For three years she’d been slipping out. I had never wanted to know with whom. I had been quite deliberate about not asking. And yet suddenly—
“Who do you meet, out there?” I asked.
Xie was shadowed by the lintel—hidden there from the Panopticon, with the hallway dark behind her. I couldn’t see her face well, but I did see the glimmer of her smile. “Will you come with me?”
I thought she was dodging the question. “Really, Xie. Who?”
“Whoever I can get my hands on, really.” The smile fluttered away. “Mostly Atta. It’s always been Atta.”
Atta the silent. Like a star that didn’t have the mass to begin fusion, Atta was a weight and a pull in the system, a dark star to Xie’s moon. I was startled, and said the first thing that came to me: “Does he talk to you?”
“Not much.” Her face was in the thickest dark now, invisible. “Not since we lost the baby. Two years ago.”
She stood in the doorway, in the shadow, in the silence. I think she was waiting for me to say something. What could I possibly say? Many of us Children are dynastic rulers, and it is in no one’s interest to see the Preceptures produce bastard princes, so: “There are drugs—we take drugs.”
“There are ways around drugs.”
“But—”
“But they found out. Obviously. Atta thought they would send me home, but—but that is not what they did.”
“Xie . . . ,” I whispered. Two years ago she’d been fifteen. Fifteen. “My God, Xie . . .”
She’d been silent that fall, dulled like an eclipsed moon. I had thought her ill, or worried over her schoolwork, or over some threat of war she knew of and I did not. I’d scoured the dispatches for that phantom war. I’d helped her with her philosophy papers. Her Greek. To read Greek, and miss this. I felt as if I’d had my eyes closed for years.
“I don’t love him,” said Xie. She might have been talking to the moon: her voice was soft and distant. “I think I did, back then, but . . . It’s just shared sorrow, between us, now.”
“But at least it’s shared.”
She looked back up at me. “At least it’s shared.”
I took three steps, and came into the doorway with her. A small space. The hem of her alb swung over my bare feet. I could smell the harsh soap on her hands, and smell something softer, too, like musk and clover. I could sense the movement of her breath. “Take me with you,” I said. “Let’s go outside.”
You cannot control a man if you take everything from him. You must leave him something to lose.
Therefore, the Precepture had its loose places, and this was one of them—playing coyotes, slipping outside at night. It only made sense, I’d long told myself. Better coyotes than armed rebellion; better sex than pitchforks. It was only logical then, that getting outside was easy. This was the Precepture’s way of letting off steam, and one doesn’t want one’s pressure valve blocked.
And yet, the ease with which we left the Precepture hall unnerved me. It was too simple. Xie led me through the refectory, its tables long slabs of gleam. We wove through the complex shadows of the kitchens, and went down a flight of stairs. The cellars were utterly dark and smelled of another season: cold earth, dampness, potatoes. I stumbled into something and then jumped at a fleshy touch—but it was only Xie, reaching back to take my hand.
Up some steps then, spiderwebs and dust. Something creaked, and an indigo panel of sky appeared over me. Xie stood in it, framed and shining. She shouldered the door of the root cellar all the way open, and we climbed up into the night.
And that was all there was to it.
Xie stood in the open air and stretched. “There are tunnels,” she said. “Out to the toolshed, over to the dairy, even all the way up to the launch spire and Charlie’s pen.”
“Tunnels, heh?” Elián Palnik drawled out of the darkness. “I want a map.”
Xie laughed. “Of course you do.”
“Elián.” I was—exasperated? How was I meant to save him, if he took such risks? “A single night in the cells was too many for you?”
“And five thousand was too many for you?” he snapped back at me—but then he switched tones with a sigh. “I just wanted to see the sky.”
Where on Earth had he been? Before he had been assigned a cell, where had he been, that he couldn’t see the sky?
“The tunnels don’t matter,” said Atta. Elián and I both spun to look at him—Atta. Atta the silent. His voice was as thick as dust and honey. “It is an illusion. They can read our minds. They watch us everywhere.”
“Atta,” whispered Xie, and touched him wonderingly, as if he were gold.
I don’t love him, she’d said. And maybe not. But I knew her—she would give him what she could. She would take care of him, if she could. It wouldn’t have to be out of love.
Was that why she had kissed me?
I stared at them until Elián took my elbow and drew me away. “Let’s let them have their illusion of privacy, huh?” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder as he strolled away. “So that’s a thing?”