Chapter Text
When her eyes blink to consciousness, it takes Yaz four slow breaths to realize what day it is. For four, slow, deep breaths, still drowsy from sleep, she relaxes.
And on the fifth inhale, Yaz jerks upright, eyes wide open, remembering, realizing. Adrenaline washes through her system.
It’s her birthday.
Her twenty-fifth birthday.
She takes her fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth breaths quickly before she can calm herself down again. She tells herself it’s not a big deal. She tells herself that she shouldn’t put so much pressure on her soul mark. It’s just a number.
But that number tells you when you’ll meet your soulmate, Yaz. That is special, she can practically hear in her father’s voice. Hakim’s always been the romantic between her parents and passed it down to Yaz. Najia, on the other hand, balances her father’s dreams with a realism she instilled in Sonya. Her mother has tried to assure Yaz that plenty of people found plenty of happiness before ever meeting their soulmates.
But Yaz believes—Yaz wants to believe—that there’s someone in the world perfect for her.
And now there’s a mark to prove it.
She unravels herself from her bedsheets and stands in front of her mirror. Carefully, her eyes comb over every inch of her skin: searching, hoping, wanting.
She’s not entirely sure what it is she wants, though. Perhaps she’s already met her soulmate and she’ll find a scarlet red zero somewhere. (She hopes not. There’s really no one in her life she would want to spend the rest of her life with.) Maybe Yaz will find a golden orange digit imprinted on her skin, indicating that her soulmate is just days away from entering her life, though she doesn’t want that either. She’s not ready, she doesn’t think. She’s still living with her parents, still in a job she hates, still waiting for her life to fall into place, and that won’t happen in days.
Nor would that happen in weeks, probably, so she hopes against a sunflower yellow numeral as her soul mark.
She doesn’t think she’d mind a forest green soul mark. Meeting her soulmate in a few months sounds doable. Plausible. Balanced. It would give her time to get her act together while also not making her wait for too long. If she has an indigo blue mark, signaling that she’s at least a year removed from meeting her soulmate, she can tolerate that as long as she’s not left waiting around too long.
You shouldn’t wait around for your soulmate, Yasmin. Live your life. They will come when it’s time, her mother’s voice rattles around in her head. She wishes she had that patience, that wisdom.
She peels off the shirt she wore to sleep and finds the mark immediately.
There, on her right collarbone: a splash of indigo blue on her dark skin. A year or more, then. She can wait that long.
She leans in closer to the mirror to see the numbers that will determine her future.
Her brow knits together as she looks at them. She wonders if the mirror is playing tricks on her. She wonders if she’s still sleeping, or if her eyes and brain aren’t awake enough yet to be reading correctly. Furiously, she rubs at her eyes, then leans back in to see the number remains unchanged.
62.
She has to wait for 62 years before she’ll meet her soulmate.
She punches the mirror. It shatters with the force.
Yaz cries as she collapses onto her floor. Her knees dig into the broken glass that’s managed to embed itself in the carpet.
She cries as her parents come barreling into her room, not bothering to knock. She cries as they hold her and she confesses between sobs that she’ll be in her bloody 80s before someone loves her. She cries while they comfort her and tell her that she’s loved now. She cries harder when Sonya pokes her head into the door and surveys the damage she’s done to her mirror and to her hand.
She breaks down entirely when Sonya leaves the room, comes back with the first aid kit, and silently, diligently, delicately bandages her sister’s scraped knuckles and wipes the glass from Yaz’s knees.
Her eyes are so clouded with tears that she doesn’t even notice the strange little smudge in front of the six of her soul mark.
Yaz tries not to take it to heart when her coworkers ask about the mark. They’re showing an interest in her life. Trying to be supportive. There’s a little birthday celebration when she next walks into the precinct, with little streamers and a smiley face balloon. They sing to her, poorly, to the point where she covers her ears, which only makes them scream louder. Their enthusiasm somehow manages to make her smile, or maybe grimace. It’s nice, until the inevitable happens. In between bites of store bought cake, one of them asks: “So, when’ll you meet the lucky fella?”
Yaz puts her fork down on her plate and musters a smile. “It’ll be a while, but that’s okay,” she says, even as her heart clenches. She does her best to shrug her shoulders like it isn’t eating away at her. “My mum’s always saying that I should try and live my life in the moment and not wait around for anyone.”
“Your mum’s a smart lady,” one of the other officers says. He offers her a gentle smile and a little nod of encouragement. “It’ll be good to focus on your career and not let your love life intervene. Not for a while, at least.”
But another officer, one she’s got a particular dislike for, says, “I hope you’re not waiting around too long, though. Biological clock and all that.”
And, fuck, if that doesn’t send her into a spiral.
She excuses herself to the restroom, where she leans against the stall door and fights back the crushing wave of grief that swells in her chest, the one that threatens to drown her in her own tears. She hadn’t even thought of that in the initial fallout. All the dreams she’d had about raising a family of her own were predicated on meeting her soulmate at a reasonable point in life. Months or years away, not decades. Not over half a century.
She could have children with someone who’s not her soulmate and risk the potential disaster that could come from it. She’s heard of plenty of couples who have defied their soul marks and married people who weren’t their soulmates, raised children with those people. Sometimes it’s worked out well enough: her old piano teacher had a relationship like that. It wasn’t perfect, but they were more committed to each other than to the destiny assigned to them. But Yaz isn’t a fool. She’s heard of countless tales of people defying their soul marks, only to discover how deeply flawed those relationships were. She’s all too aware of what can happen when a family is born of those relationships, then suddenly one of the parents meets their actual soulmate and leaves behind the life they’d already built in pursuit of their destiny. She’s comforted too many children in her line of work, suddenly abandoned by their fathers or mothers and internalizing some of that blame. She’s been able to connect many of those families to resources of people experiencing the exact same scenario, and while Yaz is glad those resources exist, she also hates that they have to.
She doesn’t want to be one of those stories.
But the alternative is to deny herself the opportunity to raise children. She can either shoulder the risks of raising children without her soulmate, or not. She’s confident that she won’t run from her family, but she can’t guarantee that any husband she finds will stick around if their soulmate is on the horizon.
Assuming she can even find a husband. Assuming she can find anyone at all who could have an interest in her.
She clenches and unclenches her fists. She lets her unbearable worries slip from her fingertips and sink to the floor. She can’t think this through right now. She’s supposed to be resolving more parking disputes today.
Yaz pushes it down, boxes it neatly next to that piece of her that thinks she’s so unlovable that no one will want her for another sixty years, and opens the restroom door.
It gets easier with time, just as her mother assured her it would. She’s fortunate that the indigo numbers are on a location of her body that’s simple enough to cover up. On the rare occasions she wears a strapless dress, like the time her mother accepted an award at work, or when the precinct had its annual formal ball, she’d shrugged on a blazer and used some makeup to cover the rest. She moves through her days as confidently as she can, keeping her head held high despite the sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach that worsens every time she goes on a date.
The men she sees are nice enough. Charming. Handsome. Courteous. She has a handful of first dates who judge her for being in a “men’s profession,” or judge her for still living with her parents, or judge her for not talking about her soul mark. But plenty of them are understanding about her reluctance to discuss her soul mark on a first or second date.
But none of them make it to date number three.
One night when she comes home, heaving a sigh and prying off her heels, Sonya looks up at her from her place on the sofa.
“No luck?”
“No,” Yaz grumbles. “Men, am I right?”
Sonya gives her a strange look, one that’s simultaneously scrutinizing yet nonjudgmental. Her head tilts to the side, curious. Eventually, she hums to herself. “Men,” she agrees, then goes back to scrolling on her phone.
She ends up going to see a therapist once a week after a particularly disastrous date, one where her date insists she just hasn’t met the right man yet, and the way he leered at her made her so uncomfortable that she faked a phone call from her sister just to get out of there. The therapist is quiet while Yaz talks out her thoughts, and when Yaz runs out of things to say, the therapist asks gentle questions that set her off on another tangent.
It’s good for her.
At the very very least, it gives her something to do on Wednesdays that isn’t just sitting in her room and wallowing.
She takes on more hours at work, even though she kind of hates every second she’s there, just because she knows that being out on patrol is better than being cooped up inside.
It isn’t until the summer that she notices the strange little smudge in front of her soul mark.
62, the blue screams at her, but right in front of the digits is an odd-looking line.
She’s never looked at the mark for this long. Not since her birthday. But with the summer comes warmer weather and more revealing clothing. She planned on going for a run, just to give herself something to do, but clad in only a sports bra with thin straps crossing behind her back, and not interested in wasting makeup she knows she’ll just sweat off, she’s forced to stare at the mark.
She prods at the little blue mark, like it might be an inconveniently-placed bruise. It’s not.
She wipes at it, even grabs a washcloth and tries to clean it off like dirt. It doesn’t budge.
She squints at the mark in the mirror, the one she’d replaced quickly after breaking the old one. But she can’t make any sense of it.
She hears Sonya’s voice calling for her in the other room. Right, she planned on running with Sonya today. The sound pulls her from her thoughts.
“Be right out!” she hollers back. She smooths down her hair and dismisses the strange blue smudge with a flick of her ponytail.
She doesn’t think of it again for months.
She should have.
She should have thought of it more.
She should have worried more about that line, because that line changes everything.
Or maybe it doesn’t change anything at all.
The day she turns 26, she wakes up notably less frantic than she did on her previous birthday. She goes through her morning routine, humming a soft tune to herself, and only in passing does she glance at the soul mark. She’s made a point to avoid looking at it over the past year, not because she’s afraid of it (“No Khan should ever be afraid of love,” her nani had told her), but because that number wasn’t going to become important to her for a long, long time.
That’s what she thought.
She thought wrong.
Does it matter if the outcome doesn’t change all that much?
When she first saw that number appear over her collar bone, she learned she’d have to wait the rest of her life before meeting The One.
But now, a year later, Yaz has learned something new: she’ll never meet The One at all.
Because this is impossible. This is unheard of. This is ridiculous.
The number’s gone up, not down.
“No. No, no,” Yaz murmurs to herself. “That can’t be right.”
But it is. Where she expected to see a deep blue 61 on her collarbone, instead she sees the number 63.
She drags her fingers over the numbers, as though she could wipe them off, as though she could rid herself of the curse of being unlovable. She feels the sting of tears welling up, the tightening of her chest, the panic threatening to consume her.
It sinks in all at once, in the same moments she collapses to her knees.
That stupid smudge. That line in front of those bloody numbers. It’s a negative sign.
Somehow, she’s getting further away from meeting her soulmate.
She’d been making progress in therapy coming to accept her soulmark. Maybe someday, she could have been okay with waiting for so long. But this?
She closes her eyes and tries to control her breathing. The words of her therapist echo in her head. In. Out. We control our reactions.
Yaz waits until her stomach untwists, until her panic recedes. She opens her eyes again. She puts on her bravest face, the one she’d learned from her nani, the one that she hopes and prays will be enough for her family, waiting just outside her bedroom door to celebrate her birthday.
The day blurs by. They sing to her, give her presents, feed her cake. She wears a silly little birthday hat and smiles for the camera. She tries to remember that even if she’ll never find love with a soulmate, at least she’s found love with her family.
It’s not quite the same, though, is it?
That night, Yaz lies awake, staring up at the ceiling, her fingers absentmindedly tracing over her soulmark. She reflects on the past year, on the attempts she’s made to come to peace with her future, on the chances she’s taken on countless men and an endless string of failed dates.
And that was when she still had a chance at love. Now, with the clock winding the wrong way, she has nothing at all.
She hates it, hates it all, hates that she will never be loved.
Yaz’s thumbs skate over her phone, searching for anyone who’s ever had an experience like hers. On a planet of eight billion people, surely she isn’t the only one, right?
She Googles, “soulmark number higher,” “soulmark gone wrong way,” and “will I die alone” before she sighs and tosses her phone aside, still just as alone and empty as before.
Yaz knows she won’t find any solace in sleep, not tonight. She’s too restless, her body too tightly wound.
She blinks, slow and unfocused, and somehow finds herself sliding her feet into her shoes. She blinks again, and her keys are in her hand, and she’s creaking the door open.
Instinctively, subconsciously, Yaz does what she did all those years ago when it got to be too much. She runs.
The air is cool on her skin and in her lungs. The movement feels good, feels freeing. She lets her feet lead her, her keys gripped carefully in her hands. She follows the sidewalks, dimly lit by street lamps.
Eventually, Yaz passes a graveyard, and the light haze lingering over the ground is at once haunting and inviting. A gentle smile tugs at her lips as she admires the history and stories of the people resting there. She leans in to read the names on the headstones, but it’s too dark and the names too faint to make out.
She shrugs it off, but when she turns to keep walking, there’s a figure standing in the road.
“Hello?” Yaz calls out. The figure remains motionless. Her hands tighten around her keys, and she weighs her instinct to protect herself with her curiosity. Who else would be out at this time of night? Maybe they need help.
She takes a cautious step forward. Her hand flits up in a greeting wave. “You all right, mate?”
As she approaches, she studies the figure in the mist. Dressed all in gray, the figure covers their face with their hands.
It reminds Yaz of the angels in the graveyard. When she glances to her left, to the pillars and headstones and monuments to the long-dead, she sees stone angels that look an awful lot like the figure ahead of her.
When her eyes return to her mystery figure, they’ve moved considerably closer. Their hands have moved from their face to stretch out, reaching for Yaz.
“Cute Halloween costume, mate, but that were a few months ago,” Yaz says. The figure doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even move.
A sense of uneasiness settles in Yaz’s chest. She takes a step backward.
“I’m a police officer,” she says, careful to keep her voice under control. “Do you need any help?”
No response. No movement. And then, she blinks.
In the fraction of a second it takes for her eyes to close and reopen, the angel manages to leap that much closer to her.
She stumbles backwards, her eyes not leaving the figure.
“Back off,” Yaz warns. Still, the figure says nothing.
She trusts her instincts.
She turns and runs.
And in an instant, the night has turned to day. The empty street has turned to a bustling road of pedestrians and old-timey cars. Yaz squints against the bright sun. The graveyard is gone. In its place is a barber shop and a clothing store, their storefronts straight out of an old magazine.
Women in skirts, their hair carefully arranged and their lips lusciously painted, walk together or on the arms of men in crisp suits.
She’s horrendously underdressed in her pajamas. In the reflection of the barber shop window, she sticks out like a sore thumb against these elegantly-dressed people.
But what also sticks out is her soulmark.
Gone is the indigo blue she’d grown familiar with in the past year. In its place is a breathtaking forest green soulmark, the sign that she’s just months away from meeting her soulmate.
The forest green soulmark loops in a single digit.
Wherever she is, whenever she is, she’s just two months from meeting her soulmate.