Not a lot visually here, but here are some songs that I think fit this chapter well:
Chapter Nine Glossary
24 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in24 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inNot a lot visually here, but here are some songs that I think fit this chapter well:
24 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[9]
“Are you mated?”
“What?” I’m assuming he doesn’t mean mated as in check-mated, but we didn’t study vampire courtship rituals in school thoroughly, as most, if not all, Vampires were mated already.
The little I do know is that every vampire has a mate, and who their mate is isn’t a choice. I can remember the passage in the textbook because all the girls spent weeks giggling over it.
“Another example of the inherent superiority of the vampire race is their tendency to take mates. A vampire bond grows slowly, but once acknowledged is irrefutable, passionate and eternal. There is no infidelity.”
(I ❤ the textbook that is the ultimate 3rd person narration tool. It’s kind of a cop-out, but whatever.)
The real subject of gossip were the rumors of humans disappearing, being stolen away and changed by mateless vampires. (This would be an interesting story, wouldn’t it.) But they were just stories. Yet . . . I wonder if this is this his way of flirting with me?
Instantly, I dismiss the idea. I’m a human with a crooked nose, frizzy, brown hair and eyes the color of shit. He’s an immortal god-monster.
“Bonded, engaged, married, betrothed, hitched . . . in love?” He rattles through the list cleanly, until he gets to the last phrase which he spits out with disgust.
“Bonded?” Calling it that makes it sound like construction work..
His eyes don’t narrow and his expression is as nonchalant as ever, but his pupils dialaite. “Stop blushing.”
What kind of person reprimands someone for a reaction they can’t control?
I glance down at the spoon and see my distorted reflection, complete with ruddy cheeks. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“You don’t?” He looks at me carefully, and I know it’s a warning even though he doesn’t look angry.
“No.” It comes out timid, but it comes out.
“Well, then.” He leans back in the chair.. “You’re dismissed.”
“What?”
“You’re dismissed. You can go.” With an economical grace, he holds his hands above his head and claps once. Behind me, the doors open.
I reach for the tablet, but he doesn’t make any move to give it to me. (Bella really wants her I-pad2) “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s not my fault I blush, I just don’t feel comfortab—”
His face is as still as water at daybreak. “I said you were dismissed, Isabella. Was I not clear?”
“I don’t understand. You said you needed me to fill out my information on that thing, but you’re not giving it to me?” I point at it, as if he had forgotten and not taken it from the table on purpose.
“Why would I give you the tablet, Isabella? Why should I care what you can and cannot do, what survival skills you may or may not have? Why should I help a girl who doesn’t have the mental facility to answer a single question?”
Enough. All my fear crystallizes into one single long frustrated gasp. “Why should you help me? Try, ‘why should I trust you?’ If I was with someone, why would I ever tell you? So you could torment them if I displeased you or said something wrong?”
“You will trust me because you have no choice. You will trust me because if you don’t you will die.”
Outwardly, he gives no sign that he’s furious; his tone is droll as if I’ve just suggested something so ridiculous he won’t even indulge me by responding emotionally, but his eyes are scraping across my every imperfection. It’s clear from his sneer that he’s finding me wanting, but for being disgusted with me he looks a surprisingly long time.
“You know what?” I ask.
His eyes practically glow, two coals heated up from darkness by annoyance, but I don’t care. If I’m going to piss him off, I’m going to do it right.
“Maybe I want to die. Maybe that’d be better than being a murderer.” I stand up from the chair, but my hand still grips it hard, tethering me, keeping me from falling down.
“You want to die?” he asks softly. There’s something burnt about his smell, caramelized and cold; sweet, but metallic and off.
I take a step backwards. “There are worse things.” The little girl with blood for eyes, flashes before me, the girl from my nightmares.
I shake my head. “Anyway, I can’t trust you. I can’t trust anybody. What’s to stop you from reporting me or even just getting bored, like Tanya.” My own honesty shocks me. I hadn’t meant to be so candid.
“I am nothing like that woman,” he says.
“Prove it.”
“I forget sometimes. We have so many plans for you, yet you—you don’t know anything. You can’t know anything. But—” His face twists into a grimace. “I suppose it may be necessary to enlighten you somewhat.”
And then he’s gone, blurring around the room.
He practically teleports, all at once at the window, the floor, and the vid-screen. Finally, he stops by the table and opens his hand. At least twenty little black spheres tumble onto the white tablecloth, bouncing and clattering against the dirty dishes and onto the floor.
I try to peer around him to see what he gathered from every nook and cranny, but Edward merely side-steps me. “Look,” he says steady and low. I can feel the vibrations from his voice in soles of my feet.
Just as I’m about to ask at what, because the only thing I can see right now is the square, strong line of his jaw, he holds something up. It’s the size of a pebble, but black and very plastic. He squeezes it with incredible gentleness. I had thought the textbooks exaggerated the physical godliness of vampires, but Edward doesn’t just have super-human strength, but superhuman control of that strength. Perhaps the stories in the textbook of vampires performing thought-impossible surgeries on humans were true.
“Bonded?” A girls voice asks, tinny and gritty, filtered through a tiny speaker on the plastic pebble.
“Stop blushing.” A man’s voice deep and commanding replies. Edward.
Whiny and petulant. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
It’s me. A recording.
“Bugs,” I whisper, as if they can hear me.
He tosses away the sphere. “They’re disengaged, but only for a moment. I will signal their respawning in the walls by commenting on your token.” A long elegant finger gestures to the silver bull pin on my chest. “Until then we can talk freely.”
“You say that as if they’re are alive.”
He smirks. “They are.” He brings his hands upwards, gesturing to the Zepplin as a whole. “This is. A marvel of vampire bio-engineering, half alive, half not. Much like me.” (Vampire technology will play large role in the story.)
“Bio-engi—”
“The explanation itself would take an hour, and for you to understand it, seven years schooling more.”
I pivot slowly, looking at the walls, at the floor. They’re still and give no hint that they’re alive. I don’t know what I expected; I guess thought if it was alive the walls to go up and down like the belly of a large sleeping animal.
“Focus.” Edward reprimands sharply. “There are some key misunderstandings I’m going to clear up for you. First of all, I wasn’t assigned to be your mentor. I chose you.”
“That’s not possible. It’s based on what district you come from. Anyway, how would you even know it was going to be me?”
“Do you take pleasure in interrupting me?”
His eyes are wide and guileless, but there is a sharpness to his smile that makes me grit my teeth. I had my share of controlling teachers in training school, but Edward is on a whole other level.
“I enjoy an unprecedented level of privilege in the Capitol due to some mistakes(HAHA! that’s what he’s calling it now-a-days?!) I made when I was younger, mistakes I am now trying to rectify. Because of my inability to read your mind, among other factors, you have been pre-selected as the Prospective most likely to successfully aid my associates and I with our cause.”
So I’m right, he can’t read my mind, but what other factors could there be? Please let him not know what I did to my brother. Please let him not have chosen me because he thinks I’ll be a good killer.
He must see the questions teeming in my eyes, because he elaborates. “I cannot tell you exactly what our cause is, let alone how we plan on achieving it. All I can tell you is that it is diametrically opposed to the current Volterran government.”
“That’s treason.” I breathe out. “I could report you.” I am in shock. My own mother was killed for saying these things, and here I am, playing with fire—no—dancing in the inferno with the devil himself.
“You won’t,” he says with all the lightness of someone making small-talk.
He’s right, but there’s no way he could know that without reading my mind, which he can’t. But him plotting treason with me, after knowing me less than forty-eight hours? Well, it’s stupid. And I don’t entrust my life to stupid people.
“You’re putting a lot of trust in someone whose thoughts you can’t read.” I cross my arms.
He gives a short laugh and moves closer to me. “Just because I don’t know your thoughts doesn’t mean I don’t know you.” Without looking, he reaches backwards and plucks the tablet from the table.
“Those questions? This?” He waves the tablet front of my face before setting it down again. “A prop, a formality to appease the Volturi. I know everything about you already. Isabella Swan, daughter of Charlie Swan and Renee Swan, née Dwyer. Good with knives and poisons. Can’t shoot a bow to save her life. Can run fast but not fast enough. Excellent swimmer. Good with knots and boats. Above average sense of direction. Greatest weakness: stealth. Lacking grace of any kind.”
I re-cross my arms—tighter. “Those are just facts anyone could find out from my school record.”(Sometimes writing a scene is like directing it on stage you don’t want the actors to repeat actions, and you don’t want actions to be repeats. My favorite kind of scenes to write are ones where the character has business to keep their hands busy, which is why this scene was so hard to write– they weren’t really doing anything.)
“Rich girl. Grew up with dad in high places. Mom got scared of seeing her baby playing with knives, so she acted out.” His adoption of the District 2 accent—bright vowels mutated by thick consonants—makes me cringe.
He’s closer still now. I can feel his cool breath on my skin. “Mom got caught. Killed. Dad went crazy. You, well, you went a little crazy too, Isabella. Didn’t you?”
I back up, tripping over the chair and landing on it. “Shut up.”
But he doesn’t let up, his eyes capturing mine and not letting me go. “Hurt your brother. Not just hurt, damaged. Felt so bad about it, you thought you’d act out, too.”
“I said shut up,” I stammer. I turn and scramble toward the door, but I only come crashing into his chest. Everywhere I go, there is Edward.
He ignores me, stepping forward, and I’m forced to move further backward or else end up in his arms. “But then you met a friend, good old Jacob Black: sunny, solid, happy.” He looks at me meaningfully. “Ignorant of the real struggles and sins of this world, of our world. Ignorant of who you really are.”
“Jacob knows me.”
Edward backs up slightly, satisfied that I won’t try and escape, making a low humming in his throat, non-committal. “You know what he thought as you volunteered for his sister?”
“No, because I’m not some kind of mind rapist.” I sneer. What right has Edward to know these things, let alone taunt me with them?
Edward contorts his face into an innocent expression of worry, which reminds me so much of Jacob it makes my heart ache. “I will never be as pure as Bella Swan.” It’s such an accurate imitation that I almost believe it’s not satirical. (Yeah E doesn’t like Jacob..)
I’m not sure if I want to cry in his arms or kill him. Instead I ask, “Why are you doing this?”
He bends down to whisper in my ear. Look me in the eye, I want to scream. Look me in the eye as you say these things about me. These true things.
“Why?” He hisses, repeating my question. “You’ve spent so long thinking you can’t ever make up for what you’ve done, haven’t you, Isabella? You’re sure that you will die with your sins, or worse, live with them forever, damned to eternal perdition.”
I turn my head to get a glimpse of him, but he is gone, a disembodied voice. It’s as if he’s coming from inside my own head.
He croons in my right ear. “You don’t have to live with that, Isabella. You can change the world.”
In my left. “We can change the world.”
“I can’t do anything like that,” I whisper, choked. I had thought about trying to save the children, but I hadn’t thought about the repercussions. My thoughts were all scrappy and torn, so torn that I didn’t even think they could be pieces of a bigger picture. “You said yourself I’m not pure.”
His harsh laugh rings out so discordantly that I flinch. It sounds like vampire music. “You think it’s the pure that change the world? If that were the case you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. The Volturi never would have taken power. You’d be in a quaint university, lounging in bed with a boyfriend, fretting about the economy and whether your philosophy degree would result in you being poor or absolutely destitute.” (Lol, replace philosophy with music and you have my life.)
“University? Philosophy?” The words sounding ancient and mystical.
He sighs, but I can’t see where from. Analytically, it’s most likely that he’s moving so quickly I can’t see him, but understanding the effect doesn’t make it less powerful.
“What power do I have?” Maybe it’s because I can’t see him, but I feel somehow freed by his odd omnipresence. “God, I can’t even protect people from myself, how can I save the world?”
In the encroaching darkness, the sun has long since given way to the skeletal crescent-moon, and through the skin of the Zepplin I can just barely see the stars. The strange shadow-light silhouettes Edward.
“It’s because you’ve hurt people that you are the one to do it,” he says.
“So only evil people can have power? That’s why you want me? Because I’m a monster, like you?”
He gives a bark of a laugh, dark as a starless sky. “You aren’t a monster.”
“Don’t laugh at me.” I want it to come out sharp and imposing, but it comes out more of rasp.
My attempts to dislodge his mirth fail. His eyes still dance. “You don’t even have a conception of the word.”
“I blinded my own brother,” I murmur into my folded hands. The weight of the words settle onto me. I’ve never said it like that before. I’ve never admitted it aloud. I didn’t think it would feel good, but I thought there would be a release.
There isn’t.
His posture softens slightly, and when he speaks it’s almost tender. “You aren’t pure, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t good. The pure are the ones who think themselves heroes. The good are the ones who actually are. I believe in you because of your mistakes; I believe in you because only people who understand the perils of darkness can have a prayer of defeating it.”
“Believe in me to do what? Are you talking about— ” I don’t even know how to express the sentiment.
“I am not talking about anything until you are an official part of our organization, which means being changed. Which means winning the games.” He glides from the table to the edge of the room. With pensive slowness he trails his fingertips over the walls of the Zepplin, skating over it like a skipped rock. There is something about the way that he touches the wall, drawing connections from stars, composing constellations, that affects me. It’s as if he’s performing magic.
A puppeteer of the sky.
He turns around slowly, fingertips lingering. “So, what say you?”
Do I really have a choice?
He steps closer, but I don’t step back. I can feel every molecule between us. I want to keep the feeling, as painfully present (I do over-use this word a little, ah well.) as it makes me feel.
“Train me, then.” This times the words come out as bold as I feel, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own.
He looks me over for a moment—every part of me. I can’t help the blush that flows from my cheeks. There is no scorn in his expression this time. Some part of me wishes desperately that he’s liking what he sees.
He brings one hand to touch my cheek, and I know I should move away, but I can’t. “Perhaps I will.”
He sees the forest fire of blush spreading across my skin and withdraws. “I’m almost positive that the very sincere promise of atonement will allow you to trust me, even when it seems I’ve led you false. But only almost.”
“I thought you know everything about me? What’s keeping you from making your decision?” It’s not until I notice that somehow he seems taller, that I realize I’m hunched and cowering before him. Funny, he could have threatened to break my neck. He could have actually broken my neck, and I would have screamed, but I wouldn’t have whimpered. His emotional assault is more effective than any physical one.
He moves back in front of me, pulling up a chair so that we are eye level. The hordes of dead bugs are strewn out between us like toppled chess pieces. “I know everything you’ve done, and I can make logical conjectures from that about how you feel, but there’s one thing I don’t yet know.” He takes one of the spheres between his fingers and crushes it like a nut. “Are you in love with Jacob Black?”
I turn from him, so that I can only see him through the curtain of my hair. “I don’t have to tell you that.”
“If you want me to insure your survival in the arena, you do.”
“Jealous?” I snort.
“I could care less about your feelings towards me. But I need to know if at the end of the day you’re greatest priority is changing the world, making up for your mistakes and allowing others never to be forced to make the same ones, or about returning home safe to your sweetheart.”
My lips part slightly at the shock of it all.
His voice is so soft so sure, and his gaze stirs something hungry in me. I am about to say, yes, anything. I would do anything, but then, he smirks.
I hate that smirk. Like I’m something to be triumphed over. Like he’s better than me.
“I love Jacob Black.” I huff.
The smirk widens.
I bite my lip in frustration. “Why are you so happy?”
“Prepositions, Isabella, make all the difference.”
“I don’t follow.”
He rolls his eyes.
“What? I studied Kali knife fighting and field craft, not sentence structure.” I retort. (This is the response I give to my Beta’s, they find it just as amusing as Edward seems to.)
He gives me a condescending smile. “You love Jacob Black, but you are not in love with him.” He draws away, and I can’t help but lean forward by an inch, some part of me drawn to the echoes of him. God, it’s pathetic, no worse—dangerous. Yes, he may be against the Volterran government, but the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, and even if they are friendship is a dangerous game if you’re friend is ambitious. And Edward clearly has plans.
“I didn’t say that I wasn’t.” I say gruffly, leaning backwards. The chair creaks, giving my façade of bravery away.
He raises an eyebrow. “Tell me, Isabella. Did you ever yearn for him to kiss you? Were there moments of silence when you tilted your head up so prettily and begged with your eyes for his lips to meet yours?”
“I—”
“No?” He smiles but it is so sharp. “Then were your fantasies of a rougher nature?” He taps a finger against his chin almost casually, like a professor puzzling over how to explain a particularly complicated concept, but his eyes darken in a way that is not at all clinical.
His eyes stalk even my most microscopic of movements. “I’d imagine you’d hardly be content with sweet nothings.”
I push up from the chair. “I don’t want to talk about this,” I say stiffly, taking a step backwards.
He doesn’t stand up but sits perfectly still. “Would you want him to pin you down onto the soft, glassy beach as you tried to scratch and claw him? Maybe, you fantasized of him biting you and marking you as his, until the only word you could remember was his name? Until you writhed like a little fish gasping for air, gasping for life, grasping for him.” Each word falls over and into the other, the cadence of his voice musical and feral at the same time.
The thought of Jacob ever doing anything like that (Bella is a little repressed, she can’t even say the word sexual. In some ways she’s very much a child. But I think it also signifies the importance of how she feels to Edward, the intensity of her own feelings makes her recalcitrant to acknowledge it.) would make me laugh and squirm were it not for the fact I can’t help but picture Edward doing these things to me. And that doesn’t make me laugh at all. “No, I don’t think of Jacob t-that way.”
He doesn’t have the same problem of mixing darkness with amusement. “Of course you don’t.”
“I don’t think about anyone that way.” I clarify.
But this is a lie; I have now. I’ve imagined Edward pinning my hands against the table, twisting my body towards him and crashing his lips against mine.
He hums low in his throat. “Are you sure?”
I gulp. “P-positive.”
He smiles, and this time it is almost polite. “I wouldn’t expect an innocent like you to think those things.”
I blush, but say, “Edward, if you know anything about me, you know I’m not innocent.” All too late, I realize I’ve fallen into a trap.
“So then you do have such dreams?”
“No, I—”
“I suggest you not argue the point further unless you want a demonstration of the full extent of your naïveté.”
His face has fallen back into that eerie stillness, but now that I know what lies beneath it, I can’t help but be more wary.
I will never take his smile at face value again.
He is oblivious to my revelation, because he continues on. “I’d also strongly advise that you try to contain that blush of yours.”
I bring my hands to my neck as if this will protect me. “Blood lust?”
“Something like that,” he says colorlessly, but his eyes don’t leave the spot on my neck that my hand covers.
“I thought the chemicals in blood prevented that?”
He stands up, tucking his chair in neatly to the table. “Oh, they do. I imagine if I was on my normal diet of animal blood there would have been an incident long ago. Probably the first moment I was close to you in the atrium of your little Blood Temple.”
“Blood Bank.” I correct instinctively, suppressing a shiver at the image of him cracking my neck. I’ll have to get used to the idea of lethal violence quickly, because I’ll be facing the reality of it soon enough.
“A bank is where you make deposits you can get back; a temple is where you make sacrifices.” His eyes flit across my skin in a way that makes me feel as if I am the sacrifice.
The shiver I tried to fight, wins, blighting my body with goosebumps. Hastily, I change the subject. “Fine, so I’m not in love with Jacob. But you don’t know everything about me.” I tilt my chin upwards.
“Don’t I?” he asks. For the first time he looks surprised. When his eyes widen, when really open up, you can see every shade of red in them. It’s beautiful, like the way the sea-glass darkens when they’re wet.
But he’s a monster. I have to remember that. He was talking about killing me as being an incident. And it doesn’t matter that he was nice before when he untied my shoes or told me I didn’t have to worry about what I said.
“I’m going to save them,” I look at the now star-painted walls. I can do this.
Edward tilts his head again, but this time it throws his whole face into shadow. “Who?” he asks, so low it vibrates my skin a little.
“The kids.” With the bugs off for the first time, I can be completely candid. “I’m not going to kill them. I’m going to protect them.”
Something snaps. I look down and see his hand clasped around the jagged edge of a newly broken fork. He sees that I see it and quickly spirits it away.
I decide that if I’m going to continue ruining his plans than I should be grateful that it’s a piece of silverware broken and not my neck.
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stave off a headache. “You could only save one of them. It would be emotional and physical torture to try and beat the game, and in the end you would lose.”
“And it’s not torture already? I’m being forced to fight for my life, to kill people, for a prize I don’t even want?”
He grimaces. “There is no one less in need of instruction on the evils of the Morphing Games than I, Isabella, but you’re not going to kill yourself to save anyone.”
“I didn’t say that.” Framed as suicide—which in truth it is—I feel much less sure of my plan.
“The implication was perfectly clear.” He moves closer to me. “Put such thoughts out of your mind.”
As he nears, my stomach tightens. Too close. He’s too close.
“I have to do it,” I mumble, hoping that he won’t hear me.
His hand stills in his hair and he turns to face me. “You’re serious, aren’t you,” he says incredulously.
Before I can confirm this, he moves toward me. “I won’t let you.” Roughly he grabs my wrists and I try to tug away from him, but his grip is unshakable. “If I can convince you of anything let it be this: you will not die in the games.”
His hands are cold, but when they touch me I feel so warm, no hot. It’s like there’s chemical reactions every place our skin meets.
I want. I need—
He turns me slowly, his hands wrapping around my abdomen, pushing me into him. I was wrong he doesn’t smell sweet or sour. He smells like a nothing I can name.
Then—oh god—one of his hands draws back the curtain of my hair twisting it, capturing it. With the other, he trails a gentle path down my neck with his fingernail tracing a vein.
“Isabella.” He cajoles in a falsetto that lends an illusion of vulnerability. “Promise me you’ll do as I say. Forget about this nonsense.”
“I, no—”
The nail digs in. “What was that?”
I try to clench my fists, but my nerves are all cross-wired.
“Isabella.” He sing-songs over my skin, his lips dancing against the small invisible hairs on my neck. “Answer me.”
Then, he presses a single kiss to my neck.
It undoes me.
“Yes,” I whisper.
Instantly, assured of my compliance, he lets go. I fall to my knees, but he doesn’t offer me a hand up, just surveys me dispassionately.
“What the hell?” I ask when I finally get my voice back.
He looks at me silent, expressionless, but his eyes are just a bit wider. He’s also not acknowledging my swearing at him..
I bring my hands up to my neck. “Seriously? What was that?”
“I play to win; you will, too.”
I snort, hiding in the hole of sarcasm. “Not if you kill me first.”
His gaze roots me out.
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”
I guess I really have to play his game. I’m not going to kill the children, but he has to believe I will. Who knows what he’ll do if it seems like I’m not going along with his plans.
Still, I want to leave. So I do.
His hands remain at the table, his eyes don’t even meet mine, but the masculine weight of his voice stops me. “You do not leave until I dismiss you.”
I sigh. Fine. I can do rules. I had a training professor, Banner, who was this strict. Although he wasn’t half as beautiful—not even a quarter, really. I bend my knees to sit back down.
“The bugs are set to be fully functional in less than a minute. Once they are, you are never to mention any of this again. If you do I will claim that you are trying to weasel your way out of the competition by plotting treason. In the trial against you, I will argue passionately for your immediate death.”
My breath catches in my throat. How is it that I haven’t even entered the arena and I already feel like I’m fighting for my life?
“And, Isabella, make no mistake, I will win.”
And I had threatened him before about telling someone. He was right, I was naïve, no, even worse — I was foolish to think that I could ever have power in this game we were playing, ever be a step ahead of him. I don’t know why, but I almost feel choked with bitter tears at the thought of it.
I had actually thought he was stupid for trusting me, when the truth was there was never any way he could have been hurt by me. He doesn’t care about me. I’m just a tool. It was amazing how naïve I could be, even after years of training in manipulation. The only explanation was he had dazzled me somehow.
“Secondly—” he holds up two fingers, numbering his list “—my first goal is your survival. As I am better equipped to coach and teach you than anyone else, and you will follow my instructions explicitly. This starts with not complaining about whatever choices the stylist makes when you meet with her tomorrow.”
For the first time I see what appears a genuine smile over Edward’s face. It’s almost as disconcerting as his glare; it looks so out of place. “Esme may seem demure, but she is a better stylist than anyone, perhaps even better at her job than I am at mine.”
Fashion is perhaps my weakest area after stealth, but I don’t let Edward know this, partly because I’m sure he already does, and partly for a reason I don’t quite understand, I don’t want him to know how unstable I am in heels. “Fine.”
A thought occurs to me as I stare at the bugs, and then at the walls. Nothing has appeared to have grown or changed, but then again I hadn’t noticed the bugs in the first place. “Won’t this thing—”
“The Cloud Gate.” He corrects.
“Won’t it monitor that you killed the bugs; won’t it sense a gap in its records?”
He nods. “It will notice the gap, but with some rewiring and reconditioning of it’s nervous system I should be able to convince it that that it had an immune malfunction. Namely that its built in security systems accidentally pegged parts of its own body, if you will, as hostile.”
“Oh,” I say to the floor, not looking at him, not really comprehending, but tired of looking a feeling like an off balance idiot.
If it wasn’t totally crazy I would almost say that Edward’s expression softens a little, “This is a lot for you to take in, I understand, but—” In an instant, whatever gentleness there was in his expression disappears.
“But what?” I ask, baffled.
“But that’s a very charming pin you have there.” He gestures to the pin in my chest, and I can’t help but sigh.
That’s our agreed upon cue. The bugs are functional again. Hello, anonymous audience. I missed you.
I would be getting no more answers from Edward tonight. In fact, it was possible that he wouldn’t talk to me candidly again until the games were over. I realize the sinking feeling in my gut isn’t because I won’t be getting answers, but because some part of me liked the honesty of Edward, no matter how brutal it was. True honesty was something I hadn’t had a taste of in almost five years. I hadn’t realized how freeing it could be. It made my blood electric . . . or maybe that was something else?
No, it had to be the candidness.
“Thanks.” I fingered the two bulls horns, overlaid upon each other. “Emily, Jacob’s sister, gave it to me.”
He gives an almost genial smile. So he can be nice. “That was a very kind thing you did, volunteering for her, but I expect you wanted some of the glory, too.”
I look at him in confusion. “What?”
I am beginning to see hidden shadows in his smile, and I can’t help be almost be in equal parts fascinated and disturbed. “Stirb und werde.” (this is German for Die and become from Goethe.)
I don’t know what he just said— but I can guess. We had to do a unit on codes; was it possible that this was just a formulated code? If S=1— no. No, the answer was simpler somehow. Maybe the words were modifications of English sounds.
Does this hold the answer to the mysterious “cause”?
Unfortunately, the best I can come up with is, “Wearing the stirrup?” (Oh lol Bella and your funnyz tranzlations.)
I didn’t think it was possible to surprise Edward more than a quirked eyebrow, but he bursts into laughter. Something catches in me, like my heart is velcro and his laugh has a thousand little hooks to latch right onto it.
I glare. Partially because I am angry at him for making fun of me, partially because I’m angry at myself for smiling at his laugh.
His chuckles soothe and his grin compresses to a smile. “You know what it means; you’ve seen it plastered across every surface of District 2.”
“Your vitality is your greatest asset?”
The memory of the smile lingers on his lower lip, even as his upper lip falls. “Try a bit more topical to our current situation.”
Not for the first time, I think it is convenient Edward cannot read my mind, because I think loudly: I have the most treasonous, arrogant, asshole of a mentor on the history of the planet. Childish, I know, but I can’t help but regress under the pressure.
“I give up,” I say instead.
The smile is gone now entirely, leaving only boredom and disappointment. Except his eyes, his eyes still watch me with unnerving patience. “It’s late and we’ve had a long conversation, but if this is the kind of effort you’re going to put into training, then Tanya was right, I do have my work cut out for me.”
“Die and become.” I blurt out. “The slogan for the Morphing Games.” The words and syllable numbers map out better than anything else I can think of.
“And what does this mean?” he asks, reminding me of the times a teacher would try to have us figure out new weapon hold on our own.
I can’t help but roll my eyes. This is what we learn in first-year: the symbolism, the history. Why is Edward making me repeat it now when I could be in a nice comfortable bed, forgetting all about causes and atonement, running back to my old friend denial. “Only through the power of death, can we be transformed into a vampire, only through morphing, metamorphosis, can we grow.”
“A caterpillar dies to become a butterfly, a snake sheds its skin. Growth is loss at its heart, but humans only die once.”
On the surface I could take it to be a comment for me to stay alive, but I know there’s a deeper meaning here. “But vampires never die, never change,” I say slowly.
For the second time, Edward smiles at me. It’s utterly devastating and he knows it. I’ll have to keep myself aware of the fact that it seems Edward will use every weapon in his arsenal to bend me to his “cause.” Certainly, his beauty is one of them.
“Anything can change with enough pressure and force, even vampires. Throw lame old graphite into the fiery furnace of the deep, dark mantle of the earth and what do you get—” (Hunger Games reference ahoy!!!)
His face is illuminated by starlight as he speaks. I hadn’t realized it until now, now the outside wall of his suite is completely coated with constellations. They cast thousands of glimmering dots over Edward’s face. He’s sparkling like . . .
“Diamonds,” I say.(In an interesting play Edward sparkles but in the night-time. hmm.)
He gives me a pensive look. “I know you’re tired, Isabella, but if you could stay for just one moment more.”
I’m about to grumble and ask why. I am tired of riddles and cross-examinations. I just want to sleep. Forever maybe. Just as I open my mouth to say so, I notice something: a burst of red at my feet.
I look down.
“There it is,” he says, as if he had been holding his breath, waiting for something, but of course, he hadn’t. As a vampire he has no reason to breathe.
“What is it?” I look at the dot. It’s growing bigger and bigger.
“Just watch,” he says, reverently.(I like that this is a continuation of the Edward as puppeteer of the stars metaphor. The man playing God images is one of my favorites. I find it very sexy.)
As the light grows it fractures, and while most of the off-shoots are red some are white. It divides and divides until the whole floor is covered with patterns of light, patterns that look almost like a city.
Then, the lights burst into shapes below us, towers, spires and long illuminated neon ropes of streets looping between and around every surface, with cars zipping through them at unimaginable speeds. Soon the shapes and shadows grow from the floor onto the walls.
It isn’t like a city— it is one, and we are plummeting right into it.
“Welcome to Volterra, Isabella.”
(DUM DUM DUM!)
24 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[9]
“Are you mated?”
“What?” I’m assuming he doesn’t mean mated as in check-mated, but we didn’t study vampire courtship rituals in school thoroughly, as most, if not all, Vampires were mated already.
The little I do know is that every vampire has a mate, and who their mate is isn’t a choice. I can remember the passage in the textbook because all the girls spent weeks giggling over it.
“Another example of the inherent superiority of the vampire race is their tendency to take mates. A vampire bond grows slowly, but once acknowledged is irrefutable, passionate and eternal. There is no infidelity.”
The real subject of gossip were the rumors of humans disappearing, being stolen away and changed by mateless vampires. But they were just stories. Yet . . . I wonder if this is this his way of flirting with me?
Instantly, I dismiss the idea. I’m a human with a crooked nose, frizzy, brown hair and eyes the color of shit. He’s an immortal god-monster.
“Bonded, engaged, married, betrothed, hitched . . . in love?” He rattles through the list cleanly, until he gets to the last phrase which he spits out with disgust.
“Bonded?” Calling it that makes it sound like construction work..
His eyes don’t narrow and his expression is as nonchalant as ever, but his pupils dialaite. “Stop blushing.”
What kind of person reprimands someone for a reaction they can’t control?
I glance down at the spoon and see my distorted reflection, complete with ruddy cheeks. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“You don’t?” He looks at me carefully, and I know it’s a warning even though he doesn’t look angry.
“No.” It comes out timid, but it comes out.
“Well, then.” He leans back in the chair.. “You’re dismissed.”
“What?”
“You’re dismissed. You can go.” With an economical grace, he holds his hands above his head and claps once. Behind me, the doors open.
I reach for the tablet, but he doesn’t make any move to give it to me. “Listen, I’m sorry. It’s not my fault I blush, I just don’t feel comfortab—”
His face is as still as water at daybreak. “I said you were dismissed, Isabella. Was I not clear?”
“I don’t understand. You said you needed me to fill out my information on that thing, but you’re not giving it to me?” I point at it, as if he had forgotten and not taken it from the table on purpose.
“Why would I give you the tablet, Isabella? Why should I care what you can and cannot do, what survival skills you may or may not have? Why should I help a girl who doesn’t have the mental facility to answer a single question?”
Enough. All my fear crystallizes into one single long frustrated gasp. “Why should you help me? Try, ‘why should I trust you?’ If I was with someone, why would I ever tell you? So you could torment them if I displeased you or said something wrong?”
“You will trust me because you have no choice. You will trust me because if you don’t you will die.”
Outwardly, he gives no sign that he’s furious; his tone is droll as if I’ve just suggested something so ridiculous he won’t even indulge me by responding emotionally, but his eyes are scraping across my every imperfection. It’s clear from his sneer that he’s finding me wanting, but for being disgusted with me he looks a surprisingly long time.
“You know what?” I ask.
His eyes practically glow, two coals heated up from darkness by annoyance, but I don’t care. If I’m going to piss him off, I’m going to do it right.
“Maybe I want to die. Maybe that’d be better than being a murderer.” I stand up from the chair, but my hand still grips it hard, tethering me, keeping me from falling down.
“You want to die?” he asks softly. There’s something burnt about his smell, caramelized and cold; sweet, but metallic and off.
I take a step backwards. “There are worse things.” The little girl with blood for eyes, flashes before me, the girl from my nightmares.
I shake my head. “Anyway, I can’t trust you. I can’t trust anybody. What’s to stop you from reporting me or even just getting bored, like Tanya.” My own honesty shocks me. I hadn’t meant to be so candid.
“I am nothing like that woman,” he says.
“Prove it.”
“I forget sometimes. We have so many plans for you, yet you—you don’t know anything. You can’t know anything. But—” His face twists into a grimace. “I suppose it may be necessary to enlighten you somewhat.”
And then he’s gone, blurring around the room.
He practically teleports, all at once at the window, the floor, and the vid-screen. Finally, he stops by the table and opens his hand. At least twenty little black spheres tumble onto the white tablecloth, bouncing and clattering against the dirty dishes and onto the floor.
I try to peer around him to see what he gathered from every nook and cranny, but Edward merely side-steps me. “Look,” he says steady and low. I can feel the vibrations from his voice in soles of my feet.
Just as I’m about to ask at what, because the only thing I can see right now is the square, strong line of his jaw, he holds something up. It’s the size of a pebble, but black and very plastic. He squeezes it with incredible gentleness. I had thought the textbooks exaggerated the physical godliness of vampires, but Edward does’nt just have super-human strength, but superhuman control of that strength. Perhaps the stories in the textbook of vampires performing thought-impossible surgeries on humans were true.
“Bonded?” A girls voice asks, tinny and gritty, filtered through a tiny speaker on the plastic pebble.
“Stop blushing.” A man’s voice deep and commanding replies. Edward.
Whiny and petulant. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
It’s me. A recording.
“Bugs,” I whisper, as if they can hear me.
He tosses away the sphere. “They’re disengaged, but only for a moment. I will signal their respawning in the walls by commenting on your token.” A long elegant finger gestures to the silver bull pin on my chest. “Until then we can talk freely.”
“You say that as if they’re are alive.”
He smirks. “They are.” He brings his hands upwards, gesturing to the Zepplin as a whole. “This is. A marvel of vampire bio-engineering, half alive, half not. Much like me.”
“Bio-engi—”
“The explanation itself would take an hour, and for you to understand it, seven years schooling more.”
I pivot slowly, looking at the walls, at the floor. They’re still and give no hint that they’re alive. I don’t know what I expected; I guess thought if it was alive the walls to go up and down like the belly of a large sleeping animal.
“Focus.” Edward reprimands sharply. “There are some key misunderstandings I’m going to clear up for you. First of all, I wasn’t assigned to be your mentor. I chose you.”
“That’s not possible. It’s based on what district you come from. Anyway, how would you even know it was going to be me?”
“Do you take pleasure in interrupting me?”
His eyes are wide and guileless, but there is a sharpness to his smile that makes me grit my teeth. I had my share of controlling teachers in training school, but Edward is on a whole other level.
“I enjoy an unprecedented level of privilege in the Capitol due to some mistakes I made when I was younger, mistakes I am now trying to rectify. Because of my inability to read your mind, among other factors, you have been pre-selected as the Prospective most likely to successfully aid my associates and I with our cause.”
So I’m right, he can’t read my mind, but what other factors could there be? Please let him not know what I did to my brother. Please let him not have chosen me because he thinks I’ll be a good killer.
He must see the questions teeming in my eyes, because he elaborates. “I cannot tell you exactly what our cause is, let alone how we plan on achieving it. All I can tell you is that it is diametrically opposed to the current Volterran government.”
“That’s treason.” I breathe out. “I could report you.” I am in shock. My own mother was killed for saying these things, and here I am, playing with fire—no—dancing in the inferno with the devil himself.
“You won’t,” he says with all the lightness of someone making small-talk.
He’s right, but there’s no way he could know that without reading my mind, which he can’t. But him plotting treason with me, after knowing me less than forty-eight hours? Well, it’s stupid. And I don’t entrust my life to stupid people.
“You’re putting a lot of trust in someone whose thoughts you can’t read.” I cross my arms.
He gives a short laugh and moves closer to me. “Just because I don’t know your thoughts doesn’t mean I don’t know you.” Without looking, he reaches backwards and plucks the tablet from the table.
“Those questions? This?” He waves the tablet front of my face before setting it down again. “A prop, a formality to appease the Volturi. I know everything about you already. Isabella Swan, daughter of Charlie Swan and Renee Swan, née Dwyer. Good with knives and poisons. Can’t shoot a bow to save her life. Can run fast but not fast enough. Excellent swimmer. Good with knots and boats. Above average sense of direction. Greatest weakness: stealth. Lacking grace of any kind.”
I re-cross my arms—tighter. “Those are just facts anyone could find out from my school record.”
“Rich girl. Grew up with dad in high places. Mom got scared of seeing her baby playing with knives, so she acted out.” His adoption of the District 2 accent—bright vowels mutated by thick consonants—makes me cringe.
He’s closer still now. I can feel his cool breath on my skin. “Mom got caught. Killed. Dad went crazy. You, well, you went a little crazy too, Isabella. Didn’t you?”
I back up, tripping over the chair and landing on it. “Shut up.”
But he doesn’t let up, his eyes capturing mine and not letting me go. “Hurt your brother. Not just hurt, damaged. Felt so bad about it, you thought you’d act out, too.”
“I said shut up,” I stammer. I turn and scramble toward the door, but I only come crashing into his chest. Everywhere I go, there is Edward.
He ignores me, stepping forward, and I’m forced to move further backward or else end up in his arms. “But then you met a friend, good old Jacob Black: sunny, solid, happy.” He looks at me meaningfully. “Ignorant of the real struggles and sins of this world, of our world. Ignorant of who you really are.”
“Jacob knows me.”
Edward backs up slightly, satisfied that I won’t try and escape, making a low humming in his throat, non-committal. “You know what he thought as you volunteered for his sister?”
“No, because I’m not some kind of mind rapist.” I sneer. What right has Edward to know these things, let alone taunt me with them?
Edward contorts his face into an innocent expression of worry, which reminds me so much of Jacob it makes my heart ache. “I will never be as pure as Bella Swan.” It’s such an accurate imitation that I almost believe it’s not satirical.
I’m not sure if I want to cry in his arms or kill him. Instead I ask, “Why are you doing this?”
He bends down to whisper in my ear. Look me in the eye, I want to scream. Look me in the eye as you say these things about me. These true things.
“Why?” He hisses, repeating my question. “You’ve spent so long thinking you can’t ever make up for what you’ve done, haven’t you, Isabella? You’re sure that you will die with your sins, or worse, live with them forever, Damned to eternal perdition.”
I turn my head to get a glimpse of him, but he is gone, a disembodied voice. It’s as if he’s coming from inside my own head.
He croons in my right ear. “You don’t have to live with that, Isabella. You can change the world.”
In my left. “We can change the world.”
“I can’t do anything like that,” I whisper, choked. I had thought about trying to save the children, but I hadn’t thought about the repercussions. My thoughts were all scrappy and torn, so torn that I didn’t even think they could be pieces of a bigger picture. “You said yourself I’m not pure.”
His harsh laugh rings out so discordantly that I flinch. It sounds like vampire music. “You think it’s the pure that change the world? If that were the case you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation. The Volturi never would have taken power. You’d be in a quaint university, lounging in bed with a boyfriend, fretting about the economy and whether your philosophy degree would result in you being poor or absolutely destitute.”
“University? Philosophy?” The words sounding ancient and mystical.
He sighs, but I can’t see where from. Analytically, it’s most likely that he’s moving so quickly I can’t see him, but understanding the effect doesn’t make it less powerful.
“What power do I have?” Maybe it’s because I can’t see him, but I feel somehow freed by his odd omnipresence. “God, I can’t even protect people from myself, how can I save the world?”
In the encroaching darkness, the sun has long since given way to the skeletal crescent-moon, and through the skin of the Zepplin I can just barely see the stars. The strange shadow-light silhouettes Edward.
“It’s because you’ve hurt people that you are the one to do it,” he says.
“So only evil people can have power? That’s why you want me? Because I’m a monster, like you?”
He gives a bark of a laugh, dark as a starless sky. “You aren’t a monster.”
“Don’t laugh at me.” I want it to come out sharp and imposing, but it comes out more of rasp.
My attempts to dislodge his mirth fail. His eyes still dance. “You don’t even have a conception of the word.”
“I blinded my own brother,” I murmur into my folded hands. The weight of the words settle onto me. I’ve never said it like that before. I’ve never admitted it aloud. I didn’t think it would feel good, but I thought there would be a release.
There isn’t.
His posture softens slightly, and when he speaks it’s almost tender. “You aren’t pure, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t good. The pure are the ones who think themselves heroes. The good are the ones who actually are. I believe in you because of your mistakes; I believe in you because only people who understand the perils of darkness can have a prayer of defeating it.”
“Believe in me to do what? Are you talking about— ” I don’t even know how to express the sentiment.
“I am not talking about anything until you are an official part of our organization, which means being changed. Which means winning the games.” He glides from the table to the edge of the room. With pensive slowness he trails his fingertips over the walls of the Zepplin, skating over it like a skipped rock. There is something about the way that he touches the wall, drawing connections from stars, composing constellations, that affects me. It’s as if he’s performing magic.
A puppeteer of the sky.
He turns around slowly, fingertips lingering. “So, what say you?”
Do I really have a choice?
He steps closer, but I don’t step back. I can feel every molecule between us. I want to keep the feeling, as painfully present as it makes me feel.
“Train me, then.” This times the words come out as bold as I feel, but my voice doesn’t sound like my own.
He looks me over for a moment—every part of me. I can’t help the blush that flows from my cheeks. There is no scorn in his expression this time. Some part of me wishes desperately that he’s liking what he sees.
He brings one hand to touch my cheek, and I know I should move away, but I can’t. “Perhaps I will.”
He sees the forest fire of blush spreading across my skin and withdraws. “I’m almost positive that the very sincere promise of atonement will allow you to trust me, even when it seems I’ve led you false. But only almost.”
“I thought you know everything about me? What’s keeping you from making your decision?” It’s not until I notice that somehow he seems taller, that I realize I’m hunched and cowering before him. Funny, he could have threatened to break my neck. He could have actually broken my neck, and I would have screamed, but I wouldn’t have whimpered. His emotional assault is more effective than any physical one.
He moves back in front of me, pulling up a chair so that we are eye level. The hordes of dead bugs are strewn out between us like toppled chess pieces. “I know everything you’ve done, and I can make logical conjectures from that about how you feel, but there’s one thing I don’t yet know.” He takes one of the spheres between his fingers and crushes it like a nut. “Are you in love with Jacob Black?”
I turn from him, so that I can only see him through the curtain of my hair. “I don’t have to tell you that.”
“If you want me to insure your survival in the arena, you do.”
“Jealous?” I snort.
“I could care less about your feelings towards me. But I need to know if at the end of the day you’re greatest priority is changing the world, making up for your mistakes and allowing others never to be forced to make the same ones, or about returning home safe to your sweetheart.”
My lips part slightly at the shock of it all.
His voice is so soft so sure, and his gaze stirs something hungry in me. I am about to say, yes, anything. I would do anything, but then, he smirks.
I hate that smirk. Like I’m something to be triumphed over. Like he’s better than me.
“I love Jacob Black.” I huff.
The smirk widens.
I bite my lip in frustration. “Why are you so happy?”
“Prepositions, Isabella, make all the difference.”
“I don’t follow.”
He rolls his eyes.
“What? I studied Kali knife fighting and field craft, not sentence structure.” I retort.
He gives me a condescending smile. “You love Jacob Black, but you are not in love with him.” He draws away, and I can’t help but lean forward by an inch, some part of me drawn to the echoes of him. God, it’s pathetic, no worse—dangerous. Yes, he may be against the Volterran government, but the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend, and even if they are friendship is a dangerous game if you’re friend is ambitious. And Edward clearly has plans.
“I didn’t say that I wasn’t.” I say gruffly, leaning backwards. The chair creaks, giving my façade of bravery away.
He raises an eyebrow. “Tell me, Isabella. Did you ever yearn for him to kiss you? Were there moments of silence when you tilted your head up so prettily and begged with your eyes for his lips to meet yours?”
“I—”
“No?” He smiles but it is so sharp. “Then were your fantasies of a rougher nature?” He taps a finger against his chin almost casually, like a professor puzzling over how to explain a particularly complicated concept, but his eyes darken in a way that is not at all clinical.
His eyes stalk even my most microscopic of movements. “I’d imagine you’d hardly be content with sweet nothings.”
I push up from the chair. “I don’t want to talk about this,” I say stiffly, taking a step backwards.
He doesn’t stand up but sits perfectly still. “Would you want him to pin you down onto the soft, glassy beach as you tried to scratch and claw him? Maybe, you fantasized of him biting you and marking you as his, until the only word you could remember was his name? Until you writhed like a little fish gasping for air, gasping for life, grasping for him.” Each word falls over and into the other, the cadence of his voice musical and feral at the same time.
The thought of Jacob ever doing anything like that would make me laugh and squirm were it not for the fact I can’t help but picture Edward doing these things to me. And that doesn’t make me laugh at all. “No, I don’t think of Jacob t-that way.”
He doesn’t have the same problem of mixing darkness with amusement. “Of course you don’t.”
“I don’t think about anyone that way.” I clarify.
But this is a lie; I have now. I’ve imagined Edward pinning my hands against the table, twisting my body towards him and crashing his lips against mine.
He hums low in his throat. “Are you sure?”
I gulp. “P-positive.”
He smiles, and this time it is almost polite. “I wouldn’t expect an innocent like you to think those things.”
I blush, but say, “Edward, if you know anything about me, you know I’m not innocent.” All too late, I realize I’ve fallen into a trap.
“So then you do have such dreams?”
“No, I—”
“I suggest you not argue the point further unless you want a demonstration of the full extent of your naïveté.”
His face has fallen back into that eerie stillness, but now that I know what lies beneath it, I can’t help but be more wary.
I will never take his smile at face value again.
He is oblivious to my revelation, because he continues on. “I’d also strongly advise that you try to contain that blush of yours.”
I bring my hands to my neck as if this will protect me. “Blood lust?”
“Something like that,” he says colorlessly, but his eyes don’t leave the spot on my neck that my hand covers.
“I thought the chemicals in blood prevented that?”
He stands up, tucking his chair in neatly to the table. “Oh, they do. I imagine if I was on my normal diet of animal blood there would have been an incident long ago. Probably the first moment I was close to you in the atrium of your little Blood Temple.”
“Blood Bank.” I correct instinctively, suppressing a shiver at the image of him cracking my neck. I’ll have to get used to the idea of lethal violence quickly, because I’ll be facing the reality of it soon enough.
“A bank is where you make deposits you can get back; a temple is where you make sacrifices.” His eyes flit across my skin in a way that makes me feel as if I am the sacrifice.
The shiver I tried to fight, wins, blighting my body with goosebumps. Hastily, I change the subject. “Fine, so I’m not in love with Jacob. But you don’t know everything about me.” I tilt my chin upwards.
“Don’t I?” he asks. Hor the first time he looks surprised. When his eyes widen, when really open up, you can see every shade of red in them. It’s beautiful, like the way the sea-glass darkens when they’re wet.
But he’s a monster. I have to remember that. He was talking about killing me as being an incident. And it doesn’t matter that he was nice before when he untied my shoes or told me I didn’t have to worry about what I said.
“I’m going to save them,” I look at the now star-painted walls. I can do this.
Edward tilts his head again, but this time it throws his whole face into shadow. “Who?” he asks, so low it vibrates my skin a little.
“The kids.” With the bugs off for the first time, I can be completely candid. “I’m not going to kill them. I’m going to protect them.”
Something snaps. I look down and see his hand clasped around the jagged edge of a newly broken fork. He sees that I see it and quickly spirits it away.
I decide that if I’m going to continue ruining his plans than I should be grateful that it’s a piece of silverware broken and not my neck.
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose as if to stave off a headache. “You could only save one of them. It would be emotional and physical torture to try and beat the game, and in the end you would lose.”
“And it’s not torture already? I’m being forced to fight for my life, to kill people, for a prize I don’t even want?”
He grimaces. “There is no one less in need of instruction on the evils of the Morphing Games than I, Isabella, but you’re not going to kill yourself to save anyone.”
“I didn’t say that.” Framed as suicide—which in truth it is—I feel much less sure of my plan.
“The implication was perfectly clear.” He moves closer to me. “Put such thoughts out of your mind.”
As he nears, my stomach tightens. Too close. He’s too close.
“I have to do it,” I mumble, hoping that he won’t hear me.
His hand stills in his hair and he turns to face me. “You’re serious, aren’t you,” he says incredulously.
Before I can confirm this, he moves toward me. “I won’t let you.” Roughly he grabs my wrists and I try to tug away from him, but his grip is unshakable. “If I can convince you of anything let it be this: you will not die in the games.”
His hands are cold, but when they touch me I feel so warm, no hot. It’s like there’s chemical reactions every place our skin meets.
I want. I need—
He turns me slowly, his hands wrapping around my abdomen, pushing me into him. I was wrong he doesn’t smell sweet or sour. He smells like a nothing I can name.
Then—oh god—one of his hands draws back the curtain of my hair twisting it, capturing it. With the other, he trails a gentle path down my neck with his fingernail tracing a vein.
“Isabella.” He cajoles in a falsetto that lends an illusion of vulnerability. “Promise me you’ll do as I say. Forget about this nonsense.”
“I, no—”
The nail digs in. “What was that?”
I try to clench my fists, but my nerves are all cross-wired.
“Isabella.” He sing-songs over my skin, his lips dancing against the small invisible hairs on my neck. “Answer me.”
Then, he presses a single kiss to my neck.
It undoes me.
“Yes,” I whisper.
Instantly, assured of my compliance, he lets go. I fall to my knees, but he doesn’t offer me a hand up, just surveys me dispassionately.
“What the hell?” I ask when I finally get my voice back.
He looks at me silent, expressionless, but his eyes are just a bit wider. He’s also not acknowledging my swearing at him..
I bring my hands up to my neck. “Seriously? What was that?”
“I play to win; you will, too.”
I snort, hiding in the hole of sarcasm. “Not if you kill me first.”
His gaze roots me out.
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”
I guess I really have to play his game. I’m not going to kill the children, but he has to believe I will. Who knows what he’ll do if it seems like I’m not going along with his plans.
Still, I want to leave. So I do.
His hands remain at the table, his eyes don’t even meet mine, but the masculine weight of his voice stops me. “You do not leave until I dismiss you.”
I sigh. Fine. I can do rules. I had a training professor, Banner, who was this strict. Although he wasn’t half as beautiful—not even a quarter, really. I bend my knees to sit back down.
“The bugs are set to be fully functional in less than a minute. Once they are, you are never to mention any of this again. If you do I will claim that you are trying to weasel your way out of the competition by plotting treason. In the trial against you, I will argue passionately for your immediate death.”
My breath catches in my throat. How is it that I haven’t even entered the arena and I already feel like I’m fighting for my life?
“And, Isabella, make no mistake, I will win.”
And I had threatened him before about telling someone. He was right, I was naïve, no, even worse — I was foolish to think that I could ever have power in this game we were playing, ever be a step ahead of him. I don’t know why, but I almost feel choked with bitter tears at the thought of it.
I had actually thought he was stupid for trusting me, when the truth was there was never any way he could have been hurt by me. He doesn’t care about me. I’m just a tool. It was amazing how naïve I could be, even after years of training in manipulation. The only explanation was he had dazzled me somehow.
“Secondly—” he holds up two fingers, numbering his list “—my first goal is your survival. As I am better equipped to coach and teach you than anyone else, and you will follow my instructions explicitly. This starts with not complaining about whatever choices the stylist makes when you meet with her tomorrow.”
For the first time I see what appears a genuine smile over Edward’s face. It’s almost as disconcerting as his glare; it looks so out of place. “Esme may seem demure, but she is a better stylist than anyone, perhaps even better at her job than I am at mine.”
Fashion is perhaps my weakest area after stealth, but I don’t let Edward know this, partly because I’m sure he already does, and partly for a reason I don’t quite understand, I don’t want him to know how unstable I am in heels. “Fine.”
A thought occurs to me as I stare at the bugs, and then at the walls. Nothing has appeared to have grown or changed, but then again I hadn’t noticed the bugs in the first place. “Won’t this thing—”
“The Cloud Gate.” He corrects.
“Won’t it monitor that you killed the bugs; won’t it sense a gap in its records?”
He nods. “It will notice the gap, but with some rewiring and reconditioning of it’s nervous system I should be able to convince it that that it had an immune malfunction. Namely that its built in security systems accidentally pegged parts of its own body, if you will, as hostile.”
“Oh,” I say to the floor, not looking at him, not really comprehending, but tired of looking a feeling like an off balance idiot.
If it wasn’t totally crazy I would almost say that Edward’s expression softens a little, “This is a lot for you to take in, I understand, but—” In an instant, whatever gentleness there was in his expression disappears.
“But what?” I ask, baffled.
“But that’s a very charming pin you have there.” He gestures to the pin in my chest, and I can’t help but sigh.
That’s our agreed upon cue. The bugs are functional again. Hello, anonymous audience. I missed you.
I would be getting no more answers from Edward tonight. In fact, it was possible that he wouldn’t talk to me candidly again until the games were over. I realize the sinking feeling in my gut isn’t because I won’t be getting answers, but because some part of me liked the honesty of Edward, no matter how brutal it was. True honesty was something I hadn’t had a taste of in almost five years. I hadn’t realized how freeing it could be. It made my blood electric . . . or maybe that was something else?
No, it had to be the candidness.
“Thanks.” I fingered the two bulls horns, overlaid upon each other. “Emily, Jacob’s sister, gave it to me.”
He gives an almost genial smile. So he can be nice. “That was a very kind thing you did, volunteering for her, but I expect you wanted some of the glory, too.”
I look at him in confusion. “What?”
I am beginning to see hidden shadows in his smile, and I can’t help be almost be in equal parts fascinated and disturbed. “Stirb und werde.”
I don’t know what he just said— but I can guess. We had to do a unit on codes; was it possible that this was just a formulated code? If S=1— no. No, the answer was simpler somehow. Maybe the words were modifications of English sounds.
Does this hold the answer to the mysterious “cause”?
Unfortunately, the best I can come up with is, “Wearing the stirrup?”
I didn’t think it was possible to surprise Edward more than a quirked eyebrow, but he bursts into laughter. Something catches in me, like my heart is velcro and his laugh has a thousand little hooks to latch right onto it.
I glare. Partially because I am angry at him for making fun of me, partially because I’m angry at myself for smiling at his laugh.
His chuckles soothe and his grin compresses to a smile. “You know what it means; you’ve seen it plastered across every surface of District 2.”
“Your vitality is your greatest asset?”
The memory of the smile lingers on his lower lip, even as his upper lip falls. “Try a bit more topical to our current situation.”
Not for the first time, I think it is convenient Edward cannot read my mind, because I think loudly: I have the most treasonous, arrogant, asshole of a Mentor on the history of the planet. Childish, I know, but I can’t help but regress under the pressure.
“I give up,” I say instead.
The smile is gone now entirely, leaving only boredom and disappointment. Except his eyes, his eyes still watch me with unnerving patience. “It’s late and we’ve had a long conversation, but if this is the kind of effort you’re going to put into training, then Tanya was right, I do have my work cut out for me.
“Die and become.” I blurt out. “The slogan for the Morphing Games.” The words and syllable numbers map out better than anything else I can think of.
“And what does this mean?” he asks, reminding me of the times a teacher would try to have us figure out new weapon hold on our own.
I can’t help but roll my eyes. This is what we learn in first-year: the symbolism, the history. Why is Edward making me repeat it now when I could be in a nice comfortable bed, forgetting all about causes and atonement, running back to my old friend denial. “Only through the power of death, can we be transformed into a vampire, only through morphing, metamorphosis, can we grow.”
“A caterpillar dies to become a butterfly, a snake sheds its skin. Growth is loss at its heart, but Humans only die once.”
On the surface I could take it to be a comment for me to stay alive, but I know there’s a deeper meaning here. “But vampires never die, never change,” I say slowly.
For the second time, Edward smiles at me. It’s utterly devastating and he knows it. I’ll have to keep myself aware of the fact that it seems Edward will use every weapon in his arsenal to bend me to his “cause.” Certainly, his beauty is one of them.
“Anything can change with enough pressure and force, even vampires. Throw lame old graphite into the fiery furnace of the deep, dark mantle of the earth and what do you get—”
His face is illuminated by starlight as he speaks. I hadn’t realized it until now, now the outside wall of his suite is completely coated with constellations. They cast thousands of glimmering dots over Edward’s face. He’s sparkling like . . .
“Diamonds,” I say.
He gives me a pensive look. “I know you’re tired, Isabella, but if you could stay for just one moment more.”
I’m about to grumble and ask why. I am tired of riddles and cross-examinations. I just want to sleep. Forever maybe. Just as I open my mouth to say so, I notice something: a burst of red at my feet.
I look down.
“There it is,” he says, as if he had been holding his breath, waiting for something, but of course, he hadn’t. As a vampire he has no reason to breathe.
“What is it?” I look at the dot. It’s growing bigger and bigger.
“Just watch,” he says, reverently.
As the light grows it fractures, and while most of the off-shoots are red some are white. It divides and divides until the whole floor is covered with patterns of light, patterns that look almost like a city.
Then, the lights burst into shapes below us, towers, spires and long illuminated neon ropes of streets looping between and around every surface, with cars zipping through them at unimaginable speeds. Soon the shapes and shadows grow from the floor onto the walls.
It isn’t like a city— it is one, and we are plummeting right into it.
“Welcome to Volterra, Isabella.”
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inCheck out my new story (updated daily/drabblefic)
Blessed Are the Forgetful » reviews
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inCheck out the two new videos for the Morphing Games
a new trailer
and a music video
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
inOkay so a lot of new characters/things here.
First the real star of this chapter– the Bean! aka The Cloud Gate, which is basically the bean from Chicago, but flying!
In blimp form, like the Hindenberg:
But also like being inside a shadow puppet show:
And here are pictures of the prospectives:
Aston Martin and Vovlina Doublyuu
(Obviously a nod to the cars the cullens drive.)
I picture them as having this hair:
But
looking like this:
Volvina: (20)
Aston: (20)
District 10
Mike Newton(18)
And Jessica Stanely (18)
District 3
Alice Brandon (17)
Ashley Green never looked delicate enough for me
Eric Yorkie (13)
District 7
Victoria (15)
District 6
Renesmee (12)
District 8
Angela Weber
(14)
12 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[8]
Pinpricks of black swim in front my eyes, so close that if I try to focus on them my head hurts. It’s not until my vision un-blurs that I realize exactly what has woken me up. (Isn’t it funny how the narrative staple of waking up becomes a bookend for chapters. Such an antique device.)
Light and color. All the walls are back-lit, and what I thought was a dark-silver color, actually turns out to be made of fierce oranges and pale yellows. As I slip out of the bed, still clothed in the now rumpled beyond repair polka-dot dress, I realize that it’s not the walls that have changed color; it’s the sky. The walls are transparent. (Like she’s travelling in a giant lantern)
The lights must be coming from the sky. We are inside the sunset, a boat riding on air, swimming through pure color. Blurry shadows drift lazily across the walls— clouds.
It takes my breath away, but not for long, I can’t afford to be distracted by beauty here. The thought of beauty drags my eye to the dresser. I’ve never been one for nice clothes, mostly because in training school, ability was more important than appearance.
More important, but not useless. Last year, Rosalie won most of her sponsors because of her beauty. In training school we were taught to have a strategy and I was never pretty enough to use beauty as mine. I leave the room naked. I wonder what Edward would think if I did. The thought brings a blush to my cheeks and I don’t know why.
He’s a monster. Why should I care what he thinks about my body? But then again, am I really any less of a monster than him?
I fold the blue dress away underneath the bed carefully, worried that while I’m gone someone will take it. Then I filter through a litany of gaudy dresses and some seriously scandalous lingerie before settling on training clothes.
Just as I finish pulling on the black pants and tank top, the door opens.
“Edward?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from shaking. Usually, I wouldn’t be modest. For our sixth-year training exercise they left us in the woods nakedm and we had to find our way out, but somehow the idea of Edward seeing me naked makes my heart beat almost as fast as when I worry about the Morphing Games.
But it’s not Edward or Jasper or even Rosalie.
“Surprise!” chirps a very feminine voice. “C’est moi!” (Originally there was a long bit in here about Tanya speaking german and how Bella wasn’t supposed to know about other countries. But I cut it. Because french is so much better. And I already have too many world-building details to keep straight.)
“Tanya?” I ask.
Every part of me tenses up, ready to fight, but it’s pointless. Even as I watch her stomach muscles— she’s changed into a sparkling cut-off top with shorts the size of some of the lingerie in my closet—I know that I won’t be able to win. She could kill me before I’d even register it.
“Ugh, you look like you’re ready to beat me up.” She pouts.
I relax my posture. “What are you doing here?”
She gives me a look as if I am a class A idiot. “I’m here to bring you for dinner, Jasper is up on the viewing deck eating. Come on.” She looks me up and down and gives a put upon sigh. “Unlike you, he took advantage of his wardrobe. Nice black suit, red tie.” She begins to walk down the corridor clapping her hands above her head, closing the door as I scurry out of it. “He’s cute, don’t you think?”
“He’s my competitor.”
Her fangs glimmer as she smiles. “All the better.”
I jog to catch up to her. “I thought you were going to visit District 12?”
“Nosy aren’t you, little human.”
I successfully fight the desire to punch her in the face, knowing if I did I’d probably only get a broken hand out of it—or worse. (Forshadowing, forshadowing, forshadowing.)
“Where’s Edward, he said I was supposed to meet with him.” His instructions had been explicit, and although he had decided not to kill me, it would be prudent not to push my luck.
Tanya sighs even louder, tossing her head of blonde curls. “Probably in his room, reading or composing. I’m sure he’s forgotten all about wanting to meet with you. He has a tendency to disappear for long periods of time. You know how men are.”
I don’t, though. Jacob was always the talkative one, and I don’t know if he is a man, let alone my man. Tanya certainly seems to think Edward is hers though, but it had been him that had reminded her to leave to go to District 12, and he had only kissed her on the cheek.
We turn the corner, my feet hitting the ground just after her heels. “Does Edward know you’re here?”
“Oh, no. I’m giving him a good, old-fashioned surprise.” She winks.
I have a feeling that Edward isn’t the kind of vampire who likes surprises, but it could be I’m just projecting. In my ninth year, I was so involved in figuring out different combinations of tinctures and powders for timed explosives that I came home late almost every day. One day when I came home the house was dark, and even after I called out for my parents or Ben, no one answered. We were being burglarized—I was sure of it. When the lights flicked and a crowd yelled surprise, with Rosalie standing next to the cake smirking and all my family gathered, my first thought was to dive towards the cake searching for a bomb. I tore off the top of the cake and dug through the interior, but came up only with handfuls of frosting. (Bella has serious PTSD and she hasn’t even seen the horrors yet to come.)
“So it’s just me, you, Jasper and Rosalie then?”
“Rosalie is also hiding out in her room. You’d think she’d at least want to talk to her brother, but I guess her bitchiness applies even to family members.” Tanya leans towards me and says in a stage-whisper, “I think she’s bitter because she’s ugly, frankly.”
Why is Rosalie hiding from her brother??
I restrain myself from rolling my eyes. If anything, it’s the other way around, but I file away Tanya’s jealousy of Rosalie. Maybe I can use it later.
In front of me a door opens and soft rays of pink and orange, more muted than before, pour through.
I step through the threshold and into the observation deck, a room constructed entirely of glass. What had been colorful shadows are made clear by the transparent walls. Wisps of clouds, like bolts of moth-bitten silk, dance and turn in the sea of warm light. The only thing more beautiful than the sky is the reflection of it in the exterior of the balloon. I hadn’t noticed it before. The balloon isn’t perfectly oblong, but arcs upward from the bottom, almost like a bean. (You know the Bean from Chicago. I really liked the idea of having it be the mode of transportation for District 2, since District 2 is Chicago.) All the reflections of clouds are twisted and distorted. If that weren’t enough, the Zepplin is also glowing oddly, the distortion of the glass sending strange loops of light out into the ether.
We must have walked upward through the balloon, because I can see down the side of it in every direction. This must also be another miracle of vampire engineering, because I hadn’t felt any incline on the way up.
Tethered to a pole outiside is what looks like a motorcycle. That must be how Tanya reached us mid-flight.
In the middle of the room, or rather, deck, is a long table, set with every kind of food imaginable. Real food, not blood bars. At the end of the table sits Jasper, his hair tied up, exposing every plane of his face. He’s handsome, but the real grandeur is outside and no lavish table settings will convince me otherwise.
“Jasper, darling, Bella and I shall join you for dinner, yes?” asks Tanya, her voice taking a more sophisticated Volterran accent than it had with me. I have to stifle a smirk. A-thousand-year-old vampire, trying to impress a sixteen-year-old boy? Ridiculous.
Jasper gives an easy smile. “Plenty here for everyone, darling.” His eyes catch mine. I’m surprised by how cold they are. I feel caught on it like a tongue on an ice-cube.
He rips his gaze from me and toward Tanya. “I didn’t fancy you for the salad type.”
She licks her lips. Woah. Tanya Denali is trying to do a little more than charm Jasper Hale. If the smirk on his face is anything to go by, he is open to manipulating her, and he is much better at it than I am.
“No, but I have a good vintage here, a good year 2080,” Tanya says, pointing to a small container of blood, kept refrigerated in a mini-cooler. She pulls out the bottle and shakes it, redistributing the platelets.
I can’t help but watch, fascinated and horrified in equal measure. She’s going to drink blood—human blood. For all I know it could be my blood in that bottle. I plop into one of the chairs, all thought of the luscious food on the table gone.
Jasper is impassive at horror around him. He’s the perfect Prospective. “Is that from District 7? I hear that blood has a nice note of maple, but obviously—” he grins, “—I don’t speak from experience.”
Tanya sips the blood and gives a little sigh. “Yes, it does. Quite pleasant. Funny for you to know that.”
“My mother works in a Blood Bank; it is her job to know such things.”
My mother used to work in a Blood Bank. His mother must have gotten her job just like he had gotten everything else from my life. This could have been my brother, sophisticated, able to hold his own with a vampire. Instead, my brother is blind.
But he has something on Jasper: he’s alive, and going to stay that way. For all his sophistication, I can’t say that about Hale.
(This is a question we must ask ourselves. Do the wealthy really have it better in this society.)
“You know,” says Tanya, her gaze darkening . . . “you should be grateful for Edward, Jasper. Even if he’s not your mentor.”
“And why is that?” he asks, as if he’s indulging her, when the truth is the entire existence of humanity is entirely dependent on the whims of vampires.
“Because he invented the chemical agent that suppresses my blood lust and keeps me from tearing you apart.” She takes another sip of blood from her glass, her eyes never leaving his. “I’d imagine you’d taste delicious.”
I know my heart accelerates; I can feel it pounding in my chest in a frenzied polka of fear. (Danse Macabre anyone.) Oom-pah.Oom-pah.
Jasper blinks once, and then gives a slow grin. “I’d imagine I would . . . darling.”(I like playing with Jasper’s tendancy(cliche) of calling people Darling, and making it more sinister.)
I stand up. I do not want to be around to see Jasper get disemboweled, or possibly other things, but I’m hungry enough that I grab a bowl of a creamy looking soup and a whole loaf of bread to take with me, which draws Jasper’s attention.
“Going so soon, Bella?” asks Jasper.
“Going to read up on strategy.” This is a lie, but the moment I say it, I realize it’s not a bad idea. If I’m going to try and figure out a way to keep other people, the kids, alive and not just myself, I’m going to have to know the Games backwards and forwards.
“And what’s your strategy? Going the route of beauty?” he asks. (He actually was trying to be charming, not mean. But of course Bella doesn’t see herself as pretty.)
I’m not quite sure if he’s trying to be charming, but it comes off rude. I’m not beautiful.
I wish I could tell him the truth, throw in his face that I am going to be saving people, sacrificing myself. But I know that my plan of saving the kids is controversial at best, and treasonous at worst, so I say instead, “I’m going the route of staying alive.”
Tanya rolls her eyes.
“Sounds like you do need to read up on your strategy books then. Everyone knows the game’s won by preemptive warfare, alliances, violence. Hiding out in the woods just leads to death by starvation—” Jasper smirks “—or worse.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I say.
“No, you won’t,” a voice whispers in my ear.
I whirl and to my utter humiliation grab at thin air, almost stumbling in the process. Thankfully, no one else notices it because Tanya has stolen all the attention.
“Edward!” She cries, flinging herself into his arms in a blur of sequins and giggles.
Edward stands about six feet away from me, by the door. Damn, vampires are fast. It just isn’t fair.
Edward transforms the hug into a kiss on the cheek. “I was under the impression that you were in District 12.”
“I got bored.”
“How unfortunate,” he says coldly.
“Yes, for them.” She waltzes over to the table, picks up her wine glass and takes a sip. “I don’t know how they shall survive without me.”
Her lips are stained red with blood, and as she tilt her head back to laugh I see dabs of blood, viscous and dark, staining her fangs, too. “Oh, that’s right! They won’t!”
No one laughs, not even Jasper, but even he’s probably only silent because the joke’s not funny, not because he has some problem with sending starving children off to die.
“Tanya, Isabella and I have Morphing Game business to discuss.” Adroitly,(My fav fanfic writer uses this word like it’s going out of style and I’ve picked up the tick.) he plucks the soup and baguette out of my hands. I turn to look at him, my lips parting slightly.
He raises an eyebrow at my appraisal. I quickly screw my lips together in a scowl.
“Bella hasn’t had anything to eat yet today, darling, why don’t you all stay?” She raises her wine-glass in a salute. “The vintage is delicious!”
“Isabella will be dining with me in my suite. The food may be slightly cold because of her tardiness.” His red eyes find me harshly, and I wince from the force of it. “But for her training it’s important to maintain a strict diet.” (Lol liarward. He just wants to get Bella alone.)
If strict diet means blood bars, I think I will revolt. I can almost taste the crunchy shell of the bread and the fluffy, buttery interior. I haven’t had real food in so very long, but I will not beg.
“You didn’t tell me where your room was,” I say, my eyes still caressing each contour of the leg of turkey slathered in gravy, half eaten on Jasper’s plate.
“If you want to have this discussion, and I guarantee you don’t, we’ll have it in private,” Edward whispers. But this time, he doesn’t move away, so instead brings a cold hand to touch the edge of my shoulder blade, herding me toward him.
A lamb towards the slaughter.
“Fine,” I hiss back.
“Edward, you aren’t going to let a human talk to you like that are you?” Tanya asks indignantly.
I shouldn’t have underestimated the power of her jealousy, especially now that it’s turned on me. I hate that I’m so physically underpowered here. If she wants to kill me there’s nothing I can do.
“She’s not a human anymore, neither of us are,” says Jasper. (Key insight to Jasper with this line. This is how he’s going to get through the games by dehumanizing himself and those around him.)
Everyone, Edward included, turns to look at Jasper Hale. He raises an eyebrow at the sudden attention, as if he hadn’t just said something patently false.
In his hand, he holds a glass of blood he must have poured for himself. Is he going to drink it? That is sick! “We’re Prospectives; soon we’ll either be dead or immortal. Under Volturi law that makes us not human.” The pride with which he speaks sounds just like those kids in the propaganda videos.
“I’m human,” I retort.
Jasper scoffs.
“I’m human, and I’m proud of it.” I elaborate.
look to see if this makes Edward mad, because I don’t care about Tanya. If Edward, a man who calls the Game Master by his first name, won’t kill me for treasonous thoughts, than how can Tanya hurt me?
My bravado calms Tanya, maybe because she thinks I’m crazy. The crazies usually die right after the weaklings in the arena. No reason to be mad at a dead girl.
“You have your work cut out for you, Edward.” She sneers.
Edward, for his part, says nothing. Again his hand reaches out to the small of my back. I feel like a puppet, every touch a tug on my string— a manipulation.
The only sound is the subtle squeak of the floor bending as we walk through darkened corridors towards his room.
He remains silent even as he claps the door open and escorts me to a small table. Thankfully, my plate is full of pasta, laden with a thick red sauce.(Port Angeles reference anyone.) This is a good sign: pasta means carbs. Carbs mean he’s going to give me a solid work out. He’s taking this seriously.
I look up at him questioningly. I really want to eat, but he’s already spared my life numerous times so maybe it’s not wise to piss him off further.
“Eat, Isabella.”
I dig into the pasta shoveling forkful upon forkful into my mouth. My lips end up smeared with the sauce, in a human parody of Tanya’s blood stained ones. What would life be like if spaghetti could talk and think? Would we corral noodles up in cities and eat the disobedient. The thought makes me laugh a little hysterical giggle. (Dark humor folks.)
God, am I going insane? If I’m going to be dead soon, I’d at least like to be myself for the time I have left. I take deep breaths to clean the choked laughter from my lungs.
“May I ask what’s so amusing?” Edward said. For the first time he looks almost sincere Like he could almost be my friend. But there’s a puzzle piece missing.
“Don’t you know?” I frown.
He leans forward. “No, I don’t.”
“But you said you could read thoughts?” Maybe he doesn’t want to immerse himself in my mind. I wouldn’t blame him; sometimes I just want to get out of my mind too.
“Usually.”
I set down my fork with a clink. “Usually?”
“Never mind, we have more pressing matters to discuss than your internal monologue.” He’s back to his commanding self, and before I can ask him what exactly he means by “usually” he takes out a screen much like the vid-screen in my room, but smaller. With a simple touch of his finger it explodes into life, with a logo of a red V. Volterra-tech. Definitely won’t be keeping a diary on this baby.
“This tablet has a list of information you need to give me about your strengths and weaknesses in the arena. You volunteered, so I assume you trained through level 15.”
The logo disappears and the screen is filled with thirty or so pictures of weapons. Maces, clubs, axes, bows, darts, swords, knives, daggers and staves.
“I stopped at level 10,” I say, praying he won’t ask me why. Even if he can’t read my thoughts, he’ll surely be able to read my face.
He frowns, but moves his finger across the screen again, showing generic figures performing various skills. “Just write it in the report.”
At first the symbols are simple and easy to understand, but eventually they become abstract: a picture of the sun, an image of a man baring his teeth, a series of numbers. Since when would I have to solve a math problem in the arena?
I look up at him, and am startled to find his eyes boring into mine, exactly like I am some kind of math problem he’s trying to solve. Can he not read my thoughts? That must have been what he was saying earlier.
I expect him to make a remark on that, but instead he says something that knocks the wind out of me. “Are you mated?”
(AAH Cliffhanger!)
05 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[7]
Outside, the air is still coated with the stale mist of yesterday. We’ve managed to miss most of the crowds by ducking out the poor man’s entrance, but at least two hundred people clamor toward us through the fog.
After the people follow the cameras, hovering in the air, their large lens-faces trained squarely on Jasper and me. ( I love the camera’s they’ll keep showing up.)
Muffled by the moisture, girls, raggedy and rich alike, scream, “Hale dynasty! Hale dynasty! Hail to the Hales!”
I look straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I can see Jasper smiling, stopping occasionally to shake hands. Startlingly enough, people seem to ignore his sister, the one who actually won. Maybe it’s because she’s distant from them, unreadable.
How does he have the energy, the will? I’m trying my best not to just . . . stop. The only the way to keep up my energy is to distance myself from the ever growing mob, but he seems to thrive on the crowd. He will have no problem winning sponsors.
Yet, I’m not totally alone.
Once, I think I hear a voice suspiciously like Greasy Ol Sae’s yell, “Now you have a reason to break someone’s arm.”
A chorus starts from somewhere. “Swan! Swan!” Jacob, Leah, even Emily on Jacob’s shoulders, all pump their fists. I swallow my disappointment at the fact that I don’t see Charlie or Ben anywhere.
Finally, we push out to a door in the marble wall. I remember when I was little, thinking it was some kind of tomb. As I got older, I was sure it was just a glamorized supply closet. In truth, it leads to a small tunnel. I expect it to be like the sewers, but it’s clean, made of marble. We walk for a minute and then come across a square platform hanging over a metal track.
A soft whirring sound comes from the dot of light in the distance, where the tunnel ends. As we are encouraged up the stairs by Tanya, the sound gets louder. By the time we are all standing on the platform, a metal sphere, large enough to fit four people, has arrived. I cock my head, looking at it. I don’t see any bolts or lines where the steel is joined together.
Tanya smirks at our questioning looks. “Vampire technology. We usually don’t let you humans see the real goods. Your brains wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. ” She looks less stunning up close than from far away. I can almost see a wrinkle on her forehead. The transformation is supposed to eliminate all but the most severe signs of aging. She must have been turned when she was very old. (I like the idea of Tanya being simultaneously a cougar trying to stay young for eternity.)
“Tanya, I believe this is where we part ways,” Edward says.
She moves to him, pouting, and tugs on the shiny sleeve of his black suit. It’s an odd contrast; her made up face and the childishness of the motion. “Darling, I could always join you in the Zeppelin. Just like old times.”
He removes her hands and kisses her lightly on the cheek, so quick I almost don’t see it. “I think you have other Districts to see to.”
“I only have District 12 left. Everyone knows their story anyways; two sad, emaciated humans going off to die. Boo hoo.” (Hello! Hunger Games reference.) She looks up at Edward for approval.
I have to force myself not to spit in Tanya’s crimson eyes. We are people. She can’t just joke about us dying. Except, I can’t stop her, so I guess she can.
“We all must make sacrifices,” Edward says coldly, his eyes flitting towards mine.
He knows about my thoughts. And he’s going to do what? Sacrifice me? Kill me? But his gaze doesn’t seem angry as they catch mine. So maybe he’s going to hurt me for my thoughts.
Her eyes narrow. “Well, ta-ta for now then,” Tanya says, before giving a jaunty little wave and disappearing.
With an economical gesture of the hand, Edward commands the three of us towards the sphere.
Edward and I get in on one side and Jasper and Rosalie on the other. Immediately after we enter, the carriage lurches into motion. As I’m thrown back from the lurch, I can’t help but meet Rosalie’s eyes across from me. I know that she’s powerful now, that she could destroy me with just a thought, but I don’t care. I scowl at her for all I’m worth.
“What?” she says, as if she actually has no clue why I’m staring at her. Although she glares right back despite her confusion. This isn’t surprising. Glaring was always Rosalie Hale’s default expression.
Maybe she’s forgotten. Maybe she doesn’t remember what she did to me, who I am. The process of being a vampire dulls human memories, all but the most important.
I’d think informing on your best friend’s mother would be an important memory, but it’s possible I’m wrong. It’s possible that Rosalie Hale doesn’t remember how she ruined my life.
I invited her to my mother’s birthday party, because she was my best friend. For all the beatings she gave me (and I beat her up a few times just as good), she wasn’t a bad friend. She terrorized anyone who teased me about my inability to shoot a bow, and when Garrett, an eleventh year I had a crush on, ended up going out with Kate, Rosalie told everyone that he had gotten a 2 on his last sparring quiz.
After she came to the party and heard my mother sing the song about flowers, she told someone. (A song loosly based on where have all the flowers gone. The idea of flowers and stories and songs will play a large role in this story.) Maybe her parents, maybe a teacher, maybe she wrote a letter to the President himself, I don’t know.
I know it was her, because she didn’t speak to me all day in training-school, and when I got to my house after staying late for afterschool, everything was wrong.
Everything I owned, not the expensive stuff, but the important things: photos, recipes, clothes, the jar we used to keep the moths we caught in summer, the preserves of jams, lay strewn across the yard. There caught on the branches of the little tree out in front dangled the dress my mother had worn only yesterday.
Our other things were hidden in the grass, toy trucks, chipped coffee-mugs, pictures, picture-books with the pages torn out fluttering lamely the clipped-wings of a dying bird.
“What are you doing here?” said someone behind me.
I whirled to see Rosalie. She looked as confused as I felt, but instead of staring at the wreckage outside of my house, she was staring at me. Like I was the anomaly.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, cold as if she was talking to a first year that had tried to get too friendly.
“Rose?” Her nickname sounded wrong the moment I said it. Even though everything was a mess she looked almost sterile standing there. Sterile and formal.
“You should be at your home,” she mumbled.
Rosalie never mumbled. Her whole strategy was beauty and charisma.
The world was upside down.
“This is my home.” I said, my voice rising in confusion and anger.
“Not anymore,” she said bitterly.
Coldness seeped into me. “What?”
She just stood there, silent and beautiful. Like it was just part of her strategy—to seem invulnerable.
“Why is all my stuff on the lawn?” I repeated, louder.
A light breeze picked up, stealing between the strands of her shiny, straight, blond hair, animating it.
“Rose! Seriously, this is a shitty joke, even for you.”
She tried to step away from me, but I couldn’t just let her go. She knew something about why everything was so wrong, and she wasn’t telling me. She was supposed to be my friend.
Using my back foot, I propelled myself forward. She hit the ground with a thud and I followed soon after, but she shouldn’t have gone down so easy.
She let me push her back into the dirt, not moving to break my hold. “If this your house, why isn’t your father stopping us?”
“Rose, what’s your pro—”
Finally she turned to look at me again, but her gaze wasn’t just cold, it was glacial. “Why isn’t your mother here?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled. I was just about thrust my fist into the side of her jaw with all my might, because I didn’t know what else to do, when I heard the thump of heavy boots.
Peacekeeper boots. I turned around, expecting my father, my strong, stoic father. He wouldn’t tolerate people doing things like this to his family, his house.
But when I turned, it wasn’t just father’s face that greeted me, just an anonymous Peacekeeper. And there, behind him, was my brother. ((There is more to this story. Did Rosalie really betray them? Read on to find out.))
Ben didn’t even look worried. He always looked awkward and frightened before my mom died, but that day his back was straight and his gaze flinty and strong. Holding his hand, looking so lost, like a child, like an animal, was my father, the strongest man I ever knew— broken.
“Charles, Benjamin, and Isabella Swan, you are hereby relocated to grey-level,” said the Peacekeeper.
“What?” I asked, choked.
Rosalie looked away. I don’t know if she was ashamed or just couldn’t see my face as I looked at my brother.
In his hand, my brother held up the letter.
Embossed on it was a blood red-seal and the words, in flowing red, script, “The Empire appreciates your contribution.”
Rosalie was the reason my mother was dead.
Abruptly, the pod is filled with the pink light of breaking dawn. The tunnel has ended. I hadn’t noticed in the darkness, but the hull of the pod is semi-transparent, a cross between steel and glass.
I press my cheeks to the cold wall-window and look at outside. It’s a blur, but I’m able to see things that are far enough away, like the craggy shoreline and the tall tree surrounded by gravestones, crowding like children around a teacher eager to hear a story. The fog is gone now, migrated somewhere else; soon I will have too.
The countryside morphs from the half-wild ruins of suburbia to long stretches of deserted fields. Then even those are swallowed up by rag-tag bands of trees. ( I have a minor obsession with trees ever since reading the line the trees rioted on the Earth in Heart of Darkness by Joeseph Conrad.)
All the Morphing Game Prospectives go the capitol, Volterra, for the opening ceremony, but I don’t know how far away it is. Rumor has that it’s located on the East Coast, in the North near a waterfall so tall and fierce that if you tried to swim underneath it, you’d drown. The oceans swallowed up most of the eastern seaboard, so Volterra is now a coastal town too. (Aka niagra falls.)
Gradually, so gradually that at first it’s almost imperceptible, the pod begins to slow, until it stops right on the edge of a field of rust-colored stalks of wheat. ( A nod to the later persephone reference.) But as I exit the pod, I don’t notice the way the trees here are so much brighter than the dying ones near the lake, or how bitingly fresh the air is.
All I can focus on is the thing resting on the grain.
It looks a lot like the pod, but much, much larger, and warped slightly, like the back a spoon, taking in light, color and distorting it.
If Ben were here his jaw would drop. He loved big, moving things when he was little.
“I’ve heard it said that traveling in it is like riding in the clouds,” Edward breathes against my ear.
I jump a little, bumping into his chest, and I can swear he rumbles with inaudible mirth before I step away from him.
“Others say it’s like dissolving into the ether. Some consider it a spiritual experience.”
I root my feet into the ground. If I turn around I’ll know exactly how close he is, and I can’t know that. Just the possibility that he is as close as he is, is doing frightening things to my stomach.
I briefly contemplate running off into the field. But there’s no cover to hide in, and even if was he would have no problem catching me. My face would be reflected in the surface of the zeppelin—it catches every scrap of light.
“And what do you think?” I ask I can almost feel him, even though he’s not touching me. Just a few more millimeters and I will be able feel his muscles explicitly.
He waits so long to speak that finally I pivot, expecting to see him right behind me. Instead he’s leaning indolently against the bottom of the balloon, gazing at his reflection with mocking curiosity. “I think that four black horses and a chariot would be more appropriate.” (Obviously he sees himself as Hades stealing away Persephone to hell. I have a penchent for this myth and yes it’s overused as hell in the romance genre, but who cares. here hell def has a super dark connotation, perhaps relating directly to death.)
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
He’s not making any sense, and he has to know that he’s not. He’s playing with his food. I can’t help but turn towards the grain-edged horizon and step toward it. But before I can take another step, he is standing right in front of me.
“Sorry, Persephone,” he says soft as the wind brushing against the top of the stalks. “No running away.
I move to the side, but he grabs my wrist, not hard, but tightly enough I know I won’t be able to get out. The tips of his fingernails graze the inside of my wrists right over the branching tributaries of my veins.
My heart beats so loudly I can hear it.
Immediately, he drops my hand and stills, like he’s been flushed out of hiding. Yet I am the one being hunted.
Then as if he hadn’t just started, he gestures upward to the sky. “Unfortunately, black horses or not, we have places to be, and the Cloud Gate (The cloud gate is actually a cross between the Hindenberg, the Bean and a Japanese Lantern– see visual appendix for more.) waits for no man or beast.”
It’s almost like he’s speaking another language, a beautiful one, but one I don’t understand all the same.
I tip my head back, my hair falling slightly out of the twist, tickling the back of my neck, as I see my own face, contorted and enlarged in the mirror-balloon. “Cloud Gate?”
He smiles, eyes slightly hooded. “It’s the name of the zeppelin. Do try to keep up, Isa-”
“My name’s not Persephone or Isabella. It’s Bella.” It’s a long shot, but maybe if he sees me as a person and not just as a name from a slip of paper, he’ll decide not to kill me for my thoughts.
“Come, Isabella,” is all he says in reply.
So much for my strategy.
Despite the command he doesn’t move, his hand remains immobile saluting the giant zeppelin.
Then I see why.
In response to his motion, unfolding from the belly of the balloon and down to the ground is a long arm of stairs. It contorts and unfurls, each tread popping out like a finger out of a fist.
Before it is even down to the ground, Edward jumps onto it, and once the jump is manageable, I follow. The ladder shakes slightly as we walk up it, and I realize that it’s lifting up off of the ground.
Finally, the name makes sense because of the movement and reflection the upper edge of it seems to be made of sky and the lower half earth. It really is a gate to the clouds.
Edward closes the hatch behind me, and I’m left looking at a long hallway. “Take off your shoes,” he commands, a blur as he slips out of his brown loaders
I bend down to try and try to untie my laces, but by fingers are trembling too much to pick open the knot. Is he going to kill me now?
I look up to Edward whose expression is unreadable as ever. He leans forward, and I flinch. Now. He’s going to do it now. Break my neck. It would be so easy.
But the blow never comes. Instead, he bends over, and in seconds my shoes are off. I shiver at the feeling of his cold hands through my threadbare socks.
“I did ask you to keep up, didn’t I?” is all he says for explanation before setting off at a brisk walk.
I have to jog to keep up as we make a few turns along the long corridor. As I run, I discover why he wanted me to take off my shoes. The floor bends. There’s no other way to describe it. It doesn’t bend much with each step, not enough to be alarming, but ever so slightly.
“Is this some kind of glass balloon?” I joke. I have to joke; the only other option is fainting from the fear that at any moment Edward is going to rip me apart for my treasonous thoughts.
But now in such a tight space, the truth of my situation becomes clear. I am trapped.
Edward makes a sound that must be a laugh, but it seems more like a cough. Humor never was my strong suit, but I seem to amuse him a little at least. Maybe he won’t rip me limb from limb.
“A glass balloon,” he says. “If Marcus heard you call his precious Cloud Gate a balloon.”
Before I can reply, he points to a door. “Look.”
I can’t help but stare at his hands pointing; they are large but his fingers are still tapered and long.
I look at him blankly. The door isn’t opening.
He could have killed me in the field, but maybe he wanted to wait until I had let down my guard. Didn’t want a scream to disturb the other Prospective.
But I can’t take it anymore, the waiting.
“Just get it over with.” I blurt out.
His eyes narrow, “Get what over with?”
He was going to make me say it out loud? Fine. “Just kill me.”
He chuckles that same low laughter that makes me prickle in a way I’ve never felt before.
He leans over slightly, so that we are eye to eye. “Why would I kill you, Isabella?”
It’s hard to think when he says my name like that. “B-because you heard my thoughts.”
“Did I?” He moves closer until his cold breath tickles the tip of my nose.
I square my jaw. I will not die afraid. “Tanya said that you could read thoughts.”
He smiles and I can see every tooth, even the fangs. “I can.”
“So?” I will not close my eyes. I will look my killer in the face, make him realize what he’s killing is alive, is a person.
“Silly girl, I’m not going to kill you.” He admonishes, and to my great surprise brings out a finger to touch my face. Stroking it. Something in me clenches. “Even if I could read your thoughts, I wouldn’t care whatever heretical thoughts you have.”
“Y-you don’t?” It is so unfair. My mom died for one little song. And Edward must have heard my every explicit hatred of vampires, and he’s going to do nothing. Why do I deserve this? I almost feel disappointed.
His hand is at the underside of my chin now, and goose bumps have emerged from my skin like buds from the dirt.
“Not an iota,” he says so fiercely, the words seem like they’ll combust.
His hand leaves my face. Involuntarily, I lean forward.
His eyes darken, but he raises a hand over his head and snaps his finger, behind him the door opens.
Watching his fingers press together like that, so fast and hard, makes me blush. “Is that your power too?” I ask, and it comes out oddly breathless.
Edward chuckles, raising an eyebrow. “No, the door is just the magic of vampire engineering and electronics.”
I move away from him cautiously, still not sure that he isn’t going to come from behind me and snap my neck.
“I’m not quite finished with you yet, Isabella.” All mirth is gone from his voice. (If she only knew how unfinished he was with her.)
I stop suddenly, all of the hairs on the back of my neck raising. “Yes?”
His expression turns sharp and serious “Dinner’s at eight. Do not be late; you and I have things to discuss. You may do whatever you please until then. There are clothes in the closet, and breakfast on the bed. The reaping should be on the vid-screen. I strongly encourage you to watch your competition.”
‘Thanks,” I say, the thought of food pushing away my fear of Edward. Will it be real food and not the blood flavor bars? Maybe it will be hot and steaming. Saliva floods my mouth at the thought, and I find myself scrambling through the doorway.
Once through, I turn around and give a slow clap, not sure exactly how this will close it, but the door swings shut in spite of my hesitation. This seems silly to me. If you can move at super-speed, with super strength, how are you too lazy to open a door?
The room in front of me isn’t grandiose like the Blood Bank, but looks rich in a different way. Every surface, except for the bed, desk, and a few chests of drawers, is made of a smooth malleable material; the same material making up the mirror-balloon, as I’ve dubbed it, and the floor. The ceiling appears to be slightly convex, as if it’s a canopy. On the right wall is a small screen, and as Tanya said, it’s playing re-runs of the Reapings. I’ll need to watch that soon to understand my competition.
But first I am drawn to the plate of food lying on a tray on my bed. There’s a tall glass of some pink liquid I’ve never seen before, as well as plate of toast and waffles. The toast is coated with a thin white and yellow film of eggs. Circling the perimeter of the plate are lines of strawberry’s cut into quarters. The artfulness of the display lasts approximately two seconds before it is in my mouth.
As I scarf down the food, I watch the Reapings. What I see causes me to slow my pace of consumption, and eventually push the plate aside all together. For all the luxury, I had almost forgotten the price I had paid, what was to come. The recaps of the Reapings remind me.
The first Reaping looks almost festive. District 1, the richest of all the districts, produces luxury goods. The women are wearing dresses that look more like cupcakes and columns than clothing, and then men are in suits.
Unsurprisingly, the Prospectives are two volunteers.
Aston Martin and Volvina Doubleyuu (Does nobody get this? 😦 Aston Martin is and Volvina are references to the Cullen’s cars. I thought it was funny.) look every inch the perfect perspectives from their blank faces, beady eyes to their midnight skin and matching silver dreadlocks.
But the tone of the other Reapings is very different.
For one, in not one other district does anyone volunteer.
Except for in District 10.
Unlike District 1, the Reaping Room of District 10 is not theatrical, but over-illuminated by fluorescent lights, with only a makeshift stage below which the crowd stands.
I pause the video and peer closer to check something.
Oddly enough, there doesn’t appear to be families or any other smaller groups, just row upon row of shaved head and empty eyes, like soldiers. Even odder, the moment the liaison gets on stage, the same vampire from District 1 who looks much less at home in the moldy basement than on the mahogany stage, the crowd explodes into sound.
It’s hard to tell the boy apart from the girl, let alone the girls apart from each other. But eventually two scramble out of the crowd and onto the stage. But unlike the volunteers of District 1, they don’t seem in any way physically fit or possessing any skills that could lead them to victory.
This happens every year; the District 10’s are always the most eager to participate and they are usually the first to die. I’ve never understood, and even high definition doesn’t clarify this mystery. (A mystery which will be clarified.)
Only a few other contestants stick out to me. From District 3, in what looks to have been a school auditorium, a small girl with dark hair and darker eyes who seems to be on the stage before they’ve even called her name, even though when I rewind I see she was in the twenties pen, the one farthest away from the stage. (Hello, Alice!)
A sly, slender girl with a mane of bright curly red hair from District 7, takes her place in the out-door amphitheater bordered by tall winter-trees. (Hello, Victoria!)
Most hauntingly, is a girl from District 6, who were it not for the pale skin and bronze-curls, looks exactly like Emily, with her big brown eyes. She’s a child. Unlike Emily, though, she doesn’t cry as she walks up to the platform, and also unlike Emily, when she stands on stage there is no desperate voice volunteering for her. (Hello, Renesmee!)
The racketeers would have put her odds as being abysmal in any other year, but this year she’s not the only child.
From District 3 is a small boy with black hair and almond eyes who doesn’t ever meet the camera head on (Hello, Eric!), and from District 8, a girl obviously too tall for her (Hello, Angela!) body, lanky with early adolescence. Most surprisingly, a pair of twelve-year-old twins is called from District 11. (Hello Alec and Jane!)
This shouldn’t be my competition. There should be large eighteen-year olds, the kind who know how to use axes and blowguns. Looking at the pictures of the small, frightened children that come on stage, I can’t help but feel that this is going to be impossible. How can I watch these children die? How can I kill them?
After I finish watching the Reapings, I draw the covers over my head, much like I had earlier yesterday morning. Was it really only a morning ago? As I drift off to sleep, I can’t help but remember the face of the girl with the bronze curls. She is so pale, so delicate looking. I won’t be surprised if she is the first to go.
In my dreams I cradle her to my breast and whisper in her ear, “I’ll love you forever.”
She turns her face, curls bouncing, cheeks dimpled with a smile. “Mommy, tell me again.”
But this time I don’t say anything. I just raise my hand, and claw out her eyes.
She doesn’t even cry as the blood runs down her cheeks.
I wake up screaming, clutching at sheets.
And I know the answer to how I’m going to watch them die.
I’m not.
I know what I have to do.
I don’t know how I’m going to do it, or if it’s even possible. But I know I have to do it, even if it means my own death.
I’m not going to watch the children die. I’m certainly not going to kill them.
No.
I’m going to save them.
05 Saturday Nov 2011
Posted Uncategorized
in[7]
Outside, the air is still coated with the stale mist of yesterday. We’ve managed to miss most of the crowds by ducking out the poor man’s entrance, but at least two hundred people clamor toward us through the fog.
After the people follow the cameras, hovering in the air, their large lens-faces trained squarely on Jasper and me.
Muffled by the moisture, girls, raggedy and rich alike, scream, “Hale dynasty! Hale dynasty! Hail to the Hales!”
I look straight ahead, but from the corner of my eye I can see Jasper smiling, stopping occasionally to shake hands. Startlingly enough, people seem to ignore his sister, the one who actually won. Maybe it’s because she’s distant from them, unreadable.
How does he have the energy, the will? I’m trying my best not to just . . . stop. The only the way to keep up my energy is to distance myself from the ever growing mob, but he seems to thrive on the crowd. He will have no problem winning sponsors.
Yet, I’m not totally alone.
Once, I think I hear a voice suspiciously like Greasy Ol Sae’s yell, “Now you have a reason to break someone’s arm.”
A chorus starts from somewhere. “Swan! Swan!” Jacob, Leah, even Emily on Jacob’s shoulders, all pump their fists. I swallow my disappointment at the fact that I don’t see Charlie or Ben anywhere.
Finally, we push out to a door in the marble wall. I remember when I was little, thinking it was some kind of tomb. As I got older, I was sure it was just a glamorized supply closet. In truth, it leads to a small tunnel. I expect it to be like the sewers, but it’s clean, made of marble. We walk for a minute and then come across a square platform hanging over a metal track.
A soft whirring sound comes from the dot of light in the distance, where the tunnel ends. As we are encouraged up the stairs by Tanya, the sound gets louder. By the time we are all standing on the platform, a metal sphere, large enough to fit four people, has arrived. I cock my head, looking at it. I don’t see any bolts or lines where the steel is joined together.
Tanya smirks at our questioning looks. “Vampire technology. We usually don’t let you humans see the real goods. Your brains wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. ” She looks less stunning up close than from far away. I can almost see a wrinkle on her forehead. The transformation is supposed to eliminate all but the most severe signs of aging. She must have been turned when she was very old.
“Tanya, I believe this is where we part ways,” Edward says.
She moves to him, pouting, and tugs on the shiny sleeve of his black suit. It’s an odd contrast; her made up face and the childishness of the motion. “Darling, I could always join you in the Zeppelin. Just like old times.”
He removes her hands and kisses her lightly on the cheek, so quick I almost don’t see it. “I think you have other Districts to see to.”
“I only have District 12 left. Everyone knows their story anyways; two sad, emaciated humans going off to die. Boo hoo.” She looks up at Edward for approval.
I have to force myself not to spit in Tanya’s crimson eyes. We are people. She can’t just joke about us dying. Except, I can’t stop her, so I guess she can.
“We all must make sacrifices,” Edward says coldly, his eyes flitting towards mine.
He knows about my thoughts. And he’s going to do what? Sacrifice me? Kill me? But his gaze doesn’t seem angry as they catch mine. So maybe he’s going to hurt me for my thoughts.
Her eyes narrow. “Well, ta-ta for now then,” Tanya says, before giving a jaunty little wave and disappearing.
With an economical gesture of the hand, Edward commands the three of us towards the sphere.
Edward and I get in on one side and Jasper and Rosalie on the other. Immediately after we enter, the carriage lurches into motion. As I’m thrown back from the lurch, I can’t help but meet Rosalie’s eyes across from me. I know that she’s powerful now, that she could destroy me with just a thought, but I don’t care. I scowl at her for all I’m worth.
“What?” she says, as if she actually has no clue why I’m staring at her. Although she glares right back despite her confusion. This isn’t surprising. Glaring was always Rosalie Hale’s default expression.
Maybe she’s forgotten. Maybe she doesn’t remember what she did to me, who I am. The process of being a vampire dulls human memories, all but the most important.
I’d think informing on your best friend’s mother would be an important memory, but it’s possible I’m wrong. It’s possible that Rosalie Hale doesn’t remember how she ruined my life.
I invited her to my mother’s birthday party, because she was my best friend. For all the beatings she gave me (and I beat her up a few times just as good), she wasn’t a bad friend. She terrorized anyone who teased me about my inability to shoot a bow, and when Garrett, an eleventh year I had a crush on, ended up going out with Kate, Rosalie told everyone that he had gotten a 2 on his last sparring quiz.
After she came to the party and heard my mother sing the song about flowers, she told someone. Maybe her parents, maybe a teacher, maybe she wrote a letter to the President himself, I don’t know.
I know it was her, because she didn’t speak to me all day in training-school, and when I got to my house after staying late for afterschool, everything was wrong.
Everything I owned, not the expensive stuff, but the important things: photos, recipes, clothes, the jar we used to keep the moths we caught in summer, the preserves of jams, lay strewn across the yard. There caught on the branches of the little tree out in front dangled the dress my mother had worn only yesterday.
Our other things were hidden in the grass, toy trucks, chipped coffee-mugs, pictures, picture-books with the pages torn out fluttering lamely the clipped-wings of a dying bird.
“What are you doing here?” said someone behind me.
I whirled to see Rosalie. She looked as confused as I felt, but instead of staring at the wreckage outside of my house, she was staring at me. Like I was the anomaly.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, cold as if she was talking to a first year that had tried to get too friendly.
“Rose?” Her nickname sounded wrong the moment I said it. Even though everything was a mess she looked almost sterile standing there. Sterile and formal.
“You should be at your home,” she mumbled.
Rosalie never mumbled. Her whole strategy was beauty and charisma.
The world was upside down.
“This is my home.” I said, my voice rising in confusion and anger.
“Not anymore,” she said bitterly.
Coldness seeped into me. “What?”
She just stood there, silent and beautiful. Like it was just part of her strategy—to seem invulnerable.
“Why is all my stuff on the lawn?” I repeated, louder.
A light breeze picked up, stealing between the strands of her shiny, straight, blond hair, animating it.
“Rose! Seriously, this is a shitty joke, even for you.”
She tried to step away from me, but I couldn’t just let her go. She knew something about why everything was so wrong, and she wasn’t telling me. She was supposed to be my friend.
Using my back foot, I propelled myself forward. She hit the ground with a thud and I followed soon after, but she shouldn’t have gone down so easy.
She let me push her back into the dirt, not moving to break my hold. “If this your house, why isn’t your father stopping us?”
“Rose, what’s your pro—”
Finally she turned to look at me again, but her gaze wasn’t just cold, it was glacial. “Why isn’t your mother here?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled. I was just about thrust my fist into the side of her jaw with all my might, because I didn’t know what else to do, when I heard the thump of heavy boots.
Peacekeeper boots. I turned around, expecting my father, my strong, stoic father. He wouldn’t tolerate people doing things like this to his family, his house.
But when I turned, it wasn’t just father’s face that greeted me, just an anonymous Peacekeeper. And there, behind him, was my brother.
Ben didn’t even look worried. He always looked awkward and frightened before my mom died, but that day his back was straight and his gaze flinty and strong. Holding his hand, looking so lost, like a child, like an animal, was my father, the strongest man I ever knew— broken.
“Charles, Benjamin, and Isabella Swan, you are hereby relocated to grey-level,” said the Peacekeeper.
“What?” I asked, choked.
Rosalie looked away. I don’t know if she was ashamed or just couldn’t see my face as I looked at my brother.
In his hand, my brother held up the letter.
Embossed on it was a blood red-seal and the words, in flowing red, script, “The Empire appreciates your contribution.”
Rosalie was the reason my mother was dead.
Abruptly, the pod is filled with the pink light of breaking dawn. The tunnel has ended. I hadn’t noticed in the darkness, but the hull of the pod is semi-transparent, a cross between steel and glass.
I press my cheeks to the cold wall-window and look at outside. It’s a blur, but I’m able to see things that are far enough away, like the craggy shoreline and the tall tree surrounded by gravestones, crowding like children around a teacher eager to hear a story. The fog is gone now, migrated somewhere else; soon I will have too.
The countryside morphs from the half-wild ruins of suburbia to long stretches of deserted fields. Then even those are swallowed up by rag-tag bands of trees.
All the Morphing Game Prospectives go the capitol, Volterra, for the opening ceremony, but I don’t know how far away it is. Rumor has that it’s located on the East Coast, in the North near a waterfall so tall and fierce that if you tried to swim underneath it, you’d drown. The oceans swallowed up most of the eastern seaboard, so Volterra is now a coastal town too.
Gradually, so gradually that at first it’s almost imperceptible, the pod begins to slow, until it stops right on the edge of a field of rust-colored stalks of wheat. But as I exit the pod, I don’t notice the way the trees here are so much brighter than the dying ones near the lake, or how bitingly fresh the air is.
All I can focus on is the thing resting on the grain.
It looks a lot like the pod, but much, much larger, and warped slightly, like the back a spoon, taking in light, color and distorting it.
If Ben were here his jaw would drop. He loved big, moving things when he was little.
“I’ve heard it said that traveling in it is like riding in the clouds,” Edward breathes against my ear.
I jump a little, bumping into his chest, and I can swear he rumbles with inaudible mirth before I step away from him.
“Others say it’s like dissolving into the ether. Some consider it a spiritual experience.”
I root my feet into the ground. If I turn around I’ll know exactly how close he is, and I can’t know that. Just the possibility that he is as close as he is, is doing frightening things to my stomach.
I briefly contemplate running off into the field. But there’s no cover to hide in, and even if was he would have no problem catching me. My face would be reflected in the surface of the zeppelin—it catches every scrap of light.
“And what do you think?” I ask I can almost feel him, even though he’s not touching me. Just a few more millimeters and I will be able feel his muscles explicitly.
He waits so long to speak that finally I pivot, expecting to see him right behind me. Instead he’s leaning indolently against the bottom of the balloon, gazing at his reflection with mocking curiosity. “I think that four black horses and a chariot would be more appropriate.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”
He’s not making any sense, and he has to know that he’s not. He’s playing with his food. I can’t help but turn towards the grain-edged horizon and step toward it. But before I can take another step, he is standing right in front of me.
“Sorry, Persephone,” he says soft as the wind brushing against the top of the stalks. “No running away.
I move to the side, but he grabs my wrist, not hard, but tightly enough I know I won’t be able to get out. The tips of his fingernails graze the inside of my wrists right over the branching tributaries of my veins.
My heart beats so loudly I can hear it.
Immediately, he drops my hand and stills, like he’s been flushed out of hiding. Yet I am the one being hunted.
Then as if he hadn’t just started, he gestures upward to the sky. “Unfortunately, black horses or not, we have places to be, and the Cloud Gate waits for no man or beast.”
It’s almost like he’s speaking another language, a beautiful one, but one I don’t understand all the same.
I tip my head back, my hair falling slightly out of the twist, tickling the back of my neck, as I see my own face, contorted and enlarged in the mirror-balloon. “Cloud Gate?”
He smiles, eyes slightly hooded. “It’s the name of the zeppelin. Do try to keep up, Isa-”
“My name’s not Persephone or Isabella. It’s Bella.” It’s a long shot, but maybe if he sees me as a person and not just as a name from a slip of paper, he’ll decide not to kill me for my thoughts.
“Come, Isabella,” is all he says in reply.
So much for my strategy.
Despite the command he doesn’t move, his hand remains immobile saluting the giant zeppelin.
Then I see why.
In response to his motion, unfolding from the belly of the balloon and down to the ground is a long arm of stairs. It contorts and unfurls, each tread popping out like a finger out of a fist.
Before it is even down to the ground, Edward jumps onto it, and once the jump is manageable, I follow. The ladder shakes slightly as we walk up it, and I realize that it’s lifting up off of the ground.
Finally, the name makes sense because of the movement and reflection the upper edge of it seems to be made of sky and the lower half earth. It really is a gate to the clouds.
Edward closes the hatch behind me, and I’m left looking at a long hallway. “Take off your shoes,” he commands, a blur as he slips out of his brown loaders
I bend down to try and try to untie my laces, but by fingers are trembling too much to pick open the knot. Is he going to kill me now?
I look up to Edward whose expression is unreadable as ever. He leans forward, and I flinch. Now. He’s going to do it now. Break my neck. It would be so easy.
But the blow never comes. Instead, he bends over, and in seconds my shoes are off. I shiver at the feeling of his cold hands through my threadbare socks.
“I did ask you to keep up, didn’t I?” is all he says for explanation before setting off at a brisk walk.
I have to jog to keep up as we make a few turns along the long corridor. As I run, I discover why he wanted me to take off my shoes. The floor bends. There’s no other way to describe it. It doesn’t bend much with each step, not enough to be alarming, but ever so slightly.
“Is this some kind of glass balloon?” I joke. I have to joke; the only other option is fainting from the fear that at any moment Edward is going to rip me apart for my treasonous thoughts.
But now in such a tight space, the truth of my situation becomes clear. I am trapped.
Edward makes a sound that must be a laugh, but it seems more like a cough. Humor never was my strong suit, but I seem to amuse him a little at least. Maybe he won’t rip me limb from limb.
“A glass balloon,” he says. “If Marcus heard you call his precious Cloud Gate a balloon.”
Before I can reply, he points to a door. “Look.”
I can’t help but stare at his hands pointing; they are large but his fingers are still tapered and long.
I look at him blankly. The door isn’t opening.
He could have killed me in the field, but maybe he wanted to wait until I had let down my guard. Didn’t want a scream to disturb the other Prospective.
But I can’t take it anymore, the waiting.
“Just get it over with.” I blurt out.
His eyes narrow, “Get what over with?”
He was going to make me say it out loud? Fine. “Just kill me.”
He chuckles that same low laughter that makes me prickle in a way I’ve never felt before.
He leans over slightly, so that we are eye to eye. “Why would I kill you, Isabella?”
It’s hard to think when he says my name like that. “B-because you heard my thoughts.”
“Did I?” He moves closer until his cold breath tickles the tip of my nose.
I square my jaw. I will not die afraid. “Tanya said that you could read thoughts.”
He smiles and I can see every tooth, even the fangs. “I can.”
“So?” I will not close my eyes. I will look my killer in the face, make him realize what he’s killing is alive, is a person.
“Silly girl, I’m not going to kill you.” He admonishes, and to my great surprise brings out a finger to touch my face. Stroking it. Something in me clenches. “Even if I could read your thoughts, I wouldn’t care whatever heretical thoughts you have.”
“Y-you don’t?” It is so unfair. My mom died for one little song. And Edward must have heard my every explicit hatred of vampires, and he’s going to do nothing. Why do I deserve this? I almost feel disappointed.
His hand is at the underside of my chin now, and goose bumps have emerged from my skin like buds from the dirt.
“Not an iota,” he says so fiercely, the words seem like they’ll combust.
His hand leaves my face. Involuntarily, I lean forward.
His eyes darken, but he raises a hand over his head and snaps his finger, behind him the door opens.
Watching his fingers press together like that, so fast and hard, makes me blush. “Is that your power too?” I ask, and it comes out oddly breathless.
Edward chuckles, raising an eyebrow. “No, the door is just the magic of vampire engineering and electronics.”
I move away from him cautiously, still not sure that he isn’t going to come from behind me and snap my neck.
“I’m not quite finished with you yet, Isabella.” All mirth is gone from his voice.
I stop suddenly, all of the hairs on the back of my neck raising. “Yes?”
His expression turns sharp and serious “Dinner’s at eight. Do not be late; you and I have things to discuss. You may do whatever you please until then. There are clothes in the closet, and breakfast on the bed. The reaping should be on the vid-screen. I strongly encourage you to watch your competition.”
‘Thanks,” I say, the thought of food pushing away my fear of Edward. Will it be real food and not the blood flavor bars? Maybe it will be hot and steaming. Saliva floods my mouth at the thought, and I find myself scrambling through the doorway.
Once through, I turn around and give a slow clap, not sure exactly how this will close it, but the door swings shut in spite of my hesitation. This seems silly to me. If you can move at super-speed, with super strength, how are you too lazy to open a door?
The room in front of me isn’t grandiose like the Blood Bank, but looks rich in a different way. Every surface, except for the bed, desk, and a few chests of drawers, is made of a smooth malleable material; the same material making up the mirror-balloon, as I’ve dubbed it, and the floor. The ceiling appears to be slightly convex, as if it’s a canopy. On the right wall is a small screen, and as Tanya said, it’s playing re-runs of the Reapings. I’ll need to watch that soon to understand my competition.
But first I am drawn to the plate of food lying on a tray on my bed. There’s a tall glass of some pink liquid I’ve never seen before, as well as plate of toast and waffles. The toast is coated with a thin white and yellow film of eggs. Circling the perimeter of the plate are lines of strawberry’s cut into quarters. The artfulness of the display lasts approximately two seconds before it is in my mouth.
As I scarf down the food, I watch the Reapings. What I see causes me to slow my pace of consumption, and eventually push the plate aside all together. For all the luxury, I had almost forgotten the price I had paid, what was to come. The recaps of the Reapings remind me.
The first Reaping looks almost festive. District 1, the richest of all the districts, produces luxury goods. The women are wearing dresses that look more like cupcakes and columns than clothing, and then men are in suits.
Unsurprisingly, the Prospectives are two volunteers.
Aston Martin and Volvina Doubleyuu look every inch the perfect perspectives from their blank faces, beady eyes to their midnight skin and matching silver dreadlocks.
But the tone of the other Reapings is very different.
For one, in not one other district does anyone volunteer.
Except for in District 10.
Unlike District 1, the Reaping Room of District 10 is not theatrical, but over-illuminated by fluorescent lights, with only a makeshift stage below which the crowd stands.
I pause the video and peer closer to check something.
Oddly enough, there doesn’t appear to be families or any other smaller groups, just row upon row of shaved head and empty eyes, like soldiers. Even odder, the moment the liaison gets on stage, the same vampire from District 1 who looks much less at home in the moldy basement than on the mahogany stage, the crowd explodes into sound.
It’s hard to tell the boy apart from the girl, let alone the girls apart from each other. But eventually two scramble out of the crowd and onto the stage. But unlike the volunteers of District 1, they don’t seem in any way physically fit or possessing any skills that could lead them to victory.
This happens every year; the District 10’s are always the most eager to participate and they are usually the first to die. I’ve never understood, and even high definition doesn’t clarify this mystery.
Only a few other contestants stick out to me. From District 3, in what looks to have been a school auditorium, a small girl with dark hair and darker eyes who seems to be on the stage before they’ve even called her name, even though when I rewind I see she was in the twenties pen, the one farthest away from the stage.
A sly, slender girl with a mane of bright curly red hair from District 7, takes her place in the out-door amphitheater bordered by tall winter-trees.
Most hauntingly, is a girl from District 6, who were it not for the pale skin and bronze-curls, looks exactly like Emily, with her big brown eyes. She’s a child. Unlike Emily, though, she doesn’t cry as she walks up to the platform, and also unlike Emily, when she stands on stage there is no desperate voice volunteering for her.
The racketeers would have put her odds as being abysmal in any other year, but this year she’s not the only child.
From District 3 is a small boy with black hair and almond eyes who doesn’t ever meet the camera head on, and from District 8, a girl obviously too tall for her body, lanky with early adolescence. Most surprisingly, a pair of twelve-year-old twins is called from District 11.
This shouldn’t be my competition. There should be large eighteen-year olds, the kind who know how to use axes and blowguns. Looking at the pictures of the small, frightened children that come on stage, I can’t help but feel that this is going to be impossible. How can I watch these children die? How can I kill them?
After I finish watching the Reapings, I draw the covers over my head, much like I had earlier yesterday morning. Was it really only a morning ago? As I drift off to sleep, I can’t help but remember the face of the girl with the bronze curls. She is so pale, so delicate looking. I won’t be surprised if she is the first to go.
In my dreams I cradle her to my breast and whisper in her ear, “I’ll love you forever.”
She turns her face, curls bouncing, cheeks dimpled with a smile. “Mommy, tell me again.”
But this time I don’t say anything. I just raise my hand, and claw out her eyes.
She doesn’t even cry as the blood runs down her cheeks.
I wake up screaming, clutching at sheets.
And I know the answer to how I’m going to watch them die.
I’m not.
I know what I have to do.
I don’t know how I’m going to do it, or if it’s even possible. But I know I have to do it, even if it means my own death.
I’m not going to watch the children die. I’m certainly not going to kill them.
No.
I’m going to save them.