by Carrie Patel
Jane opened her mouth but found that the words had dried up on her tongue.
The Qadi stirred her tea until a smooth vortex sucked at the liquid. “I know this is mob justice, Jane Lin. But it is the only kind of justice fit for Recoletta now. People need to see someone – someone living – held accountable. And if one man’s blood will cool their anger and paranoia, I am happy to spill it.”
Jane was caught between horror at what the Qadi was saying and envy at the woman’s clarity.
The Qadi tapped her spoon against the rim of her cup and set it aside. “I see judgment in your eyes, Miss Lin. But you were in Madina long enough to understand why I wear the veil. People like us – Father Isse, Chancellor O’Brien, your long-dead councilors, and I – we’ve never had the luxury of your moral high ground. We’ve been charged with mankind’s survival. And we’ve had the Catastrophe at our heels for hundreds of years.”
She thought of Roman, the trapped and defeated man he’d been when she’d spied him on her way to Ruthers. He’d been wrong to support Sato, but he didn’t deserve this. She’d seen goodness in Roman, and she’d always hoped it would have the chance to come out.
Jane’s mouth still felt dry, but she knew what she had to do. “Then take me,” she said. “I’m the one who killed Councilor Ruthers.”
As the Qadi maneuvered the teacup behind her veil, Jane caught a glimpse of the woman’s lips, twisted in distaste.
“That is exactly why we cannot touch you.” She sipped her tea, then pried the cup from behind her veil once more.
Jane swiped a dry tongue over her lips. “What do–”
“Haven’t you been outside? You’re a hero.” The Qadi spat the word like the vilest of curses.
“Me?” A lot had happened in the last twenty-four hours – Freddie’s death, Ruthers’s death, Roman’s imprisonment – but none of it had made her feel heroic.
“Word of Ruthers’s death had spread halfway across the city by the time we returned from the Library,” the Qadi said. Jane cringed to hear her crime spoken aloud. “We couldn’t very well admit that a laundress had thwarted us, could we?”
But it made sense. In the warped, conniving way of everything the Qadi and the other politicians did.
“You had to save face,” Jane said, putting it together. “Or no one in Recoletta would have accepted your authority.”
The Qadi tugged her veil and smoothed it down. “It wasn’t terribly difficult. Rumors had already begun that Sato and Ruthers had been in league from the beginning. That Sato had released Ruthers and executed the other councilors on his orders.”
Jane’s laugh scratched at her dry throat, but she wasn’t amused. She was horrified. “That’s absurd.”
The Qadi acknowledged this with a tilt of her head. “It improved our standing considerably when people learned that you had found refuge in Madina.”
Jane wanted to argue with the woman, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Out of everything that had happened to her and the people she cared about, the worst was the notion that it had all been twisted to serve the interests of the Qadi and her ilk.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the Qadi said, scraping again at the sugar bowl. “But for now, people have a hero, a villain, and a story with pleasing symmetry, all of which are more satisfying than the truth. And, your moral objections aside, you’ve no right to deny them what little comfort they find after two wars.”
As Jane watched the woman scratch a thin crust of sugar from the empty bowl, she reflected that perhaps the Qadi was right. And perhaps she had also given her the key to securing Roman’s release.
If the people of Recoletta needed a hero and a villain, then she could furnish them with a few of her own.
A rattle of disgust drew Jane’s attention. She looked over to see the Qadi drop her spoon in frustration.
“Is there no sugar in this whole wretched city?”
Jane pushed herself back from the table. “You were supposed to send trainloads of food.” That was how the Qadi had tried to sneak her own forces into Recoletta before chasing down Sato at the Library. Jane stalked out of the room before the older woman could respond. The guards didn’t stop her.
She stalked down the hall, numb with anger. It beat aching with grief and guilt, though.
Especially when it gave her something to do.
She realized that she could tell the Qadi about the vault, the coveted repository to which Roman was the key. No one knew that Ruthers had taught her the code before he died, and if anything would stay the hangman’s noose, it was the promise of pre-Catastrophe weaponry.
But for Roman, that would be worse than an execution. Held captive and used to open the one thing he feared above all – that was a mercy even she could not inflict upon him.
She would find another way. Or burn Recoletta trying.
Chapter 3
Checks And Balances
Malone awoke to pain.
Her whole body felt as though it had slowly been pulled apart, each joint and limb tugged by an unseen force. If it weren’t for the stiff ache in her back, she might have thought she was still hanging.
She opened her eyes and saw two hazel ones staring back at her.
A woman with auburn hair and a long, straight nose was bent over her. She was saying something, but Malone couldn’t make out a word of it.
Her throat burned. “Water,” she said. The word felt like gravel in her neck.
A man’s voice rose with a few sharp syllables – more words Malone couldn’t make out. The woman backed out of her field of vision.
Malone tried to rise, but the effort shot pins and needles through her body, and that ripped an agonizing gasp from her throat. Her blood was resuming its proper course, but it filled her veins with fire.
Strong arms gripped hers and pulled her upright. She shut her eyes against the pain and the urge to vomit. When she opened them again, she saw a man watching her, standing at the end of the table she was sitting on.
He was about a head shorter than she was, with oiled black hair, a meticulously cropped goatee, olive skin, and eyes that narrowed in the corners, like Jane’s and Sato’s. Yet the most distinctive thing about him was the scar that curved across his left cheek, ending just under his eye. He was dressed in a silky black and crimson uniform that hung a little too loose on him. The woman was wearing something similar.
The man bowed at the waist, not in the manner of Recolettan whitenails, but lowering his head with the rest of his body.
He said something else that she didn’t understand.
“Water,” she said again. Malone didn’t recognize the room she was in, but it looked like a small office, just big enough for the table. Light filtered in behind her, casting warm hues on the pale wood paneling of the walls.
The hazel-eyed woman returned, bearing a flimsy tin cup before her.
Malone took it. She’d never tasted anything so good.
The man cleared his throat before he spoke again. Slowly, this time. “I am very much regretting to seem brute, but we must spreck. I am Geist.”
Malone slowly wiggled her arms, legs, fingers, toes. They were all there, and they all hurt. “Where am I?”
“We are still in Recoletta, of course. Conzentresse, please. You are comprending me now, ya?”
Malone nodded. She didn’t catch every word, but she got his meaning.
“Goot. I am cherching for some persons who I estimate are living here boocoo yars. Perhaps you are knowing them.” He unrolled a thick sheet of paper with two gray pictures: one of a family of three, and the other of a young man. The images had an eerie, spectral quality, as if the people in them were corpses. Except for the lack of color, they were more realistic than any painting Malone had ever seen, but they made her skin crawl.
The family included a man, a woman, and a small boy, all with dark hair and serious, unsmiling expressions. She didn’t recognize them, but there was something familiar.
The young man in the second image was A
ugustus Ruthers. He couldn’t have been more than twenty in the image, but the proud, aquiline face was unmistakable.
“Augustus Rothbauer,” Geist said, pointing to the image of the young man. “Und Ilse et Jean Arnault mit their son, Roman.” He drew the last syllable out in a way Malone had never heard before. “You know them?” he asked. It was barely a question.
Malone laughed. It felt like sandpaper in her throat.
“This is funny?” Only his raised eyebrows told Malone this was a question.
“You’re five days late,” Malone said. “The man you’re calling Rothbauer is dead. And Roman left town.”
The hazel-eyed woman had been busy with some cups and a pitcher on the table near Malone’s feet. She dropped one of the cups which shattered on the floor, spilling a brownish liquid too dark and thick to be tea.
“Merd, Phelan!” Geist said. “Sortay, sortay!” He shooed her away, and she backed out of the room, head low.
“You’re from somewhere else,” Malone said, trying to clear the fog from her brain. “Same place Arnault’s family first came from.”
“Und Rothbauer, ya. The Continent.”
“Why are you looking for them?”
“They are having something that belongs to us.” He said “us” with an expansive lifting of his brows. He was talking about more than just the people on this ship, likely the whole of the Continent. And if he was being this vague, then there was no sense in asking him what that “something” was.
“Then why are you asking me?”
This time, Geist laughed. “Because you were the sole person in the platz remaining to be asked. How are you thinking you are here? The others, they flet.” He made a little flapping motion with one hand.
The gesture took Malone back to a moment she wasn’t ready to revisit – the agony, the crowds, the shadow–
“In plus,” Geist said, “the last person to be seeing him before his evanoosment was you.”
The surprise gave her a much-needed jolt. “If you already know–”
“What I am not knowing is which plass he is going to next.”
Malone watched Geist, wondering how much else he knew. His expression betrayed nothing. “He didn’t say. That’s the whole point of disappearing.”
Geist pulled a chair out and sat at the table. “Then perhaps you commence by telling me the history. Perhaps we comprend it together.”
But there was nothing she would rather do less – Arnault and his damn history had gotten her into this mess in the first place. Malone swung her legs over the table. “No. I’m done. Find Roman Arnault on your own – I’m going.”
“Going where?”
“Away.” To the farming communes – where she should have gone as soon as the peace deal had gone through – away from the intrigues and the politics of the city. “Far away–”
She broke off when she saw the view outside.
A round, metal-buttressed window curved from floor to ceiling in the little room. All she could see was sky.
It was only when she moved closer that she could see the city below her. Far, far below her.
The verandas looked as small and insubstantial as trash on the pavement, the surface streets between them like lines of mortar. She could see the shapes of the different districts below her – the sprawling gardens of the Vineyard, the ramshackle mess of the factory districts – but it was small and distant.
Geist gestured to a chair. “Please, setz. Consider it un faveur.” He tapped a finger on his neck and gave her a smile that was perfectly symmetrical and perfectly empty.
Malone took the nearest chair, moving as carefully as she would around a coiled snake.
“Now,” he said, “you were to be telling me about Roman Arnault.”
But if she was going to tell him about Roman, she might as well tell him the rest. “The first thing you ought to know is that Roman isn’t the one you’re searching for. She is.”
He raised his eyebrows. “She?”
“Jane Lin.”
* * *
It started with a bad decision made for the best of reasons.
After the assault on the Library and Malone’s elimination of Sato, Malone and the others had followed a night of battle with a long, cold morning of verbal conflict that was no less perilous and no less exhausting. But after hours of haggling and horse-trading, the farmers, the powers from the north, and the new leaders of Recoletta had finally reached a deal.
After that, they needed to get away from each other as fast as possible, before somebody had cause to regret the terms.
She had bid farewell to Salazar as the sun broke the horizon. The farmers had been the most energized of all, even with several days of marching behind them and still more to go.
But when Salazar shook her hand and gave her a rare smile, she understood well enough. Theirs had been a victory of progress. According to the newly inked treaty – what everyone was already calling the Library Accord – they would have joint ownership of the crops and goods they produced for the cities. Their quotas would be relaxed, and they would engage in annual rotations in which some of their brightest would go to the cities to learn while doctors, educators, and engineers came to live in their communes.
Best of all, they would have an advisory seat when the Council of Recoletta was reconstituted along with the governments of Madina, Underlake, and the Hollow.
Malone was almost surprised to see Salazar returning to the communes instead of claiming one of those seats himself. Until she remembered that he wasn’t that kind of leader.
“There’ll be meetings, then the votes, then some more meetings. With any luck, we’ll get around to making a decision after that,” he said. “But someone’s got to make sure the whole process moves forward. I’d hate to see all this fall apart over squabbles back home.”
The trains for the cities were already being loaded. Malone felt the high, sharp steam whistle in her teeth.
“Come with us,” he said. “You know the cities as well as anyone. Be useful to have someone of your experience in the coming weeks.”
She watched the trains, belching and chuffing as the last of Underlake’s soldiers boarded.
“Like you said, someone’s got to make sure this doesn’t fall apart,” Malone had said.
They made their farewells, and Malone had turned to the trains, trying not to dwell on the image of the burning carriages and screaming soldiers she’d last seen in Recoletta.
At least she’d be able to get some sleep. If recent events were any indication, it would probably be her best opportunity for the foreseeable future.
As she reached the tracks, she glanced over her shoulder for one last glimpse of the farmers, exhausted but triumphant. She would be welcome in the communes. There, she would be the hero who had brokered the compromise in their favor.
In Recoletta, she would be one of the last remnants of two fallen governments. And anyone wanting to discredit her would only have to point out that she had failed – or betrayed – them both.
Salazar looked back at her in final invitation, but only for a moment. They both knew she’d made her choice.
Malone boarded the train while a falling star streaked across the sky in the distance.
* * *
Back in Recoletta, Malone had reclined behind her desk – a desk, at any rate – with her feet up, but it felt like she was still marching. When she closed her eyes, fire and musket blasts seared her vision.
The door swung open with an undignified groan.
“Not now,” Malone said, her eyes still closed.
“Lady Lachesse would speak with you,” said a voice. Young, male, breathless. Inexperienced. Like most of the guards and inspectors these days.
“Not now.” As long as the politicians weren’t actually killing each other again, Malone wanted to stay as far from their intrigues as possible.
“Councilor Ruthers has been assassinated, Chief. And Roman Arnault is in custody.”
Her eyes sn
apped open. The bright light from the hall was blotted out by a regal shape with wide skirts and a crown of coiffed hair.
Young, male, and breathless fidgeted by the open door behind Lady Lachesse.
“You can go,” Malone told him. He disappeared behind the closing door. “So. Assassinated,” she said to her visitor.
Lady Lachesse seated herself on the other side of the desk. For decades, the whitenail matron had been one of the quiet powers behind Recoletta’s ruling Council, and more recently, she’d been one of the chief architects of the Library Accord. Trouble followed her like a cloud of musky perfume. One could tell when she’d had her hand in something because it always stank.
Malone took a deep breath and braced herself against the odors of licorice and amber.
“It doesn’t bode well when the chief of the Municipal Police is the last person in the city to learn of a crime,” Lady Lachesse said.
“I’ve had a busy couple of days,” Malone said. Something about this was odd. Why had Lachesse come to harass her personally? People like her paid others to do that sort of thing.
Lachesse sniffed. “Not busy enough, I see.”
“So. How did Arnault get to Ruthers?”
“He didn’t. He’s in custody.” Lady Lachesse blinked her painted eyes.
Malone held a swell of annoyance in check. “You told me he assassinated Ruthers.”
The whitenail sighed. “I told you Ruthers was assassinated. And that Arnault is in custody.”
Malone kicked her feet down from the desk. She was too tired to spar with the old woman. “Then who–”
“Will you just listen?”
The tension in Lachesse’s voice snapped Malone back into the moment. For the first time, she realized that the color in the woman’s cheeks was too splotchy, too low to be rouge. Lachesse was agitated.
Malone leaned slowly forward, the way she’d learned to do when questioning a suspect. “I’m listening.”
“It was a nobody. An exile,” the whitenail spat. “A laundress by the name of Jane Lin.”
Malone knew the name. But she was experienced enough to hide it.