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THE TITHE CLAIMS ten souls from Ironcross every year. An offering to the wall, to keep the beasts out and protect the town.
What happens to those revered chosen few is a guarded secret known only to our Alders and the Tithed.
I’ve been Tithed for an hour now, and I’m still none the wiser.
Unless this is it.
A manmade cave scooped into the belly of the dark side of Mount Claire.
It may be my imagination, my mind reminding me we’re sealed inside here, but it feels like the air is growing thinner and thinner.
It feels like a tomb.
My eyes find Kane, again and again, searching for the answer in his apparent composure. He stands with his back pressed to the wall, arms folded, one knee bent to stamp a foot against the rock. He came in here dressed in the tailored suit he wore to the Tithe ceremony, but at one point he disappeared into a shadowed corner and reappeared in black—black cargo pants, black boots, a form-fitting long sleeve black t-shirt. The guards must have left the package of clothes in here for him to change into.
The special treatment doesn’t surprise me.
Kane Marques is a special case. A Junior Alder and a volunteer. He was that boy at school and nothing’s changed, the boy who stands out miles above the rest, the guy who’s always been in a league of his own.
His face is sculpted in arrogance and boredom and his gaze rarely strays to anything that is not rock or dirt or shadow.
He appears unaffected, but I remember the tension in his grip, his fingers digging into me when I first stumbled into the cave. He volunteered for this, I remind myself, offered himself to the Tithe. As a recently elected Junior Alder, he knows more than the rest of us and I don’t believe he’d walk himself into a tomb. Whatever this thing is between me and Kane Marques, I don’t think he’d stand back and watch me walk into a tomb.
Across from me, Gabe leans in to fiddle with the oil lantern.
I watch, don’t ask what he’s doing. I haven’t spoken a word to him since the Tithe ceremony. I didn’t speak many words to him in the days leading up.
Gabriel Winter is not my best friend.
He is not my pair.
He is not the guy I will spend the rest of my life with.
He is a stranger to me.
The ache in my bruised heart deepens. He is still the boy with the blue, blue eyes who had that way of looking at me, looking and looking, as if I were the most beautiful, precious creation in his world.
I wasn’t.
He’s the reason I am here.
He was determined to Tithe himself to spare his younger sisters when their time came. I went behind his back. I forced Kane’s hand into lodging our pairing without Gabe’s knowledge.
I did it for myself as much as for Gabe. I wanted him to live. I didn’t want to live without him.
I knew, I knew with all my heart, that Gabe wouldn’t stand me up at the Tithe ceremony. He wouldn’t leave me hanging there, unpaired and sacrificed to the Tithe.
I was wrong.
I am the reason Gabe is here.
I wasn’t enough to keep him safe in Ironcross.
We have betrayed each other.
We have failed each other.
We are not some great love story that can conquer all barriers. That kind of love only exists in fairytales. It’s not real. That’s what I have to believe. My heart has grown some callouses in the past few hours, but the scars are still fresh, too tender to accept that those great love stories do exist, Gabe and I just aren’t one of them.
I see Gabe has turned down the flame on the lantern. To make the oil last longer, I suppose. How long does he think we’ll be here? Does he think we’re ever getting out?
He leans back into his wall, his eyes fixated on the flickering flame, and I can’t look at him anymore. There’s a part of me that will crumble. That still wants to crawl into his arms. That whispers to me: If this is how we end, then let us end together.
The rest of my fellow Tithed are searching every inch inside this cave for an escape, scratching on the rock and in the dust and at the iron door that sealed us in.
Except for Georga.
I’m taking my lead from Kane, I have no idea what Gabe’s thoughts on the possibility of escape are, but I suspect Georga is just being deliberately otherwise. She’d never be caught dead acting like the rest of the rat pack. That’s not her style.
She refused to pair even though she could have had her choice of nearly any guy, even though it would have saved her from this ordeal.
I don’t want to be content, she told us. That’s a half-life, living for the sake of breathing air. I want to rage. I want to love so hard it feels like suffering. I’d rather fly into the sun and burn than be too afraid to lift off from the ground.
I wonder if we’ll ever see the sun again.