CHAPTER FIVE
Five years later
"I'll kill myself if I have to stay here one more day," Henri said, sobbing into my shoulder. "I'll hang myself from the tower's rafters like Little Saye did last night."
We hid in a pantry; empty shelves lined the wall and the smell of flour and sour milk lurked in the air like an almost forgotten memory. My stomach churned. Even the faintest smell of food was unbearable.
"Make us disappear," she said, dropping the r like she always did. Henri spoke different than the others. "I can't take it anymore. Please, make us disappear."
I squeezed her tight in my arms. She couldn't really mean it. Only death lay outside the city walls. Worse creatures than my uncle and his two hired men lived out there. Wild animals, swallowing their prey while it still breathed, hoarding it inside their bellies until they got hungry enough to begin consumption—sometimes weeks later. Packs of dogs ate orphans like us one finger at a time. In that dismal and endless jungle, even the plants would turn on us, digesting our bodies slowly in pools of gooey sap beneath snapping shells disguised as man-sized flowers and leaves. And if we survived the animals and the killer jungle plants, we'd be hunted down by maneaters or a pack of Shades or a giant so monstrous he'd make my uncle's hired axe, Ballard, seem harmless as Little Saye.
No one survives the jungle. Not without hired swords and armor and transport. Not the Roslings. Not Mazol. Not even Ballard on his own. We were prisoners—all of us—more afraid of running away than captivity.
So we escaped inside our heads. All of us did. And I was the best of us all. I taught Henri to come with me into my dreams. We stayed up late, long after my uncle allowed us to stop working, talking about the lives we imagined. When I wasn't having nightmares of falling, I imagined living in a cottage on the beach with a father who loved me. Fantasy was the only way I managed reality.
I'd developed other ways of escaping reality too. A few stupid magic tricks I'd learned from Dravus, a tiny man with thick bushy side burns who delivered shale to the castle every Saturday morning. Henri was too old to be much impressed, though she always appreciated my effort. But the other Roslings—what we called the girls who fell from the sky the day Pike died—squealed and giggled no matter how stupid my tricks were.
Reality always caught up with us. This was about to be one of those moments. My uncle searched for us, possessing the supernatural sense of a predator. It was only a matter of time.
I pictured the passage outside, where my uncle lurked. A small curved hall led to the castle's towering entrance hall where eight passages split off to more passages which led to more rooms and more passages and stairs and halls and doors until you were lost in the endless puzzle known as Daemanhur. The arteries, great passages along the outside walls of the castle, were lined with arched glass windows, thirty feet tall and ten feet wide. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings throughout the castle, each with mounts for dozens of candles. The ebony and alabaster floors were carved into a maze of vines, flowers, and trees.
Henri put her ear to the door. Mazol was getting closer. I imagined pulling a flower from behind my back, or a bit of stale bread from Henri's pocket, but after what happened to Little Saye last night—with what waited for us on the other side of the door—those tricks weren't up to the task.
"Please Evan," Henri begged, tugging at my hands as if... as if trying to force them to work magic. "We could do it. We could run away together."
Henri didn't know what she was asking for. The book I stole from my uncle told me my future: the most evil and powerful sapient the world had ever known. Henri had never seen the book, and I'd make sure she never did. I hugged her tight to my side, imagining real magic in my fingertips. Sapience. That's what the book called it. In my mind, it was easy. Just wave my hand in the air and we were both gone. Sapience was more than magic. Beyond simple tricks. With sapience, even the jungle couldn't stop us. I could make a new world just by thinking it. My dreams would become reality.
I pushed those thoughts away. My only hope was that the book was wrong about me—that I wasn't a sapient. That my nightmares were just that. Dreams. That there wasn't really a falling. That I didn't become a nightmare whenever I fell asleep.
Henri cried louder—tears soaked my shirt where she lay against my chest. Her body shivered like a cornered mouse. I tucked a few strands of her choppy hair behind the black glasses she'd worn since the day I first saw her.
"Shhh," I whispered. "They'll hear you."
Didn't Mazol care at all about Little Saye? Didn't he care that we might all be scared after what happened to her? The floor vibrated from the pounding of feet in the hall.
Henri gasped. "I couldn't help eating."
"Shhh. I know."
"I'm so hungry." She twisted the black anklet on her right leg, like she always did when she was scared. All the Roslings had one, each with the broken base of an hourglass hanging from it. Impossible to remove, and somehow, as the Roslings got older it grew larger.
"I'm hungry too. We're all hungry."
"But it hurts. It hurts so bad."
Sometimes we ate grass or tree bark just to make the pain go away for a little while, even though we knew it only made it worse later. The jungle plants that had overtaken the abandoned city weren't edible. Nothing that came near the castle was. Even the fish, bony as they were, had stopped swimming in our lake long ago. One day, when I was swimming in the lake, I rose to the surface to find I was surrounded by floating carcasses. That was three years ago.
"Just keep telling yourself the hunger's only in your head," I said, "remember?"
Mazol said only eleven Roslings were supposed to fall the day Pike died. But in the end, twelve came. One of them was extra, or Mazol was wrong about the number. They were special. We discovered it shortly after they arrived. Burns, cuts, broken bones, nothing harmed them. They could feel pain, just like me, but cuts or bruises, no matter how bad, usually healed in an hour. Except for feeling sick with hunger, they didn't even need to eat. That's how Henri could go days, sometimes weeks, without food. Somehow, she never grew gaunt from hunger like you'd expect.
And the other thing about Henri, the thing that was either extraordinarily wonderful or unnervingly creepy—she wasn't growing any older. The first time I saw her I figured she was about seventeen. About the age a girl is when she's as tall as an adult, but still thin in the hips and shoulders—that's how I imagine teenage girls from the pictures I've seen. And now, five years later, Henri looks exactly the same as the first day I saw her. Sometimes, and I try not to think about it if I can help it, I imagine she's actually much older than she appears. If she's not growing any older, how can any of us know how old she really is? And then, other times, she behaves like she's as young as the other Roslings—like her mind is confused about how old she's supposed to be. We used to think that she and the other Roslings were immortal.
Then Little Saye died.
"I don't know if I can do this." She wiped her face with the sleeve of her faded yellow dress. All the Roslings wore dresses like Henri's, made from floral bedsheets with pockets on each thigh right above the hem.
In the hall, someone flung open a door and it crashed into the wall. Dust fell from the ceiling, stinging my eyes.
"They're almost here," Henri whispered, her voice breaking. "They're going to find us."
I imagined the punishment that was coming for both of us. No food for a day? A double shift of work? A belting?
"Please, Evan. I know you can do it. Make us disappear."
Why did she keep saying that? Could she know about sapience?
Real sapience.
For a moment my heart beat faster—sapience would have given me the power to keep Little Saye from dying. I could have saved Pike the night we fell from the tower.
No. I shook my head. I can't let the book be right about me. I can't be sapient.
"Take us where it's safe," she whispered.
I hit the floor with my fist. "N
owhere is safe."
"Far away," she insisted. "There must be some place, far away from here."
"We'd have to cross the jungles."
"Not if you made us disappear."
"That's just a dream." I turned away.
"Sapience." She said it so quietly her voice was almost drowned out by the thudding inside my head.
"What did you say?"
"Sapience," she repeated. It came out as barely more than a hiss.
The monster inside me smiled. Short for breath, I imagined invisible hands wrapping around my neck. "You're confusing our dreams for what's real. We can't really escape. That's only games we play."
"Will you try?"
"It's just tricks Henri. I can't do real... sapience." The thing inside me said, liar.
"It is real."
"Stop saying that." I put my hands over my ears, trying to block out the voice of the monster inside me. And it was Dravus too. He told me just yesterday that I was special. That I could do sapience. Why did he say that yesterday, after all these years of saying nothing? Just hours before Little Saye died?
"I've always believed it's real." Her whispers rolled inside me like shouting.
"Why?" I said, "Why do you believe?"
She paused. I held my breath.
"Because you're not a bad person..." she said. "You'll only become a monster if you choose to become one."
"You've seen the book, haven't you?"—the book I couldn't remember stealing from my uncle. The book that lodged in the eaves of the castle's tallest tower the night Pike died. It was a year before I climbed back up to get it, sure I wouldn't find it there. Sure it was destroyed. But the book was there, just like I'd left it. Like I'd left it there a moment earlier and was pretending a whole year had passed.
She nodded. My face tingled; my head wasn't getting enough blood.
Voices echoed in the hall.
Henri was so close I could hear her eyes blink.
"It says I'm becoming a monster."
"It says your father could be wrong about you," she said.
"But if I have sapience, that proves he's right."
She put her hand on my thudding chest. "You can be a sapient and a good person."
Footsteps echoed down the hall. I waited for them to pass. "My father doesn't think so. That's why he left—"
"You don't know that."
"—he realized I wasn't worth sticking around for." I smoothed an imaginary crease in my pants.
"Don't say that."
"That's why Mazol hates me too. He knows what I'm becoming."
"He hates you because of Pike."
"Only a monster would let Pike die."
"You're not evil and you never will be," she whispered so loudly it came out like a growl.
"What if I can't tell what's real anymore?"
"You can always do what is right."
More footsteps outside the door. "Wait," said a low voice. "Heard something."
The door handle rattled.
Henri gasped.
In the key hole, a single, ugly eye appeared.
"Look at this," said the voice. Uncle Mazol. I imagined him grinning at Ballard and Yesler, the other two wards, or Warts as the Roslings and I called them, who kept us working day and night on steam operated clanker machines. "Found our dear little Henrietta."
The eye dissolved. Feet scuffled outside.
"Evan," Henri begged. Her face was almost touching mine. "Please, just try."
The door rattled again. Banging.
I rubbed my eyes, suddenly itchy and wet. "I'll just hurt you."
"I believe in you."
The air charged with static. I pulled at the collar of my ragged shirt. It seemed like everything in the tiny pantry pressed down on me.
I heard metal clinking. Mazol, trying different keys.
"Hurry, Evan. I know you can do it." Henri's voice was different. Stronger.
Mazol yelled from the hall. "Ballard, get over here and help me with this lock!"
I clenched my eyes shut as a message grew stronger inside me. Insistent. Impossible to ignore.
Help her.
A single thought moved in a way I'd never felt before, from my mind to a place deep in my gut. Or was it the nightmare trying to escape?
I lifted my hand, fingers trembling.
On the other side of the door, something slipped into the lock. But it didn't turn. More keys rattled.
My hand hung in the air—as if acting on instinct—waiting for the cue to begin. My cheeks flushed, suddenly I felt thankful it was so dark. Maybe Henri hadn't noticed.
Dust sparkled in a sliver of light shining through the key hole. Like watching a thousand fireflies waltzing. The particles slowed to a stop, hanging frozen in time, watching to see what happened next.
My hand began to move.
It felt like—sapience.
My mind cleared. The constant pain in my leg was gone. In the dim light I saw Henri's eyebrows rise with anticipation. Watching my fingers move, I felt they belonged to someone else. They seemed about to strike an invisible match in the air, and then they stopped.
What were they waiting for?
With a crash, splinters of wood shattered against my face. Henri screamed. A fist burst through the door.
Light streaked through dust-clogged air.