Around me, at first glance, it looked like any other morning, but anyone who’d lived here long enough could see the change. The day of the Oathtaking was always different. Still reeling from the Culling, people emerged from their homes with tentative hope. The homes of any potential candidates were always decorated with little banners bearing their names and flags cheering them on. Their families would speak of the day with hushed excitement and broad grins. The upper ringers would throw parties for their candidates, using any excuse to drink freely and cavort with one another. But it meant a chance to earn money to pay my rent, so I couldn’t complain.
I made my way through the crowded streets of the Third Ring, glancing up at the eastern gate as I passed it. It felt ridiculous, doing something so mundane as going to work, considering everything that had happened. But I didn’t know what else to do except to go through the motions. I couldn’t stop living just because it felt like I'd died.
I overheard whispering about the oddity of this Culling, how it’d been mostly those under the age of twenty-one, and how there’d been so many of them.
Thirteen. Thirteen had been Culled. I wouldn’t forget their faces for as long as I lived.
I passed a house that must have belonged to another of the Culled. The windows and doors were shut, but gifts were piling up on the porch. A covered pot steaming with some sort of stew, a hand knitted trinket, a small pile of letters and cards. My eyes burned and I turned away.
We had little in the Third Ring, but a few years ago, our neighbor had been taken and my mother had used the last of our flour to bake cookies for their family and leave them on their front porch. We didn’t have bread for a week but no one said a word.
Things had been harder for us then. Before Maurice and Warren had both begun to work more steadily. Before my mother’s reputation as a skilled seamstress had taken off enough to procure clients even from the upper rings. Before we were comfortable enough for me to risk moving out of my family’s home in search of a little independence with my best friend. Now, we were seen as some of the lucky ones in the Third Ring. Still poor, still lower class, but doing well enough to afford some small luxuries. It hadn’t always been that way, and I’d always remember that, even at our lowest, my mother would give what she could to those with even less.
Mourning. That was the only word I knew for what our ring was going through right now. But it was probably worse on the Deck. Despair, hopelessness, grief. All paired with the sharp pain of hunger and the stench of people who didn’t see fit to set aside much time to attend to personal hygiene in the shared communal baths on the lowest level of Sanctuary.
The Trials wouldn’t lift our spirits too high on the lower rings. Hardly any of our people ever made it past the first one. That was why Dahlia had become such a celebrity. She was doing the impossible, the unthinkable, and was doing it all with a Second Ring partner she’d been lucky enough to be paired with. No onefrom our ring had ever made it so far. At least, not that anyone could remember.
Someone jostled my shoulder as they passed, muttering a brief apology before ascending the northern staircase to the Second Ring. The throng of people headed up toward the other rings kept growing. The second shift, my shift. How long had I spent wandering in circles around the Third Ring, watching people, lost in my own mind? I joined the masses and ascended the stairs to the Second Ring.
After clearing the security check, I rushed off toward the House of Valin, not wanting to be late.
I was almost at the door to the kitchen when someone called my name. Cyrus. He stood a little way away, dressed head to toe in the finery of the elite, watching me with a frown and a sadness in his eyes.
“I’m sorry about Darius,” he said. “I should have said that when I came to see you yesterday. I just…”
I stared at him, lips pursed. How dare he say his name so soon? I turned around and wrenched open the kitchen door.
It was hot and already bustling with activity. Susan, the woman in charge of the servants, shoved a tray of glass flutes full of a bubbling liquid I was sure I’d never tasted before into my arms and pushed me into the next room without a word.
“Drink, sir?” I asked, hoping I sounded pleasant, but it was a poor effort at best. The man in front of me didn’t seem to notice. He reached for two glasses and handed one to the woman he was speaking to without so much as glancing my way. I rolled my eyes and moved on.
“Zya did marvelously, Ezekiel,” another man was saying, this one much older, middle-aged, and talking to another middle-aged man who looked vaguely familiar. “The Grand Priest of House Lynx told me so.”
“Excellent.” The man who must have been Ezekiel gave a confident smile, but he’d exhaled in relief just before he spoke. “Zya understood it was her turn to serve the Geist. I knew she would leave Sanctuary with her head held high.”
My gut dropped as I realized who they were talking about.
The girl from the Culling, the only one from the Second Ring. She’d held her head high, but she hadn’t looked half as pleased about it as the Culled from the First Ring had.
So her name had been Zya. Another fact I tried to commit to memory as I approached the two men and offered them drinks.
“Of course she did,” the first man exclaimed. “As they say, good breeding will out. The Lynx Priest told me how proud he was of all his First Ring Culled, of course, and mentioned Zya’s service as well. I only wish that the others could have shown the same piety.”
“What do you mean, Ajani?” a woman nearby asked, suddenly interested in the conversation as Ezekiel took a drink from my tray and held it to his lips.
“Well, I heard about it from one of the families who’d watched the Culling. The Third Ringers and the Deckers were terrified. They acted as if it were some sort of ritual of torture rather than a blessing. They were chosen for this by the Geist themselves, but they huddled together, sniveling and whimpering, the lot of them.”
My grip on the tray turned my knuckles bone white.
“The priests were appalled. I heard one boy tried to run.Run.Can you imagine it?” He chuckled into his glass.
“But it just goes to show you, as I said, good breeding. They question why we’re above them, why we’re so graciously blessed by the Geist, and yet they act so piteously when given the chance to accept a blessing themselves.”
“You call it a blessing to disappear from the only home you’ve ever known?”
The room fell silent.
The woman turned first. Then the men. Then everyone else followed suit. It took me a moment to realize they were looking at me—that I was the one who’d spoken. But my anger was too hot, boiling just under the surface, and my grief was too fresh. There was no stopping it now.
