“And they killed each other,” I said. “It’s clear you loved one more than the other, if there was only one whose ichor you risked your life to preserve. Have you given a thought for Eteocles’ immortality? Do you even know where his body is?”

  Her eyes hardened.

  “I assumed that you would treat it with respect, given how loyal he was to you,” she replied. “Do you think you honor him, by destroying his kin permanently?”

  “Do you believe a victim of murder feels warmly toward his murderer?”

  “My point,” she said, harder now in voice as well as expression, “is that one man, High Commander or no, doesn’t have the right or the power to declare cruelty to be morality just because something has affected him personally. There is a word for the man who tries. Do you know what it is, Kreon?” She raised her voice so it rang through the square. “Tyrant.”

  All around us was silence.

  “It is unfortunate to see you this way, Niece,” I said, as softly as I could manage.

  “In what way?” she said. “Grieving?”

  “No,” I answered. “Warped beyond recognition. We all knew, of course, that it would happen eventually. Genetic deterioration is the lot of everyone who still lives on this planet. But most people start with a clean slate. You, however … un-souled, natural-born daughter of two broken parents…” I shook my head. “I am surprised you still trust your own assessments of what is right. Your twin brother did, and it led to him dying in disgrace.”

  The mask that she had worn up until that point fell away. I had laid bare her hatred, at last.

  “If I had a brother who was ‘warped,’ as you say,” she said, “it was Eteocles, who served a power-mad dictator at the expense of his own family.”

  “Yes, well,” I said. “Some of us understand the necessity of duty over personal attachment. And that is why I cannot spare you, dear niece, after hearing you admit to your crimes, as well as your obvious awareness of them, brazenly and in the public square. You cannot be given special treatment simply because of my familial attachment to you. You must suffer the same consequences as every other citizen of this city. You must be executed.”

  The clamor that rose among the crowd in response to this was deafening. Not just murmurs, but shouts; the soldiers who guarded the square used their staffs to press people back, holding a barrier that had been invisible and was now made manifest.

  “You can’t!” Ismene emerged from the shadow of the courtyard, followed closely by Eurydice, who reached for her. Ismene tugged away from Eurydice’s hand holding her elbow, but not hard enough to break free. Together they stumbled into the square to stand between me and my traitorous niece, Eurydice at Ismene’s back.

  Tears stained my other niece’s cheeks. She was taller than her sister, but softer, her voice gentler. I had wished, many times, that I had selected her to marry Haemon instead of her elder sister. She was easier to deal with.

  “You can’t,” Ismene said again. “I tie my fate to hers. If she dies, so will I, and then two losses will be on your conscience instead of one.”

  “Ismene!” Antigone shouted the name so that it could be heard over the tumult in the crowd, and scowled at her. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “Neither loss weighs on my conscience,” I said to Ismene, “when the deaths are the deaths of traitors.”

  Eurydice spoke softly in the girl’s ear, her hands on her shoulders, soothing, pressing her back toward the courtyard. I thought the disruption had been dealt with until my wife left Ismene’s side and stepped closer to me, close enough that I could see dust gathering in the creases beneath her eyes.

  “Mercy,” she said to me softly, “is as fine a quality to be known for as strength, Kreon. Do not sacrifice so valuable a treasure as a young woman’s body—not when it has not had time to contribute anything yet.”

  “What could she contribute, with her origins?” I said, and I flinched as the shouts around us grew louder.

  Eurydice’s eyes were insistent. “Life.”

  I felt something crawling up my spine—a feeling from memory, soon followed by the images of memory themselves. A man breaking through a barrier, stabbing a soldier. Screams. Chaos. Blood spattering the street. The riot that had almost claimed my life; that had claimed the lives of my brother and his wife, and so many others.

  I could not allow it to happen again.

  I turned toward the crowd.

  “Make no mistake, this is not about mercy. Mercy would be valuing the lives of our citizens over the lives of two women!” I gritted my teeth until they squeaked, and then continued: “Still, I am not hard-hearted. I hear you—all of you.”

  The crowd quieted a little. I turned back to Antigone, standing alone even now, her sister weeping behind her, my wife turning her face away.

  “I will not execute her,” I said. “But a traitor cannot be permitted to live freely among us. It is too great a threat to our society’s health. Instead, I will send her on a special mission. She will board the Trireme, and take our desperate plea into space.”

  The and die there was implied, but I didn’t say it aloud.

  Our eyes locked. Hers were wide and soft as a rabbit’s. She looked up and out toward the ship that glinted in the daylight not far from here, its nose pointed at the heavens.

  “Thank you, Niece, for giving us this great gift,” I said. “Your last few years will be spent making amends for your treachery. You will be our messenger.”

  The crowd’s quiet had been just a held breath. Their shouts filled the air again, and Nikias rushed forward to escort me back into the courtyard, to be locked safely behind the gates of my house.

  12

  Antigone

  I had seen the true color of the day sky only a few times in my life. The city was shrouded, always, by dust and pollution. On clear days, it was gray-white. On days when the northern wind blew, it was yellow.

  But right after a particularly bad storm, when the wind was right, the clouds sometimes cleared, and there it was: blue.

  In a world that left no room for the frivolous, it felt almost indulgent. The heavens mocking us, perhaps. But everyone walked around on those days with their heads tilted back, until the wind blew the clouds back into place.

  Never did the Trireme glint more. There had been rumors, a few years ago, that the Trireme didn’t actually work—why hadn’t they launched it yet, if it did?—but that Kreon kept it there to inspire hope for the future. I had halfway believed them, until now, when I knew the Trireme would be my tomb. Kreon wouldn’t have given me that sentence if he hadn’t known he could carry it out.

  I lay on the bed, my fingers spread wide. I felt numb, and the numbness was weight in my limbs. The ceiling, cracked and stained, held no interest, but neither did the dinner they had delivered to me an hour ago. It waited on my desk, cold now. Would they poison me? I didn’t think so. Kreon wanted the big, marvelous display of launching me into the sky as much as I did. We just wanted it for different reasons. He was betting it would be a spectacular display of his authority. I was betting it would rouse people to rebellion.

  Regardless of who was right, I would still die.

  I sat up at the knock. I was certain they wouldn’t let Ismene visit me. And anyone Kreon sent would not bother to knock.

  The door opened, and Haemon stepped into my bedroom for the second time in two days.

  There was trouble in his eyes and a slump to his shoulders. I got up, standing by the foot of my bed, and I meant to say something sour and funny, the way I usually would, but my words failed me, for the first time.

  He was at the edges of so many of my memories, after my parents’ deaths, but never in the center of them. I suspected he never wanted to intrude on my time with my siblings, certain he wouldn’t be welcome, thanks to his father. He had been right about that. We would not have welcomed him.

  But a year ago Kreon had summoned me to his study, and Haemon had been there already, sitting with his back so straight it looked painful. Kreon had introduced us to each other as future husband and wife. I had been waiting for him to marry me off—I was not foolish enough to believe that the choice would be mine; soul or not, I was still highborn—and so I received the news in silence. But Haemon had laughed, sharply. I had avoided him since then.

  He looked me over, almost like he was checking me for injuries. Only—then his eyes lingered, here on my hip, there on my collarbone.

  “I came to break a law,” he said.

  “I’m not interested in a daring escape,” I said.

  “Yeah, I realize that,” he said. “You think I don’t see that you’re walking a path you chose?”

  I did think that, in fact. But it was becoming clear that I didn’t really understand Haemon, didn’t really know him. I sat on the edge of my bed, and he moved to stand in front of me. He took a silver Extractor from his back pocket.

  It was smaller than the one I had used to try to save Polyneikes. A newer version of the technology. Slim enough to look small in Haemon’s hand. He pressed a button on its side, and a needle extended from it.

  “You can’t Extract ichor from the living,” I said.

  “I can,” he said. “Do you know the history of Extraction? Initially, when the practice began, it was only tied together with our death customs because it took so long to edit the genes affected by the virus. But this notion that the soul in our cells can only be Extracted properly after death, that came later.”

  “You think if you take my cells now, you’ll take my soul with them?” I asked, and I wanted to laugh, but there was no laughter in me.

  Haemon shook his head. He cradled the Extractor in both hands.

  “Suppose,” he said. “Suppose I think the soul is an eternal, ever-regenerating thing. That your soul can be simultaneously whole in you and whole in your ichor—suppose I think that it’s possible it suffuses every part of you, powerful and potent. Suppose that even if I am not certain of this, I am willing to risk it to preserve you.”

  He held the Extractor out to me, and I felt a momentary pain—if he had convinced Pol of this, I could have stored Pol’s ichor while he was still alive—but I pushed it aside. It was too late for that now.

  I shook my head, pushing the Extractor away.

  “Speak to the mystics,” I said. “Ask them if I even have a soul.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “I don’t need to ask. I already know.”

  I shook my head again.

  “I don’t care about the law,” he said, and he sank to his knees in front of me. Kneeling, he was almost as tall as I was sitting on my low bed. We were eye to eye, and the Extractor was between us. “What my father is doing is wrong, and only something wrong can make it even a little bit right again.”

  “No, it’s not … it’s not that,” I said. “It’s a kind gesture, Haemon, but I don’t want to be stored in the Archive at all.”

  His eyes were hard and fixed.

  “I don’t believe in immortality,” I said. “I think you could use an ovum from my body—you could bring back the shape of me, refined and edited, but you could never bring me back. And an edited version of me is not me anyway.”

  “But Pol—”

  “Pol did believe in it,” I said. “The last thing he asked me to do was to use that Extractor. So I did my best.” I shrugged. “Look at what came of that.”

  The sky was getting dark. I had read somewhere once that in the dark, our eyes relied more on rods than on cones, meaning that night vision and color vision were incompatible. So I always thought of sunset as the color draining out of the world, like dye leeching out of a garment when you rinsed it. The little courtyard beyond my bedroom window was turning gray.

  And then I couldn’t see even that, through tears.

  “Sorry,” I said, choking.

  Haemon put the Extractor down and took my hands in his.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “I can go, if you’d like. But I thought maybe you’d prefer even my company to being alone.”

  “Even yours.” I laughed a little. “If you knew what I was thinking about, you’d know why that was funny.”

  “You could always tell me. Maybe I’ll laugh.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “I was thinking about all the things I won’t do,” I said. “Won’t have a wedding. Won’t walk through the Archive. Won’t get crow’s feet.” I laughed again, and my laugh broke. “I didn’t want to be married, but I thought I would get married. I thought Ismene would put flowers in my hair, and I would wear my mother’s dress, and I would have a wedding night and wake up and decide whether I felt any different. I didn’t want children, either, but I thought I would have them—thought I would walk through the Archive and find someone who looked like my mother, and make the best of the thing I didn’t want. I thought I would find the moments I loved among the moments I didn’t. I thought I would have time.”

  His hands tightened around mine. His hands were warm and I focused on that, the heat in his fingers, the heat behind my eyes, the blood and muscle of him, of me, the life in us both. Technically, there would be life in me for years yet. There were as many rations on the Trireme as the ship could hold, so it could broadcast from as far away from Earth as possible. And that was the worst part of it, that I would have to choose between taking my own life—driven mad by the isolation—and watching my food supply dwindle. That I would be both alive and dead at the same time for so long, cursed to hover between the two, unobserved.

  “This morning it felt so easy to give all that away,” I said. “Pol, he was worried I wanted to die. Ismene, too. But I didn’t, I don’t. I just wanted to be done, and that’s not the same thing.”

  “I know,” he said softly. “I know it’s not.”

  I had imagined marriage as a cage. Even my mother, in love with my father as she was, hadn’t been able to escape that. People asking my father how he allowed my mother so much autonomy, as if he was her jailer. The way men wouldn’t listen to her unless he repeated what she said. And love was never going to be mine to claim, so I had imagined worse than that—an arrangement of restriction and demand. But I had never imagined Haemon, specifically. Thoughtful Haemon with his watchful eyes. Big and strong enough to be capable of violence, but I had never once seen him inclined toward it.

  “You helped me,” I said. “We could have gotten married sooner, if I hadn’t delayed. We could have had good things together, I think. And now I’ll never have any of them.”

  “I know,” he said again. My mother had always yelled at me for saying that, I know, even when I didn’t, just because I was annoyed with her for nagging at me. He didn’t say it like that. He said it more like an acknowledgment, heard and then understood. I wondered if he had thought about our marriage, what it would be like, how our children would be, what we might choose. A life after Kreon’s death. I could have asked. But I thought it might be worse to hear the answer.

  “There are still good things you could have,” he said. “You need only ask.”

  I opened my eyes. He was still on his knees—like a supplicant, his words a kind of offer.

  I thought of his hands on me, and I wanted it.

  I bent my head toward his, and our lips touched, just for a moment, like palms pressing together. It was like a test—is this all right, is this the kind of madness that makes a certain amount of sense. I decided it was, and I kissed him again, slowly this time, and though his mouth was spare and though I hardly knew him, it felt how I imagined it was supposed to feel, warm and lively as an exposed wire.

  I pulled him toward me and we fell back against my bed, and I stripped him bare and I took my time looking at him and I took, and I took, and so did he. And there was no pain, only strangeness, and for a few hours more, at least, I was alive.

  * * *

  It was strange to sleep on the eve of banishment. In the moments before I drifted off, I thought that I should have been drinking in everything that I could, everything that I loved about this planet. It was not a lovable place in so many respects, but its gravity steadied me, its sky enfolded me, its scents instructed me, and none of those things would accompany me into the Trireme. But my body was still a body, and it still needed sleep.

  I fell asleep with my head on Haemon’s shoulder, my arm slung around his waist. He was so warm I didn’t need the sheet that covered me. He didn’t snore, exactly, but his breaths were loud and slow when he slept. When I woke a few hours later, his fingers were still laid across my rib cage, but the loud, slow breathing had turned quiet. He was awake.

  I lifted my head and looked at him.

  Despite the fact that we were naked—despite the fact of what we had done together—it was still odd to be so close to him. I had spent the last year avoiding him, and all the years before that not seeing him at all.

  “I can’t let this happen to you,” he said to me.

  “I chose this,” I said. “The moment I requested a public hearing, I knew what would come of it.”

  “You shouldn’t have to choose it,” he said. “I won’t let this happen to you. I have to do something.”

  He sat up, wrapping his arms loosely around his knees, bent under the sheet. I stood, and walked to the window. Goose bumps spread over my skin from the cold, now that I was no longer lying against him. The moon was shrouded in clouds.

  “Your attachment to me will fade,” I said.

  “I have been attached to you for a long time,” he said sharply.

  I looked back at him. I really couldn’t read Haemon at all, could I? He was at the edges of so many of my memories—but maybe he had put himself there so that he could still be in them at all. He had come for me after Polyneikes died, to see if I was all right. He had waited for me in the courtyard. He had rigged an explosion—or gotten someone else to do it—as a distraction. He had tried to shout down his father.

  His eyes skimmed my bare body, and a small voice in my head told me that if he cared for me, it was an advantage I could not ignore. My gut twisted at the thought.