Don't Die
Odelli returned to her room and stared down at the ring for a long while, her face troubled. It was the ring he had worn every single day without fail. She had been certain it was a token of promise, the sort of thing one split with a beloved and wore as proof.
Then why is my name engraved on it?
There was no reason. Not the slightest—truly, not the slightest reason at all.
"Anyone would have done."
"You simply fit the conditions better than the rest."
"Is that all you have to say?"
He had cast her aside so cruelly that he had not even left her room to cling to what remained. If it was not for the sake of a beloved, then why had he come looking for Odelli Cardel?
Her mind filled with nothing but him. The cold gaze that had looked down on her. His back as he opened the door of the underground prison and walked away. The kiss at the wedding. Even his last words, that they would never see each other again.
Amid that tangle of confused feeling, Odelli found herself tracing the ring with a fingertip. And in that instant, light flared through the dim room.
She looked down. A blue flash was bursting from Ludville's ring—more precisely, from the blue jewel set into it. All this time she had taken it for a sapphire.
It wasn't an ordinary gem?
If that was so.
Odelli hesitated, then slipped the ring onto her finger with a trembling hand. It was far too large. The moment she barely managed to work it over her thumb, his memories came surging in.
White fog rose like breath, and her vision blurred. When it slowly lifted, an unfamiliar landscape opened before her eyes. No—not entirely unfamiliar.
This place...
Odelli took a faltering step back. She drew in a breath and went rigid all over. It was none other than the mansion of House Cardel: the underground laboratory joined to the secret room where she had been confined her entire life.
Then the faint clink of chains caught her ear.
Odelli turned her head and found someone there in a horrific state. A boy, bound to a chair, hung limp. His skin, as if corrupted by miasma, had gone pitch-black and split open in places. Golden hair was soaked so red that its original color was nearly impossible to tell, and between those strands a pair of beastlike violet eyes burned bright.
...Ludville?
Odelli's eyes flew wide.
Why is he...
Bewildered, she studied the boy, who looked to be in his mid-teens. Of course she had not been the only one shut inside this underground laboratory. House Cardel periodically brought slaves in as expendable subjects. If the purification work—the work of forcing the unclean into Odelli's body—was to proceed without a hitch, clinical trials were essential.
But if he spent his childhood in Cardel's laboratory, there's no way I wouldn't have known.
She had first seen him six years ago, on the Day of Guardianship. Before that she had only ever heard the infamy of the Iron-Blooded Archduke, a name spread across the whole of the empire. While she stood there, unable to make sense of it, the researchers' voices reached her.
"The body can't withstand the contamination. Prepare the next specimen."
The cold voice rang through the room. The researchers called Ludville RU-39. It meant the thirty-ninth expendable subject, scheduled for collapse.
The boy said nothing. He did not scream. He did not beg to be spared. He only opened his eyes, and closed them again.
Just then—
"The curse on House Rowendil. Is it unchanged?"
"It keeps spreading. Delay treatment any longer, and House Rowendil will begin to question the ancient barrier."
"Then we'll have to use the Purifier before it's too late."
Odelli turned, following their gazes. A small, frail girl sat there with her body curled in on itself. It was unmistakably her past self.
House Rowendil's curse... I remember.
Odelli had always been used as a Purifier, a tool for erasing the unclean. The reach of that word was broad. Curses, disease, miasma, madness, the seeds of calamity—everything harmful in the world fell inside it. The Odelli of this time had the curse injected straight into her body, so that she might purify it from within. Among all of them, House Rowendil's curse had been so exceptionally painful that it stayed with her. She would suffer a heat as if her whole body were burning away, and whenever she opened her eyes she was somewhere else: the laboratory, the secret room, the laboratory, the secret room. Days soaked through with cold sweat inside an experimental gown, when even moving a single finger was too much.
And yet.
Why is Ludville the only thing I can't remember?
Before she knew it, the two of them were shut in separate rooms with only a single wall between them. Odelli had no memory of this whatsoever. But set that aside, and the things she had actually lived were unfolding exactly as they had: the curses she had been made to take, the diseases she had been made to take, the miasma she had been made to take. Every experiment she had been forced to endure.
Was Ludville really in this place as a child?
For now, she decided to watch them both.
Ludville and Odelli knew of each other beyond the wall, by the sound of breathing. Some days were quiet. Some days turned violent. On the days when that breathing came especially ragged, each could guess that the experiment had been horrific.
Then, one day.
Tap.
Odelli, curled on the floor, suddenly struck the wall with her fingertips. A gesture without meaning or context. By all rights the sound should have ended there.
Tap.
An answer came from the other side.
Odelli went still, then pressed her ear to the wall and knocked again, a little harder this time. Ludville, leaning his back against the wall just as she was, returned the same sound.
Tap. Tap.
At some point that quiet exchange became a daily rite by which each proved the other was still alive. Tap, and the slave knocked. Tap, and the offering answered. They had never traded words or glances, and they did not even know each other's names, yet every day, with that wall between them, they felt one another. It was the only connection permitted them. The single way of telling each other that they were still alive.
One day, while the researchers had briefly left their posts, a strange sound followed that quiet knocking.
"...Don't die."
Not a plea to be allowed to live. Not a vow that they would survive together. Only those words: don't die. It was the first thing Ludville had ever spoken.
Odelli, seated against the wall and breathing hard, let out a thin laugh and answered.
"You'll die first."
"..."
"You're an expendable subject kept for me. The house dragged you here to stretch my life as far as it could. ...You didn't know?"
The words she muttered, mocking herself, sounded like a confession. Silence held for a moment.
"Then that's a relief."
What if he resented her? Odelli, eyes squeezed shut and her lip worried between her teeth, went still.
"...What's a relief about it?"
"It means you get to live longer than I do."
She shot back, incredulous.
"What good is living long in a place like this?"
"I don't know... I couldn't say. Even so, you live a long time."
There was no feeling in the boy's answer, as if a lowborn slave's life had neither reason nor worth enough to protect. Days like that went on. Sometimes Ludville laughed out loud. Sometimes he cried without a sound, where Odelli could not see. After they began to speak, the boy's feelings grew richer with every day that passed—nothing between them but a wall, nothing to rely on but each other's breathing and a few faint words.
And so ten years went by.
Twenty-five. Odelli could feel how little time she had left. One night, after she had endured every experiment as usual, the researchers' watch was unusually slack. That night she opened the door of the laboratory where Ludville was and stepped inside.
"...Odelli?"
It was the first time they had truly seen each other's faces. But her face was already so smeared with blood that even her features were hard to make out.
"Odelli!"
She swayed and collapsed. Ludville rose on reflex and caught her in his arms. Whether because her lungs were ruined, she brought up blood with every breath she drew, and her breathing came more undone by the moment. Even so, Odelli did not stop.
"Just... stay still a moment."
She rested her forehead against his chest and laid her fingertips over his heart. A golden light of purification shimmered. The poison running through his veins. The traces of experimentation buried deep in his tissues. The fractures in his mana, the damage to his nerves. All the pain she had felt each time he drew a breath was, in an instant, purified and gone.
Ludville stood frozen where he was, staring at her in a daze.