“Minnow,” Jude repeated again, his voice adamant. He tugged vehemently on my shirt sleeve.
His eyes were hard on Constance, but not her face. I followed his gaze to Constance’s lap. There, folded like rotting meat, were two crumpled, purple stumps.
The air turned cold. Each cell in my body bucked.
“Your hands,” I breathed. “Your hands!”
I knelt beside her bed where her legs were slung to the side. All she wore was a nightgown, the sleeves barely brushing the thin place her hands used to grow from.
I pictured the scene, Constance wrestled to the ground by those men, her body so much smaller than mine, so much more like a bird than a girl. Did our father cut hers off, too? I hoped she looked him in the eye, like I did. I hoped the look on her face killed him.
“Minnow, don’t look so stricken.” The way she said it made me look into her fever-blushed face. “You never were very quick, were you? I asked to have them cut off.”
The entire scene went out of focus. Blurred, then came back again even sharper till I could spot, even from here, the crooked half circle of Xs stitched around her stumps, hear the fevered hitch at the back of her throat when she breathed.
“After you left, the Prophet repeated God’s message,” she said. “That I was to be his new wife, not you. And I knew I had to do something to be worthy. To prove my devotion.”
I stared at her. This girl with blue, blue eyes. This girl who I saw as a baby still, the steam that rolled off her little red body on the winter morning she was born. The tuft of damp blond hair. Her hands that gripped at nothing.
“Do you—do you have any idea what you’ve given up?” I cried.
“It’s nothing when you’ve got a higher calling.”
I gaped at her, raw panic rising in my throat. “You’re crazy!” I bellowed, my voice breaking, tears forming at the corners of my eyes. “You’re a lunatic!”
“Me, a lunatic?” she scoffed. “You’re the one who broke the rules—knowingly. You understand what happens to girls who fraternize out of wedlock.” She shook her head. “And with a Rymanite. You’re sick. You’ve damned yourself for good.” Her eyes were wide open. She was afraid. Of me. She lived in a house of horrors, and she was afraid of me?
“You can lie to me,” she said. “You can lie to yourself. But you can’t lie to God. He sees straight through you.”
“Shut up!” I screamed. I struck her across the face, and she wheeled back, her arms crossed in front of her, barely able to move, too sapped from fever. Her stumps were new, so when she swung to hit me and her stump connected with my cheekbone, she crumpled in pain. I swiped her with my elbow and her head flung back. When Jude wrestled me off of her, I saw that blood trickled down her cheek.
“Minnow, we have to get out of here,” Jude said. “Now. Someone probably heard.”
“She’s coming with us,” I panted.
“What?” he demanded. “But she doesn’t want to.”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s—brainwashed. I can’t let the Prophet have her.”
“But, she wants to marry him.”
“She’s twelve!”
“Fine,” he barked. “Fine, but how do you suggest we convince her?”
I looked down at her, a steely look of defiance wound over her features. “We don’t,” I said. “She’s not going to come willingly. We’re taking her with us.”
Chapter 53
“You’re back,” I say when I see Dr. Wilson in the doorway. I thought he might have disappeared again.
“For now,” he says. “I’m going away for a day or two.”
“My hearing is coming up,” I say. “My birthday’s at the end of the week.”
He nods.
“So, are you going to make it?”
He doesn’t respond. “What are you reading?” he asks instead. I look down at the library book in my lap and move my arm so he can see the title over a backdrop of a whorled galaxy. “Cosmos,” I say.
“Any good?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m learning things.”
“Teach me something,” he says.
“Teach you?”
“Sure,” he says. “Teach me the best thing you know. The best fact in the universe.”
At first, I don’t answer. An unconscious prickle of heat has been filling my cheeks, and I can’t figure out why until I realize that no one has ever asked me to teach them something. I never could. I didn’t know anything before.
“Most of the energy on Earth comes from the sun,” I explain. “We all run on sun power. And did you also know that everything on Earth, including people, is made of particles of a star that exploded? We’re stars who run off stars.”
“Wow,” he says. “That really is the best fact in the universe.”