“No luck,” I said.
I had a desperate urge to pull out the piece of paper in my pocket, holding it as others held prayer. I could not show it in front of Cynthia.
“I’ll die in three days.”
I should probably be scared. I should probably cry.
I just couldn't.
Cynthia continued to smile through whatever pain she seemed constantly subdued in. “Oh, that’s so unfortunate.”
Magnus and Cynthia had connected souls just before both of their twenty-fifth birthdays. A modern love story. A theatre made a performance of it. A wealthy distinguished young man brought up with a silver spoon in his mouth matching with a young woman who had grown up in the gutter.
I was a child when Cynthia and I first met and she moved into the estate. She bent down to hug me and told me we would be the best of friends and ever since she’s looked at me as if I were an insect.
“Magnus?”
Now she lost her smile. “My adoring husband is busy in his study.”
“Thank you.” I turned to leave.
“He’s very busy.” She warned. “I do not think he will have time to—”
“He will see me.”
This she knew and could not argue. She smiled, pain surfacing again.
Magnus was not in his study, but I stole his throne of a chair and sat behind the large mahogany desk that had once belonged to our father and grandmother and great-grandfather. The very desk each of the De Astor family heads had used for generations in all their political careers. Our family photo sat proud in a silver-rimmed frame. It had once been of the four of us; my parents, Magnus and I. However, Magnus said that was too depressing and so he replaced it with one of him and me.
I moved the computer mouse to see what Magnus was working on. I was currently deep into my fourth semester of studying political science. One day this would be my desk too.
A video played without sound.
On the screen a man lifted a machete and decapitated a woman in two swings.
My heart leapt.
I knew it was the eighty-fifth annual Execution Battle without needing to read the tittle. This same scene had played out routinely on news channels and social media. The man with the machete managed to slaughter twenty-three Soulless in the Battle and after he was famous for a while, interviewed from his prison cell until the next Battle, when he was slaughtered himself.
The Soulless needed to be executed.
But people with souls could not do it. People with souls were good people and could not stain their goodness with blood, and so to rid the Soulless from the earth, we used them to do it for us.
Every year we had the Execution Battle. All Soulless were taken out of prisons and placed in the arena and there they had a battle royal.
They killed each other.
Those who survived after the ten days were given better treatment, some even became celebrated. Meanwhile, the rest of the world got to watch.
When I was little girl, I had asked my brother, “Why? Why do we watch them do this?”
“To remind us,” he had said to me. “Of what they are.”
“What are they?”
He pointed to the screen where a woman dug a blade into a man’s throat. “Barbarians.”
These people were evil.
