Perry closed his eyes and inhaled. Her scent had changed. The rancy Dweller musk was almost gone. Her skin breathed a new scent into the air, faint but unmistakable. For the first time since he’d known her, her flesh smelled like something he recognized, feminine and sweet.

He smelled violets.

He took a step back, swearing silently as it hit him. “You’re not dying. . . . You really don’t know?”

“I don’t know anything anymore.”

Perry looked down at the ground and drew another breath, no doubt in his mind.

“Aria . . . it’s your first blood.”

Chapter 17 - Aria

Chapter 17

ARIA

Since she had been thrown out of Reverie, she’d survived an Aether storm, she’d had a knife held to her throat by a cannibal, and she’d seen men murdered.

This was worse.

Aria didn’t recognize herself. She felt like she’d donned a pseudo-body in a Realm and couldn’t get out of it.

Her mind ran in circles. She was bleeding. Like an animal. Dwellers didn’t menstruate. Procreating happened through genetic design, then a special course of hormones and implantation. Fertility was used strictly when needed. How terrifying to think she could conceive at random.

Maybe the outside air was changing her. Maybe she was breaking down. Malfunctioning. How would she explain this to her mother? What if she couldn’t be fixed and this happened to her again, what, every month?

She’d been prepared for death. Death was to be expected on the outside. A normal consequence of being tossed into the Death Shop. But no matter how she looked at it, menstruating was utterly barbaric. She lay down on the filthy mattress, feeling much the same. Filthy. She closed her eyes, hoping to shut out the horrible outside world. She imagined lying on the white sand of her favorite beach Realm, listening to the soft lapping of the waves as she began to relax.

Aria tried to restart her Smarteye again.

It worked flawlessly.

All her icons were back, exactly where they should be. The icon of Aria strangling herself slid to the center of her screen, flashing a reminder.

SINGING SUNDAY. 11 A.M.

She chose it and fractioned instantly. Swaths of the Opera House’s crimson curtain billowed in front of her. Aria reached out, touching the thick velvet. She’d never seen it move like this, in rolling waves. She stepped forward, feeling through the heavy cloth for the center seam. She felt the curtain shift as it surrounded her. She turned in circles and saw no way out. Panicked, she pushed out her arms, but the material grew coarse as gravel beneath her touch.