BORDER OF TABOO

Chapter 14

Aris never tires of seeing true dawn seeping through the windows, gradually gaining intensity. For now, it's a dim, sluggish white, pulling every colour in the room towards the same uniform colour so that she feels embedded in an elaborate icing-sugar sculpture.

There is a sweet ache in her belly, and she feels it grow when she looks at the man lying next to her. He's on his side, long arms and legs tucked around himself like he never quite got used to sleeping in a bed this big. Aris lets herself look at him. His hands are balled in fists even as he sleeps. She finds herself imagining what he might've looked like, stepping into Medgar for the first time, untamed and ungroomed by the corporation that owns both of their lives. Pollen from a distant countryside still clinging to his hair, body still lean and gangly from that last growth spurt. She wonders if he still writes home. If he gets as homesick as she does, for a place that exists rather than an imagined village somewhere in the snowy North.

She asks him over breakfast, about where he was before he came here. She watches him cutting peaches, eyes glazing over as he stares down at the fleshy golden slices dripping juice down his fingers.

'It's a place you've probably never heard of,' he says.

'Do you think I don't know anything about the world outside of Medgar?' Aris asks him. 'The people in the slums, some of them are from all around the world, you know. Some of them came here looking for riches and found only dirt and rags and sealed doors instead, but that doesn't mean that was all they've ever known. I spent all my childhood listening to their stories. Practically got a map all drawn out up here.'

She touches her temple and he give her the kind of look that she's used to getting from wise old men who shake their heads at her and find her innocence 'charming'.

'Can you place Banora?' he asks her.

She frowns down at her bowl of cereal, trying to summon any memories of the name. The only one that appears with any persistence is the damned apple juice label, so she smiles and says, 'Sorry, apart from the juice... oh!' An image, a young man telling her of a place way down south where the Livestream is so close to the surface that all the wells carry whispers, and all the trees carry fruit of a rather peculiar nature. She tells this to Genesis, and he smiles at her fantastical interpretation of a place he knows so well.

'It's not quite as romantic as you make it sound,' he tells her. 'Lots of farmers, lots of poverty and superstition. And not to mention, plainclothes Shira informants occupying every street to make sure the townsfolk aren't making their own profits from the richness of Livestream simmering beneath the earth.'

'Were you not happy there? she asks him, and again he pauses and weighs his words before speaking.

'It's not the easiest question to answer,' he says.

'Did you have a farm there?' she says.

'I did.'

'Don't farms mean open stretches of fertile soil and trees and a harvest to watch over? Surely that must've brought you some measure of happiness.'

He smiles at her again and says, 'My family did own several orchards which I daresay never quite made me unhappy.'

The word orchards? bursts out of her mouth, and she gazes up at him with such wide twinkling eyes that he goes on, surprising himself as he willingly describes a place he hasn't spoken of in years. She listens, mind full of silver arching trees and birdsong and wide-open horizons.

'I do confess,' he says after having added far too many qualities to a place he never appreciated, 'there is one thing I miss. The freedom of walking out in a rain-sodden garden and seeing the flowers revel in all that water.'