Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  Well, he’d gotten an earful, hadn’t he?

  A fresh start in Esilia. Yes! Dad wouldn’t have any power to corrupt him, and Jef would find the two of them some honest work to keep him free of temptation. There was always a demand for work in a frontier country, wasn’t there? Jef’s imagination presented a picture of himself riding a tall horse through the red-rock country of the Esilian plains, doing some sort of unspecified job that entailed killing greatcats, capturing bandits, and thwarting the plots of water thieves who tried to manipulate the irrigation system for profit.

  Just like Red Ryder: Guardian of the Low Country. Jef had the entire series on a data stick. Even though he could only watch it here – the crêche only let them watch boring stuff like The Story of Houseprinting – he’d memorized all the story lines and much of the dialogue.

  “Hold on just a minute there, buddy,” he imitated the deep voice of Red Ryder himself, “let’s see what you got in that bag.” It would be smuggled treasure or bandits’ loot or tools for changing the irrigation gates…

  “What was that? Did you hear something, Ray?”

  Shi – Discord. He’d been talking right into the vent. Red Ryder would never have been so careless!

  “Just the cooling system coming on-line,” his father said as if he knew anything about the maintenance side of the apartment. Jef breathed easier. Were they going to talk about Esilia now?

  Nooo, it was back to Mom’s boring old party. Dad was recommending that she try to get Jillian Lisadel or that buxom newser on the weather show, Ashli Somebody, if she wanted to coax more important men to the party.

  “But I don’t even know this Ashli!”

  “Well, well, do whatever you want to,” his father said impatiently.

  “Can I have more money for the canapés?”

  “Don’t I already make you a generous housekeeping allowance?”

  For once Mom stood her ground. “For all your know-it-all talk about the crisis, you’re not the one checking accounts and keeping the servants honest. Everything costs more, every day. But if you important men won’t crack down on the price-gouging black marketeers, I’ll have to keep paying their extortionate demands. Things will likely be even more expensive in two – ”

  “Talk to me about it next week,” Dad cut her off. “It’s too soon to be laying in supplies for the party, the food would spoil.”

  “Not if it’s kept – ”

  “And how are you planning to keep it cold? Even this neighborhood is having power outages. And tomorrow the Committee will be announcing daily rotating power cuts.”

  “Not here?”

  “It would look bad if the Hill were exempted,” Ray said, using the informal nickname for the neighborhood where all the highest-ranking Committee members lived. “We don’t want people grumbling that we get special privileges. Especially now.”

  ***

  Ruven came to his second tutoring session with low expectations. The girl from the party acted as if she hated him, and she was probably lying about being able to help him persuade politicians. Had she made up that story because she wanted to keep getting a share in the food parcels he received from the coop? No – she’d spun that line at the party, before food was even a major issue in the city. So, maybe she was delusional. Thought her starring role in a holodrama made her an actress, thought she understood motivations.

  So why go back?

  What else did he have to do? He’d been thrown out of more offices than he could count, and he wasn’t ready to return to the cooperative and report total failure. Besides, the cooperative kept sending him food parcels that held more than he could eat. Better to share it with someone than to let it spoil.

  The elevator in her apartment building sputtered and died at the fifth floor. No big deal; he took the last five flights of stairs at a brisk clip.

  When Jillian opened the door, Ruven found that he was slightly out of breath. Must have taken the stairs a tad too fast. Nothing to do with the girl’s changed appearance.

  On his first visit she must have been deliberately making herself look as plain and ordinary as possible. Probably a good tactic for a woman going out in the city these days. She couldn’t really do it, of course, but the tied-back hair and unflattering tunic had dimmed her light a bit, and the black eye hadn’t improved her looks.

  He hadn’t fully appreciated how much she’d played down her beauty until this moment. Her long, white-blond hair was piled atop her head, with one curling lock allowed loose to caress her neck. The black eye had faded; there was nothing, now, to detract from her perfect oval face and regular features. And the dress did something for her figure; she looked willowy now, rather than just thin.

  And he’d seen that whole look before… Ruven chuckled appreciatively. “Playing Ditani Stavros today?”

  “Trisha thought it might be safer to go out if people recognized me. It’s a nuisance, of course, having holos taken with fans and all that, but perhaps they won’t slug a holo star.”

  Not entirely bad reasoning, but she wasn’t on her way out, was she? Ruven had a feeling the makeover was intended to impress him, leave him stammering and speechless at her incandescent beauty.

  Problem was, it was working.

  “I gather you made the time to watch one of my episodes?”

  He had, and more, but if she was fishing for compliments on her acting skills she could just go fish. He held out a bag instead of responding to her question. “They’ve sent jam this time, and flour. More butter. And here – ” He pulled out a floppy, only slightly damp parcel. “I was just passing the riverside, and there was an enterprising young man catching fish.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” Her face lit up and – discord, he hadn’t realized she could look even more beautiful. He followed her inside and waited in the living room while she took the food to the kitchen. There was a pleased exclamation from the sister-in-law, but she didn’t come out to thank him in person. Jillian did.

  “I’m – sorry they’re not cleaned,” he said awkwardly. Damn the girl! He hadn’t been ill at ease with her last time. Today she had that brightly polished look common to rich city women, and he was painfully aware of the size of his boots and of the fact that he hadn’t had a haircut since he left the cooperative. He ran a hand over his head, trying to tame the over-long, shaggy locks.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Trisha actually knows how to scale and gut a fish. You just have to promise never to let Tomas know! Once a woman admits being able to clean fish, she gets stuck with the job on every fishing trip. Do sit down.”

  “Tomas, that would be…”

  “My brother,” Jillian said. “Trisha’s husband. He – he asked me to take care of her, when he was posted to a riot squad and his hours were so irregular he never knew when he’d be at home.” She looked down at her hands. “He… hasn’t actually been back in several weeks. Or sent any messages. The Ministry for Security won’t tell us what his assignment is, can you believe that! Trisha thinks he must have been posted somewhere up the coast, too far away for him to come back to the city when he does get time off.” She raised her eyes. “That’s not – very likely, is it.”

  “I don’t know enough about a peace officer’s job to guess,” Ruven hedged. If the girls weren’t ready to accept that this Tomas was probably dead, it wasn’t his place to push them. A revelation occurred to him. “Last time I was here. You thought your visitor would be Tomas.”

  Jillian nodded. As before, she’d taken a seat in the shadows, but he could tell she was blinking furiously. “Galen – the director – he told me that my brother had been to the studio, asking for my address. That didn’t make sense, of course, Tomas knows perfectly well where I live, he left Trisha with me. But I was so happy, I didn’t want to think about that.”

  “And instead it was just me, and it was my fault Galen told you your brother had been there.” Ruven let out a long, low whistle. “No wonder you were – ”

  “Rude?”

&nb
sp; “Less than welcoming.”

  A brief smile flickered across Jillian’s face. “You see? You can be tactful, when you take the time. Now let’s talk about how you can use that tact to get your case across…”

  A grueling hour followed, while Jillian tried to get him to frame simple, obvious statements into weasel-worded ambiguities that would convey the impression he had the greatest respect for whichever bureaucrat he was addressing and trusted him alone to stand up for Harmony’s founding principles and save the cooperative.

  “And why should I help you?” Jillian, playing the part of a skeptical politician, demanded for what had to be the hundredth time.

  “Because you aren’t like the others. You still honor our founding principles. And so- Discord take it,” Ruven cursed, “I can’t say that to every single bureaucrat I talk to!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s such an obvious lie. They must know I’m handing out the same line to everyone.”

  “My director, Galen,” Jillian observed, “tells every girl he meets that she’s not like the others. He tells me it’s a remarkably successful line.”

  “Dissonance! I’m not trying to romance a girl!”

  “And a good thing, too, because you’d be terrible at it. Like it or not, you’ll get better results treating this like a seduction scene than coming at it like a secondary-crêche debating club. Don’t you see, debating automatically makes a man want to oppose you. Seduction will make him want to agree with you. He’ll want to believe all the nice things you’re saying about him, and that will be easier if he believes everything you say.”

  Ruven ran his fingers through his hair. “All right. I see what you mean. You really do know something about this, don’t you?”

  “More than you, anyway,” Jillian said crisply, “although that’s a low bar to clear. I wouldn’t be a successful actress if I didn’t understand human nature, would I now?”

  Ruven sighed. “I don’t know how much this has to do with acting. You’re just smarter than I am about people.”

  “And I learned it on the stage,” Jillian said. “You did watch an episode of LL, didn’t you?

  “Of what?”

  “Love for Living,” she amplified. “This is the third season; we’ve started abbreviating things.”

  “Third season! You must have been just a slip of a girl when you started.”

  Jillian gave him a mocking smile. “Why, you silver-tongued devil! You can be flattering when you feel like it, can’t you? I was twenty-two the first season,” she said, “and it wasn’t my first part. I’ve been in the business since I was fifteen. What did you think of the show?”

  Her bright, enquiring glance pinned him in place. “You’re very talented,” he said. “I shouldn’t be surprised if you did something good, some day.”

  “Something good? Do you realize Love for Living is the highest-rated holodrama in the City, for the third consecutive season?”

  “I don’t care how popular it is,” Ruven said, “it’s sentimental tosh. You should be acting in something real. I wouldn’t say that,” he said, belatedly trying to retrieve his position, “if I didn’t truly admire your acting talent. Just – not the vehicle you’ve chosen.”

  He had never realized just how much blue-gray eyes could resemble chips of ice.

  “It chose me,” Jillian said, “and I’m perfectly happy with my successful career, thank you. Can you say the same?”

  They didn’t make arrangements for a third tutoring session.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It started when a woman fainted.

  People had been gathering around the community market since dawn, drawn by the rumor that it would open for a few hours and that no one would scan their hands to make sure their ID was the correct one for this shopping day. The rumor was only half true at dawn; the manager did plan to open the market, but she hadn’t heard about the food riot at another market some days earlier, at least not about the part where the store clerks fled and didn’t even try to scan hands or collect money. She expected the usual crowd of “Fives” – this was a shopping day for people whose IDs ended in 5 – and the usual ten percent of scammers who would try to sneak in even if it wasn’t their turn to shop.

  By mid-morning the external security cameras showed that she had seriously underestimated the size of the crowd they would have to deal with. A solid ring of citizens, twenty deep, surrounded the market.

  “Where are they all coming from?” Randa Yamini asked.

  Then she found out about the total security failure at the Vista View market.

  “Somebody should have told me! Why didn’t I know anything about this? The newsers talked about the riot, but not that the clerks had run away.”

  “Likely they didn’t want the story to spread,” suggested Jens, the assistant manager. “Not that it worked… All the people who shouldn’t know about it, do know, and people like us who actually depend on the news get caught off guard.”

  “Well, I’m not going to let that happen here. Get on the external speaker system and announce that today we are serving only Fives; everybody else should go home.”

  The announcement only increased the size of the crowd, as more people came to hear what was happening and stayed hoping for… something; they didn’t specify the ‘something’ even to themselves.

  By noon there were an estimated four thousand people silently encircling the market. The Vista View market had had a fenced-off loading deck by which the store employees made their escape; this one in Glen Estates had no such amenities, and there was no break in the silent, sullen crowd.

  “If we open now, those people will tear us to shreds,” Randa thought, and made her first timing mistake: she instructed the assistant manager to leave the doors locked.

  What finally set off the mob was something so predictable and commonplace that nobody had even thought to worry about it.

  Donne Ortega, fifty and overweight, had been waiting since before dawn in the hope of getting flour and butter for her daughter and four grandchildren. By rights she should have been in the front of the crowd, but people had no manners these days; younger and more agile customers kept squeezing around her until she could barely see the locked entrance gates. She had been feeling dizzy for some time, but it was impossible to sit down in the close-packed crowd. She hadn’t brought water, counting on buying something from a vendor if she got thirsty. But no vendors braved the sullen, muttering crowd pressing ever closer around the market and its chain-link entrance gate.

  Donne Ortega fainted quietly and unobtrusively, just as she had always lived. Her black-clad body simply collapsed downward, that being the only space it could occupy. Two people behind her were alarmed enough to push backward, away from her; this gave her the space to topple over and hit her head on the syncrete paving.

  The blood started a minor panic of pushing and shoving. “We’re dying out here! Open the market!” someone called, and someone else picked up the key word and led a demanding chant.

  “Open, OPEN, O-PEN.”

  The heavy double beat resonated through the locked market.

  It was then that Randa made her second timing mistake. “Com the Bureau for Security! Tell them to send a riot squad!”

  She should have called for help much, much earlier.

  Ruven Malach heard the roar of the crowd from blocks away. He had just finished moving his scanty possessions from the official visitors’ lodgings to an unoccupied apartment in an old, and unfashionably small, housing block. Another delegate from up-river had suggested the place to him. “There are plenty of empty apartments. It’s not being publicized because they don’t want it known how many people have left – or worse. The folks who are still there will be happy to have you living in one of the vacant places, safer than leaving apartments unoccupied.” Given this opportunity he saw no reason why the cooperative should continue paying for him to stay in government lodgings when there was more than enough space elsewhere.

  An
d being old and unfashionable, the housing block had other advantages. It was small – only three stories; the windows were also small; and there was a fence around the building.

  It was much more defensible than the city’s lodgings, and lacked any bureaucrats who could order him not to take obvious precautions because it might look as if he didn’t trust the peace officers to keep order.

  He had just deposited his baggage and installed a new lock on the apartment door when he heard the roar of the mob going permanently, fatally out of control.

  “Did you hear that? What’s happening?” Mariya Yair, one of the remaining legal residents, had already informed him that she was too old to leave her home and too mean to be driven out by the incompetent boobies presently running the city.

  “Not that far away. I’ll take a look, shall I?”

  “No!” Mariya fastened claw-like hands in his sleeve. “They’ll tear you to pieces!”

  “I am not,” Ruven said, “entirely without the ability to defend myself.”

  “And I,” said Mariya, “am not senile, just old. I was here for the Tax Riots of ’88. You don’t know what a mob can do, young man. Just you stay here and help guard the block.”

  The block defense group had been organized by Andru Abadi, a reasonably fit middle-aged man who had failed to get his family out of town before most transport out of the city broke down. His teenage sons, Kris and Danyel, were old enough to fight and young enough to look forward to the prospect. There was another legal resident, someone called Danko whom Ruven had not met, and half a dozen other men, three of whom were single and had rooms on the ground floor. And now, Ruven.

  Most of the adults still had day jobs, so the building was “guarded” by Ruven and the two boys, who spent the time practicing forbidding stares and fondling their weapons – a couple of axe handles without, Ruven was relieved to see, their cutting heads. The kids couldn’t do themselves much damage with the handles alone.