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The trapdoor beneath her feet opens. She falls, and for one moment, her hair hangs suspended about her head, a flourish of red. Then her feet scramble at air and she falls. Her slim throat gags. Eyes open so wide. If only I could save her from this. If only I could protect her; but the world is cold and hard to me. It does not bend as I wish it to bend. I am weak. I watch my wife die and my haemanthus fall from her hand. The camera records it all. I rush forward to kiss her ankle. I cradle her legs. I will not let her suffer.
On Mars there is not much gravity, so you have to pull the feet to break the neck. They let the loved ones do it.
Soon, there is no sound, not even the creaking of the rope.
My wife is too light.
She was only just a girl.
Then the thumping of the Fading Dirge begins. Fists on chests. Thousands. Fast, like a racing heartbeat. Slower. A beat a second. A beat every five. Every ten. Then never again, and the mournful mass fades away like dust held in the palm as the old tunnels wail with de
ep winds.
And the Golds, they fly away.
Eo’s father, Loran, and Kieran sit by my door through the night. They say they are there to keep me company. But they are there to guard me, to ensure I do not die. I want to die. Mother dresses my wound with silk my sister, Leanna, stole from the Webbery.
“Keep the nervenucleic dry, or you will scar.”
What are scars? How little they matter. Eo will not see them, so why should I care? She will not run her hand along my back. She will never kiss my wounds.
She is gone.
I lie in our bed on my back so I can feel the pain and forget my wife. But I cannot forget. She hangs even now. In the morning, I will pass her on the way to the mines. Soon she will stink and soon she will rot. My beautiful wife shone too bright to live long. I still feel her neck cracking against my hands; they tremble now in the night.
There is a hidden tunnel I carved in my bedroom long ago in the rock so I could sneak out as a child. I use it now. I leave out the secret path, climbing stealthily down from my home, so my kin never see me slip away in the low light.
It is quiet in the township. Quiet except for the HC, which makes my wife die to a soundtrack. They intended to show the futility of disobedience. And they succeed in that, but there is something else in the video. They show my flogging, and Eo’s, and they play her song throughout. And as she dies, they play it again, which seems to give the video the wrong effect. Even if she were not my wife, I see a martyr, a young girl’s pretty song silenced by the rope of cruel men.
Then the HC flashes black for several moments. It has never gone to black before. And Octavia au Lune comes back on with the same old message. It almost seems as though someone has hacked into the broadcast, because my wife flickers onto the giant screen again.
“Break the chains!” she cries. Then she’s gone and the screen is black. It crackles. The image comes back. She cries it again. Black once more. Standard programming goes up, then it cuts to her screaming one last time and then there’s me pulling her legs. Then static.
The streets are quiet as I make my way to the Common. The nightshift will be returning soon. Then I hear a noise and a man steps into the street in front of me. My uncle’s face leers at me from the shadows. A single bulb hangs over his head, illuminating the flask in his hand and his tattered red shirt.
“You are your father’s son, little bastard. Stupid and vain.”
My hands clench. “Come to stop me, Uncle?”
He grunts. “Couldn’t stop your father from killing his bloody self. And he was a better bloodyman than you. More restraint in him.”
I step forward. “I don’t need your permission.”
“Nay, you little squabber, you don’t.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Don’t do what you’re gonna do, though. It’ll break your mother; you might think she didn’t know you’d slip out. She did. Told me so. Said you were gonna go die like my brother, like your girl.”
“If Mother knew, she would have stopped me.”
“Nah. She lets us men make our own mistakes. But this ain’t what your girl would’ve wanted.”
I point a finger at my uncle. “You don’t know a thing. Not a thing about what she wanted.” Eo said I wouldn’t understand being a martyr. I will show her I do.
“Righto,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll walk with you, then, since your head is full of rocks.” He chuckles. “We Lambdas do love the noose.”
He tosses me his flask and I fall into tentative step beside him.
“I tried to talk your father out of his little protest, you know. Told him words and dance mean as much as dust. Tried squaring up with him. I squabbed that one up. He laid me down cold.” He throws a slow right. “Comes a time in life when you know a man has his mind set and it’s an insult to gainsay.”
I drink from his flask and hand it back. The swill tastes strange and thicker than usual. Strange. He makes me finish the flask.
