by Wren Weston
Chairwoman Randolph had granted the contract to preserve her honor and her word. She could not destroy the contract unless she wanted to lose her family’s esteem, unless she wanted the world to question the word of a Randolph. Her mother wouldn’t break their contract, not without a damn good reason.
Lila might be the only person in history to ever get one over on Beatrice Randolph.
“How can you get Mother to agree to that?”
“By offering her something she wants more. The hospital contract is still up for grabs. Your mother might not want me to give her the deal, but she’ll certainly ask for my help to earn it. No more holding the prime heir spot over your head. No more forcing you to attend High Council meetings because she thinks Jewel isn’t savvy enough to manage them. She’ll have to accept Jewel’s shortcomings or pick a new prime. That’s how important the oracles are, Lila.”
“Oskar, too? Mother won’t go for it, just like she didn’t go for it yesterday. She’ll earn that contract on her own merits or not at all.”
“Your mother has always dreamed of earning a spot on Unity’s High Council.”
“She doesn’t want a seat that badly. Not badly enough to drop the idea of me as prime. Not badly enough to cheat, either.”
“Cheating and using her resources aren’t the same thing. I’m a resource, Lila.” He put a few more slices of bacon on his plate. “You don’t know your mother half as well as you think. She might be middle-aged, but she’s always retained the dreams of a child. I’ll worry about the deal. You just worry about the oracles.”
“Do you really need the information this much?”
“Yes. It’s important, Lila.”
She thumbed her sapphire ring under her glove. “Okay, I’ll look into it.”
Chapter 7
It was nearly ten o’clock before Lila jogged down the steps of Falcon Home, her father and Chief Shaw trailing behind in hushed whispers, chests open and wide, hands folded behind their backs in the elegant pose of Bullstow.
Shaw excused himself once they reached the front door, begging his blackcoat from the footman, then headed off toward his security office.
“I should do the same,” Lila muttered on the stone steps outside. Shaw disappeared around the side of the building. His boots clacked on the sidewalk.
“Not yet. It’s Father Week.” Lemaire grinned and nudged her with his elbow. “Come on, let’s go to the park like we used to.”
“I took the entire afternoon off yesterday to go to the auction, and Commander Sutton has already had to fill in for me at the commanders’ meeting this morning. She’s had to do that too much lately, mostly due to Bullstow and Unity business.”
“That’s what she’s there for. You have to learn to delegate more, Lila. It’s unhealthy to try to handle everything yourself.”
“Unhealthy? I’m getting health tips from a man who just ate an entire plate of bacon?”
“It was only a few pieces. I’ll work it off in the gym later. I always do.”
“That’s not your doctors’ concern, and you know it.”
“Let’s go play with the little ones just for an hour,” he said, changing the subject. “You haven’t been to the park in ages. Shiloh will be there. Claire might have arrived as well.”
Lila smiled at the mention of Shiloh. She used to visit him often when her father still resided in Bullstow. He had been shaped in the same mold as his father, even taking after Chairwoman Randolph in some rather fortunate ways. He’d taken their intelligence, their shrewdness, their serious nature. Barely older than Pax, he had every intention of becoming prime minister, just like his father. He’d already started his two-year internship with the New Bristol and Saxon High House, and after he finished, he’d cast his lot in the senate elections, allowing his brethren to place him in a city where his particular skillsets would be of most use. He’d spend the next decade working his way back to the New Bristol High House, and perhaps even Saxony one day, though Lemaire had managed it in only five years.
Lila had to take advantage of what little time they had left.
As for Claire and the youngest of her father’s brood? Lila hardly cared, if she had to be honest. Half-siblings on your father’s side drifted away from your awareness, just like old friends from university. You occasionally saw one another and caught up, but usually they had their lives and you had yours.
Unless someone tried to mess with them, of course. Then you might have been best friends for life.
Lila followed her father reluctantly, her dwindling time with Shiloh fresh on her mind. The pair turned on a cedar-lined path and strolled toward the southern area of the compound toward Bullstow’s elementary school, where the youngest sons of the senate were housed and educated. Lila hadn’t walked by it in several summers, and that was a shame, for summer was the best time to visit. The high school principal always charged the graduating senior class with creating some new contraption for the elementary students to play on every year. Part of the project involved speaking with the younger children and taking their needs and wants into account as the seniors planned and designed the equipment.
It was supposed to teach the seniors a fair number of life lessons: how to take your constituents’ opinions into consideration, how to listen more than you speak, how to reach a consensus with so many hands stirring the pot, and how to ensure your work always secured the safety and happiness of the next generation. But mostly they learned that you couldn’t please everyone and that children had the attention spans of gnats, just like the masses.
And like most things, it had become a contest over the years.
Shiloh had helped build his class’s project, since he’d taken the relevant math, art, and shop classes. It’d been up for months, and Lila hadn’t had a chance to stop by and see it. She’d only seen pictures, proudly slid over the table when he and her father came to dinner.
Lila had a feeling pictures hadn’t done it justice.
They both heard the park before they saw it, surrounded by the hulking high school, junior high, and dorms. Screaming, squealing, and crying erupted in their ears.
Where there was screaming and crying, there must be Father’s Week.
Lila paused at the line of shrubs around the park and checked her watch, a long list of excuses sliding through her mind.
“Oh no you don’t. You promised,” her father said, already searching the crowd for his children. His Saxon children, anyway. The ones from Unity and other states did not always come for Father’s Week, due to the distance.
Given his happy face, Oskar Kruger and the oracles had retreated from his mind.
Lila wished she had the same off switch.
Sighing, she gave herself over to her father’s mood, promising to stay for an hour.
An hour might have been too optimistic, though. Children screamed down slides or chased one another across the playground, kicking balls or bouncing them. Strollers lay abandoned in the grass, overturned and forgotten on the edges of the melee. Diaper bags lay scattered among them. Senators bounced among the chaos, encouraging it and swapping supplies with one another. They’d abandoned their coats and breeches for soft t-shirts and worn jeans, all so they could chase the children around the park, some with hands raised to the sky as though they’d been turned into monsters, growling and picking young ones up under their arms. Others tossed children over their shoulders, holding them like sacks of flour while the child giggled and smacked their father’s back. The same men who gave stirring speeches on the floor of the High Senate, the same men who had been so charming at the last highborn party, every one of them turned into absolute goobers during Father’s Week.
Those who weren’t busy in the melee treated bumps and bruises or hurt fingers and toes along the edges of the fray, or changed the diapers of the tiniest children, the wiggling crawlers chewing their fingers and staring vaguely a
round them while the men worked. It was easy to tell the first-time fathers, so gentle they might have been handling fine china.
There was plenty of experience here, and they soon learned better.
Not all the senators were so enamored of the little ones, though. One senator had made a potato gun, and a crowd of girls and boys had lined up to fire it. Other senators had spread out among a sulky row of teenagers on the grass. The teens refused to get dirty with their younger sisters and brothers. Instead, they tapped on their palm computers, ignoring everyone around them, including their peers and fathers and uncles.
Lila had spent many an hour during Father’s Week the same way. Except instead of being sulky, she’d been poking at Bullstow’s defenses, ignoring her younger half-siblings while she played on a different sort of playground. She’d only been sullen when her father, knowing exactly what she was up to, made her put down her palm, stay in the park, and interact.
He didn’t really care with whom.
With so many children, he had to turn his back at some point, though, and she’d be off seconds later, chasing a decent signal with more gusto than the senators chased after the toddlers, running deeper in Bullstow, breaking into buildings and offices she had no right to be in.
Poking, reading, and digging.
If Shaw knew half the rooms she’d been in during Father’s Week, if he knew half the codes she’d stolen, he wouldn’t be so blasé about inviting her into the compound.
Even her father didn’t know that she could get into his and the governor’s offices any time she damn well pleased, even without forcing the lock. She could even break into the holding cells and knew her way around the tunnels underneath the compound.
That was before she turned fourteen, before her mother gave her Our Lady of Light. Running the hospital and meeting with her advisors had taken up much of her time. When she wasn’t busy with the hospital or attending school, she’d been accompanying her mother to Saxony High Council meetings and her Aunt Georgina to New Bristol High Council meetings. She had to learn as much as she could before taking Georgina’s spot at sixteen.
It had angered her father that she was too busy to spend more than a day or two with him during Father’s Week. He could hardly complain, though. When her mother was fourteen, she’d assumed responsibility for the entire Randolph family, for Lila’s grandmother had passed suddenly during childbirth, leaving all responsibility on her mother’s shoulders.
He’d gritted his teeth every time Lila sent a hurried message to her advisors, always working to shape the direction of the hospital. He wasn’t angry that she was distracted. He’d been proud of her work, but he frequently despaired that she was missing her youth. It was likely the only reason why he allowed her to penetrate Bullstow so often. It was the only chance she got to be a stupid, reckless child.
Lila wandered away from her father toward a mass of brightly colored netting, strung out across a ring of trees and sunk posts nearly thirty meters in diameter at the edge of the park. It was as if an egg sac full of spiders had burst apart in the center, making a series of horizontal webs with thick, velvety strands, weaving holes in the middle. A mass of children already climbed upon them, using the holes to climb up to a higher level, sometimes slipping through a higher hole to fall on the netting below, crouching and bouncing as though it were some sort of trampoline. Some used the netting to climb up to the top branches of the trees, then jumped and rolled down the top layers of netting, toppling their friends.
Lila crept near and grabbed the netting, examining it, a bit jealous that she didn’t have something similar in her militia’s gym. Perhaps she’d send someone out to copy it.
“I don’t mean to be biased, but I don’t think any group will ever top Shiloh’s creation,” her father said. “Did you know he came up with the winning proposal? The kids were getting into trouble for climbing the trees, and now they can do it safely. They’d also studied spiders in their science classes and had become obsessed with the horrid things.”
“Yes, I know he came up with the idea.” She chuckled. “You haven’t shut up about it all summer.”
“The boys had quite a bit of fun learning how to weave the nets. They must have made a dozen prototypes. Shiloh even taught me how to do it.” He crouched down and pointed to the two bottom layers. “Those are his. He weaved the strongest nets, so they put his on the bottom. Even the Massons have even been in for a look. They’ve gotten permission to use the idea for a new line of playground equipment.”
“Any of that money going to Shiloh?”
“You think like a chairwoman too much,” he chided. “The seniors decided their portion of the profits should go toward funding swings and slides for the poorer classes. The local senates even agreed to install the equipment during Volunteer Month, and the Massons are giving it to us at cost. It’s too bad the poorer children can’t have something like this in their playgrounds, but it requires a level of supervision that the poorer classes don’t enjoy.”
Lila turned and eyed the senators underneath the shade trees, watching the children play, Senator Dubois among them.
Lila nudged her father, and the pair strolled toward him. The senator inclined his head in greeting, barely taking his eyes off the raw-faced two-year-old on his lap, rubbing the little boy’s back as he hiccupped at the end of his crying fit. Dubois had always had a penchant for distraught toddlers, able to set them to rights before they entered into a full-blown meltdown. Other senators constantly bugged him for tips or, in their frustration, simply handed off their children and watched him work.
He’d be an amazing father once he and Jewel finally conceived.
“What happened to this little one?” her father asked.
“He smooshed his finger in the swing set chain.” Dubois wrapped his hand around the boy’s fist and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Gabriel will be okay. It’s not broken, and he likes the swings too much to stay away. Don’t you?”
Gabriel nodded and buried his face in Dubois’s neck, turning shy.
“Whose is he?”
“I’m actually related to this one. Gabriel is my cousin’s boy. Unfortunately, Bilsby is delayed in Beaulac. He’ll be here tomorrow morning. I get to play the favorite uncle until then.” A happy smile lit up Dubois’s face.
“You’ll have your own soon enough. Jewel is too enamored of you to stop trying so easily. She’ll go to the doctors soon and do what she must.”
Dubois nodded, a forced smile on his face.
Lila knew what he would not say. Even though he’d been fertility tested and cleared before his appointment as a senate intern, he feared that he was the reason for the couple’s childless state. Randolph women were known to conceive quickly and easily when they wanted, as were the women of the Hardwicke clan, Jewel’s family on her father’s side.
It was likely why he hadn’t taken other lovers. He feared he’d be found out.
“After my hands heal up, you should borrow Jewel’s Firefly,” Lila suggested. “We could go on a ride somewhere.”
Dubois’s face lit up again. “Gods, it’s been months since we’ve done that.”
Lila and her father chatted with Dubois for a few more moments, then drifted among the children. Lila managed to catch up with a few of her half-siblings, and she even saw Shiloh in the mix, wrangling a four-year-old over his shoulder before tossing him back into the netting.
He’d grown bigger since she saw him last, and begun filling out his clothes. He wasn’t nearly as large as Pax, but taller than most. Unlike Pax, he’d started spending more and more time in the gym, widening his shoulders and thickening his legs with rep after rep. It was a pastime of Bullstow senate interns, and a religion to those ambitious enough to enter the heir carousel early.
Clearly, Shiloh hoped to make his first match when the season began next month.
Gods, she remembered changing his d
iaper. She’d always been too scared he would leak on whatever new gadget lurked in her pocket to manage the task with any degree of competency, but when had he gotten old enough for his first season?
Oracle’s light! Little Shiloh might be a father soon.
When her palm’s alarm vibrated discreetly in her pocket, Lila gave Shiloh and her father one last hug and dashed away, winding through the laughing and squealing and crying children. She drove through Sunday afternoon traffic to the Randolph estate, parking in the family’s garage before marching down Villanueva Lane toward the security office. The twelve-story steel and glass tower rose high above the mansions in the southern part of the compound. It stretched like a nest of glass and steel, all arcs and curves, a gem cleaned and polished.
Lila loved the building, which was a good thing, since she spent most of her time there. It had been designed as the home of the Randolph militia, housing the barracks, cafeteria, training facilities, and department offices, as well as the private apartments of its senior officers.
Including her private apartment, if her mother had allowed her to sleep there.
She pulled open the metal front door, sculpted into the Randolph coat of arms, her boots clicking on the white tiles underneath a crisscross of steel arches. Since she hadn’t worn her militia uniform, it felt too odd for her to take the staircase. Instead, she broke for the glass elevators, which would offer her a peek into every department on every floor, for the walls had also been made of glass.
Lila stopped as soon as the doors opened.
Several dozen blown-up pictures of her leaping across the LeBeau’s ballroom had been taped along the walls of the car, even worse pictures than her father had saved on his palm. Our Hero had been scrawled across the top of each one, and around the edges of the posters, semicircles within semicircles had been drawn. A pert little dot sat at the center.