“I know,” she snaps.
I’m thrown for a moment. I didn’t expect her to admit it.
“I know it wasn’t right to steal from you,” she says. “But until I met you, I’d never seen anyone from another city. I could almost believe that you weren’t real. I don’t feel good about what I did. Do you think I feel good about it?” Her voice is trembling. “But my people needed water. And I couldn’t put them in a tower. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t be like…” She trails off.
“Tell me about what happened,” I say. “When you did it.”
“Did what?” she says stubbornly.
“When you killed her,” I say.
At first, I think she’s not going to answer me. It’s too dark to see her, but I can imagine her huddled against the far wall of our cell, starved and weak with blood on her clothes but still insufferably determined to be perfect.
“She brought us into her study,” she says quietly. “We thought it was for our lessons. But then she told us that it was time for her to choose her heir. We’d always thought we were going to rule together. But she told us how to do the ritual, and she told us that whoever did it to the other would be the heir, and I realized she had planned it that way all along.”
Her voice has become strangely flat.
“We tried to run,” she says. “But she stopped us. I knew she wanted him to win. He was always her favorite. He was smarter than me, and better at everything, and he had control over his emotions. She was always talking about how important it was to keep control. But she still didn’t understand him. He would never have done that to me. I realized that if we didn’t do what she wanted, she was going to kill us both. She didn’t care. She would just try again, with new heirs. So… I killed her.”
“How?” I say.
“Does it matter?” she says.
I think about the crack of the watercrea’s bones on the cobblestone. I think about Verene’s housekeeper, dribbling blood onto the floor. I think about my papá, standing over me with a rock in his hand, looking at me like I was just an obstacle in his path.
“I want to know,” I say.
“She had this big glass jar on her desk,” she says. “She would put blood in it and show us her magic. When we were children, we thought it was… I don’t know. Interesting. We didn’t understand. I grabbed the jar, and I hit her. She fell down, and I kept hitting her until the jar broke. I got one of the shards, and I stabbed her until she was dead.” She pauses. “Until she had disappeared, actually. I didn’t notice it at first. I just kept stabbing at the floor.”
I shiver a little bit, imagining the sound of it. The feel of it.
“I said I would never do the ritual on anyone,” Verene whispers. “I was so sure about that. But then… you threatened me. Just like she did. And I would have done anything to stop you.”
She takes in a shuddering breath.
“I’ll never be able to learn to control the magic,” she says. “I’ll hurt people. I deserve to be in here.”
I go still.
“We can learn to control it?” I say.
“Our maman said it’s always hard to control at first,” she says. “She said she was going to train her heir for years.”
So it’s not just me.
“But I don’t want to learn,” Verene insists. “I don’t want to go back to Iris and become the Eyes. Theo is bringing them water now. He was prepared to do it without me. He told me—” She chokes on a sob. “He told me that he always knew I’d go too far, and that he’d have to pick up the pieces.”
She sobs again. “I just wanted to do something good for my city,” she whispers.
She sounds broken, and I’m surprised by how much it hurts me. The pang in my chest is extremely disconcerting.
I don’t want her to feel so helpless. I don’t want her to give up and let herself wither away. She deserves better than that.
“No,” I say. “It’s not that you went too far. It’s that you didn’t go far enough.”
“What?” she whispers.
“What is your brother doing in Iris?” I say. “Stealing water from the other cities, just like you were doing before? That’s not the answer. You tried everything you could to change Iris for the better, and you couldn’t. But it wasn’t your fault.”
“What was it, then?” she says.
“It’s these cities,” I say. “In these cities, we can’t get water unless we feed on blood. The person who makes the water can’t do it unless they feed on eyes. Of course you couldn’t truly change your city for the better, because your city is broken. They all are. And who made them this way? Who’s been around for a thousand years? Who told everyone that this was how things were always going to be?”
“The rulers,” Verene says. “All of them.”
I’m on my feet. I haven’t been on my feet in so long, and it’s dizzying.
“How do we know they’re right?” I say. “They kept so much from us. The Eyes was your maman, and she barely told you anything.”
“She said we would learn everything once we had our magic,” Verene says. “But I don’t even know if that’s true. She said she was going to pass her power on, but she liked having power. She was so secretive about it. My—” She stammers a little bit. “My papa didn’t even know the truth about where she got her magic. He felt sorry for her. He thought she was trapped. If he’d known…”
“Of course she liked having power,” I say. “Who doesn’t like it? Who doesn’t want to be the most powerful person in the whole city?”
I hear Verene rustling. She’s on her feet, too.
“But if we can get out of here, we’ll be just as powerful as the other rulers,” she says. “No—we’ll be more powerful. Because there’s two of us.”
“Yes,” I say.
“We can use the power for good,” she says. “We can find out what the other rulers are hiding. We can find out why they’re keeping things this way.”
“And then we can stop it.” I’m rushing forward in my excitement. “Really stop it. And then we’ll be—”
I bump into her and stop short, startled. I didn’t realize she was so close to me.
But she is. I can smell her, sweet and fresh underneath all the grime. My hand seems to have gotten tangled in something soft—her shirt. Beneath, I can feel the warmth of her body. I can feel her stomach rising and falling as she breathes.
And then her fingers are on mine. She’s no longer wearing gloves. I feel the rough gauze of the bandage around her wounded palm, and her long, delicate fingers. They curl around mine, and I tighten my grip without even thinking.
She shoves my hand away.
“No,” she says.
She backs up.
“No,” she repeats. “I’m not—I’m not working with you. What am I even saying? We could never be a team. You’ll just use me and betray me, because you don’t care about doing good. All you care about is yourself.”
My fingers are still clutching empty air. My heart is pounding in my throat.