“I know you think of me with dread,” he said, and his eyes were sharp enough to cut me to the bone. “And I know you have no reason to. I do not keep hostages.”

  “No, perhaps you don’t,” I said quietly. “But you don’t release them, either, do you?”

  “If you’d like me to escort you out of the city and into the wilderness,” he said, “I will. But I don’t think that’s where you want to be.”

  We had been told that this city was founded here because of its comparatively low radiation levels—that when our ancestors all had fled their homes, they had been armed with nothing more than a Geiger counter, and most of them had died on the journey. I might not have believed this, if my father had not been outside the city. Every politician was required to go out there at least once, to see firsthand what it was like. My father wasn’t afraid, so he had gone often. He had shown me his hazmat suit once, and the device he had used to measure radiation levels—someone checked them every year, to see if they were decreasing, if there was a chance the planet was healing itself.

  Eventually, it will, he had told me. The only question is, can we survive long enough to see it?

  And that was the whole point of it all—the Archive, the gene editing, the compulsory reproduction, and even Kreon’s obsession with stability. We just had to hang on until the rest of the planet was habitable again. The Trireme, gleaming in the middle of the city like a fallen star, was meant only as a desperate backup plan: send a signal begging for help, see if anyone answers. And it was not the one that most people put their faith in.

  “No,” I said. “Funnily enough, I would rather my insides not be devoured by radiation.”

  A hint of a smile passed over Haemon’s lips.

  “We are all hostages here,” he said. “Held at knifepoint by our own planet. But we can make the best of what we’re given, you and I. And I don’t intend to cause you any more misery than you’ve already endured.”

  Haemon had never lied to me, had he?

  But there was always a first time. One day soon, he would have more power over me than anyone. And it took a singular man not to misuse power. How singular was Haemon?

  “Prove it,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Prove it,” I said again, and I stepped closer to him. “Help me.”

  He frowned. I reached into my bag, and took out the Extractor, just enough for him to see what it was.

  “Help me,” I repeated.

  I watched him calculate. He looked up at the hazy sky.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Meet me here at midnight.”

  “That’s cutting it close,” I said. Pol had died just after one in the morning. We only had until one o’clock tonight to perform the Extraction.

  “It’ll be enough. I need to prepare something first.”

  All I could do, for a moment, was blink.

  Then I nodded.

  * * *

  The Extractor was a marvel. Most people regarded it as they would have a magic wand or a cursed amulet—as if it wasn’t to be touched carelessly, as if they needed to pray to it, worship it, to make it do its work. Even my mother, so determined that we should know the proper names for things, hadn’t been able to simplify its processes enough for me to understand. I relied on figurative language instead.

  In the low belly was where it needed to go. I had practiced on Ismene once, when we were small. Laid all four of my fingers beneath her belly button to mark the place, and then jabbed her with a stick, harder than I meant to, so she had leapt up and slapped me in retaliation. When she had lain back down, I’d wriggled my fingers in the air over her pelvis, to signify the microscopic bugs that wriggled through her body in search of her ovaries. My teacher had called them that, reminded us that a mosquito could smell carbon dioxide from thirty feet away, so was it really so strange that the Extractor could seek out the right cells?

  After it found them, it wrenched the ichor from the body, leaving destruction in its wake. An Extractor was too brutal in its work to be used on the living. It left bruises on the surface, and greater damage within.

  After making my bargain with Haemon in the courtyard, I lay down on the bed with the Extractor in my left hand and felt beneath my belly button with my right for the place. I positioned the point of the device against my skin. This was how it would look to Polyneikes if he was still there, his soul trapped in his body, living on in his cells.

  I prayed for cloud cover, because a darker night meant concealment, but the sky cleared while I ate dinner at my desk, and by the time midnight came the moon was bright enough to read by. Still, I dressed in my darkest clothes and tucked the Extractor into the waistband of my trousers, covered by a jacket to disguise its bulk. Satisfied by the quiet press of my feet on the stone, I walked to the fall of ivy where Haemon was waiting.

  “Bright out,” he said in greeting. “Not good for us.”

  “I’m cursed, haven’t you heard?”

  Haemon smiled, wry. “I don’t believe in curses.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “So what’s the plan here?”

  He shrugged. “I arranged a distraction earlier.”

  “You arranged it … how?”

  “Just trust me. Let’s go.”

  We walked across the courtyard and down the hallway to the kitchen, where a few of the staff were sitting, playing cards, a pile of dried corn kernels in the middle of the table serving as chips. Haemon’s hand slid into mine, and my shock was the only thing that kept me from pulling away.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “Just sneaking out the back.”

  I tried for a smile, but it didn’t feel right. He tugged me toward the door and I tripped after him, into the alley behind the house. It smelled like rot there, and broken glass crunched under my shoe soles.

  His hand slipped away.

  “Can’t believe I forgot about poker night,” he said.

  “Poker night?”

  “Every week they get together and play—I’ve joined them a few times.”

  It didn’t fit in with my image of him, sitting at that grubby table in the kitchen where the cooks sat to peel potatoes after a long day, his elbows propped, sleeves rolled up, cards in hand. Even now he was too stiff for that, his shoulders pulled back in an imitation of a soldier’s posture.

  “You any good?”

  He laughed. “No. Lost all my corn, every time. But as you can see, it helps to make the right people like you.”

  We reached the end of the alley and started down the street that led around the wide house. Ahead of us, obscured now by buildings, was the street where my brother’s body was displayed. The moon glinted on half a dozen windows. The Extractor dug into my hip with each step.

  The road bent around a corner of Kreon’s house where the plaster had broken, showing the stone underneath. The foundation here was cracked, the building weathered by time even though it was the finest one in the city. Not even Kreon could escape deterioration. It was hard to imagine a time when it hadn’t been this way—when plants grew untended in the wild, maintained by their own seeds spreading; when the plains beyond the city were overrun with animals that we had not bred ourselves; when genes persisted through the generations, presenting a person with their grandmother’s brow, their great-grandfather’s jaw. Everything required effort now. Everything required editing.

  The street opened up in front of us. I saw the contours of the soldiers guarding it—not spread out as they likely were during the day, each one taking a corner, but gathered together around a small flame, lighting their cigarettes. Several yards behind them, a dark lump on the ground, was Polyneikes.

  “Wait here,” Haemon said to me. “Until they’re distracted.”

  “How will I know?”

  “It won’t be subtle.”

  I stood in the middle of the street, in the dark, and waited. Haemon put his hands in his pockets and strolled toward the guards. They startled when they recognized him, like they had been caught in an indiscretion by Kreon himself. Haemon only waved a hand, dismissive.

  “Got a spare?” he said to them.

  One of them produced a fresh cigarette, and another held out his own so Haemon could light it. I saw a curtain shift in the building across the way, and then, somewhere down the block, there was a huge, resonant boom. The ground rumbled. A plume of fire stretched up from the street, followed by a cloud of smoke. Screams echoed through the city. Haemon looked at the guards with alarm.

  “What the fuck—” one of the guards said.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Haemon said. “Go!”

  “But—” another said, gesturing behind him to Polyneikes’ shape on the ground.

  “I’m fully capable of watching a dead body,” Haemon said. “Go!”

  I started toward the square, cautious at first, and then as the guards took off in the direction of the explosion, I burst into a run. I tripped into the square and fell to my knees next to Polyneikes’ body.

  Time slowed as I looked at him. I heard my heartbeat, the twin thuds distinct, valves closing, valves opening.

  Thump, thump.

  He still looked like himself, but his body was covered in a layer of pale dust. His arms rested at an awkward angle across his torso, as if he had been dragged out here and then dropped without ceremony. His shoes were gone. His shirt was soaked with blood.

  Thump, thump.

  I reached for him, unable to stop myself. His wrist felt wrong, too cold and too stiff. I choked on a sob as I lowered his arm, tucking it close to his side. His skin was discolored, from his imminent decomposition or from the moonlight, I could not tell.

  I had not said the prayers over my parents’ bodies. Ismene had done that. It was, of course, women’s work. Usher in life, usher in death. But I found I had the words memorized anyway.

  Thump, thump.

  I mouthed them over my brother. We did not beg for things in prayers—that was for Followers of Lazarus. Ours were a list of demands. Make his rest easy. Weave his soul into his body, to be preserved and renewed. Keep the best of him and let the worst slip away.

  I had to hurry, but I felt like I was moving through water as I pulled the Extractor from beneath my jacket. I wrapped both hands around it. A shout rang out across the courtyard. Someone charged toward me. I pressed a button in the side of the Extractor, and a needle extended from the bottom of it, so it looked like a giant syringe. I held it over my brother’s stomach.

  A strong hand wrapped around my wrist and wrenched it back. I swung with my other hand, the needle held out like a weapon. The guard who had stopped me twisted my arm behind my back, and I saw stars. The Extractor fell to the ground next to Polyneikes. I found myself begging.

  “Please,” I said. “He’s my brother. Please.”

  “Sorry,” he said in my ear as he dragged me away.

  10

  Antigone

  “If you were a man,” Polyneikes had asked me once, “what would you be?”

  The question had annoyed me at the time. We had been sitting on the front steps of our parents’ house, teenagers, passing a lit cigarette back and forth. None of our cigarettes were tobacco, anymore—tobacco wasn’t useful for food, so it wasn’t worth growing. Instead we smoked corn silk rolled in flimsy paper. It was nothing but an idle activity, something to do with your hands while you talked.

  I had replied, smoke spilling out of my mouth, “Someone whose gifts aren’t wasted for no reason.”

  I didn’t want to change my body. I liked the rhythm that it gave to my life, rising and falling, swelling and shrinking, aching and releasing, with every cycle of the moon. And though I knew there were some men—the state didn’t call them that, but my mother had—who could still bear children, I wasn’t one of them, either. People know themselves, my mother said. Not fully, not ever, but they know enough. She was right. I didn’t long to be a man. What I longed for, instead, was the freedom to follow my inclinations. The first time Polyneikes went to a meeting of rebels, sneaking out of the house in the early hours of the morning, I was angry that I couldn’t go with him. I knew my value. I knew my strengths. The rebellion would be better off if I joined them, too. My absence was to their detriment.

  But the womb that gave my life its ebbs and flows made my body sacred to the state, and therefore particularly subject to its might. My mother called this nonsense. She said that protecting a thing was just an excuse to control it. She dedicated herself to freeing people from that control. Technology can be used for liberty as well as domination, she wrote, when she petitioned the state to allow her to develop the artificial womb. Let me prove it to you.

  That was how my parents met.

  My mother had been able to make a place for herself in a world that refused to give her one, because she was simply too brilliant to ignore. Because of her genius, she was allowed to occupy spaces that no other woman could. It was the great disappointment of my life that I was not excellent enough to do the same.

  I was to be protected, Polyneikes said when I complained of the waste of my gifts. It was the first time since we were children that I shoved him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Locked in my bedroom now, waiting for dawn, I realized that all that protection had been for naught. Kreon had ordered execution for anyone who tampered with Polyneikes’ body, who tried to collect his ichor. So what good had it done, to guard my womb? I would die anyway. My body was forfeit.

  I chewed my fingernails and watched the sky lighten.

  Did it have to be?

  My mother was a scientist. When my first cycle began, at the age of thirteen, she explained every part of it to me, how my organs knew the steps of an intricate dance, the same one they had been doing for all of human history. I had cried, because I knew something would change—something I had not then been able to articulate, that the world would treat me as a woman then, instead of as a sexless and genderless being of endless potential. I would become subject to a household, guarded by men. She had wiped my tears and told me that plenty of power was still within my grasp, but I would have to learn to wield it, and wielding it was an art. There are always ways, she said, to get your way. Easy for her to say, I remarked at the time. Not everyone was like her.

  But perhaps she was right.

  Could my body not have one final purpose?

  My body, the same body that Polyneikes had denied my usefulness to protect, the same body that made my consciousness unimportant to rebels—it would outrage them, to see it sacrificed so carelessly, and all for the crime of loving a brother.

  I could become something greater than my body simply by allowing myself to use it.

  * * *

  I felt time slow after that. I filled the bathtub and it took an age to undress, the fabric chafing my skin as I peeled it away. I sat in the lukewarm water for too long, as the sun slanted over the ivy outside. I put on a black dress, my funeral clothes. When the lock turned, I was ready.

  Flanked by two of Polyneikes’ least favorite guards, I walked to Kreon’s study. I passed Ismene on the way, taking her morning tea with Eurydice, and didn’t spare her a glance. In truth I wasn’t sure I could bear to see her expression, whether full of apology that I would not accept or, worse, empty of it.

  Kreon’s study was on the second floor, overlooking the courtyard. The door was closed. One of the guards knocked for me, and I stared at the wood as I waited for it to open, polished as a mirror. I had been here only once before, when he had summoned me to inform me of my engagement. It was the only place in the city that was not dusty.

  Kreon’s assistant, the worm Flavian, opened the door for me and gave me an imperious look. In truth, I wasn’t sure Flavian had any other kind of look. I moved past him and into the room. The tile floor had been freshly swept; it didn’t have the gritty feeling of the stone in the hallway. Two bookshelves framed Kreon’s wide desk, made of the same polished wood as the door. He sat with his body angled toward the window and didn’t stir. It was as if I hadn’t entered.

  The worst part about him was seeing my father in him. I wished that I couldn’t. They didn’t share genes, but he had Oedipus’s gestures, surprisingly delicate for a man so prone to brutality. Sometimes he even sounded like my father—the intonation on certain words, the soft way he said goodbye to Eurydice.

  But there was an artifice in him that was never in my father. He knew I was standing there. That he chose not to acknowledge me right away was a power play.

  Sitting in one of the two chairs opposite him was a guard, wearing his uniform. He looked like every other guard I had ever seen, tall and broad and masculine, his eyes finding me with a level of focus that made me feel shifty and strange. After a moment I recognized him as the guard who had arrested me.

  I sat in the chair beside him and waited.

  “I wish to hear your account first,” Kreon said, and he nodded to the guard beside me.

  “Uh…” The guard looked from Kreon to me. “After the explosion, everyone vacated the square—I was running there like everybody else, you know, to help with whatever was going on—I wasn’t even on duty last night, I was just, you know, trying to do what needed to be done—”

  “Get to the point, soldier,” Kreon said.

  “Well, as I was running past the square I noticed there were no guards, and then I saw something moving, and at first I thought, you know, the body maybe wasn’t as bodylike as everybody thought, somehow—but then I saw the girl.”

  “The girl.”

  “Her.” The guard nodded at me.

  “You saw her,” Kreon said, “doing what?”

  “Well, she was sort of leaning over him—the body, that is, so I guess I mean she was leaning over it—and she was holding something.”

  “Something.”

  “An Extractor—one of the older ones, big and clunky, long needle at one end—”

  “You’re certain of this?”

  “Well…” The guard shifted a little. “I mean, you can ask her.”