But as close as I was to them, standing on the balcony right above their heads, I could tell that the people were not here for a spectacle. They shuffled, restless. Muttered. Pointed as they took note of the guards positioned at the perimeter of the square. Directly across from me, elevated a foot above the crowd, was a platform. It stood between the people and the hill that led down to the Trireme. The guards kept the people from climbing on it; it was where Kreon and Haemon and I would stand to watch the ship launch.

  The ship was huge. Even though it was a ways off, across the square, down the hill, it loomed over us all. Bigger than most of our buildings. I had gone the night before with Kreon to make sure it was all in order. His instructions up until that point had been to ensure the Trireme was ready to launch at all times. He had never known when its launch would be most useful to him.

  I had gone to persuade him that now was not the time. He had been angry with me for contradicting him in public, at the hearing, but his anger was a cold, lifeless thing. It made him into stone, and now he wouldn’t listen. I knew him, and I knew I had made him impossible to reach by daring to disagree with him at that pivotal moment, yet I still had to try. Not just for our niece Antigone, who I liked well enough, and not just for a young woman who had wanted to honor her brother—but for Kreon himself.

  This crowd was not gathered for a spectacle.

  They were gathered to see if the thing that horrified them would really come to pass.

  And that was not a crowd that would favor Kreon.

  “They told me you were up here,” Kreon said, his hand finding the small of my back. “What are you looking at, Wife?”

  We were a love match. My father was too negligent in his duties—too lost in moonshine—to arrange a match for me. My mother, hanging on my every word, would simply do as I said. My cousin took me to a party, thrown in an abandoned building in the Neïstan District. In those days people were dying faster than they were being born. A lot of buildings were abandoned. Empty. Crumbling. If we weren’t careful, analysts said, we would lose valuable genetic diversity and we would not be able to survive. That was why the compulsory child-bearing regulations began.

  But the party—

  There weren’t many girls there. It wasn’t what respectable girls did. But at that time, I was tired of being respectable, so I went. All the boys there were military. It was the only way to look clean-cut—the uniforms were better maintained than most people’s hand-me-downs and repurposed old clothing. Kreon was one of the only ones who looked like he needed to shave. His jaw was strong; so was his brow. When he met me, he bowed a little, like I was a queen. The others teased him for it, but I thought it was sweet. There was always something sweet about him in those days. Awkward. Sure of himself in his work, but with me, so careful, like he thought he might break me. It was nice to be taken care of. I had always done the caretaking. After all, I was the prophet of my house. God’s Chosen.

  Now, I wished Kreon would see me that way, just long enough to correct his mistakes.

  “I am looking at trouble brewing,” I said to him. One last try.

  “They seem peaceful enough.”

  “They’re not,” I said sharply, and I glared at him. “For years you have instructed them to value not the minds of people who bear children but their bodies. Now you seek to dispose of one because she cares for her brother—”

  “Because she defied me—”

  “They do not see that part! They see only that you are careless with a precious resource. That you seek obedience without rational thought!”

  “Obedience,” he said, and he put his hand on my elbow and drew me closer. “Obedience is essential to our survival.”

  I tensed. In all our years, Kreon had never hurt me, never grabbed me. This was not like him.

  “That may be,” I said, and I pulled my arm free. “But you cannot force people to see the world your way.”

  I saw Haemon standing near the platform. He crouched down beside it, so that for a moment I thought he was tying his shoelace. But no—he was looking at something beneath it, something I couldn’t see. He straightened, and looked up at the balcony where we stood. I could not read his expression from here. But I saw things clearly; I always had.

  “I must go speak with our son,” I said.

  * * *

  Walking through the crowd, my suspicions were confirmed. There was a buoyancy to crowds that waited in eager anticipation. It was absent here. The tension here was that of a finger on a trigger, a wire pulled tight enough to snap. A soldier escorted me across the square, but shoulders still bumped me from all angles. Voices chased me all the way to where Haemon stood, waiting for us on the platform. His face was drawn. When he set a hand on my shoulder to steady me as he kissed my cheek, it was shaking. I frowned up at him.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said. “But if it’s making you look this sick, I’m sure you don’t want to do it.”

  “My father is about to kill my betrothed,” he said. “How else am I supposed to look?”

  I was not used to words failing me. But this was an extraordinary situation. I pursed my lips and by that time, Kreon was making his way through the crowd.

  He was flanked by soldiers, but the simmer of the crowd reached a boil when he was among them. People edged closer, pressing against the men that protected my husband. One man threw himself at Kreon, and a soldier’s retaliation was swift. He brought the butt of his gun down on the side of the man’s head. The man collapsed into the crowd, disappearing. Kreon made it to the platform as the crowd roared. I saw the injured man resurface with a red streak of blood on his face.

  The shouts were deafening. The soldiers held their weapons crosswise, the rifles becoming a barrier. Kreon’s eyes were too wide, the whites showing, as he looked back at the Trireme. He took the radio communicator from his belt and held it up to his mouth. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I reached for him. His arm felt like steel beneath my fingers.

  Our eyes met.

  “If you do this,” I said to him, “they will revolt.”

  The platform beneath the Trireme roared to life. A flame ignited beneath the ship. Smoke curled over its base. At the sight of fire, the crowd erupted. The wall of sound was like a physical thing; it pushed me into Kreon.

  “You’re right,” he said to me.

  It was as if my body had turned to water. Weak with relief, I clung to him. I smiled up at him and, for a moment, he appeared to me just as he had all those years ago, awkward and sweet.

  It would be all right, it would—

  A man broke through the barrier of soldiers and barreled toward us. Kreon turned to shield me, and the radio communicator flew out of his hand. It bounced on the platform and broke in half.

  We both stared at it. I dove for the pieces, hoping it was just that the battery had fallen out, but it was split in half at its seam, the parts spread over the platform.

  “Mom!” Haemon said. “Mom, you have to get out of here!”

  I looked up at Kreon, who was staring with horror at the Trireme. I stood, leaving the radio communicator on the ground, and shoved him toward the edge of the hill. He stumbled off the platform, just barely keeping his balance.

  “Go down there!” I shouted. “Go!”

  Kreon took off running. I hadn’t seen him run like that in a long time. He tumbled down the slope as the crowd broke through the barrier. I heard a gunshot. Haemon grabbed me around the waist and hauled me off the platform, his hand on my head to keep it down. An elbow caught me in the cheek.

  “Run!” Haemon screamed.

  And then the platform exploded.

  The sound—the sound, so loud it filled my head and rattled my teeth. The force threw us both forward, into a woman with gray, curly hair and a man wearing a bandana around his head to catch his sweat. Together, Haemon and I tumbled to the ground. Someone fell on top of me, their knees digging into my legs. I hit my head on the pavement, and the spray of shrapnel was sharp, stinging my shoulders and back.

  I lifted my head just in time to see a ball of light expanding around the base of the Trireme.

  Kreon hadn’t made it in time. The ship was launching.

  Haemon screamed. I couldn’t hear him—everything was muffled—but I saw the anguish in his face, like kindling split by an axe. He stumbled to his feet, over the wreckage, to the edge of the hill. He must have known it was too late to do anything. I tried to go after him, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. A hand closed around my arm, a soldier pulling me up. I recognized him—Nikias, head of Kreon’s guard. He spoke to me, and I watched his mouth moving but couldn’t make out the words.

  I managed to see Let’s go, and he lifted me to my feet. I looked back to see Haemon swallowed by the raging crowd, and Kreon on the hillside, alone, and the streak of the Trireme in the sky.

  * * *

  For a long time, I was alone.

  Nikias carried me like a bride back to the house. By that time, I had recovered enough to walk. I smacked his shoulder to get him to put me down; he wasn’t listening to me. I could hear my own voice, though it sounded far away. He led me by the hand to the safe room beneath the house. He sat me down there, on the low cot in the corner, and he gave me water, and checked me for injuries. I meant to thank him, but I wasn’t sure if I managed it or not. He left me, promising to get an update.

  It felt like a long time before anything changed. My glass of water was empty. My feet were bleeding, and my body ached. The door to the shelter opened, and it wasn’t Kreon who walked through it. It was Nikias. His expression was blank. A studied blankness—the face of someone who didn’t want to give himself away. I stood, my stomach heavy.

  “Which one?” I said, because I knew, I knew that someone was dead, and there were only so many people it could be.

  In the moment before he answered, I prayed that it was Kreon. A woman can fall in love more than once, but she cannot replace a child. The thought felt almost brutal to me, but grief lays us bare, even to ourselves. I prayed that my husband was dead, because I knew how that would go: I knew where I would get the Extractor for his ichor, what I would wear to mourn him, how I would process through the streets with my son at my side to the Archive. All women in our city know the procedures for losing a spouse.

  But there are no procedures for losing a child.

  Which is why, when Nikias hesitated to respond, I felt it as a physical blow to the gut. I stumbled back and sat on the cot. No, I thought, and I stood.

  “Show me,” I said.

  Together we climbed the steps to the hallway above. It should have been in chaos, staff rushing everywhere, as it always was during emergencies. Instead it was silent. Everyone we passed avoided my eyes. I followed Nikias to the courtyard.

  My son lay on the ground, and I thought of a particular memory. Haemon, age eight, on a clear night, asking me to see the stars. We had gone up to the roof of our building, then an apartment in the Seventh District. The moon had been a crescent—Like a toenail clipping, Haemon had said, and I’d laughed. We had lain down side by side on the roof and looked up at the night sky until the clouds blew in again and our noses were cold.

  For just a moment, time fractured, and I saw him as that eight-year-old boy lying on the roof. And then time returned, and I knew this was his body, and my boy, my love, my dearest and most precious thing, was dead.

  * * *

  I was still kneeling there at his side when Kreon returned.

  It was late afternoon, and I was numb. I couldn’t feel my feet or my hands. I couldn’t feel pain.

  I looked up at the man, my husband, standing grief-stricken in the courtyard.

  “Eurydice,” he sighed.

  I pushed myself to my feet. My vision went black, just for a moment, as the blood rushed back into my extremities. When I saw again, he was reaching for me. I stepped back.

  “Look carefully, Kreon,” I said, my voice still distant, and rough, as if I’d been screaming. “Because you will never see me again.”

  * * *

  At dusk, I carried my son’s ichor to the Archive.

  And then I kept walking until I was in the wilderness.

  16

  Antigone

  It is, I imagine, a little like the horror of being born.

  We come into the world screaming, after all. There is warm and safe, and then there is motion, and pressure, so intense we can hardly stand it. And then everything is loud and bright and strange, and we can’t help but scream at the top of our lungs.

  Ismene screams during the launch. I don’t blame her. It is a forceful, helpless feeling. Like being thrown, like dreams where I am falling and feel terrified of my own weight. Fear washes over me, prickling and stinging, and I grit my teeth against it. Ismene sobs as we break through the clouds. I want to be sobbing, but my body has become a prison, and I can’t move.

  I watch through the porthole as Earth appears beneath us.

  It didn’t occur to me until that moment that I had lived inside her. I always thought of my planet as something I lived on. But clinging to the straps that hold me in place, I think, no, I was within her. Folded somewhere between her atmosphere and her surface, as if between a mattress and a blanket. But there are depths to her I don’t know, and layers I never thought of. She is a complex entity that I know, in the end, very little about. I watch her become distinct from me, and it seems to me that gravity was a kind of umbilical cord that bound us to our planet, and that cord has been cut.

  So of course I am afraid. Nothing is more frightening than the sudden realization that you are new.

  I reach over to Ismene and grab her hand.

  “Here I am,” I say, and it’s nonsense, just words to fill the space. But it seems to help her.

  She turns her hand and interlaces her fingers with mine.

  “Here I am,” I say again, this time to myself.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, you can’t write a retelling of Antigone without acknowledging Sophocles. Hot damn, what a play. Secondary nods to Euripides and Aeschylus for their supporting material (though Euripides’s version of this play is, of course, lost to time). If you haven’t read the original, please do.

  Thank you to Lindsey Hall for your enthusiasm and wisdom and book-induced despair (but like, in a good way). Joanna Volpe, for always being instantly on board every time I randomly appear in your inbox with new dreams.

  Thank you to the entire team at Tor, especially: behind-the-scenes wizardry from Rafal Gibek, Dakota Griffin, Steven Bucsok, Rachel Bass, and Aislyn Fredsall; marketing and publicity pizzazz from Sarah Reidy, Renata Sweeney, and Emily Mlynek; detail-oriented reading from Lauren Hougen, Su Wu, and Lauren Riebs; exterior and interior beauty courtesy of Greg Collins, Katie Klimowicz, and Pablo Hurtado de Mendoza; and captains of various ships Eileen Lawrence, Lucille Rettino, and Devi Pillai.

  New Leafers! Jordan Hill, for your support and your keen eye. And of course Meredith Barnes, Emily Berge-Thielmann, Jenniea Carter, Katherine Curtis, Veronica Grijalva, Victoria Hendersen, Hilary Pecheone, and Pouya Shahbazian for all the work you do on all my books.

  Kristin Dwyer, for continuing to crush it, and also, all the Dune GIFs a gal could ask for.

  Adele Gregory-Yao, for keeping me on track. Elena Palmer, for your thoughtful feedback.

  Nelson, for immediately reading Antigone when I slapped it on your desk last year, signaling your willingness to walk with me down all the weird paths.

  My family and friends, for always cheering me on.

  Robert Bagg, for my very first translation of Antigone, and Anne Carson, for the one that reignited my interest.

  I’ve been racking my brains trying to figure out which teacher, specifically, introduced me to this play in high school … and I’ve come up empty. But to them: thank you for fostering my love of it.

  And finally, S, for telling me “Write it!” … because otherwise I wouldn’t have.

  Also by VERONICA ROTH

  Chosen Ones

  Poster Girl

  About the Author

  VERONICA ROTH is the New York Times bestselling author of Poster Girl, Chosen Ones, the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings, the Divergent series, and the Carve the Mark duology. She is also the guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. Roth lives in Chicago, Illinois. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Antigone

  2. Polyneikes

  3. Antigone

  4. Eurydice

  5. Ismene

  6. Antigone

  7. Ismene

  8. Antigone

  9. Antigone

  10. Antigone

  11. Kreon

  12. Antigone

  13. Haemon

  14. Antigone

  15. Eurydice

  16. Antigone

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Veronica Roth

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.