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place.
She tells me of Yuan at the end of its first hundred years, before the
Dark Heart was forgotten, when every soul in the city knew the roses were
the teeth of the monster they had created. She tells me of growing up
yearning for the world outside, watching from the wall walks the giant cats
roaming the grasslands, and longing to run free the way they did. She tells
me of her fourteenth birthday and the meager meal she shared with her
family at the end of a summer when the crops had refused to grow, the day
it was decided that the queen must die and Ana’s father promised her to
the king.
King Sato was tired then, already finished with two wives, and
decades older than his new bride. The king promised Ana’s father that he,
the king, would take his turn under the blade when it became necessary,
and he and Ana were married. Years passed and three children were born.
Then, just before Ana’s thirty-sixth birthday, the crops once again began to
fail. King Sato was nearing his ninetieth year, but when the advisors agreed
the time had come for a sacrifice, he refused to go to the roses.
Ana was told to kiss her children good-bye and prepare herself for
the ceremony the next morning.
Terrified, Ana ran from the tower, through failing fields begging for
blood, to the King’s Gate and out into the desert. She hid in the tall grass
that surrounded the city in those days, praying she wouldn’t be found by
wild animals, hoping the king would take his own life within a day or two
and she would be able to return home.
It was there, sleeping in the grass with her cheek pressed to the
earth, that she spoke to the Pure Heart of the planet for the first time.
She’d been raised to fear the Dark Heart’s other half, the magical force that
had caused the deformity of most of Yuan’s citizens, but she found the Pure
Heart anything but cruel. It spoke kindly to her; it offered her life instead of
death. It told her how to break the curse and restore the health of the
planet and all the creatures living upon it.
Ana was transformed, frightened, but also filled with the certainty
that her people must change their ways and end the division of the world.
She returned to the city and to her tower, where she wrote her last
diary entry, the one explaining how to break the curse, and why the people
of Yuan must reach out to the monsters in the desert.
The diary ends there, but Ana’s spirit shows me the morning the
guards came to escort her to the royal garden.
King Sato and the heads of the noble families were gathered around
the roses. The royal executioner was already wearing his hood. Ana begged
the king to listen to what she’d learned outside the dome, but he wouldn’t.
No one would. Just as no one would remind the king that—according to the
covenant—his life would serve as well as hers. The king threatened to kill
Ana and marry another if she refused to offer herself to the roses, while,
beneath the soil, the Dark Heart called to her, promising her peace and
rest, assuring her there was no choice but death.
Finally, Ana gave up. She knelt down. She took the knife in her hand
and opened her own throat. The executioner ensured that her death was
swift.
After the ceremony, King Sato buried the covenant beneath a paving
stone in the royal garden and ordered all copies of the text burned, hoping
to ensure the ignorance of his fourth wife. Unfortunately, the king didn’t
live to enjoy his new wife for long. Only two days after giving Ana’s
bloodless body to the river, the king suffered a heart attack in his bed and
died. His new wife—barely twenty and unprepared to rule—married Ana’s
eldest son the next afternoon and went on to give the city many sons and
daughters.
Ana had died for nothing. Her soul lingered to see that painful fact, to
see her diary hidden away by her maid, and to see the truth of the
covenant and the dark magic it nurtures lost to the people living beneath
the dome. Her spirit lingered for centuries, reaching out to Yuan’s rulers in
their dreams, hoping one would discover her diary. She was a part of the
city, but a piece that didn’t fit, the keeper of a secret even more important
than the location of the covenant, the keeper of the truth about the Dark
Heart and the only way to end the nightmare of life under the domes.
Love. The secret is love.
A citizen of the domed cities and a man or woman of the Monstrous
tribes must love each other more than they love anything else. When they
do, the cities will fall, life will return to the desert, and every creature
dwelling on the planet will be made whole and strong. All it takes is love.
My mother must have also somehow discovered the truth. That had
to be why she took me into the desert, and why she attempted to destroy
our family when she was locked in the tower and denied a way out of Yuan.
She wasn’t crazy. If she’d succeeded in burning the three of us to ash that
night, there would have been no blood for the Dark Heart. Murder would
have succeeded in destroying Yuan, but only love will heal our world.
I love Gem. I grow more certain of that every day. I also grow more
certain that Gem is dead.
He would have returned by now if he weren’t, I know he would. He
must have died out there in the desert, and now I will never be able to tell
him how much he means to me. At least, not in this life.
I ask Ana’s spirit if I will see Gem in the afterlife, but that is one
question she refuses to answer. She doesn’t want to believe I will share her
fate; she wants to believe Gem and I will end the curse, but I know better.
Yuan is failing. I awake each morning certain I’ll find Junjie and the guards
waiting outside my bedroom, prepared to kill me if I continue to refuse to
give my life for my city. Bo can hold them off for only so long. They will
come. Soon.
My time grows shorter than the thorns on the royal roses.
I tell Needle about the secret location of the covenant, but warn her
to stay away from the garden. Still, I’m not surprised when she returns one
evening with a scroll wrapped in cloth so ancient that it falls apart in my
hands.
I unroll the paper carefully. Needle reads and signs each word. I
follow along, flinching when she reaches the final line and I learn that Ana
was telling the truth. Our city’s bargain with the Dark Heart calls only for
the death of “one bound by oath of marriage to the first sacrifice.”
One bound by oath. Not a woman bound by oath. Not a queen. A
king would serve just as well.
It’s a little betrayal in a world ravaged by centuries of hatred and
suffering, but it doesn’t feel little. It feels like proof that there is nothing
good within the human heart. How could there be? If an entire generation
could condemn Yuan’s daughters to death because they found that
preferable to the death of Yuan’s sons?
What is there worth fighting for? Worth dying for? What have any of
my dreams ever been worth?
That night, I tuck the covenant beneath my mattress, lay my head on
my pillow, and dream of the day my mother took me walking outside the
dome. I smell the wild scent of the desert; I feel the sun hot on my cheeks. I
hear a whisper on the wind, a voice begging me to stand up to my people
and for my people, to force the darkness to end with me, to save my
daughters, to save myself.
To be brave.
I wasn’t brave. I was as afraid of that voice as I was of death itself. So