“They’re ugly,” Zin said. “Most certainly your family.”
“Civs?” he said.
She nodded. “No guns.”
He smirked. “You get funny when you can’t use a gun.” He slipped brass knuckles onto both fists and crouched low into a boxer’s walk, moving fast and low.
Zin followed. She was bigger than him, not as nimble, and kept her truncheon out, stun on. He leapt and drove his weaponized fist into the first shooter’s face as she rounded the bank of bikes. The hit was so powerful that Zin heard the bones of the woman’s face crunch. She toppled like a tree.
Zin caught the woman’s weapon and threw it hard at the other woman behind her opponent. The weapon had been designed for just that purpose; a magic-imbued Enemy weapon that morphed its shape and function depending on the purpose intended by its user.
Merriz leapt off the one with the crushed face and pounced the third one. He hit her hard enough that Zin saw her jaw dislodge from its socket. It went one way, her face another. She fell.
Zin grabbed the one she’d stunned before Merriz could take her out. Zin smacked her with her truncheon, sending a stunning zap through her body that left her limp. Zin straddled her.
“Who sent you?” Zin said.
The woman’s eyes rolled in her sockets. Zin thought to zap her again, but once was usually enough to stir up the truth.
Merriz came up behind her. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “It work?” he said.
“Give it a minute,” she said. The truncheon was another Enemy weapon, one she and the other Justicars would have to give up, eventually. But not today. It encouraged truthful answers.
“You hear her?” Merriz said to the woman.
The woman blinked slowly, like she’d gone dumb.
Zin hoped she hadn’t fried her senses. She had done that before, too. “Who told you to shoot at us?” Zin said.
“Your senior father,” the woman said.
Merriz snorted and held out his hand.
Zin tucked into her tunic pocket and pulled out a quarter bit coin. Tossed it to him.
“You said two bits,” he said. “You’re short.”
“So are you,” she said.
Zin pressed the warm truncheon against the woman’s face. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Got the job from his secretary.”
“I heard he was in town,” Zin said. In truth, she had not. They had just started a preliminary search for him and a dozen others due for processing. But sometimes letting a witness think they were commiserating with you over shared secret knowledge got them to open up easier than the truncheon. And she wanted to make it easier on this woman before she had to kill her or bring her in. Pity had always made her soft, but no less effective. Sometimes pity and compassion got better results. She had seen torture get a lot of misinformation spilled all over the floor, and little else. “We were on our way to pick him up.”
“Yes,” the woman said. She blinked furiously. “I think... yes, the hotel.”
“The hotel, yes,” Zin said.
“Just ask her,” Merriz said.
“Hush,” Zin said. He had never liked her methods. But she didn’t always like his either.
“Shiny grim façade,” the woman said, and smiled. “All those skulls.” Then her eyes came back into focus, and Zin saw that she was back, fully present.
“Get the fuck off me,” the woman said.
“I’m a Justicar,” Zin said. “Admit your crimes and I might.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“You know what happens if you don’t admit your crimes?”
“I know,” she said. “Do it.” And she jutted her chin forward, defiant.
“You want to die?”
“I know what you are,” she said. “I know you’re trying to erase everything.”
“We’re not erasing anything,” Zin said. “This is about truth and justice.”
“You’re erasing everything,” she said. “You’re turning heroes into monsters.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “You have no idea what we do.”
“Do it,” the woman said. “I know the protocol. You’ll do me eventually. You’ll kill all of us.”
Zin shook her head, but an image rose up in her mind, one she had tamped down since first reading the protocol, of her own people walking into the big cremation ovens, drinking red phials of liquid, breaking apart into a thousand starry pieces. “That’s for the court.”
Merriz looked disappointed, but he went to the emergency tube box at the end of the block and pushed the button for the guardia. The numbered pneumatic tube fwumped out to the station. Zin and Merriz restrained both of the conscious shooters. But one couldn’t be roused; her jaw was clearly broken, almost comically askew.
“Should have called paramedics too,” Zin said.
Merriz shrugged. “They usually send some.”
The guardia arrived in their green-striped suits and loaded all three women into the back. Zin filled out her report and reminded them to get a medic.
The man who took her thumbprint on his report frowned at it. “They’re violence offenders, though, right?”
“Yes, but -”
“Well, you know what happens to them.”
“That’s for the court.”
The man huffed out something like a laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Once you sign this, you know what the sentence is. Think it’s different because the court says it?” He shook his head. “I don’t understand why you don’t just kill these people.”
“Because we’re not animals,” Zin said. “You let that woman die and it’s you they’ll ask to step into an oven.”
Merriz came up beside her and tugged at her sleeve. “Hey now, let’s go. We’ve done our jobs.”
She turned abruptly away. It didn’t feel like she’d done her job. It felt like she was still on the field, calling a bullet justice.
They stepped up into the tricycle lane, narrowly missing a gaggle of students headed to the campus common.
“So much for hotels,” Merriz said, picking at the flecks of blood on his sleeves. “You could have scared her more, at least. She’d have talked.”
“Torture doesn’t work,” Zin said. “Besides, there wasn’t any need.” She rubbed her face, wondering if she could rub the whole thing off and become someone else, someone with some greater purpose, and a longer future. “I know what hotel it is.”
* * *
The first time I did something I knew I shouldn’t have was when I fed the baby lake fowl without permission. Lake fowl have a very particular life cycle, and interrupting it can cause chaos. I was exploring the garden shed down by the pond on our family plot. It was unlocked and the food bin was open. So I just took out a handful of food and threw it out onto the lake.
It turns out that fattening up lake fowl doesn’t take much time at all, and after a couple of days of that protein-rich food, all the babies had grown into full adults, two weeks earlier than they would have just eating wild foliage. When the whales in our pond came up to feed on them the same way they did every year, there were no baby fowl in the lake, and our whales starved. I remember seeing their big bloated white bodies floating in the lake, like dead gods. I cried and cried, but I never told anyone what I’d done. The groundskeeper was fired for keeping the shed unlocked; my parents assumed some outsider had come in and tampered with our fowl to sabotage the whales. It was not unheard of. The whales were sacred creatures, the god Savazan’s favorite animal, and doing injury to them was a grave crime.
Elodiz liked a lot of hotels in Ceriz, especially the ones on the water, because he could watch the lake fowl spawning. Spring was a busy time at the waterfront, and for three weeks every year, all water traffic ceased in order to accommodate them. The lake fowl courted, mated, and laid their eggs at the bottom of the lake. Two weeks later—so long as they weren’t overfed by overzealous children - the slimy, squawking larva emerged, halfway between gory amphibian and arrog
ant fowl. They grew quickly and took flight just a week later, but the arrival of the whales was the real spectacle. The whales hibernated the whole year long at the bottom of lakes. They came up for a single week and gorged themselves fat to sustain themselves for another year of hibernation. The whales were tremendous things, each the length of a trolley, with great feathered frills around their wedged heads. In the spring the harbor was full of the sounds of their chattering language, a series of whistles, pops, and water thumping with the front two of their eight flippers.
They were fully sentient animals, eerily so. When a few citizens occasionally gabbled about why we stopped traffic in a lake with whales in it every year, the city elders reminded them that the whales had been here longer than we had, and the alternative to allowing them three weeks of time to feed and breed was to murder them all, and then what would we be then? We would be no better than our own Enemy.
One season I met with Elodiz at one of the hotels, a grand old pre-war building with fanciful leering faces on the façade. The faces were meant to be jolly, I think, but the art style of the time depicted people with bony features and starved bodies. There were few portraits that did not emphasize the bones of the skull beneath, painting all skin as slightly translucent.
He and I stood out on the balcony watching the fish while two of my sisters bickered over the breakfast cart in the room behind us. Sometimes Elodiz would take a few of us out with him on business like this, so each of his children got to spend time with him and meet the various magistrates and politically powerful people who we might need to make an impression on later in life.
I was only ten at the time, though, so I saw these ventures as little more than great fun. An excuse to eat rich food from a hotel cart and spend time with my senior father.
We watched the whales on the beach below. They were clever, those whales. Though they ate many of the larval foul, most often they used the larva to bait the much larger adults. The whales would slide up onto the shore and deposit an injured baby lake fowl there, and six or seven adults would swoop and circle and crowd in to defend it, and then the whale would slide back up onto the beach and swallow one of the adults whole.
This seems, in retrospect, to be a strange pastime for our people, to watch this dance of death and rebirth every year at the lake. But Elodiz said he found it very cathartic.
“What’s happening in the lake below is just like our lives with the Enemy,” he had said, “only time is compressed. It’s like watching the whole cycle speeded up.”
“But the whales aren’t evil,” I told him, already firm in my sense of fairness and justice at that age. “They’re just doing what they need to do to survive.”
“Yes, they are,” Elodiz said, and he reached down and smoothed my hair and crossed my forehead for luck. “Sometimes we must do terrible things just to survive, Ahgazin.”
I remembered that day well.
I also remembered the grim, skeletal façade of the hotel.
* * *
Zin hesitated on the steps of the Hotel Savazan, struck by how the bony, grimacing figures leering at her from its exterior looked both more and less terrifying than they had when she was ten. Merriz was already at the door, his hand on a handle carved to look like a femur. Zin had taken her fair share of anatomy classes during basic training—it was supposed to make the soldiers more effective killers—and found that she could name the types of bones decorating the archway, too: metatarsals, fibula, patella, two sacrums, a coccyx....
“This the right one?” Merriz said. He wore smoked glasses now, though the day was so overcast that the sky hardly seemed to change during the sun’s multiple rotations. The black dust of the winter season had blown in a few hours before, two weeks ahead of usual. Zin expected to see a lot of angry farmers in the news on the counter display at dinner.
“It’s the right one,” she said. “Let me go around to the other side. As soon as you ask for him at the front, he’ll bolt.”
“They can’t legally announce our presence,” he said.
She raised her brows. “Elodiz is very convincing. He’s known the people who run all these hotels for years. Why do you think nobody’s turned him in yet?”
“I won’t know what room he’s in unless I ask,” he said.
“I might know,” she said. “Let’s try meeting up there first. Highest floor, center room facing the lake. It’s his preferred room. If he isn’t there, we ask, and have a brawl just like you want.”
“I don’t always want a brawl.”
She made a noncommittal grunt and waved at him. She went around the back of the hotel and through the lush gardens. The great bountiful faces of the blue margonias were already drooping. Soon they would wither and become clotted with fungi. Most gardens became fungal havens during the winter season; dying flora, darker skies, and the invisible but radiant heat of the winter star made conditions perfect for them.
Zin pulled off her red coat and left it on the banister. Without the coat, she looked slightly less like a Justicar. She couldn’t imagine anyone would recognize her—Elodiz was the senior father of a household with two dozen children, and none of them had become politically powerful. Elodiz had wanted to make them all into well-connected politicians, but most, like Zin, found they preferred community organizing and military service to politics.
Zin came to the end of the hall on the third floor. Merriz was already waiting at the other end. They met each other at the door emblazoned with a black tulip. Her father’s preferred room.
Merriz, too, had taken off his jacket.
“You knock,” Zin said, taking out her truncheon.
“You think he’ll fight? He’s a politician. They never fight.”
“Just being cautious,” she said. “He may not even be here.”
Merriz snorted. How arrogant, she thought as Merriz raised his hand, that Elodiz would have hidden here in plain sight, confident that the many people he had befriended over the years would continue to shield a man who committed some of the war’s greatest crimes.
The door opened immediately, so fast Zin flinched, instinctively bringing up her truncheon.
A young woman stood at the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “He’s been expecting you.”
Merriz raised a brow at Zin and smirked, his usual “I told you so” look. He strode in ahead of her. Zin kept her truncheon out.
They followed the young woman into the large suite. Windows overlooking the lake made up the whole rear wall. She saw Elodiz’s familiar portly form there at the glass, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a plain white robe and yellow linen jacket.
He turned and smiled when he saw them. He looked much the same as he had during their last argument. Zin found it oddly unsettling. It was as if she had gone back in time, obliterating the last decade comprised of the final horrible push of the war and routing of the Enemy and the subsequent institution of the post-war protocol and Justice Commission.
She pushed back her sense of dissonance and flicked her truncheon. “Elodiz Ta Muvard—” she began.
“Oh, save all of that rhetoric,” he said, waving at her. “I know what you’re here for. What baffles me is why my own daughter took this case.”
“Not my choice,” she said. “Your name was in the file we were assigned. You were just one of the easier ones to find.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “When justice is done, we’ll have condemned fully ten percent of our own people.”
“Yes, well—” Zin said.
“You know who they move to next,” he said.
“I’ve read the post-conflict protocol, yes.” She walked forward, gesturing for Merriz to pull out his restraints. Merriz took out the long curl of the stretchy bands.
“And still you came for me, even knowing your own end,” Elodiz said. He did not present his hands to her, though she was now within four paces of him.
Zin hesitated. What was he playing at? “Clearly you expected me to be,” she said,
“or you would have run further.”
“Your Worship—” the young woman said, and Zin winced.
Elodiz waved a hand. “You go on, Jivoz,” he said. “I won’t have need of you. Thank you for your service.”
The young woman burst into tears.
“It’s all right now,” Elodiz said. “Come, this is the way of things.”
She nodded and left the room.
Merriz looked over the top of his glasses at Zin and cocked his head at Elodiz.
Zin began again, “Elodiz Ta Muvard, the Justice Commission has found you guilty of collaboration with the enemy. You have the right to hear these charges in full on remanding yourself to custody today. Though your sentence is heretical death, this sentence may be commuted if you give a full confession of—”
Elodiz snorted. “Who dares judge a god?”
“You’re not a god,” Zin said. “You’re a human being. And we are judged by the communities that make our lives possible. The communities that feed and clothe us and care for us—”
“It was not the community that did that,” he said. “It was me. I clothed you. I fed you. And the things I did ensured you are alive now to condemn me.”
Zin said, “And how would you have cared for us, without mastering a harbor built by public funds and free hands? How would you have reached our home without the roads built by civil servants and squabbling politicians? The freedom you sought by sacrificing the lives of others was not freedom at all. You sought power. There is no other name for it.”
“You are self-righteous. You get that from your near-mother Caroliz, or perhaps your mother Mashiva, or your fallen mother Lizatia.”
“No,” Zin said, “I got that from you.”
Merriz stepped between them. “I’m sure you can both catch up back at the repository,” he said. “Family stuff, I know. You haven’t seen each other in a while. But let’s just get you downstairs, call a trolley and—”
“You know the protocol, Elodiz,” Zin said. She tucked her truncheon into her belt and jerked the restraints from Merriz’s hands just as Elodiz turned and walked out onto the balcony. Zin sighed. “Father, please—”
Just as she stepped up beside him, Elodiz took her by the back of the neck and propelled her to the edge of the balcony. Zin pin-wheeled her arms, dropping the restraints. He was her father, still, even now, and she was transported back to her girlhood, when her father was always right. Her gut clenched, and she found herself paralyzed with guilt for a full breath.
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