Of Beast and Beauty Read Free

my teeth in my most ferocious smile, and jump from the ledge.
     
    The night comes alive. Cool air snatches my hair, lifting it from my shoulders, tugging at my scalp. It rushes up my pant legs, shivering over my belly and up my neck. My blood races, and my throat traps a giddy squeal.
    The tips of my toes beat with their own individual heartbeats as they make contact with the curved edge of the first roof and I take a running leap for the second, deliciously alive with fear.
     
    I’ve made this descent a thousand times or more, but still a taste of
    the original terror remains. The first time, my feet didn’t know the dips and curves and footholds for themselves. The falls—the six curved roofs below the tower balcony—were only a story told by Baba as we sat in the afternoon sun. My fingers and toes are my eyes. I couldn’t see the truth of my way out until I was already over the edge, dropping the ten feet to the top of the first roof. But it was there. Just as my father had said. As were the second and the fourth and the sixth, and the last tumble into the cabbage garden.
     
    I plop down on the hard ground between the cabbage rows—no fertile patch of land is wasted in Yuan—and fold back into a crouch, staying low as I shuffle back and scatter the dirt with my hands, concealing the two deep prints from my landing. There is rarely anyone this close to my prison, but I don’t set off right away. With all the guards milling about, Baba surely has a patrol stationed near the tower.
     
    I wait, squirming my toes, ears straining in silence broken only by the faint buzz of the hives at the bottom of the hill. The bees are quieter at night but still busy. I like the hum, the evidence of nonhuman activity. We used to have wild birds under the dome, too—all different sorts, some night singers, some day—but the last of them died years ago. Father said it was an avian epidemic.
     
    “Why didn’t it take the messenger birds, then?” I asked him at the time. “Or the ducks and geese by the orchard pond? Why did only the wild birds die?”
     
    “Wild things don’t always survive under the dome,” he said.
     
    There was something in his voice that day.…
     
    It made me wonder if he knows I’m not as biddable as I pretend to be, if he knows I’m wild, and doesn’t hate me for it. Or at least doesn’t blame me. It’s not as if I asked to be born this way, with a taste for defiance and a longing for the hot desert wind, the wind I felt only once, the day my mother took me for a forbidden walk outside the city walls.
     
    I’ll never have that wind again—if I left the city for any length of time, I would die of thirst or sun poisoning, if the Monstrous didn’t get me first—but I can have my night runs. I can have the autumn smells, the satin of rose petals between my fingertips, and the sweeter sting of the roses’
    thorns.
     
    My mouth fills with a taste like honey and vinegar mixed together.
    The rose garden. How I love and loathe it. How I need it and hate the
    needing. But still, I’ll go there first tonight. I want to see the color of the sky, know which of my moons hangs heaviest above the dome. I am efficient in my darkness, but how I crave the moonlight!
     
    It’s hard to wait, but I don’t move a muscle, don’t twitch a nostril, even when my nose begins to itch in the way noses never fail to do when you’re not able to scratch them. Two minutes, three, and finally my patience is rewarded with the soft, rhythmic scuffing of leather boots on stone.
     
    Scuff, scuff, scuff, scuff. I am a soldier, this is my song, and I shall scuff it all the day long. I am a soldier and these are my boots, the biggest shoes for the biggest brutes .
     
    My lip curls. Soldiers. Ridiculous. Yuan needs a third as many, and those should be stationed at the Desert Gate and Hill Gate and around the wall walks, where the rest of the city won’t have to bear witness to their strutting about.
     
    Our only hope is