now that he knows the truth
about the roses.
Now I may never see him again. I may not live to tell him how much I
care, how much I—
I gasp as the vines suddenly clutch more tightly, as if the Dark Heart
can read my thoughts and disapproves of the way I feel for Gem, as much
as any citizen of Yuan would.
Death, the Dark Heart whispers inside me, making me shiver and my
arms go numb. My eyes roll toward the sky, but instead of the dome and
the moons hovering above it, I find myself seeing through the roses’ eyes.
But this time they show me something new. They show me … fires.
Fires in the desert, scaffolds made of long-dead tree limbs holding
the corpses of Monstrous men and women and children. There are a dozen