Promised

  “I’m betting he does,” Derek said. “But what can he do about it? The Wharfton parents aren’t going in. He can’t stop Enclave children from coming out.”

  “But they always had the choice before and they never did,” Gaia said. “Remember the unadvancement notices? Why is it different now?”

  Leon shook his head. “There wasn’t a directory before. Those unadvancement notices were a one-shot chance to move outside permanently, but that meant leaving your life and your family in the Enclave behind. None of us wanted to do that. This way, people can get to know each other.”

  “Exactly,” Derek said. “I’m telling you, it makes for a strange situation. There are all these bonds being created across the wall, even while hostilities with the Protectorat are worse than ever.”

  “What does this mean for us?” Gaia said. “Do you have allies within the wall?”

  “It means nothing’s predictable,” Derek said, shaking his head. “Anything could blow up in your face at any time.”

  “I’ll agree with that,” Theo added.

  “Can you get inside the wall if you want to?” Leon asked Derek.

  “Not at the moment.” Derek said. “Our latest tunnels were all discovered and shut down in the crackdown a year ago. We’re working on opening up more, but it’s no easy feat, getting under that wall. Why? You want to get in?”

  Gaia looked at Leon, who took another drink of his ale and left the question to her.

  “No,” Gaia said. “We’re going in through the gate to negotiate legitimately.”

  The baby on Derek’s lap burped up some yogurt, and Derek wiped it with the edge of her bib. “I’m glad to hear it,” Derek said. “That’s the way to make a lasting difference.”

  Theo nodded his chin at the baby. “I’ll hold her for you, if you want,” he offered gruffly.

  Derek took the bib off entirely and passed the baby over. When Theo leaned back a little, settling her in his arms, something about Theo’s careful, heavy hands showed how much he longed to hold his grandchildren, and Gaia ached for him.

  A new song started, a brighter one, and Gaia glanced over to where Will was now turning his slow, thoughtful smile on the piano player. He shoved up his sleeves and crossed his arms.

  “Who’s that playing the piano?” Gaia asked.

  Derek craned his neck. “That’s Gillian, Ingrid’s friend. She’s good, isn’t she? She seems to be taking a fancy to your friend there. I’ve never seen her talk while she plays before.”

  Gaia glanced at Leon to find him watching her. He lifted his eyebrows and leaned back a bit, smiling at her. There was no reason why Leon’s look should confuse her, but she could feel heat rising in her cheeks.

  “She plays well,” Gaia said to Leon.

  “Yes, she does.”

  She couldn’t bear to consider looking around for Peter.

  “Ready to go?” she asked.

  “Anytime.”

  She peered out the window. Things seemed to have settled down out in the quad, while inside, the tavern promised to stay rowdy for quite some time. Ingrid came over once more as they were saying good-bye and urged Leon to consider their home his, anytime. “Unless you plan on moving back in with the Protectorat, that is,” Ingrid added. “We’d understand if you do. They’re your primary family, after all, despite any differences you may have had.”

  Leon let out a brief laugh. “There is no chance I’ll be living in the Bastion again.”

  “But, I mean, if you and Gaia ever get serious, you know,” Ingrid said. “Sometimes families work things out and reunite when there’s a wedding on the horizon.”

  Leon took Gaia’s hand. “Gaia and I are already engaged,” he said. “I hope when we get married, you’ll come to the celebration.”

  “Ah!” Ingrid said. “I thought as much. Congratulations! When’s the date?”

  Leon turned to Gaia. “That shouldn’t be too long now. We’re nearly settled, aren’t we?”

  Gaia laughed and leaned into his arm. He dropped a kiss on her cheek, and they started out.

  The night was cooler as they strode through Wharfton, and the streets were quiet again. The swift, nearly silent flight of swallows overhead was welcome in her ears after the bustle of the tavern.

  “That was interesting,” Leon said.

  “I like Ingrid.”

  “I like Gillian,” Leon said.

  Gaia wasn’t certain what to say. She knew he only meant that he approved of the piano player for Will.

  Leon laughed and gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m teasing you.”

  “I mean, I want Will to be happy, of course.”

  “I know,” Leon said. “Don’t worry about it. They’re going to be fine, all of them. You’ll see. And you’ll get used to it, too.”

  “Poor Theo,” Gaia added.

  “I know. It’s almost like his daughter was advanced as an adult,” Leon said.

  As they reached the far end of Western Sector Three, Gaia could see the campfires of New Sylum spread out in the unlake below. Already the settlement looked different from any of the temporary sites they’d set up during the exodus. The fires were grouped in a loose pattern of widening rings that dipped organically with the slope of the valley. In the center was the new commons. She could imagine a new matina bell being cast and mounted there eventually. How lovely it would be to have that piece of Sylum’s traditions here.

  They turned down the path toward clan nineteen. There was a rustling off to the side, and Gaia stopped, instantly alert. “Did you hear that?”

  “It’s Malachai and some of the excrims,” Leon said. “I’ve asked them to guard you. They won’t disturb you.”

  Her heart was pounding, and she had to make an effort to calm down.

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you,” Leon said.

  “You should have asked me.”

  “Would you have said yes?”

  She hesitated, then began walking again. “Yes. It’s not the way I thought it would be here. The minute I think something’s familiar, I find it has changed. Nothing feels safe.”

  “Because it isn’t. Not yet. Not for you,” Leon said.

  “I need to check on Maya. I haven’t seen her since I came back out,” Gaia said.

  As they reached the campfire of clan nineteen, she had a clearer glimpse of Malachai and two of the other excrims, and they nodded to her respectfully.

  “We’ll stay out of your way, Mlass Gaia,” Malachai said. “You’ll hardly know we’re here.”

  “Thank you.”

  Norris stood to give her a warm hug. “You’re a sight to see. You’re not supposed to worry us like that.”

  “I’m okay. You missed our first night in the tavern. Where’s Josephine?” Gaia asked.

  Norris lifted a finger to his lips and pointed. Gaia peeked under a tarp to see Josephine asleep on a bed of blankets, with little Junie and Maya asleep beside her.

  “There’s room for one more under there if you want to tuck in,” Norris said.

  Weary as Gaia was, there was still one more thing she wanted to do. Somehow, seeing Theo had made it all the more necessary. “I have to go home,” she said.

  “To your old place? Mlady Myrna’s up there,” Norris said. “With Jack and little Angie.”

  “I know.” Looking at her sister’s sweet, sleepy profile, Gaia made a decision. She crouched under the tarp and gently lifted the little girl in her arms.

  Josephine stirred and opened her eyes. She shifted up on her elbow. “You okay?” Josephine asked softly.

  Gaia nodded.

  “Leave her with us,” Josphine said, as Gaia’s intention to take Maya became obvious. “She’s all settled in.”

  “I want to take her home.”

  “This is home,” Josephine said.

  “My old home,” Gaia corrected. I need her with me. She felt guilty and selfish about it, but it was true. Her experience in the Enclave was still just below the surface, making her restless in a way
that only Maya could help.

  Josephine blinked sleepily. “Then take an extra blanket,” she said, handing one to Gaia. The fabric was already warm with body heat, and Gaia wrapped it around little Maya. She rose again to find Leon waiting for her.

  They’d gone only a few paces up the path before he spoke, his low voice carrying easily in the dark stillness. “You’re going to tell me what happened to you in the Enclave,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER 10

  on sally row

  “JUST LET ME GET home first. Please,” Gaia said.

  As she breathed in the old, nighttime scents of Wharfton, a mix of sweet grass, chickens, and the dry earth itself, her longing for her parents grew stronger. A quarter moon cast just enough cool, blue light to make the path faintly visible. In her habit, she searched the stars for Orion, and couldn’t find it. She patted Maya on her back, cuddling the sleeping toddler along her shoulder and cherishing her limp, heavy weight. Leon’s footsteps whispered behind her along the dark path, and she knew, farther out, the excrims were shadowing them.

  Candlelight glowed in the window. For an instant, her ordeal in the Enclave and the past year vanished, leaving her just Gaia Stone, the midwife, coming home and hoping to find her parents waiting for her. This was her first time home since they’d died, and she knew, logically, when she stepped up on the porch, that they could not be inside playing chess before the fire, but as she reached for the latch, the feeling of them was so strong, so powerful, that she closed her eyes and heard their voices on the other side of the door.

  “Is that you, squirt?” her father asked.

  “She must be hungry. Don’t move any pieces while my back’s turned,” her mother said. “I can always tell.”

  Gaia’s fingers closed on the cold latch, and she could go no farther.

  “What is it?” Leon asked quietly.

  She glanced up, peering at him in the dim light, and confusion swarmed around her sorrow. This was the place where she’d last been together with her parents as a family, and it was also where she’d first met Leon. He’d arrested them, and now she was engaged to marry him. How was that possible? With sudden clarity, she realized her parents would have tried to protect her from him, and not just because he was the Protectorat’s son. They’d have wanted someone warmer for her, someone more demonstrative and openly loving, like them. They wouldn’t have understood Leon.

  “It’s my parents,” she said. I’ve grown away from them, choosing you.

  “Sit with me,” he said gently. “Stay out here with me, where we can be alone. Just for a little. Want me to hold Maya?”

  She shook her head, and sat beside him on the top step of her parents’ porch. He braced a hand on the floor behind her, not quite embracing her. She slid Maya to her lap and tucked the blanket carefully around her.

  “I can’t say the wrong thing if you don’t tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.

  She let out a sad little laugh. “This is terrible. I don’t think my parents would have liked you.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re wrong, though,” Leon said. “I’d have won them over. They’d have seen how happy you are with me.”

  “You arrested them.”

  “True. But that was a different me, before I met you.”

  “You wouldn’t do it now, would you?” she asked.

  “I would bring your mother flowers and help your father with his sewing.”

  She laughed again, more easily this time. “He never wanted any help with his work.”

  “I couldn’t even hold his pincushion for him?”

  She smiled. “No.”

  “Well, then, maybe you’re right. Maybe it would be hopeless.”

  She slid a little nearer, to where her knee bumped against his leg.

  “Any better?” he asked, his voice tender.

  She hardly knew what she was feeling anymore. “This day has been insane.”

  “It can’t be worse than what I was imagining,” he said. “Evelyn told me they took you straight to the prison.”

  She nodded, gazing out absently at the dim road and the dark houses across the way. “They took some blood from me,” she said. “Several vials. They said I carry the anti-hemophilia gene and my blood is O negative.”

  “Which doctor did this?”

  “His name was was Hickory.”

  “He used to work with Persephone Frank,” Leon asked. “I don’t know much about him. Did he do anything else?”

  “He injected me with something. I don’t know what. And he listened to my heart and lungs.”

  “This was in a prison office? You cooperated with them?”

  Gaia didn’t want to answer any more. She didn’t understand why she should feel ashamed for being so afraid in V cell, but she was. She dropped her head, focusing on Maya’s little fingers curled gently in innocent sleep. “They strapped me down and gagged me to take the blood,” she said. “Then they put me in V cell and left me there.” She took a tight breath. I fell apart.

  Leon was very still beside her.

  “I can’t be afraid,” she said. “People need me now. I can’t be afraid.”

  “Iris,” he said.

  She lifted her gaze. His shadowed face looked like it had turned to stone in the dim moonlight.

  “No one even touched me,” she went on, “but all I could think about was you and what they did to you. I’ve never been so afraid. I became completely unglued, from my own imagination. It’s some sick, awful game to him, isn’t it? Why is he like that?”

  “He just is.” Leon said. “He just knows. It’s like he can empathize completely, but then he uses that knowledge in reverse to hurt people. He did it to me, too. When they were torturing me, back when you first left for the wasteland, he told me that they’d caught you. He said he had you in another room and he could do whatever he wanted to you. I didn’t know he was lying.”

  “You never told me.”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “It was unbearable. And I didn’t even know yet that I loved you.” He moved then finally, drawing her close so that his arms encircled her and Maya both. “Remember you said we have places where our minds don’t meet? I don’t want that anymore. Please don’t ever close me out,” he said. “There’s nothing you could ever tell me that would be worse than you not telling me what you think.”

  She understood then. It wasn’t just that she could trust him, she realized. He needed her to trust him. It was his own craving, to be trustworthy. She felt a new, small opening inside herself. This was what it meant to truly be close to Leon, to let him in. She peered into his eyes, searching the darkness there, and his lips curved slightly as he studied her in return. He touched a warm hand to her cheek.

  “It’s insane what I feel for you,” he said.

  She let out a wistful laugh. “I wish we could go somewhere, just you and me and Maya. Leave everything behind.”

  “It’s too late for that, even if you really meant it.” He loosened his embrace enough to snuggle her comfortably closer beside him.

  A cricket sounded, a thin dry chirp after the lush night noises of Sylum.

  “I miss the lightning bugs,” she said. “Remember that night? It seems so long ago, but I can still see it so clearly.”

  “They were unbelievable.”

  “You wouldn’t come out with me,” she said, recalling how he’d leaned against a pillar on the porch while she and Maya had circled in the dark meadow grasses, surrounded by thousands of blinking, skimming lights.

  “I couldn’t,” he said.

  “Why? Were you still mad at me?”

  “Mad. Lonely. Everything. I was still hoping I could get over you.”

  “What a mistake that would have been,” she said.

  She felt his arm around her back.

  “It’s baffling, isn’t it? Even then, even when we could hardly talk to each other, I still had to be around you,”
he said. “I tried to imagine life without you, and nothing made sense. I’m not sure what I would have done if you hadn’t finally seen how much we belonged together. Destroyed Sylum in some way, I suppose.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” she said.

  “I’d have tried,” he said. “We’d still be there. Do you realize that? You’d have married Peter and we’d have all stayed in Sylum.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Or Will. One of those Chardos.”

  She shook her head.

  “Yes,” he repeated, like it was a certainty he’d considered at length.

  She really didn’t want to think about what could have happened with Peter. Or Will. She didn’t want to think of them making friends in Peg’s Tavern, either.

  “Well, you won me over with your pumpkin bread and your smooth moves,” she said.

  He laughed. “Smooth I was not.”

  “You were smooth. You were waiting for me that night with no shirt on.”

  “Maybe a little smooth,” he admitted, rubbing his bearded jaw. “I wasn’t going to give up without a fight, that’s for sure.”

  She smiled, remembering. “It worked. We’re here.” She inhaled deeply, trying to keep her tension at bay as she recalled what “here” actually entailed. “Was it good to see Evelyn?”

  “Yes. She’s incredible. I want more time with her, but I don’t see yet how I’ll get it.” He shifted slightly. “It’s hard to believe I have a baby sister now, too. I wonder if I would be more like Derek if I’d grown up with him as a father.”

  “You turned out fairly decent the way you are,” Gaia said. “Besides, if you’d lived outside the wall, you might have died like your sisters and your mother did.”

  He smiled. “I’d like to think I would have lived and met you sooner. ‘Fairly decent,’ huh?”

  You know what I mean, she thought. “I just wish the Protectorat could see it.”

  He straightened slowly. “Did he say something about me?”

  She tried to find words that wouldn’t revive bad memories, but there was no way around it. “He brought up your sister Fiona,” she admitted. “How come he doesn’t know what you’re really like?”

  “Gaia,” he said, drawing out her name and sliding his arm away at the same time. “You don’t want to go there.”