The Meadow

1-2

Sudden, solid ground. Before her stood another door, this one encased in metal. A damp chill crept under her skin, whistled into her blood. But before fear could close its shackles around her ankles, she opened the door and stepped onto the street.

Outside, the city was eerily quiet. Beneath her feet, the stone was plastered with warped paper and soiled cloth, sealed with a silky sludge. As a wave of putrid, piss-sharp air puckered her lungs, she drew the cloak across her nose.

“Left or right?” she whispered to herself, if only to break the oppressive silence.

But before she could choose, a sound like thunder crackled toward her, spattering the sky to her left with silver flecks. Just thunder, she tried to reassure herself. “Right.” The sun-girl began to walk quickly away from the sound, which seemed to be growing louder. She’d only taken a few steps before she stumbled, fell over a pile of rags. At once, a cloying stench filled her nose and mouth. She’d fallen facedown on a body reduced to green meat, pitted with bullets. Ilana hurtled herself to her feet, running now, swallowing sobs. She sprinted through the winding streets, away from the sound coming ever closer, until it was upon her.

Fiery streaks ripped the dark apart. Ilana fell to her knees with her hands over her ears, flattening herself against the wall, wishing she could melt into it.

The street swelled with the sound of gunfire. The figures that now surrounded her wore crystals and feathers and face paint, AK-47s strapped across their shoulders. They were being forced back by two soldiers in an armored truck. Ilana watched with dammed breath as the painted figures clamored across the top of the truck, slamming the backs of their guns against the windshield, which quickly crumpled into spiderweb cracks. One of the soldiers leapt out of the overrun truck, lighting a flare as he somersaulted to his feet. The sun-girl watched as a spray of blue stars burst from his hands, blinding her.

The soldier swiveled to his left, scanning the side streets, searching for a way out. His eyes stopped. Locked on hers.

And she watched as a shower of gunfire struck him, planting red blossoms all across his chest.

The sight snapped her into motion. Like a wave of heat and light, limbs de-iced. She slipped around the corner and began to run, with a feeling like pine needles pounded into her muscles, black acid pumped into her heart. A primal, pyretic strain of adrenaline.

She felt for a moment that she was running across the surface of a white ocean, molten marble roiling under her feet. The street crested, and she found herself at the top of a hill staring down at all the punctured, petaled walls, a crumbling expanse of putrefaction and ruin. In the distance, she could see a bright pearl of light. Devoid of any other indication or direction, the sun-girl began to make her way toward it.

¤

Seraphim Armed Forces.

Ilana stood before a silver gate wrought in razor wire, the white light just beyond. She remembered the army-branded ration bags Amma used to bring home, printed with the crest of the Seraphim. Ink-black stars, the crest of West.

As the sun-girl reached out to touch the gate, she noticed a soldier standing in the corner, watching her from behind a blue visor. Statuesque in polished, plated armor, he seemed to her some kind of avant-garde art piece, out of place in the decaying surroundings.

“Please,” she whispered, her voice wrinkling the dark. “I … I’m looking for my mother. Will you help me?”

He turned away.

“Please,” she repeated, taking a step forward. Suddenly, she found his gun c****d at the crown of her head.

“Get away,” he said roughly, in a heavily accented voice. “Go back.”

She stood frozen with her hands extended, palms up.

The Seraphim shot the ground near her feet. “Go back!”

Ilana jumped, twisted around on her toes and ran.

But as she turned the corner at the next block, she slowed to a stride. Ilana reminded herself that all good things came from West: sugar, tomatoes, peppermint tea. This had to be the safest place she could be. She traced the perimeter of the Seraphim complex, running her fingers along the wall as she walked. Abruptly, she stopped. Her fingers hovered over empty air.

Beside her, she could just make out a faint outline where the dark deepened. A small space where the wall had been shelled apart, small enough that only a child would be able to fit through. Ilana took a deep breath, as if she were about to dive underwater, then stepped through the breach.

Into heady, oil-slick dark.

The alleyway was ripe with viscid sweetness, lined with long metal drums. The sun-girl pressed her hands against one. As quietly as she could manage, Ilana clamored over the side and crouched on the ledge, peering into a pool of glistening refuse. She burrowed her fingers through, grasping a slick cake of breadfruit flesh. Immediately and apart from her own volition, she crammed the entire wedge into her mouth. She felt it puddle like firelight in the pit of her belly.

“You have to check for mealworms.”

Ilana looked up. A willowy figure leaned against the opposite wall, seemingly materialized out of it, watching her.

“You can’t just eat it like that. Here.” The figure slipped across the alley, offering a husk of brown bread. Black grime darkened all the lines of her palms. “This one’s clean.”

“Thank you,” Ilana whispered. Something about this girl terrified her. The way the words left her lips, like a lake iced over, no way of knowing what was under the surface. The way she walked so lightly, like a firewalker or a suicide bomber.

“You’re new.”

The sun-girl nodded.

“Well now you know. Now you’re one of us.”

“Us?” It came out as more of a breath than a word.

“The last of the sun-worshippers. If there ever was a Sun, we are proof He has forsaken us.”

¤

For a time, the sun-girl lived like this. Like a long-forgotten prophet, subsisting only on locusts and wild honey. She drifted through the city in Amma’s overcoat, blurring into the ashen walls. Her hands were always glazed with something like honey and a thin, gray pelt of the crumbs that kept her alive.

She only ever took what she needed. A handful of potato peelings, a half-moon of burnt bread, a glassy gob of tomato seeds. She scraped out the remnants of canned beans, careful not to cut herself on the sharp rim. Excavated past the animal bones and amber glass. Cracked apart a disposable coffee cup, running her tongue along the brown bottom ring.

There were almost always a few others with her, little boys and girls with hollowed ribs and furrowed brows, with empty army-brand sacks slung over their shoulders. Some, like her, simply filled their pockets or gathered scraps in their clothes, upturning their skirts like bowls.

But one day, inevitably, she found the wall boarded up.

On that morning, with the cold air tightening around her neck like a noose, she returned to the eleventh floor of the crumbling apartment complex. The room she’d shared with Amma was veneered in a sticky film of dust, like a cemetery lush with fine white moss.

Crematory air, drifting.

She watched the old man settle into her home with his crows, littering the floorboards with seeds.

Days passed. A week, maybe more.

She drifted up and down the stairs and through the alleyways, searching for what she did not know.

“Please,” she whispered to passing strangers. But they only shook their heads and walked quicker, sidestepping her empty hands. They wouldn’t even look at her. Because if they didn’t look at her, they wouldn’t have to see themselves, reflected in her eyes.

She sometimes slept on the streets with her head pillowed on her hands, dreaming of dissipating clouds, god-rays, Indian blue. Moon cakes. Turtledoves. Water lilies.

The feeling of someone’s hand on her cheek.

What would it be like to live in the light?

¤

“Ilana.”

She woke to the sound of thunder. She’d fallen asleep on a stone bench, amid the ruin of the royal orchards. As dry leaves swept across the marble, time dipped into slow motion.

That was when she saw him. Standing in the shade of a dead willow, he watched her from afar. He wore a hooded, ink-black cloak, which pooled around his feet like an oil slick. A sheer cloth covered his nose and mouth; ropes of cream jasmine cuffed both his wrists.

“Ilana.” He moved toward her with an inhuman fluidity.

The sun-girl rose to her feet. Although every instinct screamed for her to run, she found she could not move. “Who are you?” she whispered. “How do you know my name?”

“I know you, just as you know me.” His face was shadowed. She could not see what expression he wore. “Through myth and prophecy, written in the stars.” But she could see the crystal amulet around his neck, bleeding gold light into the fog.

Ilana began to back away, suddenly understanding. “The stars,” she breathed.

The Spirit of the Stars loomed over her, grasping her hands in his own. “Everything you know will fade to ash and ember. Your world will burn.”

The sun-girl stood frozen, her heart thrumming like a hummingbird.

“You are the only one who can save it. But you are not long for this world.”

Just as his grip began to tighten, she realized her arms were bound in flower chains—black roses and blue marigolds. She had eleven fingers, eleven toes growing roots into the stone. And when the broken courtyard clock struck thirteen, the toll rippled into her bones.

With a start, Ilana realized she was dreaming.

“Wake up,” she whispered, trying to wrench her hands free. It’s only a dream. The flowers strained and snapped, their petals bursting apart. She bit her lip until the salty taste of blood filled her mouth.

Wake up.

With a final surge of willpower, Ilana pried her eyes open, gasping.

She found herself curled up on the eleventh-floor balcony, dangerously close to the edge. As she levered herself to her feet, she felt a twinge of pain. She stared at her hands, suddenly filled with dread.

“Only a dream,” she said to herself.

But her skin had turned a pale blue wherever he’d touched. The finger-shaped bruises were dusted in thin blossoms of frost, like stars.

Later that night, as she sat on the street begging for a bite to eat, Ilana tugged her sleeves down over her hands and decided she was hallucinating. Like a man dying of thirst, seeing oases in the desert. It was only the memory of a story her mother used to tell—nothing more than mirage.

¤

One afternoon, just at the outskirts of the Seraphim compound, she stopped. Her gaze caught at an open window. Ilana stared at the heaping plates of white rice and diced mangoes almost within reach. For a long moment, she sat under the windowsill with her knees drawn to her chest, breathing in thick curls of steam. Like clotted cream. It billowed through all the hollows of her chest.

Maybe if I only take a little, she thought. They have so much. They won’t notice.

With a deep, trembling breath, she scrambled over the concrete sill. As she crept across cold tiles, her gaze swept over the banquet of golden raisins, chopped onions, chickpeas in clear broth. Clustered in the corner of the countertop, there were a dozen pitchers of chilled water. She ran her fingers along the frosted steel, pressed her cold hands to her forehead. Then, quickly, she began filling her pack, her pockets, carving clumps out of the dome of white rice, turning clay bowls upside down over plastic bags, folding soft bread into her sleeves.

She didn’t hear the click of a back door opening. She didn’t see the soldier slowly cross the room, watching her with a kind of curious repulsion. He regarded her the way a hunter regards a doe’s dead body—her steaming blood, his silver shells.

She didn’t notice until his breath was on her neck, his hand around her wrist.

He lifted her by the arm, slammed her against the wall. “Dirty slum cockroach!”

Ilana gasped, pain in white-hot daggers bursting up her side, rice spewing across the room. As she collapsed in a heap on the ground, shielding her face with her hands, the soldier began beating her with the back of his rifle, shouting obscenities in a foreign tongue. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and dragged her onto the street, muffling her screams with his other hand.

“Enough!”

Ilana looked up.

A boy with painted skin stood across the street, his gun leveled at the Seraphim’s unarmored chest. “Get your hands off of her.”

The soldier dropped her, lifting his hands above his head.

“Hand her your gun.”

For a moment, the Seraphim only glowered down at him.

“Hand her your gun,” the boy repeated, louder this time. “And you better pray she doesn’t blow your brains out.”

The rifle placed in her hands was solid, weighted. It was the realest thing she’d ever felt. For a brief moment, the sun-girl wondered what it would feel like. To take a life. The Seraphim watched this thought pass across her face like a winter wind, and she in turn watched his gaze flicker with fear. “Go,” she said softly, keeping her eyes fixed on his. “Just go.”

Hands out, head down, the soldier backed away slowly. But once he turned the corner, they heard his footsteps quicken as he began to run.

“You should’ve killed him.”

“I couldn’t. He …” She hesitated. “He didn’t deserve it.”

“Do you know how many people that man has killed?” The boy didn’t speak with anger, but with a steely bluntness. “Innocent people.”

“I know,” she said quietly, laying the gun on the ground. “But if I am given the choice, I won’t choose to be like him.” Ilana’s eyes flicked up to meet his. “Thank you.”

The boy nodded. “If we don’t look out for each other, nobody will. I am Isa.” He had hooded gray eyes, long dark lashes. Olive skin painted in faded swirls of turquoise, feathers threaded through his hair.

“Ilana.”

“Ilana,” he repeated. “You should come with me, before he comes back with others.” Isa reached out to take her hand, but she recoiled. “Don’t be afraid,” he said gently.

“I … I know you,” she said. Something about his eyes, something about the way he was looking at her.

Isa paused, tilting his head to the side, studying her. His gaze roved down to her toes and up to the crown of her head and back to her eyes again. “You must be mistaking me for someone else. Now come on, quickly.” With that, he began to walk, his fingers clasped firmly around hers. She took two strides for every one of his.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Manipura,” came the answer. “The base of the resistance.”