“I am not.” I might be, at that.
“He can’t possibly expect you to work after what you’ve been through. And on a Sunday! Call him up, or I’ll do it for you—but you need to rest, Mercedes. He’ll understand, if he’s anything like half as decent as you say he is.”
“This isn’t about him,” I retorted. “This is about me. I expect me to work. I choose to work. Don’t bother arguing with me—you won’t win.”
Francis argued with me. He didn’t win. “Fine,” he snapped, “but you aren’t going alone.”
“I won’t be alone; my boss will be there.”
“You’ll take Luc.”
“I will not.”
“I’m not going with her!” Luc cried. “You go with her!”
“You’ve slept,” Francis told him, “and I have work today. It needs to be you.”
“Why should it be? She can go alone, for all I care. And I have work too.”
“You can work anywhere. Bring a laptop with you.”
“No! I have had it up to here with you assuming that because I work from home I don’t have a real job. It is real, and it can’t be carted off to the side whenever convenient. I need my desktop. I need time and space and quiet, not a sister to babysit. Just because you seem to think—”
It’s easy to make Francis angry; happens at the drop of a screw, and stops about as quickly, most times. Luc’s another story, and this argument had been boiling beneath the surface for years. If it was going to pick right now to erupt, the least I could do was take advantage of it and slip away as they bickered.
If only Francis weren’t blocking the doorway. I tried to squeeze past him anyway, and he held up a hand to stop me.
“I am not taking Luc with me,” I informed him furiously. “Fob him off on someone else.”
“You’re in no condition—”
“That’s my decision!”
My brothers stared, their argument evaporating like morning dew. My pitch doesn’t usually reach such exalted heights.
“I am in a hurry,” I stated. I aimed at a cold tone, to restore my equilibrium. The result left much to be desired. A gust of dizziness swirled around me, and tears crawled along my cheeks. What was the matter with me? I was fine. Fine.
“Francis is right,” Luc said, a strange twinge in his voice.
“Frankly, I can’t believe the prefect let you go in this condition,” Francis said, bolstered by Luc’s turnaround support. “He should have had someone drive you to the hospital and then call us. He’s a busy man, but this is plain irresponsible.”
The wave of fatigue and useless, interrupting emotion had left me weak. I did not want to deal with this, or with anything. I just needed to keep going, get done what I’d meant to, get to Edenfield. I wished people would stop interfering. “Would you move?” I asked. “Please, move. I’m hideously late.”
“A few more minutes won’t matter,” Francis said, although that’d never been his attitude when he was the late one. But he wasn’t reflecting on his hypocrisy; his eyes unfocused to other thoughts. “Maybe it would be good for me to get away,” he mused. “Deodato can take care of things for a few days, and I haven’t had time off in months.”
“You aren’t invited,” I said. “Please move.”
“Better you than me,” Luc said, and I recoiled from the intense dislike in his voice. I tried to catch his eye, but he turned away from me.
Fine. Let him be like that. What did I care?
“I can be ready in fifteen minutes,” Francis said. “Don’t let her leave without me.”
Luc folded his arms and watched Francis retreat down the hall and into his room. He left his door wide open, so he could keep an eye on the hall.
I guessed Luc would leave then, or maybe just stare at me and rat me out when I snuck away, but instead he stepped fully inside my room and closed the door. Whatever he was going to say or do, he didn’t want Francis to hear.
“I don’t appreciate your highhandedness,” I said. Not quietly; this extended to Francis. “Get out of my room.”
“Did you steal the car?” Luc asked.
That was about the last thing I’d expected him to say. It took me a good few seconds to figure out what car. My mind went immediately to my boss’s car, which made no sense, before cycling around to the official van I’d driven home. “No,” I said, like he was a complete idiot—because at the moment, he was. “Of course not. I told you—”
“Yes, and I didn’t believe you. You and I know the actual reason you were arrested. So what I really want to know is what level of stupid you were to come back here after escaping. Why didn’t you drive straight for the border? You can’t imagine they wouldn’t look for you here.”
“I didn’t steal the van.” Silvertip had offered it, actually, without any prompting from me. Funny, how some people will do anything you want once you show them you’re not cowed. Or once you start acting the way they expect you to. I’d had the feeling I probably could’ve wrangled a few prefectsmen out of him too, to play chauffeur and minion. Naturally, they would’ve been minions who would’ve turned on me the moment he changed his mind, if he changed it, so I hadn’t asked. But I could have. . . .
Luc clearly didn’t believe me, but he didn’t pursue that line. Instead, he asked, “What happened? I didn’t turn you in, if that’s what you’re wondering, so you don’t need to look at me like that.”
I hadn’t been. This was dull frustration, not accusation.
“They must’ve found the body,” he concluded. “Seems your preparations weren’t as clever as you thought they were.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What would our parents say, Mercedes? They raised you better than this.”
Because they were such bastions of virtue, a pair of uneducated potato farmers groveling in the dirt for a few cowries. Truly, I should strive to be like them!
“If there is any decency left in you,” Luc pressed on, “you’ll turn yourself in.”
I sneered. “I guess it’s true what they say. There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
“And even the Devil can quote Scripture.”
If he’d struck me with his fist, it would’ve been easier, simpler. I could’ve hit him back. But words are an uglier weapon, and I couldn’t make him understand. I kept seeing the carefully catalogued, shrink-wrapped human lungs, the surgical steel of the kitchen; kept smelling the tang of iron, the echo of blood from the pantry, from the riverside, hovering around the slices in my wrists and the gash in my scalp. Gushing heat and bleached lavender and the sickly sweet of brain.
“That’s what you think I am,” I said. “The Devil. Then you’d better run back to your room, or you might get infected. By all means, let yourself out.”
Luc slashed the air awkwardly, partly in exasperation, partly in anger, and partly to take back his words. “Just tell me the truth,” he said. “I just want the truth from you, for once in your life. Don’t you have any feelings at all?”
I think I hated him, in that moment. Hated him for demanding I pour out my feelings to him and make myself vulnerable when he was actively attacking me. Hated him for demanding the truth when he had repeatedly refused to listen to it, refused to see it when it was before his eyes. Hated him for his words, which were a far greater betrayal than all that had come before, because they denied our long friendship, his supposed intimate knowledge of me—and because they denied, more than anything else, my basic humanity.
If he had been kind, if he had listened, I could have shown him as great a display of emotion as even he could desire. But instead he had attacked me, and so I retreated and froze my expression into scorn. “What an ugly little fool you are,” I sneered. “You think I should care more about my feelings than about Francis’s life, than the lives of hundreds of others. But oh, yes, that’s exactly what you would have done: let anyone and everyone die rather than offend your pathetic bleeding heart. Because heaven forbid anyone n
ot enslave herself to the gluttony of her own sentiment. How dare I do what is right over what is pleasant. How dare I?”
“If you had feelings,” said Luc, “you couldn’t have done what you did.”
“That’s true,” I said. “People with feelings never protect those they love, and they certainly don’t protect total strangers.”
“They don’t commit murder!”
There: it had been spoken aloud, and it couldn’t be unspoken.
I turned my back on him and fussed with my suitcase, though there was nothing more to be done with it. I told myself that this, too, was a price I had been willing to pay. I told myself that if Luc knew me so little, trusted me so little, then it wasn’t that much of a price. I told myself that I didn’t need his good opinion anyway. I told myself anything and everything that might stop me from sobbing, because Luc had no right to see me cry, and I would not let him.
Luc still wouldn’t leave. He sighed and said, “At least tell me if they really let you go.”
That helped; it let me retreat from hurt to coldness again. “I will give you no further information,” I told him.
“Tell me,” he ground out, “if I can expect reeves banging down my door, wanting to know where my sister is—or if you somehow convinced them you were innocent.”
“Get out of my room, Luc.”
He didn’t move. He was trying for hardness of his own, and failing pathetically. “Did you murder anyone else to escape? Where are you headed now—the border? Should I return unopened any Christmas cards I get from Akter and Vela?”
I slapped him as hard as I could. I didn’t mean to; I meant to stare icily at him. But I wasn’t sorry, and I didn’t apologize. I pushed up my window and dropped my suitcase through. I was shaking. I wanted to hurt him. “You won’t get any cards from me,” I spat. “You’re no brother of mine. Coward.”
I didn’t wait for his response. I climbed out of my window and into the early morning and away, away, away from him.
Chapter 19:
Conspiracy
Francis anticipated me. He couldn’t get into the van without a key, but he could prevent me from getting in. He lounged against the driver’s door, quite neatly dressed in one of his visiting-clients outfits: tartan flannel shirt and jeans, so they’d know he was a tough man, but cleaner and better fitting than the clothes he actually worked in. A duffel bag slouched by his feet, half-covered by a shearling jacket.
He couldn’t have had more than ten minutes to prepare, and less if he’d wanted to be sure to beat me. I was impressed, although I suspected he’d find himself in dire need of toothpaste and underwear once we reached our destination. No doubt he planned to buy them in Gjerde.
And he would be coming with me to Gjerde. I had spent my fight . . . and to tell the truth, I’d be glad of the company. So I tossed my keys at him, slid into the passenger seat, and set the GPS.
I didn’t expect to sleep, but I did. I woke up after we crossed the border into Tey Prefecture, when Francis stopped at a gas station. The store was closed, but the vending machine worked, which was all we needed. While Francis bought coffee and breakfast, I called my boss and left a message. “Sorry about flaking and not calling earlier,” I informed the voicemail cheerfully. “Things have been a real mess on my end, and I just had to get away. Francis and I are going on vacation in the south for a few days. Hope you enjoy your trip!”
“Was that your boss?” Francis asked curiously, balancing drinks, mini-muffins, and a parfait on the dashboard as he climbed in. “Did he tell you to go home and rest?”
“I left a voicemail,” I said, starting up the van.
Truth be told, I’d have liked my boss’s input on what to do with Francis—mostly because my boss dislikes random factors messing with his plans. Francis was a random factor . . . but he didn’t have to be. In fact, managed properly, Francis could be an extremely useful asset. Since he had made it clear that he was sticking to me during this trip, I might as well deputize, minionize, and utilize him. Then he could function as a subset of me, and no plans would be messed with.
I turned this over in my mind as Francis woke himself up with muffins and coffee. “This,” I said, “is no ordinary business trip. I didn’t tell you what it was about before because—well, you’ll soon understand why. But I’m telling you now because I think you can help . . . and because I know that once you hear what I have to say, you’ll want to help.”
That sure got his attention. He forgot to finish chewing, which was distracting as anything. I told him this and he got his jaw going again as I drove on. At least I didn’t have to worry about traffic, between the Sabbath and the government lane.
“My boss,” I explained, “is very, very good with numbers. In fact, most of his work involves manipulating numbers: looking for patterns and discrepancies and then tracing them back to their source.”
Francis nodded his understanding. “Fraud-detection expert,” he said. “You never told us what kind of accountant he was.”
I’d never used the word “accountant” at all, but I wasn’t surprised that that was the conclusion he’d come to.
“Over the past year or so,” I said, “he started noticing . . . not fraud, but unusual patterns in the distribution of money across Carina. It wasn’t anything definite, anything illegal or reportable, but it niggled at him. He started digging in, hunting for the source of the pattern, for the fly in the ointment. He didn’t neglect his other work, but he—you might say he layered it in.
“It took me a while to catch on to what he was doing, but he has very strict habits, and they shifted during that time. I eventually asked him about it, and he confided in me, showed me his evidence. He was right that most people wouldn’t believe him about it: it was a delicate shift in many different factors over time. Such things can usually be explained by economics, but he demonstrated—I can’t go into his proofs; I don’t remember them well enough—but he demonstrated that the economic explanation didn’t make sense, that in some ways the numbers were acting in the exact opposite fashion to how they should. It was clear that the shift was occurring in every prefecture, but was focused on Avior, Lindo, and Canopus.
“We got stuck then; there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go. Were Akter and Vela to blame? There was movement there, but it didn’t correspond. Some underground group? The prefects themselves?
“We researched the prefects exhaustively. You’d be amazed what I could tell you about them. Did you know that Lindo blames the king for her sister’s suicide? And that Hemmel’s proposed to her at least six times? And that although Fjordland’s doctors say he’s not mentally competent to remain prefect, he won’t step down?”
“I don’t read tabloids.”
“I’m not talking empty gossip, Francis; I’m talking motives. Fjordland and Batata are under Avior’s thumb; Tey will believe anything he’s told; Canopus is power hungry; Silvertip is greedy and power hungry; and Edenfield is in desperate need of resources.”
“Back then,” said Francis, who isn’t the fool he sometimes acts, “Avior had a different prefect. I can’t imagine Lord Gil Winter getting in on a conspiracy.”
“No,” I agreed, “Gil had no motive; they conspired with his brother. And for the record, we didn’t know Lucio planned to kill him.”
“Are you sure Lucio was the one who killed him?”
“He practically admitted it to my face—no, Francis, not yet. Let me tell this thing in order. Anyway, Lucio did have a motive. You’ve probably guessed at it. Twenty years ago, Lucio was passed over for Avior’s prefectship. The official reason was that his mother thought Gil more suitable, but the real reason is that Lucio is and always has been mentally unstable. Even as a child, he was interested in what the locals called black magic, and demonology is his pet project.”
“You believe he sold his soul to Hell.”
“He certainly tried. Or—or maybe not. My boss is the one who traced him down on various demonology forums, and Lucio seemed to b
e obsessed with reality. He posited that the people around him weren’t quite real and that, since unreal people worshiped God, the way for him to be real was to contact the enemy of God—the Devil. At one point, it even looked like he was looking for a way to summon the Devil, but he gave it up years ago and started asking about demons instead. Yes, I know,” I said, in response to Francis’s expression. “He needed a psychiatrist, not a demon.”
“He needed a minister,” Francis replied, and I saw how disturbed he was.
“Yes, well,” I said, “I didn’t get a chance to chat theology with him. My boss might’ve, only he was trying to ingratiate himself, find out what the prefects were after. He posed as an expert in demonology and began making wise comments on forums until Lucio contacted him. Long story short, Lucio thought that the reason he hadn’t managed to summon a demon was that he wasn’t important enough for demons to bother with. What he needed was a really juicy evil, something that would put him on the demons’ radar.”
“So he killed his brother,” said Francis, “and became prefect.”
“As a stepping stone,” I said, “to killing the king.”
Tey Prefecture really is exceedingly picturesque. The Star Ridge Mountains start up to the east almost as soon as you enter the prefecture, and follow you all the way up into Edenfield. They keep away the bay weather, which means the thick, wet forests of Silvertip give way to the drier woods of Edenfield. Unlike Edenfield, however, Tey is quite populated. It has the best universities in Carina, and has the reputation of being a haven for artists and musicians, poets and academics. It also has the reputation of being the most expensive prefecture to live in, and it looked it: beneath the Star Ridge Mountains and among the groomed forests and flowering parks rose elegant buildings of creamy stone, two or three stories high, flat-faced, each story complete with fenced wrap-around balcony and constant towering windows.
I had a lot of time to admire it all, while I was waiting for Francis to stop swearing. I kept thinking he was about to stop, only for him to remember something else I’d said and rev back up again. Only once did he ask for my input, when he asked whether we’d reported Lord Winter to the palace.
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