Are you devil? Are you angel?
Am I heaven? Am I hell?
|CHAPTER 1|
When I think of my mother, I think of her sitting on the floor as I carefully pressed ice into her back, where the skin was bruised to the exact shade of her dress. The silk fabric pooled around her like a puddle of tar, inky black. But even freshly battered, she looked beautiful, with sharp cheekbones carved into dark freckled skin and a pair of seductive, midnight eyes.
It was a mystery how such a beautiful woman could have given birth to a strange, phantom thing like me.
"Can we leave now?" I asked, keeping my voice lower than the volume of the TV. It sat on the dresser, just a small black box with a cracked screen, flickering between bits of news and pure static.
My mother flicked her hand. "No."
She was doing it again, acting like nothing was wrong. Her moods were always too ill-timed, misplaced.
I pressed the ice a little harder.
She hissed and whipped around. "What's the idea?"
"Are you waiting for him to beat you to death?" I bit out.
"Stop it, Olya." Her eyes flashed, a warning, and her mouth pulled down on one side. This was the look she gave whenever she was genuinely upset, which was rare for her. The genuine part, that is.
Then her eyes flickered to the door, and I watched her hesitate—watched her contemplate being honest. Moments of honesty were few and far between in this house—hardly a house at all, more like a prison—but her lover had gone out since he'd run out of liquor, which meant we had a few moments of peace.
The boy servant was still downstairs, but at twelve years old, the orphan hardly posed a threat. Although my mother appeared to consider if he might be a tattletale.
She must have decided he wasn't because she turned to face me fully. "I'm not leaving empty handed," she spoke in a hushed, urgent tone. "He's finally starting to trust me. I can feel it. But we're not leaving without something."
I didn't have to ask to know what she meant by something. She meant valuables, something to barter with, money. That's all that seemed to matter to her anymore.
"He'll never give you the key to the safe. He knows you'll run if he does."
She shook her head, mouth curling with a small smile and eyes cloudy with denial. "No, no. He trusts me now. Just a little while longer..."
She turned so I could put the ice on her back again, forcing me to stare at her mortified flesh, the skin discolored and ugly. This was the price we paid for a roof over our heads, food in our bellies. It made me sick things had come to this.
I quickly covered the injury with the ice, while my mother hummed, a love song of all damn things, pretending she hadn't just been beaten that morning. I would have admired her act if I didn't hate her so much for putting me through this hell.
For years, my mother and I had survived by lying and stealing our way across the country. It was easy to get away with, for a Daughter of the King. That's what they called them, the women like my mother, the ones who could still have babies. They were protected by the king through a law.
But this same law hoarded them and used them as breeders—and this is the very law we fought to escape, subjecting ourselves to a life on the run instead. The life of outlaws, always on the move, desperate not to get caught.
We would stand on street corners, sometimes in the rain, sometimes in the snow, a widow and her albino child, aiming pleading eyes at men with deep pockets. In the dead of night, we'd take all the money we could and run. So far, we'd managed to evade the war that raged across the country from the south—the same war we watched footage of playing on that black box in the corner—but our last score had been months ago and smaller than we'd hoped.
We ended up stuck here, in a town no bigger than a speck of dust in a dissolving world. Population: Unknown. Because no one likes to count backwards.
All the while, news of the war chased us, reminding us of why we were running out of time.
It felt like the war had been going on for years. Maybe it had, no one cared to keep track anymore. The enemy army had materialized from seemingly nowhere and marched into the King's Country to claim it for their own. These people were the remnants of old collapsed civilizations, and they preached about hope and a chance at salvation. They said it was their duty to save us.
Funny how saving the world always ends up turning into a battlefield. Or not funny at all, actually.
Any day now, we expected to hear the war had been lost—any day now, we expected to find enemy soldiers barreling through town, taking what they want and destroying what they want. They came from the other side of our borders, after all. They came from the parts of the world that had long vanished and become known as the Wastelands, so who knew what they were capable of?
My mother and I managed to stay one step ahead of them, but only if we kept moving.
That's when she picked this guy. An act of desperation if there ever was one. She pretended to faint in the street, he took us home. The rest had depended on her powers of seduction.
She was never unsuccessful. She chipped away at him like a chisel against stone, unraveling him slowly, and now months had gone by and we were still here. We tried to break into his safe once, but we nearly got caught, and meanwhile his drinking only got worse and with it came the violence.
There was nothing good to be said about a man like that. In a world plagued by infertility and facing extinction, only a truly insane person would ever dare lay a finger on a Daughter of the King.
I knew there was nothing for us here, but for some reason my mother refused to budge. I honestly didn't understand her. Once, I told her, "Plenty of people are surviving in other ways." And she said, "Plenty more are dead."
I hated her for choosing this kind of life for us, but I kept quiet, I played along. What choice did I have? All we had was each other.
"I hear whispering." The boy servant cracked the door open and stuck his head through.
We just called him Kid, and whenever we were alone in the house with him, he liked to act in charge. Without asking for permission, he walked right into our room and threw his shoulders back, held his chin up, all in poor imitation of his employer. He was the youngest person I'd ever met, but I failed to warm up to him because his curiosity towards me was obsessive and unnerving.
"Hey, Albino," he called, dragging out the word in a way that grated on my nerves.
Albinoooo.
Neither my mother nor I responded. I focused on keeping her hair out of the way, the ice in place. She kept her gaze averted and her hands on her belly, trying to rub the pain away.
She told me the bleedings hurt her, although I didn't know what that was like. Unlike her, I never had the bleedings and therefore would never bear children. This fact was comforting, because it meant I didn't face the same obligations as a Daughter. But it was equally discomforting, because it meant I was a disposable part of a fading world.
"Wow," Kid exclaimed stupidly, coming closer to get a better look. "He really beat you hard, huh?"
"My lover isn't himself when he drinks," my mother said patiently.
"That's for sure," Kid drawled, and I wanted to punch him in the throat.
Then we heard the front door, the squeak of the old hinges, and we all fell silent. Kid's arrogance fell off like a curtain dropping.
"He's back," he hissed, eyes big, the fear plain on him. He was more afraid of him than us, I think.
His name was Sky, though I mostly just called him the Drunk. He'd inherited lots of land from family, which meant he had money, although how such a mindless oaf could be so lucky infuriated me to no end.
Kid scurried away to find a hiding place, but neither my mother nor I reacted to the sound of the door. We remained seated on the hardwood, quiet as always. We were waiting for our opportunity—waiting for the moment when we would strike.
Undoubtedly, Sky would be getting even drunker tonight, even more violent. We would have to leave soon, before it was too late. On our television screen, images of warfare flashed through the static. They were warning us: the enemy army was advancing, they were due to arrive any day.
Something inside me unraveled, a deep-rooted rage, the kind of rage that's built right into you, a part of your DNA. I made my decision right then and there: we were leaving this wretched town, even if it meant I had to drag my mother the whole way out of here.