“No, Zoe,” he said gently. “I am the one without rights. I was born into their midst. I am no one’s son, no one’s brother. I belong to the Lowlands itself. My parents … I cannot imagine how they stole even a moment in each other’s company to produce me, but they broke every law of the Lowlands to do it. I am just the living embodiment of a crime—if I can even claim to be ‘living.’”
X stopped, and looked at Zoe. She had put her hands in her coat pockets to warm them. She seemed not to know what to say.
“No one ever told you who your parents were?” she said finally.
“They never even told Ripper,” said X. “I suppose they feared I would look for them. And, in that, they are correct. When I was young, I used to console myself by inventing a love story about my mother and father. I told myself that my mother wept and my father tore his hair when the lords wrenched me away.” He paused. “You did not expect such a dreary monologue,” he said. “Shall I end it there?”
“Please don’t,” said Zoe, then quoted something he’d told her himself: “Perhaps telling the story will take away some of its power.”
“I suspect my father was unaware of my existence and my mother was glad to be quit of me,” X said. “After all, they were almost certainly prisoners—and of rough character. I have scant memories of my first decade. It was an oddity for a child to be growing up among the damned. I have never met another. Only I needed to eat because only I needed to grow. Only I was aging at all.”
“It’s why you can’t read,” said Zoe softly. “Because no one bothered to teach you.”
“Many of the prisoners hated me when I was a child,” X continued. “Many still do. Perhaps I remind them of their own lost innocence. Perhaps they’re jealous because they think that, unlike them, I will grow old and one day die and escape the Lowlands.”
“Will you die?” said Zoe. “Can you?”
“I do not even know,” said X. “There is not another like me to ask. Maybe I will rot little by little but never actually perish. I see that my words pain you, Zoe, but you should know what sort of creature you have befriended.” He stopped, before returning to his story. “As a child in the Lowlands, I was kicked and punched by other prisoners. I was beaten even by some of the guards, who resented having to bring me water and meat. I was given nicknames, but they were forgotten, one after the other, because no one cared enough about me to remember them. Then, when I was ten, one of the lords simply shoved me at Ripper and told her to train me to hunt souls. ‘Let’s see if he’s worth keeping alive,’ he said.”
“Ripper,” said Zoe. “You like her.”
“I owe her everything,” said X. “I learned to hunt quickly. Banger was my first soul. I took him when I was just sixteen. I found him in a tavern. He looked at me like I was a child, a nuisance—so I struck him in the throat. Ripper seemed astonished when I brought him back to the Lowlands and threw him at the lords’ feet. She told me I was special. I swear to you, her praise kept me alive. She couldn’t teach me to read, for she had no books, no paper, no pens. She didn’t even have fingernails to scratch letters into the rock, because she had ripped them all out. But she taught me to be quick and strong and hard—just as your mother has taught you.”
“I wish I could meet Ripper,” said Zoe.
X laughed quietly.
“Arranging such an interview might be complicated,” he said.
“Right?” said Zoe.
She was laughing now, too.
“Yet Ripper would adore you,” said X.
Zoe blushed at this. X did not know why.
“You haven’t explained the ice on the lake,” she said. “Why did you turn it orange?”
X looked pained.
“Am I to have no secrets at all?” he said.
“I showed you mine,” she said playfully.
X stood, and drew closer to her. He saw her smile and roll her eyes at the sight of his bare feet on the ice. Something about this girl loosened the ever-present knot in his chest. Just the sight of her unclenched every part of him.
Zoe handed him his shirt. She turned away, but just slightly, as he tugged it on. The closer they came to each other, the more the air itself seemed to want to pull them together.
“I set the lake afire because I knew you were there,” he said. “It was not a necessity.”
Zoe arched an eyebrow.
“You were showing off for me?” she said, grinning.
“I shall leave you to your conjecture,” he said. “I have no more to say on the subject.”
Zoe leaned toward him.
She pushed the wet hair from his eyes, her face just inches from his.
X jerked away in surprise. Zoe cast her eyes down, mortified.
Immediately, self-loathing flooded through X. She’d meant to kiss him, and he had flinched! He had ruined the moment.
But, no, he would not let the moment go.
Now he moved toward her.
He could feel himself shaking. He hardly knew what he was doing. So little in either world frightened him—and yet this did.
Zoe saw that he was nervous, and leaned in to meet him. At the last possible moment, she turned her lips from his and kissed the bruises beneath his eyes, one after the other.
The knot in his chest fell to pieces.
He knew then that he loved her.
Zoe took a pen from her pocket, and drew a wide black symbol on the back of his hand.