Page 9 of These Godly Lies
“Why does she have a blue dot on her?”
“It’s just a bit of paint. It makes her easier to find,” she explains, tilting the frame as she examines the brood cells. “See the ones that keep following her? Those are her attendants.”
“The queen has attendants?”
Anna hums an affirmation, distractedly checking the other side of the frame. “They clean her and bring her food so she can focus her energy on laying.” She frowns, noticing a bulb of wax in the corner. “Though she might not be for much longer. Do you see that? It’s a queen cell.”
“What does that mean? That there would be two queens?”
Anna shakes her head. “It would be her replacement. I noticed a decrease in how much she was laying in the last few weeks. They must be rejecting her.”
The bridge of Jiro’s nose wrinkles. “They can do that? I thought the queen controlled all of them?”
“No,” she murmurs, putting the frame back into the box. “A queen doesn’t command the hive—she’s a slave to it.” The moment she’s born, her life becomes dependent on how well she does her job. If she does it poorly, the hive will build a special cell for her replacementbefore swarming her. The needs of the many will always outweigh the needs of the one.
Anna has always admired that about them. She can think of more than a few monarchies that would have done well to learn a few things from the lives of bees. Anna doesn’t hesitate to voice the thought and is rewarded with one of Jiro’s rare smiles. She can’t help but notice how much younger he looks when there’s a hint of laughter lighting his eyes.
They’ve only shared a roof for just shy of two weeks, hardly enough time to truly know the other, but Anna already finds comfort in his presence. It’s nice, not being alone between the sometimes long stretches of Khiran’s absences.
Jiro, she knows, is still struggling to settle. He walks through the house like a stranger. There’s a hesitancy in his touch. Anna gets the sense that he is perpetually waiting for it all to be taken away. The first week, whenever she said his name—to ask him to bring something from the garden, to stir the pot of stew on the stove—his spine would straighten. He stared at her, breath held, as if preparing for the worst.
Anna understands that feeling. She has lived it every time the hem of her sleeve rose too high or her collar slipped. Has spent centuries avoiding communal baths and swimsuits on the beach. There is a torture in waiting for the fall; an agony in understanding that the world has given you every reason to expect it.
Two days later, they’re clearing the bed of broccoli and cabbage to make room for tomatoes. Spring has started to warm into summer, too hot for her winter crop to thrive. She rolls up her sleeves, pulling the old plants from the soil and places them in the wheelbarrow to compost later. There’s dirt everywhere by the time she’s done. It stains the knees of her overalls and powders her skin—she’s certain she’ll feel it on her scalp when she bathes later.
Anna knows it’s not the dirt that keeps snaring Jiro’s attention.
She pretends not to notice the way his stare lingers on her exposed arms—lets him have a moment to gather his question before deciding whether to voice it or hold it close.
“Are you sick?”
Anna thinks of another boy she brought under her wing lifetimes ago—the only one to ever call her mother. Piers had been so much younger than Jiro is now, less hardened, but there’s a subtle thread of concern in the teen’s voice that reminds her of the terror that had rimmed Piers’ eyes when he first spotted the marks on her skin. She remembers how her heart shattered when he asked, “Are you dying?”She spares Jiro a glance. Long enough to read the crease bridging his nose and the furrow in his brow as curiosity and not fear. Short enough that he won’t feel embarrassed for asking. She pulls a stray weed from the bed, then another. “Do I look sick?”
A moment of silence. When Anna dares to look, he’s watching her as if she’s some kind of puzzle he can’t quite solve. It’s only when she offers him a small smile of encouragement that he finds the courage to answer. “I guess not.” His gaze lowers back to her arms, a frown teasing the corner of his mouth. “What are they?”
Her hand sinks into the soil, cupped palm making a pocket as her left tucks a seedling into the dirt. “Vitiligo,” she answers. The word still tastes strange on her tongue, despite Khiran’s assurances that its origins are older than she is. After enduring centuries of accusations ranging from leprosy to witchcraft, that particular bit of knowledge still feels like a slap in the face.
She brushes the soil from her hands, dirt smudging her gardening apron. “It isn’t contagious. It doesn’t even hurt.” Shrugging, she straightens and admires her work. The seeds she started in the greenhouse had a high turn out this year. She’ll likely have to thin things out later, but for now she can at least let each seedling have a chance to thrive.
“I used to be ashamed of it,” she admits. The confession pulls at her chest, a string still stubbornly twining around her heart no matter how many times she’s tried to cut it loose. “Maybe I still am, just a little. It’s hard wearing our differences with pride when theworld looks at them with contempt. It took me a long time to realize that it’s not my skin that’s the problem, butpeople.”
She looks at him, sees the way he shifts, the way his eyes go dark with memories and nightmares. Anna thinks of the way Carl saw him as a thief before a starving child. Thinks of the pier full of jobs and the dock workers—the ones that turned him away and the ones who offered him only a fraction of what they should—and she knows that Jiro understands what it is to beother. To be ostracized for something as out of his control as where his ancestors came from. Gently, her hand rests on his shoulder with the softness the world has robbed him of. Connection in the form of touch. She’s prepared for him to pull away, to curl inward the way he always does when he feels the need to shield himself, but he leans into her hand. The tension in his shoulders relaxes beneath her palm as if her touch is balm on a wound that was left to fester longer than it should.
Once, so long ago it has become more fact than memory, she lived a life alone in the woods. A life where the only words spoken to her were threats and the only touch she received was the feeling of rough hands dragging her away. Until a stranger with dark eyes and sun-kissed skin pressed a peach into her palm and soothed the oppressive silence with a kindness Anna hadn’t felt in years.
It dawns on her, with a swiftness that temporarily robs her of breath, that her presence in Jiro’s life may very well hold the same earth shattering impact. She thinks of the way she once looked up to Khiran, idolized and feared him, and her stomach twists uncomfortably.
Jiro doesn’t know of her immortality. It’s Anna’s hope that he never will; that he’ll spend a few years growing under her roof, so he can build up the strength to take on the world once he leaves. She hopes, with a fierceness that makes her pulse hum, that Jiro will only ever see her as a woman and nothing more. That he’ll see her flaws—see that the empathy that guides her actions is entirely human.
He doesn’t have the centuries she did to learn the difference.
In the end, it takes Jiro five weeks to finally start treating her home like his own. Anna discovers her suspicions were correct about his talent in the kitchen. Where he once seemed uncomfortable making meal suggestions, he’s begun taking it upon himself to plan their weekly menu. Anna chimes in occasionally, but for the most part he takes charge.
He seems to thrive when given the opportunity to control some things for himself. Anna suspects it’s been a while since he’s had the luxury of choosing his meal versus making do with what he was given. It is, again, something she understands more than he knows. There is a freedom that comes with knowing you won’t go to sleep hungry; a weight that’s lifted from your spirit. She has never had to remind him not to be wasteful—he’s as conscious as she is over every scrap of food.
Anna washes a few carrots in the sink, her hands working out the bits of soil clinging stubbornly to the gnarled roots. “Jiro,” she says, tipping her head in his direction. “Could you grab me some rosemary from the garden?”
He pauses, his knife still in the process of peeling a potato as his brow furrows. After a moment of quiet frustration, he asks, “Which one is that again?”
