Of Beast and Beauty Read Free Page B

roses have eyes.
     
    They have no idea.
     
    The roses have more magic than anyone, even my father, understands. I am the only one who knows their secret, who knows that they are more alive than other flowers, that they see and hear more than anything else on our world.
     
    I throw out my arms, running faster and faster, until my heart beats in time with the slap of my feet, a layer of sweat coats my skin, and the giddy feeling inside swells so big that I have to leap and twirl, to spin with my head thrown back, the wind I’ve created whipping my hair. I want to scream with delight. I want to howl like the dogs on hunt day. I want to announce to the world that I’m free, free, free!
     
    Instead I leap onto the ledge of the central bed, where the oldest roses’ roots dig deep into the ground, where vines as thick as human arms twine through ancient trellises, snapping the brittle wood. Where flowers as big as melons bloom and thorns as long as fingers warn, Don’t touch!
    Hands to yourself! Back, savage!
     
    I reach out, the pads of my fingers prickling. I never know where I’ll find a thorn. The wind never blows in Yuan, and the roses seem to grow like any other flower—though larger and older and always blooming—but the vines move. They move .
     
    From one night to the next, a girl never knows when she might—
    “Ssss …,” I hiss as my finger finds a thorn, a sharp one that glances off my fingertip and slides beneath the nail, piercing the bed. I grit my teeth and fight the urge to snatch my hand back to my chest. We must be connected—the thorn and the flesh—for the magic to work. I hold perfectly still until the sharp pain becomes a mean little ache, until the blood flowing from my cut eases the hurt away with its warmth. I stay and I breathe and I sigh as, one by one, my eyes open.
     
    All one hundred of them.

     

TWO

GEM
    THERE’S a woman in the garden.
     
    No, a girl. Tall but young. She runs like a child. Big, loping steps with her arms held out and her head bobbing like one of the giant flowers.
     
    I’ve never seen so many flowers. Flowers, plants, fruit, green things bursting out all over. When we first crawled from the caverns, I stumbled in the face of it. I fell, and my hands felt alien against the soft, wet grass. The smells devastate me. I don’t have Desert People or Smooth Skin names for them, can’t tell where one smell ends and another begins. The land under the glass dome overwhelms with its life.
     
    Fierce, vicious life. Stolen life. Paid for with the deaths of my people.
     
    We’re starving. The children first. Their skin cracks and bleeds. They cry until they have no strength left, and their silence is worse than their moans. The tribal medicine men have become death dealers. Better to eat poison root and have the pain over in an instant than to die slowly.
     
    The autumn harvest of cactus fruit has bought the Desert People time, but only a little. We must have the roses. According to our chief’s visions, they are the key to the magic that keeps the land under the domes flourishing and abundant.
     
    “Take them at any cost,” Naira said when we left our camp a month ago. “Die for them. Kill for them if there is no other way.” Our chief is a peaceful woman. But these are not times for peace.
     
    Or mercy. If the girl sees me, she’ll scream. The guards will come.
     
    They’re everywhere. They were here a few minutes ago. I hid in the orchard, but they’ll come again, and I might not be so lucky next time. The moons are so bright, it’s practically daylight under the dome. I have to act.
    If Gare were here instead of on the other side of the city, he would have already slit the girl’s throat and wrested a plant from the soil, and would be halfway back to the caverns.
     
    It took generations of digging to build the tunnel down to the underground river. It will take generations more to find another way in if we fail, generations we may not live to birth.