“Good morning,” Aster said, forcing herself to meet his eyes. Blisters on Frederick’s nose and ears, courtesy of Baby, meant he’d just gotten off a long watching shift in the Field Decks, and she wondered if he’d been one of the men chasing her and Giselle. “You don’t usually work this junction.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard the news by now. Got reassigned to J deck to help manage any wanderers from Jutting Cliff Wing. Sovereign Nicolaeus’s death has everyone out of sorts.”
“Wanderers?”
“You and the Surgeon are going to have a whole lot of company today.”
Aster fished into one of the pockets of her belt. “For your burns,” she said, and handed him a small vial, mostly because the sight of his flaking nose was an eyesore from which she wished to be spared. Besides, small favors such as this kept him on her side. She might need a favor from him one day.
He smiled widely, revealing gapped but straight teeth. “Thank you, love.”
“You’re rather joyful despite the news,” said Aster.
Frederick straightened his face, his manner stiffening. “It’s my way,” he said, “but you’re right, it’s not appropriate. I’ve got to work on my mourning face. It’s not that I’m not sad. I just . . . I didn’t know him, you know?”
He was so different from the guard this morning. Not better, not worse. More confounding, perhaps. Aster didn’t know what to do with his genuinely friendly manner. She didn’t know how many lowdeckers he’d beaten—if any—or how many times he’d stood by watching one of his fellows do similar.
She did know some of his life story. He’d shared it multiple times. He was an upperdecker, one of the few low-tier guards spawned from Matildan elites. He was the fourth child of five boys and, Aster suspected, the family disappointment. He wasn’t handsome. She doubted him much good at school.
“And the man was old, yeah? Seventy-fucking-four. ’Sides, he’s been sick for weeks. Who didn’t see it coming? Took ill same day the blackouts started. Guess his heart couldn’t take his ship falling apart.”
Aster had known the timing between the first blackout and the beginning of Nicolaeus’s health coincided, but she didn’t realize the two events had begun the exact same day.
“Tell me, are there other guards I should be wary of? Off-schedule?” Aster asked.
Frederick applied Aster’s burn ointment, slapping generous glops over his face. “Bayard and Timothy have been sent to guard the morgue, so things should be quiet until you get there. Holler if you need me.”
Aster nodded her head, as was expected of her, but she would never holler for him, nor any guard. The remainder of her travels went without incident, and when Frederick had said the Surgeon and she wouldn’t be alone, he meant it. Jutting Cliff Wing was filled with rosy-cheeked, rosy-lipped, rosy-gummed upperdeckers. In the nebula of pink, Aster stood out. Brown. All brown.
Bits and pieces of overheard conversation indicated there’d been an information leak. A woman with long hair braided down her back said that the location of the body was supposed to remain a secret. Everyone assumed he’d been taken to the B deck processing morgue, given his status. “Thank Heavens for loose-lipped servants,” the woman said to whomever stood beside her.
“I still don’t understand,” her companion said. “Why go through the trouble of transporting the body down here?”
B deck’s morgue lacked the broad range of surgical supplies of J’s. They weren’t necessary there. In the upperdecks, you lived, you died, you were processed back into Matilda, no questions. If they brought the body to the Surgeon, the Sovereignty wanted an autopsy.
“Oy, you, want to make a quick piece?” a boy asked, seventeen or eighteen, his face scratched with red blotches from unhealed acne scars. “I’ll give you a silver piece to help me lug this.” He pushed a handheld phonograph toward Aster.
“No,” she said, then slipped by him. Coins, though not quite worthless, were of little use to her. A bit of silver held value on the upperdecks, maybe, but below L deck, only tradable goods mattered. He might’ve had himself a deal had he offered her a pair of new knickers.
A gray-haired man, fat, stood interviewing an inspector. He wore dark slacks that were too small, the hemline falling above his medial malleolus. Ill-fitting trousers aside, there was an elegance to his appearance. The spectacles about his face smartened him up. A perfectly trimmed mustache projected gentility. Aster stopped a few feet away to eavesdrop on his conversation.
“Inspector, sir,” he said, “the announcement specified the suspected cause of death was a heart attack. Can you confirm that?” He wrote in a notebook, graphing ink onto ivory pages.
“At the moment, no, I can’t,” answered the inspector. “All I can do is reiterate what Sergeant Barrett already spoke earlier, that Sovereign Nicolaeus was found by one of his nursemaids this morning in bed, and preliminary reports say his heart gave out.”
Aster smiled at their ignorance, haughty that she knew something no one else did.
She was working her way through the crowd when a man grabbed her from behind, grip tight on her elbow, pulling her whole right arm behind her back, jerking the shoulder. She could tell by the feel of his jacket that he was a member of the Guard. One of his medals pressed coldly against her neck.
All attention shifted to Aster, and many of the upperdeckers began to chatter in chorus, louder than they’d been before.
“Order!” a guard called out.
Aster’s goggles filtered out the worst of it, dulled the lights and muted the colors. Still, vents hummed fussily. Up above, copper pipes shook. Matilda had a way of pricking the senses. That was to say nothing of the onlooking mob.
“My pass,” she stuttered out. “In my trousers.”
The guard slipped his hand into her back pocket and grabbed the pass. News reporters scribbled stories into their writing pads. Those here for no reason other than curiosity gossiped anxiously, their eyes set on Aster as they conversed back and forth.
“Does it check out?” asked another guard as he walked up, pressing himself between two onlookers who wordlessly observed everything unfolding.
“You work for the Surgeon?” an inspector asked.
Aster nodded. “Aye, his assistant,” she answered, though she’d characterize it as working with.
The inspector led Aster through the wing’s visitors, most of whom stood back as she neared. Once they arrived at the end of the corridor, a guard reached to pull the ringer. Aster said, “No need,” waving away his arm. She inserted her key—a metal hole-punched card—into the lock slot. The hatch clicked open, and she entered cabin J-00.
x
The Surgeon smelled of witch hazel, menthol, and pine. A bar of soap, ivory and withered, sat squatly in a porcelain dish near the morgue wash station. The creamy lather that ran off the sides suggested he’d used it to freshen himself not long before Aster’s arrival. He required of himself impeccable cleanliness, purity, perfection.
Aster had walked in on Theo once before, his shirt hung over a chair while he scoured his pale skin till it turned pink then red. Water, still wafting steam, splashed as he dipped a rag into a pail. She’d left, slipping out as easily as she’d slipped in, before he’d privied to her presence.
When first she met him, Aster thought Theo’s obsessive hygiene a function of his devotion. Ritual cleaning was a standard part of many religious practices, and though Theo seemed to perform these acts more often than what was typical, his dedication seemed within the realm of reason. But in time, Aster saw his piousness as something more.
Belief played a part in it, but so did compulsion. He may have prayed five times daily because the scriptures demanded it, but there was no denying that independent of God or religion, his mind demanded it too. Pathologically inclined to blame himself for every wrong thing about the world, he thought that if he just fasted for the right number of days, recited his verses at the right times, he might be able to stop some of the bad.
Theo
was not his first given name. Thirty years ago, his father looked upon him and wished to name him Sedvar, after himself, a dreadfully old-fashioned name with a meaning very unsuited to Theo: merciless in battle. “Merciless in spiritual battle might be accurate enough,” he’d said once, attempting a joke. Aster and he had apparently reached that point in their association where it was acceptable to divulge irrelevant personal details.
“Your father was Sedvar Smith?” Aster had asked, recognizing the name of the sovereign who preceded Nicolaeus. They were dining in Theo’s office, she sitting on papers stacked atop his desk, he in the dark-green leather chair with four scratched wooden feet, legs crossed.
“Yes, Sedvar Smith,” said Theo. Aster had shifted her focus from the swirl of dark gray on his tie back to his face—which she’d recently learned he took the time to shave in the afternoon, in addition to in the morning.
She’d only known him for two years at that time, and there was never trusting a man who was son of a sovereign, nor was there trusting any man at all, or any woman, or anyone. Aster had softened to him more after piecing together the details of his life. He was the Sovereign’s bastard child by a lowdeck woman, and he hated the Sovereignty even more than she did.
“Would you like to hear how I chose my name?” Theo had asked.
Aster took a bite of maize flatbread and dipped it into her tin of stew. “I am indifferent.”
“Theo Thackeray was the protagonist in a series of stories my nanny told me as a child, revolving around the adventures of a farmer girl who solved mysteries—like, who stole the great harvest pumpkin, or where did all the draft horses go? So I declared to my father at eight years old that he was to never call me Sedvar again. I was Theo now, after Theo Thackeray.”
Aster had known it was a lie, one of those convenient tales that was too spot-on, too cute, too thick with meaning to be true. The real reason he chose Theo, Aster suspected, was because it was a name that expressed his obsessive devotion to God. The Surgeon’s love for the Creator and the Heavens whistled from him like a birdsong: so much a part of him as to be quotidian.
Now Aster washed her hands after stepping into the morgue in preparation for examining Sovereign Nicolaeus’s body.
“I trust you made it here without incident?” Theo said, not looking toward her.
“Define the parameters of incident,” she responded.
Theo set his pen upon his pad, turned to observe her. His eyes roved up, down. “You are uninjured?”
“Yes, though there was what you might term a close call. I am recovered now, however.” She wondered how much he knew about the murdered guard, and if he believed she had a part in it.
“I would’ve come for you, or at the very least sent an escort, he said. “You shouldn’t be in the corridors alone right now. It’s a dangerous time.”
“And you’d be wise not to concern yourself with what I should and shouldn’t do, as you aren’t me, and therefore aren’t qualified to make such judgments.”
“You can’t dictate what concerns me,” he said.
Aster found a smock to put on over her clothing, pushed her goggles up to her forehead. “I am tired of being told what I should do and what I should be wary of. Do you want my assistance with the body or not?”
Sovereign Nicolaeus lay split open on the table several feet in front of her like the bitterest of grapefruits, organs half-removed. Clearly, Theo had already completed the better part of his investigation, and had only invited Aster here in order to: a) confirm his findings; or, b) provide her with an impromptu practicum.
“Has he been dead for very long?” she asked, letting the latex gloves snap against her skin as she pulled them on. The elastic hugged her bones pleasingly.
“A few hours, I estimate.” Theo stood at the counter on the opposite side of the room, his back to her, and he barely cast a glance in her direction to say, “Come now, get started.”
No stranger to the inside of the body, Aster stood loosely as she put on her face mask and waited to approach Nicolaeus’s stiff, unmoving cadaver. Her muscles relaxed even more when she was forced to consider the problem before her. “Should I look for anything in particular? When you came to me before, you seemed pretty certain it was poison. Do you stand by that?”
He moved toward her, removing his gloves, their sweet, powdery smell filling the room. He had delicate, spindly fingers, made for gentle, fine tasks like crocheting lace and sorting beads and incising cadavers. Their skeletal, smooth structure stood in stark contrast to Aster’s: stubby, calloused, and dark.
“If you plan to stand there and stare for much longer, let me know so that I can fetch myself breakfast in the meantime.”
“Aren’t you fasting?” she asked, though she had no reason to believe that he was except that he seemed always to be fasting.
“Pay attention to the matter at hand. You’re stalling,” said Theo. She noticed that he didn’t deny that he was midfast.
Aster had accompanied him during autopsies before, but to observe, not perform. “I am incapable of a touch as light as yours. I will unintentionally crush him with my grip, and there will be no body left to examine.” The excuse, though rooted in genuine self-consciousness, obscured the actual source of her reticence, and she could tell from the way Theo’s eyes flashed to and then away from her that he was skeptical of her explanation.
“You’re capable of far more than you give yourself credit for. An autopsy is no different than the numerous other procedures you’ve performed under my tutelage. You are more accomplished and diverse in skill than any of my colleagues. Go.”
“Am I? Do you consider me your intellectual equal, then?” Aster asked, flattered by his praise.
“I do not,” said Theo.
Aster was glad that Theo’s eyes were not on her but on Nicolaeus. She didn’t wish him to know the expression her face had taken on in response to his abrupt denial. She shouldn’t be offended. For all his kindness, the Surgeon was a strict and precise man. Rules and rules and more rules and ever distant. It would be out of character for him to lie to protect her ego.
“Aster, you’re not my intellectual equal. You’re my intellectual superior,” said Theo, biting his lip. “As far as one accepts intellect as a valid category by which to organize people—and I’m not sure that I do. But the raw data suggests you know more than me about a wider range of topics, and your ability to reason through complex problems surpasses my own. Which is why I don’t understand your hesitation to proceed with this autopsy.”
He scratched the bumpy skin along his jawline, red from razor burn. It was a rare sight given how meticulous he was with the blade. He was as distracted by the recent goings-on aboard Matilda as Aster was.
“It’s now clear that your hand is not in this as I previously thought, or you wouldn’t be . . . standing all the way over there.” He waved his hand dismissively in her direction. “So, I must ask, why is my bold, brazen, blunt Aster suddenly so shy to examine a body? Once upon a time it was one of your favorite things.”
Because Nicolaeus and my mother are inextricably linked, she wanted to say, perhaps by more than their mangled irises. Aster feared what answers she’d find inside the Sovereign’s cadaver. Worse yet, she worried there were no answers to find at all. She had happened upon an erased chalkboard, and though she could see the unsettled dust of calcium carbonate, there was no putting together what had been written there before. Everything left a trace, but sometimes a trace was not enough.
“I feel like I am chasing a figment of someone else’s imagination,” Aster said, and instead of waiting for what would no doubt be Theo’s perplexed reaction, she approached Sovereign Nicolaeus’s body, ready to face whatever was there or not there.
Though upon reflection, ready to face whatever was not accurate at all, given what happened when she reached the cadaver. For the first time in twenty-five years, and for the first time since Aster was born and Lune had died, her radiolabe beeped. It beeped. And it beeped. A
nd it beeped and it beeped and it beeped.
Though when she considered it more fully, Aster supposed it rather more clicked. The sound of Giselle’s magic machine came to mind, which she’d seen described in Night Empress time and again, but could’ve never properly imagined. Aster had easily heard it over the noise of her world ending. Not the crack of the gun blast but quite before that. The bolt of the barrel unlocking, the firing pin cocking. The joyous, wondrous, satisfying tick-tick of parts working together in harmony.
“Excuse me, Theo. I’m in the midst of an auditory hallucination. Perhaps it’s best I sit down.” Disoriented, she braced herself on the metal slab where Nicolaeus lay.
“It’s there, Aster. It’s there.” Theo grabbed her from behind by both shoulders and squeezed hard. “It’s there, and I’m here, and we are both hearing this together.”
She let herself slump into his arms, but only for a second. She righted herself and unclipped the device from her medicine belt. The radiolabe that didn’t work worked. “Mother, oh Mother, oh Mother,” she said. Oh, how it ticked! Aster so loved the sound.
“Try moving from him,” Theo said, and gestured to Sovereign Nicolaeus.
She did, and once two feet away, the radiolabe became silent. Close, it ticked. Far, it didn’t.
“But radiation poisoning doesn’t make any sense,” said Theo, perplexed as Aster but clearly less affected on a personal level. She saw him eye the storage closet where the protective clothing was, similar to the suits she’d worn when visiting Baby.
“Maybe it’s not meant to detect radiation. Or at least not the typical sort,” said Aster, reminded of her days chasing ghosts in X deck, the radiolabe out in front of her. She had been so desperate to find a piece of her mother in those days, and now here she was, everywhere. Had been all along.
“Scan it over him,” said Theo, and Aster nodded. The beeping continued as she did so.
She had difficulty accepting that the man before her had ruled Matilda for the last thirty years, and was now reduced to a heap of material pieces that in a few years’ time would turn to dusty bone if left to their own devices. She removed her mask, as it scratched her face and pricked her skin and made it difficult to breathe.
An Unkindness of Ghosts Page 12