By the time the Healer mobile arrived, Easton was unconscious for more than fifteen minutes. They weren’t able to revive him on the street and when we arrived at the Healing Center, I had retreated so far into myself I could no longer even scream—no longer do anything but stare at the eerie glow cast across my brother’s face from the blue lights of the machines keeping him alive. He looked as if he wasn’t quite real. As if none of it was.
My mattress feels stiffer than this morning and my body feels twice as heavy. But I force myself to sit anyway, if only to buy some respite from the way the linen sheets scratch at my skin.
Dying, dead, died.
I stare across the room, uncertain where to go to make myself more comfortable, while at the same time knowing there is nowhere to go. This room, which just this morning could be recognized as mine, no longer feels familiar. It was Easton that made the quarterage home, and without him, there is nothing to connect to. The thought crashes against me, breaking against my heart and pounding at my ribs.
Before I consider why, I run into Easton’s room. I burst through the door and inhale the air as if it is his, and his alone. The room is tidy and well kept. There’s a bed, a desk and a small dresser, all plain and functional. The walls and surfaces are all bare and a lump forms in my throat. There’s nothing in this room that belongs to Easton, nothing any different from my room or every other bedroom in Similis. Easton could die tonight, and I will have nothing to cling to. Nothing to remind me of his small smiles and patient kindness.
Desperate, I rip open his dresser drawers, yanking all the folded jumpsuits out and discarding them carelessly on the floor. I do the same with the next drawer, and the next, until the entire dresser stands empty. Farrah will have a fit when she sees the room in ruins, but I move to the desk anyway, emptying its drawers as well. It’s mostly writing utensils and loose paper, but as I reach my hand into the back of the final drawer, my fingers brush against something different. Foreign. Metal.
I yank the drawer out unceremoniously and peer into the far corner. There, where the back and bottom of the drawer meet, sits a small, circular shape. I pry at it with my fingernails, but it’s wedged so neatly that it doesn’t budge. I scan the room, the mess I’ve made of it, until my gaze lands on Easton’s scissors. Opening them up, I leverage the blade until the little piece of metal pops out of the crack and lands on the concrete floor with a crispting.
I cradle it between my thumb and forefinger, running my fingertips delicately over the bumps of cool metal. I’ve never seen it’s like in Similis, but I have seen them in our lessons of the Dark World—money. A coin.
There’s never been a need for coins in Similis, currency being something that was outlawed by the Founders. Fear slithers up my spine, fear that someone will know that Easton has broken a Key. Wonderment edges my worry. What is my brother, a rule follower and Key believer, doing with contraband?
It’s not as if he’s hoarding extra rations or clothing, something that would get him a minor sanction. Money is what caused the fall of the Dark World. From it, greed, hatred, and jealousy were birthed. Wars waged that were so terrible, a queen sacrificed herself and all her power to bring down the curse upon the land. It’s said that Similis was spared only because of our dedication to selflessness. And it’s this continued self-sacrifice that keeps the curse at bay, even today.
So, possession of something such as a coin will not get Easton a slap on the wrist; it will get him Outcast.
The sharp cold of the concrete floor digs into my knees, but I hardly feel it as I examine the coin. Etched in the red metal is the picture of a majestic looking mountain, its snowcapped peak stretching toward an open sky full of stars. Vertical rocks surround the base, shooting up into the sky like some sort of natural crown. And underneath are the wild waves of a sea.
I stare at the coin, imagining a place where an ocean like this exists, cradled between towering mountains. Imagining how far this coin must have traveled to end up here, stuck in the back of Easton’s drawer. Easton is immaculately organized and there have been various times when I’ve seen him take everything out of his desk to reorganize it. There’s no way he would have missed it. This little coin, or perhaps whoever gave it to him, means something.
I rub my thumb over the back, and though it should be smooth, it bounces under my skin. Flipping it over, I bring it closer to my face. The metal is glossy, its many ripples fanning out from the center, but there are two words carved crudely into the back.Here, love.
My breath catches in my throat. I spend a full minute suspended like that, knees pressed into the concrete and the coin raised above my head.
Here, love.
Is it a message from whoever owns this coin? Could that sea be a real place? Every map I’ve ever seen always shows the Dark World as a black stretch of land, gaping and blank. But there must besomethingstill there, something that lives and thrives, if there have been breaches to the Boundary.
Love.Heat floods my cheeks. A word never uttered here, much less written down. Love is said to have driven Dark Worlders mad, responsible for as many tragedies as money and war.
How would Easton have gotten the coin in the first place, when he has never even been close to the Boundary and none of us has ever seen anyone outside of Similis?
My heart pounds and my breathing hitches.
Anyone outside of Similis.
Except for two people who used to beinsideof Similis.
My parents.
And if my parents are alive, that means…that means that Easton has a chance.
Parental donation.
The coin falls from my hand and rolls across the floor, the sound as loud a clap of thunder.
ChapterThree
Outside the Boundary
The hole is bigger than I expected. It gapes like the open maw of a creature that roams the Nemoran wood, hungry and grotesque. For a wall that has stood as long as man’s memory, that has never once even been dented, it crumpled easily enough beneath the force of my explosion.
The Boundary men have been scurrying around it since yesterday, the way rodents do when smoked from their burrows. And isn’t that just fitting for a people who blindly follow a false god, comfortable in their prison while the world around them burns? My lips peel back from my teeth in distaste.
