The Secret World of Briar Rose(53)
Her sanity felt like a frail thread, one that would snap under any more weight. Still, Elly continued rambling. “Maybe their plan worked. Maybe they escaped Gyldan—”
Corin slammed a hand on the table inside their home. The ceramic fox Harlow once gave her rolled to the edge and shattered on the ground.
“They’re dead, El.” Her patience had worn thin, and she no longer cared about delivering the news so bluntly. “They used the tunnels to plant a bomb under a military post. The soldiers knew and wasted no time killing them. You should be grateful we never got involved.”
Elly rushed to the broken fox, her knees pressed to loose floor boards, fingers pricking against the jagged edges of clay. The attempt was so useless it made Corin want to scream.
“But they planned this for so long,” Elly argued. “How would they have gotten caught—”
“Because I told him, El!”
Her words spewed out in an angry rush, a dam burst open to reveal nothing but regret and self-loathing. She didn’t realize the snarl at the end of her sentence until it lingered in the air, silencing them both. The leaking pipe made a small, dripping sound that matched her heartbeat, though Corin could have sworn she heard the cracks in her sister’s.
“Who?” Elly whispered.
For the first time, her voice was quiet and frail, a flimsy hope that Corin would be better than this. They both knew that would be a lie. Elly believed in fairy tales, but even she couldn’t believe in something as impossible as Corin being good.
Corin could not bear to say his name without wanting to vomit.
“The man who put this roof over our heads.”
She had kept away from Woodbine shop whenever she patrolled the marketplace for easy pickpockets. He’d often conversed with soldiers, a business suit among steel uniforms, laughing in camaraderie as if they weren’t responsible for others’ suffering. The man was indistinguishable from any other landlord rubbing elbows and licking boots for approval.
Corin had caught his eye without stealing anything, as if her very existence had incriminated her. He’d approached her like she was a disposable body he recognized across the street, claiming she had a friend who took something of his. Even when she’d acted oblivious, he’d cornered her, a group of soldiers behind him in tow, ready to beat her into submission if she’d tried to run.
He’d claimed he’d seen Harlow and other vagrants skulking around the shops, collecting wood pulp and sawdust and gunpowder. He knew they were the same group of people spreading protest flyers around districts. What he’d wanted to know was what they were planning.
“You’d get in a lot of trouble for stealing from me. Fortunately, I’m a generous man,” he’d said. “I can tell you value the same things as I do. When there’s a lucrative opportunity, we take it. That’s the only way we survive in this world.”
The deal had been renting one of his vacant properties for five years and only paying for one year in monthly installments. Corin had been stunned by the proposition. She hadn’t allowed herself to believe it until he’d prepared the contract. A roof and four walls guaranteed by signature, even if the ink would be stained with blood.
He’d promised to send soldiers to kill her in their place if she warned the group about their conversation. On her last night at the commune, she’d told Harlow not to go to the tunnels, that they would die if they tried to execute their plan, but she could not reveal why. Did the reason matter? Her warning would have been the same even if she had not met Woodbine. They would have died regardless, with or without her.
She thought she’d made the logical choice for survival. And yet, with each night she’d screamed herself awake from nightmares, she only remembered herself as a desperate, pathetic animal that had been backed into a corner and chose to save only herself.
Elly must have thought the same, for she was still staring at Corin with disgust.
Corin had never seen her sister look at her that way before. Her skin itched with shame. She wanted to rip it off until she could no longer live inside her own wretched body.
“I warned Harlow not to go. I tried to get them to stop. But we had to leave them, El.” Like an afterthought, she added, “I did it for us.”
“Stop lying, Corin. You did it for yourself.”
Elly stood up, her volume raising with her height. Since when had she grown so quickly? The girl used to be a wailing infant in Corin’s arms. Now she stood almost to eye level and talked back when Corin did something irreparable.
“I was happy with them, and you couldn’t be. You kept wanting more.”
“Of course I wanted more!” Corin shouted, a burst of fury in her chest like her heart was a star collapsing into itself. “I don’t want to die a starving artist or be part of a rebellion. I don’t want to sleep on the ground because every army owns the land we walk on. I don’t want to hold on to little figurines and have my life be reduced to useless, sentimental trinkets just to cope with everything I’ve lost.”
Her boots crunched against the shards of clay on the ground. The sharp edges of the fox cut into the soles. Her bare hands grabbed the pieces. She held a jagged chip, the paint already peeling off. The cuts in her palm stung as if she held that pen again, signing her fate, throwing away her friends’ lives in return.
“You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.” The words burst from her lungs like a sob while anger shook her body. She hated the cards that life dealt her, and how, no matter which card she played, she would lose every single time.