Page 1

EBEN

As one of ten Dusk Guards, I walked the perimeter of Elysium, soaking and lighting the logs inside the large metal lanterns situated along the path. The bright beacons our only source of light at night since the world had gone dark a year ago. The kerosene burned the tips of my fingers as it seeped into the small cuts in my skin. I lived in the guard camp south of the prison and worked every evening. Each shift started with the lanterns, then clearing the trash from the daily windstorms, and if I was lucky, by midnight, I’d have enough time to eat before checking the fires again. It was monotonous, lonely work, but lately the isolation was welcome. The longer I was stationed here, the harder it would become to hide the truth.

I would’ve preferred working in the west camp, but men were not allowed to work the women’s prisons anymore. The northern militias were known for their brutal behaviors. Rape and nonconsensual polygamy had run rampant for months after the US military fell to the so-called freedom fighters. Women were not safe from men. Not anymore. Maybe they never were in the first place. But me. My kind. If anyone found out about my predilections for men, I’d be hanged in the street and used as an example.

Too many things had changed, the world as I’d known it was gone, and it had only gotten worse over the last year. We had no real understanding of how it all had happened. The virus, the wars, the shifts in power. The weak veil of democracy fell as fast as the people died in their beds from fever. And when we lost all electricity, the last shred of humanity we’d been holding onto vanished along with it. There were no more hospitals, no more cars, no more easy communication. All that was left was war, uncertainty, and a fight to simply exist.

The things I’d seen and done. I was only twenty-five years old, but death was a shadow I couldn’t shake.

“He won’t make it a day on the front lines.” The doctor removed the stethoscope from his ears. “He’s useless.”

“I don’t know about that.” The prison guard grabbed my chin, turning my head back and forth with his rough fingers. I could smell the smoke and kerosene on his skin and my stomach turned. “He could easily light the perimeter.”

“A Dusk Guard?” the doctor laughed. “With the weight he’s lost… it will take double rations for a month to keep him alive.” He shook his head, his cold black eyes staring through me. “Better off in the furnace, if you ask me.”

I didn’t say a word, my mouth dry with terror and hope. Death seemed too easy. I wished for it as much as I feared it.

“He’s been pardoned…” The guard dropped his hand, his upper lip curling tight as he spoke. “Though, I wonder if you’re right… I guess only time will tell.”

I’d survived the pandemic, but I had been wounded.

Useless.

According to the militia doctor, my lungs had been too weak to fight in their war. And what I’d first thought had been a blessing, had become my curse. I was stuck here. Surrounded by temptation and death and pain.

“Eben,” Dorel called my name, out of breath as he ran toward me. He handed me a small brown bag. The bottom wet and torn as he set it in my hand. A sour smell filled the air. “Captain said you’re to report for guard duty in the east sector.”

“But I’ve just finished lighting the lamps, what about—”

“You’re going to argue?” He raised his brow as a dangerous smirk lit his features. Shorter than me with a paunchy stomach that hung over his belt, he rolled his shoulders and stretched as tall as he could manage. “I’ve been called up to the Boulder front. Said they grabbed about a dozen NEA fighters. Some of them women.” The way he licked his lips, the scent emanating from the bag wasn’t the only thing making my gut churn. “I leave in twenty, get your ass to the east sector. Captain doesn’t like to wait.”

“What’s this bag for?” I asked and he laughed.

“That’s for prisoner 192. A gift for his good behavior.” Dorel’s jaw pulsed. “Make sure he gets it.”

I made my way toward the front gate, trying my best to ignore the stench. Some of the other Dusk Guards gave me pitiful glances as I passed by. Working the perimeter was a highly coveted position. No one wanted to work the halls of Elysium. It was easy to see your own reflection in the face of the prisoners. We were all one accusation away from sharing a cell with those we guarded. Once inside, there was always a chance you’d never leave. Experience had taught me that.

I was lucky, they’d said when they’d left me here to die. My window was a luxury some of the other prisoners didn’t have. But that window, and the sun creeping its way across the concrete floor, were nothing more than a reminder. A reminder that everything I had was gone. It was a carrot dangling in front of a starving horse. The sun with a promise of heat, a warmth that never truly saturated my skin. The sun with its memories of snowcapped mountains behind my house back home, and the smell of sage and Mom’s Sunday pot roast. But the night sky. The stars. They haunted me the most. If I stared at them long enough, I could remember fireflies and camping trips and hiding away in tents to steal a kiss from that boy I once knew. If I stared at them too long, the hunger I’d tried so hard to ignore would hollow its way through my bones, and the taste of bile would drag me back to the smell of my own filth and the feel of my ribs on my fingers, more prominent every day. If I counted those stars, those specks of memories, I’d never forget, and forgetting was my only escape. Remembering was a punishment worse than death, and I prayed every night for my heart to stop beating.

The iron bars echoed as they closed behind me, each door heavier than the last, each door a memory I tried to repress. The deeper into the labyrinth I traveled, the darker it got. Much worse than where I’d been held. The east sector was for the worst offenders. The leaders and officers of the NEA, North Essential Army. Traitors of the state. The rebels. The darkness here was like a lead weight. It didn’t budge. It laid like a blanket on a humid night, suffocating and overly warm.

“Those who join the NEA are destined to die,” my father had said to me before he’d gone to the Boulder front in Colorado to fight with the freedom militia.

He died two weeks later. Hung by his own commanding officer for refusing to take part in the punishment of a woman prisoner. My mother had already succumbed to the virus by the time word of his death found its way back to our small encampment south of Salt Lake. That was the day I was sent here, sent into Elysium. A prisoner for two months before I was pardoned for my father’s crimes and given the position of Dusk Guard. Another small mercy.

“Eben… what took you so long?” Captain stepped from the shadows and handed me his candle. The acrid smell of body odor and piss assaulted me, reminding me how close I’d come to this very fate. Caged like an animal for life. “Get lost in the dark?” he laughed. “Nah… You’re familiar with the ins and outs of this place, aren’t you? Never in this deep, though, lucky for you… you had a forgiving judge.”

I placed the candle in the metal holder attached to the stone wall. “I’m grateful to serve the freedom militia, sir. Any way I can.”

“Grateful?” he asked, exposing his gray teeth with a sneer. “Grateful and lucky are not the same thing… watch yourself… or you’ll wind up back behind bars.” He nodded to the package in my hand. “Down there, third cell on the left.”

“Thank you.”

He grunted before lighting another candle. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Do your rounds, hall A, B, and C until I get back. Not too many prisoners in the east sector, shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Yes, sir.”

Relieved, I exhaled a weary breath when Captain disappeared into the darkness of the stairwell. With the stinking bag in my hand, I followed the low light down to 192’s cell. The light was virtually nonexistent this far down the hall, and when I approached the small chamber door, I couldn’t see anyone inside.

“Hello?” I asked and a loud scuffled noise made me jump. “Stand where I can see you, prisoner.”

I waited and he did not appear.

“Dorel said to give this to you. That you earned it for good behavior. Come into the light.”

Another shift and scrape, and when I thought he wouldn’t show his face, a pair of icy blue eyes pierced through the darkness. His hair was inked black, his skin pale, the aristocratic lines of his nose and jaw sharp and delicate. He was painfully beautiful, even here, in Elysium, where men come to die.

CALE

Every step I took hurt, my bones ached, and my muscles pinched. The deep cold of this place had made a home inside me. Thirty days, or was it thirty-two? I’d lost count. There was no daylight this deep into Elysium, only candles when the guards were gracious.

“Who are you?” I asked without regard for my own safety.

Elysium, according to the old Greek myths, was a place of peaceful death. The irony was not lost on me. There was no peace in death here. Only days that stretched forever into nights that wouldn’t end. I’d beg for death, but in doing so I’d only prolong my suffering. Begging for death only assured a torturous and long life.

“Eben… but it shouldn’t matter to you.” His eyes were warm and brown, almost soft and benevolent in the low candlelight. A perfect deceit. Kindness did not exist here. “Take this,” he said. His voice gruff as he shoved the bag he held in his hand through the cell bars. When I didn’t reach for it, Eben sighed. “I won’t hurt you,” he whispered and leaned closer. “I’m… I’m not like the others. I’m a Dusk Guard.”

I didn’t know what the difference was between him and the likes of Dorel, but I didn’t care. “A guard, nevertheless.”

Eben pulled his hand back and opened the bag. His face contorted as he retched. “What the hell?”

The bag fell and hit the ground with a quiet, wet thud.

“Why would they send you rotten apples?” he asked as he wiped his hands on his pants.

I couldn’t find it in me to laugh at his na?veté. “My family used to own an orchard in Vermont before… everything. The militia killed my father and sold my mother to one of the officers.”

“But… they said you’ve been good, and…” He ran a big hand over his shaved head. “I didn’t know.”

As if that excused it. “Now you do.”

I stepped back into the shadow and waited for him to leave. Eben stood still, staring into the cell like he could see me, see my eyes—like he understood.

“What’s your name?” he whispered.

I almost quoted the number given to me by the prison, but something, some type of longing, or maybe it was loneliness, twisted inside of me, and I spoke without thinking.

“Cale.”

“I’m sorry, Cale.”

Cale.

The sound of my name, sad, and husky on his lips, made my hands shake. It was too human. Too real. Too palpable.

After a minute of silence, he walked away.

This had to be a test. Dorel had sent Eben as a test. Did they know about me? Surely, they’d have executed me by now if they knew. Maybe I should’ve told them. Told them I’d had a boyfriend once. A man not unlike Eben, tall and muscled, and tan, and sweet. I should’ve told them about Seven, told them he used to fuck me in the orchard house my father and I had built with our own hands, the same one they’d burned down the day they’d sold my mother. Maybe then I’d get the peaceful death promised to me. Fast and easy. Every day I was dying, but they’d draw it out. That was the whole point.

“I’m not sorry,” I said to the darkness before I lay down onto the hard pallet, covered in hay, like a pig in a barn, and fell asleep, dreaming of cider and cinnamon.

“Hey…” Drowsy, I sat up. The pain along my spine, hardly bearable. “Are you awake?” Eben asked.

He held a candle in one hand and an apple in the other. With the light close to his face, I could see how handsome he was. He had a strong chin with a dimple in the middle, his skin a deeper brown than the sun could create on its own. The hair on his head was clipped short like the other guards. A protection against lice. The prisoners were not afforded such luxury. But it was the wrinkles around his eyes I liked the most. A mark of happiness lost. No one smiled enough for laugh lines anymore. Maybe in another life he was good. Still, I didn’t trust him.

“This is for you.” He held up the shiny red apple.

“Why?” I sat, unmoving.

“I don’t need it… I packed too much to eat and you look hungry.”

Too much food? That was a lie. Everyone was rationed.

“Why do you care if I’m hungry? I’m a traitor, haven’t you heard?” I rubbed the back of my neck. The headache I had earlier resurfaced, pounding behind my eyes. The apple in his hand tempted me. I’d only had a bowl of broth for breakfast and a small piece of bread. My suspicion kept me seated. “How do I know you won’t say I stole it?”

His lips broke into a small, almost friendly smile. “Steal it? How would you manage that from in there?”

He was mocking me.

“Keep the fucking apple, I don’t need your charity.”

His lips flattened into a thin line. “You should watch your mouth.”

I managed a smirk. “Don’t you have rounds to do?”

He leaned down and set the apple on the concrete floor just inside the cell door. The light of the candle trickled across the small space, and it was then I saw the small tattoo on his wrist. I stared at the numbers on my own wrist. 192.

“You were a prisoner?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Eben stood, pulling the sleeve of his uniform down. His eyes met mine, the rise and fall of his chest faster and faster with each passing second.

“Eat the apple. Take the small mercies.” His throat bobbed as he stepped back. “We’ve all lost something.”

What had he lost? Why had he been imprisoned? How did he get out?

“Tell me,” I said and stood on wobbling legs.

He turned to look down the hall and then settled his eyes on my face. “I was a traitor too. But I was pardoned.”

“How?” I asked, impulsive and eager. If I could get out of here. If I could make it back to the front. Everything I had was gone. My family. Seven. But If I could fight, if I could find a way back to the way things used to be—hope was a dangerous drug.

“I was punished for something my dad did, and the judge hearing my case... He was kind.” Eben spoke in fast, whispered sentences. “Said I’d suffered enough, and my imprisonment would do nothing for the militia’s constitution. I became a guard. They own me, but I live. I breathe.”

“Are you NEA?”

He shook his head. “No.”

Hope drained from my limbs, and I couldn’t find the strength to continue standing. I sank to my knees, my eyes on the apple. I wouldn’t eat it. I wouldn’t be bought.