Dreamy. I was not dreaming. I was thinking about the new hostage screaming—about me shocked and falling to my knees. I would not say this to Thandi. I had wanted to say it to Xie, but constantly monitored as we were, it was hard to find a good place in which to hide such a large conversation.
Outside I could hear Grego and Han laughing together. They were meant to be straining cream, but it sounded livelier than that. Grego was funny, but he told jokes in precise deadpan, as if they were engineering instructions. It was rare to hear him laugh—but somehow Han, who was as far from deadpan as one could imagine, could always make him. I envied them their ability to laugh together. Somehow Xie and I could rarely manage it.
“You know,” said Xie, “it would be all right, if you were thinking about him.”
“Who?” I said, because I did not know what else to say. Under the dairy roof we were not in the line of sight of the Panopticon, but some kind of eavesdrop bug could be assumed. We all took greater liberties under roofs, but they could not be infinite.
“Who?” Xie echoed. Her mood, maybe infected by the laughter outside, seemed playful. “Sidney, obviously.”
“Oh. Sidney.”
“Yes, Sidney,” said Thandi. “I know you two weren’t off playing coyotes, but . . .”
“Playing coyotes” was school euphemism for meeting outside, after dark—one presumed it was for sex.
“Certainly not,” said Xie. “But still. He liked you. And you didn’t mind. All things are relative, and from you, Princess of the Icy Places, not minding is nearly a declaration of undying love.”
I turned my back on them both, and looked to my own, slightly riper, cheese tray. The smell of it—sour as baby spit-up—suddenly turned my stomach. “My marriage will be dynastic.”
“So will mine,” said Xie to my back. “But in the meantime, I have eyes.”
“Yes,” said Thandi, whapping her way back out the door. “We noticed.”
I blushed. Eyes were the least of what Xie had. Playing coyotes? She was the queen of the pack, whereas I had my sexuality filed under “further research is needed.”
Sidney. We’d been hostaged together for eleven years. I knew every curve of his accent, every lilt of his laugh. I knew he hated zucchini, as do we all. But the shameful truth was I was not thinking about Sidney at all. He was, after all, already dead.
I looked at Xie. We were alone. A roof was over us.
“So,” she said, softly. “Sidney?”
“Sidney,” I said, but it was a lie. “No. I’m thinking more of this new boy.”
Da-Xia’s eyebrows folded up, and then she gave a faint, faint nod, letting me know she’d followed my switch to speaking in code.
“I wonder—I just wonder how long he’ll be with us.”
“So fickle!” Xie said, as if teasing, as if we were still talking about boys. She meant wars were fickle too. I’d been ready to die with Sidney, and I hadn’t. And maybe I wouldn’t, even now.
“Just remember,” she said. “There’s time yet between you and that dynastic marriage.”
“I hope so.” Sixteen months was not so long.
Da-Xia put her hand—well known, work hardened, hot from the pitchers—on the back of my neck. I leaned into her.
“Me too,” she said.
And in the five days after I first saw the Cumberland hostage, I didn’t sleep well.
I have never been a good sleeper. If I could choose a blessing it would perhaps be the ability to put my head on the pillow and drift off, quietly, reliably, without fuss. Instead my brain takes exhaustion as its cue to review every stupid mistake I’ve ever made, and then (like the crowned princes in Shakespeare) I have bad dreams.
Xie sleeps. I don’t.
By the fifth day I had had quite enough of it.
I was alone that night. Da-Xia had gone out to play coyotes. The room was too quiet without her breathing in it. Above me the glass ceiling was a dark gleam—glass, to let the Panopticon watch over us. I lay there and looked up at it. Xie had a habit of folding cranes from whatever paper she could scavenge, and hanging them from the glass. Their small angles shifted slowly, dully, though the room seemed airless. Through their dapple I could see the spill of the Milky Way, and the insect twist of the Panopticon mast rising against the sky.
My pillow grew hot. I turned it over. The other side grew hot. My hair spread out all around me. I had quite a lot of hair, which was entirely my mother’s fault. A queen does not cut her hair, she often said. And once, the last time I saw her: A queen cuts her hair on her way to the block.