have the beginnings of my wall.

Unfortunately, beginnings are not the same as endings.

I’m not even close to an ending when I hear footsteps on the stairs.

Heavy steps, two pairs of boots, two men’s voices arguing in harsh whispers

as they circle around to the top of the tower. When they reach the last

stair, Junjie pauses, clearly surprised to see me and my half wall.

“What is this, Isra?” Junjie’s eyes are sad, but not nearly as sad as his

son’s.

“I tried to stop him,” Bo says from his place behind his father. “I

wanted you to have a few more hours.”

A few more hours. Then he means to do it, to help his father kill me.

“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. I can’t have failed, not when I’m so

close.

“This doesn’t have to be painful,” Junjie says, holding out his hand.

“You can still change your mind and make your death a meaningful gift to

your city.”

“It’s no gift. Not for you or Bo or anyone else.” I back away, my

trowel falling to the floor with a dull thud, smattering mortar across my

bare feet. “This city is built on evil. It has to end with me,” I say, voice rising

until it rings with desperation.

“You will give your blood, or we will take it,” Junjie says, as stern as

he’s been with me since I was a little girl. “This city will stand and prosper

and flourish for another seven hundred years. You know this is the way

things are done in Yuan.”

And the way they will always be done. Nothing I say now will change

that. Nothing I do will accomplish anything but putting off the inevitable.

Escape is impossible, but still, I turn and run. I skid into my room and slam

the door behind me, throwing the lock seconds before Junjie throws his

weight against the door.

I back away from the trembling wood, hands shaking at my sides.

I won’t let him take my death. It’s the only thing I have left, the only

thing that matters. My death will be mine. I will have my revenge against

this city and the monster beneath the ground so eager for my blood, and I

will finally, finally, finally be free of it all. Of life and fear and love and loss.

Free of my responsibilities. Free of my failures. Free of this love that’s been

nothing but another curse, another stone around my neck pulling me to the

depths of an ocean of pain so deep that I will never hit bottom.

I want to be free. Free.

“Isra! Open the door!” Junjie shouts.

“Free,” I say aloud.

I’ve always craved freedom more than anything else. Anything.

If even one citizen of the dome and one Monstrous can love the other

more than they love anything else …

If I’m brutally honest with myself, do I really love Gem more than

freedom? Have I ever loved anything more than that elusive, seductive

unknown? If I had the choice—Gem or freedom, even the freedom that will

come with death, when all my obligations have been honored and I’m free

to exit on my own terms—what would I choose?

Gem is strong and brave and clever and good, and he makes me feel

things I never dreamed I could feel, but he is also difficult and frustrating

and impatient and … overwhelming. His arms feel like home, but he

represents everything strange and uncertain and unknown. Loving him

means gathering up all of those things, and carrying them with me. Forever.

Love means being vulnerable and beholden. Love means embracing the

pain I’ve been holding apart from myself for all the months that I’ve waited

for him. It means taking that pain and claiming it and knowing it might not

be the last of the pain he’ll bring into my life.

Love is pain, and pain is the opposite of freedom, and freedom is all

I’ve ever wanted, but I’ve never really stopped to wonder why. Why do I

want my freedom so desperately? Why do I dream of the wind instead of

something solid or permanent that I can hold in my hands, my arms?

Maybe I … Maybe …

“Isra! Isra!” Junjie is still shouting loud enough to rattle the door, but

his cries seem muted, drowned out by the roar of the revelation taking

place inside me.

“I had nothing better,” I whisper. Back in the time before Gem, back

in the darkness, in my cage, in my narrow world with Death waiting with His

arms outstretched and only my father to help me prepare for the long walk

to greet Him, there was nothing better than the dream of having no ties to

bind me.

But Gem, with all his flaws and complications and high expectations,

is better. His love, his faith in me, his belief that I can be as strong and

brave as he is … The way he makes me feel and think and try harder than

I’ve ever tried …

All of it, all of him, is better than anything else. Anything at all.

I take a breath and let the pain and love and admiration and

everything I feel when I think of Gem fill me up, soak into my soul, break

my heart wide open. It hurts—so, so much—but it’s also a relief. It’s also

warm and peaceful and safe. Beautiful. This kind of love is weightless,

limitless.…

And almost exactly what I imagined freedom would feel like.

If only I’d known sooner. If only I could thank Gem for helping me

find the only thing I’ve ever wanted as much as I want him.

TWENTY-SIX

GEM

I’M too late. Yuan is falling before my eyes.

Cracks as wide across as my body snake up the surface of the dome.

Stones tumble from the wall walks, making skittering sounds beneath the

moaning of the buckling metal that once fused the glass to the rock.

Bizarrely shaped Smooth Skins unlike any I encountered during my

captivity, partial mutants that I assume are the Banished that Isra spoke of,

and a few starving animals stream away from the once-healthy city in a

seemingly endless ribbon across the desert. The last of them emerged from

the Desert Gate less than an hour ago.

Isra was not among them. But I didn’t expect her to be. There’s a

reason the city is crumbling to pieces. Isra is gone.

Not gone. Murdered, and the city along with her, while you walked

away. And stayed away, wallowing in your weakness. You might as well

have slit her throat that first night. You’re the reason she’s dead.

Add another name to—

I begin to hum beneath my breath one of the songs Isra taught me, a

complicated tune with as many ups and downs as the path over the

mountains that brought me back to Yuan from the wilds where I had lost

myself for months.

Singing drowns out the terrible thoughts. Sometimes I imagine I’m

singing to Herem, the son I held for the first time the day I lifted him onto

his funeral pyre. Sometimes I imagine Father singing along in the deep,

steady voice of my childhood, banishing from my memory the confused

whimpers of his last days.

By the time I returned, Father no longer knew me. He called me by

his brother’s name. He asked where our sisters were. He smiled and told

stories about his new mate, as if he were a young man and he and Mother

just married. He cried like a child, begging me to bring a light into the hut

because he was afraid of the dark.

He died in his sleep a week after I returned. I never got to say

good-bye to the man I remembered.

Gare blamed me for that, too. He blamed me for Father’s broken

mind. He blamed me for the twenty dead before I brought the food. He