Spur of the moment, he raised his wineglass and offered, “To present endeavors. May the good succeed, and all the rest fall flat.”
The rest of the company lifted their drinks. Looking straight at Aristide, Pulan added, “And I hope we have the wisdom to choose between them.”
* * *
They’d waited to tell Stephen what was going on until they were far beyond the bounds of Cantrell, out in the farmland among the huddled sheep and slumping stone boundary walls.
He hadn’t believed them at first, and then once he clocked they weren’t trying to put a bag on his head he dropped the old-man act and turned into an eight-year-old boy at last, crowing and bouncing in his seat and asking a long string of questions without any breaks for answers in between.
It would have been cute, if they’d only been stuck in the car with him for an hour or two. But the drive to the border wasn’t a jaunt, and the novelty of having a little boy along for the ride had faded.
“I really need to use the toilet,” Stephen said, for the third time in as many minutes. This was a reprise; he’d first mentioned it about an hour back, and when Cordelia told Memmediv to pull over the boy had stared at her in horror. She’d shrugged and told Memmediv to drive on.
“Then you gotta piss by the road,” said Cordelia. “Like I told you. Are you ready to do that yet? ’Cause if you just give me that look again, we ain’t stopping.”
He did give her the look again, but this time she saw his eyes were turning wet. She wasn’t ready to have him piss himself and cry. “All right, Vaz, pull over when you can.”
Loren had taken the train back to Amberlough and left them with the car. Cordelia had ditched the flags and false plates and replaced them with some more innocuous ones Kurt had dug out of a scrap pile. Now Memmediv was driving—Cordelia couldn’t, and getting stopped for failing to indicate or crossing a center line wasn’t something they could afford right now.
Not that there was anybody to stop them out here. Memmediv pulled over to the verge in the middle of a wide stretch of prairie, mown down and gathered into hayricks. The vista was bordered far to the northwest by the foothills of the Culthams. Cordelia could just make them out, shrouded in tattered cloud and broken beams of sunshine.
A small hand tapped her knee.
“What?” she asked, eyes coming down from the mountains.
But Stephen didn’t even squeak; just looked at her with a lip that trembled until he bit down to make it stop.
“Come on,” she said, turning irritable, “we’re in a hurry.”
One of the tears escaped and rolled down his cheek. A flush had crept across his nose, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t have to … to…”
“Oh, Lady’s name,” said Cordelia, and was about to tell Memmediv to keep driving, but then Stephen blurted out, “It’s the other one,” in a cracked little voice that Cordelia was sure would have broken his mother’s heart. She busted into raucous laughter, clutching the car door to keep herself upright. Even Memmediv, in the driver’s seat, had to work to keep his dour face from cracking.
Stephen’s woeful expression twisted into anger. “Don’t laugh at me!”
“I ain’t, I ain’t!” Struggling mightily, she sucked in a breath. “Mother’s tits, I needed that.” Her belly ached and her shoulders were free from tension for the first time since before she could remember. “Come on. You can do that by the side of the road too.”
He stared at her, goggling, mouth open just wide enough she could see the tips of his too-big front teeth.
“I done it,” she said. Because when you were living rough in the mountains, there wasn’t always an outhouse. “You’re lucky—you got a nice wall to lean against.”
“But,” he said, and didn’t go on.
“Come on,” she said. “This is how soldiers do it. Or … I dunno. It’s how you’d do it if you were on an adventure.”
“Like Captain Courageous?” he asked.
She cast a look at Memmediv, who said softly, “Comic strips.”
Full of surprises, this one.
“Sure,” she said, “just like Captain Courageous.”
At this, Stephen’s jaw tightened up and he nodded stiffly. Cordelia got out of the car and walked over to the crumbly stone wall at the road’s border. There were some goats in the field, but they were far off, standing around a pile of hay.
“All right,” she said, “over the wall.”
He scrambled over with the speed and gravity of a spy infiltrating an enemy camp.
“Bottoms down and squat,” she said. “I’ll watch your back.”
While the kid did his business, she sat on the wall and stared off toward the mountains. The ache of laughter still lingered in her belly, but it settled there heavily now.
She hadn’t had a quiet moment alone since Cantrell to think about the choice she’d made. This would have to do.
It wasn’t just the kid. It wasn’t just what Memmediv had said to her. It was some combination of the two, and not quite either of them.
Opal had told her if she got drug in, the Catwalk would crumble. But she’d vanished into thin air and when she’d come down again, her people were still there. Scared and scattered, maybe, but still ready to sneak and fight. If she had never shown up again she hoped they would have sorted themselves out, gotten their feet back under them. If she—Lady keep her—ended up scratched, she didn’t think it would be the end of them.
Maybe it was superstition, but in the moment that it really counted, she found she couldn’t believe that about her folk, and anything else about Acherby’s. Or rather, if she killed Acherby, it would be admitting that a single person stood for any idea—hope or hate or progress—and that when the person died, the idea did, too.
She hadn’t been able to hash it out in the split second circumstance gave her. Now, with nothing but the wind in her ears, she knew that’s what it was. She couldn’t bear to be the only hope her people had—because then what hope could she put in them? It didn’t work like that. Maybe Acherby thought it did, but she didn’t want to be like him in any way.
“Um,” said Stephen, from behind the wall. “I … do you have…”
She reached into her handbag and pulled out a handkerchief. “Ditch it when you’re done,” she said. It was the only one she’d brought, but if her nose ran she’d just use her sleeve. It wasn’t like she intended to keep the suit. Wouldn’t do her much good crawling through the Culthams.
* * *
They reached the Tzietan border sometime after dark. It shouldn’t have taken so long, but they were staying off the main highways to avoid notice. If Flagg’s folk had come for Stephen after he was gone, the confusion was bound to get the hounds’ noses to the earth. But they’d been lucky, and seen only three other cars in the whole time they’d been on the road.
Stephen was asleep in the back, lying down across the seat and making little noises every now and then as he dreamed.
Memmediv, who’d been driving nearly eight hours with a bad head, looked like he wanted to lie down in the backseat, too. His expression had grown more pinched as they got closer to the border, and Cordelia couldn’t tell if it was pain or nerves.
“Really,” she said, “I can drive.”
“Don’t offer again,” he said, terse but quiet. “This close to the border I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
“How long ’til we ditch the car?”
He lifted one shoulder. “Fifteen minutes?”
“And the walk?”
“An hour to the rendezvous, maybe.”
“You know this route pretty well, huh?”
In the moonlight, and the glow of the headlights bouncing back from the road, the line bracketing his half smile cast a deep shadow. “I have been fighting this war for a long time.”
“I thought it all mostly happened in the south, near the harbor.”
“It’s harder to get people and supplies across the border there; everything is watched more c
losely, more tightly controlled. Here, it is easier to bribe guards at the checkpoints, or avoid them altogether.”
She made a small sound of understanding, and leaned her head against the window. The glass was cold on her forehead, the stars painfully clear.
“Did you know,” he said, so quietly he could have been talking to himself. Then he didn’t say anything for so long she started to think she had imagined it, or that some swelling in his head had finally burst and he’d lost the power of speech. Then, “This is what he was doing before he … before the Ospies.” Another long pause, and then he said even more quietly—and rough, like the words were digging in their claws—“DePaul, I mean. Cyril.”
At the name, she froze. She had almost forgotten. It was like the tide, ebbing and flowing: Sometimes she hated Memmediv for what he’d done, and other times—like just now, after hours in a quiet car with the countryside rolling past them—he was just a partner in this scheme, the getaway driver, the man who knew how to cross the Tzietan border without getting caught. The one who read the same comic strips as Stephen.
He hadn’t talked about his time in the CIS that much, and certainly not since they left Porachis. Probably he knew it would get her hard beneath the ribs like this and stoke her anger.
But it had put an itch in her, too. “Yeah? Doing what?”
He shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure. My old boss, Ada Culpepper, she was his case officer for a while. The information he was gathering mostly had to do with the militia’s capabilities. I was … angry when I found out Amberlough was spying on us, but not surprised.”
“Is that why you turned him over to the Ospies?”
He didn’t answer at first—they had been gaining altitude, and the road had grown potholed and treacherous. Their path wound between buttes and stony rises crusted with frost, saw grass growing in their crevices. Between each bit of scrabbly mountain bone that poked from the earth were narrow meadows of tall weeds, all turned brown by the cold. It was into one of these that Memmediv pulled the car. They rattled over the rocky ground until they were out of sight of the road. In the back, Stephen half-woke and said, “What?”
“Shh.” Memmediv cut the lights. “We’re almost there.”
“Mm.” Stephen laid back down.
“I ain’t carrying him,” said Cordelia.
Memmediv ignored her quip. “Get out and stretch. Change into your boots.”
The hills to either side cut most of the wind, but she could hear it whining and gibbering between the standing stones and hissing through the grass. Buttoning her coat against the chill, she felt the revolver bounce against her breastbone.
She unbuttoned her coat again.
Without the headlights shining into the meadow, the angle of the moon cast everything into deep shadow. Memmediv was a moving patch of darker black, who she could mostly keep track of by sound. He trudged through the grass, took a piss behind a clump of gorse, and came back to the car. There was a brief spark, a flame that wavered in the protective curl of his palm, and the flare of a straight.
“I’ll take one,” she said.
He sighed, brow weary in the light of the cigarette, and handed her the one he’d just lit.
“It didn’t hurt,” he said.
“What?” It was late, and she was tired; the thread of their conversation had slipped just out of reach.
“The fact that DePaul had been selling our military secrets to Amberlough’s Foxhole. It was not endearing. It made him easier to turn over.”
Cordelia took a long drag on the straight and let the breath out as slowly. The weight of the gun pressed the smoke from her lungs. “Don’t tell me you regret it, ’cause it won’t do any good.”
“I wasn’t going to.” He held out his thumb and forefinger, and she passed the cigarette back. Her hands were free now, and even though the cold made her left wrist ache, and recoil would make it hurt worse, she knew she could squeeze a shot off pretty fast.
But then who would harry Acherby’s eastern flank? What would she tell Pulan when she showed up with Stephen alone? And if she was going to spare Acherby’s kid the sight of brains blown out across the ground, why should Stephen have to see it?
Like she’d said to Ari: Memmediv had something she wanted, and to get it she had to put aside history and make peace with him.
Bitterness coated her mouth. She reached for the straight and he handed it back, still wet from the inner edges of his lips.
Memmediv picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. “I don’t regret much. I just wanted to say it. I’m not even sure Lillian knows what he was doing, or where he was. I wanted … it seemed right, that somebody should know. So much of what we do, nobody will ever hear about. Or, if they do, they will not know our names.”
The truth of it struck home. How many of her own folk only knew her as Spotlight? How many of them had ever clapped eyes on her, or knew her for the stripper at the Bee? She was a stranger to most of them, and would be forever unless by some miracle they won this fight and … what, they put her name in a book, on a plaque? Made a sculpture and put it in Loendler Park?
Flicking the straight to the ground and grinding it under her heel, she said, “Enough jawing about that; it’s over and done. Let’s stroll.”
Memmediv turned up his collar so she couldn’t see his face except the shards of moonlight that caught in his eyes. “Right,” he said, and opened the rear door of the car. Stephen drew his knees up at the cold air and made a grouchy sound of protest, but didn’t wake. “I’ll carry him.”
“What about his stuff?” Cordelia asked, jerking her chin at the trunk of the car, where they’d shut Stephen’s luggage.
There was a pause, and then—did he sound pained? Or was that her imagination?—“Bring the small case. The rest is just a sacrifice to the cause.”
* * *
He cried. Oh, mother’s tits did he cry. Cordelia sent up a string of thanks to the Queen if she was listening: his blankie and his stuffed dog, Dash, had been in the luggage they brought along, and from the worn edges and frayed hems they were his best-loved bits of stuff. If they’d left those on the Geddan side of the border, no power would have saved them from his wrath.
Luckily, he didn’t wake until they were safe in the back of a truck, rumbling through the midnight steppe a mile or so inside of Tzieta. And he was so tired and confused that after sobbing hysterically for about ten minutes he fell asleep again with his snotty nose in Cordelia’s lap.
This dynamite Pulan had promised her had better blow the Ospies’ oysters off.
The murk of predawn found them drawing to a stop outside a ring of elaborate canvas tents: massive things, more like houses than any camping equipment Cordelia had ever seen. Not that she’d seen a lot of it until this latest episode in her life, sleeping under tarps in the paltry shelter of hillside lees. This was a lot nicer than any of that.
The driver, whose name was Nafaz, hopped out of the car and held her arms out for Stephen. Cordelia maneuvered his dead weight into them. Nafaz murmured something in Porashtu, and Stephen responded sleepily, then tucked his face into her neck.
Stiff and exhausted, Cordelia clambered out of the truck and almost fell over. Her legs were cramped with cold and bracing against the jolt and bounce of the moving vehicle. Memmediv followed her down with a grunt.
Nafaz took them to an empty tent at the edge of the circle, with two empty cots. For the second time in recent memory, Cordelia ended up with a snuffling kid tucked into her belly on a tiny bed. This time, though, she dropped off faster than a dead pigeon.
Noise woke her up not long after, unrested and unused to feeling it. It was too easy to turn soft.
Then she noticed Stephen was gone, and was off the cot and nearly out the tent flap before she realized Memmediv was gone, too, and that the noise that had woken her sounded a lot like breakfast.
The last of the fear-ice melted out of her veins when she got to the mess tent—did they call it that on picture sets?—an
d saw Stephen tucked up against who else but Inaz Iligba, stuffing syrup-slathered cheese dumplings into his face like he hadn’t spent the wee hours howling over his comic book collection.
And there, across from Inaz, drinking coffee from a porcelain cup just as if he’d been in a fancy café or his own dining room, a man she’d never expected to see within twenty-five miles of a tent.
“Ari,” she said.
He set his cup down in its saucer. “You sound surprised. Weren’t you the one who said we’d see each other in Tzieta? Didn’t you believe it, at the time?”
It was only then she realized: She hadn’t really thought they would succeed.
Then it was her crying. When she wiped her face on her sleeve, and he gave her a napkin and said, “Don’t you have a handkerchief?” her tears turned to laughter. Then she sat down to eat for the first time in a full turn of the clock, with a real appetite she hardly remembered having since her days onstage.
* * *
Pulan had put off shooting until later in the day, to get Aristide, Asiyah, and Stephen safely off without the entire cast of the film watching them go and wondering where.
After breakfast, Pulan kissed Aristide’s cheek. “The film will suffer for your absence.”
“And you will suffer for Daoud’s, I’m sure.”
She followed the kiss with a gentle slap and a quick, dirty admonition in Porashtu that he didn’t quite catch. Daoud, clearing up his breakfast dishes, winced.
“Thief,” said Pulan, pouting.
“Please,” said Aristide. “I’m a legitimate businessman.”
Memmediv, at the other end of the folding camp table, made an eloquent sound through his nostrils. Aristide ignored him, and did not say goodbye.
The plane—a yellow-and-white-striped three-seater with candy-red propellers—was parked on blocks in a field a quarter mile from the camp. Aristide was not looking forward to this part of their escapade.
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