“I came for a pregnancy test,” Clio said. “The Archivist called my father.”

  “I see.”

  “At first, he thought—” She closed her eyes. Tears ran down her temples and into her hair. “He called me a wild girl.”

  “But you aren’t,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “And now your father is at home sharpening his blade,” I said. “And he wishes to know where to point it.”

  Clio’s eyes were hazel, an in-between color. One moment they were blue, and the next, brown.

  “Is it strange,” she said, “that I am not eager for this man’s death?”

  I reached for her hand and she gave it to me, letting me lace my fingers with hers and squeeze.

  “We punish few crimes as severely as this one,” I said. “As bearers of children, we are sacred vessels in need of protection.” It was a line directly from a pamphlet my mother gave me when I was ten years old and started to bleed. I quoted it without meaning to. It was so embedded in my mind, in my memory. “If we didn’t punish this crime with death, it might become more common. And that would compromise the vigor of our society. With each violation of that vigor, we become more fragile and susceptible to loss. So this is not about revenge, Clio. It is about stability. Do you understand?”

  She squeezed my hand so tightly it caused pain. She squeezed her eyes shut, too, her body braced against whatever came next.

  “Eneas,” she said, the name breaking from her like a scream.

  I kept hold of her hand.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve done everything you were supposed to. Okay?”

  She nodded, and when I opened my hand, she opened hers.

  “Do you want me to call your mother here?” I asked as I stood.

  “My sister,” she said. She was still tense, bent inward like a hand cramping after too much writing. I had done that to her, I knew. In the service of law and order, but not in the service of her. Guilt rose up in me like bile from a sour stomach, and I swallowed it down.

  “I’ll let them know,” I said, and I turned toward the door. Just before I opened it, her voice stopped me.

  “I have to keep it. This … soulless thing,” she said. “Don’t I?”

  I looked at my hand on the handle. Trembling.

  “Every life is essential,” I said quietly.

  I left.

  5

  Ismene

  “You can’t stay for dinner?”

  She wrapped her arms around my waist and pulled me back against her body. She was warm. My height, perfectly aligned. I felt her mouth against my shoulder, against my throat. I smiled, turning my face so she couldn’t see it, and covered her hands with my own.

  She was a singer. I heard her once while walking through the market, in the evening when I was long past my unstated curfew. The sun had set, but there was still some light in the sky, and as I moved through the crowd a rich alto reached my ears. I followed the sound to her—she was picking through an array of scarves at a woman’s clothing stall, her fingers long and elegant. When she caught me staring, she raised an eyebrow. What? You have something to say, rich girl? When I stammered through an apology, she only laughed.

  She hummed now, and I felt the vibration of it against my back.

  “I can’t stay,” I said. “I have to go back.”

  “Is someone counting down the minutes?”

  I couldn’t explain it to her. That would require admitting who I was, which inevitably led back to what I was: a jug without water to fill it, a shell without a nut, a lantern with no flame. I had given her a name that wasn’t mine, a name that wasn’t anyone’s. It was easier than risking her disgust.

  Below, the street was crowded with food stalls. The smell of smoke and cooked corn and fried bread wafted up through the curtains.

  Instead of answering, I turned in her arms and ran my fingers along her collarbone. Her skin was sticky with sweat. I touched my lips to hers.

  “I have to go,” I said again, and she sighed.

  I slipped on my sandals and left. Once on the street below, I didn’t look back to see if she was watching me go. Our time was at an end. I wouldn’t see her again. That was what happened when I started to feel like there was a string connecting me to another at the sternum, when my refusals were no longer sufficient for either of us.

  It wasn’t built to last anyway. My path was set.

  * * *

  I tugged the bars out of place on the cellar window and stuck my feet in. With a glance down the alley to the left and to the right to make sure no one was watching, I shimmied through the small opening and dropped down on flat feet into the storage room, between two sacks of grain. I stood on my tiptoes to put the bars back in place, and then picked up an empty bottle from one of the shelves near the door, as if I had merely come here for a new water jug. It was a plausible enough explanation. Household staff didn’t like to talk to us if they could avoid it, so they didn’t ask many questions.

  I made it all the way back to our wing of the house before I saw anyone. Eti stood at my door, his fist raised to knock, a flower in his hand. He smiled at me in greeting, but the smile faded too quickly.

  “Where were you?” he said. “You look flushed.”

  I held up the empty bottle. “I broke mine. Decided to fetch myself another.”

  “That’s the second bottle you’ve broken in a week,” he said. “Who is she?”

  I took the flower from him and opened my door with my shoulder. “Did you clip this from Kreon’s greenhouse?”

  It was just the end of a stem, but it had a few blooms on it, big draping purple things. I put it in the glass of water on my bedside table and carried it to the window. That way the sun would shine through the petals in the morning.

  “It’s monkshood,” he said. “So don’t eat it. It’s poison.”

  “Is that its only purpose?” I said. All flowers had to have purpose, now, or they wouldn’t be taking up space in a greenhouse.

  “Yes,” he said. “I believe so.”

  “What a shame,” I said. “It’s so pretty. Thank you.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “She’s no one,” I said. “It was nothing. You don’t need to worry.”

  “Others are allowed to have nothings. Not us.”

  I didn’t correct him, but he was wrong. He was allowed certain liberties: stolen moments with a lover, an older woman who could no longer bear, anyone who was outside of a man’s protection. But until I was married, I was Kreon’s to guard, and not to be touched. If I didn’t let myself have nothings, I would have nothing.

  “Eti,” I said. “Let it go.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  I still felt her arms around my waist. I watched my brother go, and in his absence, I could believe that I really was empty, as the mystics said.

  Later that night, all I could see was the flower’s outline against the window. The moon was bright as daylight. I kept fading in and out of sleep and thinking about why Kreon kept poison in the greenhouse next to the potatoes and the wheat. I wiped my palms on my pillowcase and got up to move the flower away from the windowsill. A breeze wafted in, pressing my nightgown tight to my body. Then I heard a knock.

  It was Antigone’s knock, four sharp taps. I pulled the stopper from beneath the door—wedged there to keep unwanted people out as I slept—and opened to my sister’s worried eyes. She wore her robe cinched tightly around her waist and sandals on her feet.

  “Can I come in?” she said.

  I stepped back to let her in, then looked down the hallway in both directions to make sure no one was watching. The hallway was quiet and still, but even that was no guarantee. There was always someone following Antigone in this house. But there was nothing too interesting about sisters seeking comfort with each other.

  “Are you all right?” I said to her. She paced toward the middle of my room, where a worn rug covered the stone floor, and then back to me. She was picking at her fingernails like she was plucking guitar strings.

  “I have a bad feeling,” she said.

  Antigone had bad feelings about everything lately. Her life seemed to be weighed down by dread. Dread of Haemon, dread of a child—as if the more attachments she formed, the more she would wither away. But that wasn’t how it had to work. I had as many obligations as she, and half her misery.

  “A bad feeling about what?”

  She looked away.

  “There’s just something in the air,” she said.

  She was never a good actress.

  “You know something you don’t want me to know,” I said.

  Pacing again. “I don’t know anything. That’s the problem.”

  Sighing, I caught her by the wrist and led her toward the bed.

  “You can’t predict the future,” I said. “You can’t feel bad things coming, and you can’t make them come by feeling them.”

  She nodded. She still looked frantic, and her color was off, but she sat on the edge of the mattress.

  “Come on, let’s have a sleepover,” I said. “It’ll be easier to sleep that way.”

  She frowned at me. Maybe she was remembering all the sleepovers we had as girls. We would pull the mattress off the bed—Father scolded us for this, since the floor was dirtier than the bed frame—and gather as many pillows as we could from the rest of the house, including the couch cushions, and hang a sheet over the whole nest of down so it felt like we were inside a cloud. Then we would try to stay up all night. Antigone never made it, but I did. I had no shortage of memories to keep me awake, even when both our parents were alive and we knew nothing about the world’s troubles yet.

  Antigone liked to say we had been doomed from the start. We came from excess—our parents’ hedonistic desire to see themselves replicated without refinement, heedless of our souls. As a result, I carried too many of yesterday’s woes. Antigone carried too many of tomorrow’s. And Polyneikes carried too many of today’s.

  Eteocles, well … Eti was a hard person to know.

  This sleepover felt different than the ones in our youth. Heavy with dread. Antigone and I lay on top of the blankets, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the corners of the same pillow. I closed my eyes and tried to find something settled inside myself. But the monkshood was still on the desk, lush and purple, and the hum of anxiety was running down Antigone’s arm like an electric current. Her fingers hooked around mine. Her hands were tacky with sweat. So were mine.

  We didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

  I dropped off at some point—from sheer boredom, probably—and woke to a clatter.

  Antigone was already at the edge of the bed, her hair loose around her shoulders and wild, her feet shoving into sandals. Before I could even say her name, she was throwing my door open and racing down the hallway, and I had no choice but to follow. I ran barefoot down the hall, the stone scraping my heels, and chased her down the stairs and around the bend to the courtyard. I heard distant screams. None of the guards were where they were supposed to be. Everything felt empty and strange, like the world had ended and we had slept through it.

  We tumbled into the courtyard together, where ivy grew like fungus on the walls, and the stones were rougher, paler. They cut my feet. The doors to the street were wide open, the bar that usually held them closed lying in the dust. Men were tangled together in the courtyard itself, and everywhere was grunting and groaning and the sound of metal hitting metal. Screams of pain, screams of names, screams of last words intended to fill the night but instead fading into the din. And in the center of the courtyard, two bodies.

  My mother once told me she knew me from a distance because of the way I walked. How do I walk? I asked her, full of adolescent insecurity. She only shrugged. Like my daughter, she replied.

  It was in that way that I recognized the bodies in the middle of the courtyard as my brothers.

  Antigone sprinted right into the middle of the fray, ducking under a swinging arm. She fell to her knees beside one of the bodies. The fight was already ending. There was no surrendering. No raised palms, no swords laid down, nothing but fleeing or dying.

  “Get her away from him!”

  Kreon’s voice rang out from one of the balconies. He stood there, his chest bare and scarred from his years in the military police, his shorn head reflecting moonlight. He extended a long arm and pointed at Antigone, who was sobbing over our brother’s body; I couldn’t tell which one, Polyneikes or Eteocles, though I knew they were both dead.

  One of the guards grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her like she was nothing. She squirmed and kicked, but she was small—smaller than me, even—and there was nothing she could do. The guard dragged her away flailing and undignified.

  I stood under the fall of ivy. There were bodies all over the courtyard. Their blood looked black. I stepped over one, careful, and then another. My footprints left wet impressions on the stone. A guard held out an arm to stop me from going any closer to my brothers. I stopped just behind it, obedient.

  My brothers wore identical wounds, just under their ribs. Clutched in their fists—Eteocles’ right and Polyneikes’ left—were identical weapons, short pistols from Kreon’s stores. Eteocles’, given to him by Kreon, a reward for his loyalty. Polyneikes’, likely stolen. There was no one near them. It seemed clear to me, based on how each of them had fallen, that they had fired at each other, one in opposition to our uncle and one in defense of him.

  Doomed from the start, I found myself thinking. All of us.

  6

  Antigone

  We didn’t have many pictures of us as children, but in the few we did have, I was indistinguishable from Polyneikes. Both born with a thick head of dark hair, a ready smile, a dimple in one cheek but not the other. He kept the smile. I kept the dimple. We called them “our” baby pictures because it was never certain who was who.

  We were a rarity among rarities: twins, in a world where siblings weren’t even genetically related, where the living only ever came from the scrubbed, polished dead. We were made of the same substance, two parts of one whole, the most abominable of abominations. One age’s horror is another age’s wonder, my mother said once, mildly, as she poured herself a drink. It was as much of a defense as she had ever offered for her choice.

  Two parts of one whole, and I felt the loss of him that way, as the loss of a leg, an arm, a lung, a kidney.

  They locked me in my room, but they needn’t have bothered. I sat on the edge of my bed, one sandal on and the other lost by the doorway as I kicked and scratched at the guard dragging me away from my brother’s body.

  I watched the sun come up.

  A knock came, and for a single, beautiful moment I thought it was him, come to tell me it had all been a ruse, a trick, and the revolution had succeeded because of it, and that was why he hadn’t been able to tell me, because the whole operation hinged on no one knowing, and he was sorry, so sorry to have put me through all that, but we were free now—

  Right. The knock.

  Kreon’s son, Haemon, walked into my room with the air of someone who knew he was somewhere he shouldn’t be. We were betrothed, but the arrangement didn’t include any intimacy. It had been Kreon’s idea, a way of consolidating power. The daughter of his greatest challenger conceding to his rule by marrying his son. An act of mercy, some said, toward a broken, cursed girl. An act of foolishness, others said, to marry one’s only son to someone who might not have a soul.

  Haemon was tall and broad, his skin sun-warmed and his face carved from stone. He looked like he had been designed specifically for Kreon to love him, and perhaps that was exactly what had happened—maybe Haemon’s entire being had been Eurydice accepting her husband’s limitations, as she always did, and easing his way for him.

  He stood like a soldier. His face betrayed no sympathy for me.

  I was glad. I could not have withstood it.

  “Hello,” he said, and it was like an apology.

  I cleared my throat.

  “I assume you’re here with a message from your father,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “May I sit?”

  I gestured to my desk chair. The wicker strained under his weight when he sat. He looked too big for it.

  “I woke to chaos,” he said. “But I wanted to see if you were…”

  He trailed off.

  “I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “After a destructive event, what’s the first thing people do? Survey the damage.”

  “Antigone, that’s not—”

  “Well, I’m damaged. You’ve seen. You can go now.”

  “I wanted to see if you were all right,” he said, scowling at me.

  “You knew I wasn’t all right.”

  He sagged a little, like a clothesline weighed down by too many sheets, like a tree after a downpour. He stood and faced the window, his hands clasped at the small of his back.

  “Yes, I did,” he said.

  “You came to tell me something,” I said. “Better get on with it.”

  I tried to see the courtyard below through his eyes. The vines clinging to the edge of the window. The dry roots of the cypress below, bulging from the earth.

  What did he love? What did he know?

  “My father,” he said slowly, “has decreed that your brother’s body is not to be touched. It will be used as a warning against insurrection.”

  “Not to be touched,” I said.

  “Not to be Extracted,” he said. “Excluded from the Archive.”

  The words were like cold water spilling down my spine.

  “What?”

  Haemon looked at me. Then looked away.

  “That was his decree earlier this morning,” he said. “Violators will be subject to the highest penalty.”

  “The highest penalty.”

  He gave me a pointed look.

  “Execution,” I said.

  He nodded.