Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

Author:Veronica Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan Books

10

ANTIGONE

“IF YOU were a man,” Polyneikes had asked me once, “what would you be?”

The question had annoyed me at the time. We had been sitting on the front steps of our parents’ house, teenagers, passing a lit cigarette back and forth. None of our cigarettes were tobacco, anymore—tobacco wasn’t useful for food, so it wasn’t worth growing. Instead we smoked corn silk rolled in flimsy paper. It was nothing but an idle activity, something to do with your hands while you talked.

I had replied, smoke spilling out of my mouth, “Someone whose gifts aren’t wasted for no reason.”

I didn’t want to change my body. I liked the rhythm that it gave to my life, rising and falling, swelling and shrinking, aching and releasing, with every cycle of the moon. And though I knew there were some men—the state didn’t call them that, but my mother had—who could still bear children, I wasn’t one of them, either. People know themselves, my mother said. Not fully, not ever, but they know enough. She was right. I didn’t long to be a man. What I longed for, instead, was the freedom to follow my inclinations. The first time Polyneikes went to a meeting of rebels, sneaking out of the house in the early hours of the morning, I was angry that I couldn’t go with him. I knew my value. I knew my strengths. The rebellion would be better off if I joined them, too. My absence was to their detriment.

But the womb that gave my life its ebbs and flows made my body sacred to the state, and therefore particularly subject to its might. My mother called this nonsense. She said that protecting a thing was just an excuse to control it. She dedicated herself to freeing people from that control. Technology can be used for liberty as well as domination, she wrote, when she petitioned the state to allow her to develop the artificial womb. Let me prove it to you.

That was how my parents met.

My mother had been able to make a place for herself in a world that refused to give her one, because she was simply too brilliant to ignore. Because of her genius, she was allowed to occupy spaces that no other woman could. It was the great disappointment of my life that I was not excellent enough to do the same.

I was to be protected, Polyneikes said when I complained of the waste of my gifts. It was the first time since we were children that I shoved him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Locked in my bedroom now, waiting for dawn, I realized that all that protection had been for naught. Kreon had ordered execution for anyone who tampered with Polyneikes’ body, who tried to collect his ichor. So what good had it done, to guard my womb? I would die anyway. My body was forfeit.

I chewed my fingernails and watched the sky lighten.

Did it have to be?

My mother was a scientist. When

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