LXXXXI. The Manuscript, Part FiveFlowery dress.

Visella:

I was ragged, torn from my family. Then one day a guard came for me. He led me to the central building. My feet faltered as I stepped inside. The air was different here—cool, clean. Silence. No shoving, no barking orders. With an eerie, quiet escort. My mind raced to find what I had done wrong. Several turns inside the main building, the guard stopped at a door, opened it. It was dark inside. My heart sank. I had heard stories of casual aggressions, and they all started like this.

He turned on the lights, lifted the blinds and opened the windows. Sunlight flooded the bedroom. I meekly waited for my doom, upper body caved in.

The guard ordered me to wash, pointing to the bathroom. It smelled nice inside, there was a shower, and there was a white dress with flowers on a chair.

I hesitated. But he didn't grab my arm. Didn't sneer.

Instead, he lowered his eyes, mumbled I was to get ready, and closed the door behind him.

Things like this didn't happen to the laborers in my camp. This was not fairyland and there was no prince - only bad things happened to pretty girls in flowery dresses.

All alone in a room that was clean, white walls, polished floors. A steaming basin. I looked at the big shower. There was real soap, shampoo, creams and ointments. I stepped in, hands braced against the wall. Hot water! It rushed over me. My skin prickled, shocked at first, then melting. I closed my eyes.

Every good deed comes with a price. This time, the price would be me.

I recalled a girl. Sela. She was plucked from the mill once. Brought to the barracks, never to be seen again. Poor Sela. Poor me.

I dried myself up with finality, straightened my hair with the brush, hand slightly shaking. Get ready for assault and funeral.

I reached for the dress, slipped my feet into the low shoes geometrically arranged parallel to the black and white floor tiles.

A knock. I froze. What type of evil would enter the door to bring harm? Nobody came. More knocks. I stepped back into the hall, feeling the fabric light against my skin; the guard was there, waiting. He did not appraise me like the others would. He bowed his head slightly, then gestured for me to follow him. Me and my unlikely bodyguard walked through corridors, opened closed doors, eyeing rooms filled with a gentle light. Still trembling and awaiting for my ugly destiny to be revealed.

Then the smell of food; the warm wafting scent of baked bread. The corridor opened up to a dining room bathed in sunlight. A long table, draped in white linen. Silver dishes piled high—fruit, bread, honey, steaming tea. At this point I was all bone and skin. The food was obscene in its abundance.

At the far end, seated in white, was Shepherd.

He smiled.

"Come sit," he said, "I have been wanting to meet you."

That's how I met Shepherd.

After that fateful, intimidating breakfast, I am given to instructors, I am taken off my kitchen duties, and given a bed with the other postulants – the Blessed-in-training. I eat more food and drink clean water. I am given hand cream for my cracked skin.

A week later, again breakfast with Shephard, and I feel a bit more hopeful nothing bad will happen to me just yet.

A week later, again. Well nourished and rested, pampered and complimented, a light is turned back on in the darkness of my mind. Maybe the future does not have to be like the past. Like a child who climbs out of the underground cell where she has spent the best of his youth, and for the first time sees the sky, I feel I can extend my spirit to the heavens. For once in my life I know the meaning of grace.

So when a month later I am baptized, and become Blessed, my innocent heart truly gives itself day and night to adoring Beauty.

Guard.

In retrospect, it took little to take my faith away.

One day I arrive at the mill floor to realize there are only two other workers. The vast space swallows us, eerily hollow where thirty women should be busy. The guards look disoriented. Shepherd has ordered a feast for tomorrow, they say, and most of the workforce has been reassigned to kitchen duty. Foodstuff. Preparations. A parade. I check the production schedule. A shipment is due at the end of the day—five thousand pounds of flour. I step into the inventory room, my breath tight. There are enough bags for three.

Quick math. A full team makes a thousand pounds a day. We are three, me, Lara, and a Commoner.

A Bad Karma day.

I bark orders. The Commoner is slow. She blinks at me. "Move it, Sleeping Beauty," I snap, and she drags her feet across the dusty floor. Useless. Lara and I work in sync, throwing double loads onto the screens, shoving material into the feeder, racing up and down ladders until the drying racks are scraped clean. The building feels eerily empty and quiet. I can hear the sound of my steps on the metal grates.

Sweat slicks my back, dust coats my skin. Crouched to tie a flour bag, I sense it—

Eyes.

A slow heat presses against the back of my neck.

I turn around, glance up.

A guard. A boy.

Chestnut eyes. Black hair falling over his shoulders. The same one who secretly watches me at the workshop. He stares at me—not blankly, not cruelly, but searching, gentle. He must be my age.

I should be annoyed, but something about his eyes makes my pulse jump. Damn it.

"Stop looking," I tell him.

He smiles. That knocks me slightly off balance, my half-tied bag slipping between my fingers, flour threatening to spill everywhere. I grit my teeth, yank the twine tight, get it under control.

"Are you a guard?" I ask, eyeing the weapon over his shoulder, the green uniform.

"Yes," he says, then hesitates. "Obviously."

Then he smiles again. Damn.

"Obviously," I mimic, unimpressed. "Well, then, get on with it. We're busy."

And I turn my back on him. A bit of me dies as I drag my face away from those searching eyes. I tie the flour bag, but it takes longer than it should. He is still there behind me, standing, his stare burning two large scars on my back.

By the time I look again, he's gone.

I miss the feeling of him there.

Lunch time arrives, but there's no time to eat. I spot the Commoner girl slinking toward the exit and explode, my voice cracking through the empty mill. "Where are you going?" She stops, wide-eyed, small. I descend the ladder in three bounds, rage curling hot in my stomach.

She points to the storage room. Empty. She did her task. And now she wants to eat?

I hand her a knife. "Peel," I order.

She stares, pouting. Defiant. Where are the guards?

So I slap her.

She gasps. I slap her again. Her cheeks bloom red, but she moves now, grabbing a stool, chopping root. It would not be the first time a Commoner attacks a Blessed, to grab a knife too and go about my business. With Lara's help I take all the pulp that is fermenting, rinse it and without a second thought off it goes into the machine. The flour comes out moist, damp, unusable, but it's getting packed regardless. We grind through lunch time.

There is no way we will make quota.

At this point we are still short a full thousand pounds. Flour dust is in my hair, in my lungs. Lara asks me, where is the girl? I hear no sound of chopping nor peeling. I fly down to the courtyard, ready to explode. I see her hiding in a dark corner.

Oh Beauty.

A flicker of light in the shadows. A match. A cigarette.

Oh no.

We are all in explosive and immediate danger as I observe a cerulean snake of smoke rise in the dust-filled air.

A hand shoots from the dark, snatching her wrist. The flame vanishes. Just in time.

The guard steps into the light, dragging her with him.

"Are you insane?" His voice is sharp.

I took advantage of the diversion to lunge. The idiot girl. The little fool. I approach and slap her again, once, twice, again. She crumples to the floor, wailing.

A hand catches my wrist. Strong.

I twist, but another hand catches my other wrist. My arms are pinned, my breath coming fast. He's close, too close, his voice low.

"Wait."

I can't help it, my rage melts away.

He turns to the girl, still holding me firm. "The air is full of flour dust. Have you noticed?" His voice is softer now, coaxing. "Have you ever thrown wood dust into a fire?"

The girl sniffles. Slow realization dawning. She nods weakly.

"Boom," he says.

The girl's teary eyes widen. She looks at the mill, at the air, at her hands.

"Had the machine been running, you would have turned all of us into tinders," he warns.

"Do you understand?" I snap, but my voice is hoarse, thin.

He's still holding me, my lifted arms.

I wonder if Shephard's arms are as strong.

A noise behind us—Lara. The spell breaks. I catch her looking at him, at the guard, a long intense stare.

Lara and I start to quarrel while not letting our eyes away from the girl. Stupid, dangerous, deadly girl. We turn at a sound. The grater is running. The guard, or boy, is loading the peeled roots, his sleeves rolled up. He calls for the other guards, and orders them around: two to the peeling, one at the grater, then he moves to the press, loads it, turns the wheel, but it is stuck. Amidst the confusion, I wait, until her searching eyes find me. I walk, gracefully, up to him, and push him aside gently with one finger - I savor his brief flicker of frustration - and with the same finger I release the catch, freeing the wheel. And a moment later we are turning the wheels together. He looks down at the raw material, while I look directly at him.

The work has never felt so pleasant.

By sundown, the shipment is loaded. Bags stacked high, some proper flour, some damp, some just chunks of pulp that will ferment en route to some distant buyer who won't return for refunds.

The transport departs. We made it.

I exhale, breathless.

"I'm Teian," the guard/boy/searching eyes says to me.

"Visella."

Despite norms, despite the taboos, we shake hands.

And he, my captor, smiles.

Green eyes.

She arrives in silence. No roar of engines, no hum of machinery—just the eerie glide of a luminous white transport slicing through the air, settling onto the landing pad like a ghost. I shield my eyes, squinting through my fingers. A staircase lowers before the whispering crowd. Red shoes emerge first, gleaming against the metal, untouched by dust or time. The rest of her figure remains veiled in the afterglow of the transport's blinding light.

The shoes have not changed. Nor has she.

The Honored Matre floats forward, her body impossibly graceful, each step effortless. We—the women—march behind her in silence, clad in shirts and gowns borrowed from the workshop's warehouse. She does not turn to acknowledge us. Shepherd and the guard commander wait at the entrance, their backs straight. She steps past them.

We follow, a bottleneck of bodies forming near the doorway as laborers and guards all press forward. The air is thick with expectation— of food. No one wants to miss the feast. After the speeches and ceremony, Shepherd and the guests retire to the shaded patio while the rest of us are ushered into the courtyard. Kitchen aides move swiftly, pouring hot soup into empty bowls, slicing thick hunks of bread. We women scramble to the workshop where we change in haste - best to avoid stains on the new clothing for tomorrow's shipment - and put our rags back on before sitting at the table. I sit by my parents. It's the first time in years. My mother's touch on my arm—light, fleeting—sends a jolt through me. Familiar, yet foreign. My mother is no longer my mother, she is an acquaintance. My father asks a question, and I laugh, the sound strange in my own throat. To talk to them I overcome a learned reticence. A trick of Shepherd's jubilee; during the feast and the feast alone, the Blessed can mingle.

Even with non-believers.

Even with family.

Teian is not on duty - I know it because I don't feel the weight of his gaze. The guards, too, have been given reprieve and are feasting, except for the few watching from the edges.

Why would anyone run, when for once we are allowed to stuff our bellies?

But Shepherd cannot be denied when a soldier tugs at my sleeve: the Twelve are being summoned. In our old rags we drag ourselves in front of the guest of honor. Us in beige roughspun cotton against a crowd of green uniforms and one, sultry red dress with a dragon embroidered across the arms and back.

The goddess with the dragon. I notice the yellow speckles. The gold thread. The eyes are rubies, the scales on the tail are mother-of-pearl. No one here could embroider a dragon like that.

Is she the Beauty Shepherd always preaches about? That's when I shift my gaze and look at her face.

Piercing eyes.

Magnetic, piercing green eyes.

Her face is ageless, smooth as porcelain, a thing sculpted rather than born. Pearly, shimmering skin, piercing green eyes. She looks like a painting untouched by decay. I am nine years older, a woman now, and the lady in front of me is unchanged since the last time I saw her as a child. All health and youth. Ageless.

She orders all the men but Shepherd to turn, then us to undress. The girls shift, glancing at one another. One by one, we pull off our rags. The men avert their gazes. They know better. Should they look, Green Eyes will gut them without a word.

The Honored Matre moves among us, inspecting. Her eyes roam over our bodies, assessing like a buyer at a livestock auction. She tilts my chin up with one finger. She lifts my arms, turns my wrist, smells it, brushes her fingers along my collarbone. My pulse is loud in my ears. Those green eyes stare at me like bad karma. Her features are imprinted in my mind.

She walks down the line, watching, touching, smelling.

"Not now," she says, half to herself, "but maybe in six months."

She returns to her seat. A servant shuffles in, serving dessert.

The men are still, looking the other way.

We remain standing. Naked. Silent. Eyes lowered.

She eats slowly. Savoring. She burps.

Only when she finishes does she wave a hand. A dismissal.

"Dress."

We pull on our rags and file out.

Marigold.

At the beginning, it's all about little gestures. One morning, I enter the workshop to find a flower, its stem carefully wedged between the warp threads on my loom. I pull it away, afraid Lara will say something, and break it. It falls like a dead body to the ground.

Then it's an extra cup of rice pudding, hidden in my locker, stolen from the soldier's kitchen. Delicious. Small miracles.

I am on a night shift at the mill when I feel it again—that gaze. Taking a break, I slip upstairs to the drying shed. We work with half staff since Green Eyes has ordered reduced work schedules during her visit—our first vacation. Shepherd is concerned: too many bodies with unspent energy, wandering the compound with too much time to think. But I am not spared the work.

For once, though, it's quiet. The production plan does not demand double effort from the remaining workers, so we keep our sanity.

The drying shed is empty, and dark.

And it smells like fermenting white pulp. Not your idea of a romantic encounter.

But he is there.

I thank Teian for the flower, I tell him how I broke it.

He has another, a little marigold. He slides it into my hair, just over my ear.

It's really just innocent talk. I have not spoken to a man other than Shepherd in ages. It's a short, beautiful chat filled with his smiling eyes. Before anyone notices my absence, I excuse myself.

He watches me go, his gaze direct but easy, joyful. Like going through mud, I trace my way back to my station.

A coworker notices my flower. I am startled. Then, I decide not to care. A flower is just a flower.

From that moment, we become fast friends—stealing moments during breaks, whispering in the courtyard at night. Green Eyes flies away in her silent, shining sky lance. The work schedule resumes at full speed, and more, to make up for lost production. Longer hours. More night shifts. Oddly, that means more opportunities for us: stealing a glance, exchanging a word while everybody is running late at night; hands touching in passing.

It is the clandestine game we play against the system. Each stolen moment is a point scored. Each shared look, each smile, tips the scales of a life that isn't ours.

I learn about his family, the island in the north where he was born. A larger place, where deer and wolves are real, where water falls from the sky silently like white sea foam. I learn that while we laborers see the soldiers as our captors, they are trapped too—watched, ruled, kept from escaping by each other.

Every minute stolen from the rigid routine is a treasure.

Teian likes to tease me. He makes me laugh. We make fun of people we know. We dream about life on other planets.

One night, the mill is closed, the power rationed. I pretend not to remember and show up to work anyway, holding on to flecks of faith, hope, and doubt.

It's on the first floor of the flour mill that we embrace for the first time, just beside the press where our eyes first met, among the sleeping machines.

Rose.

From that point on the game is no longer a game.

The hours crawl when I know he isn't around. I am restless, disconnected. My existence is a mechanical sequence of work, meals, sleep. The food becomes tasteless, the hot water does nothing to melt the tension in my bones.

I retreat into my mind, spinning illusions. A life beyond these walls. A village. Sun. No worries. Dancing. Friends. Normal people. A normal lover.

A lover?

What do I know of that?

What do I know of life at all?

Then there is Shepherd.

I try to avoid him, but I have my duties as a Twelve. I try not to look at his face. I can't help but compare him —his flat, unreadable eyes, the sleazy smile, the double chin—to Teian's seemingly perfect features.

It's as if I saw Shepherd by candlelight, and now, in the blaze of morning, his stature has shriveled. Where once he was charming, now he is petulant. His voice, once gospel, now grates, a thin, reedy contralto. His compliments once carved beauty into me. Now they only carve.

I have sobered up. The illusion no longer crackles with magic. It cracks.

Where I feel the magic is Teian's voice, his touch, the unexpected flower bidding me good morning. His hand holding mine, casually, not possessively like Shephard.

Is this what people call affection?

As old illusions fade, enter the nightmares.

Evenings were once about fear of rejection—slipping into my cot among the Twelve, each in our curtained cubicle, waiting. Our benefactor arrives, pretending to be quiet, waking us all. His little petty ritual: reward one, shame the others. My stomach twisting with insecurity and longing.

Now, I pray to be ignored. I ask myself what keeps Shepherd from choosing me—and how long it will last. Every evening is a trial. I try sleeping with the Commoners and get lice. Shepherd is furious. Then the Common women throw me out. They never liked me.

One evening, I push aside the curtain to my cubicle—and freeze.

A rose on my pillow.

My skin prickles.

It can only be one of two things.

It's Teian, he risked his life sneaking in. If caught, he will hang.

Or, it's Shepherd, and tonight I've run out of luck.

I wait for the girls to fall asleep and I slip out, silent as a snake, still dressed.

I will spare you the details—the stomach-churning fear, my hands searching blindly in the dark, followed by the too-bright corridors of the compound.

I find two guards I've seen around Teian. I ask where he is. They are terrified a Twelve is speaking to them—against the rules. But they look toward the boiler room.

I find him there, sweat beading down his temple, his uniform damp in the heat.

I hold up the rose.

He smiles.

My heart lifts, with the terrible, shivering relief that it was not Shepherd summoning it burns, in fury, because of the risk Teian took, and the dread about what could happen to him.

I lash out. Words spill, sharp with anger. I swear, I shake the rose at him like a weapon, petals scattering in the heat. I demand to know why he dares talking to me against the rules, me one of the Twelve, what does he want from me, how dare he sneak into the Sanctum and vilify me in front of the others by means of this flower, not to speak of the monstrous risk he took by stepping onto sacred ground…

I am not through, and I never will be, because in the middle of my tirade, he pulls me close and kisses me.

A plain, simple kiss that tastes like euphoria.

And just like that, my rage evaporates.

A thirst replaces it. I need more. I would risk anything for more.

Inside the boiler room, the guards have left a mattress, clean and soft, for stealing naps late at night. It is where I want my next kiss.

I fall asleep in his arms.

At first light, I slip back into my cubicle.

Wall.

Shepherd must be planning something for me. After requesting my presence for a night walk—a grim ritual in the central courtyard that feels more like an inmate's time-out than a privilege—he reminds me that I will soon turn eighteen. The next morning, an instructor of the faith informs me that my days at the mill are over. No more hard labor.

The significance of my age is lost on me.

Now I carry lunch to the commander. I bring water to the perimeter guards. I deliver messages from the officers to Shepherd and to the commander. After years of heaving sacks of flour, I now walk the camp with nothing heavier than a tray of sandwiches. It feels absurd, like I have ascended to some mockery of heaven.

Moving lightly along the trails, through corridors, tunnels, and hidden passages—the arteries of our captors' surveillance network—I marvel at how intricate these private highways are, how they rarely cross the laborers' paths.

At noon, I climb up till I reach the outer walls.

The breeze carries the scent of coral and salt.

From up here, I can see out. I see sails at the horizon.

The walls are thicker than I am tall, impossibly high. A sheer drop. No one could climb, and yet the guards stand there like gargoyles, eyes fixed on the horizon. Winter is creeping in. Maybe they fear the locusts.

At first, I get lost, constantly running late, breathless, earning my share of bad Karma. But soon, the map unfolds in my mind—a pattern of black and white threads. The black paths are for us laborers, a shadow maze woven beneath the white lanes, where the officers and soldiers move. Almost touching.

The fortress is complete. Impregnable.

A single gate feeds it. Through it come the soostone divers, the shuttles packed with laborers sent to the crops, always under guard. The Sanctum sits at the farthest end of the compound, the farthest from escape.

Every afternoon, my last task is to bring lunch to the two sentinels posted at the top of the gate.

I grab whatever is left from the sandwich basket, a canteen of water, and race for fun through the maze—out of the officers' building, right, left, right again, under a bridge, up stairs, through an open passage along the east wall, down again, through nameless doors, up three more flights, onto an opening just above the gate.

There is more to climb. A wooden ladder three times my height leads to the very top of the wall. From there, another ladder descends down to the sentinels' ledge, four times my height. The very top of the gate is two wooden ladders set at an angle.

When I reach the top, breathless, I stop short, looking down.

Teian is one of the guards.

This time, I smile.

I climb down to them and I find myself on a terrace overlooking the street below. The boys let me peek through the slits in the wall. They are chatty, explaining how the ladders are set so they can be pulled away from either side—a single guard at the top can kick the internal ladder, stopping any number of slaves trying to escape, or kick the outside ladder, barring intruders from climbing up from the terrace we are in.

I look down to the streets. "But how would anyone get up to this terrace from the outside?" I ask.

Teian's companion grins. "Wait for it."

They show me the iron bar on the outer gate, lowered each night by a complex system of levers and pulleys. They point out the metal ladder they use to descend when—inevitably—the outer doors aren't locked properly.

I stare at the gate.

This fortress isn't just built to keep us in.

It's built to keep everything out.

Pearl.

When you are in love, carelessness is only a matter of time.

I would risk anything for more.

Teian and I have moved swiftly—from strangers to friends, friends to lovers, lovers to conspirators. Our stolen moments stretch longer as we dare more, but more of these moments are spent whispering plans instead of loving words.

There must be a way out.

I turn eighteen in two weeks.

Whatever that means for me. For Shepherd.

We steal kisses in broad daylight, hidden behind the turret. Before dawn, he waits for me outside the Sanctum—something that would have made me furious weeks ago—to make sure nothing happened to me overnight. At lunchtime, I bring extra food, treats, cigars, which he trades with his colleague for privacy. We sketch ideas, murmur plans, and I slip away to map the labor camp, memorize the transport schedules, and scout for the sentries' blind spots.

One night, I steal enough from the officers' table to bribe Teian's roommates to leave us alone. We turn on the light among the bunk beds and study the maps I've traced onto scraps of fabric.

Still, there's no sure way out. The only escape is through the gate—or above it, through the system of ladders. Both paths are impossible without triggering alarms. We go in circles, debating pretexts to get me past the checkpoints at night, diversions to draw the guards away.

Teian looks into his shift schedule, and learns that three nights from now, he is assigned to the outer terrace above the gate.

We lock eyes. "We go together," he says. "No guarantee it will happen any other time soon."

I nod.

He reaches into his pocket, pulls out something small—a necklace. A single pearl, suspended on a fine metal thread. He fastens it around my neck.

Tears veil my eyes. It's the most beautiful thing anyone has ever given me.

The necklace at my neck, I hide it under the shirt. Then, I change my mind.

The shirt comes off as the lamplight flickers out.

The next day, Green Eyes returns.