The first meeting

Twenty years later

Hiding in his favorite spot, high atop the tall tree line, Zander nestled on a thick branch overlooking the outskirts of the forest and the edge of the thriving female metropolis. Any free moment he had, he escaped his isolated camp of men and spent hours here in admiration. The outer districts of the Capital lay to the east, silver-roofed and humming, a city that looked from this distance like a circuit board laid flat against the earth.

He had been coming here since he was nine, when Chris had shown him the climb and made him swear not to tell his father.

Your dad’s got enough to worry about. Boys need a place to go that’s just theirs. Don’t you tell him.

Zander never had. He sat on the branch with his legs swinging over the drop and watched the city.

He was looking for girls, mostly. He was twenty, and he had never in his life spoken to a girl, and this was the closest he could get. Sometimes, on warm afternoons, groups of young women would come to the edge of the forest on dares from their friends. They would shriek and laugh and push each other toward the tree line. One would get brave and take a few steps in, and then all of them would run back screaming and laughing again. Zander had watched this ritual for years. He had learned the shapes of their bodies and the sounds of their voices. The way they touched each other’s arms when they were excited. It was all he knew about women, and it was not enough.

He was supposed to hate them. He had been raised to do so. The men in the camp—what was left of them, a dozen old-timers now, their number thinning each year—told the same stories over and over. Sirens. Vipers. The cruelty of the Ministry and the vanity of the daughters it raised. Zander had listened. He had nodded. He had not, in any place deep enough to count, believed a word of it.

He could not believe that every single person on the other side of the trees wanted him dead. Statistically it seemed unlikely. And anyway, the old men in the camp hated women they had never met, and Zander had come to understand, over the years, that people who hated things they had never met were usually telling you something about themselves and nothing about the thing itself.

He sighed at the circumstances of his life, knowing his birth was forbidden and his very existence illegal. Yet, the older he got, the bolder his actions became, in hopes of meeting someone his age. Anyone.

Tired of talking with so many grumpy old men. Why can’t—

A movement in the trees below snapped him out of his inner rant. “Huh?”

Someone was in the forest. Small. Hooded. Moving carefully, but not carefully enough. They didn’t know the ground, didn’t know where the dry leaves were. An outsider. An outsider in his woods. His heart jolted.

He began the climb down as quietly as he could, watching the figure the whole way. They were heading deeper, roughly toward the camp, but not quite—angled a little north, like they were looking for something and weren’t sure exactly where.

Are they looking for camp?

He landed harder than intended. The wanderer froze. Slowly turned. Zander dove behind a thick root and pressed himself flat, holding his breath, his heart hammering so hard he was sure it was audible across the clearing.

Shit, shit, shit.

Silence. He waited until he could not stand waiting anymore, then lifted his head just enough to see over the root. The figure was gone.

Climbing over the root, Zander crept along the path the figure had taken, scouting for any telling clue. His adrenaline pumped, heightening his senses to full alert.

Where did you go?

An uneasy feeling of being watched washed over him, and he began to sweat. His body tensed, fists clenched, and he stood his ground, ready. Rustling in the bushes behind him nearly made him yelp. The rustling stopped. A presence lingered close. Turning his head slowly, he strategized his line of attack, deciding to strike first and ask questions later.

The boy gasped at what stood before him, caught completely off guard. A large pair of emerald-green eyes stared deep into his soul. His body froze, his mind went numb, and he could not fathom the person in front of him.

A girl.

Her porcelain face was shadowed by the hood, and in a catlike manner she slowly pulled it back to reveal jet-black hair spilling down her body. Zander felt his face burn. He had seen women only from the top of a tree, at a distance, as shapes and sounds—never this close, never looking back at him. His mind went blank of every story the old men had ever told him about what a woman was. None of them had mentioned this.

She, for her part, did not look afraid. She looked fascinated. Her eyes moved over him the way his own moved over a thing he’d found in the woods and couldn’t yet name—his face, his shoulders, his hands, cataloging him. She took a step closer, tilting her head, and Zander had to fight the instinct to step back. Everything he’d been raised to fear was walking toward him wearing an expression of pure, unguarded curiosity.

She’s not scared of me.

The thought unbalanced him more than fear would have. He was the one who was scared—of her, of the closeness, of not knowing a single rule for this. He had been warned his whole life that a woman would be the end of him, and here was one studying him like he was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen, and he could not for the life of him find the danger in it.

She took another step, near enough now that he could see she was as new to this as he was—that whatever pulled her forward wasn’t practiced or sure, just want-to-know, plain and bright and unashamed of itself. It was the openness that undid him. He didn’t have it. He’d been taught to hide, to be wary, to keep the trees between himself and exactly this. She’d been taught none of that, or had thrown it off to come here, and it left her looking at him with a frankness he didn’t know how to return.

Only a few inches apart, Zander felt the warmth radiating off her. His heart was going so hard he was sure she could hear it. The forest held its breath, and neither of them moved—she from curiosity, he from the sheer overwhelm of being, for the first time in his life, seen.

Courage mounting, the boy’s mind raced for what to say.

Hello, how are you? No, too simple. Hey, my name is Zander. No.

His face contorted in concentration, sinking deeper into his thoughts. The girl watched him with curious confusion. Looking up, he caught her scrutinizing face and felt the hot blush spread across his own. He opened his mouth and tried to force out a word—any word.

“Who are you, and why is your face turning so red?” the girl blurted, taking the air out of his body.

He let out a sigh of relief. “My name is Zander. What’s yours?”

Lame.

He ignored her second question, hoping not to embarrass himself further.

She continued to inspect him. “My name is Diana. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She extended her hand instinctively.

He hesitated, half-afraid Chris’s stories might be true.

The moment a woman gets her hands on you, your life is over. First contact, and already they’re sucking your soul till the day you die… yup.

Zander looked into her eyes, searching for any sign of deceit or malice, and to his bewilderment found none.

You won’t know till you try, right?

He extended his hand and grasped hers firmly. An electrical shockwave surged through them as their energies collided into one. Unable to let go for a moment, they both rode the wave as it connected them. Reluctantly, they released, and the feeling still lingered.

Zander looked at his hand, then at her; she looked equally surprised. Glancing around, he spotted a place to sit and invited her to join him. She walked beside him, eager to learn more about this mysterious boy. “Zander? Is that short for something?” she pondered aloud.

He chuckled. “Yeah. Short for Alexander.”

She nodded, then came to a sudden realization. “Zander! How old are you?!”

Sensing where this was heading, and knowing he couldn’t hide it, he took a leap of faith. “I’m twenty and a half. How old are you?”

Yeah, that half will really help you look older.

Her eyes sparkled. “No way! This is nuts! I never would have dreamed of meeting a boy! Do you have all your parts? Can I see them? Do you live in the camp? Are your parents still alive? I just turned nineteen, by the way.” Unable to contain herself, she fired the questions off all at once.

Zander blushed at the content of them. She looked at him earnestly, then glanced at his crotch, a wide grin spreading at the mysteries a man might offer.

“Aren’t you scared? I thought you girls were taught how evil and scary we were? And no—I will not parade my dick and balls for you like some sideshow.”

Dejected, she cocked her head, confused. No one had ever told her no so bluntly before.

“They do teach us about men all the time. But you look nothing like the hairy, muscled ogres they show, and I never really believed anyone could be that bad.” She held her head high, confidently defying the law to see the truth. “That’s why I’m here. To find the man camp and see for myself if everything I was taught is true.”

And because someone once taught me to ask who benefits from my fear.

She didn’t say that part out loud—didn’t say that there had been one person in her life who’d never quite let her swallow anything whole, who had a way of asking the quiet questions that unpicked the loud answers. That woman had once told her about Pandora, from the old Greek myths: the first woman the gods ever made, given every gift they had to offer, and one box she was never to open. Most people told it as a warning against curiosity. She had told it as a question: why hand anyone a box and forbid them to open it, unless you were afraid of what they’d find? Curiosity was dangerous, she’d said; it had let plenty of terrible things into the world. But nothing worth knowing ever came out of a box that stayed shut. Then she’d look at Diana a moment too long, the way she did when she meant more than she said, and add that everyone forgets what stayed inside. When Diana asked what it was, she only smiled.

Diana had spent years turning that over. She too had been given everything: every comfort the Capital could offer, every door open but one. Nowhere in the Capital could she find what was left at the bottom of that box. In the end it was that question, more than courage, that walked her all the way out here, past the tree line, into the forest she’d been told her whole life to fear. She wasn’t sure yet whether that made her brave or foolish. Pandora probably hadn’t known either. She supposed she was about to find out.