Eedric perked up at the remark.
“Why is that significant?” Stepmother asked, though even Eedric didn’t miss the slight roll of her eyes.
“The raid took place in one of the places where a lot of those people live, of course.” Father was casual about it, but there was nothing casual about the derision in his voice.
“Did they say where?” Eedric asked in turn.
Father glanced over the newspaper at him, brows furrowing slightly as he regarded his son.
“Somewhere in the west, near the Layanen Docks.”
The surface, Eedric thought with relief.
“Is that all?” he went on, trying to get down the rice he’d spooned into his mouth.
Father folded the paper in half and slid it to Eedric, the drug bust story on top. It wasn’t a long article to begin with and Eedric read it quickly, skimming for familiar names and places. There were none and while he could breathe a sigh of relief at that, he couldn’t help but feel that there was something inconsequential about the news piece. One couldn’t have a drink in the Layanen entertainment district without a ruckus—usually a fight, followed by sirens. The police were almost indiscriminate about who they asked IDs from: anyone with scales, anyone fresh off the boat, anyone who spoke Ro’ ‘dal with a F’herakian accent, any Human they thought looked like trouble. Eedric actually knew people who went to the district specifically to smoke illegal doses of medicinal winter’gra, a type of plant that resembled tobacco in constitution and appearance, except that it could make you see the world in technicolour when taken in strength with powdered aspirin. There was nothing new about a raid in that shady district. Every time the authorities cracked down on the stuff that went on in the winding paths between the low-rise buildings, there was always someone willing to sell excess rolls of winter’gra under the table as soon as they left; always more girls stepping off the boat at the ferry terminal to take the place of the ones who had been taken away; always more unlicensed cigarettes from across the border going cheap if you only winked at the right bartenders.
The latter pages of the paper reported the usual tripe and diatribes, and half-page spreads of advertisements selling toasters and out of date stereo systems. There was nothing about Nelroote or an underground settlement of illegals. Eedric didn’t know if he should feel relieved or worried by it. Eventually, he turned to the article about the Feleenese minister—of youth welfare and development. (Of course. As if they would let a Feleenese hold, say, the education portfolio, because you know, ex-army generals knew exactly how to teach kids their ABCs.) He found himself gazing down at the elegant features of the man, wondering what the aged eyes had seen that the smile could not utter.
“They just needed to get a face in,” he heard Father remark. “I don’t want to believe that our youth are going to grow up on policies sanctioned by that man.”
“Don’t want to, or don’t like to?” Eedric found himself asking. Aloud.
Father stared at him before replying curtly, “Both.”
“Neither,” Eedric countered. “For you, the uncertainty would have done the race too much credit.”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Father, without conviction or agreement, “and I suppose Human genocide is right as well. Betrayal, no loyalty—”
“That shit happened a long time ago!”
“Watch your mouth, Jonathan.”
“It was a war. Last I checked, everyone in that battalion had the choice to follow. And they practically won it for us, didn’t they? Got this country back so that you can still be here, bitching about this. If getting rid of half the Human population is the only way to make sure you live, you would do it, wouldn’t you?” demanded Eedric.
“Why are you defending them?” Father snapped. “You were not there when—”
“Gentlemen, please!” Stepmother cut in, holding up a hand as she did so. Exasperatedly, she went on, “Henry, we don’t always have our son sitting to dinner with us. Can’t we just have a civil meal for once? For once! Without all this drama. And keep politics off the table.” She shot Father a glare. Then Eedric. “Henry? Jonathan?” she pointedly added. “Do we agree on this?”
Eedric stared as Father sullenly went back to reading. “I guess I should apologise,” he went on with mock effusiveness. He gazed down at his mess of a plate, his appetite gone. He rested his utensils beside it with great deliberation before lifting his eyes to look at Father once more. “I just can’t help but think that whatever you couldn’t get over from all those years ago caused you to let them put Mama down before her time came.”
He imagined he heard the faintest hiss around his ears in the muted atmosphere. Even so, he went on. He could not remember a time when he’d spoken up of his own accord at the table, thanks to the attitude drilled into him by Father from a young age and carried into adulthood out of sheer apathy. Now that he was on a roll, he didn’t see why he should stop and start playing at being polite.
“What are you talking about?” Father demanded. “Why this so suddenly?”
“Because there are days when I can’t sleep at night, wondering if what we did to Mama was right! Days when I lay awake wondering if there was something I could have done!” Eedric cried, fist slamming into the table, drawing a protesting clink from the tableware. “And you,” he continued, “I wonder, I do wonder, if you are really not this man. That you wanted to do something too, but due to some… some difficulty, some need…some necessity…” He snapped his fingers and then raised his eyes from the lacy tabletop to his father once more. “Some reason why you had to let her die like that.”
Stepmother turned sharply to Father. “What is he saying?”
“Tell me,” Eedric said as if he had not heard Stepmother, “did she go easily? Did she smile for you? Forgive you? Or did a doctor do the work for you, while you played golf at the Hynes?”
“You were there, Eedric, when the doctor talked about this. You knew we had to do it.”
Leaning forward, Eedric angled his head to get a better look at Father’s face, and asked, “I didn’t. I still don’t.”
Father had his head down, staring at his near-empty plate. His voice was gentle when he next spoke with difficulty, “Your…mother… her illness’s final stage was…violent. She was hurting nurses and attacking doctors, breaking equipment... They had to call in the police and tase her more than once. That was how bad it had got. Nothing was working. The doctors said she retained no semblance of her Humanity and she wasn’t getting any better. They gave me two options. Either admit her into a specialised asylum—hospital—or give her the peace she deserved.”
“Henry!” Stepmother gasped.
“Like a sick pet?” Eedric pointed out.
Father looked away.
Eedric believed he had expected the answer. He had thought he would understand, thought he was going to be prepared for it. However, hearing the words, Father’s words, caused a release, like a fuse box blowing out or machinery that had been performing at optimum suddenly deciding it had had enough and couldn’t take any more. His palms met the tabletop; he didn’t feel the pain. He could sense Stepmother and, somewhere, Suri flinching, but he could only keep his glower focused on Father.
Father turned to consider him with an expression somewhere between hard and mournful. “You don’t know what it feels like when you no longer know the person you’re married to. You don’t know what it’s like knowing your only son is tainted because of it!”
“Tainted?” Eedric said, voice high with disbelief.
“Extra effort had to be made to make sure you grew up into a fine young man in spite of it,” Father went on to explain, patiently and levelly as if he was explaining a project in a meeting. “If you ever wondered why I made sure you had the best education, the best tutors, and more, wondered why I keep pushing you? It was all to make sure you’d never fall behind, that you’d still be on the same level as your peers. So that you would have everything you needed to break out of it!”
/> “You talk about it like it’s a disease…or a fucking handicap,” Eedric pointed out.
Father met his eyes: onyx against onyx.
“It is.”
“I am not an investment, Pa,” Eedric told him. “Mama was not an investment.” Disgusted, Eedric pushed away from the table. He was about to make his way to his room when a sudden rush of blood to his head and limbs made him turn back. Something in Father’s impassive expression as he evaluated Eedric’s condition— condition!—made him want to tear the face off the man, for he, Divines damn him, didn’t need it.
But he thought about the woman sitting in his room, severed from the only life she’d ever known.
He thought about her. He continued to regard Father. And then said, “I get it.” As an afterthought, he added, almost amiably, “If you read the science pages in that newspaper, you will know they just discovered that survivalists can grow back lost limbs in their temporary beast forms by the way. And so many are coming forward to help with research.” He shrugged and started to back away. “Maybe all Mama needed was time, Pa. Maybe all she needed was you.”
“Oh, Henry…” Stepmother started to say.
Eedric had reached the bottom of the stairs by then. He paused, a hand on the ornate baluster, feeling the coils and curves of the carved flower beneath his fingers. Looking back, he regarded the man who continued to sit in his chair at the head of the table, and thought, sadly, how small he’d become. Eedric threw a glance upwards. He climbed the stairs to this room. He heard Stepmother walking away, her bare feet on the parquet floor an impossible staccato rhythm, and later the front door slamming.
Upstairs in his room, Ria stood in the far corner by the window, peeking out between the curtains. Below he could hear Father calling out to Stepmother intermittently. Then a car started, followed by another, seconds later. Ria turned, uneasy questions already written on her face.
He had thought to reach gently for her. Instead, he grasped her face in his hands and mashed his lips against hers, focusing her snakes to a standstill. They remained a frozen halo around her head when he pulled away, and it was a while before she recovered. He ran the pads of his thumbs under those eyes as if to sculpt out her face with them. He wanted to worry about nothing but that distant day when her face was going to be lost to him.
“I heard shouting,” she remarked with concern.
“Nah,” he assured her, chuckling. “Just your normal family mealtime conversation.”
Ria angled her head. “Normal family conversations do not include shouting.”
“Yes they do.” He saw that Ria was wearing an old T-shirt that he had loaned her earlier. It was rather big on her, and long enough that she didn’t wear any shorts with it. Still, it fell only to a little below the thick of her thighs. She wore no bra beneath it and her nipples showed through the thinned material, themselves dark eyes through the veil of white. He grinned, snaked an arm around her waist, and drew her to him. “The family’s away,” he pointed out.
However, instead of giving herself over to him the way she had always done before, Ria pushed him away. Gently. Almost sadly.
“No,” she said. “This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right, exactly?”
“Us being like this. I don’t—I...” She trailed off and looked to him as if expecting him to finish her words for her. When he said nothing, she continued, “I’ve…I’ve cost you so much.”
“What, that?” he replied, pointing a thumb towards the window. “It was a long time coming.”
He made for the window, peered out of it briefly and then continued: “You have no idea how long I have been keeping it quiet, how much I’ve wanted to say to my father, to Adrianne, but was unable to. But you…” he said, going up to her and taking hold of her, “you made me a braver man than I have ever been.”
Sitting on the corner of this bed now, he went on, “You know what, Ria? You stand up for people. You don’t see survivalist or Cayanese…or anything. You see something that needs protecting and you go ahead and do it.”
“Not always. And you think that is a good thing?” she asked.
He looked at her. “Yes. Why not? There is too much of sitting around nowadays. The whole ‘I won’t do anything because no one is doing anything’. Or the ‘everything is good so why rock the boat’? If I do something, then I lose everything. Like the ‘if shit does not flow out of the showers or your faucets, no one cares where the sewage goes’ mentality, you know? So we keep voting for the same people to get into parliament. We keep quiet about social injustice. Because we’re all so damn engrossed in what we have and so damn frightened to lose it all. And they know we know it.” He gestured at the space around his room. “Heck, I know it. I could walk away and live on my own…but when it’s all you know, a big house, a car, a maid and a full stomach seems like the air you breathe, you know?”
Ria joined him on the bed, falling back onto it, her legs dangling off the edge.
“And what would it take for these people to stop sitting around?” she asked.
Eedric fell back too, his face level with hers. He shrugged. “For shit to flow through their showers.” Quickly, he added, “Not you though.”
“Do you…do you think they will stop?”
“Stop what?”
“The raid on Nelroote.”
At this, Eedric was quiet. He turned to look at her and saw her looking back, eyes wide with expectation, snakes flowing over his quilt. He could always be honest with her, even if the truth was going to be painful.
“I don’t think they will. Not until they find…” He trailed off. After a beat, he reached out and took her hand. “But don’t you worry. I have some money and I have savings. We can rent a small, cheap apartment and I can find another job. Run away from all this and make a life somewhere.”
He gave her hand a squeeze.
“We can make it work.”
Ria said nothing in response, only kept her eyes on the ceiling, listening as he somehow fell into a slumber.
Tracing
The light blue water was cold when she dipped her feet into it. The grass surrounding it was clipped so close to the ground, Ria wondered if Eedric’s family regularly got someone to come down to their estate to do the mowing and the gardening. It didn’t look like anyone in the family knew how to handle a tool and she was loath to think that those tasks fell on the wretched little Human they called Suri. She looked back at the house and her eyes wandered up to the windows on the third floor. Her thoughts drifted to Eedric, sleeping like a dead log on his too-large bed, beneath his too-thick stuffed blanket—quilt—in naught but a small, thin pair of shorts. For a dead log, he tossed and turned a great deal in his sleep, going from side to front, and then to back, arms flailing sometimes, and sometimes—too often—seeking Ria out to pull her into an eager, though crushing, embrace. In the days that passed, she had learnt to simply remain still, feeling the turn and twitch of his body as she listened to either the smacking of his lips or the far more entertaining murmurs of his gibberish sleep-talk.
Eedric never woke earlier than nine. Which had been a blessing when she needed to step out before dawn. His arms had been around her, one of them crossed over her chest, hand grasping her shoulder. She had had to inch carefully out of it, worried that for all of his dead sleep, he would choose that day to be alert. He had murmured her name, making her pause in the middle of getting out of his bed. She had looked over her shoulder at him and continued to gaze down upon him for a long while after. It was the first coherent thing he had uttered in his sleep since she’d first arrived. And a part of her had died as she considered what she was going to do to him.
Ria’s eyes dropped from the windows to the patio. On one of the woven rattan lawn chairs, sitting with his feet propped up on a footstool, Eedric’s father reclined, frozen, a cigarette between his fingers.
They had heard his father’s car sometime late in the afternoon. Eedric had been working on a resumé that he’d
promised himself to send out before the end of the week. Ria had been watching him work on his computer while she finished off a plate that he had brought up for her. There had only been one set of footsteps moving through the house, each step ponderous and contemplative. A feather-light knock on Eedric’s room door had caused them both to freeze, wide eyes trained on the door, then each other’s faces. Eedric had been so sure that his father would not speak to him after the episode at breakfast. Neither had dared to speak, and then footsteps were heard again, this time receding, before a door closed and it was quiet again. Henry Shuen must have slipped out from the house before dawn to have a smoke in the early quiet before the koel had even started its call.
The automatic porch lights had been on when Ria came down. She had smelt the smoke before she even saw him. He had not made a sound when Ria came around from behind him. The cigarette had barely left his lips when he started to grey over. So abyssal were his thoughts, or so surprising her appearance, that his expression was nothing more than a casual lift of his eyes. When the last of the smoke had streamed away from the cigarette end of stone, he sat fully inert. A good-looking man, even for his age, with a touch of olden-day class in his shirtsleeves and his hair gel-combed away from his face. Eedric kept saying that he took most of his looks from his mother who, from the photographs he had shown her, was pretty in her own way. However, in truth, Eedric was every bit an image of the father he so disliked.
Dawn had come, merging an orange wash with the leftover blues from a fading night. The cool air that had rested around her like a veil was starting to lift with the sun’s rising. Ria walked back to the house, bare feet wet and cold. Just as she was about to cross the open patio doors, she buried her hands in the pockets of the hoodie that Eedric had given her. Within the house, Suri was bustling about, arranging breakfast things on the table that had been set for two. Ria glided past her, taking care not to glance.
She moved ghostly quiet through the ground floor of the house and came through on the other side, finding herself in the driveway where the cars were usually parked. That morning, there was only one.
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