Another soldier loomed over her from where she lay on the stretcher. Black spots flashed across her vision. She thought the soldier might be Maradiv, then laughed at that idea because the man was the least likely to bother to come up with a retrieval team. The medic jabbed something into her thigh. The pain eased off at the edges, but it still felt like her organs were bleeding out of her shoulder.
“Were there any more?” the soldier said. “More than these?”
“Just us,” Arkadi said. “Just us three.”
“Two,” the medic said. “There are two soldiers here on the floor. Were there three?”
“The dog,” Arkadi said. “Will the dog be all right?”
Then the darkness came, and it was blissful, the little death.
Arkadi woke alone in a tent. It took her some time to convince the intern on duty to tell her where she was.
“You’re still at the Red Secretary,” the intern said. “I’m getting the medic.”
The medic came in with Revlan tagging along behind her.
“Did you save—” Arkadi began.
“Both dead,” Revlan said. “The girl, we shot. She was out from a head injury. The second was dead when we came in. What happened in there? Did they murder each other?”
“The dog,” Arkadi said. “Did you save the dog?”
“The dog’s fine,” Revlan said. “Tovorov is happy for that.”
“She the trainer?”
“Yes. What were you thinking, throwing yourself in front of the snipers?” Revlan said.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Arkadi said, which was true. It would take her some time to understand that.
“I told them you must have realized there were two in there,” Revlan said. “Is that right?”
Arkadi blinked at her. Did Revlan know what had happened? Was she trying to cover for Arkadi, or just guessing? No, Revlan had no reason to cover for Arkadi’s violence. Revlan simply needed to fill out the paperwork. If Revlan knew, if any of them knew that she had picked up a weapon . . .
“Ask the trainer,” Arkadi said, “she was there.” Arkadi put her arm over her face.
“We already asked Tovorov,” Revlan said. “I wanted to corroborate her story with you.”
“Then you know what happened,” Arkadi said. “Put it in the report and get it over with.” What did they do to crisis negotiators who committed violence? What order would she go into the incinerators? Before or after the soldiers? After, certainly.
“You did well,” Revlan said, “better than any negotiator I’ve seen. None of them would have taken that bullet. Tovorov says the soldiers shot each other. I admit I’m . . . trying to work that out. Which is why I wanted your help with it.”
Arkadi pulled her arm from her face. Her stomach twisted, but she said nothing to correct her.
Revlan continued, “And I said to Tovorov, are you quite certain? Because you’re good, Te Avalin, but I didn’t think you were good enough to get that soldier to shoot one of her own to save the Red Secretary. Especially considering she had a very serious concussion.”
“I didn’t either,” Arkadi said.
Revlan patted her pillow. “You rest,” she said. “Get her some water, will you?” she said to the medic, and the medic took the hint and left them. Revlan leaned over Arkadi and murmured, “Do not think I accept that your hands are clean, negotiator. None of us are. You are as human as me.”
Revlan rose.
Arkadi gave her a little two-fingered salute.
“I expect you’ll get a medal,” Revlan said.
“You will, too,” Arkadi said.
“I will,” Revlan said, “and I’ll be wearing it along with the others when I walk into the incinerator next year. It will be very beautiful, I’m sure.”
The lorry came for Arkadi the next day. The medic had stuffed her full of drugs and coagulant, and she was able to limp her way out of the tent. All around her, the soldiers were packing up the command center, carrying supplies back down to the inflatable bridge. Groups of red-liveried scientists were marching up the other way, back to the Red Secretary, presumably to recalibrate it. The Red Secretary would be a weapon no longer. Not for another three hundred years, at least. Arkadi was thankful she would be dead, and all these people either dead with her or incinerated, by then.
But what about those other people? Those future generations, the ones born of those who had committed no violence during this horrible war? Only the peaceful could create a peaceful society, all the holy books said, and this is where it left them in the aftermath of war. She had given them nothing, preserved nothing but a cyclical war as regular as the seasons. Maybe someday they would murder every last one of the enemy. Or maybe someday the enemy would destroy them. One could hope.
As Arkadi reached the fissure in the road, she saw Tovorov there counting out the dog crates and overseeing their transit across the bridge.
Arkadi could not help herself. She limped over to Tovorov and stood a pace distant until Tovorov relented and said, “What do you want?”
“Why didn’t you tell them?” Arkadi asked.
“To what end?” Tovorov said. “So you could get incinerated after this, too? No. Someone has to rebuild. Someone has to go on. What you did was not wrong.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“Who else’s decision would it be? People make the laws.”
“The gods make the laws. People follow them.”
“That’s a pretty story in the daytime,” Tovorov said, “but it doesn’t hold up here on the field, when you see night eight times a day.”
“You should have told the truth.”
“You tell the truth,” Tovorov said. “I’m damned already. I just want a nice quiet year or two with my dogs before the end. That’s all. One more dead out there . . . No point.”
“How is Mavis?”
“Alive,” Tovorov said. “No thanks to you. But he’ll need to be retired.”
“We should all be retired.”
“Not you,” Tovorov said, pointing across the fissure at the lorry. “You have work. My work is done. Soldier work is done.”
The driver waved, and Arkadi recognized her. It was the same driver who had taken her up here. She had kept her promise to return.
“When they said the war was over, I was glad,” Arkadi said. “I thought it would get easier after that. But it’s harder now. It’s harder to fight your own people. Harder to see what’s right.”
“Get yourself a dog,” Tovorov said. “They’ll keep you straight.” When she saw Arkadi staring at the dog crates, she said, “Not one of mine.”
“Sorry,” Arkadi said. She waved to the lorry driver again, who motioned her over. Arkadi stepped up onto the bouncy bridge, and this time she looked down into the fissure, down and down, past the colorful layers of minerals to the darkness that never seemed to end. It was like looking inside of herself, inside of Soraya. A blackness that would never be filled.
“Come in,” the driver said from the other side of the bridge, “Come in,” but Arkadi remained transfixed on the bridge, halfway between the driver’s open arms and the darkness, halfway between war and peace.
THE SINNERS AND THE SEA
I WANTED HIM the way a sinner wants his feet on solid ground.
I saw him up in the tower of a little shop. His head was bent over his typewriter while the great Mercy Hospital building floated past on its morning flight toward the meatpacking island. The wind brought with it the rancid stink of that district: rancid blood, rotten meat, animal fear. The Mercy Hospital would eventually end up on the second level south, where the techno-babblers waited to stream inside its doors, seeking a remedy for every little injury that had pierced their dirty fingers the night before.
The man looked so studious. So intent on his work, with no care for me or the world outside. I longed for that kind of immersion, but so far could not find it in anything but the contemplation of boys in high windows. I wondered, often, if I co
uld make a living at gawking at pretty boys, but my cousins insisted there wasn’t such a job. Last time I was in this quarter of the city, the tower shop had sold crystal recordings and laser players for music that hadn’t been banned yet, stuff that folks insisted had come from legal family collections and not stuff hauled up from the sea below. The sign out front now said, “Stationery and Antiquities.”
“Stop gaping, Arret,” my mentor, Solda, said. She was already ten paces ahead of me, electric truncheon in hand, face masked by her brilliant crimson scarf. My scarf was up too, because we were technically on a Guardian assignment to retrieve a relic. In theory, we couldn’t be bothered by vigils, the purity corps, the coven, or even the island Prefect herself, no matter our actions, once the scarves were on.
Solda is generally right, but also old. Your priorities change a lot when you’re just a couple years from Reunion.
But me? I wasn’t dead yet. Not even close. And that boy was very pretty. The relics could wait.
I pulled the scarf from my own face and stepped into the tower shop. Behind the counter was a plump older woman, the sort who looked like she spent her mornings churning butter or pounding metal or flaying carcasses. She smelled of yeasty wine barrels and old books, which made me want to curl up next to her and stay awhile. Her hands and forearms were massive, and made the stylus she held look dainty by comparison. She had an underbite, and when she turned her doughy face to me, she put me in mind of a bulldog. I’d need to use some charm.
“Fair wind, matron, I’m in a terrible hurry,” I said, leaning on the polished counter. It appeared to be real wood, very old. Not surprising, considering she sold antiquities.
“Fair wind ever,” she said, and her gaze moved to my red scarf. “There’s nothing illegal here,” she said. “I have my papers. These are all family relics. Nothing from the sea.” She reached beneath the counter.
“Not here for that,” I said. “Personal business. Who’s the man upstairs?”
“Upstairs?” she said, like a parrot. One of my cousins once had a parrot, which she kept secretly in the barracks for six years. It knew how to say hello in four different dialects. When the head-woman at the orphanage found it, she killed it and made us eat it. We didn’t try and sneak in pets after that.
“At the typewriter,” I said. “I can see him through the window.”
“Ah,” she said, and smiled broadly. “You wish to purchase him?”
“You own him?”
“It’s all legal—”
“I believe you,” I said. “I’d rather romance him.”
“That, too, can be arranged,” she said, as if the idea amused her.
“The Priory docks in fifteen minutes,” Solda said from the doorway. “Stop screwing around. I’m not likely to approve your promotion as it is. You’re testing my patience.”
I tapped the counter and slid over a gold-engraved five-note shell piece. “Pick out something he’d like,” I say. “A nice hat. Would look real fetching, with a complexion like his.”
She put her meaty hand over the piece and smiled again. “Indeed it would.”
“Arret!” Solda, again. “You’re the worst apprentice I’ve ever had—”
“—in a decade,” I finished for her. I clucked at her and pulled my scarf back on. “I really want to meet the other bad apprentice from ten years ago. I bet we’d have a lot in common.”
“Mooning at a man,” Solda muttered, jogging ahead of me. I hurried to catch up. “Shall I tell the coven that’s why we were late? That’s why this will be a containment and not a retrieval?”
“There are more important things than relics,” I said. “I mean, one day one of those things will set the whole city loose and we’ll drop dead into the sea. Might as well have fun before then.” I spared a look back up at the man. I could no longer see his profile.
“Guardians are supposed to prevent that day,” Solda muttered, “not hurry it along.”
I couldn’t argue with her there. We ran the rest of the way to the Priory dock. I could see a flashing hologram blooming up over the island as the ship’s great bulk floated over to the dock. The sharp, tangy scent of lemon wafted toward us.
Solda swore. “I told you,” she said. “They’re getting a message out. This is on you.”
We leapt the guardrail before the Priory had properly docked. I pulled my own truncheon and raced across Priory Island after Solda. I caught up to her as we heaved over the Priory gates and into the great garden where the misty illegal recording dominated the sky. Solda might be old, but I was spry, and I delighted in overtaking her. One thing about growing up an orphan tasked with running messages at six years old—you get fast real quick.
A small crowd had already gathered around the holographic image, mostly pilgrims and nuns who made their living on Priory Island. Few tourists or regular citizens ended up here, which is why it was a strange place to stage a demonstration, but Solda’s relic tracker was impeccable, the best one the coven had ever given her, she always said, which almost made up for them giving her me at the same time.
Solda slung her tracker around her neck and waded through the crowd to find the device causing the light show. I loped around the periphery, which was usually where the dissidents would stand around to watch how their demonstrations were received. I ran one hand along the gritty wall, all pocked brick and concrete. Every step I took released the musky scent of decaying leaves.
Above us the image rippled with voices, their tones high and cantankerous. They talked of revolution like it was a great idea that wouldn’t lead to the whole city falling into the sea. They talked about a world where people lived on solid ground, and didn’t fear the purity corps and Guardians. They talked of some dead world, of the dead past. Most of what they said was stuff any recited text would tell you was a lie, but people loved the idea that there could be some other world but this one we’d made over the drowned carcass of the last one. Here were people like me out here trying to save these folks from themselves, and what thanks did we get for it? The coven telling me I mooned over too many boys.
I tripped over a bit of rubble in the grove surrounding the clearing, and caught myself on a thick tree trunk so large it must have been planted during the Founding. I’d disturbed some duff and dirt, revealing a flat, black projection device. In the stories the school marms all told, glittering jewels and gold were the treasures sought by people of the past. But this was pirate’s gold to me. X marks the spot.
I reached for the box just as another figure rushed me from behind. We both went over hard. With the wind knocked out of me, I wasn’t much good for anything but flailing. My attacker straddled me and pressed her hands to my throat. Already short on air, I felt my hands go reflexively to her wrists. I should have kept my head and flipped her up and over me, but panic overrides training when you don’t have enough of the training part. Blackness juddered across my vision. I freed my right hand and threw dirt in her face. She wore a long coat with a hood, though, and I ended up eating more dirt than she did.
I always heard you think a lot about your whole life before you die. But there I was, getting strangled to death in the Priory Gardens, and the only thing I was thinking about was how I really didn’t want to die. I can’t imagine having time to think about anything else. Maybe you got more time to think when it all goes black, but I doubted it.
Solda’s truncheon thwacked the woman from behind. I had never been so glad to see Solda’s scowling face.
The truncheon’s current went straight through my attacker and into me. I had a brief moment to watch her seize up before I did, too, losing all control of my body. As I jerked and spasmed, Solda interrogated my attacker, smashing her with the truncheon again and again to emphasize her points. “Where are your collaborators? Where’s the other device?”
By the time the pain had passed, for me, I had heard those questions so many times I wanted to answer them just to make Solda be quiet. Little bits of spittle flecked her mouth. But my attacker
still lay on the ground, curled up, wordlessly absorbing the attacks. I couldn’t help but admire that stupid, thankless little rebel, just a little.
Solda bashed the woman once more, in the head, and her hood came free. My attacker was much younger than I’d thought, maybe sixteen, already old enough to start an apprenticeship. She should have been under some guild’s care, working her twelve hours like the rest of us.
“Confine her,” Solda told me, and marched off to start on the containment work with the witnesses. Containment was boring, so I was glad to have the more exciting part of the job.
I restrained the girl with a canister of spray-on webbing. It bundled her up in a breathable cocoon. The grunts could come in later and haul her off to the coven for a proper interrogation.
By the time I finished, Solda had already contained the audience. They lay on the grounds, still and beatific as sleeping children. The air still smelled like lemons, an aftereffect of the projection. In a quarter hour the witnesses who’d been contained would get up, shake off a headache, and carry on like nothing had happened. I’d been contained before, back when I was a little kid. I hadn’t known what it was at the time, but I remembered the big, kindly face of the Guardian crouching next to me when I came to. I’d been alone, I guess, when I saw whatever illegal tech show it was, and she had stayed with me to make sure nothing happened to me while I was out. When you contain kids too young, sometimes they don’t wake up. It’s good form to make sure it takes. That was when I decided I wanted to be a Guardian, just like her. She was calm and reasoned and comforting, and she could remember all the world’s secrets, all the stuff they made the rest of us forget. I told the coven I wanted to be like her to protect people from the gory technology all the insurgents were bringing up from the dead world below us. But really, it was because I knew she had more knowledge of the real world than I ever would, and I coveted that. I wanted the truth of the world. Turns out, being a Guardian didn’t come with as many answers as I’d hoped. Not yet, anyway. The only hope to get more truth was to pass this apprenticeship, and Solda wasn’t too keen on seeing me do that.
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