She only needed to break that last hold, the one no one had brought up in negotiations. Perhaps because Pulan found it too embarrassing. Perhaps because no one considered Stephen’s paternity to be a problem, outside the borders of Porachis and the reach of its taboos.
Yours and Mr. Addas’s value to the CIS increased immeasurably after you delivered those photographs.
As long as this secret remained so, they would be worth something to the CIS. And that was not a worth she wanted anyone to trade on. Even if they made it to Asu, with their son, she could envision scenarios in which their arms were twisted, in which Jinadh compromised himself in order to avoid compromising his family.
He would never have the strength to bare his shame; much as she knew he despised the strictures imposed upon him by society, he had still been raised within them. Someone else would have to do it for him.
She wouldn’t have been able to reach him to ask for permission, anyway. That would make a convenient excuse later. He would forgive her. He always forgave her. She hoped this wasn’t the step that took her beyond his generous capacity for reprieve.
Before she went back to her office, she stopped in the first-floor washroom to splash some water on her face and compose herself. When the flush had died back from her cheeks and her breath came regularly, she flashed a demure smile at the mirror and proceeded on her mission.
“Rinda,” she said, when she returned to the mess of papers and ticker tape the press office had become, “did Odell take the call from the Cliff House, or did they reschedule?”
“They were happy to talk to Odell, ma’am. I have notes, if you’d like to see them.”
“Yes, please. And Rinda?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You can go home.”
That surprised her. So much so that she forgot to add a “ma’am” when she asked, “Really?”
“Really. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Not true, but she didn’t need to know.
“Thank you, ma’am.” She was already gathering her handbag, her calico wrap. “Have a good night.”
Rinda’s departure left the bull pen empty. Odell was still in his office—she could see the light over the transom—but his door was shut.
She closed her own door and locked it, then sat down at her typewriter and began to compose a press release on official letterhead.
It didn’t take long to write: a few dates, a few names. A notice of her resignation. Which necessitated the composition of a resignation letter after the press release, effective immediately.
She sealed the latter in an envelope and put it into the outbox on Rinda’s desk. The former, she clipped into a folder that she put into her briefcase, next to a sapphire collar, a diamond tiara, and a frightening sum in banded bills. This was not a release she trusted the press office to disseminate.
She took her garment bag from the supply closet where it had been hanging since yesterday. No one had thought it strange when she placed it there—after all, didn’t she usually keep a spare suit in case work required her to stay at the office overnight? If this bag was slightly bulkier than usual, as though it contained three or four outfits, no one had noticed or remarked on it.
The offices of Al Ayina Wireless weren’t that far out of her way. She caught a cab outside the chancery—the second one that came, but at this point no one could say her paranoia wasn’t justified.
When she asked after her goal, the elderly woman at the night desk directed her to the fourth floor through a wide yawn. The lift came swiftly, untrafficked at this hour. When she stepped out into the corridor, it was empty.
The nameplate on Satya Amal’s door had been freshly polished, probably by her own hand. Lillian had met the Foreign Affairs editor on numerous occasions and always found her impeccably well groomed. If she hadn’t known the woman was such a vicious firebrand, she never would have inferred it from her outward appearance.
The other option had been Vadan Muthi-Amahn, who had the Royal beat. But Amal had always frightened Lillian more. She would break this story smiling.
Lillian stood before that shining brass nameplate and contemplated the small sliver of space between the door’s bottom and the tiled floor.
If she did what she was about to do, it was the final leap. She would not be able to come crawling back to her office, to her complicity.
In one swift movement, she pulled the folder from her briefcase, knelt at the door, and slipped the press release faceup into Satya Amal’s office, where it would be the first thing she saw in the morning.
After, she did not go home. It wasn’t home anymore.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
It wasn’t smart to make a spectacle when she was supposed to be Memmediv’s sour peach of a secretary, but when the kid in his smart sailor uniform bawled out to the dining room that they’d sighted land, Cordelia couldn’t help herself. She went to the prow of the ship and leaned over the railing into the wind.
She wasn’t alone: a passel of other folk came along, all straining to make out the details of Amberlough’s docks. A smutch of city smog colored the crisp blue sky, but beyond that not much stood out at this distance. A lot of the watchers peeled off, excitement draining as the smutch failed to get much closer within the hour. Cordelia plunked herself down on a deck chair to wait. Her eyes and heart were hungry for home, and she’d never seen it from this angle.
They were due to dock in the early evening, and as the sun took a header to the west it blinded her. She held up a hand until it got low enough to the horizon it didn’t bother her so much. Then she started to shiver—she’d gotten used to sweating. But the chills were a small price to pay for the sight of Amberlough’s lights flickering on. She could almost taste the reek of the docks in the back of her throat, the diesel smoke and rotting fish.
“A beautiful view, isn’t it?”
“Mother’s tit,” she said. “Don’t creep up on me like that.”
“Don’t wander off,” said Memmediv, “and I won’t have to. I didn’t want to ask after you and turn it into some steward’s little mission. The fewer people we make an impression upon, the better.”
“I know,” she said, not trying to rein up on the snappish sound of it. Stones, he was insufferable. He had this little smile he wore nearly all the time—she could tell when he was nervous, because that was the only time he lost it—and she would have slapped it off his face if there hadn’t been so much riding on their cooperation. “I just wanted to … well.” She flapped a hand at the horizon, where the harbor had become a glittering crescent against which the ragged curve of the Spits rose like fangs in silhouette. The lighthouse on Big Snag lit its beacon as she watched, and the beam cast out over the water in a searching arc.
“When we dock,” he said, “there is a hotel on Wick Street, near a livery garage.”
“We ain’t hiring a car,” she said. “Not under your name. We’re gonna go under my name”—the one on her new papers—“and we’re gonna pay cash, somewhere that won’t be out of the ordinary.”
“And you know a place?”
Folk had started coming back out on deck, for the pretty sight of the city lit up. For the excitement of pulling into the harbor.
“I got some ideas,” she said. “But they mean I gotta go out. And don’t,” she said, looking at his face, “tell me to be careful.”
There came that poxy little grin. “I didn’t think I needed to.”
* * *
There were so many things she wanted to see. So many places she wanted to go and people she wanted to look up, if they were still in town. But she and Memmediv took a cab straight to the stodgy hotel on Wick—Second Precinct, near Armament, not a neighborhood she’d spent a lot of time in. Her room smelled like mothballs, and the window looked out on an air shaft.
She got out as quickly as she could, taking just enough time to change into boots instead of pumps. The neighborhood she was headed to hadn’t been clean the last time she’d walked there. Some th
ings about Amberlough hadn’t changed even under the Ospies.
Really not a lot had, for the folk who pinned gray-and-white cockades to their lapels and got on with their lives, since they could. And, peering from the back window of her cab across town, it made her skin crawl to see how familiar everything looked. Driving south on Baldwin, they passed the Klipstone Arch, the dark mass of Loendler Park beyond the streetlights. Bellamy’s was still there, advertising “Coffee and Tea” on its windows. Closed at this hour, but freshly whitewashed and looking prim.
She hadn’t told the driver to do it—that would have been asking for the midden heap—but he turned onto Temple Street. Truth be told, even if it had been safe, she wouldn’t have chosen to come this way.
This was one part of the city that didn’t look the same. Or, it did, the way a death mask looked like someone’s face.
After she’d blown the Bee, a lot of other managers had put their tails between their legs. She hadn’t thought it would go that way. Hadn’t thought much at all. But nobody had known who set the blast, and a lot of people thought it might be the Ospies, or folk working in aid of them. By the time she got smart enough to put around rumors, most of the theatre folk had cleared out of Temple Street. A couple of picture palaces moved in, and some of the restaurants stayed, but it had turned pretty quiet. The cab didn’t even come on any traffic until the corner of Seagate, where there was some kind of construction going on around the trolley transfer.
“Here’s fine,” she said, a couple blocks down Waxworks Road. She was never going to get used to paying cabbies. It never felt worth it to her, who’d always had to save her coins for bread and cheese and wouldn’t have taken a cab if it was pissing rain and she bare-naked. But no respectable secretary was going to be catching streetcars this late, nor to this neighborhood.
It wasn’t that bad, not by her standards, but it was dark, and nobody much was around on the streets. The place she wanted—a little pub that did some after-hours business—was shuttered tight and she was worried it had been closed up for good. A soft knock got her a cagey woman with a torch peering out the chain-locked door.
“Oats or barley?” she asked, which didn’t make sense on the face of it. Cordelia bet there was some answer that would get her painless entry into the bar. She didn’t have time to guess, but she’d spent the passage over planning this.
“Look,” she said, “this sounds ripe, but I been out of town and I ain’t up on the codes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The woman started to shut the door on her, but Cordelia put a hand to the wood and braced herself. “I know what I look like in this suit, but that ain’t what I am. I wanna talk to Roustabout.”
“I don’t know what you’re going on about,” she said.
“Kurt. Lemme talk to Kurt.” The code name was more a signal to let them know she was in on things, anyway.
“He ain’t here.”
“Swineshit.”
“Don’t you swear at me.” The woman gave the door an ineffective shove. She wasn’t strong enough to close it all the way, but Cordelia didn’t want to fight her way in if she didn’t have to. Bad first impression.
“I got a business opportunity for him,” she said, and flashed a couple of large bills. They’d brought a lot of cash over from Porachis. Geddan currency, and who knew where Pulan had gotten it. Cordelia hadn’t asked.
But the money didn’t sway the lady. It was inconvenient, but it nailed down Cordelia’s suspicion that the place still did a little more than sell beer past midnight. If she could just get in!
“Listen,” she said. “Don’t you tell a rotten soul about this. But I got a message from Spotlight.”
The woman’s eyebrows lowered skeptically, bringing the brim of her cloche down. “Sure you do. And I’m a goat with golden teats.”
Cordelia clenched her fists inside their fussy white gloves, sending a spark of pain up to her left elbow. Then she got an idea. It would have been a bad one, if this woman had been any less stubborn about keeping her secrets. But that was just a part of the game: trust-that-wasn’t-trust, faith that hung on a rusty nail.
She put her foot in the door frame in case the lady slammed it shut when she let go of the door. Good thing she’d changed to work boots. Then she tore the glove off her right hand with her teeth and held up her fingers, spread, to show where they were missing.
“Let me through the rotten door,” she said. And the woman, eyes wide, did.
* * *
“I still don’t think it was a good idea to tell them who you were.” Memmediv had been pouting in the backseat of the car since they left Amberlough, though he said he needed to lie down on account of his pounding head.
“These folk know when to keep quiet,” Cordelia said, from the passenger’s seat. “It’s why they ain’t been drug in yet. They got good judgment about who they can tell what.”
And they had told her a lot. Kurt had gotten word from one of their people on the rails—a stoker on the Farbourgh-Amberlough express—that Opal had been scratched, which explained how they’d clocked she was in Porachis. No one had gotten word from Opal since; figured she was still locked up. Or worse.
Things weren’t as dire as the news made it seem, though. People had got hauled into the pens, but the papers were painting it rougher for the Catwalk than it had been, and the rest of the networks had just hunkered down closer to the ground and cut all their communications except the ones that came into their laps at a chance. It was patchwork, but it held at the important seams because folk hadn’t quite given up.
She could have kissed Kurt when he told her that. Didn’t, though, ’cause his spark was staring at her from behind the bar with cold eyes and one hand on the butt of his pistol.
One thing they hadn’t been able to tell her was whether Greasepaint was still in place.
“If he is, he ain’t broadcasting,” Kurt’s sweetheart had said. “Not like we’ve needed to know much about the trains, these last few months.”
“We’ll get our feet back under us,” she told him. “Don’t worry.”
He’d looked doubtful about that, but she didn’t care to give any of her people details until the supplies Pulan had promised were ready to be distributed. And that would mean cleaning up her act in the north, bringing the Chuli deeper in, shaking hands with Memmediv’s folk, gaining safe ground in the north and east to work from …
One step at a time, though.
“It got us what we needed, right?” she said to Memmediv. “Complete with a chauffeur.”
Loren, behind the wheel, tipped an imaginary cap. A stropped-keen razor, she passed easily for a man and had been living as one even before the Ospies got their claws in, working as a greaseknuckle in Kurt’s garage. She’d come with the car, spit-shined up as cleanly as its running boards and chrome. The folk at the garage had even wrangled a couple of flags for the bonnet, which she’d opted not to fly on the drive up. She only wanted to go under Ospie false colors when it would undercut the real ones. In the trunk, tacked down to keep them from sliding or upending at a turn and ruining the paint, a pair of hastily doctored diplomatic license plates, done from a sketch Lillian had given them.
Loren checked the mirror and then indicated—she’d been following traffic laws to the fine print at every turning—to take them through a roundabout and out the right exit.
They’d left early in the morning and were still in the heart of the weald: farmland, pastures, and houses big as city halls. It was a part of the state that was strange to Cordelia. Stones, everything outside the city limits had been strange, at first. Most of it still was. Though now she had a close-up acquaintance with the Culthams, and a map of the whole country’s railroads in her head.
This was Cyril’s territory. She remembered that conversation like it was a record playing in her mind. His slippery, polished voice telling her he’d grown up in the country and come south too late to pick up a city drone.
The sweep of soft
hills under chill, gray rain felt muffling, like cotton wool. Low clouds snagged on the trees, bare now. It made her sleepy. She wondered how anyone who grew up out here turned as sharp as Cyril and his sister, as slippery and keen and cutthroat.
It was Amberlough that had turned her into what she was. Her heart pulled her back down the road toward it, like it had pulled no matter where she traveled.
She’d never been a strict planner, never seen past the horizon of each evening. She’d been a day-to-day type, happy as long as she had enough for rent and a couple of meals, a date lined up every other night or so and somebody to call on if it fell through.
You couldn’t fight the Ospies with a hairpin and prayers. Opal had been better at the logistics, a natural-born wrangler of people and places and plans. Cordelia had learned from her: Make a list in your head, have a backup.
But sometimes—often—it all went wrong anyway. You couldn’t cleave too close to details or the whole thing would crack apart.
That’s when all Cordelia’s time skating over thin ice, all her flying without looking down, really came in handy. And it was going to get them through this action neat and tidy. At least, that was the idea.
* * *
They came into Cantrell as the sun finally sank below the bellies of the clouds. Everything was soaked in red, the shadows deep purple, the underside of the rainstorm colored gold and pink and orange. Whitewashed cottages on the outskirts of town lit up like gold, their windows blazing. It was gorgeous, but it didn’t look natural.
“Drop me at the station and then drive around to the north side,” she told Loren softly. Memmediv had fallen asleep in the backseat. “If there’s trouble I’ll run down the tracks to you.”
“Sure thing, boss.” Loren brought them down the main drag of the cute little town, peering at street signs until one cropped up reading Station Street. “You expecting any?”
“I ain’t expecting anything. I’m trying to keep an open mind.”
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