“Because Kreon thinks Polyneikes doesn’t have a soul?” I demanded. “Or because of his crime?”

  “I assume,” Haemon said, “it’s a combination of both. But the stated reason is the latter.”

  “Even my father was not excluded from the Archive,” I said. “None of those who participated in the riots were, either.”

  “I know. Apparently he feels that a stronger tactic is needed to discourage further … attempts.”

  I knew there was nothing of Kreon in Haemon. He hadn’t even provided the vessel in which Haemon grew to term. Still I wanted to hit Haemon and see if his father could feel it; I wanted to lash out as wild as I had been a few hours ago, struggling to get back to my brother.

  Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed again. I dug the toes of my bare foot into the stone until it hurt.

  “I’ll leave you to your grief,” he said.

  The Extractor Polyneikes gave me was still in my bag, shoved under my bed with the spiders. I had not been able to imagine using it, not really, but now the absence of its weight in my hand felt like another thing excised from me. The most zealous in our city would say there was no point in storing Polyneikes’ ichor because it was only cells, with no substance. But I knew my brother had a soul. I knew he was not empty.

  Haemon paused by the door.

  “I’ll talk to him,” he said, and my sharp laugh followed him out.

  7

  Ismene

  One of the servants walked me back to my room, and I tried not to be offended that they didn’t even think me troublesome enough to warrant a guard. She didn’t speak to me, though I was desperate to hear something normal, some chatter about breakfast or discussion of the weather, something, anything to make the world feel like it had before, even if it was just for a second.

  I went straight to the bathroom and stood in the tub as it filled, the water turning pink from the blood on the soles of my feet. Staring down at my toes, I got the unsettling feeling that I had been here before, and I remembered the art project we did in school, the teacher painting our palms and our feet and instructing us to make shapes on a big piece of paper with our footprints and handprints. We each got a color, and mine was red.

  I looked again at the pale pink water, and vomited.

  I moved through the rest of the morning like something was chasing me, urging me to move faster. Emptied the tub and scrubbed my legs and feet until they were flushed with color. Braided my hair and chose a dress. Chose a different one when I remembered I was mourning. Laced my shoes tight around my ankles. Ate my breakfast in bits and pieces. Pinches of toast and bites of apple. Dry and sour and nauseating.

  I heard the decree from there. Not the exact words, but the shapes of them, the timbre of Kreon’s voice recognizable even through the windowpanes and walls. There were horns throughout our district for announcements such as these. I had stood beneath them before, to hear warnings for storms, for fire, for high levels of radiation, for curfews.

  It was the maid who brought my lunch who told me what he said.

  Then Eurydice came, with all the quiet that usually attended her, her eyes red and the fine hair that framed her cheeks a little wet, as if she’d splashed water on her face.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  I was crying. It had been happening all day, tears just leaking out of my body, as passive as bleeding.

  “What for?” I asked her, a touch of bitterness in my voice. “Have you done something I’m not aware of?” I tilted my head. “Or perhaps failed to do something?”

  She pressed her mouth into a line.

  “I came to ask you if you’d like to perform Eteocles’ Extraction,” she said.

  I felt as if I’d drunk poison. Bitterness filled my mouth, my throat. Bitterness soured my stomach and dried up my tears. To offer this to me as if it was a mercy was the height of cruelty. Of course I would perform Eteocles’ Extraction. Of course Kreon would permit it—my brother had died defending him. Of course.

  And Polyneikes would rot.

  I followed her through the hallways to the courtyard. It was bright outside, the sky a white haze, and the rest of the bodies had been cleared from the courtyard. The bloodstains had been sprayed down and then covered with a fresh layer of dirt. The trampled plants had been removed by the root, the places they occupied packed down and smoothed over. And lying on his back under the cypress tree was Eteocles.

  His skin was coated in dust. Blood had dried around his mouth. Someone had put his hands at his sides and straightened his legs, a posture he had never taken when alive, so he looked unlike himself—like a statue of my brother instead of the actual form of him. I stood at his feet for a few long moments.

  Eteocles knew me, and I knew him. How he struggled to make sense of things, sometimes; how he found it easier to simply follow the rules. How he craved not praise but affirmation that he was doing what was expected of him. How he envied the lively energy of our twin siblings, and shared with me a desire to be like them, all edges, always on the verge of some kind of revelation. But we were not like them. We were like each other. Quiet and level. A cup of flour skimmed with the flat of a knife. A picture frame hanging just so on a wall. The click of a metronome.

  Three elderwomen stepped out of the house. There were always three, waiting for the Extraction to be done. They would wrap the body in cloth and then carry it, two at the head and one at the feet. I looked over their rounded shoulders to the street beyond the courtyard, where a cart waited for Eteocles’ body. They would take it back to the mortuary, and burn it.

  There would be only women there. No man would dare touch a body, fearing its emptiness. Empty things were hungry. They wanted to take. But women were different. Once we could no longer bear life, our sole responsibility was to attend the dead.

  “Can I have some water,” I said to one of them. “And a cloth.”

  I knelt at his head and waited. The oldest of them—or so it seemed, her face had the deepest lines—brought me a small bowl of water with a folded scrap of linen a few minutes later, and I began to clean his face. I scrubbed at the dried blood around his mouth. I ran the wet cloth along his cheeks and brow. I discovered my father anew in his crooked nose, my mother in his attached earlobes.

  When I was finished, Eurydice handed me an Extractor. I lifted Eteocles’ shirt. There was a scar on his abdomen from an appendix removal. I touched four fingers to his cold stomach, below his belly button.

  I was a woman, so this was my task, mine and Antigone’s. We had learned the right procedures from our mother, and she had learned them from hers. No one had asked us if we wanted to. No one had asked us if we could bear it.

  As it happened, I couldn’t bear it, but I did it anyway.

  I said the prayer. I plunged the Extractor in.

  8

  Antigone

  Rumor—passed along by the maid who came to change my sheets later that morning—said that Polyneikes’ body was on display in the street just north of Kreon’s house, guarded by soldiers. As of twenty-four hours after his death, his ichor would no longer be viable, and the body would be removed.

  They unlocked my door and I walked to the north end of the house, where two walls separated me from my brother’s body. I thought about looking out the window to see the grotesque display, and my stomach roiled at the thought. When I left a few minutes later, I left through the back door and took the circuitous route, walking through the Neïstan District to get to the North District. When I turned back to see if I was being followed, I could just barely see the glimmer of the Trireme, nose pointed at the sky.

  I expected my head to be busy, maybe even frantic. Instead, I felt stillness. I saw the sagging buildings, the shops with their beat-up pots and pans stacked high on the street, the food carts with smoke hanging around them like a cloud, the children selling bouquets of weeds, the drunk men slumped in doorframes, the old women sitting on front steps to stitch old garments, and I didn’t think about my brother, about the Extractor in my bag, about his body as a crude monument to Kreon’s cruelty. I didn’t think about anything. I walked for the better part of an hour. The North District was the next one over from the Seventh, where I lived, but it was one of the larger ones; it spanned quite a few miles.

  When I arrived at Parth’s door, he greeted me with a nod and let me in. His apartment was on the ground floor, so all the noise of the street filled it. He lived there with several others whose names I didn’t know and his mother, a wry, hunched woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair, who looked at me when I came in and said, “If I wasn’t already dying, that face would probably kill me, girl.”

  “Don’t look at it, then,” I replied, and her laugh was like a wheeze.

  Parth sat me down in his kitchen with a glass of water, and I waited for Ismene to arrive. I knew she would come, because I had asked her to, and Ismene always did what I asked her to. I was hoping that quality would extend beyond a long walk to the North District.

  In the apartment above, someone was playing music. The bass rippled through the water in my glass, which sat untouched on the table. Some time passed before I heard Ismene’s knock, a faint tap. She came into the kitchen, her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were red with tears.

  “Tig, what’s this about?” she said, and I felt a deep ache. That name. Pol was the one who gave it to me, when we were children.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “I know,” I said. “I just needed to talk to you someplace where I knew no one would be listening.”

  We both looked at the door separating the kitchen from the living room.

  “Where I knew Kreon wouldn’t be listening,” I amended.

  Ismene sat in the chair across from mine. I slid my water glass toward her, and she sipped from it as I reached into the bag at my side and took out the Extractor.

  I set it on the table between us.

  “That’s one of Mom’s,” she said. Sharp-eyed as ever. She brushed it with her fingertips, reverent. “Where did you get it?”

  “Polyneikes gave it to me yesterday,” I said. “‘Just in case,’ he said.”

  She tugged her hand back like the Extractor had bitten her.

  “You knew?”

  “I didn’t know anything,” I said. “He wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “Oh, sure. Our brother was worried he might die,” she said. “But why tell me? It’s not like he’s my brother, too, right?”

  “I’m—”

  “You’re not sorry,” she snapped. “The two of you have always been like this. As if swimming around in the same womb with him gave you a greater capacity to love him.”

  I didn’t argue with her; there was no point. But the mystics believed that sharing a body with someone created a sacred connection, the bond of mother and child, the bond of husband and wife. Was it so difficult to believe, then, that sharing a body with my brother had forged a similar connection? As children, when he fell down, I cried. When he was ill, I vomited. What was I to do now that he was dead?

  She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

  “It doesn’t matter, now,” she said. “None of it. Kreon’s decree—”

  “Fuck Kreon’s decree,” I said.

  “You can’t possibly think…” She scowled at me. “You’re going to do it anyway?”

  “We don’t exclude people from the Archive,” I said. “We don’t exclude murderers, or thieves, or rioters. We don’t deny anyone their chance at immortality.”

  “They don’t believe we have souls, Antigone.”

  “I don’t care. I do.”

  “You don’t even believe in immortality.”

  “He did.”

  “You obviously haven’t been down to the street,” she said. “Because if you had, you’d know there’s nothing but space and guards around his body. There’s no way you can even get near it.”

  “Not alone,” I said. “But if I have help…”

  “Help,” she repeated. “From me?”

  “Well I’m not going to ask Parth, known rabble-rouser,” I said. “We’re women. No one will think of us as a threat. No one will think of us at all.”

  “Until they watch us walk across the square to his body and arrest us!”

  “We’ll make a plan.”

  “A plan to become invisible?”

  “Is it not worth the risk to you?” I said. “Not worth the attempt?”

  “He killed our brother,” she said.

  “He is our brother,” I said. “And he was the better man.”

  “You insult the one in an attempt to salvage the other?”

  “Yes!” I said. “I’ll do whatever I have to, to salvage him!”

  Silence fell in the room next to ours, as Parth and his mother undoubtedly heard me. Ismene shook her head.

  “You’re suicidal.”

  “No. I’m just not a coward.”

  I regretted saying it a moment later, when she just stared at me with wide eyes, like she couldn’t believe I could think so badly of her.

  “It’s not cowardice to run from an inferno rather than spit water at it,” she said. “It’s survival.”

  “What good is survival if you trade yourself away in the process?”

  She got to her feet and smoothed her shirt, and I knew she was ready to leave.

  “Don’t make me hate you, Ismene,” I said. “Not when I love you so much.”

  She didn’t look back.

  9

  Antigone

  When the four orphaned progeny of Oedipus and Jocasta—then adults, or nearly so—came to live in Kreon’s house, we took only what we could carry, and we went on foot through a silent city still under military lockdown. Eyes peered at us through darkened windows as we passed, escorted by guards, and every so often, we heard taps as our father’s sympathizers drummed their fingers on the glass. In one quarter, we paused to listen to the patter all around us, like rain blowing against a windowpane.

  We walked a long way, as my mother had insisted on living close to the university, which was in the Proetid District, on the far side of the hill where the Archive stood. As we went, I thought about making a run for it. Fleeing the city. Taking my chances in the emptiness beyond it. But there was only death out there; my father had seen it. Every so often the university tried to make contact with anyone else, anywhere on the planet. But there was nothing. No signs of life. There was nowhere to run.

  So I kept walking.

  Eurydice greeted us at the courtyard entrance, which opened to the street, her warm smile at odds with the soldiers around us, there “for our safety,” as Kreon had put it. What had been strange to me then was not the silence of our city or the guards prowling the streets to make sure everyone stayed inside or the phalanx of soldiers around us, but the game of pretend that everyone seemed to have agreed to without consulting me. Kreon making a show of his generosity, of his responsibility to his family. Eurydice giving us a tour of the house, unleashing us on the east wing to choose our bedrooms like it was a treat. Smile fixed, eyes sparkling.

  Only their son, Haemon, had refused to play, his wary eyes meeting mine across the dinner table, his voice echoing through the hallways as he asked his father why there were so many guards stationed in the east wing. He treated us like the hostages we were, and in the weeks that followed our arrival, I found myself grateful for it. At least he was not lying to me.

  But Polyneikes had been the reason we all learned to survive there. He learned our guards’ names, developed private jokes with them. Cajoled Eurydice into giving us comforts—a little plant for Ismene’s windowsill, a cup of tea for him every Sunday, a schematic drawing of the Trireme for my wall, and for Eteocles, a position assisting Kreon.

  Looking back now, I wondered how early Polyneikes had become a revolutionary. It might have been upon our arrival. Perhaps he had intended Eteocles to become an informant. Perhaps he had thought it was a given that Eteocles would want to help him, just as I had thought it was a given that Ismene would want to help me.

  How well, I wondered now, did I really know any of them?

  After my confrontation with Ismene in Parth’s kitchen, I took the long way back to the house, my hair bound up in a scarf so I was less likely to be recognized. I slipped into the house through the back entrance, walking through the kitchen, busy with dinner preparations, to the unadorned hallways where the household staff worked. I passed through the little courtyard on my way to the east wing, and Haemon was there, standing beneath the ivy.

  After our betrothal was announced, I had heard some of the household staff discussing it—how little I deserved him, how any woman in the city would love to trade places with me. How could Kreon promise his son to such a warped creature? Who knew what her imperfect body, swimming with unedited genes, would do to a child?

  But Kreon knew what I knew: that if he did not bind one of us to Haemon, we—or our children—would forever be Haemon’s competition. And Kreon believed in eliminating the competition.

  So Haemon and I were assigned to each other, and he became my adversary, the man I had not chosen, who I did not want and who did not want me. Yet standing there beneath the ivy, a look of concern on his face, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders, I remembered that most people would have felt lucky to marry such a man. It was a shame, I thought, that they couldn’t.

  “Are you waiting for me?” I said.

  “You left,” he said. “I suppose I was … concerned.”

  “I needed some air,” I replied. “I was in no danger.”

  “It’s customary to take an escort.”

  “I like to walk alone.”

  “Hmm.” Haemon set his jaw. “So you and your sister independently decided to walk alone at the same time?”

  I tilted my head and studied him for a moment.

  “Did your father send you to question me?”

  “I am not nearly as much his errand boy as you suppose.”

  “I’m not sure you have any idea what I suppose about you.”