place.

She tells me of Yuan at the end of its first hundred years, before the

Dark Heart was forgotten, when every soul in the city knew the roses were

the teeth of the monster they had created. She tells me of growing up

yearning for the world outside, watching from the wall walks the giant cats

roaming the grasslands, and longing to run free the way they did. She tells

me of her fourteenth birthday and the meager meal she shared with her

family at the end of a summer when the crops had refused to grow, the day

it was decided that the queen must die and Ana’s father promised her to

the king.

King Sato was tired then, already finished with two wives, and

decades older than his new bride. The king promised Ana’s father that he,

the king, would take his turn under the blade when it became necessary,

and he and Ana were married. Years passed and three children were born.

Then, just before Ana’s thirty-sixth birthday, the crops once again began to

fail. King Sato was nearing his ninetieth year, but when the advisors agreed

the time had come for a sacrifice, he refused to go to the roses.

Ana was told to kiss her children good-bye and prepare herself for

the ceremony the next morning.

Terrified, Ana ran from the tower, through failing fields begging for

blood, to the King’s Gate and out into the desert. She hid in the tall grass

that surrounded the city in those days, praying she wouldn’t be found by

wild animals, hoping the king would take his own life within a day or two

and she would be able to return home.

It was there, sleeping in the grass with her cheek pressed to the

earth, that she spoke to the Pure Heart of the planet for the first time.

She’d been raised to fear the Dark Heart’s other half, the magical force that

had caused the deformity of most of Yuan’s citizens, but she found the Pure

Heart anything but cruel. It spoke kindly to her; it offered her life instead of

death. It told her how to break the curse and restore the health of the

planet and all the creatures living upon it.

Ana was transformed, frightened, but also filled with the certainty

that her people must change their ways and end the division of the world.

She returned to the city and to her tower, where she wrote her last

diary entry, the one explaining how to break the curse, and why the people

of Yuan must reach out to the monsters in the desert.

The diary ends there, but Ana’s spirit shows me the morning the

guards came to escort her to the royal garden.

King Sato and the heads of the noble families were gathered around

the roses. The royal executioner was already wearing his hood. Ana begged

the king to listen to what she’d learned outside the dome, but he wouldn’t.

No one would. Just as no one would remind the king that—according to the

covenant—his life would serve as well as hers. The king threatened to kill

Ana and marry another if she refused to offer herself to the roses, while,

beneath the soil, the Dark Heart called to her, promising her peace and

rest, assuring her there was no choice but death.

Finally, Ana gave up. She knelt down. She took the knife in her hand

and opened her own throat. The executioner ensured that her death was

swift.

After the ceremony, King Sato buried the covenant beneath a paving

stone in the royal garden and ordered all copies of the text burned, hoping

to ensure the ignorance of his fourth wife. Unfortunately, the king didn’t

live to enjoy his new wife for long. Only two days after giving Ana’s

bloodless body to the river, the king suffered a heart attack in his bed and

died. His new wife—barely twenty and unprepared to rule—married Ana’s

eldest son the next afternoon and went on to give the city many sons and

daughters.

Ana had died for nothing. Her soul lingered to see that painful fact, to

see her diary hidden away by her maid, and to see the truth of the

covenant and the dark magic it nurtures lost to the people living beneath

the dome. Her spirit lingered for centuries, reaching out to Yuan’s rulers in

their dreams, hoping one would discover her diary. She was a part of the

city, but a piece that didn’t fit, the keeper of a secret even more important

than the location of the covenant, the keeper of the truth about the Dark

Heart and the only way to end the nightmare of life under the domes.

Love. The secret is love.

A citizen of the domed cities and a man or woman of the Monstrous

tribes must love each other more than they love anything else. When they

do, the cities will fall, life will return to the desert, and every creature

dwelling on the planet will be made whole and strong. All it takes is love.

My mother must have also somehow discovered the truth. That had

to be why she took me into the desert, and why she attempted to destroy

our family when she was locked in the tower and denied a way out of Yuan.

She wasn’t crazy. If she’d succeeded in burning the three of us to ash that

night, there would have been no blood for the Dark Heart. Murder would

have succeeded in destroying Yuan, but only love will heal our world.

I love Gem. I grow more certain of that every day. I also grow more

certain that Gem is dead.

He would have returned by now if he weren’t, I know he would. He

must have died out there in the desert, and now I will never be able to tell

him how much he means to me. At least, not in this life.

I ask Ana’s spirit if I will see Gem in the afterlife, but that is one

question she refuses to answer. She doesn’t want to believe I will share her

fate; she wants to believe Gem and I will end the curse, but I know better.

Yuan is failing. I awake each morning certain I’ll find Junjie and the guards

waiting outside my bedroom, prepared to kill me if I continue to refuse to

give my life for my city. Bo can hold them off for only so long. They will

come. Soon.

My time grows shorter than the thorns on the royal roses.

I tell Needle about the secret location of the covenant, but warn her

to stay away from the garden. Still, I’m not surprised when she returns one

evening with a scroll wrapped in cloth so ancient that it falls apart in my

hands.

I unroll the paper carefully. Needle reads and signs each word. I

follow along, flinching when she reaches the final line and I learn that Ana

was telling the truth. Our city’s bargain with the Dark Heart calls only for

the death of “one bound by oath of marriage to the first sacrifice.”

One bound by oath. Not a woman bound by oath. Not a queen. A

king would serve just as well.

It’s a little betrayal in a world ravaged by centuries of hatred and

suffering, but it doesn’t feel little. It feels like proof that there is nothing

good within the human heart. How could there be? If an entire generation

could condemn Yuan’s daughters to death because they found that

preferable to the death of Yuan’s sons?

What is there worth fighting for? Worth dying for? What have any of

my dreams ever been worth?

That night, I tuck the covenant beneath my mattress, lay my head on

my pillow, and dream of the day my mother took me walking outside the

dome. I smell the wild scent of the desert; I feel the sun hot on my cheeks. I

hear a whisper on the wind, a voice begging me to stand up to my people

and for my people, to force the darkness to end with me, to save my

daughters, to save myself.

To be brave.

I wasn’t brave. I was as afraid of that voice as I was of death itself. So