Melancholy: Episode 1

  Because Anthony was a drone but he loved me and I killed him. Because I killed many people, normal people with families and jobs and people to love. People with no choice about what they had become, who did not deserve to die.

  Those people. Those people I have spent the last ten years calling soulless. They aren’t. They deserve life. Not to be treated as animals. Not to be discarded by the real monsters of the world – the ones like Raven who have no love in their hearts.

  Oh god, my whole body hurts as I cry and cry. I am a worse monster than Raven. A worse monster than anyone left in this world. It floods me. Crashes through the wall I have built around my heart, a wall that is the only reason I am a functioning human being and not a guilt-ridden madwoman.

  I should have killed myself. Instead I am drowning in the deaths I caused, the murders I committed, all those poor people I can’t even remember. It is vile; I am vile.

  Footsteps sound and I moan because I can’t bear for anyone to see me like this but I also can’t stop crying. It’s Pace, and she stares at me in the dark for a few moments before crouching to drag me against her body. I sob hysterically and try to shove her away but she is much stronger than me and eventually I stop fighting and allow her to hold me. Her heartbeat against my cheek is a steady, calming thing.

  By the time I fall asleep I think I have cried an entire ocean’s worth of tears. I’m a dried-up husk. A girl with skin coated in salt.

  *

  January 20th, 2066

  Luke

  Josi has been asleep for three days. Though I look otherwise, I am scared. She is swallowed whole by her guilt and her grief over Anthony and the people she killed. She loved him, I think. And now the depression is worse than I have ever seen it. It was the conversation with Raven that triggered it, and the woman’s brutal, callous dismissal of drones.

  Pace came to find me on the second day, uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Dual’s … There’s something wrong with her.”

  “What is it?”

  “She won’t get out of bed.”

  Something in my heart broke at the words. Some part of me had hoped now that the virus was gone from her blood that she would be healthy again, and no slave to the moon. I hoped that her depression wouldn’t follow her anymore. It was a stupid hope. It isn’t something that just goes away.

  I followed Pace back to their house and checked on Josi. She was dead to the world, and when I tried to get her up she woke briefly and said, “I need the sadness cure.”

  It was the worst thing she’d ever said and it scared me stiff.

  I left it a day, trying to wake her at intervals. I tried tough love, gentle coaxing, shaking her awake, but nothing worked.

  Today I carried her to the infirmary so that Ranya could attach her to a drip because she still wouldn’t get out of bed or move or speak. Ranya didn’t want to do it – she said that Dual needed an incentive to wake up. But I told her that Dual was more likely to let herself die. Ranya didn’t ask how I knew that, she just hooked up the drip.

  I try to act like the concerned friend I supposedly am, but obviously I feel like a lunatic inside a body. I hate seeing her like this.

  My mother once told me that passion and melancholy are two sides of the same coin. But what she didn’t tell me was how to flip the coin.

  I meet Shadow at the wall and we go hunting. I am rusty with the bow, as I was only starting to get good when I left. There’s so much movement in my body now that I have trouble aiming.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Shadow tells me.

  “Why?”

  “You’re unfocused.”

  I sigh, sliding the arrow back into the quill and letting him fire the shot that takes the Fury through the eye. Two more see this and run at us, so I draw knives from my belt and cut them both down before they get anywhere near Shadow.

  Wiping the blades on my pants, I sheathe them and we take a moment with the corpses.

  “I don’t know how to help her,” I say abruptly.

  There is a long silence.

  “Melancholy,” Shadow replies, “is an unconscious yearning for something lost, something that can’t be named and can never be had.”

  My mouth falls open. It’s literally the last thing I ever expected Shadow to say. Before I can think of any kind of response, he strides back for the wall.

  I keep watch as we return quietly through the dead forest. We reach the wall and wave to the guards on duty, then Shadow places a big hand on my shoulder and gives me a look that manages to bolster my strength.

  “But what do I do?” I ask him. He doesn’t answer.

  Inside we part ways and I go straight to the hospital. Raven is there, watching Josephine. She glances at me with distaste. “It’s becoming clearer why they stuck her in a loony bin.”

  “Get out,” I order, and I’m so angry I’m scared I’ll hurt her. Raven looks smug as she leaves.

  Grabbing one of the books from the shelf, I sit beside Josi’s sleeping form and start reading to her. There are a couple of other patients here tonight, both with injuries from training. I see their eyes in the dark as they listen to me read. But Josi doesn’t open hers even though I read to her all night, trying to imagine of all the things she might be yearning for.

  *

  January 21st, 2066

  Josephine

  I dream of birds and blood. But I dream of gentler things too. Smiles and touches and clipboards and reading glasses. Words spoken in a deep, poetic voice. I dream of Anthony’s daughter Marley.

  I feel so heavy. I am barely able to breathe I am so heavy.

  *

  Something is warm and bright against my face. It takes me a long while to become conscious enough to be annoyed at this and groan. It also doesn’t feel like I’m on a bed. It feels … gritty.

  Dragging my eyes open, I am startled to realize I’m outside. The sun beats down and my hands move through … sand? Jerking upright, all the air is stolen from my lungs.

  Because I am sitting beyond the wall, on the beach. And before me is the sea.

  Luke Townsend is standing further down the sand, writing something with a stick. My heart thumps. Oh, god. To be outside. To be free.

  I stand and walk to him, looking at the words.

  a bright thing, the brightest thing of all

  Words I spoke to him a million years ago. Luke looks into my face and he smiles. I feel that smile of his fill me up, and then I turn and look at the ocean. It glitters silver in the sunlight. There are tears in my throat, but it is not because inside I’m black and ugly and rotten, it is because I am overflowing with the sudden beauty of it, the aching beauty, and when I walk into the water and let the salt swell of it wash over me I am laughing.

  *

  We swim for hours. I love this ocean. Love it like I was born to it.

  “Seaborn,” Luke agrees when I try to explain. We are floating on our backs and looking at the clouds.

  “Have you been to the beach before?”

  “Last year. I snuck out a few times to come here.”

  “Before that.” This is the first question I’ve asked him about his life since the Big Reveal. I am very aware of it.

  “How would I have gone to the beach? They’re all beyond the wall.”

  “I thought … maybe Bloods were allowed outside.”

  “No one’s allowed outside.”

  We fall silent. No one has been in the ocean for decades, is what that means. It seems tragic. I can see a fisherman’s hook in the clouds. And what I imagine to be a mermaid tail. I move my hands through the salty water. The waves are calm, and I’m getting sunburnt but I don’t care.

  “Seaborn,” I murmur, liking the sound of it.

  “There were people who lived in the sea, once upon a time,” Luke says in his deep storyteller’s voice. “The souls of the drowned. Sometimes taking the form of a seal, sometimes shedding their sealskin to become human. They were bound to the
ocean, tethered to it by their souls.”

  I want to shed my skin. I want to take a different form, one that lives in the sea. I want my soul to be tethered to something. In this moment, I want it more than anything.

  “It sounds lonely though,” Luke murmurs.

  Not to me.

  “How long did I sleep?” I ask eventually.

  “Four days.”

  I breathe out slowly. “You carried me here?”

  He doesn’t answer, which means yes.

  “How did you get through the Furies?”

  “Came south.”

  Right. Meaning Shadow lied to me when he said that north of the camp was the only way to reach the beach – when he was trying to scare the shit out of me. “Will they find us here?”

  “Hope not.”

  I can’t help smiling at his blasé manner. It’s a nice change from all the dour terror everyone else has of the Furies, despite it also being blatantly reckless. “I’m gonna get in so much trouble for not going to work.”

  “Yep.”

  “Think Ranya’ll write me a note?”

  “No.”

  “She’s a battle-axe.”

  We both start laughing.

  “She made Hal work after he’d had a ruptured testicle,” Luke tells me. “He waddled around like he had a cactus up his ass for days.” This sends us both into hysterics. The sound of our laughter drifts up into the sky.

  Eventually we wade onto the sand to dry off, our skin wrinkled like prunes. I lie in the warm sand, feeling the coarseness of it all over my body. It is these moments, these tiny moments, which remind me how wonderful it is to be alive.

  “You said you wanted the sadness cure,” Luke tells me. He sounds betrayed.

  “I don’t want to be powerless anymore. I don’t want to feel all this sadness.”

  “Josi, you’ve been through some seriously, seriously bad shit. It’s normal for you to be sad, just like it’s normal for you to be angry: you’re uncured.”

  And then when Luke sits up and starts moving his hands as though he’s wielding a bow against the strings of a cello, and when he hums the notes of ‘The Swan’ as if they are coming from his imaginary instrument, I realize that my soul is tethered to something after all. It is tethered to his.

  I feel more tears spill out of my eyes and I laugh, and then I join in, pretending to play the cello while we hum along together.

  Chapter 8

  January 21st, 2066

  Josephine

  There are people waiting for us inside the wall. Quinn, Raven, Shadow and a couple of guards I don’t know. Luke tenses beside me, and I know something’s very wrong.

  “It was an emergency,” Luke says automatically.

  “What kind?” Quinn asks.

  “Dual hasn’t been well – ”

  “Ranya says there’s nothing wrong with her,” Raven interrupts.

  “You didn’t clear it with anyone before leaving the walls,” Quinn goes on. “You both know it’s illegal. On top of which, Dual hasn’t shown up for her shifts or training for the past three days.”

  “Okay, yes, I’ll own that,” I say, “and I’m sorry, but – ”

  “You’re both to be punished.”

  Great – no meal tonight. And right when I’m finally hungry again. Except that Shadow isn’t meeting my eyes. And Luke seems too still. And Raven is way too smug.

  Quinn studies us both with a look of regret. “You have to follow the rules. We all do, or this place falls apart.”

  I’m starting to get nervous now. It’s his tone.

  “Ten lashings for each rule broken, which makes it ten for Luke and twenty for Dual. You’ll receive them at sundown.”

  “Lashings?” I repeat. “Is that a joke?”

  “I volunteer to take Dual’s punishment as well as my own,” Luke says immediately.

  There’s a momentary hesitation, a rustle of surprise.

  “Very well.” Quinn shrugs.

  “He can’t!” Raven protests.

  “It’s within his rights,” Quinn replies.

  “It’s my right to take them, so I’m taking them,” Luke agrees firmly. “It was my fault she was beyond the wall anyway. I wasn’t thinking – I should have cleared it.”

  “Hang on …” I am staring between them all, still convinced this is some kind of practical joke. A queasy sensation uncurls in my guts. “You’re honestly telling me that you punish people with physical torture? Did I just step back into the Dark fucking Ages?”

  There is a momentary silence as everyone stares at me.

  “What? Am I not allowed to argue now?” I demand. “Is that illegal too? What kind of dictatorship are you running here, Quinn? Am I about to have my mouth sewn shut for speaking an independent thought?”

  He still doesn’t answer, and I step towards him. “Surely you can see the hypocrisy of not letting people outside the walls.”

  “It’s different,” Raven says flatly. “The wall here keeps you alive, it doesn’t imprison you.”

  “What’s the fucking difference?” I ask her. I am so angry it’s a struggle not to scream.

  “You broke the rules of The Inferno, which exist only to keep you safe,” Quinn says finally. “We punish in order to teach a simple fact: that to break rules in the west can mean your death. It’s a very dangerous world out here. One day you’ll thank me for instilling a sense of caution in your careless spirit. Be in the square at sundown.”

  “He can challenge it,” Shadow says and everyone looks at him. “He has the right to challenge his accuser to a bout.”

  Quinn’s eyes narrow. “That’s right.”

  “Who’s my accuser?” Luke asks.

  “I am,” the leader of The Inferno says.

  Luke considers him, then shakes his head. “You go down a second time and you irreparably damage the respect your people have for their leader. Not good for anyone.”

  Quinn’s mouth opens then closes again. I watch a shadow chase through his eyes. He nods once and they disperse, leaving us standing in the sun. Shadow is last to walk away and he does so with a guarded look I can’t read.

  My head is spinning. “You’re not taking my lashings,” I tell Luke.

  “Actually,” he replies, “I am.”

  “It’s not your choice.”

  He spins to face me, taking my upper arms urgently. “Listen to me. If you were healthy and strong I would let you take your punishment because you seem hell-bent on it, but you’re not. You’re sickly and weak. You haven’t eaten in four days. Severe blood loss and pain could kill you, Josephine.”

  I stare at him, ashamed. “It’s not your choice,” I repeat faintly, my voice scratchy.

  “I don’t care.”

  *

  At sundown Luke’s arms are tied to a wooden pole on either side of him. His shirt is removed.

  I’ve spent the afternoon arguing with Quinn, trying to volunteer to take my own lashings back, as well as Luke’s, even though I know Luke’s right and it’d probably kill me. The principle of the matter remains the same: I don’t need or want a man to take my punishment for me. Neither of us should be punished in the first place – not like this, anyway – but if we have to be then I ought to have the same right to volunteer as Luke does.

  There’s no budging the leader of the resistance on this one though. Because of my reaction to all of this, he’s taken it into his head that seeing Luke punished for me will actually be a better lesson than having my own back lashed.

  “Your own suffering suddenly doesn’t seem to bother you all that much,” he pointed out.

  So now here we stand, all two-hundred-and-sixty-nine of us, even the children. Nobody looks happy, but nobody looks outraged or incredulous, like I am. Which means it’s happened before.

  Will, Pace and Hal are beside me. Will holds my hand, knowing somehow. Or perhaps he is the one looking for comfort. I have none to give. I feel hollow.

  Quinn and Raven watch from near the poles. Shad
ow steps up with a whip made of knotted rope. It has been made wet so it’s heavier.

  “Breaking the laws of The Inferno is not to be tolerated. No one is above our rules. Fifty lashings.”

  There’s an intake of breath. Murmurs of unease and outright denial. Fifty is too many.

  “You said thirty!” I shout.

  Quinn ignores me. Shadow looks paler than I have ever seen him. He leans close to Luke’s ear and says something too soft for anyone else to hear. Luke nods.

  The whipping begins. The first blow slaps out with a resounding whack. I flinch; my whole body recoils as though it has been whipped. Luke’s jaw clenches and he squeezes his eyes shut. The second lash makes him flinch a little more. The third a little more. But he remains silent. Even when he has been whipped ten times, twenty, thirty.

  Blood is streaming down his legs and pooling on the sand.

  Shadow looks wretched as he keeps going. It seems to last forever.

  By the time we reach forty-five Luke is weary with pain. His face is twisted, his shoulders bowed. Each time he is whipped his legs give out and he falls against the bindings around his wrists. Each time he stands once more, and Shadow waits for him to regain his footing.

  The Vikings of ancient times used to blood eagle each other, flaying open the backs of their enemies and removing the lungs to place over the shoulders like bloodied wings. If the victim could withstand this torture in silence, he would be admitted to Valhalla when he died. I don’t know if that’s what Luke is thinking of now, or of all the other foolish people who’ve believed throughout the ages that pain must be endured in silence, but I wish that he wouldn’t. I wish he would scream. In rage or pain or anything. Because whatever heroic role he is playing in this quiet evening seems like madness.

  *

  Luke

  Getting flayed hurts like a bitch. At first it feels fine and delicate, an intimate kind of pain. By the end it’s heavy, brutal, a dull hammer.

  “Can we hurry this along?” I growl.

  “Quiet,” Ranya chides me as she cleans and dresses my back.