by Andy Graham
“One member of the government decided to weaponise the drug. She had a scientist come up with a variant that would produce multiple births, as opposed to the single- or zero-child setting. The plan was a tsunami of children in the areas where it was used. The idea was that so many children would cripple the location financially and stretch the health services to an unsustainable point. She wanted those areas to eat themselves into starvation. She was a mother herself. I’m not sure what kind of relationship she had with her family.”
Rose was starting to feel sick.
“What the minister didn’t write down but confessed to when the VP” — Beth paused, a venomous tinge creeping into her voice — “spoke to her, was that she was hoping the mothers would also die from carrying multiple babies in multiple pregnancies.”
The fury kicking inside Rose’s belly twisted into a sickly knot. “Why would a mother do that?”
“I don’t know,” Beth said. “You have more experience of motherhood than me. Marginally.”
Rose recoiled as if slapped. Before she could speak, Beth pressed on.
“When the VP found out what the woman was doing, he had her reassigned. He appears to have reserved a particular place in his own hell for those who commit matricide.”
Rose didn’t realise she was frowning until Beth answered the unspoken question. “The VP had a very powerful bond with his stepmother,” she said simply. “He did, however, take the scientist’s research. He was very much against the single-child policy and didn’t want to waste the ‘progress of sacrifice that had been made’.”
“Progress or sacrifice, not of.”
“I spoke correctly. Your eldest has a heart like an oil slick.”
Rose had no retort. Beth was right.
A dog, grizzled and scarred, padded out of the shadows. It curled up at Rose’s feet, nose to tail in a content furry loop. Without thinking, she tangled her fingers into the fur on the animal’s neck, digging down to the skin. Beth looked on, her eyebrows raised. The dog’s never done that to anyone else, the expression said. Rose shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. The butt of her one-shot pistol was cold and hard under her arm. “Are you telling me the drugs were designed to save money?”
“Government is about money. Without it, there is no government; without that, there is no society. No matter what you bleeding-heart rebel-till-I-die folk think, we can’t live off love alone.”
“We can’t live without it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
The clouds shifted. The moon light winked out. The table was lit only in the glow from the low lights above the table.
“And where do I come into this experiment? Why was I so special?”
Beth’s blue eyes, eyes that had haunted Rose for so long, studied the younger woman, judging, assessing. “Special? Yes, I guess you are special.” She cleared her throat. “You were the first live test. The drug was slipped into your vaccination schedule. You were programmed to have one baby, and one baby only. You weren’t supposed to have the second pregnancy, the one that gave you Ray and Rhys.”
Rose gripped her mug in taut fingers. “This is how you honour your promise to my father?”
“Yes.”
“You bitch.”
A single, raised finger set Rose’s teeth on edge. “I suggested you be the first to receive the injections while Hamilton was still pretending to be president. He ran with it because he thought I was as petty and vindictive as he was. It enabled me to keep tabs on you more easily. And by keeping tabs on you, I’ve been able to give you some kind of protection. You and your children. All of them. You were going to get the injection anyway, but this way, I could try and help.”
Another dog ghosted out of the darkness. He lay across the first in an ungainly heap. Rose, now pinned to her seat by the large animals, was scrambling to make sense of the story she was being told. Struggling to cope with the truth she’d been chasing. “How is this protecting me?”
“Fill in the dots between the lines, Rose. In a society where our central computer tracks everything, even how much toilet soap each household uses, don’t you think it odd your pregnancy with the twins went undiscovered for so long? In a society with more surveillance cameras than rats, don’t you think it strange you enjoy the freedom you do? I may not have given you a completely free hand, but I gave you a longer leash than anyone else would have. I kept my promise to your father as best as I could, but your family’s fame and notoriety made that difficult.”
She sat back in her seat, the shadows under her cheek bones giving her face a haunted, cadaverous shape. Rose’s head was spinning. The need to hate this woman was lost in a fury of emotion that tracked back decades.
“And I have more selfish reasons,” Beth said. “Society needed someone like Prothero to be the official face of the opposition. Society also needed a rebel to give it a collective dream and hope. You were perfect. Having you as the leader of the Resistance, with a family history entwined with my own, gives the Resistance a mystique that lends to the dream. Dreams are healthy. People with no dreams may as well be dead. I can allow the dream of your Resistance to flourish, but never the nightmare of you realising your aims.”
She tapped one of the red binders on the shelves next to her: 2072, the date of the Silk Revolution, the year Rick Franklin had been sent to the mines. The leather was worn and sweat-darkened. “Cynicism is a means to an end, to survival, but politics is about winning. Edward De Lette taught your father and me that lesson the hard way. You claimed to have won earlier in our conversation. But ask yourself this,” — Beth leant across the table, her eyes hard — “how many of your victories have I let you win?”
35
Inside the Bridged Quarter
The alleys around Ray and his quartet were sealed by rubble and rubbish. Some buildings were trapped in a slow-motion collapse, others leant together like drunks for support. What had stopped the rebels in their footsteps, however, were the real bridges of the Bridged Quarter.
They soared above the streets, punching holes in the night. The crossings of brick, stone and steel connected buildings, houses and towers. Several arched over the square off to one side. One spiralled dizzyingly high around a minaret, the railings crumbling.
They had been a way of negotiating the planning laws of the time, Ray explained. Some people were rumoured to have lived their entire life without their feet touching the ground. A bohemian generation of builders and architects who hadn’t yet been browbeaten into beige conformity had let their imaginations (and probably drug habits) run unchecked. To call them living bridges was akin to calling a palace a building: accurate but limited.
They had built bridges on bridges, adding rooms, shops and schools. Some had thick glass floors that allowed you to watch the world pass under your feet. Others seemed not much more than a collection of threads in the air. Nascimento would’ve called them a G-string not a bridge. At the thought of his wicked-humoured friend, Ray felt a growing pang of discomfort.
They moved into the quarter, Ray’s breath coming in clouds of mist. The staggered patrol formation he’d insisted on fell apart almost instantly. The twins and the kid had bunched together. They were all shades of the human rainbow and slowly realising that this was real. Stann Taille’s smack-time bell was ringing loud and clear.
Ray soon saw there was almost no need for the tracking device they’d got off Lynn. The maze of streets, rivers and bridges was blocked in so many places that there were only a few paths they could follow. If this was a trap — “It is!” the voice in his head screeched with laughter — then they were funnelling themselves into it under their own steam.
A flash of movement scurried out in front of them. Sebb yelled. Dylan whipped up his crossbow. The string hummed in the air. There was a squeal, a wet thud. A rat disappeared behind a stack of tyres. The echo of its almost human scream imprinted on Ray’s ears.
Dylan: “What was that?”
Seren: “It’s huge!”
&nbs
p; “Put that thing down,” Ray said. “Save your quarrels for the people that are holding Stella’s family.”
“And that’s dangerously close to a dad-joke,” the voice whispered, “you practising?”
Wide-eyed, Dylan lowered the crossbow. Seren shuffled closer.
Kayle lowered the hammer on his two antique revolvers but kept them out of the holsters. “Too many places to hide.” He craned his neck up and around to take in the bridges overhead.
“It was only a rat,” the kid said, his voice almost steady.
“Yeah, but what startled a rat that size out of its hiding place?”
“Us.”
“Let’s hope so.”
They pushed on between emaciated towers and under bridges that were just waiting to fall. Houses loomed like giant oblong skulls, shattered eye sockets and doors where teeth should be. The rebels’ paths twisted and turned, doubling back on themselves. At least twice, they circled past an ornately carved copper bridge that had a long-dead fountain jutting through a hole at the apex of the curve. The generously proportioned woman that was the centre piece of the fountain was covered in mildew and bird droppings.
The restless silence of before was now split by a soft chittering. It quieted as they got closer, and picked up with renewed fervour once they had passed. The scrunch of their feet on the ground had a new urgency as their pace picked up. They hurried through streets that were equal parts ghost town, graveyard and rubbish dump. Then (and when Ray remembered this moment in his cell later that night, this was the moment he should have trusted his instincts and listened to the nagging voice in his head) they turned into a long, narrow street where the chittering noise sawed at their ears.
36
A Twist
Rose’s teeth chattered against her mug. She was fighting warring feelings of dealing with someone she had more in common with than she wanted to admit, a person who had become her own larger-than-life bogeyman. Laudanum and her government had become not only a caricature of oppression in Rose’s mind but the problem that had given her existence meaning. But to discover her rebellion was being sanctioned by the people she was rebelling against had just upended the last half century of her life. She had a feeling that this was a speciality of Beth’s.
“Politics is about winning,” Beth said. “Without an opponent, you can’t win, you just are. People need a struggle to give them a sense of purpose. Our minds are designed for it just as much as bodies are made to move. The more well-off people become, the more fanciful the problems become: the coffee’s too weak, the bed’s too hard, my air-con is noisy.”
“So I’m just one more puppet in your quest for total power?”
“Everyone is one more puppet in my quest for total peace. And, after a fashion, I get to fulfil the promise I made to your father.”
Tea slopped over the side of the mug. Rose set it down. “Why are you telling me this?”
No answer came. Beth’s straight-backed posture had caved. Her face, etched with deep lines that usually spoke of wisdom and calm, looked wrinkled and pouchy. The woman facing Rose didn’t look like the most powerful person in Ailan, but a woman struggling to survive.
Rose clasped the mug to keep her hands still. She should feel some kind of glee at seeing her opponent in such a manner, but not even the cynical voice at the back of her head shouting that it was another game could quiet the growing feeling of kinship.
“I’m not sure I know why I’m telling you.”
“You’re a politician, make it up.” The sting was gone from Rose’s voice, no matter that she wanted it there. The words sounded like banter.
“No. That would be too much like Tallest-Man Syndrome.” Beth blinked away a gleam in her eyes. “It’s something your father and I once discussed. Why am I telling you this? Various possible reasons. One, honouring your father’s memory.”
“Honouring his memory,” Rose said, anger driving the banter from her voice. “You sent him to the uranium mines.”
“I did not send him to the mines. De Lette did that. I tried to stop it.”
The ferocity of the statement cut Rose off in her tracks. A violent gust of wind threw the branches of the Folly Tree on the balcony into a rough dance. The dogs warming Rose’s feet growled, the vibrations thrumming through her bones. A deep silence settled across the table. “Did De Lette really disappear after he staged the Silk Revolution?” Rose asked at last.
“From public life, yes. He had Luke Hamilton installed as a puppet president. De Lette used to joke that Hamilton was president in nothing but name. De Lette pulled the strings from behind the scenes, where he could rule in his pants, picking his spots.” Beth grimaced. “His lifestyle finally caught up with him. If his heart hadn’t given out, then his rapidly flourishing gout would have got him.”
“It sounds better if your heart kills you than your big toe.”
“Yes, heart attacks are usually less painful and over more quickly than severe gout. As for his successor, Luke Hamilton, he was shot by one of the young boys he’d been abusing. The horror of what that excuse of a human was doing to the poor child finally outweighed Hamilton’s threats and promises.”
Rose felt sick. She’d heard the rumours. The Light Net was awash with speculation. To hear it spoken of so casually made her gag. “You knew about the abuse and let it happen?” Her voice was not much more than a hiss. “You could have done something. You politicians are all the same — protecting your own.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not when there is that kind of abuse. Why didn’t you stop it?”
A quizzical expression crossed Beth’s face. “Who do you think got the boy the gun? It’s better for the oppressed to rise up against the oppressor than having to be rescued. I empowered that child.”
“You made him into a murderer!”
“Some people are never happy,” Beth muttered. “A murderer? Possibly, but I would rather be a bully than be bullied.” Her face split into a grin as nasty as it was satisfied. “Apparently, the look on Hamilton’s face when he realised what was about to happen was worth framing. It was a classic comeuppance story moment.” Her back straightened again, shoulders rolling back.
As Beth transformed once more into the woman Rose had fought across the decades, her own posture crumbled. She had the distinct feeling that the fate of the two of them were inextricably linked and balanced. “And my father?” Rose asked. “You said you would have crawled through the seven levels of hell to find him. Why didn’t you?”
“When I finally had the chance, I looked. I couldn’t find him. I don’t know what that means but the mine owners didn’t bother keeping personnel records. There wasn’t really much point.” Beth turned the full force of her gaze back on Rose. The fragility was buried. Her eyes gleamed with a zealous fire. “Now, it’s getting late and we have things to do. If you won’t take my honouring your father as a valid reason for this lengthy explanation, how about trying to make good on a promise to an old friend? Essentially the same thing but semantics is an evil akin to its sibling, statistics. If that doesn’t work for you, then think of this information as a token of respect.” She held up a finger to silence Rose.
“The remaining three reasons are manifest. One, you have been a worthy adversary. Two, you were a necessary foil to my rule, in a manner as vital as David Prothero’s. Another man we both almost loved, albeit in different ways. I wonder whether the men kept us balanced and apart. Without them our meeting was inevitable. Three, I don’t know if we’ll see each other again. This is our third meeting.”
“Third time unlucky.”
Beth’s lips twisted to show teeth. “I’m not sure I believe in the old superstitions and sayings, that’s a Free Town thing. But in this case, it does seem appropriate. Maybe I’ve spent too much time at the Ward, that silly society of the Famulus’s, or maybe it’s just age and wisdom.”
Beth leant over to the red binders. Under the one labelled 2072 was an antique brass reception bell. Rose
hadn’t noticed it before, caught up as she was in Beth’s stories. It was shaped like a skull. It could have been the twin of the one carved into the map wall of the sea towers, right down to the recently shattered red eye. The president clapped her palm down on the bell. The gentle chiming sound that pealed through the air seemed to be mirrored by a deeper toll somewhere in the tower’s guts. One of the dogs scrabbled to his feet, ears twitching.
“I have no children I can claim as my own,” Beth said. “The people of Ailan are often described as my family. It’s a large dysfunctional family with more issues than solutions, granted, but still a family that I’m trying to corral into working together. That being said, there are some things best dealt with by parents, not politicians. I do not believe in the so-called nanny state. Look after your family first.”
The window panes shuddered in a sudden wind. One of the branches on the Folly Tree cracked and tumbled, unheard, to the floor. Both dogs bolted out from under the table, battering Rose’s legs as they did.
“What are you talking about?” Rose asked, hairs standing up on her neck.
“Maybe my telling you what has happened will help you with what you have to do. Something I tried to stop but have failed. It was bad manners not to finish the phone call I was having when you arrived, but I was trying to resolve a situation that has spiralled out of control. Short of sending in the legions, and despite what you think of me I wouldn’t use the military to settle personal scores, my options are limited.”
“Bethina?” Rose could hear the edge of panic seeping into her own voice. The dog’s hackles were raised, tails low, ears flat on their skulls.
“You have to go. You have to stop your eldest from killing Ray.”
“What?” Rose’s voice exploded across the table.
“Ray’s walking into a trap. The VP and his men are waiting for them. And they outnumber them considerably. I’ll have you escorted there. I think you have more chance of stopping the slaughter than me.”