Joba trees are deciduous plants that thrive in the sand of the Wardens’ Empire. They range in size from small shrubs to large trees with canopies that stretch up to 250 handspans, as can be seen in the courtyard. Their flowering season is during the sixth mooncycle when large red flowers bloom, followed by the joba fruit three weeks later. The fruit is as red and glossy as the flower before it, and hardy in order to withstand the tidewind. The thick skin can only be breached by burning the fruit in a furnace. It has been found that the seeds inside are an effective painkiller and natural high, requiring strong policing of the drug. The difficulty in obtaining and harvesting the seeds makes the drug all the more profitable for crime lords.
—The Soil We Toil by Warden Iko
The room was spinning. Sylah’s tears had dried, but the incessant swirling of the room made her want to shed more. She bit her cheek until it bled. The taste of salty iron was a poor replacement for the joba seed she craved. Sylah hugged her knees to her chest and rocked slowly back and forward, against the movement of the room.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she chanted.
Whether it was the swearing or the rhythm of the movement, she began to feel better. She unraveled her long limbs from her cocoon and stretched her aching muscles.
Her stomach roiled.
“No, no, no, no, no.” Sylah could feel the bile rise up. “No!” She swallowed it and waited.
After ten minutes her stomach settled and Sylah began to think through her options. Despite the aching muscles, the headache, shaking limbs, churning stomach, her mind was clear. And with it, her memories. She pushed them away with enough mental force to rattle her brain.
So I’m stuck in a dressing room of a deranged brat who thinks I can train her to win the Aktibar. The Aktibar I missed signing up for because of her.
Anger eclipsed her mind, and suddenly Sylah’s hands went slack. Sylah looked at her useless fingers, willing them to move, but instead spasms prickled up and down her forearms.
It was the joba seeds, or the lack of them. Her body couldn’t function without the drug anymore. It didn’t know how to. Sylah breathed in and out slowly until her hands gained mobility.
Okay, let’s try this again. Aktibar, no longer an option. But she said she could give me anything. What do I want?
Red beads flashed behind her eyelids. A field of joba seeds, all hers. Sylah reveled in the daydream. When she opened her eyes, she considered what the girl had said. Jewelry? Gemstones? Clothes?
Sylah’s laugh was harsh as she imagined what it would be like to care about such frivolous things. Her eyes scanned the racks of clothes in front of her.
Sylah stood, her legs like a newborn goat’s, and took shaking steps toward the rack of clothes. She’d never seen such luxurious materials up close before. They were extravagant and repugnant in equal measure.
Sylah donned the most expensive dress in the closet, two of them, in fact. This first dress was made exclusively of bows. Big sweeping green bows. There must have been a hundred of them, all stitched together to make a landscaped mess of material. The other dress was a frothy chaos of lace in purple and green. It reminded Sylah of a weeping bruise.
The dresses were so baggy on her she could have probably slipped into a third. Her straight body was so different from Anoor’s curves. The hems ended three handspans off the ground, and with the heels she had strapped herself into, she couldn’t have looked more ridiculous.
The mirror at the end of the room agreed. She didn’t recognize herself. Skeletal and bald. Eyes rimmed red from crying. Limbs quivering from withdrawal. She tried to squint and see herself as she would have been if she’d been brought up within the walls of the Keep. Was that sick in the corner of her mouth? Probably. She ran her hand over her scalp, down to the scar at the base of her neck.
They had been scoring the rubber trees for strikes. The Stolen and their foster parents worked as a unit, each with a scythe scraping the bark diagonally until a white substance hemorrhaged into the buckets below. The Stolen’s chant hummed through the leaves.
“Stolen, sharpened, the hidden key,
We’ll destroy the empire and set you free,
Churned up from the shadows to tear it apart,
A dancer’s grace, a killer’s instinct, an Ember’s blood, a Duster’s heart.”
It was hard and dusty work, but the sun had set long ago. Papa whistled through his teeth, and the Stolen changed routine. They retraced their steps, collecting the buckets that had overflowed with latex. Thirty buckets in total, a good haul.
“We reaped a lot this day.” Papa Azim was pleased, his lips almost lifted at the corners. He was tall, impossibly tall, tall-as-two-buildings tall. Not in physical height, in presence, even though he was a quiet man—silent in his fierceness, a sandstorm in the night. His cheeks were slightly dimpled, skin dark from working the fields. And he had the softest eyes, brown like two coffee beans, toasted and warm.
He made them call him Papa Azim, though none of his blood ran through their bodies. But he loved them, and it was a love born from purpose and struggle.
Sylah grinned with the rest of the Stolen and basked in his happiness.
Then he lifted his hand high and brought his scythe to meet it. He slashed the sharpened end through his palm. It required a lot of effort to break the skin. Sylah knew because it was her turn next.
All of them cut their hands, one by one. They circled the buckets, shaking droplets of their blood into the curdling latex. Red and blue congealing.
“The handles of the overseers’ whips, the tires of the trolleys that carry food away from our starving, the shoes that trample over our dead. It is our blood that carries these deeds forward.”