A woman in black pushed aside the curtain and came at her with hands upraised, fingers bent like claws. Devra stepped back involuntarily, held the shopping basket before her as if it were some kind of protection.
The woman slowed and spat into the empty basket. Then she screeched at the boy who’d brought Devra.
“This is the mother of Ferit,” the boy said. “She will like you to see Ferit. She will like you to know.”
Ferit’s mother grabbed Devra’s wrist with one clawlike hand and tugged her towards the tumbledown shed. Devra dug her heels into the ground and leaned backward. “Tell her I’m not going in there!”
The boy spoke and after a moment the woman released Devra, but not before spitting into the basket again. Her shrill, incomprehensible harangue almost deafened Devra.
“What is she saying?” she asked the boy. “What does she want?”
“She say good, you see Ferit in daylight. You see what you have done.”
Ferit’s mother darted into the shed and came out again, towing a tall, shambling figure that seemed to have no will to move on its own. Devra’s breath caught. This wasn’t the boy she remembered, with the cocky smile and the light step.
Slowly, reluctantly, she looked up into the listless face and catalogued the features one by one. “Ferit?” she said.
The tall boy made a gargling sound. His mother screeched in Devra’s ear.
“She say this is her son, this is all you have left of her son. He no talk, he no work, he like blind cripple.” More screeching. “She poor widow, now she no have son to care for her, she have only idiot to take care of.”
Medical rehab, Devra thought. She’d never seen somebody she knew after “rehab,” and it was easy to look away from the poor shambling figures of those who’d been set to sweeping halls or carrying garbage. Too easy. Now she looked at Ferit, and his face was burned into her memory. Both his faces: the laughing boy with one eyebrow cocked and teeth flashing white as he teased her, and this ghost with dull eyes and slack mouth.
“No,” she said, stepping backward off the path. The glutinous mud sucked at her shoes. “No. I did not do this. It was Security–”
“Sen! Sen!” his mother said, and Devra needed no translation. “You! You!”
She’d brought money for the butter. Would it be an insult to offer it to her? It wasn’t enough – just a handful of marks and two silvers. She could come back— No. Devra knew she would never come back to this place of despair. She fumbled in her pocket.
“I am so, so, sorry,” she said, holding out the coins.
Ferit’s mother struck them out of her hand and spat again. This time the gob of spittle landed on Devra’s cheek. She felt an urgent tug on her hand.
“You go now,” urged the boy, and like Ferit, without volition, Devra followed him.
At the first turning she looked back. Ferit’s mother was on her knees, picking marks out of the mud.
The café was still closed, but it didn’t matter; Devra’s heavy, clanking, old-fashioned keys were in her pocket. Every time she wrestled to turn the stiff back door key she felt a spurt of irritation with the backward Esilians; why couldn’t they at least install hand sensors so that she wouldn’t have to lug these antique keys around? But it wasn’t important; today nothing was important. She let herself in as quietly as she could, in case Mikal and Vess were napping, and found her usual seat behind the Stinking Billy.
She’d come back here because the thought of sitting idly in her room was intolerable, and she’d thought that she could throw herself into baking so many things at once that there would be no place in her mind for recalling the bazaar. But now she couldn’t think of anything to bake. Especially without butter… The bright cold light, the tumbledown shack, the woman spitting on her; the emptiness inhabiting what had once been Ferit. Devra rubbed her cheek with one hand. Would she ever feel clean again?
It might be a relief to bury her head in her arms and cry. But she’d learned so long ago, in the crêche, that crying was a sign of weakness that would only encourage her tormentors. Now the tears would not come when she wanted them. Her eyes dry and burning, she stared straight ahead and saw the muddy back street and Ferit’s home superimposed over the tables and chairs of the café.
Not my doing. But that was cold comfort. Might Ferit have been spared if she’d begged for his life?
Not my doing. But if only she’d been working for the Green Cat then, if her theory about them smuggling dissidents to safety had been correct, might Ferit have escaped that way?
The Leafletter should have told him about this way out. But did even the Leafletter know about it? He should have known. If he was going to use children as distributors, he should have had a plan to keep them safe.”
“He should have, I should have, somebody should have…” she murmured bitterly. And a lot of good all the “should haves” had done Ferit.
When you knew something was wrong, you had to fight it with all the weapons you had. Even if your weapons were, frankly, pitifully weak. She’d acted without thinking to save Ferit from the habbers, because she knew that it was wrong to threaten a child with something that made him pale and sweaty and consumed with fear. But she’d tried to keep that knowledge separate from the rest of her beliefs. She’d wanted to believe that her country was good, that it was ruled and guided by good people, that her primary duty was to be the best Citizen she could. She hadn’t wanted to see that the rotten core of ‘medical rehabilitation’ could not be separated from the rest of Harmony, corrupting everything it touched and spreading the corruption farther and farther.
And she’d chosen to believe that since Security let her go on the basis of no evidence, they would let Ferit go free for the same reason. Even when she was brought back and assigned to spy on the Green Cat and its owners, she hadn’t been willing to see that this was why they’d let her go in the first place: to make her life miserable until she’d jump at the offer. And they had made sure there’d be a vacancy for her, hadn’t they, by killing Rojer as soon as she agreed. She supposed the other people, the Citizens, were written off as collateral damage. Every Citizen should be willing to give his life for his country; those mangled victims had only done what they ought, even if they hadn’t volunteered.
They hadn’t sent her to rehab because she happened to have a skill that was useful to them, enabling them to slip her into a place they wanted to spy on.
Ferit, though, wasn’t useful to them, so they casually destroyed him and then sent him home to be a warning to others.
She couldn’t blame Viktorya or her sister-in-law for not wanting her around. She tainted everything she touched. She would have to quit working at the Green Cat before Security found a way to ruin Mikal and Vess through her.
“Hello! Esilia to Devra, do you copy? Hello!”
Something pink and brown was waving up and down before her face. She couldn’t see the café. But the images in her head kept playing on this new, hideously close screen. She turned her head to get away from it.
“Devra, I’ve heard of a brown study, but this…” Mikal dropped his hand and peered at her face. “Devra, what’s wrong? What happened at the bazaar?” He put an arm around her shoulders. She wanted to lean into it, to soak up his care and protection, but she didn’t deserve that. “Did somebody… hurt you?”
Not the way you’re thinking, no. Devra tried to speak, but her mouth and throat were dry and the best she could manage was a husky whisper.
“I didn’t get the butter.”
“To Harmony with the butter! What happened to you?” Mikal turned his head and shouted for Vess.
“She’s just staring at the wall,” she heard him say as Vess came down the stairs. “She won’t tell me what’s wrong, but look at her!”
One look and Vess swept Devra into her arms as if she were a child. “There, there,” she crooned, rocking back and forth. “Whatever it was, you’re here with us now, you’re whole and safe, it can’t be that bad. “
“Mikal, you idiot. Hot drinks, and sugar, for shock. But not kahve, that’s a stimulant. Brew some sweetleaf tea and put plenty of honey in it.”
I don’t have to say anything until he comes back with the tea.
Maybe it’ll take him a long time to make it.
But time was dilating and contracting strangely. He was back before these thoughts had finished crawling through her mind, holding a cup to her lips. Devra took a sip and discovered she was desperately thirsty. She drained the cup without waiting for the tea to cool down. It was thick with honey and sickeningly sweet. But she did stop shivering afterwards. Funny, that, she hadn’t realized she was shaking.
“You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” Vess promised, keeping one arm around Devra.
“The butter isn’t important,” added Mikal, jiggling from one foot to another as his worried stare fixed on Devra’s face. “I can go out right now and find one of our, um, irregular suppliers who’ll fix us up.”
At Devra’s convulsive shake of the head, he said, “Or if you want me to stay here, let me borrow your CodeX and I’ll just send him a message.”
“Too – too dangerous,” she managed. “You said – Security was probably watching my CodeX.” If I tell him I know they’re reading my messages, because I’m working for them, they’ll throw me out right now, and I don’t think I can bear that. The warm interior of the Green Cat, redolent with the smells of kahve, cooking, and fresh baking, felt like her only refuge. Or maybe it wasn’t the place; maybe Mikal and Vess were her refuge.
Esilians?
People.
As the sweet, hot tea worked its way through her, she began to feel her rigid joints loosening.
“You don’t have to tell us,” Vess said again, “but you should talk to somebody. It does help. I should know.”
They still think I’ve been raped. Devra couldn’t do mental arithmetic at the moment. Could Vess have lived through the Esilian rebellion? Surely she was much too young for that?
“Nothing happened to me,” she said huskily, cleared her throat. “It was somebody I used to know. At the bazaar.”
She pulled the CodeX off her wrist and handed it to Mikal. He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen for a moment; she heard the pantry door opening and closing.
She would have to go back to the very beginning to make them understand.
When Mikal came back and held her hand between his, so pale that the freckles showed on his face, she told them about Ferit. What a bright, lively, funny kid he’d been; how she couldn’t even get angry at his constant practical jokes, because she couldn’t help seeing the funny side. Then she told them about the meeting in the bazaar and her impulsive decision to protect him from the habbers.
“Well, of course,” Vess said. “You couldn’t have done anything else.”
She told them about her arrest and questioning and release the next day, and summarized her desperate week in a couple of sentences. “I was so relieved when you gave me a job,” she said, skating over the facts that Security had assigned her to this job and had killed their friend Rojer to make sure there was a place for her. They would hate her if she told them about that.
“I never checked up on Ferit. I just assumed that since they let me go, they certainly wouldn’t go after a kid. Vikki said he hadn’t come back to school… but a lot of New Citizens drop out at his age, or even younger. If I thought about it at all, I thought his family had decided to keep him close to home and out of trouble.”
“There was nothing you could have done even if you’d learned right away that he’d been sent for rehabilitation,” Vess told her.
Mikal agreed. “Once they’ve started someone through the process, it’s impossible to break them out of the rehab facility. The problem is that they’re perfectly willing to kill prisoners before letting them get away.”
“Ferit might have preferred that,” Devra said bitterly. Her right hand stole up to rub her cheek again as she told them about the scene in the bazaar. “Ferit’s mother blames me for what happened to him, and she’s right. I should have – should have – I didn’t even think about him while I was scrambling for a job and a place to live.”
“I don’t see any way you can possibly blame yourself,” Mikal said sternly. “It’s not rational. Look: Ferit, not you, decided to distribute the leaflets. Ferit, not you, got noticed and pursued by habbers. You saved him from immediate disaster, and you’ve paid a heavy price for that. Once he was picked up by Security, there was nothing you could do. Nothing.”
“Well, you keep saying I’m not rational.” Devra tried to make a joke of it, but her voice wobbled.
“And I keep trying to improve your mind.” Mikal followed up on the feeble joke. “I’m going to ask our supplier for extra chocolate too, you know.”
“Why?”
“You’ll need it to make that tray of Chocolate Ecstasy you owe me!”
Devra groaned. “Did you have to remind me? Why can’t you fixate on something that takes a little skill, instead of a boring cake that’s just a carrier for chocolate and sugar?”
And they were, more or less, back to normal, at least on the surface; if you could call two Esilians and a spy trying to run a kahve house and bakery “normal.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Devra moved through the next few days in a sort of trance during which she startled the regular customers with a variety of pastries worthy of Gunter’s. When she was baking, she could avoid thinking, especially if she baked pastries she hadn’t tackled since her apprenticeship and which required her full attention. A few of the regulars grumbled about missing their favorites, but most reveled in the new and exotic treats: macarons glacés, Sacher torte, petits fours decorated with frosting flowers, mousse cake with chocolate ganache, even a seven-layered Dobos torte.
Because, she told Vess, when she was baking complicated things, she wasn’t thinking.
“Seems to me you have some thinking to do, my dear.”
“I have plenty of time for that at night,” Devra said somberly
“Hmph! If the circles under your eyes get any darker I’m calling in a medtech. Well, give me some muffins and scones in between the fancy stuff, okay? Some of our customers actually prefer them, you know.”
“The new cakes and pastries seem to be selling all right,” Devra said defensively.
“Hmph!” Vess snorted again. “Selling too well, if you ask me. Some people try to sample two or three at one sitting. I don’t want anybody to go into diabetic coma in our place.”
“Mikal’s been taste-testing everything I make,” Devra said defensively, “and he’s just fine.”
“Mikal,” Vess said, “has the metabolism of a hummingbird. He’s a special case.”
“Good to know somebody’s finally recognized that I’m special,” Mikal said. He had come into the kitchen just in time to here Vess’ last words. “Say, Devra, are you going to make that whatchamacallit, you know, that three-chocolate cake today?”
“Rigo Jansci,” Devra said automatically. “It’s a Hungarian dessert.” She’d learned that at Gunter’s, although her schooling had left her a bit vague on where Hungarians were to be found. Some other planetary colony, maybe.
“Whatever. Do one just for me and I’ll forget about that Chocolate Ecstasy you still owe me.”
Devra snapped a dishtowel at him and he retreated, laughing.
And Devra continued to lie awake at night, thinking. The only way to keep Ferit’s face from haunting her was to think very hard about something else. And the something else usually amounted to reexamining all the principles she’d been taught and the system that supported them.
Medical rehab was cruel. A clean death would be far better. Why did they send the survivors of rehab back out into the world? The only reason she could think of was to make sure every normal citizen was terrified of doing or saying anything that could bring the habbers down on the
m. And that was cruel, too.
She’d been taught that all the science anybody needed to know had been done already. Esilians and off-worlders didn’t agree; they were still doing research while Harmony rested complacently on its monopoly of something the rest of the inhabited worlds desperately wanted. And she believed Mikal; some day researchers would figure out how to synthesize sasena extract, and their economy would crater.
She also believed him when he said that the information in her CodeX was constantly being revised and sanitized. She’d followed his suggestion and checked the records of the sasena quota. According to the records in her CodeX, the quota had always been exactly what it was this year. And she knew that wasn’t true. A lot of other citizens must know it, too; it wasn’t like everybody in Harmony suffered from selective amnesia. Why hadn’t she heard even a murmur about this lie? Because everybody was afraid of Security and the habbers, that was why. It always came back to fear.
A government that lied, that punished anyone who questioned the lies, that ruled by cruelty and fear, did not deserve the unthinking loyalty she’d always, without question, given it. Oh, she still loved Harmony; it was her home. But she wasn’t so sure about the Central Committee.
And now that she’d given up carefully not thinking about it, she really did know that her suspicions were correct. Mikal and Vess were helping people evade the habbers – just as she’d tried, unsuccessfully, to help Ferit. Mikal claimed to be a computer genius; he might be talented enough to give the fugitives new names and an innocuous history. The café had to be making a healthy profit; why did Vess keep saying they couldn’t afford a sheet roller? Perhaps the profits were going to help the fugitives resettle in a new community where nobody would recognize them.
It was her duty to report this flagrant evasion of the law to Security.
What duty did she really owe to this evil system?
And how was she to conceal her knowledge from Citizen Grigg, who would surely insist on her reporting in person very soon?
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