Page 125 of Because I Killed Him
“I don’t like watching people get executed, whether they deserve it or not.”
Edmund stares at my text, rubbing his eyebrow as if confused. Then he circles the table and settles into the chair beside me, his long legs nearly reaching the tabletop.“If you can’t watch other people die, how are you going to face your own death? Are you afraid of it?”
I turn away from him so it’s not so obvious to the others that we’re having a conversation. A Pinkie clears my plate, the clink of cutlery too loud in the silence between us.“Yes, I’m afraid. But more than that, I’m afraid of getting used to death.”
Edmund keeps his eyes forward, but even in profile, I notice the worn ease of someone too accustomed to violence, the look of a man who learned the value of time by watching it run out for others.
“All right, then,”he writes.“You can skip it.”
I look him in the eye for the first time since we started texting.“You mean that?”
“Yes.”He works on his Bond for a moment, then adds.“I also put your name on the exemption list. You don’t have to watch the campus executions anymore either.”
Gratitude floods through me so intensely that my legs tremble beneath the table. I stare at him, fighting the urge to hug him and even more, to cry.“Why?”
Edmund leans back against the headrest, his eyes drifting as he thinks of a reply. Then he looks over at me and smiles, a bright, slow lift that I can almost feel.
“Because I thought you’d like it.”
Snow drifts through the air in weightless spirals, melting on my flushed face as I glide back to the Green Dormitory on a hoverboard. The streets are crowded with students absorbed in their afternoon routines, their voices rising above the jazz of holographic street musicians and the buzz of holographic ads showcasing the latest fashion trends and Bond upgrades. I take a deep, fresh breath, tinged with melting snow, and as I exhale, relief and gratitude flood back in full force. It feels as if a black hole in my mind has finally sealed, one that grew larger every time I was forced to watch the executions.
I don’t think Edmund fully realizes how thankful I am for what he did. As far as he knows, he offered a small kindness. But he doesn’t see the ledge he pulled me back from, the shadow that’s haunted me since I killed Charles Blackwell.
My old fencing instructor once said the best part of being skilled with a saber is that it helps you ward off death. The more threatening you appear, he explained, the more violence you can avoid. But the more you encounter death, the more you invite it in, giving it permission to possess you. And if you’re not careful, death can claim your spirit long before you’re buried.
Only after killing Charles did I fully understand my fencing instructor’s warning. A casual intimacy with death is corrosive, and death itself isn’t asport. I woke to the truth that celebration belongs to beginnings, to birth. I knew that if it ever changed and I lifted my glass to death instead, something inside me would be broken, perhaps beyond repair.
I cut through the gardens outside the Green Dormitory, where snow clings to hedges and bare branches, weighing them down like chandeliers of white crystal. As I return the hoverboard to a public rack, my thoughts drift to Edmund and to the moment he told me he disagreed with the standard, daily low-citizen executions. He made his opinion sound like a minor admission, but it wasn’t. Most Blues would never confess to something like that. If Edmund’s opinion became public, he might even be ostracized. It makes me wonder whether Charlotte was right when she said I could trust him.
Edmund wouldn’t be the first high-citizen to break the mold. President Reeve is a Blue whom even Dad respects. He’s courageous and principled, still trying to hold the cracked center of our world together, still striving to rule for something, not merely over it. He’s proof that the current isn’t all cruelty and that not every wave is meant to drown you. And maybe Edmund is like Reeve… someone I could meet at the edge of it all, in the shallows and still waters.
I inch closer to that line I swore I’d never cross: the idea of friendship, real friendship with a Blue. Letting Edmund in. Giving him a free hand and a free heart. A part of me.
As Heretics, we are butterflies against wasps, the few against the many. Yet honor burns brighter in noble defeat than in ignoble victory.
—EVE WEATHERS,
FIRST-YEAR GREEN GRANDMASTER
CHAPTER 29
At 6:30 p.m., when Bloody Sunday begins, Charlotte sends me updates. Texts pop up on my Bond, each one chipping away at the distance I’m trying to maintain. She says she’s watching the execution with Edmund, Jack, and Dickie in the Blue Dormitory lounge, and that it’s packed with high-citizens who are taking shots every time a Heretic breaks down and cries.
“Eve threw up,”Charlotte writes.“But she didn’t cry.”
I deactivate my Bond, a disturbed sensation deep in my gut, and head to the one place I’m sure that no one is watching Bloody Sunday: the student library.
The scent of leather and ink hangs in the air, a lingering reminder of a bygone era. Shelves climb to the ceiling, packed with books no one needs anymore, but the Oranges insist on keeping them. If all our knowledge is online, they say, it can be edited, erased, and rewritten. Books are the only way the written word survives in its original form.
The library is always crowded. Some students read quietly at corner tables, while others cluster in groups, conversing behind stacks of books and half-drunk cups of tea. A few Pinkies scurry up ladders to fetch new titles or return old ones to their proper spots.
I take my usual spot on a window seat and ask a Pinkie to bring me a few books on fencing. While I wait, I catch snippets of conversationdrifting through the room. I expect talk of the execution, but instead, nearly everyone is gossiping about who will replace Eve as our first-year Green Grandmaster. The realization shocks me. I wonder if Eve knew people would forget her name before her severed head even struck the grass beneath the guillotine platform.
“The new Grandmaster will be Benedict Townsend,” someone declares.
“No, absolutely not. He is only a C-level. It will be Eliza Van Alen,” another counters.
But one name keeps surfacing, again and again.
