Icons

by Margaret Stohl

  I lean closer to Lucas. “Do they know?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “That I’m my mother’s son?”

  “No. The other thing.”

  His eyes narrow and he shakes his head.

  What about me? What do they know?

  But I can’t bring myself to ask, and instead I focus on suppressing the urge to touch his hand, to unlock more of what he’s feeling. I need to not know what he’s feeling right now. I need to not know what anyone is feeling. I need to be strong, and coming into that kind of contact with people—especially in the kind of world we live in now—it’s too draining.

  So I keep my hands to myself and nod back.

  We follow the whispering, past a line of administrators and bureaucrats outside the Ambassador’s office. For the most part, they don’t look up at Lucas, though I know they see him; it’s the not-looking that gives them away. I only see them staring at us when I glance back over my shoulder.

  There is no way not to feel them.

  I can’t avoid the sharp jags of their anxiety and need. The way they want to please him, to know him. They’d follow him into a blazing pit of fire. That’s what makes Lucas so dangerous.

  That’s why he’s an Icon Child who matters, I think to myself, in a way I never will. I feel things, sense what people are thinking, that’s all. I know what I feel, what others feel around me, but I can’t do anything about it. Lucas seems oblivious to all of it, to the riot he incites by being alive. I’m envious.

  It isn’t just his mother who makes them all cower when he walks by. I’d fear him too, if I was one of them.

  An outer door opens, then an inner one.

  Our feet make no noise as we move across the rich, soft rug that lines the foyer of the Ambassador’s office. Her own door is not open.

  Even her son knocks.

  Through the glass, I see the Ambassador look up from her desk. Her hair is silver-white, like the pelt of some kind of lost species. Maybe a mink, though I have only seen one in a book. It’s her eyes that convince me, not her hair. Her eyes gleam like those of an animal caught in a trap, the moment before chewing off its own foot. Anything to escape. Anything to survive. It’s the kind of madness that isn’t mad at all. It’s only logical, given the circumstance. You’d be mad not to feel it. Like everyone in this office, I realize. Everyone we’ve passed.

  I wonder if I have it, too. If I’m too mad to notice.

  Lucas pushes open the door and I follow him inside.

  “Darling. Thank you for coming. Both of you.” She nods at me and smiles at Lucas. I feel it in her, the surge he seems to cause in everyone who sees him. Except it’s different to her, because she created him. She possesses him. When she looks at him, she feels pleasure. It’s the same love she feels when she looks in the mirror.

  If you can call that love.

  I don’t remember my mother, not really. But I can’t imagine she felt the same way about me. I can’t imagine I was only a mirror to her, nothing more. I guess I’ll never know.

  “Do you know why you’re here? Why I sent for you?” She looks to me, smoothing a stray strand of silver hair behind her ear. Her skin is flawless, not a wrinkle in sight. Her eyes, the animal eyes, are blue-gray, hard as steel. As set as the Tracks. “Why my own son came to get you, in fact, all the way from Mission La Purísima? Against what should have been his better judgment, and my wishes?” Her eyes flicker over to him and back.

  “No, sir.” The color drains out of my face at the mention of my home and everything I have lost. “Ma’am.” She looks at me pointedly. I try again. “I mean, Madame Ambassador.”

  “Please, sit.”

  I feel myself jerking downward as if I were a dog on a leash.

  Lucas is no better. He’s in his seat before I am. I try to look at the Ambassador, but it’s much harder now. The morning light is bright and blasts through the slatted blinds, sending blurry stripes across our faces, across the walls. As if the world outside was made of nothing but light. Even the ceiling lights are hot and white and flooding directly down on me. I sense that my chair is placed just so, for this express purpose, as if I am in some sort of interrogation chamber.

  I know I am.

  “Doloria. Can I call you Dolly?”

  I nod. It’s all I can manage. I try not to think about the fact that I am sitting there in a private meeting with the Ambassador, in army pants and combat boots. That she knows my nickname.

  I try not to think that this woman could kill me with one wave of her hand.

  “Have you ever been outside the Grass, Dolly?”

  I shake my head before I remember to speak. “No. Madame Ambassador.”

  She shifts in her chair, looking from me to Lucas again, slowly now. “Colonel Catallus? Can you de-Classify the footage, please?” She looks toward me, almost apologetically. “My Head of Security. It requires two Classified Embassy clearance codes to activate use of unauthorized feeds. Protocol.”

  A man steps out of the shadows, where he has been standing behind the Ambassador’s desk, half hidden in the shadow of a potted palm. It is the Brass Wings Man, I realize. He is wearing a military suit that looks oddly religious. I think once again of the Padre, my Padre.

  I look away.

  The Ambassador watches as the vid-screen behind her desk flickers online. “I’m not sure you understand what it’s like, Doloria, to serve two masters. I do it myself, every day.” She turns her back to me, staring at the images on the screen. A gray cityscape rolls past the camera.

  “The House of Lords relies on me to keep the Embassy City on task and in line, as they do all their Ambassadors. The Hole, as you Grass call it, is the fifth-largest surviving Embassy City on the planet. Keeping the city running is no small task. And more importantly, keeping the Projects running is essential to our continued survival.”

  I only nod.

  “Our Lords are not unkind masters. In the time that they’ve been here, they’ve been reasonable. They’ve never asked us anything that we couldn’t do. In fact, in many ways, our civilization has never functioned better. That’s why GAP Miyazawa refers to it as our Second Renaissance, as I suppose you know.”

  The Second Renaissance. Grass don’t think of it that way, but I don’t tell her that.

  “Madame Ambassador.” The Colonel hands her a remote. She picks it up and points it. The images on the screen change.

  “This is the House of Lords. That gray building is the original mother ship itself. To use the familiar cultural terminology.”

  There it is. The House of Lords, a dark and hulking parasite. I’ve only heard the words before—I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a ship the size of a giant rain cloud that settled over some kind of abandoned government building near the Old Capitol.

  “Beneath it, those white walls? That was the Pentagon. Do you remember the Pentagon?”

  I shake my head in awe, looking at Lucas, whose face is completely blank. He’s seen it a thousand times, maybe. It doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. Or maybe it means too much, and he can’t let himself feel anything about it at all—or he’d lose control, like Ro.

  I wonder.

  The Ambassador’s voice is grim. “When it came to Earth, the House of Lords took over the Pentagon from the inside—like a plug into an electrical socket. There.” She points with her finger, tracing the walls of the building beneath the ship, on the screen.

  I see it.

  The alien technology looks exactly like a giant black spider that has landed on the building, wrapping each of the five points in its own black ropes. Five sides. Five spider legs. The spider’s black body reflects the five-sided shape of the building below. It’s like the aliens are obsessed with symmetry or something.

  I memorize the shape in my mind. Something about it is compelling, in a horrible way. I want to remember it. I realize it’s not just the Pentagon, but the logo of the House of Lords and the Embassy Cities, all of them. The one drawn around Earth in gold, on a fiel
d of blood. The world trapped in a birdcage.

  The same logo that was on Lucas’s brass buttons.

  The Ambassador is staring at me, and I try to find the words to say what I am feeling. I look back to the screen.

  “Is it an Icon? The House of Lords?” Seeing it there, I can barely breathe.

  “Not technically. As I said, it’s their mother ship. But do you mean, does it emit a pulse field? Yes, I imagine so. GAP Miyazawa believes it does, and he’s the one who has ventured closest to the structure itself. No one has ever tried to board it and find out.”

  I flinch, thinking of the General Ambassador surrounded by some other kind of life that seems to depend on the annihilation of ours. In my mind they look like faceless gray shadows. Hollow. Empty. Emotionless.

  The No Face.

  I wonder if I could feel them. I hope not. I never have. I never want to.

  The Ambassador shrugs. “There’s no life surrounding the building, in any event. Not that we’ve ever seen.”

  She’s been there. I glance at Lucas. His face is still impassive. I wonder if he’s seen it, too.

  She touches the remote again and the screen goes blank.

  Without a word, she pushes another button. Images of the Silent Cities flood the screen. Dark city blocks. Fires in the streets. Faces of the dead, lying in rows, like footage from a war. Children slump at their desks. A bus full of lifeless bodies stops at a corner. Corpses in a sold-out stadium remain pinned to plastic seats at a baseball game. Forever fallen in place, resting in something like peace—the kind of violent peace that came to Earth with the Occupation.

  Like the Padre, I remember, slumped on the pew beside me.

  I shudder.

  We stare in silence at the procession of images. It’s finally Lucas who speaks. He looks at me, and his eyes are dark, like a storm on the water.

  “Their hearts stopped beating. They died where they stood. Quietly. Instantly. Every person, every age. Everyone close enough to the Icons.”

  “Why?” I breathe the word, though I know why. I just can’t believe there is a point, a meaning, to such destruction.

  “To show that they could,” says the Ambassador. “That they can.”

  They still can. We all know that. Even now, after all these cities, all these years. There is no hope, except to obey.

  “Which is what I am telling you when I say I serve two masters. I serve GAP Miyazawa and the Lords, to keep them happy. And in serving the Lords, I serve the people. I am afforded certain luxuries, true. But, more importantly, you are afforded life itself. I’m just trying to keep you alive.” She smiles at me, as cold a smile as I have ever felt.

  Lucas looks back at me, grim. “To keep it from happening again.”

  “What about the Projects?” I say, thinking about the cars full of Remnants that were with me on the Tracks.

  “Excuse me?” She frowns.

  “The Remnant slaves. Who serves them?”

  “A small price, to keep the Lords at peace. Don’t you think?” She leans forward. “We’re all slaves, Doloria. You. Me. My son. Even GAP Miyazawa. We can’t change that.”

  She makes my skin crawl.

  I think of Lucas and his mother as belonging to the House of Lords. I think of them as having made their pact with the devil. And yet deep down I realize things are more complicated than that.

  Maybe she has as little choice in the matter as I do.

  The Colonel, standing in the shadows, clears his throat.

  “Madame Ambassador.”

  The Ambassador pushes a button, and the images on the vid-screen disappear.

  “That’s enough.” Her tone has shifted, and she is done with me. I am dismissed.

  Oddly enough, I am somehow disappointed—and then I am ashamed that I care.

  “Why am I here?” My words are so quiet, even I have a hard time hearing them. “What do you want from me?”

  “Do not question that you are here for a reason. There is nothing I do that is not in the name of protecting my Embassy City. You are my guest here, for now. If we find you to be less than cooperative, that will change.” I don’t doubt it; the cuff marks around my wrist are only now starting to fade.

  She moves around her desk and grabs my bony arm with her bony hand. I shrink at our connection, but the images come barreling at me, all the same. She is steely metal and rough rivets. Her strength is beautiful and industrial and terrifying. Still, I can sense her eyes moving over me. Her words are quiet—almost a whisper.

  “There are those who cannot understand the delicate concept of balance. Compromise. Some do not understand why we make the sacrifices we make, or what could happen to us at the hands of our displeased Lords.”

  Some. The Grass Factions, the Rebellion. She doesn’t have to say it.

  “You’re going to help us. You, and my son. And even, perhaps, the Rager.”

  Ro. Where is Ro?

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re one of the lucky ones. Not your brothers. Not your parents. You.”

  She knows my family. Then I catch myself. Of course she knows. She’s the Ambassador. She knows everything.

  She lifts her other hand. The one not touching my arm. In her fingers, she holds a necklace. A cross. It is gold and tiny. I recognize it immediately. My mother never took it off, the Padre was so proud to tell me.

  It’s in every picture I’ve seen of her.

  A surge of pain floods through me. I think the tears will roll down my face, but they don’t. They run down the inside of my body. They course through my veins where I used to have blood, saltier than ocean water.

  “You lived so you could pay the debt.”

  Me.

  She says it again. I find it harder and harder to breathe.

  What debt?

  “You’ll need to cooperate now. Do you understand? To keep more terrible things from happening, to more people you love.”

  It’s a threat, and she looks me in the eyes as she says it.

  “Madame Ambassador—” begins Lucas.

  “Not now, Lucas,” she snaps, shutting him down.

  My eyes flicker over to Lucas. He looks to the distance, studying the patterns in the carpet.

  The Ambassador smiles at me. “It’s a shame, you know. What happened to the Padre. After so many years of service to the people.”

  She leans close. I smell perfume and sweat and stale air.

  I pull back, a reflex. “He never did anything.”

  “He had something of mine, something very important. He should have known better.”

  I want to vomit. Instead, I spit the words out at her. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  She laughs. “Not you, child. Though hiding you from me, that was also very, very ill advised.”

  I flush at her laughter.

  “I’m talking about something else. My soldiers have ripped apart your little Mission, stone by stone, trying to find it for me.”

  “What?” I try not to look at her. I stare straight ahead at a speck on the wall. My heart is pounding.

  “It’s a book.” She says it, clipped and precise.

  No—

  “About people like you and my son.”

  No, no, no—

  “There isn’t another like it, not anywhere in the world. It was taken from me a long time ago, and I would very much like to have it back.”

  That stupid, damn book. What did it say? What did he want me to know? Why does she want it? Where is it now?

  I allow myself to look at her.

  Once.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen a book like that.”

  She leans closer. “Think about it, Doloria. Take all the time you need. I believe you just might remember.”

  She presses the necklace into my hand, hard, and releases me. My fingers close around it and I want to run, sobbing, out of her office. I want to scream and cry and heave everything off the top of her polished
desk with both hands.

  I don’t.

  I take my mother’s necklace and back away. Leaving Lucas, leaving the Ambassador, leaving the Brass Wings Man and the Silent Cities behind. I feel like I will hyperventilate, but I don’t.

  I understand.

  “Dol, wait!” Lucas calls after me. But I know better than to stop. He lied. I shouldn’t have trusted him. He can’t protect me.

  I’m not Lucas Amare.

  I’m not the golden child of the Ambassador.

  I’m just an orphaned Grassgirl, here to be used and discarded, like her Padre, like her parents, like everyone else on the planet.

  RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT

  CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY

  To: Ambassador Amare

  From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke

  Subject: Icon Children Mythology

  Subtopic: Weeper

  Catalogue Assignment: Evidence recovered during raid of Rebellion hideout

  The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled Icon Children Exist! Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.

  Text-scan translation follows.

  10

  THE TRIGGER

  The moment I leave the Ambassador’s office, four Sympa guards descend on me.

  They’re in front of me, behind me, on all sides. They jostle and push, closer and closer, until I can feel the warmth of their sweat and their breath and their adrenaline and fear and I can’t breathe.

  The Sympas carry me into a hall with buzzing, bare bulbs and rows of gray, sealed plexi-doors. Everything is locked. Everything is meant to intimidate.

  I am shoved into a small, plain room with a small, plain table and two gray chairs. The walls are reflective—of me, of nothing, the nothing in the room.

  I am alone.

  It hits me that I can’t do or say anything to get myself out of this mess, while the Embassy can say or do whatever they like, as long as they have me here. I don’t know why this is surprising.

  That I am powerless, as always.

  I unclench my hand to see the tiny gold cross and the fragile chain.