“I intend to,” Kreon said. “First, however, I would like to know exactly what you saw, in the dead of night, from across a street.”

  “Well I saw something silvery—the moon was bright—and I ran toward her, and when I was closer, you know, I saw exactly what it was, and I remembered the rules about that body and so I grabbed her.”

  “All right,” Kreon said. “You are dismissed.”

  “I wasn’t even on duty,” the guard said.

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Okay. I just—I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I wasn’t about to not do anything, on account of—”

  “You’re dismissed, soldier.”

  The guard gulped a little, wiped his palms on his trousers, and stood. He gave me an apologetic look, and then walked out of Kreon’s study. Kreon stared at me, one eyebrow raised a little, like he was waiting for me to speak. I met his eyes and waited.

  “Niece,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew about explosives.”

  “I don’t, Uncle.”

  “So you just happened to be in the square, violating my edict, at the exact moment that someone set off an explosive in the Electran District.”

  I tilted my head. Smiled.

  But before I could make my reply, Haemon opened the door to the study. His eyes went straight to his father, and then he gave me a cold look, as if he had never been my co-conspirator.

  “I apologize, I didn’t know this meeting was already underway,” he said, level as a balanced scale. “I had hoped to speak with you beforehand.”

  I swallowed down the burning in my throat. Haemon must have been worried that I would become an informant to save my skin. He was here to defend himself, to call me a liar before I got the chance to talk about who set the explosion. I sat up straighter. It was a good thing I wasn’t going to marry a man who had no respect for me at all.

  “I suppose,” Kreon replied, equally cool, “you are here to castigate me for ruining your betrothal?”

  Just as Kreon had grown up with Oedipus, Haemon had been brought up under his father’s watchful eyes, raised to be a worthy successor. Mimicry of Kreon was in his posture and his manner and his expressions.

  “A loyal son doesn’t berate his father,” Haemon said.

  “Indeed,” Kreon said. “And so?”

  “I came to ask you what you intend to do.”

  “You don’t already know?” Kreon looked at me again. “A traitor attempted to kill me. He came close to succeeding. And so I made an example of him. I made an edict, and I made it publicly. In it, I outlined particular consequences for aligning yourself with traitors. Sparing her those consequences would make me a liar.”

  “And it’s better to be an honest man than a merciful one?”

  Kreon’s voice was like flint when he replied.

  “Let me explain something to you, because you are too young to know it yet.” He folded his hands on the desk and leaned toward me, toward his son. “This city is my household. I am the head of it. It is a house of people constantly on the edge of starvation, who begin to deteriorate from the moment they are born. If I intend to protect them, I do not have the luxury of indulging defiance. Defiance leads to instability, and instability leads to extinction. I have built a strong wall around this house. It is not made of stone, it is made of rules that mitigate damage, and it has been the great work of my life. What do you think would happen, if I allowed a crack in my wall?” He looked at me. “Let me tell you what would happen, because it has happened before, again and again, reaching back through history: the crack will widen and the wall will crumble. And when it does, people will die.”

  “I see.” Haemon sat down in the chair next to mine, where my friend the guard had sat just a few minutes before. He folded his hands—he had long fingers, I noticed—over one of his knees. “As you said, I am too young to know all that you know. But I have been in the city, and I know how our people think. They will see this as a senseless killing—the waste of a precious resource, all for the crime of loving a brother—”

  “For the crime of conspiring with rebels,” Kreon interrupted. “Do you think that explosion was a coincidence? It’s a wonder no one was killed.”

  Haemon went on as if his father had not spoken: “You don’t want to allow a crack in your wall—but the crack is already there, and I fear this will widen it.”

  Kreon smirked.

  “I see,” he said. “You pretend to reason with me, but reason is the furthest thing from your mind. You’ve developed a hunger for this woman.”

  “I assure you, my concern is for you.”

  “If your concern was for me, you would be outraged at the attempt on my life by a member of my own household!” Kreon spat. “Instead you are a child, with a child’s sense of justice.”

  “I’m telling you it doesn’t matter if I am a child or not, it doesn’t matter if I want her or not, it doesn’t matter if she conspired with rebels or not!” Haemon said. “If the rest of this city agrees with me, you’ll bring about the chaos you are trying to avoid.”

  “I’m not going to capitulate to anyone’s tantrums, least of all yours.”

  Haemon spat, “You’re a fool.”

  “And you’re a simpering milksop who is mastered by a woman,” Kreon replied. “I do not tolerate murderers and traitors. I will not be persuaded to do so.”

  The men glared at each other, finally falling into silence. I sat forward and cleared my throat, drawing their attention.

  “High Commander,” I said. “In the presence of this witness, I’d like to formally call upon the rights of the accused. I want to request a public hearing.”

  “What?” Haemon said.

  Kreon frowned at me.

  “It is my right,” I said. “To be judged in the presence of my peers.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Haemon said. “There should be no hearing, there should be no judgment in the first place!”

  But both Kreon and I ignored him, our eyes locked together like two swords crossed at the blade.

  “What do you think you will gain?” he said quietly. His voice was like poison dripping down my throat. “Do you think that if there is some kind of public outcry, I will be moved to change my mind? Well I warn you, girl, I am not so easily swayed.”

  I pursed my lips, as if to say we’ll see, but really, I had no doubt: Kreon was a stubborn ass, and that’s what I was counting on.

  11

  Kreon

  The statute to which my traitorous niece referred had been proposed by her own father, years before, in response to a particular tendency of the government—then not under my command; that came later—to simply disappear dissenting voices, here one day and gone the next. I remembered the day he had advocated for it before the array of men in jackets buttoned up to their throats, his voice unfaltering, never intimidated even when he ought to have been. It was not confidence so much as a belief in his own invincibility. He never did understand survival—his own, or his children’s. He might not have cursed them with his unstable DNA if he had.

  Nevertheless, it was not unfathomable that she should remember that statute, as she remembered so many of her parents’ achievements and routinely reminded me of them. What was startling, then, was not her talent for recall, but her willingness to engage in a public hearing that could only run counter to her best interests. She had been caught with an Extractor in hand, the needle end poised over her twin brother’s belly. She had been wrestled away from said body and taken back to her bedroom, where she had been contained since the crime occurred. She could not very well stand before me in the public square and deny any of it.

  And besides—what would she have Extracted? There was no soul in Polyneikes’ cells. I had permitted the charade for Eteocles, but it was all utterly pointless. There could be no resurrection where there was no pattern to convey.

  I had expected her to come trembling to my office, to perch at the edge of the chair and beg me for her life. Despite the ornery streak that ran through her, I knew her to be a practical person above all else. When she had first arrived in this house, I had seen quite plainly the hatred she bore me, yet she had thanked me for my mercy and given me a curtsy that any high-status lady of society would have found acceptable.

  So how to account for her attitude in my office? Perhaps she was overconfident in the public’s favor and in my unwillingness to be momentarily unpopular. Perhaps her view of things was simply too narrow to account for anything other than her own particular situation. She did not understand the intricacies of leadership, and how could she have? Her life, up until this point, had been one of clinging to the branch until the fruit was ripe enough to pick. One only saw one perspective when dangling for so long.

  I scheduled the public hearing for that afternoon, to be announced in the square between the house and the Trireme, according to the requirements of my brother’s statute. I doubted that anyone would heed it. I returned to my study, where a cup of coffee waited, lukewarm now thanks to the deviation in my routine. Rather than summon one of the staff to warm it, I clutched it in both hands to preserve the last of its warmth and sipped it at my desk.

  Eurydice joined me for lunch, as she often did, setting up plates and napkins at the table on the balcony. Today she put a bud vase between the plates with a paper flower in it, folded dozens of times to make geometric petals. It was red, and her dress was red, too. There was a fragility to her that was on display for all to see, but I was the one who saw her strength. Her calloused hands, from working the ground. Her flat feet, from running barefoot as a child. The scars on her knuckles, from bearing the blows of a cruel teacher’s ruler.

  When we were sitting across from each other at the table, she said, “About Antigone.”

  “I don’t wish to speak of her again,” I replied. “What she did weighs on my mind already.”

  “Only remember that she is our niece, and she is just a girl,” she said softly.

  “She is not a girl, she is an adult.” I set my jaw. “And as to her relationship to me, well, her brother was just as closely tied to me, and see what he tried to do. See what he did, firing a bullet into his own flesh and blood!”

  My hands shook. I gripped the edge of the table, and looked down at the courtyard where I had seen Eteocles’ body. A shameful waste, I had thought even then. Eteocles was not, perhaps, as strong of mind and heart as my own son—not a leader of men, that much was clear. But he had been a thoughtful and capable assistant to me, quick to heed my words and eager to please. And such a thing was not easy to come by.

  I had disposed of his ichor after allowing his sister to Extract it. There was no point in storing it. But Ismene was a gentle girl, incapable of the kind of vitriol that readily spilled from the mouth of her sister, and Eurydice had wished to placate her after her sister’s violent reaction to the sight of the bodies. She claimed Ismene would be easier to manage if she was not inflamed to rage like her sister. I resented having to manage them at all. Long had I been held hostage by their impurity, and now my house had been riven in two by deception, with my son straddling the divide as if he could keep the land from parting just by wishing it.

  Eurydice laid a hand over my own.

  “You will do what’s right,” she said to me. “I know it. I’ll go to the hearing, if you want me to.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I could use someone there who will support me.”

  “Of course.”

  As she was so skilled in doing, she turned the talk elsewhere, to the garden, to her friends’ chatter, to the gossip from the household staff, to anything but what mattered. And I was glad of it.

  * * *

  I heard the crowd that had gathered in the square before I saw it, the murmur penetrating the walls of my house. As I walked with Nikias at my heels through the courtyard, I almost felt the heat of them. I had never been fond of crowds. The mass of humanity only reminded me of how senseless we were, playing games of maturity and civilization when really we were no different than a flock of birds moving as one, each one reacting to the movements of the one in front of it. I had seen more than one riot start because of a stray impulse.

  I saw the shadow of my niece in the hallway adjoining the courtyard, smaller than the soldiers that surrounded her. She would enter after me.

  I waved to the guards at the gate that separated the courtyard from the street, and they opened it. Dust swirled across the hard-packed earth, a haze appearing between me and my public. My shoulders back, I strode forward. The street was clear now of my traitor nephew’s body, removed to the safe room beneath the house after my traitor niece’s arrest, so the only thing between me and the crowd was a line of soldiers with staffs in hand. It may as well have been a wall; no one dared breach the invisible line that kept us apart.

  I didn’t delay. “We are here assembled for a public hearing, in accordance with our statutes, of a woman accused of treason: my niece, Antigone. Lest I be accused of showing favoritism to my own kin, I present my judgment in this matter before all those gathered here. Bring her forward.”

  She emerged from the courtyard framed with ivy. Her hair was loose and long, and I had not seen it so for months. It made her face look rounder, younger. She had changed clothes—she was still in black, but her shoulders were bare now, and there were faint ripples next to her sternum where her ribs were beginning to show. She was spare, though we had not suffered a food shortage in years, thanks to my rule. Distribution was now strictly controlled, each person given a particular allocation according to their work output, an elegant calculation of calories burned and calories consumed.

  Today, her spareness spoke to her fragility. I am just a child, her appearance seemed to say, and I was certain this was purposeful on her part. As she had stood before her closet, sorting through black frocks, she had chosen this one for a reason.

  I turned away from the crowd—not to hide my face from them, but to position myself as one of them. The head of the flock, the leader of the masses, standing against this woman who had stood against me. It would not hurt to remind them that I was one of them, that I spoke on their behalf and not my own. The crime she had committed was against their survival.

  “Antigone,” I said. “Do you stand here of your own free will, ready to be questioned?”

  “I do,” she replied, her voice even.

  “Then let me recount the circumstances under which you find yourself accused of treason,” I said. “Two nights ago, a group of terrorists stormed the courtyard of this house”—here I gestured to the building—“with the express intent of doing violence to me and my household. In that attack, your eldest brother, Eteocles, rose up in my defense. He was murdered by one of the aforementioned terrorists, but not before delivering a killing blow to the very man who killed him. That terrorist’s name was Polyneikes, and was his brother, and yours, as well as my own nephew.”

  Her face was impassive. I had always had trouble reading Antigone; it had plagued me since her arrival in my house. I knew that she hated me, yes, but I was never certain of what she would do with that hatred, of whether it would simply fester inside her all her life, or whether it would inspire her to action. Even now, I was not sure of it.

  “An attempt on the High Commander’s life cannot be tolerated, and is among our highest crimes,” I said. “Therefore I delivered an edict, clearly and in the hearing of every citizen of this city: the traitor’s body must not be interfered with, under penalty of execution. Did you hear this edict, Antigone?”

  “I did,” she replied.

  “Last night, you were discovered by one of my soldiers immediately following an explosion that caused irreparable damage to the Electran District of our city, including several homes, with an Extractor poised over the traitor’s abdomen, in the process of violating my edict. Do you deny it?”

  “No, I do not,” she said, and a gasp sounded from behind me.

  “Do you know who is responsible for the explosion that empowered you to act?”

  “I take responsibility for it myself,” she replied.

  I felt my mouth twist against my will. That was a sidestep if I’d ever heard one. She had obviously conspired with someone, and I was willing to bet it was the same rebels who had stormed the courtyard with her brother. Where one twin had connections, so did the other.

  “Was there something about my edict you did not understand?”

  “There was plenty about your edict I did not understand,” she replied.

  “Do elaborate. Was it the definition of ‘interference’ with the body?”

  “No. Your intent was quite clear to me,” she said. “You wished to exclude my brother’s ichor from the Archive, the only retroactive punishment available to you.”

  I scowled at her. “What then did you find so confusing?”

  “I suppose,” she said, “it was the hierarchy of law.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “To my knowledge, we have never excluded anyone from the Archive,” she said. “Not thieves, not murderers, and not even the rioters who rose up in the wake of a free election gone awry, ten years ago. We even permit those conceived as my siblings and I were to store their ichor, though some doubt it is ichor at all.” Her eyes softened. “And so I suppose what confused me was that the merciful approach we have taken toward our wayward citizens prior to this point was suddenly not permitted for my brother.”

  I breathed deep through my nose. I could not lose control now.

  “I should think the explanation for that is obvious,” I said. “A thief, a murderer, and even a rioter are not the same as an assassin who acts against the highest level of authority. Such an act is worthy of a stronger punishment. It threatens the very foundation of our society, and our society is our survival.”

  “My brother was no assassin,” she replied.

  “Because he was stopped,” I said. “By your own brother, no less. I didn’t realize you loved Eteocles so little.”

  “I loved both of my brothers.”