by Tom Miller
“Hey, sis,” I said, my voice trembling a little.
“Oh, look at this one!” Viv said, holding me at arm’s length. “Baby Boober all grown up. Harvard man.”
“Radcliffe,” I corrected.
“It’s all the same. Welcome back!”
Viv stood there in the kitchen, warming her hands in front of the stove, talking away about her consort and her two girls—too cold to haul them on a stringer in this weather, much as they would have liked to come.
I stared at her and I could barely comprehend it.
“And you have a lady friend, I hear?” Viv said, with a familiar cackling warmth. She cocked her head as she said it, just as Ma did when she joked.
I burst out crying.
“Boober—what on earth?” Vivian said. She hugged me and the buttons of her skysuit were cold through my shirt. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” I blubbered. “You and this apartment and Ma. She can’t fly. And she’s hunting Trenchers again. She’s too scared they’ll kill her to stay at home. There’s a list—”
“I know,” Vivian said. “I know.”
“I don’t know what to do!” I sobbed. “I should stay here. To protect her. But Danielle— I don’t— Viv, help!”
“Oh, Boober.”
She held me to her for a minute and I might have been six again.
“Kiddo, it’s going to be okay. They’ve been trying to kill Ma for forty years. Do you remember any of it from when you were little? Her and your dad?”
“No.”
“Then let’s talk. We won’t get six words alone once Ma comes back and Angela gets in. Let’s fly out to the old place right now. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Okay,” I said, wiping my nose.
I gathered my gear and Vivian got back into her coat. For the first time in days, I felt like I could breathe. She would know what to do. Viv always knew.
“Hey, did Ma draw a watchman sigil on the house?” Vivian asked.
“Yeah. She thought leaving it empty would be an invitation for trouble otherwise.”
“Trouble for us. Where’d she put the directions?”
“Viv, I’ve flown Billings to Guille’s Run a thousand times. I’m not going to get lost.”
“Oh, yes you will!”
We went outside and launched, making the short flight to the home we’d grown up in. But a few miles under way, I began to feel the effects of Mother’s protective sigil. Doubts overtook me. Should the sun be over my left shoulder or my right? The closer we got to the house, the more intense my disorientation became. Surely I’d gone too far—but, no, on reflection I must be well short; I should fly on another half hour at least. I shook my head and looked at the note with Mother’s instructions, but they trickled out of my mind. Did it say to land after the second branch flowed into the creek or the third? Could it really be the third? Then on final approach, flickers of mounting dread—if I land here, I’ll die! I should fly just a bit farther, another mile.
Once we’d landed, the house wasn’t invisible, exactly, it wasn’t camouflaged—I still had the sense of an object nearby, a large structure—but the eye slipped right over it.
“Is that the shed?” I asked. “Over there?”
“Yes.” Viv consulted the instructions again. “There’s a post with a rope tied to it and a second post . . .”
“Over there,” I said, stringing the rope between them. Then I stopped.
“Don’t we have this backward?” I said. “The shed was always on the other side of the house, wasn’t it? Someone must have moved it to confuse us!”
“No, you’re doing it right,” Vivian said. “Close your eyes. It helps.”
I held the rope in one hand and walked between the posts, reaching with my other arm. To my surprise, my hand thumped against a door. I swept it back and forth to find the knob and pushed.
With that, the front door popped open and disrupted the sigil. The house, yard, and shed looked as they always had. Drawn on the door in chalk impregnated with nephrite jade was a glyph that branched and crossed and branched again, like the roots of an ancient oak tree rendered by a mathematician.
“Ma traced it out to ten levels,” Vivian said, nodding in appreciation. “Nobody was ever going to find this place unless they knew exactly where to look.”
We entered the house, which was just as frigid as outside. Snow blew in around our feet. Vivian and I sat at the kitchen table, where I’d stood so many night watches.
“Ma drew that sigil lots of times when I was young,” Vivian said. “She and Beau would go hustling off, she’d tell me they’d be back in two or three days—six at the outside—and don’t let anyone break the spell by opening the door. It was like being jailor to you and Angela.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“God, right at the start of the Second Disturbance, years before anyone called it that. In 1901. You were two, Angela was nine. Right when we nicknamed you Boober.”
“On account of having a spot of trouble pronouncing my own name.”
“On account that it suited you so well.”
Vivian pulled off her helmet and set it on the table. “The sigil would hit them, too, when they came home. Ma and Beau would blunder around the yard, shouting for me, and I’d let you run out to them. Then everything would go back to normal for a while.”
She ran her hand over the thick slab of scarred, stained wood.
“I don’t remember any of that,” I said. “Would you tell me about it? And could you tell me something about my dad?”
“Well, shit, this is ten years overdue! What do you know about Beau? He’s a good place to start.”
“A little. He grew up in Arkansas. Italian parents, so he had an accent his whole life.”
“Mmm, not quite,” Viv said. “That’s the version he told around town—it’s the one Angela believed, too. But the first thing I noticed about him was that he drew his message sigils upside down.”
Due to a curiosity of the Earth’s magnetic fields, glyphs had to be drawn inverted south of the equator. Message sigils were the only ones that worked if you drew them wrong-side up in the Northern Hemisphere.
“So, not from Arkansas?” I asked.
“Nope. He was a military philosopher in the Chilean Army. They fought their own civil war down there in ’91. The rebel smokecarvers incinerated half of Santiago and the president committed suicide. Beau was on the wrong side of it.”
“Jesus.”
“He joined the Société in Geneva as a war zone monitor afterward. They sent him to China and Ethiopia during the uprisings there. He interviewed the local sigilrists and made sweeps with a Trestor device to look for illegal philosophy among the soldiers. He had lots of stories about exotic animals and horrifying foods. He’d teach us little phrases in Cantonese—‘Sir, I admire your peonies very much!’ ”
“How’d he and Ma meet?” I asked.
“He lived in Kansas City between assignments. He and Ma sat with a couple of the same working groups for mutual protection—Jayhawk clubs—as early as ’95. The Société deployed him to Havana in ’97 to monitor the Cuban rebellion against the Spaniards. The Corps sent a few dozen women, too, as an advance force in case we decided to invade. The Spaniards didn’t like that—they attacked the corpswomen without warning. Ma led the counterattack. Beau joined in, even though he wasn’t supposed to. In the end, Ma won the White Ribbon for valor, Beau quit the Société, and they came back married.”
“What?” I said. “That’s not the way she told it to me!”
“Ma tends to leave out the part where she violated international law and married a foreigner. Oh, let’s see. You were born in January of ’99. Ma was deployed to Manila and then Honolulu later that year. Afterward, she and Beau ran a lot of raids against the Trenchers. Beau came back from one of them sick. Then the next morning he was dead. That was in November of ’01.”
There was something in the way she’d said it.
>
“Sick how?” I asked.
“Shot. Ma spent the next three years looking for the Trenchers who’d ambushed them. Those were bad times. I used to put you to bed with a passenger harness over your pajamas, in case a mob came in the night and we had to escape by flying out an upstairs window. When Ma finally had a good lead, we put you and Angie in a safe house in St. Louis—”
“I remember that a little,” I said. “Dr. Synge and Sheriff Hansen went with Ma.”
“And me. And Winnie Yzerman, Evelyn Klein, and Erin O’Malley. We burned and shot and poisoned our way through half of Kansas. In the end, we got all the ones we were after. We’re still wanted there under a bunch of false names.”
“Oh my God!”
“We told ourselves we were doing it so the next generation wouldn’t have to. But now Ma’s whispering to you about Trenchers and Max Gannet and lists of names. Slipping a pretty little gun into your pocket.”
“You know about all that, too?”
“Who do you think went with Ma on her little expedition the other week? Erin O’Malley was my friend, too.”
Viv reached over and took my hand.
“Part of Ma still wants to keep you clear of it. That’s why she’s never told you the whole story. Told me not to tell you, either—and we’ve had some rows about that over the years. But part of her thinks that killing Trenchers is the family business.”
I stared at my hands. Every strained joke the shopkeepers in Billings had told—“Tell your mother I gave you a good deal. Wouldn’t want a visit from her in the middle of the night!” The rope-skipping rhyme that the girls at school had sung, with the words altered whenever I walked past—“Parsley, rosemary, thyme, and dill, how many Trenchers did the Major kill? One, two, three, four . . .” Every nightmare I’d had about her.
“Everybody knew but me,” I said.
“And Angela,” Viv said. “She escaped it, God bless her. But you . . .”
Viv sighed. “Come with me a minute. I’ll give you a present if I can find it.”
We went into her old bedroom, which still held the furniture she’d used when she was young. She removed the bottom drawer from her dresser and fished an envelope out from under it. It contained a tarnished silver chain strung with a quartz crystal that had been hollowed out into a vial. Viv unscrewed the vial and tipped out a clod of blackened powder.
“A necklace for drawing a sigil?” I asked.
She nodded. “Ma gave it to me when you were born. She filled it with bone meal and sulfur and told me if anyone ever tried to hurt you, I was supposed to use it.”
“She wanted you to kill them?”
“Oh, yes! And it bothered me—did I have it in me to take a life? It was hardly a subject you could talk over with your friends from school: boys and sewing patterns for dresses and justifiable homicide. So, I worried on it alone. Until Beau noticed. He was a good listener. He always heard what you took pains not to say.”
“What did my dad do?”
“He told me if you can get close enough to kill a man with bone meal, you can draw a stasis glyph on him. It’s just as quick. Then you have time. You can run. Or you can string him up by a noose so that when he comes to, he hangs until he’s dead. Beau poured out the bone meal and replaced it with silver chloride and said don’t tell Mother—as if I would have dared!”
Viv fit the drawer back into place.
“I’ve thought on it the past few days, too,” I admitted. “About what I would do if they hurt Danielle. Or even if they don’t. I could get close to Gannet at one of his speeches. The Trenchers wouldn’t suspect a man.”
“I’d rather not see you cut down in a hail of gunfire five seconds later,” Vivian said.
She took the necklace from me and blew into the vial to clear out the last grains of powder. “I wish Beau were here. He would know what to say to you.”
“What do you say?” I asked.
Viv found a tube of silver chloride in her workbag and refilled the hollow crystal, then threaded it back onto the necklace.
“I think I ought to listen to what you’re not saying. Two months practicing a flare and settle? Little Boober, who asked me to read him Life and Death on San Juan Hill every night? And who asked Ma every day whether he could join R&E? And then stopped asking the thousandth time she told him it was impossible, but didn’t stop asking for the book? I know what it means.”
I looked away in embarrassment.
“Just a dream, right?” I asked.
“No,” said Vivian. “I think it’s wonderful. We’ve got killers enough in the family. You—you’re going to be the first man in R&E.”
Vivian strung the chain around my neck.
“God put big sisters on Earth to keep little brothers out of trouble,” she said. “But sometimes when you’re trying to be good, trouble finds you anyway. So, use this when it does. And then go save lives instead of taking them.”
PART 3
THE CORPSWOMAN
25
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1918
To see this heinous piece of legislation introduced by my own party—the party of Abraham Lincoln, who gave the vote to women in ’64—the party of Theodore Roosevelt, who ensured the Corps was the best-equipped, best-trained expeditionary force in the world—to see Republicans advocating for the Zoning Act—that is betrayal. It is cowardice. It is treachery.
Rep. Danielle Noor Hardin, Congressional Floor Speech, October 31, 1925
TROUBLE DID FIND ME—on my first day back at Radcliffe. Not Jake or Francine or any of the garden-variety hell-raisers, but the capital-T Troublemakers: Addams, Brock, Gertrude, and Murchison.
“What could I have possibly done already?” I complained, when they summoned me to the dean’s office.
“Nothing,” said Addams. “I’ve assembled every person at the college who thinks your one-man campaign to win a spot in Rescue and Evac isn’t a waste of time.”
All five of us. (And Murchison seemed so intent on pulling apart the wires in a mesh tea strainer I didn’t think he’d even noticed me.)
“It might be possible,” Addams conceded. “We have a connection in the Corps, a brigadier general, who’s interested in you. But taking a man for her wing would create huge controversy. She needs you to prove yourself in a public venue. So, at the end of May, Radcliffe will fly you in the General’s Cup in the long course. It doesn’t get any more public than that.”
For two decades, the General’s Cup had been America’s premier intercollegiate flying competition. The Cup had begun as part of the University of Detroit’s celebration of Lucretia Cadwallader’s fiftieth birthday: a week’s worth of exhibitions and competitions, to which they’d invited the country’s three other leading schools for philosophers: the Sacramento Institute of Philosophy, Maria Trestor College in New Hampshire (where young women studied the theory, rather than the practice, of sigilry), and Radcliffe. The hovering events had proven so popular that they’d continued every year thereafter, with each school hosting in turn. This would be Radcliffe’s year.
“The Corps sends a scout to the Cup,” Addams continued. “She invites well-qualified women to test for R&E. Usually that means the medalists in the long course, but she’s allowed to invite any expert hoverer. If you fly well, maybe beat one or two women, you might impress the scout enough for an invitation. Then our friend the general can work her magic.”
“That’s fantastic!” I said.
“It’s shaky as hell,” Gertrude countered. “Who do you think you’re going to beat flying at two hundred and eight miles an hour?”
The answer was no one, not even the future theorists from Trestor College. Medaling would be nearly impossible—the U of D had a pool of hoverers twenty times larger than ours from which to draw and would put up some of the finest fliers in the world. Sacramento, with its own sizable population of aerialists, could field women nearly as good. Radcliffe had been shut out of the long-course medals eight years running.
“I have no
doubt you’ll work your fingers bloody to improve,” said Addams, “and that this office will call in favors it can ill afford on your behalf. But still—still—the overwhelming likelihood is that we’ll fail. You need a backup plan. If you don’t win a spot in the Corps and drift into your Contingency assignment without help, you’ll get stuck with the absolute dregs. Hauling water in Death Valley or coal in Barrow, Alaska. You need an arrangement.”
An arrangement. One heard the Contingencies whisper the phrase. She has an arrangement with a munitions factory, a foundry, a courier service. An all-but-guaranteed position with the firm asking for her by name, greasing a few palms on the Regional Contingency Boards to make sure she got the assignment.
“Mr. Weekes, you’ll never have better connections than you do right now,” Addams said. “Use them. That’s your job.”
She turned to Brock and Gertrude. “You pair have five months. Get him ready to fly. And you—”
She looked at Murchison, who had succeeded not only in disassembling his strainer but also in tying the wires together in a single long string.
“One to rearrange the pieces on the chessboard before it can be knocked over,” he mused, “and one to escape notice. You could not offer me a better prize.”
• • •
“Oh, Robert,” Danielle said when we were reunited that evening. “That’s not just shaky, that’s—I mean, look at it from the Corps’ perspective. If you were a field commander, camping with your wing in the middle of nowhere, eighteen tents and a pit latrine, running casualties around the clock, would you take a man? Think of the distraction! You could be the very best flier in the entire world, but—oh, it’s not your fault. You just can’t put a man in close quarters with thirty-five women. You can’t.”
Leave it to Dar to puncture my high spirits. But she was still completely buoyant herself and it pleased me to see her so. From the string of messages she’d sent, I gathered she’d made quite a splash at the conference in Syracuse. Senator Cadwallader-Fulton had offered her a job.
“I could scarcely believe it,” Dar said. “I’d known her all of three minutes and she said I should be her aide. A glorified secretary, really, but—Robert, you can’t tell a soul this. Nobody. The very next thing she asked is when I intend to run for office. She said to do it soon. ‘You’re young, you’re pretty enough—do it before public opinion on the Great War swings the other way. In ten years, the populace will have decided it was a terrible sin and anyone involved is tainted.’ Besides, almost no one wins her first time out.”